February 2017 – John Wain : poet, novelist, and critic

Remarks on the short story

February 17, 2017 smallersky 0

This transcription of an interview John Wain gave to the Journal of the Short Story in English first appeared in that publication in 1984. It […]

Extract from A Song About Major Eatherley

(pilot of the plane that dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki in 1945)

The wise men passed. The clever men appeared.

They ruled that hell be called a pumpkin face.
They robbed the soul of what it justly feared.

Coal after coal the fires of hell went out.
Their heat no longer warmed the rooms of time...

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Apology for Understatement

Forgive me that I pitch your praise too low.
Such reticence my reverence demands,
For silence falls with laying on of hands.Forgive me that my words come thin and slow.
This could not be a time for eloquence,
For silence falls with healing of the sense.We only utter what we lightly know.
And it is rather that my love knows me.
It is that your perfection set me free.

Verse is dressed up that has nowhere to go,
You took away my glibness with my fear.
Forgive me that I stand in silence here.
It is not words could pay you what I owe.

Month: February 2017

Remarks on the short story

John Wain’s open letter to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, October 1973, BBC Radio 3

The Incidental Thoughts of Marshall McLuhan by John Wain (1986)

Remarks on the short story

Edward and Helen Thomas: from Professing Poetry

“The best lecture…. I have ever heard”: John Wain on Milton’s ‘Masque of Comus’