'As Dancing is to Walking'

“Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.” – John Barrington Wain 

Born in England on March 10, 1925 Wain was a prolific poet, novelist and journalist, associated with the post-WWII literary group known as "The Movement.”   Wain also taught  at several major universities capped by a Poetry Professorship at Oxford.  

 

Among his best-known works are the novel Hurry On Down and a poetry collection Letters To Five Artists.  For Saturday’s Poem, here is Wain’s,

 

            Outside, gulls squabbled in the empty street

 

Outside, gulls squabbled in the empty street.  Criticism

and name-calling.  Salt air scrubbed the gleaming

Sunday morning walls.  Gutter-split stalks, leaves, fuelled the

squalling

and wheeling.  Feet, motors, slept. The inured citizens

turned over to snore again.  Beside me, my darling

 

slept in a deeper peace, like a princess in a fable

all through the sea-clean, gull-torn dawn, slept below

dreaming,

stunned by those hours of outrageous bliss, bliss upon bliss,

when love leapt higher than even the fiercest lovers were able.

Patient, I lay, expecting tea and her morning kiss.

 

                                                                           

                                                J.B. Wain