Samuel Tongue

Or at least that's the myth that structures how a collection is put together.

So this poem appears not far from, yeah, not a great distance from the previous poem.

So there's echoes of it, definitely, through this.

And that might be why we thought of the previous poem as set in Greece.

But this poem's got Greece and it's got a Greek farmer and it's also got Parisian boulevards.

So we get a real American in Europe tone to this one.

But I'll read it out and we'll see what we think.

It's called How Much of That is Left in Me.

yearning inside the rejoicing, the heart's famine within the spirit's joy, waking up happy and practising discontent, seeing the poverty in the perfection but still hungering for its strictness, thinking of a Greek farmer in the orchard, the white almond blossoms falling and falling on him as he struggled with his wooden plough,

I remember the stark and precious winters in Paris, just after the war, when everyone was poor and cold.

I walked hungry through the vacant streets at night, with the snow falling wordlessly in the dark, like petals on the last of the nineteenth century.

Substantiality seemed so near in the grand, empty boulevards, while the famous bronze bells tolled of time.

stripping everything down until being was visible.

The ancient buildings and the same small stone bridges and regal fountains flourishing in the emptiness.

What fine provender in the want.

What freshness in me amid the loneliness.

So different stylistically, I think, I've just been talking about how it feels like a companion piece, but I think what links the two is this sense of either, let's think of it as balance or collapse, but there's two sides going on here.

There's the yearning inside rejoicing, the heart's famine within the spirit's joy,

waking up happy and practicing discontent.

Is this a reckoning?