emma_in_dream

Instead of just fangirling about Tennyson I should write a proper post about my life. (Anyway, poor Tennyson was subject to enough fannish stalking, requests for autographs and celebrity photography during his life. Did you know Lewis Carroll took a photo of him?)


Anyway, since the slash gathering at my house last week I have been busy being sick. I wish I could have spent more time with Special_Trille at the gathering but I was overwhelmed with a terrible fever and exhaustion. I actually tried to lie down on the ground to rest but the kids just jumped on me. This was followed by a putrid sore throat and I took all my days off work and slept instead. My poor children have heard a constant refrain of ‘No, Mummy can’t read, Mummy can’t tell stories, Mummy can’t push the swing, Mummy is too sick’.


I still feel very tired and distant from everything in my life. I think it is because I just want to rest but the only time I can see where I might be able to rest is – 2016 when Ruby starts school full time. Until then I just have to soldier on, and it’s only a few years, and really the best years of my life in a way, but I just feel so tired and run down and there is no prospect of a time when I will not be running full sprint from my part-time work where I am never fully committed to my kids who resent me not being there all the time, while squeezing in what housework I can, while hardly ever getting to see my friends, and feeling guilty about not managing it all more gracefully.


So that’s basically what I’ve been doing with my life – feeling tired, being tired, finding 20 minute windows to nap in, not being well, not seeing any way out.

Thy voice is on the rolling air;
I hear thee where the waters run;
Thou standest in the rising sun,
And in the setting thou art fair.

Dear friend, far off, my lost desire,
So far, so near in woe and weal;
O loved the most, when most I feel
There is a lower and a higher;

Known and unknown; human, divine;
Sweet human hands and lips and eye;
Dear heavenly friend that canst not die,
Mine, mine, for ever, ever mine;

Strange friend, past, present, and to be;
Loved deeplier, darklier understood;
Behold I dream a dream of good,
And mingle all the world with thee.

Neil Powell’s anthology of gay love poetry is a very pleasing mix. He has arranged it thematically, and then, within those categories, chronologically.

For reasons which have to do with the history of gay life and the history of literature, the main periods represented are the classical era, the Elizabethan era and contemporary poetry. I understand this though I do find the transitions a little jarring sometimes. One minute you are in the midst of an Elizabethan allegory; the next it’s the brisk clang of nineteenth-century optimism.

I do love the range of authors represented - from the obvious like Shakespeare and Byron, to the crazy like the Earl of Rochester, and a host of modern poets who I had not otherwise read.

I was particularly pleased to see the inclusion of works which celebrate love between men but were not (so far as is known) written by men who had male/male sex. Tennyson’s *In Memoriam* is one of my favourite poems, commemorating one of the two great loves of his life (Arthur Hallam, the other being his wife).

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