This title is "inspired" by the inquiry on so many websites How can we help you today? Well, you can cut that out for a start. I googled that expression and find it is used by any number of online companies including Skype. That's the thing about the Internet today. You can track and pin down all those dimly remembered phrases swirling about in the recesses of your mind. For example, in less time than it takes to write these words, I can trace the poem from which these lines are taken:
From small beginnings, things of easy girth,
To formidable redundancies of mirth.
For some reason, these lines, learnt long ago at prep school, had stuck in mind, as had the name of the poem, Mrs Reece laughs. I had even remembered that it was 'Reece' and not 'Rhys' or 'Rees'. It would of course have been possible to find the poem in the years between the 'fifties and the advent of the Internet, but it would have required a greater effort than I was prepared to make. The poem was written by Martin Armstrong and here are a few, somewhat shaky words about him:
He was born in Newcastle-on-Tyne in 1882 and educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke College Cambridge. His first publication of poems appeared in 1912. He served during 1914-1915 in the 2nd Artist Rifles, then commissioned into the 8th Middlesex Regiment from 1915 through to the end of the war, demobbed in 1919. He served in France on the Western Front. His book. Buzzards and other Poems was published in 1921. Martin Armstrong died in 1974.
One wonders how he survived that terrible war. A clue is perhaps provided in another poem he write:
From small beginnings, things of easy girth,
To formidable redundancies of mirth.
For some reason, these lines, learnt long ago at prep school, had stuck in mind, as had the name of the poem, Mrs Reece laughs. I had even remembered that it was 'Reece' and not 'Rhys' or 'Rees'. It would of course have been possible to find the poem in the years between the 'fifties and the advent of the Internet, but it would have required a greater effort than I was prepared to make. The poem was written by Martin Armstrong and here are a few, somewhat shaky words about him:
He was born in Newcastle-on-Tyne in 1882 and educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke College Cambridge. His first publication of poems appeared in 1912. He served during 1914-1915 in the 2nd Artist Rifles, then commissioned into the 8th Middlesex Regiment from 1915 through to the end of the war, demobbed in 1919. He served in France on the Western Front. His book. Buzzards and other Poems was published in 1921. Martin Armstrong died in 1974.
One wonders how he survived that terrible war. A clue is perhaps provided in another poem he write:
Going up the Line
O consolation and refreshment breathed
From the young Spring with apple-blossom wreathed
Whose certain coming blesses
All life with token of immortality,
And from the ripe beauty and human tenderness
And reconcilement and tranquillity
Which are the spirit of all things grown old.
For now that I have seen
The curd-white hawthorn once again
Break out on the new green,
And through the iron gates in the long black wall
Have viewed across a screen
Of rosy apple-blossom the grey spire
And low red roofs and humble chimney-stacks,
And stood in spacious courtyards of old farms,
And heard green virgin wheat sing to the breeze,
And the drone of ancient worship rise and fall
In the dark church, and talked with simple folk
Of farm and village, dwelling near the earth,
Among earth’s ancient, elemental things;
I can with heart made bold
Go back into the ways of ruin and death
With step unflagging and with quiet breath,
For drawn from the hidden Spirit’s deepest well
I carry in my soul a power to quell
All ills and terrors such as these can hold.
From the young Spring with apple-blossom wreathed
Whose certain coming blesses
All life with token of immortality,
And from the ripe beauty and human tenderness
And reconcilement and tranquillity
Which are the spirit of all things grown old.
For now that I have seen
The curd-white hawthorn once again
Break out on the new green,
And through the iron gates in the long black wall
Have viewed across a screen
Of rosy apple-blossom the grey spire
And low red roofs and humble chimney-stacks,
And stood in spacious courtyards of old farms,
And heard green virgin wheat sing to the breeze,
And the drone of ancient worship rise and fall
In the dark church, and talked with simple folk
Of farm and village, dwelling near the earth,
Among earth’s ancient, elemental things;
I can with heart made bold
Go back into the ways of ruin and death
With step unflagging and with quiet breath,
For drawn from the hidden Spirit’s deepest well
I carry in my soul a power to quell
All ills and terrors such as these can hold.
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