‘Petition’

The poet and linguist Keith Bosley (1937–2018) was something of a contradiction, deeply rooted in the landscape of the Chilterns but also a true internationalist. He worked for the BBC World Service, principally as a newsreader, but also wrote scripts for programmes about poetry and literature. These included, in 1981, a series about “The Poetry of Europe” – a subject for which he was well qualified, having himself published collections of translations from French, Portuguese, Finnish, Polish and German. His version of the Finnish national epic The Kalevala (1999) was particularly well received, earning him a lasting place in Finland’s affections.

But he was also inspired by the countryside of his beloved South Buckinghamshire. He was the organist at St Laurence’s Church, Upton-cum-Chalvey, for more than forty years, and this fact seems to lend his poem “Petition”, first published in the TLS in 1982 and then in A Chiltern Hundred (1987), an autobiographical edge. Here, a speaker from the past – gamekeeper, groundsman, sexton – finds late-flowering love and is moved to devote the rest of his life to the woman who has stepped over his threshold and brought into his room “such light / as I had never dreamed”. Bosley was proudly provincial in the best sense of the word; his careers as a writer and broadcaster were both nurtured by an enduring interest in the detail of individual lives. And although the linguistic precision of much of his poetry owes something, perhaps, to his work as a translator, his job as a newsreader can also be heard in the importance he attaches to the ear – the measured cadences and warm verbal music of a voice you can trust.

Petition

Lady, the leaves are catching fire in the avenue
the wattle fence around the estate is in need of repair
the stags have done their belling, the hinds are three months in calf
and I am not so young as I was. Man and boy
I have lived in this country cloister, this fair park
with its great house of Tudor chimneys and colonnades
where I have wiped my boots and made my prompt report
of deer, of poachers apprehended, of suckers lopped
of branches angled from the pond before the east
windows, and beside the house the darling church
topped with a spire you can see for miles that seems to tug it
heavenward, its nave no longer than its transepts, windows
whose tracery of leaf shapes these six hundred years
has writhed and wrestled in the pentecostal gale
its stone floor I sweep, keeping the commandments
always, and twice on Sunday and twice more during the week
lighting forty-seven candles, laying out vestments, finding
the place in the book, pulling the bell, pumping the organ:
WHEREAS your sweet self has visited me, stepping over
my threshold at the gate, brought into my room such light
as I had never dreamed the multitude of cobwebs
nor guessed the wealth of dust my dutiful years have gathered
whereas the fragrance of your tall and cheerful progress
has gusted through the trees I hold in trust, whose many
colours I had mistaken for my early autumn
until they flared before your laughter but did not fall
whereas you have expressed concern at the state of the fence
not for my lord’s sake but for mine, whereas you know
a tine from a royal like no other woman I have met
whereas the man I am is belling as never before.
WHEREFORE be pleased to accept my honourable services
vegetables, fruit and nuts from my small garden, hares
shot as they nibbled my lord’s fence, whose ancestor
would poach the German king by running him hard at the hunt
wherefore know that I who am neither lord nor poacher
hunt the deer You, my lips pursed to summon the gentle
hounds of my earnest wishes, their panting calendar
cooled but in no wise chilled by your own more temperate seasons.
GIVEN at my hand this day, your birthday. My compliments
to your brother who knows his letters better than I.

KEITH BOSLEY (1982)

The post ‘Petition’ appeared first on TLS.