I wrote a little while ago about the nighjar that chirrups away from evening through till the early hours of the morning… one evening I shall go out and se if I can see him, but as he is, according to the pictures I’ve seen, rather small and brown, I might not be able to find him.
I must confess I didn’t know anything about Sir Henry Newbolt who was born in 1862 and died in 1937, and if I had been asked I might have thought he was an industrialist or politician. He was however a novelist, historian, poet and government adviser, particularly on Irish affairs. And affairs is a word which could be associated with him because he had a very curious private life behind the prim Edwardian curtains of respectability. He married Margaret Duckworth and when they went on holiday, his new wife took her lover, Ella Coltman. To add the unusual arrangement, Ella became Henry’s lover and the three of them lived together, with the children (of Margaret and Henry) Celia and Francis.
Newbolt is best known for a couple of poems, which I actually do know, Vitaï Lampada which begins: “There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night—Ten to make and the match to win—”, and Drake’s Drum: “Drake he’s in his hammock an’ a thousand mile away, (Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?)”. I didn’t know this poem though, which I found when I was trying to learn more about the elusive nightjar:
The Nightjar
We loved our nightjar, but she would not stay with us.
We had found her lying as dead, but soft and warm,
Under the apple tree beside the old thatched wall.
Two days we kept her in a basket by the fire,
Fed her, and thought she well might live – till suddenly
I the very moment of most confiding hope
She arised herself all tense, qivered and drooped and died.
Tears sprang into my eyes- why not? The heart of man
Soon sets itself to love a living companion,
The more so if by chance it asks some care of him.
And this one had the kind of loveliness that goes
Far deeper than the optic nerve- full fathom five
To the soul’socean cave, where Wonder and Reason
Tell their alternate dreams of how the world was made.
So wonderful she was-her wings the wings of night
But powdered here and therewith tiny golden clouds
And wave-line markings like sea-ripples on the sand.
O how I wish I might never forget that bird-
Never!
But even now, like all beauty of earth,
She is fading from me into the dusk of Time.Sir Henry Newbolt
Lois Elsden 