Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold (24 December 1822 – 15 April 1888) was an English poet, social critic and inspector of schools. Traditionally believed to have been written on his honeymoon in 1851, Dover Beach is one of his best loved and most frequently quoted poems.

Dover Beach is a poem set on the edge of changes still too unformed to be fully understood and its rich descriptions have been interpreted in many ways. Through reading and discussion, we’ll be able to consider the poem’s influence and meaning and hear its beautiful cadences come to life. 

SALON DETAILS:

• Single meeting study facilitated by Caroline Hammond
• Tuesday 14 January 2025, 6.00 – 8.00 pm GMT
• £30 (includes background materials and opening notes)

“My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.

My apologies to necessity if I’m mistaken, after all.“

Wistawa Szymborska, Under One Small Star

Awarding Wistawa Szymborska the Literature Prize in 1996, the Nobel Academy praised her “poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.”

We are living through a fraught political era in which ecological succour and the possibility of peace may seem elusive. Can poetry offer a way to read the world that helps us be both engaged in and also derive some relief from the world and its troubles?

This single session study takes up that question, looking at two poems by Wistawa Szymborska, reading them together as a way of thinking about and through the times in which we find ourselves.

Szymborska’s poetry, written in response to the political upheavals of the twentieth century, perhaps provides a reflective space in which to dwell a little on the difficulties we face and also offer a unique way to be human within a world that is sometimes ill at ease.

In The Century’s Decline she asks “how should we live?” and in Under One Small Star she hones her sharp yet warm irony on all the recognisable shortcomings and monumental efforts of human life and endeavour and experience. She gives us permission to feel joy and to be inadequate to the problems of the world while still holding space with all these weighty things.

It is my hope that we can derive some succour from Szymborska’s words.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single two-hour study on Zoom led by Desma Lawrence
• Tuesday 21 January, 12.00 – 2.00 pm (UK)
• We will read and discuss two poems by Wistawa Symborska: The Century’s Decline and Under One Small Star
• £30 for one meeting, including notes and texts

” . . .Today, guess what, we became beekeepers!  We went to the local meeting last week (attended by the rector, the midwife, and assorted beekeeping people from neighboring villages) to watch a Mr Pollard make three hives out of one (by transferring his queen cells) under the supervision of the official Government bee-man.  We all wore masks and it was thrilling.  It is expensive to start beekeeping (over $50 outlay), but Mr Pollard let us have an old hive for nothing, which we painted white and green, and today he brought over the swarm of docile Italian hybrid bees we ordered and installed them.  We placed the hive in a sheltered out-of-the-way spot in the orchard the bees were furious from being in a box.  Ted had only put a handkerchief over his head where the hat should go in the bee-mask, and the bees crawled into his hair, and he flew off with half-a-dozen stings.  I didn’t get stung at all, and when I went back to the hive later, I was delighted to see bees entering with pollen sacs full and leaving with them empty at least I think that’s what they were doing.  I feel very ignorant but shall try to read up and learn all I can.  If we’re lucky, we’ll have our own honey, too!“

From Letters Home, 15 June 1962

When Sylvia Plath died on 11^th February 1963 she left a black spring binder on her desk containing a manuscript of forty poems with the title Ariel.*  The final five poems are a sequence about bees: The Bee-Meeting, The Arrival of the Bee-Box, Stings, Swarm and Wintering.  In this powerful sequence Plath purposefully changes her poetic tone as she uses the natural metaphor of bees to explore issues of female self-assertion, rites of death and rebirth, creativity and survival.  She also writes with loving precision about the details of beekeeping and the bees themselves.  The final poem, Wintering, is a tour de force evoking cold and despair but, ultimately, hope for the coming spring.  

Over the course of two hours we will study Wintering in depth, look at its form and construction and, through repeated readings, unlock the secrets of this acclaimed poem. 

*This is not the version of Ariel published in 1965, which has four of the bee poems in the middle of the book, but Faber did publish Ariel the Restored Edition in 2004, with a foreword by Frieda Hughes. 

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single meeting study facilitated by Caroline Hammond 
• Tuesday 28 January 2025, 6.00 – 8.00 pm (GMT)
• £30 (includes background materials and opening notes)

       “Don’t bargain.
Just grab the swishing tail
of your nerve’s latest adventure
and go with the inevitable tide.“

Dorothy Porter  The Sea Hare

Blaise Pascal wrote that what makes humans distinct is that we know we are attached to a dying animal, and that the universe knows nothing of this. Our knowledge of death, our awareness of our mortality is so fundamental to our human experience.

This study looks at the ways poets have written about death, taking up different responses to the theme in a variety of poems, reading works that face – unstintingly at times, but also tenderly and deeply – the universal yet oft avoided fact of our mortality.

My idea for this salon is that we come to it with an open curiosity about the ways that poets have thought poetically about death.

Starting with Milton’s pastoral elegy Lycidas we go on a journey to the underworld with Rilke’s Orpheus, and through the surreal musings of Neruda and deep existential fear explored in Larkin’s Aubade. Studying eleven poems over four meetings we will finish with poems that contemplate our own mortality, in Dorothy Porter ‘s The Sea Hare and in a selection of haiku known as death poems, written by Japanese poets as their last words of goodbye.

