An ‘Orlando’ diary, Robert Saxton
My new collection Against Gravity (May 2026) ends with a 68-stanza poem spoken in the voice of a 15-year-old Danish girl, Annika, who travels from her home in Denmark to Vita Sackville-West’s famous garden at Sissinghurst, in Kent, with her much older friend, whom she calls Mr Frome. I wrote the poem as a birthday gift for my friend Anna Martin, an American living in England. The age difference between Annika and Mr Frome reflects the age difference between Anna and me. The poem was my response to a customised photo book that Anna had given me for my birthday, entitled Bob and Anna in Gardens. My gift to her consisted of the poem in printed pamphlet form as well as a printout of a diary I wrote to record the writing experience. Here, for those interested in the process of poetic composition within a strict rhyming stanza form, is the diary in its entirety.
I started the poem ‘Orlando: Annika in Vita’s Garden’ around 24 August 2020, but didn’t think initially of keeping a diary. Hence the belated first entry.
12 September
I’ve got Annika and Mr Frome to Sissinghurst [10.1-2] and it’s taken longer than I expected. The pace I’ve set will probably yield a poem of about 30 stanzas, maybe more. Having spent a stanza and a third on Sissinghurst as a prison I need to have at least six stanzas, I think, on the garden. Will I be able to sustain this without becoming wishy-washy? I think so, thanks to Adam Nicolson’s NT guide book, which is turning out to be a rich resource, packed with vivid, lively detail – eg Vita and Harold opening the garden to the public for 2 days in 1937 and asking visitors to put 6d in an old tobacco tin; the Library as an image of Vita’s disinheritance from Knowle; the Cottage Garden ‘as much a cottage garden as Marie Antoinette was a milkmaid’; the ‘browse lines’ in the Herb Garden, caused by the (anticipated!) herb-plucking tourists; the Spring Garden, laid out with strict linearity by Harold Nicolson and compared by Vita to Platform 5 at Charing Cross; the Orchard ravaged by the Great Storm of 1987 (which makes me think of the Great Frost in VW’s Orlando).
Will I finish by Anna’s birthday on 9 November? That’s my aim, with time built in to make a proper pamphlet of it. I don’t want to think about that difficult procedure at the moment, though: I just want to press on with the writing. It’s giving purpose to my virus-shackled days.
Sissinghurst! I can imagine the word being hissed in a French prisoner’s ear. I thought of putting the hiss in the poem, but didn’t want to make the prison vignette even longer than it is, as that would slow me down to a snail’s pace. The prison brutality reminds me of the beginning of VW’s Orlando: the hero as a boy slicing at a Moor’s head with his sword. Dark stuff, which echoes the real Madeleine’s ‘Mohammed’ moment. I made a whole list of posh Christian names (after Googling ‘posh girls’ names’) before deciding on Madeleine for the landlady. I don’t want this choice of name to come over as a tribute or gift to Madeleine. In fact, I might introduce xenophobia more explicitly as a theme. I could easily change the name to Gwendoline, or something else, even after finishing the poem (I rhyme Madeleine, weakly, with ‘In’, and more rhymes might follow), but that would be arbitrary. And I don’t want anything to be arbitrary.
I retitled the poem ‘Orlando’ after writing the lines summarising VW’s novel [9.2-3]. This title seems apt, as the poem is a tribute to a friendship, like the original Orlando. I’ll be modest in the dedication, as in my collections: just ‘For Anna’. The poem itself will be the main impulse of affection. VW was even more restrained, dedicating her book ‘To V. Sackville-West’.
One reason I’m drawn to ‘Orlando’ as the title is the gender-change parallel: Vita inhabiting Orlando, me inhabiting Annika. More importantly, VW’s Orlando was written as a gift, as mine is intended to be.
So I’m now at the threshold of the garden description [10.2-3]. The big challenge here is what to do about the seasons. I haven’t said when the visit is taking place. Should I be specific about the month? – and realistic about some parts of the garden being in flower and others not? Or should I depict the whole garden ablaze with a magically synchronised flowering (echoing the compression of centuries into Virginia’s Orlando’s lifetime). If I opt for the latter, should Annika be aware of the magic? I don’t yet know the answers to these questions. I worry that the magical option might seem too contrived and that, once started, it would be irreversible. On the other hand, the realistic approach would require work – I’d have to look up which parts of the garden flower in which months. And the garden rooms that are totally over or merely in bud might seem like dead zones or glaring omissions in the poem.
A smaller question is whether I follow a particular route around the garden in my description, and whether, if I do, this should correspond with the prescribed itinerary for visitors, if there is one. One advantage of having an imaginary NT volunteer as the guide is that perhaps she can take her guests on her own unauthorised route.
I have some ideas about the ending. One is to have Annika resolving to commission an oak tree tattoo for herself – ‘The Oak Tree’ was the long poem written by Orlando/Vita in VW’s novel. Another is prompted by Nicolson’s guide book: Vita in her last days in June 1962, looking out over the White Garden through one window and the fields and woods of Kent through another (‘White’ and ‘Kent’ are both fruitful rhyme words). I don’t think she was in her Tower when she looked through these two windows, but in another building on the site. But maybe I can put her in the Tower for my ending. Or, even better, perhaps I can draw upon what she wrote about the White Garden in January 1950, before it actually existed: she imagined people seeing it from a bench, with a barn owl flying over this garden room that she was currently ‘planting under the first flakes of snow’. This connects with the barn owl my dad and I used to look for in Eastbridge, Suffolk, which Anna and I were lucky enough to see a week ago in the same place (a different individual obviously, but symbolically the same). The more I think about it, the more I’m drawn to this ending – concluding with the words of Vita quoted above. It would be good if this coda could evoke a sad ethereal beauty, like James Joyce’s final sentence in his story ‘The Dead’: ‘His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.’
