I’m such a constitutional lightweight lately that I’ve started looking on the website What’s On in South Devon for things to do of an evening that don’t involve total annihilation. What’s On in South Devon is surely one of those ‘shortest book in the world’ contenders. Weeknights it’s mainly the same local musicians playing the same deserted pubs; or some functioning psychotic preaching new-age nonsense in a church hall to folk whose gullibility gives one a rough idea of the infinite; or bingo. Listening to functioning psychotics in church halls is fun at first, but soon palls. I’d go to bingo if I didn’t already own a life-sized ceramic cheetah. Which usually leaves Receding Diagonal at the Turk’s Head or bloody Silhouette at the Feathers.
An unexpected listing for a poetry group discussing ‘the Sonnet’ on Tuesday leapt out at me, therefore, as a night out without the prospect of a maiming hangover. The event was held in the comfortable book-lined drawing room of a Georgian mansion. I walked in to find about 20 poetry lovers of all ages already seated in a wide circle. They were sitting perfectly still, oozing mindfulness and gentleness from every pore. You could have knocked most of them down with a feather. (Closer inspection showed that the books were secured behind elegant security bars.) The group leader, the award-winning poet Alice Oswald, was describing what a sonnet is (sonetto is Italian for ‘little song’) and who invented it (Petrarch) and who popularised it in England (Sir Thomas Wyatt). Sir Thomas was her all-time favourite sonneteer, she said. She read one of his out. It began ‘Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind’. The hind, apparently, was Anne Boleyn, the minx. Wyatt was sentenced to death for daring to dally with Henry’s Queen, but Thomas Cromwell engineered a reprieve.
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