A Letter to my Daughter

A Letter to my Daughter (On the Cave of Melody)

In Oxford’s towers do you have tutes today?
Upon a peel of bells do you move out
through library and lab to make your way
back home through Jericho? I long to shout
through all the trumpet blasts and spires, to say
those things we feel but seldom talk about.

There’s so much talk about it and about.
I wonder, if he walked the Turl today,
as tides move in and then as tides move out,
as boats are built and Sat-Navs find their way
to guide us on this swell of waves that shout
a climate’s change, what would old Khayam say?

At Fionnphort, where Ossian had his say,
the Sound of Mull blows bardic words about,
it moves a white sand bay. We spent a day
in silence there to journey in and out
of rocks; the quarry of its rose stone way
could peel back time. We heard the women shout

from their trapped isle. We heard Iona shout
herself to song. Then Staffa called to say
that we must find a way to come about,
that we must find a way to come by day,
to journey in and then to journey out.
Her boatman came to take us on the way

to Uamh-Binn. Your flute was stowed away
as fellow passengers prepared to shout
into the waves and laughed at words they’d say.
Inside the cave their words echoed about
but words were only breath and spray that day
and so my clarinet rolled low notes out,

from bottom E, rolled all its low notes out,
then sang high C. You packed your flute away
its sweet notes slipping through the silent shout
of sea-within-without. What could we say
as we two walked about it and about
and out into the light that shines the day?

Do you have tutes today? Do you walk out
where dons weigh up each peel of bells that shout?
What do they say about it and about?

Julie Boden 2006

Julie Boden explains A Letter to my Daughter ...

I wrote this poem when John Greening, who was collecting poems inspired by or relating to music for a future poetry anthology, asked me to send one to him. As often happens when writing poetry, various things occur in life that come together in heart and mind and weave their way into the poem. I had tried to write various poems which I thought I may be able to send to him but none of them seemed to work out really so I decided to put the idea of writing a poem for this particular collection aside.

A few weeks later my daughter, who was living away at university, caught the flu and I thought I’d write to her to cheer her up. I remembered a holiday we’d been on together to the Isle of Mull. We had stayed with a poet and friend of mine, Carla Jetko. During our stay there my daughter and I went on a boat trip to the island of Staffa. It was a fantastic day but I had never been able to write a poem about it because the visit to Uamh-Binn (also known as The Cave of Melody or Fingal’s Cave) was such an amazing experience words didn’t seem able to show it really. Apparently, I wasn’t alone in feeling that words wouldn’t describe this experience as even Keats found he couldn’t write a poem about his visit there. The basalt rocks rising from the sea, the sounds of the cave and the myth of Finn as told to us by the boatman made it an unforgettable day. I took my clarinet with me and my daughter took her flute and when the other visitors left the cave to picnic and to watch the puffins above us, we listened to the sounds of the cave and played them back. It was a magical day.

Writing to Charlotte and remembering our time together as we played back the sounds of the cave triggered the writing of this poem. The poem is in the form of a sestina. I did not write it as a sestina originally but drafts of the poem seemed to find their way into patterns that suited the sonata form of the overture to Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave. Sonata form with its exposition, development, recapitulation and weaving through of idioms seemed to match the sestina form so well that I decided to form it into a rhyming sestina in later drafts. It may also be useful to know when reading the poem that ‘tutes’ are what students commonly call tutorials at Oxford University.

Julie Boden
2006