14 September
I should have noted at the start that I’ve opted for a simple rhyme scheme for ‘Orlando’ – a pattern a young person might have chosen. But only after writing half a dozen stanzas did the significance dawn on me of ABCABC, with its connotations of the school room – as in, ‘easy as ABC’. This is an example of retroactive reasoning.
I’ve resolved my dilemma about the time of year: I’ve made it July, and the depiction of flowering will be calendrically realistic. Maybe July is too late, but it would hard to this change now (except to late June [see 11.1] ), as I’ve said Annika is expecting to see the White Garden at its best. My reservation is based on reading somewhere, after selecting my month, that the garden as a whole looks really good in May. I’ve brought in the magical synchrony symbolically, in Annika’s ambition to make a photo scrapbook using pictures taken on three separate visits [11.1].
I think I remember the guide book saying you should visit the top of the Tower before the garden itself, so that’s their first port of call. At first I was planning to give this just one stanza. But while taking the three visitors up the staircase [11.2], I remembered vaguely a view from a high place (maybe another tower?) in VW’s Orlando from which the hero sees things impossibly far away, and I decided to mimic this. I thought possibly Annika (not necessarily the others) could be made to see the Eiffel Tower, or even some prominent landmark in Copenhagen. Then I found the passage in question, and the viewpoint is in fact the top of an oak tree. I’m now thinking that the prospect will comprise three layers: the garden; Kent (I’ll try to bring in Harold’s feeling of ‘our romantic Saxon, Roman, Tudor Kent’); and some of the details in the impossible view Orlando has. That will mean four stanzas on the Tower – which will take me to 24 stanzas so far, I think. Oh dear! as Annika would say.
The second Tower stanza [11.3] has some language that may be a bit too grown-up for Annika. It was already tending that way in the ‘summer fever’ trope in the previous stanza – I may revisit this [I changed it in the end to ‘summer heat’]. It’s adults who tend to spin off adverbs, yet Annika does this with ‘invitingly’ [now gone]. The whole question of Annika’s language at this point needs more thought – I should be prepared to spend as much time rethinking this stanza as I’ve spent writing it. This will probably mean scrapping one or more of the rhyme words ‘allure/miniature’, ‘cabinet’ and ‘ease’. Could my mental advancement of Annika be justified as part of the magical dimension I’m striving for? I don’t think so, as no reader will see it as such. But I might have to live with it.
Second thoughts: Kent and the magical Orlando details can be squashed, perhaps, into the same stanza. Otherwise the pace becomes just too slow for my looming deadline. However, I can imagine myself getting carried away – which would have the advantage of putting off the difficult transition to the garden itself.
17 September
I’ve got the trio down from the Tower and into the Spring Garden, which has no bulbs in flower [12.2]. Annika says she can visit another time – though she can’t keep saying that in every non-flowering sector they visit.
I revised the first layer of the prospect from the Tower [11.3]. I took out the unconvincing ‘ease’ (a rhyme), and Annika now finishes the stanza with a delighted comparison: the cabinet image, with upholstery. I’m hoping her exclamation mark conveys childlike enthusiasm, to work against her sounding too grown-up.
The next layer includes the quote from Harold about ‘our romantic Saxon, Roman, Tudor, Kent’ [11.4]. The chessboard comparison may not be wholly convincing, but Annika has just demonstrated her fondness for stretched similes, so I think it’s OK. Annika’s proposed game of spotting a cow and no one being willing to go along with it again emphasises her youth and impulsiveness – in an otherwise grown-up stanza. The thankyou to Madeleine serves a similar purpose, by making it clear Annika is hanging on gratefully to an adult’s words.
I restricted the view from the top of the Tower [12.1] to the Channel and London – that’s miraculous enough for me. VW mentions both. Specifically she writes of London’s spires, and I’ve copied this, as a deliberate echo – and added St Paul’s (which I’m sure Orlando would have singled out had it existed then in its distinctive domed form). I thought of putting in office blocks but preferred in the end not to undermine the idyll. VW also mentions Snowdon but I didn’t want to overdo the magic realism. The gift to binoculars will give Anna a moment of recognition. ‘Cars’ at first seemed an arbitrary rhyme for ‘binoculars’ (like ‘moo’ for ‘you’) but it’s just what I needed – Annika noticing something very specific about the cross-Channel ferry (the cars making it low in the water).
In the first Spring Garden stanza I’ve used another quote [12.1]. The quotes help to ground the poem in factual content, making it informative, like a guide book. Does the enjambment into the second Spring Garden stanza mimic the lime avenue ‘marching straight’? – if so, this was an unconscious effect [12.2-3]. I struggled a bit with the missing bulbs, because there was no space to name any of them without relaxing the pace even more. In any case, flower lists need to be handled with restraint – some are bound to be needed later. I’m hoping ‘fanfare’ is impactful enough for the omission not to matter. This stanza has two half- rhymes out of three, but at least they’re quite close – Vita/theatre, fanfare/year – and they are anchored by the exactitude of a feminine rhyme, hesitation/station. It’s a pity I haven’t been able to bring in the choice of spring flowers in this part of the garden reflecting V and H’s happy travels in the Med, North Africa and Persia. I would also have liked to include the fritillaries, a flower that’s always appealed to me. I could add a further stanza but probably won’t: I need to press on with the tour. Also, why mention flowers that Annika can’t, in late June, see? In the bath this morning I was thinking I might steer them next to the Cottage Garden (I’ve just looked this up on the plan and it’s adjacent), which would bring in the milkmaid quote. And then I might make a joke about all these quotes Madeleine is parading. Eg ‘“Christ, not another quote!” whispered Mr Frome./ He often blasphemes like that but doesn’t mean it.’ (Possible rhyme: screen it.) The old garden room/Frome rhyme could come in handy again here. Although the air of innocence needs to be punctured a bit maybe, I’m not sure this is the right way to do it – but I do like the absurdity of meaning a blasphemy. [Not used in the end: it was a terrible idea.]
