Under the lark full cloud

On finding enchantment in a poem

Sir Guyon with the Palmer Attending, Tempted by Phaedria to Land upon the Enchanted Islands (1849) by Samuel Palmer. Getty Museum

This post is part of a community writing project called “Enchanted by a Book,” hosted by Quiet Reading with Tara Penry. In July 2024, Substack writers are joining together to spread the joy and revelation of reading and the unique experience of every reader with a book. Find a complete list of participants at the project home page, where new links will appear all month.

I was 14 when I first opened John Wain’s Anthology of Modern Poetry (1965) in a dreary small-town classroom. It was a set text book for the exams we’d take at the age of 16—hardly an object of wonder or astonishment, you’d think.

But out flew a skyful of larks and other songbirds in the shape of wonderful, sonorous poems. Careful not to show emotion in front of my bored and sarcastic classmates, I felt a door into new and exciting worlds open up, like in the Narnia books I’d read at primary school.

There were poems by Elizabeth Jennings, Silvia Path, Louis MacNeice, Theodore Roethke, and Edwin Muir, among many others. I could have chosen over a dozen other poems to exemplify what made this anthology so special for me. But it’s Poem in October by Dylan Thomas that I’ve chosen, as it was probably the greatest source of enchantment for me in the whole volume. 

**

If the contents of the book have stayed with me, the physical artefact has not. This book and I have had a peculiar history. I’ve bought it, then lost it or given it away several times. Right now, I don’t have a physical copy in my possession, though it’s on order once again.

But if the physical book is only ever in temporary custody, the poems it contains are permanent features of my mental landscape, just as much as the rolling hills and soggy fields of mid-Devon, where I grew up. 

It was possibly its rural imagery that made Thomas’ poem so immediately accessible to me, a teenage rugby-playing part-time stockman on the family farm.

I could say that the poem transported me to another place, but I could equally say that it allowed me to stay in the same place and to see it for the first time.

**

I’ve mentioned before the importance of birds in my childhood on the farm. Thomas’ poem is full of birds, such as: 

The water-

Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name.

There’s a “springful of larks,” as well as the “lark full cloud” quoted in the title of this piece. The usual collective noun for larks is “an exaltation.” And what better word than that to capture the rapture or ecstasy that Thomas generates in this poem? 

Hinting at a different form of exaltation, Thomas writes of a “heron priested shore,” a phrase that still echoes in my head every time I see one of these birds.

Also present are the 

whistling

Blackbirds and the sun of October,

evoking the dispersed clouds of blackbirds that were scattered over the damp Devon pasture I used to traipse across as a boy.

I am still astounded by the breathless voice of these words as the poet gathers them together and tumbles them across the page and into my imagination:

A springful of larks in a rolling

Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling

   Blackbirds and the sun of October

           Summery

       On the hill's shoulder

When I revisit the town where my parents lived for forty years, the church above the “dwindling harbour” in Torquay still looks just like Thomas’ description when the south westerlies bring rain:

The sea wet church the size of a snail

   With its horns through mist

**

There are many phrases that echo through my life in this poem. I could talk about how, as I’ve explored the “fond climates” during my years abroad, I’ve heard the “sweet singers” on stages, in woods, or in summer skies. I could mention how “rain wringing” connects me to the many experiences of rain I have had.

Or how the “wood faraway” takes me back to my mother’s childhood favourite book, The Faraway Tree, or how “the legends of the green chapels” take me back to my days reading mediaeval literature at university. 

But ultimately, when I read it, I am able to reconnect to that time of first reading when I could experience the world as if new, as if 

 the blue altered sky

 Streamed again a wonder of summer.

**

In his essay On Reading Old Books (1821), William Hazlitt wrote: 

In reading a book which is an old favourite with me… I not only have the pleasure of imagination and of a critical relish of the work, but the pleasures of memory added to it. It recals the same feelings and associations which I had in first reading it, and which I can never have again in any other way... They bind together the different scattered divisions of our personal identity. They are landmarks and guides in our journey through life. They are pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours.

Hazlitt’s fine phrase about how the early associations of reading a book “bind together the different scattered divisions of our personal identity” feels just right to describe my experience of reading this anthology and especially Poem in October. 

**

Our theme here is enchantment, and its apotheosis comes in the middle of the poem: 

But all the gardens

Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales

Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.

Here is a poem-conjured world that thrilled my young mind with its singing, springing cadences, and allusions to magical worlds blooming over the horizon. 

Then, in the final stanza of the poem, Thomas looks back at his own childhood with a new height of rapture, is a kind of time-defeating magic:

And the true

Joy of the long dead child sang burning

 In the sun.

And truly, through Thomas’ poem, that enchanted child still sings to me.