‘Goodbye’ – the number of times each day one says it!
But the goodbyes that matter we seldom say,
Being elsewhere – preoccupied, on a visit,
Somehow off guard – when the dear friend slips away
Tactfully, for ever. And had we known him
So near departure, would we have shut our eyes
To the leaving look in his? tried to detain him
On the doorstep with bouquets of goodbyes?
I think of one, so constant a life-enhancer
That I can hardly yet imagine her dead;
Who seems, in her Irish courtesy, to answer
Even now the farewell I left unsaid.
Remembering her threefold self – a scholar,
A white witch, a small girl, fused into one –
Though all the love they lit will never recall her,
I warm my heart still at her cordial sun.
There was the small-boned witch who would accost us
In Notting Hill Gate, white shoes and hairnet on,
Having just flown out of a dream of Doctor Faustus,
Vanished from Cambridge or Ceylon,
Or merely passed intact under the wheels
Of several buses. And instantly her spells
Worked on us – we were young, a drab day shone.
Then the attentive scholar, listening for clues
To meaning, like a bird with its head inclined
Earthward: one in whose presence to misuse
Truth was hazardous – she would find
You gently out. But her own truth sang and tingled
With a Mozartian gaiety that mingled
Wise innocence and pure elegance of mind.
But I think I loved in her most the original Alice –
The round blue gaze ready for wonderland,
The mien, polite, inquisitive, without malice,
Of one who nevertheless would stand
No nonsense from cardboard kings or tinpot knights –
A little girl who reached spectacular heights
By chewing on whatever came to hand …
Child, with a scholar’s cool, precise discerning:
Scholar, unfeigned in her bewitching glee:
White witch, whose subtle essences were burning
With a child’s candour. Now all three
Are in one grave. But still her nature glows
Through earth and night, and like trefoil there grows
On us the sweetness of her memory.
1 E. M. Butler: former Professor of German at Cambridge, and author.