Author: Reena Saxena

I’m a sucker for synchronicity and having chosen to focus on this particular poet, a timely connection with his birthdate (26.6.1914) and today’s Poetics challenge became apparent.

As with most of my favourite naturalist poets, Laurie Lee employed description with the light touch of lyricism, devoid of complex structures or the aggrandisement of the Romantics. In fact in answer to his critic Roy Fuller, his riposte was: ‘You dare me to be more complicated, but I dare to achieve simplicity’.

And he succeeds too – take for example his Christmas Landscape:
“There is hunger in the mouth
Of vole and badger,
Silver agonies of breath
In the nostril of the fox,
Ice on the rabbit’s paw”

True, Lee was a Neo-Romantic willing at times to sacrifice meaning for the mellifluous (though not to the extent that Dylan Thomas does). After all, he was musician too and hence…

When the moment of crossover occurred, it came as a bit of a shock.

He expected the lights of the palliative care ward to fade into darkness and all cognizance of life disappear. He would become nothing as he believed there was nothing to go to.

So as the lights around him faded and he slipped away from human life, it came as a surprise when another light took its place.

His first thought was its just happening in my head, my brain is trying to stay in the world and fooling me into thinking I am still there.

Then he realized he didn’t have a brain as such so wondered what it was that was happening to him.

It wasn’t as if he wanted to live forever nor did he have any definite quarrel with death, after all in his final months, life had been crap, confined to a…