Meeting One
Lycidas, John Milton
The Funeral of Sarpedon, Constantine Cavafy
Sylvia’s Death, Anne Sexton

Meeting Two
Orpheus, Euridice and Hermes, Rainer Maria Rilke
Lenox Hill, Agaha Shahid Ali ­

Meeting Three
Aubade, Philip Larkin
Nothing but Death, Pablo Neruda
To Whoever is Reading Me, Jorge Luis Borges

Meeting Four
The Sea Hare, Dorothy Porter
Japanese Death Poems
In Praise of Dreams, Wistawa Szymborska

JOINING DETAILS:

• Four week study on Zoom led by Desma Lawrence
• Tuesdays, 12.00 – 2.00 pm (UK)
• 4, 11, 18 and 25 February 2025
• £120 for four meetings, including notes and texts

The Tyger, first published in 1794, is the product of a revolutionary age. Societal transformations in Europe and North America were radically altering industry, statehood, philosophy, law and religion. In the vanguard of the Romantic movement that was to produce a generation of poets including Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats and Clare, Blake was a master of the lyric form, finding connections between the natural world and the introspective workings of the heart and mind. 

For many readers The Tyger is also woven into their earliest childhoods, one of the first poems they were introduced to, heard before it was read. Whether The Tyger is part of your personal canon or completely new, as we explore the lyricism, images and Blake’s unique voice we will uncover new and unexpected meanings through reading and discussing the poem. 

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single meeting study facilitated by Caroline Hammond
• Tuesday 4 February 2025, 6.00 – 8.00 pm GMT
• £30 (includes background materials and opening notes)

Arnica, eyebright, the
draft from the well with the
star-die on top,

in the
Hütte,

Thus begins Paul Celan’s poem Todtnauberg, setting the scene for his meeting with the philosopher Martin Heidegger.

This short poem is Celan’s record of his meeting at the philosopher’s Black Forest retreat in Todtnauberg in 1967. The two men were admirers of each other’s work, though on Celan’s side the admiration was fraught. Celan was a survivor of the European Shoah, carried out by the Third Reich, that claimed the life of both his parents. Living most of his life in France, Celan composed his poetry in German (his mother tongue and the language of his beloved mother), utilising the language that was also infused with the Reich, and which he called “the deathbringing speech” to work through the individual and collective trauma of the Shoah.   

Heidegger, one of the monumental figures in European continental philosophy of the twentieth century, had a well known affiliation with the Nazi party which he never denied, redressed, or ever spoke about publicly. Their meeting, not surprisingly, attracted much scrutiny.  

The poem, a chronicle of that meeting, closely follows the inscription that Celan left in Heidegger’s visitor’s book: “In the Hütte, with the view from the star in the well, with the hope of a coming word in the heart” (“Ins Hüttenbuch, mit dem Blick auf den Brunnenstern, mit einer Hoffnung auf eines kommendes Wort im Herzen”). 

There are many ways to read, interpret and translate the poem, a poem about silence and the hope for words. We will read the poem together, many times, hoping ourselves to come to an understanding and interpretation of this very moving and concise work. 

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single meeting study led by Desma Lawrence and Emilia Steuerman
• Wednesday 12 February 2025, 12.00 – 2.00 pm (UK)
• £40 for single meeting with two facilitators
• We will provide the German text with English Translation(s) and background notes on both Celan and Heidegger.

“This literature – which to us can sometimes seem difficult, exotic, highbrow, remote – is the product of a certain sensibility and a particular context. The idea of these sessions is to find little doors through which to step into that world and find ways to relate to it through the poetry and human artefacts as representations of that time.”

Vivien Kogut

The eighth century English monk Bede wrote a famous parable in which man’s life is compared to the flight of a sparrow crossing a warm hall on a dark, wet night: the sparrow comes “from winter into winter again”, his time in light and warmth lasting but the “blink of an eye”. Eight hundred years later, English poets believed they could trick all-devouring time through the power of words.

And today, another five centuries later, what does poetry tell us about time? And what different ‘times’ do we find in poetry? Can Medieval and Renaissance literature speak to our own perception of time? And what can objects tell us about our relationship with words across time?

This study invites readers to dive into poems and objects from the past in search of dialogues around time and literature. Focusing on the experience of reading poetry from the 10^th to the 17^th century we will try to rethink our notions of brevity and eternity, of rush and delay, of beginnings and endings. 

Each of four sessions will focus on a different genre of poetry expressing ‘time’:

1.      Old English elegies

“Thus this middle-earth droops and decays every single day;
and so a man cannot become wise, before he has weathered
his share of winters in this world”

Anonymous, The Wanderer

2.     Old English riddles

“It was swift in its going:
Faster than birds it flew through the sky”

Anonymous, Riddle 51

3.     Medieval ballads

“O’er his white bones, when they are bare,
The wind shall blow for evermore.“

Anonymous, The Two Corbies

4.     Elizabethan poems

“Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.“

Edward Spenser, Amoretti: LXXV

JOINING DETAILS:

• Four meeting study on Zoom led by Vivien Kogut
• Thursdays, 6.30 – 8.30 pm (UK)
• 13, 20, 27 February and 6 March
• £120 for four meetings, including notes and resources