Sir Osbert Sitwell

Sir Osbert Sitwell Poems

Sir Osbert Sitwell Biography

Sir Osbert Sitwell was born in London on 6 December 1892, the son of Sir George Sitwell. He was raised in Derbyshire and educated at Eton. He sat for the exam for entry to Sandhurst twice but failed both attempts but later during the First World War Sitwell served as an officer in the Grenadier Guards, in France for various periods from 1914 to 1917. His experiences left him with hatred of war. Along with sister Edith and brother Sacheverell, Osbert Sitwell was a patron and pioneer of style, remembered chiefly for his five-volume autobiography, Left Hand, Right Hand! (1945-50, comprising Left Hand, Right Hand!; The Scarlet Tree; Great Morning; Laughter in the Next Room and Noble Essences). A late addition to his autobiography, Tales my Father Taught Me, followed in 1962. His autobiography is full of marvellous evocative pictures of an age and a culture that now seem almost entirely vanished, and are remarkable for the portrait of the eccentric, exasperating figure of his father, Sir George. His memoirs achieved tremendous success in both Britain and the US. Sitwell was the author of poems, short stories, novels and memoirs. The majority of his poetry is light and satiric. Though his earlier poem The Winstonburg Line (1919), was markedly pacifist in tone. His short stories include Triple Fugue (1924); the novel Before the Bombardment (1926), a novel describing the shelling of Scarborough in 1914 and its effect on the lonely, genteel female society of the town; Collected Poems and Satires (1931) and Selected Poems (1943). Upon his father's death in 1943, Sitwell became 5th baronet. Sir Osbert Sitwell, who never married, died in 1969 after succumbing to Parkinson’s Disease.)

The Best Poem Of Sir Osbert Sitwell

Orpheus

WHEN Orpheus with his wind-swift fingers
Ripples the strings that gleam like rain,
The wheeling birds fly up and sing,
Hither, thither echoing;
There is a crackling of dry twigs,
A sweeping of leaves along the ground,
Fawny faces and dumb eyes
Peer through the fluttering screens
That mask ferocious teeth and claws
Now tranquil.
As the music sighs up the hill-side,
The young ones hear,
Come skipping, ambling, rolling down,
Their soft ears flapping as they run,
Their fleecy coats catching in the thickets,
Till they lie, listening, round his feet.
Unseen for centuries,
Fabulous creatures creep out of their caves,
The unicorn
Prances down from his bed of leaves,
His milk-white muzzle still stained green
With the munching, crunching of mountain-herbs.
The griffin, usually so fierce,
Now tame and amiable again,
Has covered the white bones in his secret cavern
With a rustling pall of dank dead leaves,
While the salamander, true lover of art,
Flickers, and creeps out of the flame;
Gently now, and away he goes,
Kindles his proud and blazing track
Across the forest,
Lies listening,
Cools his fever in the flowing waters of the lute.

.......................

But when the housewife returns,
Carrying her basket,
She will not understand.
She misses nothing,
Hears nothing.
She will only see
That the fire is dead,
The grate cold.

.......................

But the child upstairs,
Alone, in the empty cottage,
Heard a strange wind, like music,
In the forest,
Saw something creep out of the fire.

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