We find quite repulsive the text by T. Hughes (that "Ted" is the signifier of a monstrous over-grown infant is not it?) We do not understand how any one can imagine it possible that aesthetic value resides in the gruesome.
To clear the air then, here is something much nicer, and far more artistic in a small way:
Out of Weakness by A.C. Benson, who of course when it came to prose was one of England's greatest twentieth-century writers.
OUT OF WEAKNESS TO-DAY, as far as eye can see,
Or thought can multiply the sight,
In tangled croft, on upland lea,
A message flashed along the light
Has worked strange marvels underground,
And stirred a million sleeping cells,
The rose has hope of being crowned;
The foxglove dreams of purple bells;
No tiny life that blindly strives,
But thinks the impulse all his own,
Nor dreams that countless other lives
Like him, are groping, each alone;
What dizzy sweetness, when the rain
Has wept her fill of laden showers,
To peep across the teeming plain,
Through miles of upward-springing flowers!
The brown seed bursts his armoured cap,
And slips a white-veined arm between,
White juicy stalks, a touch would snap,
And twisted horns of sleekest green
Now shift and turn from side to side,
And fevered drink the stealing rain,
As children fret at sermon-tide,
When roses kiss the leaded pane.
The tender, the resistless grace,
That stirs the hopes of sleeping flowers,
Could shake yon fortress to her base,
And splinter those imperial towers;
Concentred, bound, obedient,
The soul that lifts those dreaming lids
Could mock old Ramses' monument,
And pile a thousand pyramids.
-oOo-
