On facing the words of Alexander McCall Smith, ‘….A city so beautiful, it breaks the heart again and again’ placed somehow in view
Near Waverley Station
By poster or plaque I remember not
But, never mind, it made me gasp:
My eyes, even in the glaring light of the busy day,
Became moist
Without the soul stirring of music in reflective solitude -
The heart bell was clanged
And the innocent somnolence of traipsing into
Myriad combinations of arresting view
Transmogrified
And announced itself achingly as a presence,
Not of an object of quiet affection,
Nor the growing enchantment
Of a pleasant ongoing flirtation -
The crags, the spires, the closes, the alleys (the wynds),
The sudden darts of blue in the sky
And in the distant glistening Firth,
Had me love lorn and torn
From my tourist moorings.
Thank you for telling me about the effect the poem had on you and for sharing the beautifully apt lines of Dylan Thomas. In return, I will share this quote of Thomas's which evokes the innocence found in Fern Hill - “I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't.”
I wept to see the beauty of Edinburgh
through your eyes
we need our precious precious places
not always to stay forever
but to keep forever
so we can return to them
as Dylan Thomas does
in Fern Hill:
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.