21 DECEMBER 1985, Page 54

Moving to winter

As I move, through autumn to winter, my life's house Is Edmund Waller's cottage of the soul.

How chill, how pure, eternity shines through the chinks!

Yet, while my fire still burns, I'll proffer Scraps of toasted cheese to the crickets — My long-legged, whiskery poems, that chirp in the crannies, Or hop about on the flagstones. And there'll be other visitants — an incognito Angel or so, all my accustomed ghosts, And, twirling his forked tail, pedunculate-eyed, With sharp, nine-inch proboscis for a nose, Not all malignant, the odd domestic bogle.

John Heath-Stubbs