Now online, Paul Hillier et al's Proensa interpretations of the troubadours have long enchanted me - although perhaps not some of the dinner party guests on whom I inflicted the vinyl version at various times during my more earnest past.
Is it really as long ago as the mid 1980s that I specialised in Medieval Provençal and wrote my dissertation on the amour de loinh of Peire Vidal?
Rupert Gordon and I were the only students at Edinburgh to choose the option in many a year (perhaps since the 1950s, judging by the stamps in some of the books I borrowed!), and having been back in the George Square library many times since when two of my daughters were studying at Edinburgh, I've wondered whether anyone else has borrowed (m)any of these books since?
I share below (without comment...which is a personal act that belongs in the real, not the virtual world), an evolving, far from exhaustive, but from an emotional point-of-view, highly illustrative and authentic selection of my favourite poetry and lyrics...
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And it's a battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace
And a wound that will never heal
- from Tom Traubert's Blues, by Tom Waits
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(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift
- The Uses of Sorrow, by Mary Oliver
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So come, my friends, be not afraid.
We are so lightly here.
It is in love that we are made;
In love we disappear
Sometimes we choose to wander, sometimes we are chosen to wander, down the dark deserted halls of memory:
'Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream...
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope, love of finished years...
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.'