Camille Saint-Saëns

The music came

As easy and as elegant as apples

For this, it seems, unloved, unloving man.

The nostrils of his enormous nose

Twitched, in scorn and anger

For the incompetent and the importunate.

The sugar softness of the wedding-cake

Was bait, to draw men down

Into the turning wheel, the grinding mill.

Women enslaved – were Omphale

And were Delilah; women betrayed their children.

And so he fled – to find the desolation

Of affluent hotel rooms, the icy desert

Of a continuing triumph,

And a State Funeral's final emptiness.

Only the animals

Were worthy to be loved, and sported

Through a perpetual carnival

In the lost playground of his innocence.

JOHN HEATH-STUBBS

‘Softly Awakes My Heart …’

Saint-Saëns’ aria

chosen by a man in Saudi Arabia

for his daughter in Ghana

(that version on His Master's Voice):

a Sunday morning World Service broadcast.

It brings a complex recall

of dusty velvet armchairs

a pile of records and the old victrola

net curtains faded and crisp

from sunlight through the dining room French window.

The mezzo-soprano

would smooth your mouth and eyes.

Your whole body calm except for

one hand turning on its wrist, accompanying.

I preferred a harsher music then.

RUTH FAINLIGHT