And as if reporting some felony to the police they let you know you were not John Donne.

The progress of any writer is marked by those moments when he manages to outwit his own inner police system.

I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.

In the pit of red You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness But the jewel you lost was blue.

What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.

The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.

So we found the end of our journey. So we stood, alive in the river of light, Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.