i don't want to push it

At school, in English, apart from Shakespeare, we read Donne the metaphysical poets then fashionable - and Johnson, Landor, Keats and, our most modern venture I think, Hardy. I liked them all. That is, I was less interested in their unique qualities and my direct responses to them than in the uses of language and the literary conventions they sharedwith their contemporaries. I liked the variety of English literature for its own sake, the diversity of period idiom. I was, naturally, drawn to parody and had a fair talent for it. Some of this I felt - I certainly came to feel later- as a limitation; and it is one of the reasons I chose not to read English at university. I shared the iconic view of works of literature, then at its height (to some extent I still do), but I doubted if I had the vocation for a priest of the temple. For one thing I had a disreputable inclination to look at literature for identifiable ideas. Compared with the implied praise in Eliot’s reference to ‘a sensibility so fine that no idea could violate it’ mine was a willing accomplice in ideological rape.

John Burrow Memories Migrating

Love's fiery chariot, Delia, take
Which Vulcan wrought for Venus' sake.
Wings shall not waft thee, but a flame
Hot as my heart--as nobly tame:
Lit by a spark, less bright, more wise
Than linked lightnings of thine eyes!
Seated and ready to be drawn  
Come not in muslins, lace or lawn,
But, for thy thrice imperial worth,
Take all the sables of the North,
With frozen diamonds belted on,
To face extreme Euroclydon!
Thus in our thund'ring toy we'll prove
Which is more blind, the Law or Love;
And may the jealous Gods prevent
Our fierce and uncontrouled descent!


Kipling

I was born, as a gamble, in 1935; the desirability of my conception was apparently a matter of debate. My mother was small and supposedly frail. It was feared that a pregnancy would be dangerous. Many years later, as I walked with my father past what had been our doctor’s surgery in Exeter, he pointed to a downstairs window and said “It was in that room that your existence was decided on”. I find this a consoling thought. The chances of a verdict in my favour seem to have been initially no more than even, perhaps less. Not odds, anyway, that one would want from the jury room if on trial for one’s life. Having won that first play, every critical moment thereafter diminishes in importance as the pile of chips I have left to stake dwindles.

John Burrow Memories Migrating