19 September
The first thing I did this morning was to fix a small problem that’s been bothering me. Yesterday I wrote [13.1]:
‘The name’s a tease,’ said Madeleine. ‘It’s no more
a cottage garden than Marie Antoinette
was a milkmaid – not my words but a friend’s.’
Mr Frome winked, implying ‘What a bore
all these quotes are!’ His dig was our secret.
‘That’s funny!’ I said, eager to make amends.
The milkmaid comment is actually from garden writer Tony Lord, author of Gardening at Sissinghurst (quoted in the Nicolson/NT guidebook). I can’t name him, unfortunately, as that would be a distraction (I’ll need, of course, to give him an acknowledgement). Making Lord a friend of Madeleine’s is just about allowable, I think. But what bothers me is that Mr Frome’s ‘What a bore …’ is too crabby. It’s Annika who interprets the wink, so actually it’s she who’s being unkind, and that’s out of character. Also, ‘His dig was our secret’ is awkward, but I couldn’t find any other suitable rhyme word for ‘Antoinette’. Anyway, this morning I revised the stanza:
‘It’s no more a cottage garden,’ said our guide,
‘than Marie Antoinette was a milkmaid – not
my words but a gardening writer friend’s.’
Mr Frome winked. I knew what this implied:
a surfeit of quotes! His wink was our secret.
‘That’s funny!’ I said, eager to make amends.
Not great, but I think it’s much better, as the criticism gets muted to observation. And some true information is given about the source of the quote. I might change ‘surfeit’ to ‘barrage’, which is less critical still, but ‘surfeit’ is more idiomatic and subdued, drawing less attention to itself.
Now for the rest of yesterday’s progress. Initially I put tulips and wallflowers into the Cottage Garden, and had the tulips matching Madeleine’s lipstick [12.4]. Then I realised they wouldn’t be in flower. Cannas matching the lipstick seems less likely (I think the ‘-lips’ subliminally helps to make tulips seem a more natural comparison) but there it is.
Two stanzas later ‘(Was Harold right for Vita? Was he too cold?)’ is meant both to be childlike and to reflect Annika’s identification with Vita [13.2]. The following stanza focuses on two plants [13.3]. I have some doubts about ‘like Vita’s Sapphic passion’s flames’, not least because the sunflowers are not flamelike in form, whereas tulips would be, but again this highlights Annika’s enthusiasm for her heroine.
Then comes pure garden description [13.4] – a respite after all the personal stuff. The scoop and ‘coffee-cups’ return us to the personal [13.5ff]. I decided not to stint on space for this topic. This is Annika showing how deeply she can feel. I worried about ‘Details like this made each feel less alone’, as it’s cryptic, but on reflection I felt it contained a mysterious truth: in any case, its most obvious meaning is explained later. The run of enjambement after the ‘coffee-cups’ mention is probably the longest, most complex stretch of syntax in the poem so far – Annika on the threshold of adulthood. It needs the short ‘Not that I know’ at the start of the next stanza, for the sake of not only rhythmic variation but also modesty – a pulling back from her claim to precocious wisdom. I wondered whether to mention what Mr Frome’s loss was – eg father. But I didn’t want to introduce a new character. ‘Like a train’ is hyperbole, and a bit jarring, but I like this sudden impact here. [I later added ‘hurtling’.] Harold did in real life check the rain before going to London each workday, but I wasn’t able to mention that earlier, so it’s good to have a way of including the detail now.
Where next? I think I’d like to try expanding this coffee-cup section even more. Vita wrote to Harold that when she saw him checking his scoop it was ‘the sort of sudden view of a person that twists one’s heart, when they don’t know you are observing them – they have an innocent look, almost as a child asleep – one feels one is spying on some secret life one should not know about.’ This is moving. I might even try to render the thought in Annika’s terms. Vita goes on: ‘I often think I have never told you how much I love you – and if you died I should reproach myself, saying: Why did I never tell him? Why did I never tell him enough?’ This too seems important, especially in the context of a poem that celebrates a deep friendship. Maybe Annika, more simply, could express the thought that friends shouldn’t neglect to say what they mean to each other.
21 September
I decided a few days ago to drop my stanza about Vita’s letter to Harold. Here was how it had ended up [14.4]:
‘She wrote to him once,’ said Mr Frome thoughtfully,
‘to say she felt she hadn’t said enough
how much she loved him. She didn’t want him to die
not knowing.’ This came as a surprise to me.
So Harold was a soulmate? I’d written him off
as a just a companion. It must be true – why lie?
One problem here is ‘written off’ – Annika isn’t the kind of person who’d undervalue friendship. Also, ‘said Mr Frome thoughtfully’ is very awkward: the verb ‘to say’ occurs three times in the first two lines. I also thought the ending was feeble. But having decided to drop the stanza altogether, I felt this left a hole. The poem seems to require Annika to say something about Vita and Harold, after the coffee-cup stanza. So first thing this morning I had another go:
‘She wrote to him once,’ Mr Frome informed us,
‘to say she felt she hadn’t told him often
enough how much she loved him – she couldn’t bear
him dying without knowing.’ This came as a surprise.
