The Salopian no. 166 - Winter 2020-21

SCHOOL NEWS
31
Weymouth Pine
Weymouth Pine
Her feminine wiles had got her this far –
Seated at the table of Kings, in their lands
Within her hall, courting a new kind of man.
A sapling, young and ripe, ready to bear fruit
And to make ready her faction, a heartening prospect.
And through maturity, she learned to brace the winters
Mailed and armoured in the rigid stale soil.
And then the rings appear, more and more, courtier after courtier
Until the partner is found, and gripped with fierce affection,
Small droplets fall and disperse, and new life is roused.
Labour approaches as the miners further their intervention
through the thick dark soil.
But, to no avail: a wider, more grotesque figure is born,
Born from life’s injustices.
Gluttony, a sin of gravity she creates more of what she hates,
She leeches off her neighbours.
And bursts.
Slowly
Withering
Away.
Edward Bayliss (Rt U6)
lifted from the pages of the collection and digitally
summoned into existence via a QR code on each
featured tree. So, with a mere waft of a mobile phone,
the trees themselves will pour forth poetry to enrich
any arborial amble through the 800-plus trees of our
beautiful campus.
The process of ‘composting’ imaginations began in
Lent Term last year. We responded to a wide range of
stimuli, from the oral and folk traditions of ‘The Green
Man’ and other local legends, from an article in The
Salopian by Andrew Allott, former head of Biology,
to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and modern poetic and
visual treatments of this monumental Latin work which
explores the idea of change so profoundly. But we had
no idea how drastically life would change, nor in what
ways the conditions of writing these pieces would alter
so dramatically with the onset of national lockdown in
March 2020. The title of the volume is taken from the
poem ‘Philemon and Baucis’ by Thom Gunn, from his
collection The Man with Night Sweats (1992), which
was written in part in elegiac response to the AIDS
pandemic of the time.
Written from afar, some of these poems therefore conjure
a spirit of the place recollected, if not in tranquillity, but
with intimate fondness, somehow capturing the dynamics
of mutability and an unforgettable chapter in The Schools’
five centuries of history. Yet they also express the urge
to seek reassurance and inspiration in the natural world’s
simultaneous ability to project strengths that – pace Larkin
– appear to console by seeming to transcend even the
idea of change itself. Everything changes, writes Ovid,
nothing perishes.
If you would like to receive a copy, please contact
James Fraser-Andrews at jrfa@shrewsbury.org.uk.
James Fraser-Andrews