Monday Poetry Returns

I’ve not been updating this thing for the last week due to a sudden attack of social life. In this case, the society flew in from Canada, helped with the Oxonmoot transport costs and bought me dinner on several occasions. Thanks, Beth: it was every bit as much fun for us as it was for you.

Such excuses aside, it’s high time I posted something, and the familiar Monday evening poetry selection seems like a pretty good place to start.

Since I was at Tintern Abbey with Bethberry not so very long ago, Wordsworth provides a fitting opening for today’s collection with his misleadingly titled poem of the same name.

wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.

Next I’ve selected one by Robert Graves that, being a First World War poem that refers to Norse mythology, should probably have appeared here far earlier than it has.

Dead Cow Farm

An ancient saga tells us how
In the beginning the First Cow
(For nothing living yet had birth
But elemental cow on earth)
Began to lick cold stones and mud:
Under her warm tongue flesh and blood
Blossomed, a miracle to believe;
And so was Adam born, and Eve.
Here now is chaos once again,
Primaeval mud, cold stones and rain.
Here flesh decays and blood drips red,
And the Cow’s dead, the old Cow’s dead.

The foregoing is a little dishonest: the saga is Snorri’s Gylfaginning, and the story is of the primeval cow, Auðumla, whose milk nourished Ymir, father of the frost-giants. She licked salty blocks of ice, from which Búri, ancestor of Oðinn, emerged. Graves adapts the myth to his own ends to connect the beginning of humanity with what he chooses to see as its apocalyptic end.

Next, John Lyly tells us a cautionary tale about playing cards with people who have Classical nicknames. Campaspe was the mistress of Alexander of Macedon and a famed beauty, but here her name is applied in true Romantic style to the poet’s current flame. I do like to see the boy Cupid humbled. To be perfectly honest, though, I find it difficult to care what happens to the poet.

Cards and Kisses

Cupid and my Campaspe play’d
At cards for kisses – Cupid paid:
He stakes his quiver, bow and arrows,
His mother’s doves, and team of sparrows;
Loses them too; then down he throws
The coral of his lips, the rose
Growing on’s cheek (but none knows how);
With these, the crystal of his brow,
And then the dimple of his chin:
All these did my Campaspe win.
At last he set her both his eyes -
She won, and Cupid blind did rise.
O Love! has she done this for thee?
What shall, alas! become of me?

Next is Ambrose Bierce, giving us a wry look at religious hypocrisy. Although he chooses an exotic Islamic setting, it’s more than likely that he intended his barb to be felt by people much closer to his Ohio home.

Religion

Hassan Bedriddin, clad in rags, ill-shod,
Sought the great temple of the living God.
The worshippers arose and drove him forth,
and one in power beat him with a rod.

“Allah,” he cried, “thou seest what I got;
Thy servants bar me from the sacred spot.”
“Be comforted,” the Holy One replied;
“It is the only place where I am not.”

Finally, since I’m quite tired and have already had a large glass of wine this evening, a poem about flying. Specifically, it’s about taking off in an emergency in the early years of the Second World War. The author, David Bourne, was killed in action in September 1941.

“Operations Calling!”

“Clearing Black Section
Patrol Bass Rock,”
Leaps heart; after shock
Action comes stumbling;
Snatch your helmet;
Then run smoothly, to the grumbling
Of a dozing Merlin heating
Supercharged air.
You are there
by “Z”

Down hard on the behind
The parachute; you are blind
With your oxygen snout
But click, click, click, click, you feel
and the harness is fixed.
Round the wing
And “Out of the cockpit, you,”
Clamber the rung
And the wing as if a wasp had stung
You, hop and jump into the cockpit
Split second to spike
The Sutton harness holes,
One, two, three, four,
Thrust with your
Hand to the throttle open…

“Operations” called and spoken.

I would write more, but nothing springs immediately to mind. I shall therefore leave you with the usual instruction to share and enjoy.

 

Exmouth Beach in Pictures

On Saturday afternoon I had friends over and they wanted to go for a walk. Fortunately, Exmouth is blessed with quite a lot of beach, and if you start at Orcombe Point you can finish at The Grove on the Esplanade and feel you’ve earned a swift half or six. These are some of the things you’ll see if you take that route.

This is Orcombe Point. Pick the wrong time and you'll find all of this sand underwater, so work out the tides first

Once you're round Orcombe Point, the scale of the task becomes apparent.

There are always a few sandcastles along the beach. A message requires this one not to be touched.

Exmouth's new lifeboat station, which you could just see in the distance two pictures ago.

