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19.2.26

The Fire of Joy

In my ongoing battle to acquire a taste for poetry, I bought this collection as an experiment. Clive James, at the very end of his life, found solace in remembering the many poems he'd memorised by heart; The Fire of Joy collects about eighty of them, with commentary and anecdote by James. For the last couple of months, I've been reading one poem per night, just before going to sleep (I whispered them aloud to myself if possible, as per his instructions), which has been a lovely ritual, and I certainly developed a new appreciation of many of these poems, most of which were new to me, though some were old acquaintances.

I had an idea that I might also memorise these poems and thus be able to access the same joy and comfort that James obviously felt on his deathbed, but I fear it might be beyond me. I have tried to learn Louis MacNiece's The Sunlight on the Garden by heart, which is my favourite, and which I'd partly copied onto my collage study desk in Year 12; but so many of these poems are so long, and I don't like them all equally, so I don't think that the project is going to take off after all. It would be a wonderful thing to have a fund of poetry to repeat to oneself in moments of stress or crisis, which is what Clive James says he did during health emergencies. Traditionally poetry and I don't get along very well. The Fire of Joy has been at least one step towards reconciliation.
 

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2 comments:

  1. Susan GreenFebruary 20, 2026 at 8:38 AM

    Though poetry and I are good enough friends (and I certainly wrote enough of it when I was younger), I don't read much these days and I have been thinking about re-instating the habit of a poem a night before sleep. I read a lot of Mary Oliver that way, and have picked up an anthology of poetry about birds which I hope will be useful. I used to have a few poems memorised for the dentist! All forgotten now, except scraps and lines.

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  2. A latte beckonsFebruary 20, 2026 at 5:22 PM

    As a child I used to know The Lady of Shallott and a couple of others but then after high school I fell abruptly out of love with poetry and never really got back the taste. Poems about birds sound lovely though! And I do like Mary Oliver, what has crossed my path.

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