Victoria Sackville-West
Victoria Sackville-West Poems
Days I enjoy are days when nothing happens,
When I have no engagements written on my block,
When no one comes to disturb my inward peace,
When no one comes to take me away from myself
...
She was wearing the coral taffeta trousers
Someone had brought her from Ispahan,
And the little gold coat with pomegranate blossoms,
...
And so it ends,
We who were lovers may be friends.
I have some weeks in which to steel
My heart and teach myself to feel
...
If I had only loved your flesh
And careless damned your soul to Hell,
I might have laughed and loved afresh,
...
The greater cats with golden eyes
Stare out between the bars.
Deserts are there, and the different skies,
And night with different stars.
...
I saw within the wheelwright’s shed
The big round cartwheels, blue and red;
A plough with blunted share;
A blue tin jug; a broken chair;
...
Yes, they were kind exceedingly; most mild
Even in indignation, taking by the hand
One that obeyed them mutely, as a child
...
Cisterns and stones; the fig-tree in the wall
Casts down her shadow, ashen as her boughs,
Across the road, across the thick white dust.
Down from the hill the slow white oxen crawl,
...
Tools with the comely names,
Mattock and scythe and spade,
Couth and bitter as flames,
Clean, and bowed in the blade,-
...
How do I love you, beech-trees, in the autumn,
Your stone-grey columns a cathedral nave
Processional above the earth's brown glory!
...
What time the meanest brick and stone
Take on a beauty not their own,
And past the flaw of builded wood
Shines the intention whole and good,
...
Leopards on the gable-ends,
Leopards on the painted stair,
Stiff the blazoned shield they bear,
Or and gules, a bend of vair,
...
Lying on Downs above the wrinkling bay
I with the kestrels shared the cleanly day,
The candid day; wind-shaven, brindled turf;
...
When little lights in little ports come out,
Quivering down through water with the stars,
And all the fishing fleet of slender spars
...
So well she knew them both! yet as she came
Into the room, and heard their speech
Of tragic meshes knotted with her name,
...
I have known honey from the Syrian hills
Stored in cool jars; the wild acacia there
On the rough terrace where the locust shrills
...
All her youth is gone, her beautiful youth outworn,
Daughter of tarn and tor, the moors that were once her home
...
Victoria Sackville-West Biography
English poet and novelist, born into an old aristocratic family, proprietors of Knole House in Kent. Vita Sackville-West wrote about the Kentish countryside and she was the chief model for Orlando in Virginia Woolf's novel of that same title from 1928. Sackville-West's best known poem, THE LAND, was awarded the Hawthorne Prize in 1927. The country habit has me by the heart, For he's bewitched for ever who has seen, Not with his eyes but with his vision, Spring Flow down the woods and stipple leaves with sun. ('Winter' from The Land) Victoria Mary Sackville-West was the only child of Lionel Edward, third Baron of Sackville, and Victoria Josepha Dolores Catalina Sackville-West, his first cousin and the illegitimate daughter of the diplomat Sir Lionel Sackville-West. She was educated privately. As a child she started to write poetry, writing her first ballads at the age of 11. "I don't remember either my father or my mother very vividly at that time, except that Dada used to take me for terribly long walks and talk to me about science, principally Darwin, and I liked him a great deal better than mother, of whose quick temper I was frightened." (from Portrait of a Marriage by Nigel Nicolson, 1973) Vita's mother considered her ugly - she was bony, she had long legs, straight hair, and she wanted to be as boyish as possible. Between 1906 and 1910 Sackville-West produced eight novels and five plays. CHATTERTON, A DRAMA IN THREE ACTS, was privately printed and appeared in 1909. In 1913 she married the diplomat and critic Harold Nicolson, with whom she lived a long time in Persia and then at the Sissinghurst Castle in Kent. Sackville-West's father died in 1928 and his brother became the fourth Baron Sackville, inheriting Knole. Her husband decided in 1929 to resign from the foreign service and devote himself to writing. They purchased Sissinghurst Castle, a near-derelict house, and started to restore it. In the 1930s Sackville-West published The Edwardians (1930), All Passion Spent(1931), and Family History (1932) which were bestsellers and portrayed English upper-class manners and life. Pepita (1937) depicted the story of her grandmother, who was a Spanish dancer. Her passionate gardening was rewarded in 1955 by the Royal Horticultural Society. Sackville-West also wrote several books about gardening and kept a regular column at the Observer from 1946. In 1946 Sackville-West was made a Companion of Honour for her services to literature. She died of cancer on June 2, 1962. Harold Nicolson died six years later. Sackville-West believed in equal rights for women. She is best remembered for her novels but her most enduring work was perhaps the garden at Sissinghurst Castle, evidently the joint creation of Harold and Vita, and as Nigel Nicolson suggested the true Portrait of their marriage. Nicolson published in 1973 a book, Portrait of a Marriage, which was based on her parents' journals and notes, and described their private life and marriage. The book was made into a television mini-series in 1990, starring Cathryn Harrison, Janet McTeer and David Haigh.)