Sand dunes along the beach.

The RNLI station from the dunes. In the distance is Orcombe Point.

This line of beach huts is about half-way along the route. The volleyball nets are only a couple of years old.

The landing stage is usually out on sunny days, but it's winched up the beach at night. It's absolutely ancient and must be on its last legs.

Eat your heart out, Washington: we have an Octagon, and it sells ice cream.

The clock tower was put up for Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee. Reaching it means that the walk is nearly over.

The inaptly named Grand Hotel. The pub is at the end of this line of buildings.

Looking out to sea from here you can see Dawlish Warren. The visible portion is the nice part of Dawlish Warren: go by sea and don't waste time on the tourist area.

The end of the line: The Grove, where you can now spend the rest of the day recuperating.

 

Monday Poetry – back to form edition

Back to form, of course, means more medievalism and more melancholy. It’s been a phenomenally busy week, and not just because I’ve been describing in nauseating detail how to do my job. The next pictorial guide will, I’m sure you’ll be relieved to hear, describe the walk from Orcombe Point to The Grove, comprising some two and a half miles of beach. Today, however, we have naming of verse.

First is another of Rupert Brooke’s earlier poems, this time from 1904. Yet more wistful melancholia, I’m afraid, but it seems terribly difficult to track down good comic verse at the moment.

The Path of Dreams

Go, heart, and pluck beside the Path of Dreams,
Where moans the wind along the shadowy streams,
Sad garlands wreathed of the red mournful roses,
And lilies o’ moon beams.

Strange blossoms faint upon that odorous air,
Vision, and wistful Memory; and there
Love twofold with the purple bloom of Triumph
And the wan leaf of Despair.

Go heart; go quickly; pluck and weave thereof
Dim garlands, scattering pallid dew above,
And far across the sighing tides of darkness
Lay them beside my love.

Next, more riddling from the Exeter Book. This one has an Old Testament theme, but that’s all the clues you’ll get from me.

Wer sæt æt wine mid his wifum twam
ond his twegen suno ond his twa dohtor,
swase gesweostor, ond hyra suno twegen,
freolico frumbearn; fæder wæs þær inne
þara æþelinga æghwæðres mid,
eam ond nefa. Ealra wæron fife
eorla ond idesa insittendra.

A man sat at wine with his two wives
and his two sons, and his two daughters,
beloved sisters, and their two sons,
noble firstborn; the father was there within
Of those princes both, with
an uncle and a nephew. In all there were five
Lords and ladies sitting within.

I don’t think I’ve yet put up anything in Middle English, which is quite an oversight, given the sheer variety of works from that period. I’ll rectify the omission with a little piece that I found in Kenneth Sisam’s A Middle English Reader. This was written down at a time when the old runic letter thorn (þ) was being supplanted by ‘th’, so instances of both can be seen in this piece. A bit of vocab for you: seuenist is an old spelling of sennight, which is a week. The old word ‘fortnight’ has remained in use, but sennight has gone the way of all flesh, probably because it’s easier to say or write ‘week’. Dryng just means ‘drink’, chelde is ‘cold’ and a primerole is a primrose. Other than that, welle carries the old sense ‘good’ and the rest you should be able to work out for yourselves. It’s a simple little poem, but it has a definite charm to it.

The Maid of the Moor

(Bodleian MS Rawlinson D.913)

Maiden in the mor lay,
In the mor lay,
Seuenyst fulle, seuenist fulle,
Maiden in the mor lay,
In the mor lay,
Seuenistes fulle ant a day.

Welle was hire mete;
Wat was hire mete?
Þe primerole ant the, -
Þe primerole ant the, -
Welle was hire mete;
Wat was hire mete? -
The primerole ant the violet.

Welle was hire dryng;
Wat was hire dryng?
Þe chelde water of þe welle-spring.

Welle was hire bour;
Wat was hire bour?
Þe red rose an te lilie flour.

I’ll move on from poems in difficult language to a poem that’s a bit more challenging. Sylvia Plath is famed for cryptic expression, and this is actually one of her more explicit poems.

Crossing the Water

Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.
Where do the black trees go that drink here?
Their shadows must cover Canada.

A little light is filtering from the water flowers.
Their leaves do not wish us to hurry:
They are round and flat and full of dark advice.

Cold worlds shake from the oar.
The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.
A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand;

Stars open among the lilies.
Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
This is the silence of astounded souls.

Next I’ve chosen a poem by a favourite of mine – Wilfred Owen. I don’t think I’ve seen this one outside the collection edited by Edmund Blunden.

