In the Mind's Eye

By Michael Benton

In The Mind's Eye comprises four groups of poems through each of which run traditional themes of time and memory. In the first two groups the themes are developed in personal terms, grounded in a strong sense of place - growing up in Sheffield and, latterly, living in Denmark. Groups three and four widen the perspective, first through e

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shakspeare Editorial
• Release date: Jul 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781919636016

Michael Benton

Michael Benton taught English for ten years in secondary schools in London and Manchester before taking up a Lectureship at Southampton University. He retired in 2001 as Emeritus Professor of Education. His many articles and books have made a notable contribution to literary education for over fifty years.

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IN THE MIND’S EYE

MICHAEL BENTON

First published by Shakspeare Editorial, UK, August 2021

ISBN pbk 978-1-9196360-0-9

ebk 978-1-9196360-1-6

Copyright © 2021 Michael Benton

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written consent of the publisher; nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The right of Michael Benton to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover photograph: Vilhelm Hammerhøi’s Open Doors © The David Collection, Copenhagen, B309 (photographer Pernille Klemp)

Design and typesetting www.ShakspeareEditorial.org

For Jette

Michael Benton…

… was born and brought up in Sheffield. He studied English at the Universities of Leeds and Toronto and trained as a teacher at the Institute of Education, London University. He taught for ten years in secondary schools in London and Manchester, before moving to a Lectureship at Southampton University where he worked in teacher education for thirty years. He retired in 2001 as Emeritus Professor of Education.

His involvement with reading, writing and teaching poetry has been a central concern throughout his career. He has published many articles and books, both for the classroom (notably the Touchstones Series of Teaching Anthologies, with Peter Benton) and for teacher education (Teaching Literature 9-14, with Geoff Fox), as well as books in the related areas of literature and the visual arts and literary biography. In The Mind’s Eye is his most recent publication.

Michael Benton is married and lives in Copenhagen.

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of several of these poems have appeared in classroom anthologies published by Hodder Education.

I would like to thank my good friends, Geoff Fox and Pam Barnard, for their scrupulous and sensitive reading of my typescript. My thanks too to Alison Shakspeare for her advice and guidance through the details of publication.

My wife, Jette Kjeldsen, has been my first reader. Her acute comments and unfailing support have been invaluable.

The Sheffield Poems

Remembering

Remembering flips life into reverse:

A switch is flicked, the warp of time distorts;

Time-travellers all, we spool fast-backwards down

The tunnelled monochrome of scenes and ghosts

Long-known, surprised that all those futures can

Still jab the conscience or the cheek caress.

Just think of all those busy yesterdays

Remaindered in some chamber of the mind,

A casual archive, layer on layer laid down

Devoid of colour, form or sound until,

Redacted and unbidden, one returns

Beguiling in its power to deceive.

So, seemingly new-minted in the mind,

We take its truth while yet we know it lies.

For memory mutates, pictures revive;

Recoloured scenes, their forms and lines redrawn,

Reverse the backward somersaults of time

To make the collage that designs a life.

Park Bank Wood

(i) Word & Image

Did Wordsworth really steal a boat on Ullswater …? The only evidence we have is poetic evidence.

Stephen Gill

A memory summoned makes the wood appear,

A world of green seducing me to view

These images as treasures to revere

And not to question if they’re false or true:

Pitch-perfect echoes of the cuckoo’s call,

The climbing races in the summer trees,

The apples scrumped beyond the orchard wall,

And sledging through the ’47 freeze.

But as the mind makes memories from birth,

Translating them to language so they last,

No wonder we interrogate the worth

Of words that seek to plagiarize the past.

We fish for history from a stolen boat

To catch such fictions just to stay afloat.

(ii) The Abbey

My makeshift crow’s nest lashed atop the beech

Looks out across a sea of green that heaves

And swells. The Abbey tower, unruffled by the waves,

Obeys the rhythms deep beyond its reach.

Eight centuries of stone, a sad last stand;

A stoic presence that Time undeceives:

No sermon, prayer, or plainsong rhythm saves

These stones eroding finally to sand.

Yet Time is compromised by Nature’s needs:

The tree laments its timely loss of leaves,

But as they fall and mulch into their graves

This annual death contains the life it breeds –

As ivy on