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Note on The Cliff House

Autobiographical, about memory and happiness and games and luck and being satisfied with my luck.  It’s also indebted to Montale’s La casa dei doganieri (The House of the Coastguards), though it’s very different in outlook.  The only symbolism my house on the cliff shares with Montale’s coastguard station is that both are isolated places of past residence.  Both are charged with emotions of long ago.  The tenor of his piece is melancholy and that of mine is not, I think.  Montale’s weathervane is a salient feature.  It’s replaced here by the dangling ball on a skittles board.  This pendulum went in because it was a feature of a holiday which Lise and I enjoyed in a Pembrokeshire cottage in 1965, when Undine was one year old, the same age of her son Max when I wrote this.  A wooden ball suspended from a wooden pillar isn’t really a pendulum, but it’s near enough, and can symbolise time, if it’s necessary for images to represent things.  I was reading Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum.  The theme of that novel is a search for a meaning to history via arcane documents connected with the Knights Templar and other secret societies.  I wouldn’t make much too of this fact, however.  Whatever symbolic significance my pendulum carries crept in after I’d included it, which is often the way.  For those interested in metrics, I’ve used a ‘loose’ (variously accented) ten-syllable line woven in and out of a regular iambic pentameter.  The weave is intentional.

Alan Marshfield

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