Sidney Keyes and the artist Milein Cosman, 1942
This onion-dome holds all intricacies
Of intellect and star-struck wisdom; so
Like Coleridge’s head with multitudinous
Passages riddled, full of strange instruments
Unbalanced by a touch, this organism
From wires and dials spins introverted life.
It never looks, squat on its concrete shoulders,
Down at the river’s swarming life, nor sees
Cranes’ groping insect-like activity
Nor slow procession of funnels past the docks.
Turning its inner wheels, absorbed in problems
Of space and time, it never hears
Birds singing in the park or children’s laughter.
Alive, but in another way it broods
On this its Highgate, hypnotised
In lunar reverie and calculation.
Yet night awakes it; blind lids open
Leaden to look upon the moon:
A single goggling telescopic eye
Enfolds the spheric wonder of the sky.
Of intellect and star-struck wisdom; so
Like Coleridge’s head with multitudinous
Passages riddled, full of strange instruments
Unbalanced by a touch, this organism
From wires and dials spins introverted life.
It never looks, squat on its concrete shoulders,
Down at the river’s swarming life, nor sees
Cranes’ groping insect-like activity
Nor slow procession of funnels past the docks.
Turning its inner wheels, absorbed in problems
Of space and time, it never hears
Birds singing in the park or children’s laughter.
Alive, but in another way it broods
On this its Highgate, hypnotised
In lunar reverie and calculation.
Yet night awakes it; blind lids open
Leaden to look upon the moon:
A single goggling telescopic eye
Enfolds the spheric wonder of the sky.
Memories of Sidney Keyes
Milein Cosman
Our friendship had become fraught when I began to realise that he had fallen in love with me. I found it painful not to be able to respond. It was no use begging him to forego idealising, 'symbolising' me. I admired him, and enjoyed his erudition without being remotely attracted. He quoted Rilke, who had said how much sadder it is not to love than to love unhappily.
Sidney's involvement with German literature - Schiller, Hölderlin, Heine, Rilke, Kafka - I found very endearing: they were, however remotely, part of my early life, my native language. It was a wonder to meet those poets again in the light of Sidney's enthusiasm and in England at war (had one not heard of German composers banned here during the First World War?) I had arrived in England just before war broke out, straight from my school in Geneva. I found myself plunged into an astonishing web of intelligence - unheardof myths and stories swung around my ignorant ears. Nor do I recall being baffled. Despite my scant knowledge of English ways, customs and literature; I felt impressed, even - in retrospect - awed, by the brimming buzz of allusions to saints, kings, martyrs, myths, miracles, bishops, ghosts and quotations, Yeats and Clare, Eliot, Blake...
The studio at the back of John Street (in the shadow of the Ashmolean) had become a meeting point for tea after our divergent work; or later, after lectures or concerts, until the College gates shut. It was a rickety place with gas light - no electricity, so we preferred candlelight for our gatherings - where the newly- or half-baked poems were read in the meagre light. John Heath- Stubbs, Drummond Alison, and Sidney, most memorably reading 'The Wilderness'. Once or twice we played Consequences, where you have to find a rhyming line to the end bit of the previous line - folded over - and it was handed around between seven or eight of us sitting on the floor. No need to see the handwriting: every single line would evoke its author, revealed through his arch imagery.
A propos handwriting, Sidney's was - is - always the finest. My father, handing me a card Sidney had sent me, asked which of my friends had sent it, saying it must have been written by a very exceptional being.
Milein Cosman
Our friendship had become fraught when I began to realise that he had fallen in love with me. I found it painful not to be able to respond. It was no use begging him to forego idealising, 'symbolising' me. I admired him, and enjoyed his erudition without being remotely attracted. He quoted Rilke, who had said how much sadder it is not to love than to love unhappily.
Sidney's involvement with German literature - Schiller, Hölderlin, Heine, Rilke, Kafka - I found very endearing: they were, however remotely, part of my early life, my native language. It was a wonder to meet those poets again in the light of Sidney's enthusiasm and in England at war (had one not heard of German composers banned here during the First World War?) I had arrived in England just before war broke out, straight from my school in Geneva. I found myself plunged into an astonishing web of intelligence - unheardof myths and stories swung around my ignorant ears. Nor do I recall being baffled. Despite my scant knowledge of English ways, customs and literature; I felt impressed, even - in retrospect - awed, by the brimming buzz of allusions to saints, kings, martyrs, myths, miracles, bishops, ghosts and quotations, Yeats and Clare, Eliot, Blake...
The studio at the back of John Street (in the shadow of the Ashmolean) had become a meeting point for tea after our divergent work; or later, after lectures or concerts, until the College gates shut. It was a rickety place with gas light - no electricity, so we preferred candlelight for our gatherings - where the newly- or half-baked poems were read in the meagre light. John Heath- Stubbs, Drummond Alison, and Sidney, most memorably reading 'The Wilderness'. Once or twice we played Consequences, where you have to find a rhyming line to the end bit of the previous line - folded over - and it was handed around between seven or eight of us sitting on the floor. No need to see the handwriting: every single line would evoke its author, revealed through his arch imagery.
A propos handwriting, Sidney's was - is - always the finest. My father, handing me a card Sidney had sent me, asked which of my friends had sent it, saying it must have been written by a very exceptional being.
