February meeting

For our February meeting we began with Gavin Ewart’s ‘Ending’ which was approved for its cleverly banal imaging of relationship breakdown. Emily Dickinson’s untitled poem beginning ‘After great pain a formal feeling comes’ was thought to accurately represent the stages and feelings of grief. Pat Barker’s quoting of Siegfried Sassoon’s bitterly ironic ‘The General’ continued the funereal feeling but this was offset by Christina Rossetti’s ‘Winter: My Secret’, which we finally thought had more to it than it pretends to have. We ended with one of the sonnets from Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella that begins ‘Good brother Philip’ and purports to relate a lover’s jealousy at the favours shown by his lady to her pet sparrow.