He was a soulmate, not just a companion?
Was there passion sometimes – like in an affair?
The bear/affair rhyme came to me as a windfall. It’s just what I needed, as the last line now shows Annika appealingly out of her depth on the subject of passion/sex. I don’t like ‘informed’ but ‘said to us’ would be even clumsier, given the ‘say’ repetition. And us/surprise is a tenuous quarter-rhyme. But never mind. The whole point is the last line.
Afterthought: I’ve changed the Mr Frome clause to: ‘Mr Frome shared with us.’ It sounds a bit awkward to British ears, but I hope Anna, as an American, will find it more natural. It’s plausible Annika would be at home with the idiom too.
I’d already written the first Rose Garden stanza and felt it was fine [15.1]. I’d started the second and was struggling with it. My aim was to get some of exotic romance of old roses into the description. I wanted to put in a bazaar. Vita wrote about ‘those dusky mysterious hours in an Oriental storehouse where the rugs and carpets of Isfahan and Bokkar and Samarcand were unrolled in their dim but sumptuous colouring and richness of texture for slow delight [quoted by Adam Nicolson]’. But I wanted Annika to come up with her own version of this, so rendered her thinking about the old roses as books that might be opened up like carpets if you could only find the key. The half-rhyme like/souk was another windfall.
In the following stanza [15.3], focusing on ‘Cardinal de Richelieu’, I again had a run of luck, with roses/noses and Richelieu/connoisseur. Inserting ‘very’ in ‘A minister of state under our noses!’ transforms the line into a pun hovering between the literal and metaphorical. The last line uses an exclamation mark again to make Annika more innocently enthusiastic.
I think I need to extend the Rose Garden even further, as I haven’t yet mentioned the other plants in this ‘room’ – and naming just one rose seems stingy. Also, I thought I might have Annika remembering the French prisoners at this point. But I’d be uncomfortable having more than one further stanza, and combining these two ideas in one seems like a daunting prospect.
22 September
Slow, uncomfortable progress, with only one finished stanza to show for it [15.4]. I found a way to include the hiss in Sissinghurst, belatedly, and I put in the French prisoners. To finish, I originally wrote ‘Revenge can be so sweet-scented,’ which is off-key as a generalisation – better to suggest that this revenge, uniquely, was sweet-scented. Hence the current version, ‘Was revenge ever so sweet- scented?’, but this may be worse: I think the question mark makes it hard to take in the meaning immediately. The familiar aphorism ‘Revenge is sweet’ lurks irritatingly behind the line, and I can’t be sure if it’s trying to be helpful. I toyed with substituting ‘Justice’ for ‘Revenge’, but this would notch up the age of the speaker perhaps. In the end I decided – without conviction – that the aphorism does contribute something. The tormented/scented rhyme took so long to incorporate that I couldn’t bear to lose it. Given time, I might hit upon another ending using the same principal words (‘revenge … sweet-scented’) but there are only four unspoken-for syllables, so it may not be possible. Also, is there a problem with ‘spat with a hiss’? Possibly. I just tried it – to find out if hissing produced sufficiently projectile saliva. It didn’t, but my dental work makes the experiment inconclusive. Annika is being worryingly grown-up again: her conceits show Metaphysical elaborateness. [I didn’t make these changes: I was worrying unnecessarily, I now think.]
It’s just occurred to me that ‘French, by the way, is on my syllabus’ is not only clumsily expressed (I thought someone at school might just put it like that but maybe not) but also perhaps unlikely for a Danish schoolgirl. Maybe I should try to think of a new opening line ending in ‘this’ or ‘miss’. (Having written that, I’ve just looked up which languages are taught in Denmark. All schools have to offer German but if French is available pupils can opt for that instead. So I’m off the hook.)
I haven’t got anywhere with the next stanza [16.1], despite about two hours of trying. It ought to be easy, because all I plan to say is they all went to the Orchard for a picnic lunch; they found a bench and had vegan food (a nod to Anna’s veganism). But the reader needs a ‘gift’ of some kind – maybe a joke or an unexpected detail or rhyme – and I haven’t thought of anything yet. I looked up vegan picnic ideas online. Tomorrow I might start by spinning rhymes off ‘burritos’, ‘hummus’, ’vegan sausage rolls’ and suchlike, and seeing where this takes me. When a stanza allows so much freedom, it’s best, I suspect, to let the unconscious take over the driving for a line or two.
24 September
Three stanzas done yesterday, and the last of these revised this morning before breakfast. I didn’t start with the ingredients – no mention of them yet, but I think the food choices need to be put into the last line, or last two lines, of the stanza I’ll start with today – the last on the Orchard, I hope. The walk-to-the-Orchard stanza [16.1] didn’t yield a ‘gift’, it’s entirely functional, so I had to work hard to bring poetic appeal into the following stanza [16.2]. I think the image of Vita scything the hay (her own description of this 1939 moment is quoted in Nicolson) does what I needed. The swayed/blade rhyme was a windfall, though I had to work through several false starts to get there. I worried at first that ‘swayed’ might sound arbitrary, there only for the rhyme’s sake, but I’ve come round to it. The stanza about the bricks where the trio sit for their picnic was tricky to do, and is purely functional. I spent a while trying to make a semi-comic point about the bricks being uncomfortable to sit on, then abandoned this line of thought. So today I’ll cover eating the picnic and maybe the Great Storm of 1987 and subsequent restoration, ideally all in one stanza. Then maybe it’s time to move to the climax – the White Garden – though it’s possible they’ll walk along the moat first (and I’ll check Nicolson to see if I’ve left out any important ‘rooms’).
