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| Peter Trower - Poet & Rosa 'A Shropshire Lad' 31 October 2024 |
When Summer’s End I Nighing A.E. Houseman
When summer's end is nighing
And skies at evening cloud,
I muse on change and fortune
And all the feats I vowed
When I was young and proud.
The weathercock at sunset
Would lose the slanted ray,
And I would climb the beacon
That looked to Wales away
And saw the last of day.
From hill and cloud and heaven
The hues of evening died;
Night welled through lane and hollow
And hushed the countryside,
But I had youth and pride.
And I with earth and nightfall
In converse high would stand,
Late, till the west was ashen
And darkness hard at hand,
And the eye lost the land.
The year might age, and cloudy
The lessening day might close,
But air of other summers
Breathed from beyond the snows,
And I had hope of those.
They came and were and are not
And come no more anew;
And all the years and seasons
That ever can ensue
Must now be worse and few.
So here's an end of roaming
On eves when autumn nighs:
The ear too fondly listens
For summer's parting sighs,
And then the heart replies.
This time of the year for me is less about Halloween and more about 2 November and All Souls’ Day. Because I am 82 most of my friends and many in my family are all gone.
Today 31 October I happened to go to my back lane and there I found the English Rose, Rosa ‘A Shropshire Lad’ was in bloom. Not only that it had plenty of pristine new red leaves which is a particular added quality of this rose which may be the best in my garden.
I looked at the two blooms and immediately thought of a poet. He was called the logging poet. He was Peter Trower.
I remember Malcolm Parry, editor of Vancouver Magazine, looking at me with a smile in his office and then throwing phone books on the floor. “Alex, underneath is Western Living’s art director Chris Dahl. It is a magazine that features photographs of pristine bathrooms without people.”
A few months later Malcolm Parry became the new editor of Western Living. One of his first intrusions into eliminating those empty bathrooms was by hiring Peter Trower to write for the magazine.
In the 80s and early 90s a group of artists, photographers, poets, writers, designers, editors, hoods, strippers, etc would meet for lunch every Thursday at the Railway Club. One of the regulars was Pete (as we called Peter Trower). This lovely man taught me to appreciate his favourite poet which was A.E. Houseman. Trower could recite from memory from Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad.
I remember that man, in loving memory and I dedicate this blog to him. It is impossible for me to ever look at a bloom of this rose without remembering him.