The Best Poem Of Victoria Sackville-West
Days I Enjoy
Days I enjoy are days when nothing happens,
When I have no engagements written on my block,
When no one comes to disturb my inward peace,
When no one comes to take me away from myself
And turn me into a patchwork, a jig-saw puzzle,
A broken mirror that once gave a whole reflection,
Being so contrived that it takes too long a time
To get myself back to myself when they have gone.
The years are too strickly measured, and life too short
For me to afford such bits of myself to my friends.
And what have I to give my friends in the last resort?
An awkwardness, a shyness, and a scrap,
No thing that's truly me, a bootless waste,
A waste of myself and them, for my life is mine
And theirs presumably theirs, and cannot touch.
Victoria Sackville-West Comments
Like the poem very much-it is not necessary to be gardener of the same garden to enjoy the beauty of a garden-to lie the life together.
A prose-poem written in praise of Vita Sackville-West and in appreciation for her inspiration as a pioneer. ________________________ GARDENERS Just three months before my own pioneering life began in August 1962 on the homefront in the Canadian Baha’i community, Vita Sackville-West passed away. A pioneer herself, in quite a different sense of course than my own pioneering experience, she was born just months before the passing of Bahá’u’lláh, the Founder of the Baha’i Faith, in 1892. In many ways her pioneering life was a polar-opposite, certainly a strikingly different one, to my own adventure across two continents. Her first love affair was with a house, then a husband, then several lesbian relationships, one of which was with the famous writer Virginia Woolf and, finally, with a garden at Sissinghurst Castle in rural Kent. My love affairs were with baseball, then the Baha’i Faith and finally with an assortment of people and things: Judy Gower and Christine Sheldrick in two marriages, a long career in teaching and, finally, with learning and the cultural attainments of the mind. In this last category, especially writing and especially poetry, Vita Sackville-West and I shared an equal love and passion.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs,11 January 2008 with thanks to ABC TV: “National Trust: Garden Treasures, ” 10 Jan.2008,6: 00-7: 00 p.m. I never shared your love of gardening, Vita, nor your ardent Latin temperament. My garden was always one of words like yours tended tenderly and now famously famous. My temperament was Welsh— English, coloured by a bipolar disorder. We both ran against convention’s grain, possessed an exuberance, complexity of character, a strong marriage and wrote endless reams of poetry over many years. In the process we both produced a rich and varied body of work amidst life’s turmoil but, in the end, whatever we did and whatever we were-first and foremost we were poets—wouldn’t you say, Vita? I must say, though, Vita, you were in the major league of writers while I was but a minor player with a minor role, in a minor key. Time will tell, of course, eh Vita? What do you think Vita from your place now in the land of lights where gardens of endless splendour adorn your days, I trust, Vita, I trust. You changed the face of gardening1 while I spread the seeds of a new Order that would, in time, change the face of this earth, containing as these seeds did the fruits and blossoms of consecrated joy and enable their gardeners to labor serenely, confidently and unremittently, as you did in your garden, to produce a Place of exquisite and most delightful beauty for the millions. 1 Victoria Glendinning, Vita; the Life of V. Sackville-West, Weidenfeld & Nicholson,1983. Ron Price 11 January 2008 ____________________
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4/27/2024 6:41:27 PM # 1.0.0.1119
Aside from that all, Ron Price, you cannot compare your male life with that of a female's.You have no list of duties really to be done as demanded by society. The society you live in, let you free wherever you wish to go.That is entirely different than whenever you must constantly.So many people love gardening, each his own style.