Today’s Vanilla Chai was particularly nice. So much so that we finally got an opportunity to take advantage of the teabag rest (china, cat shaped, a gift from a friend, not the one in the office) so we could re-infuse it later. All very Barbara Pym. In the office, we re-infuse tea all the time, primarily because there are signs everywhere asking us to be “mindful of our consumption” and we can get through an awful lot of tea. Also, a mug doesn’t seem like adequate use of a teabag.

Typically when we work from home it’s leaf tea all the time, but this calendar does a line in teabags, so that’s what we’ve been using. Because it was chai, and also because of the vanilla, we sweetened it again and the result tasted excellent. It also got us through three high-profile reports, and that’s not nothing.

Candidly, when it was all done we didn’t have the energy for the blog. Or for books , or for flipping mindlessly through various channels to find something maybe watchable. We just want to sleep for a week. But anyway.

The other day we gabbled on at you about the sestina, which is rare and hard to find in literature. Today we went in search of another structured poem, the villanelle. Turns out, whereas the sestina mostly died out because it’s a linguistic hell to write, the villanelle became bizarrely popular in the 1980s. The most famous example is Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle, probably with good reason. But his isn’t the only villanelle. Have this one by Auden. It’s quite good too.

Villanelle
W.H.Auden
Time can say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you, I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time can say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be told, although
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you, I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time can say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you, I would let you know.

Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away?
Time can say nothing but I told you so.
If I could tell you, I would let you know.

Really interesting tea today. It’s an Earl Grey Citrus, so it sounds like it should be a black tea, but it’s not. It’s green. But it doesn’t taste particularly of citrus. We thought at first it hadn’t steeped long enough, but the second cup has had over ten minutes and it’s still a very good, very posh green tea with no floral or citrus undertones we can find. We blame the bergamot. It overshadows a lot, and so does the green tea base. It’s a very nice blend, but it’s not citrusy. And that’s fine. We’d drink this one again. We’re definitely glad we made it in a pot instead of the usual mug.

But it’s been a ridiculously long day. We sat down at nine and didn’t stop again until after a different nine. There was a break in there where we chatted to a friend out east. Not very Christmassy, either, so in compensation, have a Christmassy sort of poem.

Oh, and try not to look at the calendar. It’s frogmarching us all along faster than racing demon. If one of us blinks unexpectedly it will be Tuesday. It’s been that kind of day.

The Christmas Rose
Cecil Day Lewis

What is the flower that blooms each year
In flowerless days,
Making a little blaze
On the bleak earth, giving my heart some cheer?

Harsh the sky and hard the ground
When the Christmas rose is found.
Look! its white star, low on earth,
Rays a vision of rebirth.

Who is the child that’s born each year —
His bedding, straw:
His grace, enough to thaw
My wintering life, and melt a world’s despair?

Harsh the sky and hard the earth
When the Christmas child comes forth.
Look! around a stable throne
Beasts and wise men are at one.

What men are we that, year on year,
We Herod-wise
In our cold wits devise
A death of innocents, a rule of fear?

Hushed your earth, full-starred your sky
For a new nativity:
Be born in us, relieve our plight,
Christmas child, you rose of light!

Today’s tea was Pure Mint. It smelled like someone plucked it straight from the garden, which is impressive for the time of year.

At least one friend grows mint (tries to) on her winodwsill and we’re always teasing her, saying one day her lawn will go all to mint.

“But I keep it in a pot,’ she says, as if this makes a difference.

News to mint. We did not grow mint up in Scotland but the part of the lawn not going to clover was full of it anyway. The tenant from four years prior must have flirted with it or something. To paraphrase an old priest, who was drawing comparisons with his overflowing kitchen sink at the time, “It’s like the Holy Spirit. It gets everywhere.”

Heaney understands. Have a poem.

Mint
Seamus Heaney

It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles
Growing wild at the gable of the house
Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles:
Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice.

But, to be fair, it also spelled promise
And newness in the back yard of our life
As if something callow yet tenacious
Sauntered in green alleys and grew rife.

The snip of scissor blades, the light of Sunday
Mornings when the mint was cut and loved:
My last things will be first things slipping from me.
Yet let all things go free that have survived.

Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless
Like inmates liberated in that yard.
Like the disregarded ones we turned against
Because we’d failed them by our disregard.

Inexplicably, today’s tea is Pumpkin Spice. No, we don’t know either. It’s definitely December, and it’s definitely barrelling inexorably towards Christmas, so you have to wonder what possessed them.

Full disclosure: We are the wrong person for this review. We hate pumpkin spice. We hate pumpkin, and we hate spice. We don’t like it in coffee, or in baking, not with a fox, not in a box, not on a train or in a plane…You get the idea.

Though having had a few mouthfuls – it’s not terrible .We haven’t spat anything into the sink, and we have done that on occasion. There’s a reason we always brew the Advent Calendar tea in our mug before we use a pot, unless like yesterday, we draw something we know we like.

There was a memorable year DavidsTea did a pumpkin spice chai, and it was dreadful. Murchies do one that’s respectable, but they have other black teas we would drink first. For some reason, as a herbal tea, the pumpkin spice sort of works. We know, we know. Really selling it over here. Don’t all rush to buy it.

Our working theory is that there’s less sugar in the herbal tea we’re trying. Or maybe the fact that it’s all spices and no tea base is balancing the orange horror of pumpkin better. Who knows. We won’t be adding it to any loaves for flavouring, but we might, just possibly, drink this again.

There’s no graceful segue here. If there are poems about the wonders of pumpkin spice, they probably live on the TTC, and look, the TTC poems are great. No, genuinely. A few of them we’ve read and would love to repost here. But we can’t, so in the meantime, have a sestina. You don’t see a heck of a lot of those because the rules are a special kind of hell. We had to write one once in high school. We had to write six different kinds of maniacally precise poem for this assignment, including at least one sonnet, and you know what? The sonnet was easier. The contrapuntal poem is easier, and you have to make that make sense in two different directions. We’ll find you one another evening and prove it. Until then, the sestina.

The Proposal
Laura Barkat

“Perhaps, let’s go to Delft, ”
he said, taking the silver tea caddy
gingerly off the shelf. It was Betjeman and Barton—
not the shelf, which was of rosewood,
but the caddy painted slight with numbers, avoirdupois,
the weight of tea I steep to pour in porcelain.

“Why should we?” I lifted porcelain.
Not the kind they make in Delft—
copied from the Chinese, high-resistance, unlike the measure avoirdupois
adopted through a confluence of words… Latin, French as the tea caddy
I opened for the promise, that petaled-rose would
spread its fragrance with Darjeeling; Betjeman and Barton

sell it so. I wonder if it’s Betjeman or Barton
who dreamed of almonds, grapes and peonies to drift in porcelain.
Who bare-suggested in a whisper that a hint of rose would
be a better choice than, let’s just say, a tulip, yellow, plucked from Delft?
I mused on Netherland’s canals and stretched towards the tea caddy.
What if he could weigh my thoughts in dark avoirdupois?

A measure partly from the Latin, avoirdupois
came over from to have, to hold, possess, like the Betjeman and Barton
I hold this very moment, twisting cover of a tight-sealed tea caddy
which, had it come from long ago, might rather be of bone-ash porcelain
hand-painted blue with scenes of domesticity from Delft.
Milk maids, windmills, a tulip— not a rose— would

play across it like the Madagascar sun on rosewood
stolen from the tropics, shipped through China, measured in avoirdupois—
all multiples of which are based on pounds, like stones of city walls in Delft.
You cannot find this in the catalog from Betjeman and Barton,
the knowledge that the British added stones as hard as fired porcelain,
or that the city once exploded like the fragrance from this silver tea caddy,

assaulting air and narrow streets with powder they don’t sell in tea caddies,
brass-mounted, inlaid carefully, satin-wood or rosewood,
the larger ones called tea chests, often seated near the porcelain
in dining rooms where merchandise bears not the paint of bold avoirdupois
but is quite fragrant with rare teas of fine purveyors. Betjeman and Barton
is my favorite, see, residing in the heart of passion—Paris—not in Delft.

I place the silver tea caddy directly on the shelf, unpainted with the weight of ebony avoirdupois,
silver tipped with fresh-spilled leaves scattered on the rosewood, lined with Betjeman and Barton
rarities to pour into my porcelain, which would, I tell him, never come from Delft.