A Pandoro box again. A lecture by Alice Oswald on water. Water is seen through Homer’s eyes in the Iliad and the Odyssey, through the poems of Adrienne Rich, John Donne, Jericho Brown, and Samuel Johnson, and the drawings by Sarah Simblet. Water as in rivers, seas, and oceans but also rain and tears, and mostly tears as the connection between water and grief. She tells us that there is a Jewish legend saying that tears were originally given to us as compensation for death. As Alice Oswald describes it… a terrible bargain.
“I keep a bucket of rain water under my window and it delights me that green leaves reflected in a bucket are not quite green. I don’t know what colour they are. At certain moments early in the day they might be called pre-green but then the clouds change or the wind moves a surface mark and all at once they seem bright dark and blind silvery then foggy emerald.”