Ode to a storyteller

I was listening to this reading of a Keats poem by F. Scott Fitzgerald (it's an edited version, so it says) and it took me to a memory i'd stowed away in a distant, dusty mental filing cabinet. 

It's not related to the poem itself. I do like bits of the poem. I like that beneath all the dressed up words it's about darkness and transience. Beauty and dreams mixed up with doom (can you tell I don't know quite what i'm talking about?) I often feel poems are grasping somewhere beyond my understanding. Some bigger, intellectual picture that my eyes are too shortsighted to see, and too restless to go study the interpretations.

But it's his voice. I like his voice. It reminds me of this old guy called Dai who ran a camp I went on every summer as a kid. We'd sit around a campfire in the middle of the woods and shout out songs and sup gritty hot chocolate. Then the circle would hush and Dai would tell his fables. We'd be gripped by his voice, lulled into a sort of meditative awe. And we'd believe so wholly in the characters in his stories, we'd go away determined to be as kind and thoughtful and brave as them. 

Then we'd go to sleep in our tents or a treehouse, and dream of the eggy bread in the morning. 

And the massive tactical waterfights in the woods, with bottles and tubs and buckets.

And the giant stilts, and rope swings, and woodcraft, and the zip wire. 

And at the end of the week we'd float candles down the river. Oh it was so lovely.

 

  

"And purple-stainèd mouth;
  That I might drink,
  And with thee fade away into the forest dim:  

Fade far away, dissolve, and fast forget
  What thou on Earth hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret"