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The following three drawings, all A3 size, are part of a collection of thirteen. They are pen and ink on illustration board, and involve almost as much scraping off the ink as putting it -on in the first place. They were done as a collaboration with David Wheldon, the author and -poet, and published in a book which included a sequence of 51 of his sonnets, called “The Uncompliant Stranger”, with these drawings facing thirteen of them, not as illustrations, as such, because I had done three of the drawings before we even decided to do the book. It wasn’t even decided which poem to put each drawing alongside until almost the last moment, but once all the sonnets were finished and ordered,and the drawings completed, it -became obvious where each one belonged.

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The journey now in hand within the mind
Must leave past houses to their local change; 
The very door that recall cannot find 
Is weathered still by every season’s change. 
The journeyer will know that weather well, 
In wind or hail or thick unpurposed snow; 
Within the sound of some vast half-heard bell 
Cognate with ends which point the path I go. 
 
I rise from sleep, and know this is a dream;
The room surrounds me in the longer night 
Which for an end takes up the barest gleam 
And makes time from a momentary light. 
 
I measure moveless hours before I leave, 
As though, awake, I would my stead bereave. 

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The night’s compassion holds the dreamless eye 
Untroubled through the troubled hours of sleep; 
Hoared boundaries in frost; the vixen’s cry;
The glassless window in the long night’s deep:
When limits fail a use then who am I 
To fence a home, an acre , and an end, 
A yard of ground beneath a foreign sky
On which a foreign life and art contend. 
Identities of silence hedge this place;
Quick motioned thought delineates the day; 
The sleeper wakes within sufficient space
To lose his all to sight and take his way.
 
The country of his waking and his name are are one; 
The place put from his mind, and he is gone.

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 Unbroken sides of day, the limit’s mind

 Unbridled in a dayspring yet unbreached

 Upon a road that has no way assigned

 Nor path upon its stones, its end unreached.
 

 A plain at daybreak, never seen before,

 Still lies in sleep. The level shadows flow

 To shadows in a daybreak from a store

 Of time and provenance where ages grow.
 

 And all potential character may thrive;

 A multitude of roads one road might span,

 An eye in animation and in speech alive

 The path in words and all intelligence in man.
 

 All days that dawn sequester such a day:

 This morning’s light should be its ray.

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