His eyesight keen

scans round the green

the owl is out to kill

These immortal lines came into my mind as I watched a barn owl flying across the marsh this morning. As usual he was in the most tearing hurry, performing a series of those low-level tip-up-and-duck-down dives that they’re so good at.

I wrote the above words myself, the first of three equally brilliant verses. They were Highly Commended by the London Borough of Wandsworth in a competition for primary school poetry. It was the summit of my achievement as a poet.

Though I once got a good mark for a poem that displayed all the existential angst a fifth-former is capable of. It began something like

Crowds of people and automatic machines stand on the platform

And wait for the Northern Line tube…

Defiant of my own incompetence, I wrote poems until I was about 21. One of them was published in Bristol University’s poetry magazine Pomegranate; with a bit of luck it’s now lost for all time. It was about a nice girl who didn’t love me as much as she might have done, not an original theme, I grant you.

Mark Brown is a much better student poet than I ever was, but then he’s fictional. He’s in a novel I wrote years ago called Miss Chance (his wife doesn’t love him as much as she might, or so it seems to Mark). At one point he’s an undergraduate performance poet. An unsympathetic reviewer noted that this passage was “obviously” transcribed from real life. Well, I’ve done some foolish things in my life but I’ve never been stupid enough to read my own poetry to the audience in the interval of rock concert.

Mark’s best-loved work is about the shame and remorse that followed an evening of drunken excess: The Night of Serial Buttock-Fondling. The novel reveals only the closing lines:

and I realised

that night

I had touched

bottom

But good poetry actually matters. Words written centuries ago and read years ago leap unasked into the mind and nail big things for all time: things like love and loss and spring. This morning the song thrushes were hard at it, with their repeating phrases: 

That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,

Lest you should think he never could recapture

The first fine careless rapture!

From Browning’s Home Thoughts from Abroad. I quote these and many more of the best spring poems in my new book Spring is the Only Season:  Shakespeare, Dante, Basho, TS Eliot, Keats, Wordsworth… nothing but the best. Barnes the Poet nowhere to be seen.

 

• https://www.waterstones.com/book/spring-is-the-oly-season/simon-barnes/9781526667373
• https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=spring+is+the+only+season&crid=1EXD0RH5D5U2A&sprefix=spring+is+the+only+season%2Caps%2C216&ref=nb_sb_noss_1