Kathleen Raine's poetry
After bracing the cold, wind and rain I find sanctuary inside The Leeds Library. A warm drink and reading some of the journal collections refreshes me. Before leaving, I pick up a leaflet about Mill Hill Chapel. Inside the leaflet are details of various events including a wednesday lunchtime contemplation service. A few days later, I go along to the contemplation service and listen to the Minister, Reverend Jo James recite poems by Katherine Raine. Reverend James’s sermon was about resistance to cold and the poem he recited was called Winter Fire. The poetry evoked the cold, clear weather outside the chapel. On my next visit to The Leeds LIbrary, I searched the catalogue and found two books of poetry by Kathleen Raine.
I located The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine on a shelf in the Main Room and went to the reading room to explore the contents. The Collected Poems book includes work from Raine’s Stone and Flower series such as: Nocturne, Returning Autumn, The Crystal Skull and the Speech of BIrds. The poem the Speech of Birds reminds me of another book in the Leeds Library collection A Sweet Wild Note: What We Hear When The Birds Sing by local author Richard Smyth. In another part of Raine’s collection are a series of poems joined together by the theme of The Pythoness. In the Pythoness collection there are poems about the elements: air, water and fire. The poem Winter Fire, from The Pythoness collection includes the following stanzas:
The presence of nature in my winter room
With curtains drawn across the cloud and stars,
Lakes, fells, and green sweet meadows far away
Is fire, older and more wild than they….
Flames more fluent than water of a mountain stream,
Flames more delicate and swift than air,
Flames more impassable than walls of stone,
Destructive and irrevocable as time.
After opening Raine’s Collected Poems book, I realise that only one reader has borrowed this since 2015. Finding these poems in the library collection has introduced me to the work of a poet I had not come across before. These sorts of expeditions to the library are rewarding because they involving learning something new and seeing the world differently.
I located The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine on a shelf in the Main Room and went to the reading room to explore the contents. The Collected Poems book includes work from Raine’s Stone and Flower series such as: Nocturne, Returning Autumn, The Crystal Skull and the Speech of BIrds. The poem the Speech of Birds reminds me of another book in the Leeds Library collection A Sweet Wild Note: What We Hear When The Birds Sing by local author Richard Smyth. In another part of Raine’s collection are a series of poems joined together by the theme of The Pythoness. In the Pythoness collection there are poems about the elements: air, water and fire. The poem Winter Fire, from The Pythoness collection includes the following stanzas:
The presence of nature in my winter room
With curtains drawn across the cloud and stars,
Lakes, fells, and green sweet meadows far away
Is fire, older and more wild than they….
Flames more fluent than water of a mountain stream,
Flames more delicate and swift than air,
Flames more impassable than walls of stone,
Destructive and irrevocable as time.
After opening Raine’s Collected Poems book, I realise that only one reader has borrowed this since 2015. Finding these poems in the library collection has introduced me to the work of a poet I had not come across before. These sorts of expeditions to the library are rewarding because they involving learning something new and seeing the world differently.
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