A Cure At Porlock poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry

For whatever did it-the cider

at the Ship Inn, where the crowd

from the bar that night had overflowed

singing into Southey’s Corner, or

an early warning of appendicitis-

the remedy the chemist in the High Street

purveyed was still a dose of kaopectate

in morphine-the bane and the afflatus

of S.T.C. when Alph, the sacred river,

surfaced briefly in the unlikely

vicinity of Baker Farm, and as quickly

sank again, routed forever by the visitor

whose business, intent and disposition-

whether ill or well is just as immaterial-

long ago sunk Lethewards, a particle

of the unbottled ultimate solution.

I drank my dose, and after an afternoon

prostrate, between heaves, on the

coldly purgatorial tiles of the W.C.,

found it elysium simply to recline,

sipping flat ginger beer as though it were

honeydew, in that billowy bed,

under pink chenille, hearing you read

The Mystery of Edwin Drood! For whether

the opium was worth it for John Jasper,

from finding being with you, even sick

at Porlock, a rosily addictive picnic,

I left less likely ever to recover.