25 September, morning
Three stanzas again yesterday [16.4, 17.1-2] – so far, the maximum I can do in a day. 46 stanzas completed to date. I decided to make the picnic a whole stanza. Only in retrospect can I come up with the reason: to make the stanza like a packed lunch in itself, self-contained and worthy of mindful attention. The ‘gifts’ are Annika’s fear that it might be lettuce-dominated and the squelchy peach. Not sure ‘splashing out juice like a river’ will convey what I intend – I was thinking of the Dove splashing on rocks. I might tinker with this later. The amount of quiche kept changing: I started off with a segment but ended with a ‘sliver’, since you wouldn’t need too much, given the stuffed pitta. I worried about ‘to wash things down’: should it be ‘to wash it down’ or maybe ‘to wash it all down’ – I can’t decide.
[I would have preferred ‘avocado hummus’ – there is such a thing – but the rhyme forced me into ‘hummus avocado’. At first that was one thing too but it made no sense, so I inserted the comma on proof. I now think the meal is over-rich. And is it likely that Madeleine would have carried three picnics in her rucksack? I can think of ways to explain this, but it makes me a little uncomfortable still.]
I’ve read, I think, that in Sissinghurst at the moment there are designated picnic spots. I’m pretty sure these brick outcrops where they sit aren’t one of them. The excuse has to be that Madeleine, as an official guide, is allowed to break the rules. But in fact that’s very unlikely. Never mind. [I hope this doesn’t disqualify me from being appointed to the post of Poet in Residence at Sissinghurst Castle Garden – I plan to write in about this.]
For the Great Storm, I looked up which parts of England were affected – mostly southern England. ‘Ripped across the land’ is stretching it. [In the end I go with ‘battered the country’, exploiting the more local connotations of the noun: see below.]
I think I always (semi-consciously) wanted Annika to reflect on time at some point, and the following stanza – the last of yesterday’s three – prepares for this. I originally had ‘In a spirit of selfless hope’ half-rhyming with Annika pondering that she’d be ‘grown-up’ (hope/up) when the trees were mature. But it bothered me that many of the trees lost in Kent were oaks, which take 75 years to mature. The trees lost in the Orchard are fruit trees, of course, but maybe there were oaks too, I’m not sure. I fixed this problem in bed this morning, in my head. I’ve kept the ‘trees’ general and I’ve dropped the reference to maturity and put in tallness instead, so Annika can end up ‘middle-aged’ (rhyming with ‘ravaged’) – partly because ‘old-aged’ is not idiomatic, but also because when you’re in your early/mid teens ‘middle age’ is perhaps as far into the future as you’d care to imagine. [Not sure this is true.]
The wounded trees in the Orchard are ‘groaning’ – this is Annika’s imagination in magical realist mode, though in the real world there may be groan-like noises from branches half-severed from their trunks. A hurricane might make still- standing trees sound groaning, or something similar, in any case. Today’s first job is to have Annika philosophise about time, and find peace in the thought of ageing and loss. Since this is a sensitive and important a matter I may need to put in extra time to get this stanza right. I need it to have some kind of truth for Anna, even if it doesn’t reflect her own approach – I wouldn’t presume to ventriloquise her worldview.
25 September, evening
I ended up doing another three stanzas today, not one, all about time, ageing, values, inner strength [17.3-4, 18.1]. It’s largely obvious MBS stuff – and too grown-up. Annika has a back story of stress but I haven’t said what’s caused it – I don’t know! The best line may be: ‘Bad people may make me happy, good ones mad’ – the irrationality of desire (or friendship, less so). I’ve been tinkering with these stanzas a lot with a tiny screwdriver. The worst line was ‘I’ll try to accept life’s changes, good and bad,’ since you don’t need to try to accept the good. But I managed to fix it.
By the way, ‘splashing’ in the picnic stanza [16.4] has become ‘sloshing’, which I think is less confusing (because less specific) and more Annika-like. And in the Great Storm stanza I’ve substituted ‘country’ for ‘land’, rhyming it with ‘we’ in place of ‘and’. I have a superstitious dislike of rhyming a conjunction, it seems; however, ‘we’ is quite a weak rhyme too, especially as the first word of a sentence – it looks orphaned.
28 September, early evening
Only two stanzas done since my last entry. The last Orchard stanza [18.2], where Annika explains that she had her serious MBS thoughts later, not at the time, worked well, and so did the next stanza about the Moat Walk [18.3]. I was lucky with the final rhyme word in both these stanzas (‘Timbuktu’ and ‘well- spoken’) – two incongruous and unexpected endings, I hope. Timbuktu was Katmandu to start with, but I suddenly realised that it’s the former that’s a byword for unimaginably exotic. I had an exclamation mark after Timbuktu at first, then felt that Annika wouldn’t have been as surprised by the comparison as I intended the reader to be.
I’ve been struggling with the Nuttery. I think there are three short episodes to conjure up before the White Garden: the Nuttery, the Herb Garden, and the walk along the moat (not the same as the Moat Walk). The only way I can think of to make the Nuttery come alive is to put in a joke at the end about Bacchus being the god of one too many – or leglessness or something. But the rhymes available are with ‘exact’ or ‘precise’ and I can’t find anything that works at the moment. I only have one line for the Bacchus reference: the last line. I also thought of putting in Annika being reminded by the shuttlecock ferns of her school badminton, but that didn’t work out.
The woodpigeons’ song – coo coo coo coo-roo – is rendered precisely [18.2]. At first I had hyphens between the first three coos but that’s wrong: as a matter of ornithological fact, these first three coos are delivered more slowly than the coo- roo at the end.
28 September, late evening
The Nuttery was challenging [18.4]. One difficulty was the hazel/cobnut question, which threatened at first to require too many words – ‘cobnuts’ is an appealingly specific term, but I felt I should explain they are a kind of hazelnut. A bigger difficulty was the joke about Bacchus. ‘Tipsy on his [something]’ seemed to make a satisfying ending, but was it to be a ‘pillar’, ‘plinth’, ‘pedestal’ or ‘column’? ‘Column’ sounded best (I checked a photo, and it is a tall column, not just a plinth) but the only (half-)rhyme I could come up with is an awkward reference to ‘flowers in bloom’. I tried ‘drunk’, ‘sloshed’, ‘wasted’ and various other ways of describing drunkenness, but ‘tipsy’ is what Annika would say. I think the stanza works now – it took a couple of hours. However, I have four lines sharing one rhyme (Nuttery/tree/sea/fleur-de-lys), which is a small transgression.
The Herb Garden was even more difficult, and at one point I was thinking of omitting the stanza altogether [19.1]. One false start was putting in the centre of this ‘room’ the bowl from Constantinople brought over by Harold when he was working in the Embassy there. Unfortunately ‘Herb’, which I couldn’t think of a way to change, has few true rhymes – ‘superb’, ‘disturb’, ‘perturb’. Among the half-rhymes only ‘tribe’ seemed anything like promising. I played with a ‘tribe/ of vandals’ ripping and sniffing the herbs. People do this in the Herb Garden and it seems to be tolerated – there’s even a kind of ‘browse line’, indicating how far the plunderers have been able to reach. I was reluctant, though, to make Annika sound too misanthropic or socially superior. And you wouldn’t suddenly see a whole posse of adults plundering. So then I thought it might be a specific bunch of ‘school kids’, though I changed that to ‘infants’ [changed to ‘toddlers’ on proof] to put them in a different group from Annika herself. I tinkered to fit in ‘shades of green’, as that goes better with the restfulness. ‘Catalogue’ is awkward – ‘palette’ might have been better, but I needed a half-rhyme for ‘plague’. A minor problem with the stanza is the lack of any true rhymes, which breaks one of my unspoken rules. [Now, looking at the final version, the only thing that bothers me a little is the detached adjective ‘soothing’. I now think ‘catalogue’ is good.]
29 September, early evening
Four stanzas today, taking me into unexpected subject matter. I wanted to make Annika very pernickety about the route – in particular clarifying the difference between the Moat Walk and the walk along the moat [19.2-3]. (Again, no full rhymes in the first of these stanzas.)
What I hadn’t expected, prompted by the paucity of rhymes for ‘water’, was Madeleine talking about her daughter, though this is surely plausible when there’s no special planting to point out [19.3]: all they’re doing is strolling by the water. I’ve put into Annika’s mouth a hint of a reprimand for M neglecting her guiding duties.
The Nicolson guide book has very little on the Gazebo but, struggling to make anything of this subject, I dug up a helpful piece on the NT Sissinghurst website, about Nigel not only writing Portrait of a Marriage here but also comparing the pavilion, as it was being built, to Apollo 11, launched previously the same year. This was a real windfall, given the romantic and other literary associations of the moon and space flight – but also because it’s tonally a surprise. I’ll progress to write this bit next. It’s good (for consistency) that M has taken up her guiding again [19.4]. I have her moving swiftly away from the marriage to incongruous subjects of other books by Nigel [20.1]. She’s frank about Harold’s homosexuality – though at first I thought I’d present her as more prim. She doesn’t avoid the topic; however, she doesn’t choose to dwell on it.
29 September, mid-evening
I’ve done the Apollo 11 stanza [20.2] – making five stanzas today: my record. I decided not to be explicit about the lunar symbolism. Will the moon occur in my final Vita stanza? – I can’t remember whether Vita mentions it. There’s a tenuous link with Anna’s book Fledge, in which the American bald eagle features as a symbol. Not sure about the Darwin reference, but I’ll probably leave it in. I may possibly be able to improve on ‘that wonder of science’, if I try, as there are lots of words ending -ence/-ance or -ents/-ants.
30 September, morning
I changed ‘wonder of science’ to ‘titan of science’. Words like ‘wonder’ can be too vacuous at times. I left ‘science’.
I’ve just done two more stanzas [20.3-4]. In the first, the moon symbolism continues. I hadn’t foreseen the Earthrise link – a windfall. The ‘gift to us’, prompted by the rhyme, shifts the focus from Annika alone to Annika plus Mr Frome, and this is accidental, but maybe it’s a good thing for A to acknowledge at this point that it’s a shared adventure? ‘Heavenly’ is cheesy, with its pun on the heavens as space, but my justification would be that hyperbole is needed at this point.
A lot of the plants here have just botanical names, so I had to find a way of opting out of naming them in any quantity. One could argue that Latin names have a ‘poetry’ of their own, but in a poem their effect would have been deadening. However, I had to put a couple in, or the point (and the stanza) would have been too abstract. ‘The feeling that time at last had brought us home’ relates back to ‘heavenly’: Annika has attained a celestial reward. I now have to describe some of the White Garden’s features. Ideally in one stanza, with one also for Vita’s winter dream, since 62 would be a good total (2 x 31 = Anna’s age). However, that’s likely to be too tight – I’ve tended generally to stretch rather than squeeze.
