Big City, Little
London
Clouds
on Museum Street
Patrick Henry
Sweetheart
from Sigmund Freud
Patrick Henry
Clouds on Museum Street
Patrick Henry
Bent iron crosses overshadow dusty
archives,
Where Freud studied, wrote and ended
his times,
Giving language so many of the terms
For the sense of doubt that ensnares
lives;
Continued in the caring cautious
tone
Speaking soft of terror in this
darkened room,
Calm for out there where manic types
will storm,
To face myself, hard as an unstarted
poem;
Shedding guilt and cash and hours
at confession
Withheld from Catholics where I
should belong;
On the road, thinking as I reach
the warmer South,
He never meant sex alone, but all
our twisting path.
Sweetheart
from Sigmund Freud
Patrick Henry
London seemed suited to Freud in its sober, analytic guise: monarchy, Parliament, the stern duty in 1914 and again in 1940 to withstand almost alone threats to all reasonable global civilisation. Freud took refuge here after Hitler invaded Austria in 1938, and died here in September, 1939, two weeks after Britain declared war.
I was one year old and beginning a wartime childhood on the North Sea coast, the surrounding anxieties there being perhaps worse than usual. Only Sigmund would have known, and he was gone. At 17, I became a government clerk near St. Paul's Cathedral. Blitz ruins still lay all around in London, even in 1954.
I passed another fifteen years here among the poetry, art, sex, drink and confusion, and then needed respite. As Freud was my third favourite writer--after Dostoyevsky and Kafka--,I spent time and lots of money on the analyst's couch of one of his disciples: a beautiful, untouchable lady.
When I was sort of cured, I escaped that smothering city--hopefully forever.