The solstice is soon: Sunday, at a few minutes past noon this year.
And Imbolc, Beltane, Samhain, and the rest... nights when the winter wind is sharp and powerful, or the spring starts to appear, or the supercharged midsummer night takes over –
David kindly helped me to put up my small, but brightly lit, tree, and, for the first time, light my fireplace. I will put up photographs – but tomorrow; it is too sleepy, too deep a night, tonight, to bother with computerized detail.
Music is playing: the intense passions of Chris Wood's folk fiddling and antique English images in the poems – that sense of power, of deep resonance: when, as Hugh Lupton's beautiful writing points out, we are embedded in time that circles, that reaches strong points in the year and fuses with the past there.
When I was young, I most dearly loved the now slightly archaic style of British Arthurian fantasy: not only Tolkien and Lewis, but also Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, Lucy Boston – all writers who were sensitive to this kind of midnight power, this feeling that the great forces of good and evil that have ruled, or tried to rule, this isle, and through it this world, are given their strong times, their years, and even their great cycles.
It all comes together in the eerie last stanza of the opening poem for Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, which I – oddly – quoted to the people who shared my taxi when I first arrived in a green, rain-drenched Northumberland six years ago:
She is not any common Earth,
Water or wood or air,
But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye,
Where you and I will fare.
Perhaps that was one of the things that distracted me from making a sensible start in life when I was young: I was waiting for the magic to happen, to catch me up, and sweep me into the depths of a story....
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