30 September, evening
I’m OK with the second of the White Garden stanzas after Earthrise (‘Her chosen palette …’) [21.1] but dissatisfied with the first [20.4], where the available rhymes worked hard to undermine me. The problem was fitting in the point about Latin. I wanted ‘fossil language’, not ‘fossil tongue’, but the only workable rhyme I could think of was ‘page’, which I already knew occurs in the next stanza – otherwise ‘I could strew Latin now around the page’, or similar, would have been all right. In fact, that’s how I started drafting it. I don’t like ‘breeding’ but the only other usable word I could get to partially (not as much as half) rhyme with ‘tongue’ was ‘learning’, and I think ‘breeding’ is more interesting, as there’s a social dimension, arguably (at least to Annika’s way of thinking), to knowing the Latin names of plants. I’ll look at this rogue stanza with a fresh eye tomorrow – it’s woefully sub-par.
1 October, afternoon
I’ve fixed the problematic Latin stanza [20.4] and written three more. To clarify the problem, these were the options till late last night:
I could strew Latin all around the page … [but why]
shackle Vita’s spirit in a fossil language?
I could strew Latin around to show my breeding … [but why]
shackle Vita’s spirit in a fossil tongue?
Both options are dire, especially the latter with its non-rhyme. The third way, which took ages to discover and is still less than stellar, is this:
I could strew Latin around to prove I’m serious … [but why]
in a fossil tongue shackle Vita’s genius?
The next three stanzas went more smoothly [21.1-3]. I’m pleased the Vestal Virgin statue took over the proceedings, bumping on a stanza I’d started about the interplay of textures, forms and tones. I’d made notes on the Vestal Virgins from Wiki. Chastity was required of them, they fetched water from a sacred spring, they served 30 years, etc. I think there’s a suggestion of plaiting in the Sissinghurst statue’s hair, though couldn’t be sure – but I couldn’t resist making her Danish-looking in Annika’s eyes. The detail about Vestal Virgins being buried alive if they misbehaved, since Vesta wanted them to be bloodless (pure white, like the White Garden), I attributed to Mr Frome because it was time he made a contribution [21.3]. The rhyme ‘punished’ to go with ‘resist’ is a stretch: it was originally ‘relished’, not ‘resist’, and I changed it without worrying enough about the rhyme. I’d thought I might have Annika approving of one aspect of the Virgins’ contract: they handled their own property and weren’t subject to their fathers’ rule. But the bloodlessness point left no space for this – I could hardly extend the statue into another stanza.
‘How dreamy it must have looked on a summer’s night!’ [21.1] In fact, Vita and Harold used to dine in summer on an adjacent terrace, but I thought this wouldn’t be interesting enough to spell out. [Afterthought: you could argue that this should be ‘How dreamy it must look on a summer’s night’ but I wanted Annika to imagine Vita enjoying the spectacle. Should it be ‘summer night’? – perhaps.]
Two or possibly three stanzas to do now: the use of forms, textures and so on; and Vita in winter foreseeing the barn owl. So the total will be 65 or 66. I can’t think of any symbolic significance for either number, and that means it would be fine to go even longer if inspiration strikes.
2 October, morning
There ought to be a term for words or word groups in a formal poem that can be changed without affecting their surroundings – ‘soft words’ maybe? Of course, the beauty of these is that they allow you to keep changing your mind without causing undue work for yourself. ‘Disturbing’, for example [21.3], is not wholly settled but could easily be changed. I considered ‘gruesome’ and ‘macabre’. But ‘disturbing’ seems the best choice at the moment.
‘She looked Danish, given how her hair was tied.’ I think this is the weakest line in yesterday’s output. I’ll start today by thinking up new rhymes as alternatives to ‘tied’ in the Danish hair line. Before that, though, I’ll look again at a photo of the statue. I’ve clung to the side/tied rhyme, as I’ve been slipping into too many half-rhymes in recent stanzas.
[I should mention that there may be no such thing as a Danish braid – probably not. Maybe there’s a Swedish braid. More generally I think there might be a Scandinavian style of braid but obviously it had to be fewer syllables.]
2 October, evening
I think this works better for the statue [21.3]: ‘By the way, she was cast in grey lead – sad,/ tall and thin, with her hair in a Danish braid.’ (Should I iron out ‘By the way’, though?) I changed ‘proud’ to ‘glad’ – less idiomatic, but worth it to accommodate ‘sad’, which is exactly how the statue looks. I can see in the photo the hair is quite complex in its weaving, a braid rather than a plait, though I could have used ‘plait’ if the rhyme had called for it. I don’t mind snuffing out Annika’s thought that the girl looks generally Danish – it’s really only the hair that has a Scandi feel. [I later came up with: ‘…in a (Danish!) braid.’ – essential really, as otherwise the coincidence goes unnoticed, and it isn’t really a coincidence in any case: it’s Annika noticing a detail and interpreting it, with glee, in the light of her own life. And ‘By the way’ had to go.]
The three new stanzas written today were slow going – nothing flowed easily, though the amaze/haze rhyme [21.4] was encouragingly lucky. I started by trying to write about the interplay of forms and textures etc but it read like a Wiki entry. ‘Abundance’ isn’t quite the word: ‘variety’ is more the point, but I couldn’t get this to work. Once I had landed on ‘séance’ as a rhyme I was reluctant to change it, so ‘abundance’ has stayed. I wrote ‘Elysian choirs’ but then had the idea of making them ‘Vestal’ instead. Annika is off on a flight of fancy here, with her ‘daylight séance’ and ‘altar of light’, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’s characteristic of Annika when she feels like being lyrical. [Later I considered changing ‘from an altar of light’ to ‘at an altar of light’, but in the end rather liked the idea of the altar being the source of the vision.]
