Tom Paulin

In Roman mythology, the god Terminus presides over walls and boundaries. He expresses the ancient doctrine that human nature is limited and life irredeemably imperfect. Terminus agrees with Robert Frost in saying ‘good fences make good neighbours’; and he also takes a classical view of artistic creation by insisting on formal constraints and closed symmetry. Although Terminus inhabits hedges and drystone walls, he is not a property of pastoral verse, and this is because pastoral writing, like fantasy writing, is a convention which licenses an imaginative freedom from reality. In fantasy literature the result is the ennui of Utopia, a luminous envelope that absorbs the world.

A pierrepoint stretch, mid-afternoon; the last two go facing back down the walled street below the chestnuts this still claggy Sabbath. They hold their rifles lightly, like dipped rods, and in a blurt of sunshine the aluminium paint on the customs shed has a dead shine like a text brushed onto basalt. It’s not that anything will happen next in this hour that is as constant as sin, and...

‘… her measures are, how well Each syllabe answered, and was formed, how fair; These make the lines of life, and that’s her air. ’

Jonson

A Lob accent pucking in the ferns would put my back up: lucky it’s not that we’ve come for this thick-necked and völkisch weather, though yesterday in the fellows’ garden his queasied voice squeezed like...

Under a stony sun, a slabbed fate, there is a paved land called nothing-original which is the home – the near-buried home – of scholarship and humility; there the god of Notes & Queries takes up our references and a silver priest called Maxwell sings everything in the catalogues. This is karma, acceptance; a bent harijan brushing dung and shards in a walled courtyard. But who...