Above my table three magnolia flowers
Utter their silent requiems.
Through the window I see your elms
In labour with the racking storm
Giving it shape in April’s shifty airs.
Up there sky boils from a brew of cloud
To blue gleam, sunblast, then darkens again.
No respite is allowed
The watching eye, the natural agony.
Below is the calm a loved house breeds
Where four have come together to dwell
– Two write, one paints, the fourth invents –
Each pursuing a natural bent
But less through nature’s formative travail
Than each in his own humour finding the self he needs.
Round me all is amenity, a bloom of
Magnolia uttering its requiems,
A climate of acceptance. Very well
I accept my weakness with my friends’
Good natures sweetening every day my sick room.
1 This was written on his deathbed. Lemmons was the house at Hadley Common, where CDL died. It was owned then by Elizabeth Jane Howard and Kingsley Amis. EJH’s brother, Colin Howard, the inventor, and the painter, Sargy Mann, also lived there.