Month: May 2022

My thanks to Keith Bosley (1937-2018) for letting me have a copy of his poem of a visit he made to Horbury over half a century ago.

In Memory of William Baines
(1899-1922)

Is this the church
we asked the caretaker
where there is a plaque
to William Baines?
It is, he said.

We had travelled north all day
to Yorkshire, to smell
and taste the soot
of Wakefield, to see
the pitheads, the slagheaps
the houses facing
two grey ways at once, to hear
people with grit on their tongues
giving a civil answer
a guarded edge:
we had come to find
what was left of a boy
in the village where he lived
fifty years ago -
this stern suburb, Horbury
hugging the hillside
above the city.

We had read old journals
proclaiming his debt
to Debussy and Skryabin
(the sea and the fire)
calling him a genius
and reporting his death
at the age of twenty-three:
we had met distant
relatives who told
of meagre schooling
of work with his father
playing in the picture
palace and the Primltive
Methodist chapel
and of consumption
and poverty that kept him
in the garden shed
till the hospital at York
could do nothing for him.

We had studied tattered
scores long out of print
from Paradise Gardens where
he walked at sunset
to Pool-Lights, whose last phrase
rises to silence
taking his bearings meanwhile
from his own Flamboro' Head
and sailing out
alone beyond the beacons
where no one was to follow.

This is William Baines
but the caretaker
unlocked the door and showed us
into gloom. Upstairs
he sald. We trod, fingered
grime and there it was
with laurels and flaming
torches carved in oak
an inscription
in the taste of the time
and at the bottom
a scroll in bronze
with a piano Prelude
engraved in full
chosen for its
brevity and because
they called it the
Amen Prelude.

He fetched us a triptych
of photographs
from the organ loft:
- a printed title page
with two corners
turned down and shaded
- a dark young man
with plain strong features
creased down the middle
- A page of manuscript
marked Labyrinth
a deep sea cave.

Call him up, call him back
from the lonely places:
here in his England
his Yorkshire where men
have died for a hard living
let this fiftieth autumn
flare in his honour, for here
is small treasure, here
is filigree of iron.

Keith Bosley