Some notes on the poetry

I first started writing poetry to Iris early in 1973. I wasn’t in the habit of verse-writing and indeed, I hadn’t done so since my early teens in schoolboy ‘crushes’.
I found that I could write verse better if I were either very sad or very happy. The two early poems were written in a sad mood when I was unsure of Iris’s feelings towards me. The first poem I wrote can be seen on my blog page, Jan.20th 2006. The second was published in my blog Feb.6th.
The sonnet, (blog Jan.31st 2006) written in February 1973, was composed on St. Valentine’s Day. It was only a few hours after we had made love for the very first time on the evening before. It is a verse written in sonnet form; i.e. a fourteen line poem with the last two lines as a couplet. The sonnet was very popular in the sixteenth century with Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, etc. I only wrote that one sonnet as I always regarded it as something very special.
My all-time favourite was Iris of the laughing eyes. (blog March 20th 2006) I thought it captured her very being; it was so descriptive of her. It was written on a train when I was coming back from a meeting in London.
I wrote the poem of our first anniversary one night when I was working late. This has not been published yet. I took great delight in giving it to her a couple of days later. We always made St. Valentine’s Day our anniversary, not because that was the first time we had met but because it was the first time we had shown commitment to each other. I wrote a special poem every anniversary and on all her birthdays. Sadly, very few remain.
Iris’s favourite has been saved, however. (blog Sept.6th 2006) It was the poem written in July 1974 on our return from Scotland and the Gretna Green ceremony. We had quite a few pics taken of the ‘wedding’ but alas, none has survived.
I wrote between forty and fifty poems over the years and Iris enjoyed them all. The original two that she never saw were written shortly after her death. One of them was the one published recently. (blog Oct.8th 2006) The other, written two weeks after her death, has yet to be published. It was the very last romantic poem that I ever thought I would write.