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William Jay Smith Oxford doggerel
For the Class of 1947
‘Memory is a dog that lies down where it pleases.’ - Cees Nooteboom, Rituals
Memory is a dog that lies down where it pleases:
Into cracks and crannies of the past it squeezes,
Recrosses bridges you long ago crossed
And sniffs out places you thought were lost.
It races up mountains and paddles through waves,
Explores old graveyards and digs up graves.
On beaches, in basements, on cliffs, and in towers
It curls up with trivia and dozes for hours...
We gathered in Oxford from near and far,
The first Rhodes Scholars after the War,
A diversified and seasoned lot,
In that historic, special spot,
Some fresh from college, some retreads,
War veterans and newly weds.
Since first we gazed on Oxford spires,
Untouched by fumes and factory fires,
Thirty-six years have now gone by.
And where will Memory, that dog, lie?
Beside what bent and blasted tree?
These are the bones it left with me.
Post-war Oxford - what was it like?
Each cold, gray morning your bride on her bike
Would cycle off with her ration card,
Eager for some delicious reward,
A gourmet treat, a trifle, a truffle,
And what would she find? Her small share of offal;
And those three vegetables Britain touts -
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Two kinds of cabbage and Brussel sprouts.
Then she'd cycle back to your abode,
That mildewed nest on Charlbury Road,
And then while you shivered beside the grate,
She cooked them on an electric plate.
Oxford those days was pretty grim
Even for those who were in the swim:
The swains of the new Zuleika Dobson
Looked like snively, effete slobs on
Parade when they strutted across the green,
Full of themselves and their Oxford scene,
Their highfalutin winin' and dinin',
Led by dramatic Kenneth Tynan,
Who would learn to criticize one day
The roles that then he tried to play,
Who'd set tongues wagging and hearts aflutter
When he made a fortune on Oh, Calcutta!
Rather than listen to their malarkey,
I sat at the feet of Enid Starkie,
Who knew everything there was to know
About Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud,
A friend of poets and a friend indeed
Of C. Day Lewis and André Gide.
And on Saturday nights I went to see
Young Dylan Thomas at South Leigh.
Dylan had already mastered the trick
Of wringing the neck of rhetoric.
He'd learned to live and to rejoice
And boomed out in his rich Welsh voice
Lines not Chaucerian or Stuart
But a little quatrain by Gavin Ewart:
‘Miss Tywe was soaping her breasts in her bath
When she heard behind her a meaning laugh
And to her amazement she discovered
A wicked man in the bathroom cupboard.’
And when the two of them gave up battlin',
I went with Dylan and beautiful Caitlin,
With Dylan as sober as a drunken sailor,
To dine with Margaret and A.J.P. Taylor
In a drawingroom built across a stream.
If double pneumonia was your dream,
The place was perfect; a feeble fire
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Glowed in the chimney like dead desire,
And around it we gathered to converse
Of the state of the world or something worse,
The foibles of some Oxford don.
Caitlin drew near and put a log on;
Then, never pausing to flinch or cough,
A.J.P. Taylor took the log off.
The dampness rose and soaked us through:
Our hearts were gay but our lips were blue.
The days were gray, the encounters cheering,
And occasional lectures well worth hearing.
I learned the values of light and dark
In a brilliant series by Kenneth Clark.
Sir Maurice Bowra I also heard,
And Lord David Cecil, that odd bird,
With a sensibility so pure
Some monstrous things he could not endure.
At the b.b.c. when left alone
With an enormous microphone,
He found its cold, steel look so trying
And absolutely terrifying,
When he tried to speak, not a word could he say
But simply fainted dead away.
Other figures great and small
I met not in the lecture hall
But absorbed their learning and their charms
At the George, the Mitre, and the King's Arms.
To All Souls I went to make my bows
To that Cornish gentleman A.L. Rowse;
And I met without much fuss or planning
Reggie Smith and Olivia Manning.
Remembered, how the faces vary:
Sir John Betjeman and Joyce Carey,
Cyril Connolly, and all -
Good friends Kay and Ernest Stahl,
And what a pleasure it was to be with
Audrey Beacham and Stevie Smith,
And rare indeed the chance to chat
With big Roy Campbell in his broad-brimmed hat.
An English spring was on its way:
On Charlbury Road early one day,
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Groping through fog to fetch the coal,
I met my landlady out for a stroll.
She asked, with more concern than wit,
‘Spring has arrived: have you seen the great tit?’
A query that in places would stop the traffic,
But she was ornithologic, not pornographic.
(The tit that she meant for me to see
Is like an American chickadee).
But my senses by the fog were blurred.
‘Not yet, I haven't,’ I averred.
Spring did come: when summer followed,
I'd bitten off more than I had swallowed.
I found that my advanced degree
Required not two years' work but three.
The thought of that remote D. Phil.
Made me uneasy, if not ill.
The effort of constant exegesis
Demanded by a doctoral thesis
Gave me nightmares every night.
And so in order that I might write
The poems I knew I had in me,
Where I could write with force and candor
In the shade of Walter Savage Landor,
Becoming the first Rhodes drop-out ever.
But Oxford ties one cannot sever
You took the high Rhodes, I, the low,
But I've, managed to get on somehow
And write my books - some forty now -
And I've had my little share of fame,
And although I have a common name,
It is far from being a household word.
And yet my vision is unblurred.
Oxford in spirit still remains:
The gray spires lifting from the plains
I see again in my mind's eye,
All the clearer as years go by.
And I'd have you all see them tonight,
Rain-washed in early autumn light,
As limpid and as close to heaven
As when we saw them in forty-seven.
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