When I was about nine I was dragged off to a jumble sale. It was boring as usual, but I browsed stoically to see if there was any treasure I could buy for one of those huge old 50p pieces. Surprisingly, I found a View-Master, which is a stereoscopic viewer for looking at three-dimensional slide scenes on paper discs—I had no idea at the time that such a thing existed. It was a red, cheap looking thing, but it was very cool, and it came with one disc, a set of scenes from Peter Rabbit books. It's been a while, so I couldn't even remember what the contraption was called. I asked two friends about my age, Joe Geldart and Paul Mutton, and they had both had one (Joe's was even red like mine) but couldn't remember the name of it either. Searching for “stereoscopic viewers” and the like uncovered it eventually.

These things were like gold dust in a small provincial town, so I don't think I ever found another disc. I didn't even have the Peter Rabbit books, so I just had these odd scenes of a clothed rabbit rooting around by a potting shed, and a farmer looking for him. The scenes imparted what I now call a metatrope, which is my term for a kind of specific poetic ambience. Metatropes don't get more frequent with age... if anything, I suspect that I had them more often and more strongly when I was younger.

A couple of months ago I had a routine dental checkup, and I was sitting in the waiting area looking at the magazines there. They're always the same: Country Life, National Geographic, things like that. Usually more of the kind of things that women read than men. There were some photography mags there too, and one of them outlined a simple method of composition based on thirds that I've been using with my ultra-compact Canon with some nice results. Country Life is pretty good too; that's a staple. Once I was reading that in a hospital, waiting for an appointment with my regular very trendy young nurse, and she comes out and calls me in, and she's absolutely gobsmacked by the fact that I'm reading Country Life. She just figured due to my rugged good looks that I'm a party animal, I guess.

Once I was reading Country Life in yet another hospital, and this one had such a great article in it that I had to scribble down a whole page's worth of notes from it. And then another time (we're getting to the point now), in yet another medical setting probably, I was reading some gardening magazine that they had. It featured an interesting garden design that was made up of lots of different parts: it had a very formal garden right next to the house, like one of those Elizabethan knot gardens and a series of herb patches; then a more regular lawn and borders a bit further away from the house; and then it gradually got more and more natural as it went out, with meadow sections and so on, until it eventually blended with the natural landscape.

I've been reading about Coleridge a lot lately, and when his pantisocracy scheme, a kind of utopia that he was going to set up on the banks of the Susquehanna with Robert Southey, collapsed, he instead turned to trying to make smaller versions of it in England. He lived in Somerset and the Lake District especially where he tried to re-create some semblance of this earlier idealistic scheme. Coleridge wrote about the strange juxtaposition of his writing room at Greta Hall with its splendid view of the mountains and lakes. Wallace Stevens had considered gardens as being the last remnants of nature to the city-dwelling moderner:

“I thought, on the train, how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes & barrens & wilds. It still dwarfs & terrifies & crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens & orchards & fields are mere scrapings.”

One of the primary forms of poetry that I've been trying to cultivate for several years now is an admixture of these and other related thoughts. It's hard to pin down exactly what I do in terms of craft to acheive it, but it has something to do with long euphonous words used in strange situations, a kind of careful intertwining of meanings, and the instinctive choice of natural imagery. The overall effect is like the sort of poem you'd expect someone to write in a potting shed. It's always got a little bit of that metatrope to it.

I'm starting to think that the question of metatrope solipsism, or rather, of metatrope individuality, can be solved in terms of a spectrum. In other words, the question is whether two people can have the same metatrope, and the answer is that they probably can, but not necessarily so. The best art, from my perspective, may be defined in terms of that which most universally encodes a metatrope. La Nuit étoilée sur le Rhône, for example, is superb on that front. Kubla Khan. A Midsummer Night's Dream. All of these have a poetic ambience that is so clear to me, and has been so often described by others, that I can't help but feel it must be universal, or at least roughly universal.

Ursa Major, depicted in La Nuit étoilée sur le Rhône, is La Grande Ourse in French, incidentally. I find this quite funny, and it also reminds me of reckoning the hour celestially in 1 Henry IV, II.i: “Heigh-ho! an it be not four by the day, I'll be hanged: Charles' wain is over the new chimney, and yet our horse not packed. What, ostler!”

I was asked recently about the relationship between metatropes and meaning, for example whether metatropes have anything to do with classificational cognitive dissonance and the integration of new information. I don't think that they do. The metatrope I got recently from crocuses peeping through a lawn, for example; I've seen crocuses peep through lawns before, just not in the particular way on that particular day that made it seem poetic in hard-to-describe metatropic way. The conjunction of elements, which I've noted before, does seem important though. In the crocuses case, the fact that I was singing Folie à Amphion by Django Reinhardt helped to solidify it.