Time and Tide Wait For No Man

I have been thinking of two poems on this first day of the year 2019. I started by thinking of an old Thomas More College classic, The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy, but for some reason my mind ran to some lines Richard Wilbur uses to describe what he calls "pilgrims of defeat". In his poem for the newly built Statione Termini, he laughingly rebukes them with almost exultant lines. Whether they are historians, archeologists, or more likely, nostalgic traditionalists, "who with short shadows | Poked through the stubbled forum pondering on decline | And would not take the sun standing at noon | For a good sign", he wants to dig them all up. It is a fitting thing to remember on a new day of a new year, especially if you have a tendency toward nostalgia... So when I read this beautiful poem for the opening of a new bridge, it strikes a similar note. A praise for the way things have been and are, for the tradition that makes a place a place and makes all those "lost centuries of local lives that rose | And flowered to fall short where they began" worth having happened. And just as Wilbur's poem has a call, so too does this one. Get up! it calls us. Get up and keep on doing what is worth doing! Time and tide wait for no man.

Bridge for the Living

Philip Larkin

(The words of a cantata composed by Anthony Hedges to celebrate the opening of Humber Bridge, first performed at the City Hall in Hull on 11 April 1981)

Isolate city spread alongside water,

Posted with white towers, she keeps her face
Half-turned to Europe, lonely northern daughter,
Holding through centuries her separate place.

Behind her domes and cranes enormous skies

Of gold and shadows build; a filigree

Of wharves and wires, ricks and refineries,

Her working skyline wanders to the sea.

In her remote three-cornered hinterland

Long white-flowered lanes follow the riverside.

The hills bend slowly seaward, plain gulls stand,

Sharp fox and brilliant pheasant walk, and wide

Wind-muscled wheatfields wash round villages,

Their churches half-submerged in leaf. They lie

Drowned in high summer, cartways and cottages,

The soft huge haze of ash-blue sea close by.

Snow-thickened winter days are yet more still:
Farms fold in fields, their single lamps come on
Tall church-towers parley, airily audible,
Howden and Beverly, Hedon and Patrington,

While scattered on steep seas, ice-crusted ships
Like errant birds carry her loneliness,
A lighted memory no miles eclipse,
A harbour for the heart against distress.

*

And now this stride in our solitude,
A swallow-fall and rise of one plain line,
A giant step for ever to include

All our dear landscape in a new design.

The winds play on it like a harp; the song,
Sharp from the east, sun-throated from the west,
Will never to one separate shire belong,
But north and south make union manifest.

Lost centuries of local lives that rose
And flowered to fall short where they began

Seem now to reassemble and unclose,

All resurrected in this single span,

Reaching for the world, as our lives do,
As all lives do, reaching that we may give

The best of what we are and hold as true:
Always it is by bridges that we live.

Wikipedia: “The Humber Bridge, near Kingston upon Hull, England, is a 2,220-metre (7,280 ft) single-span suspension bridge, which opened to traffic on 24 June 1981. It was the longest of its type in the world when opened, and is now the eighth-longest. It spans the Humber (the estuary formed by the rivers Trent and Ouse) between Barton-upon-Humber on the south bank and Hessle on the north bank, connecting the East Riding of Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire. When it opened in 1981 both sides of the bridge were in the non-metropolitan county of Humberside until its dissolution in 1996. The bridge itself can be seen for miles around and as far as Patrington in the East Riding of Yorkshire. As of 2006, the bridge carried an average of 120,000 vehicles per week.”


Special thanks to Adam Cooper for this one of several Larkin poems.

For the New Railway Station in Rome

Richard Wilbur

Those who said God is praised

By hurt pillars, who loved to see our brazen lust

Lie down in rubble, and our vaulting arches

Conduce to dust;

Those who with short shadows

Poked through the stubbled forum pondering on decline

And would not take the sun standing at noon

For a good sign;

Those pilgrims of defeat

Who brought their injured wills to a soldier’s home;

Dig them all up now, tell them there’s something new

To see in Rome.

See, from the travertine

Face of the office block, the roof of the booking-hall

Sails out into the air beside the ruined

Servian wall,

Echoing in its light

And cantilevered swoop of reinforced concrete

The broken profile of these stones, defeating

That defeat

And straying the strummed mind,

By such a sudden chord as raised the town of Troy

To where the least shard of the world sings out

In stubborn joy,

“What city is eternal

But that which prints itself within the groping head

Out of the blue unbroken reveries

Of the building dead?

“What is our praise or pride

But to imagine excellence, and try to make it?

What does it say over the door of Heaven

But homo fecit?”