Arctic Elegies

By Peter Davidson

This is a mighty book of Norths: northern geographies, histories, lights; a place of definition, frost and cold. There is an unfaltering Recusant spirit about these poems, a survival through defeat and a sense of underlying permanences.Each poem has an occasion: some of the occasions are personal meetings, conversations, which unlock shared scenes and themes; some are historical in origin, their past often one of early Christian faith or religious conflict. The poems abound in art, in specific lived detail, particulars of landscape, and in a harsh weather which is not unlike time itself in its effect on the living and ageing imagination. Each poem requires a different metre, a different pace; each form is carefully attuned to its occasion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Jan 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9781800172647

Peter Davidson

Peter Davidson is a freelance writer and has been, among other things, a restorer of antiquities from around the world, a writer and director of documentaries on World War II and related subjects for the History Channel, and a tutor on the Politics, Philosophy and History degree at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the co-author of Milestones of Civilization.

Book preview

Cover: Arctic Elegies by Peter Davidson

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Arctic Elegies

PETER DAVIDSON

CARCANET POETRY

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CONTENTS

Title Page

Epigraph

Jacobite Song

Lord Derwentwater’s Rose

Venice Glasses: I

Catterline

Macnaughtan’s Bookshop, Haddington Place, Edinburgh

Black Isle Madrigal

Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale

Venice Glasses: II

Arctic Elegy

74 degrees North: a dialogue at a grave

The Early Christian Monuments of Wales

Lastness, or Rory’s Apple

Venice Glasses: III

                                 *

Secret Theatres

                                 *

Dialogue at Kloster Eldena

Evenings under the Lime Tree

Mr Dowland’s Midnight

September Castles

Dialogue in Autumn

London Blues

Prayer to the Virgin on a Winter Night

Con Sordino

Against the Vanity of the Poets

Pryde’s Ghost

The Supper 6

Speeches in a Park in the North, in Winter

Rex Whistler’s Blues

                                 *

The Museum of Loss

                                 *

Of Death, Fame, and Immortality

Glasgow, 10 March 1615

St Edmund Campion mediates on the Passion

The True Vine

Sonnet for Trinity Sunday

The Third Land

The Secret Journey, addressed to Our Lady

Canticles for Good Friday

Per Grazia Ricevuta to our Lady of Aberdeen

The Mourning Virtuoso

Elegy for Charity Charity 1959–2021

Father Willcock’s Evening Hymn

Notes

About the Author

Copyright

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AD MAIOREM DEI GLORIAM 8

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JACOBITE SONG

The falcon flown, far in the starving air

So many lost, this long, half-secret war.

The regiments like snow all overborne

The boat rowed far from the cold shore, long gone.

O blackbird taken in the fowler’s snare

He is now far who will return no more.

The burn is frozen and the bird is flown

The rose is withered and the tower is down.

Snow, falcon, blackbird, water, rose and tower:

Faded, flown, taken, frozen, fallen, gone.

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LORD DERWENTWATER’S ROSE

The north is gone now. Victory in loss –

Devotion to the best, most-injured King:

The scaffold stairs shine forth a path of stars,

The blade the rose’s thorn in the hand of God.

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VENICE GLASSES I

For Victoria Crowe

Thoughts on the City

Seek all you have lost in twilights and depths of mirrors:

Horizons turned dusk and smoke, sanguine and lavender;

Red dust of August blown on the offshore wind,

The first lamps flickering out from the fading quays;

When vanished things take shape in the stir of the waters,

When glimpses and shadows pass at the edges of glasses.

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CATTERLINE

For John Morrison

Fifty years past in the wash and the fall of the tides

Below the houses like a crescent moon

Shining above the bay. Harvests and storms;

The smells of limewash, fish-guts, barley straw,

Salt, tar and tidewrack, fifty years ago.

The Sugar-loaf rock was my fortress on the shore

The summer boats pulled up in the long grass,

Yarrow and cresses, fifty years ago;

Bees on the Reath in failing daylight flew

Their silver missions through the golden light,

Nets stretched at night to catch the rising moon.

The barn was black at the foot of our garden

Where Angus painted in the tarry dark

Held prisoner of the tank-trap of the war.

Outside my father worked on in the light,

Painting the yard with night, the house with day;

Or shaped his coloured worlds for me, his son:

Whitening the breakers of dun autumn tides,

Touching red morning to the clouds for me,