The next stanza [22.1] seemed to cry out for some flower names, to mimic the profusion. Not sure about ‘the eye/ was entertained’ but I prefer this verb to, eg, ‘delighted’ – it flows better and is less anaemic.’ Engaged’ had its hand up but it’s a syllable short and sounds too dry. [I like ‘entertained’ now.]
Then we come to the box hedge and arbour [22.2]. Is the arbour really wrought iron? – I need to check. It might be steel. The birdcage cover idea came out of the blue and might not stand up to the overnight test. ‘Splendid’ isn’t a word I like, and maybe Annika wouldn’t use it, but I’ll leave this too to marinate overnight and see what I think tomorrow.
3 October, morning
I did get rid of the ‘wrought iron’ [22.2] – looking at a photo again I felt the slenderness of the supports needed to be emphasised. ‘Struts’ seemed more accurate than ‘poles’ in the end. [But later I thought of ‘rods’.] And I inserted ‘variety’ in the earlier stanza, without changing the ‘abundance’ rhyme: it’s now ‘abundance/ and variety …’ Removing the dry reference to forms and textures to make space for ‘variety’ is an improvement. Also, I had to shorten Nigel’s full name to just his first name, and this too is better – less encyclopaedic.
3 October, afternoon
Finished? I think so. It’s ended up as 68 stanzas, one for each year of my life. I like to think the birdcage cover prepares for the ending, a gentle shut-down after all the excitement, but a reader might not see this. I thought at one time of Vita and Mr Frome giving Madeleine a Copenhagen souvenir snow dome as a thank you for acting as their guide, and indeed might add this as a coda – there’d be no harm in trying it. [I didn’t, as the artificial snow fall would surely have sabotaged the music of the real one, 70 years ago, that touches Annika’s heart and mine.] The Vita’s/greet us and thousands/hands [22.3] rhymes came quickly – the kind of gift that always gives a jolt of satisfaction in the writing, whatever one thinks about the final result. Does ‘soil-acquainted’ work? I think it might, but only the overnight test will tell. ‘Job done!’ is brisk and unpoetic but it’s there to show the no-nonsense side of Annika – in contrast to the lyricism that follows. [Later changed to ‘Pure bliss!’, which is more to the point.] The clause ‘that seeded the future with the gift of beauty’ is a bit dodgy, largely because it’s the second of two consecutive ‘that’ clauses in one sentence. Hey ho.
The final stanza [22.4] went well: it’s what I’d planned all along. ‘Wreaths’ adds a note of commemoration. This is the Vita passage I used as a source:‘When you sit on this seat you will be turning your backs to the yew hedge and from there I hope you will survey a low sea of grey clumps of foliage, pierced here and there with tall white flowers. I cannot hope helping that the grey ghostly barn owl will sweep silently across a pale garden, next summer, in the twilight, the pale garden that I am now planting under the first flakes of snow.’
I’ve been tinkering with the tense in the last line of the last stanza: there was a choice of past or present, and fortunately ‘fall’ and ‘fell’ were both allowable for the final rhyme. I think the present does more honour to Vita by bringing her into the moment, so this was my final choice [but I changed it: see below]. ‘At ease’ is there to avoid too many present participles – it was previously ‘savouring’ the White Garden from a bench. Another late decision was to run the last line on from the penultimate line, making ‘planting’ transitive rather than leaving it as intransitive and the start of a new sentence (‘fall./ She’s planting …’). The only reservation was: can one really be said to be planting ‘flowers’? But I think it’s OK. [I later changed this to: ‘over wreaths of pale flowers at twilight./ She was planting, as the first snowflakes fell.’ It was originally ‘was planting now’, meaning January 1950, but I thought ‘now’ could be interepreted, wrongly, as Annika’s present – this would have been confusing.]
I abandoned the snow dome idea [as mentioned above], as bringing the focus back to Annika would contradict what she she says about Vita having the ‘final bow’ (Annika earlier talked about missing a show, and the stage metaphor is here continued). I haven’t said the White Garden is theatre (I’ve referred to ‘palette’ and ‘gallery’), but it is, of course. Also [as I’ve mentioned], I didn’t want to undermine the delicacy of falling snowflakes with the cruder image of the snow dome.
If I’d written ‘final word’ rather than ‘final bow’, this would have been almost literally true, as Vita’s passage ends ‘first flakes of snow’. But the reader wouldn’t know that. I think I’ll stick with ‘bow’.
The ending, I hope, will be meaningful to Anna (who will probably be reading it just before the clocks change) as a hinge between summer and winter – a contrast magnified for all of us by Covid-19, and the thought of short shut-in days to come. But the image of planting in winter for the following summer is intended to be a message of faith and self-belief. And perhaps it relates to Fledge, Anna’s book – having a bird as the symbol of fulfilled ambition has an aptness Anna will appreciate.
[Afterthought: I still worry about not making it clear that the planting Vita is doing is in the White Garden: she’s imagining what she is in the process of creating. I think changing ‘the White/ Garden’ to ‘her White/ Garden, in a reprint, might help, as the definite article makes it appear as if it already exists. Actually, I probably won’t make this change, as it has an awkward sound to it.]