Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,


          Time held me green and dying
     

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Dylan Thomas visited Fern Hill Farm in Carmarthenshire, farmed by his aunt and uncle, many times in childhood. With an orchard and 15 acres of farmland, he was to write about his time there throughout his life. 

In Fern Hill Thomas journeys back into childhood, capturing the experiences and sensations that are often dulled in later life.  First published in Horizon in 1945, Fern Hill is one of his most widely admired and anthologised poems. The soft rhymes and freedom of language are ideally suited to the subject and have made it a favourite to read aloud.

Over the course of two hours, we will work towards a deeper understanding of the poem through repeated readings, analysis and discussion.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single meeting study facilitated by Caroline Hammond
• Tuesday 10 December 2024, 6.00 – 8.00 pm GMT
• £30 (includes background materials and opening notes)

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)

” . . .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)

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.