The Complete Poems of Asa Briggs: Far Beyond The Pennine Way

By Professor Lord Asa Briggs

This is a book of 100 poems of great richness and variety. Indeed, it is genuinely a landmark book. It is an important literary and academic event in itself.
Professor Lord Asa Briggs is one of the most important historians of Britain. He is world-renowned for his work in social history, culture, and communications. He has also been a national and international leader in education, and in life-long learning.
Now in his nineties, he has been writing poetry since he was 13. But this is the first publication of this body of his literary work.
The book is an important cultural event. It will take its place amongst Lord Briggs’ other classic works, his five-volume history of the BBC, his trail-blazing The Age of Improvement 1783-1867, and his famous historical trilogy Victorian People, Victorian Cities, and Victorian Things.
The author, a vivid writer, also provides a “strictly necessary Introduction” in which he discusses his ideas about poetry and how and why he has written poetry over the years.
Asa Briggs has a very strong visual sense and an intuitive sense of place. In his work, too, he has always related literature to history. He is widely known as an effective and entertaining serious broadcaster, and his feeling for language is special.
The volume demonstrates Asa Briggs’ taste, intellectual discipline, technique and literary responses to the events and people he has known during his long life, and the challenges in his life. His style is his own, although he acknowledges his interest in the works of other poets including Matthew Arnold, John Betjeman, Robert Frost, Seamus Heaney, and Dylan Thomas.
He grew up, in a working-class family, in the West Riding town of Keighley, and at age 16 he won a scholarship to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
In his long career the author was a major influence on the development of new universities in Britain, and of education abroad too. He has been Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex, Master of Worcester College Oxford, and Chancellor of The Open University, of which he was one of the originators. He served as an intelligence officer at Bletchley Park during World War Two.
The poems particularly illustrate the significance of locality, of boundaries, of oral history, of the world of labour, and of the importance of language and of class. They also contemplate the particular in terms of the general. And the relationships between public and private events.
All of these elements have been an important focus for Asa Briggs and for his democratic approaches. His works, indeed, have implied the case for optimism in social progress. His life and works have greatly delineated and enriched democratic culture, together with his studies of the dynamics of economic and social change.
This is a book of 100 poems of great richness and variety. Indeed, it is genuinely a landmark book. It is an important literary and academic event in itself.
Professor Lord Asa Briggs is one of the most important historians of Britain. He is world-renowned for his work in social history, culture, and communications. He has also been a national and international leader in education, and in life-long learning.
Now in his nineties, he has been writing poetry since he was 13. But this is the first publication of this body of his literary work.
The book is an important cultural event. It will take its place amongst Lord Briggs’ other classic works, his five-volume history of the BBC, his trail-blazing The Age of Improvement 1783-1867, and his famous historical trilogy Victorian People, Victorian Cities, and Victorian Things.
The author, a vivid writer, also provides a “strictly necessary Introduction” in which he discusses his ideas about poetry and how and why he has written poetry over the years.
Asa Briggs has a very strong visual sense and an intuitive sense of place. In his work, too, he has always related literature to history. He is widely known as an effective and entertaining serious broadcaster, and his fe

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edward Everett Root
• Release date: Apr 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9780954207564

Professor Lord Asa Briggs

Now in his nineties, he has been writing poetry since he was 13. But this is the first publication of this body of his literary work.

Book preview

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The Collected Poems of Asa Briggs

Image of Asa writing a poem at Hangzhou Airport in April 1989. Photograph by Susan Briggs

Asa writing a poem at Hangzhou Airport, April 1989.

Photograph by Susan Briggs.

The Collected Poems

of Asa Briggs

Far Beyond The Pennine Way

Asa Briggs

EER

Edward Everett Root, Publishers. Brighton, 2016.

Edward Everett Root, Publishers, Co. Ltd.,

30 New Road, Brighton, Sussex, BN1 1BN, England.

[e-mail]

First published 2016.

© Asa Briggs 2016.

Asa Briggs has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs

and Patents Act 1998 to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any

form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the

copyright owner.

