Adrian Rice's "The Double Crown"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 19 June 2021

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Adrian Rice is from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He graduated from the University of Ulster with a BA in English & Politics, and an MPhil in Anglo-Irish Literature. He has delivered writing workshops, readings, and lectures throughout Europe and the United States. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, including The Mason’s Tongue, which was shortlisted for the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Literary Prize, and nominated for the Irish Times Prize for Poetry.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the daily poem. I'm Heidi White and today is Friday, June 18th. And today I'm going to
0:07.9	read for you a poem by contemporary Irish poet Adrian Rice. The poem is called The Double Crown,
0:14.2	and this is how it goes. Sometimes I feel like I let you down in the end, old friend, spending time out running around
0:22.3	with other best friends.
0:24.2	I guess I never learned from the late neglect of my lonely grandmother.
0:28.8	Funny, last word I shared with her over the phone was Jesus.
0:33.8	Just in case I'm right, if I let us down in life, I hope you'll accept poetry in the
0:40.0	hereafter as poor recompense from the man you mentored who's seen some sense.
0:46.7	So take this double crown, wreathed at each end, and you wear yours, and I'll wear mine,
0:54.1	and let's break bread together across space and time
0:57.7	me in the here now you in the there then this is the final poem or the epilogue in Adrian Rice's
1:09.4	sonnet sequence titled the Moongate sonnets, which he wrote in memory of his friend and neighbor Billy Montgomery.
1:16.7	It's a really lovely sonnet sequence, and I highly recommend you find it and read it in order.
1:22.2	It is a chronicle of the friendship that existed between these two neighbors, these men who were self-proclaimed
1:30.2	as undemonstrative in their affection, and yet that affection was enduring and strong and
1:36.4	quite deep. And in this particular poem, The Double Crown, we have Adrian Rice's attempt to make peace and to find hope in an
1:47.3	enduring friendship across the boundary of death.
1:52.0	And in the first half of the poem, the first six lines, Rice is struggling through and wrestling
1:59.8	through a universal experience of grief, which I think those of us who've been bereaved can really relate to, this sense of regret, the sense that there is something that he should have done more to stay connected to this man, to serve this man in his final days.
2:14.7	And he connects that experience with his neighbor, with his, another experience of loss in his
2:20.4	life with his grandmother. So he's exploring that thread of regret of I should have done more.
2:26.1	I should have been more available. And then the poem takes a turn with one single and very powerful
	...

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