7 SEPTEMBER 1985, Page 35

Postscript

Green shades

P. J. Kavanagh

It was always a doomed endeavour, in this green darkness, to try to watch county cricket on Cheltenham College ground; so we watched the hail instead, bouncing off the plastic sheets that covered the wicket. We were reduced to memories, or memor- ies of memories: of W. G. Grace striding from that same high-Victorian pavilion; of Walter Hammond, here, taking a slip- catch so quickly he was able to put it in his pocket while the rest of the fielders ran up and down the boundary, puzzled, looking for the ball; of a young writer of stories for boys who watched a cricketer on this ground, called Jeeves, and remembered the name. We were all in the condition of Francis Thompson, with his Hornby and his Barlow long ago.

The drawn-out mopping-up operations palled as a spectacle after a while so I took a walk around the town until the next, hopeless, wicket-inspection. I called at the shop of Alan Hancox, second-hand book- seller extraordinary, and on impulse asked if he had anything on Francis Thompson. The London Library has nothing but Alan had; birdlike he flew to a shelf and plucked out, the pages yellow and brittle as winter leaves, Francis Thompson by K. Rooker (B.A. Oxon.) Docteur d'Universite de Paris, 1913. It is surely the subtlest low- point in a reputation's decline that the only book (so far) available to someone in- terested in a presumably well-known En- glish poet was published 70 years ago, in London, in French. It sounds rather good, what I have dared read. It falls to pieces in my hands. The poems are quoted in English, and translated into French in a footnote. I looked to see what the trans- lator made of the famous lines — 'As the run-stealers flicker to and fro, / To and fro, / 0 my Hornby and my Barlow long ago.' They came out like this: `Tandis que dans la va-et-vient de leur course fugitive les joueurs essaient de marquer des points, / 0 mon Hornby, 0 mon Barlow des jours d'antan!' In a much quoted remark Robert Frost defined poetry as what gets lost in translation, but this is ridiculous. It is enough to put one off reading translations altogether.

Apart from washing-out cricket this pre- sent weather has made harvesting impossi- ble and, in our small case, amid the unharvested fields, the cutting of our grass. Some of this is mown, the rest grown, and the 'mown' part is now a good, soaking six inches and the grown part, tall and yellow, tosses and tangles in the wind. Yesterday there was a phenomenon. I was told that a groundsman, attempting to remove the plastic covers on Cheltenham College ground, actually took off into the air. Up here the wind blew wildly from the east, flattening the grown grass one way, then, as we watched from the rattling window, changed direction totally in a matter of minutes, came from the west and knotted the bewildered grass into such fierce confu- sion that when it is possible to scythe — if that time ever comes — it will be almost impossible to know from which direction to cut.

This enforced and additional leisure has led me to another poet, Andrew Marvell, who is clearly as great an enthusiast for grass as I am. Brooding over it, outside, uncut I was in a frame of mind to notice the extraordinary number of times he mentions grass. He even knew something about scything: 'While thus he threw his elbow round, / Depopulating all the ground.' Precisely, the stroke comes from the elbow. In 'Upon Appleton House' he has stanza after stanza about grass: stand- ing grass, scythed grass, growing grass even, so help us, wet grass; the meadows `Whose grass, with moister colours dashed, / Seem as green silks but newly washed.' Then of course there is 'The Mower against Gardens' who cannot stand all these new-fangled flowers and garden Statuary, grass is your only stuff: 'The Gods themselves with us do dwell.'

`Stumbling on melons, as I pass, / Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.' I wonder hbw Marvell translates into French? `Apnihilating all that's made / To a green thought in a green shade' would sound all right, even Baudelairean-sinister. It was 'run-stealers' that got them — 'les joueurs essaient de marquer des points' forsooth!