Requests to re-publish works from this book should be addressed

to Edward Everett Root Publishers Co. Ltd.

Typeset in Book Antiqua. Jacket design by Pageset Limited.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-9542075-6-4

Print ISBN: 978-0-9542075-5-7

Designed by Pageset Limited, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire.

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, Surrey.

I dedicate these poems to my fourteen grandchildren,

separate and together: Caroline, Tim, Charlotte,

Jonathan, Georgia, Tom and Sam, twins, Hal, Wilkie,

Arthur, Honor, Ollie, Kitty and Daisy.

Contents

A strictly necessary introduction

List of illustrations

100 Poems

1. Dreaming of a return to Hangzhou, April 1989

2. The armies of Islam, December 1936

3. My Odyssey, August 2015

4. To all Grand Inquisitors

5. Lake, mountain, wall

6. On the Emperor of Abyssinia leaving his native land

7. Guernica

8. A sonnet written at Keighley, 1937

9. After the storm: A school translation from Le Conte de Liste, 1936

10. Thoughts on spending a holiday in the Lake District, 1935

11. Christmas 1939

12. My hometown in retrospect

13. An ode to poetry; from Leeds to Lewes, 1961

14. Runways and highways

15. River, cave, runway

16. In Li Jiang

17. On the Road from Hong Kong to China. Near the border at Lukkeng, 1994

18. Also at Lukkeng

19. Renaming

20. The lament of an old cormorant forced far too long to play tricks (the average life span of a cormorant has now fallen from 25 to 18)

21. Drums beat

22. For Marjorie

23. Our house in Boundary Street, Winchelsea

24. I dream of houses

25. Home thoughts from abroad, Madeira, May 8th 1998

26. The words I speak when half asleep

27. The gamble

28. A Bletchley sonnet

29. After dreaming of myself in a baggage queue

30. Pathways with Susan, 1984

31. Sailing

32. Double jeopardy, Portugal

33. A version of the Sacrament

34. Squaring the circle

35. Reptiles from Montana, for our great grandchildren

36. Giant and girl

37. Curiosity killed the cat

38. Meditating in Portugal, 1999

39. A second poem, Santa Barbara, February 29th 2001

40. Chinese meditations, Beijing 2000

41. Listening to bells

42. Ballad sans Betjeman, 2006

43. Fame: written at Bletchley, 1944

44. Belgian ballades

45. A Portuguese lyric: written in a library

46. Lines written at Bletchley, 1944

47. Ten minutes from Shanghai

48. A Shanghai sonnet

49. On the number of dictatorships in modern Europe

50. On reaching Villareal, Portugal

51. Thought for the day, written in bed at 7.50 am, in Portugal, February 19th 2001, after a storm has disturbed our satellite dish

52. Lines written in Hong Kong’s New Territory, near to the Chinese frontier

53. Strange shapes, written at sea, November 2009

54. Sailing by but never landing, 2009

55. I do not know which stone is ours today, September 1st 1999

56. My own true Love, December 27th 2012

57. A Beijing sonnet

58. This sporting life, 2013

59. The city of Silves, Portugal

60. A sonnet to Bartok, the musician

61. The moon’s first love

62. On hearing the cuckoo for the first time this year

63. The little charioteer – a narrative, 1935

64. Nighttime in daytime

65. Ready for a flood

66. On the near conjunction of the harvest moon and National Day, 2004

67. Pathetic fallacies, Lewes, May 11th 2001

68. Remembering more of Keighley and of Yorkshire

69. For Susan: Not an incident, December 27th 1996

70. I study every face, July 14th 2004

71. 1 September 2000

72. It is 10:15 and dark

73. Journey from Shanghai

74. Lament of Qu Yan for an emperor and a country in anticipation of Wuhan, September 21st 1985

75. Our wedding anniversary 2006

76. Lines for my Valentine

77. Lines written in Portugal, March 1997

78. On a wedding anniversary

79. Leaving Recife by sea, January 16th 2006 at 5.55 pm

80. Love and deceit

81. For Susan on our 57th