Richard Westcott's poetry

  I've always found this a touching story. A man actively considering suicide – even to the point of carrying a loaded revolver in his pocket – meets another writer for the first time, who never knew what was being considered.   The latter's friendly professional advice turns out to be momentous, for not only does he unwittingly dissuade – indeed save – the depressed writer, but sets him off onto the path of poetry, which was in time to make him famous.   A deep friendship resulted, alongside a body of important poems from the one who had possibly been about to kill himself. True, our unhappy newly-made poet was soon enough to find an early end – if not exactly suicide, then arguably a deliberate taking the road towards almost certain death.   But before that, the two poets had walked together happily in a productive companionship, which helped generate many of those much-loved poems. So here is the indecisive Edward Thomas, the author who Robert Frost told he should reca

  I wonder what deliberation preceded this arrangement.  I think the care assistant probably just stacked them like this without a thought, it being the usual way to gather these rather bulky things up tidily so that they don't get in the way. I'm sure there wasn't any idea of the impression given to the by-passer, which I've tried to describe. The following little poem really needs no introduction. After all, pictures can say more than words. Outside the Nursing Home Mobility over their life work's done slowed to a stop no longer pushed so now going nowhere silently stacked up in their own tidy queue awaiting collection.   The skip being full with discarded cushions once waterproofed mattresses and uncertain items these walkers remain a little apart though still upright for now until along with the boxes the black bags and all everything's gathered to be taken away. Wondering why this little scene made me smile, I began thinking about humour. Why should this

    Admittedly, it was all legal.   But it was murder. A teenage girl – a particularly intelligent one at that, accomplished in Latin and Greek, with a decidedly independent mind – the victim of others’ ambitions and circumstance, executed. Circumstance – in this case, the accident of a relative’s early death, not to mention her own family and their inheritance. If the boy king hadn’t died, if her grandfather hadn’t divorced his first wife, if her distant cousin wasn’t a Roman Catholic and if her own learning hadn’t reinforced her own Protestantism – the list goes on and on… then she wouldn’t have been led out that February morning onto Tower Green to be beheaded.     Lady Jane Grey, February 12 th   1554   As I cross these old cold stones and climb the final steps bible in my hand, for now accompanied, silently I wonder at the accident which has brought me here.   Like you, I had no choice in who my parents were. I have been obedient and follow in

  Welcome to January – the month of beginnings and ends.   Where do things start and finish? And, while we're at it, when?   Everything gets a bit mixed up when I try to focus on finity (no such word, but perhaps there ought to be), let alone infinity. To be sure – or even certainly – the more I think about it, the more I lose certainty. Here's a dialogue between a child and an adult about the nothing – or is it everything? –   that lies beyond the edge of the known world, as it then was.   Non Plus Ultra   And what is it that lies beyond beyond the Pillars of Hercules?   The waters, child, that endless ocean as far as the eye can see.   So beyond, what lies beyond past what my eye can see?   Never ever ending ocean like time, which never ends.   But if I travel long enough might an end come into sight?   I do not know.  I cannot tell what it is the future holds.   Does the ocean hold the future as the past sets with t