Anne Barbara Ridler

Anne Barbara Ridler Poems

Since we through war awhile must part
Sweetheart, and learn to lose
Daily use
Of all that satisfied our heart:
...

Lovers whose lifted hands are candles in winter,
Whose gentle ways like streams in the easy summer,
Lying together
...

We thought they were gulls at first,
while they were distant-
The two cranes flying out of a natural morning,
...

Now that you lie
In London afar,
And may sleep longer
Though lonelier,
...

Out from his bed the breaking seas
By waking eyes unseen
Now fall, aquatic creatures whirl
And he whirls through the ambient green.
...

Woman s Voice
Perhaps you find the angel most improbable?
It spoke to men asleep, their minds ajar
For once to admit the entrance of a stranger.
...

Under cool trees the City tombs
extend, and nearer lie
stones above Blake's and Bunyan's bones
to Vivian's working days than I.
...

Now is the pause between asleep and awake:
Two seasons take
A colour and quality each from each as yet.
The new stage-set
...

Nothing is lost.
We are too sad to know that, or too blind;
Only in visited moments do we understand:
It is not that the dead return ---
...

Lying in bed this morning, just a year
Since our first days, I was trying to assess -
Against my natural caution - by desire
And how the fact outdid it, my happiness:
...

Beyond the Chiltern coast, this church:
A lighthouse in dry seas of standing corn.
Bees hive in the tower; the outer stone
Pared and frittered in sunlight, flakes with the years:
...

Lying in bed this morning, just a year

Since our first days, I was trying to assess --

Against my natural caution -- by desire

And how the fact outdid it, my happiness:
...

The raging colour of this cold Friday
Eats up our patience like a fire,
Consumes our willingness to endure,
Here the crumpled maple, a gold fabric,
...

A long while, a long long while it seems:
The bat-winged figure shaking his robe,
The cameras purring.
...

Anne Barbara Ridler Biography

Anne Barbara Ridler OBE (née Bradby) was a British poet, and Faber and Faber editor, selecting the Faber A Little Book of Modern Verse with T. S. Eliot (1941). Her Collected Poems (Carcanet Press) were published in 1994. She turned to libretto work and verse plays; it was later in life that she earned official recognition, receiving an OBE in 2001. Family Ridler was the daughter of HC Bradby, a housemaster at Rugby School, where she was born. Her mother, Violet Bradby, born Milford, wrote popular children's stories and was the sister of Humphrey S. Milford, Publisher to the University of Oxford. One of her great-grandfathers was Charles Richard Sumner, Bishop of Winchester, a brother of John Bird Sumner, Archbishop of Canterbury. Her uncle, GF Bradby, was the author of The Lanchester Tradition (1919), while her aunt Barbara Bradby was the joint author of The Village Labourer (1911). Her cousins included the composer Robin Milford and the Rev. Dick Milford, vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford. Life Anne Bradby was educated at Downe House School and later published a biography of her headmistress, Olive Willis. After six months in Florence and Rome, she took a diploma in journalism at King's College London. In 1938, she married Vivian Ridler, the future Printer to Oxford University (1958–78), but then the manager of the Bunhill Press, London, and they had two daughters and two sons. She edited Charles Williams: The Image of the City and other Essays (1958) and Charles Williams: Selected Writings (1961). A Christian and friend and correspondent of C. S. Lewis, she was on the edge of the Inklings group. Also closely associated with TS Eliot, she wrote a short but powerful poem, "I Who am Here Dissembled", full of allusions to images in Eliot's own poems, for the anthology T. S. Eliot: A Symposium in honour of his sixtieth birthday. For a short time in the 1940s, Ridler was also a successful Verse Dramatist with such plays as Cain (1943) and Shadow Factory: A Nativity Play (1945).)

The Best Poem Of Anne Barbara Ridler

At Parting

Since we through war awhile must part
Sweetheart, and learn to lose
Daily use
Of all that satisfied our heart:
Lay up those secrets and those powers
Wherewith you pleased and cherished me these two years:

Now we must draw, as plants would,
On tubers stored in a better season,
Our honey and heaven;
Only our love can store such food.
Is this to make a god of absence?
A new-born monster to steal our sustenance?

We cannot quite cast out lack and pain.
Let him remain-what he may devour
We can well spare:
He never can tap this, the true vein.
I have no words to tell you what you were,
But when you are sad, think, Heaven could give no more.

Anne Barbara Ridler Comments

Graham Ramsay 04 May 2009

Anne R. wrote several poems which were extremely sensitive and warm. ONE i think was called a 'Child Born? ' She was a talented poet.

1 0 Reply
Graham Ramsay 04 May 2009

Anne R. wrote several poems which were extremely sensitive and warm. ONE i think was called a 'Child Born? ' She was a talented poet.

1 0 Reply

Anne Barbara Ridler Popularity

Anne Barbara Ridler Popularity

Close
Error Success