The Media School

Poetry emotion for BU Professor

10 July 2009

Professor Sean Street whose poem recently featured on BBC radio 3

An original poem by BU Professor of Radio, Sean Street, has featured on BBC radio as part of the broadcaster’s recent poetry series.

Cliff Fall, read by Professor Street, featured on BBC Radio 3’s ‘Poem for Today’ as part of the 3 Breakfast programme. The poem will be published later this year in Professor Street’s new collection Time Between Tides, New and Selected Poems 1981-2009.

“Cliff Fall is based on a scene from Shakespeare’s tragic play, King Lear, where the blinded Gloucester is taken to the edge of a sheer cliff near Dover, and given a word picture so vivid that he imagines he has fallen to his death,” said Professor Street. “In my poem, the image from Shakespeare is used as the starting point for a metaphor for the aspirations of youth, and how, too often, time compromises those dreams.

“Samphire is a tiny flower which grows on the cliff, and which Shakespeare mentions in the scene,” he continued. “Today Samphire Hoe is a park at the foot of the cliff, constructed out of material excavated to make the Channel Tunnel. I visited the site two years ago while making a Radio 4 programme about the history of the tunnel.”

Cliff Fall by Professor Sean Street

Samphire Hoe, Kent
King Lear, Act lV, Scene Vl

Gloucester’s imagined cliff,
Samphire, murmuring surge,
a dizzy horizon
gleaming along its edge,

sunlight dazzle blinding
a gaze on the far sea,
persuading memory
that it saw a man fall,

time between tides rushing
towards darkness, the first
beginnings of distance
from this chalk’s white flower.

He is falling, falling
down into the story
of the rest of his life,
gone into the seascape,

the wide pewter bowl, cold,
dull at the rim, turning,
a single figure framed
in the cliff’s spun moment,

seeing the universe
flailing through air bright
for the love of Samphire,
living to tell the tale

that recollection breeds
illusion. ‘Though we may
contest against gulls’ flight,
our own self will crush us.

Beneath imagined cliffs
the fact of rock, sullen
under resignation -
inevitable impact -

the final gasp seeing
what we were spinning off
into debris, fictions
broken by gravity.

Click here for Professor Street’s rendition of Cliff Fall as broadcast by the BBC on 27 June, 2009.