The Unreturning

Suddenly night crushed out the day and hurled
Her remnants over cloud-peaks, thunder-walled.
Then fell a stillness such as harks appalled
When far-gone dead return upon the world.

There watched I for the Dead; but no ghost woke.
Each one whom Life exiled I named and called.
But they were all too far, or dumbed, or thralled;
And never one fared back to me or spoke.

Then peered the indefinite unshapen dawn
With vacant gloaming, sad as half-lit minds,
The weak-limned hour when sick men’s sighs are drained.
And while I wondered on their being withdrawn,
Gagged by the smothering wing which none unbinds,
I dreaded even a heaven with doors so chained.

Finally (and this is an edit, so apologies if Facebook jumped the gun a bit), a Thomas Hardy poem that takes a wry look at a distinctly Victorian issue. This is by way of a little joke for a friend of mine, but I’m sure we can all appreciate it.

The Ruined Maid

“O ‘Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?”–
“O didn’t you know I’d been ruined?” said she.

–”You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,
Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;
And now you’ve gay bracelets and bright feathers three!”–
“Yes: that’s how we dress when we’re ruined,” said she.

–”At home in the barton you said ‘thee’ and ‘thou,’
And ‘thik oon,’ and ‘theäs oon,’ and ‘t’other’; but now
Your talking quite fits ‘ee for high compa-ny!”–
“Some polish is gained with one’s ruin,” said she.

–”Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak
But now I’m bewitched by your delicate cheek,
And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!”–
“We never do work when we’re ruined,” said she.

–”You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,
And you’d sigh, and you’d sock; but at present you seem
To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!”–
“True. One’s pretty lively when ruined,” said she.

“–I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,
And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!”–
“My dear–a raw country girl, such as you be,
Cannot quite expect that. You ain’t ruined,” said she.

That’s your lot for this week. I hope I’ve managed to get a bit more variety in this time, and if it’s gone from dark to dark via abstruse that’s just the way I roll on a Monday. I hope you enjoyed them anyway: I certainly did.

 

More of what I do all day

I’m choosing to interpret the complete lack of response to yesterday’s helpful guide to making clasps as an urgent demand for more of the same. Today’s guide describes what to do with a cobalt-chromium denture framework once you’ve got it out of the casting machine.

We start by leaving the mould for half an hour. This is partly because the metal inside has a temperature of about 900 Celsius, and is therefore impossible to work on unless you have asbestos hands; but mainly because if you cool cobalt-chromium alloy too quickly it plays merry hell with the metal’s crystalline structure and the denture will break.

After about half an hour the metal has completely solidified, and can be immersed in cold water to cool it down. Doing this also damps down the investment, the dust from which contains silicone and other nasties that you don’t want to breathe in. When it comes out of the water, the muffle looks like this.

Ready to remove the investment. The delicate technical instrument we use to do this is in the top-right corner

A few scientific taps with a hammer and most of the mould falls off. Once you can get your fingers around the cone at the top of the sprues, do so and smack it with the hammer until most of the investment falls off. If you put your hand underneath the framework to support it, it will get bent and you’ll have to start all over again. Presuming that this didn’t happen and that you haven’t broken a finger or something equally daft, you should be left with something like this.

Free of the investment, the metal clearly needs a lot of work.

One of the reasons I like this process is that I get to hit things with a hammer, then get out some power tools. In this case, it’s a high-speed grinding unit, with a carborundum disc rotating at 25,000 rpm. The sprues are cut off as close to the framework as is possible without cutting into it (that gets you belted around the head with the hammer). This leaves us with something like this.

The sprues have been cut off, so now we can get on with finishing

Now we need to get rid of the investment and oxides that are all over the job. We do this with a sandblaster full of 25 micron aluminium oxide blasting compound. Two minutes of that, and you have sand everywhere and a chrome that looks like this.

Nice and clean. Time to start the real work

Now we need to clean up the casting. There are the stumps of the sprues to remove and pieces of flash metal all around the edges, and the rests and other delicate shapes need to be defined and shaped. Once it fits on the model and we’re happy with the result, it goes back into the sandblaster to homogenise the surface. By now it’s looking more like something you’d put in someone’s mouth.

It fits. Time to make it shiny

The sandblasted job goes into an electrolytic polishing bath for ten minutes at just under five milliamps. Then it’s smoothed off using hard rubber wheels and rubber points on the high-speed grinder. Once that’s been done it looks a bit shinier, but not shiny enough.

Better, but it needs more polish

Next we get out the hand-held motor, fit a mounted steel wire wheel to it and set it to 9,000 rpm. The whole chrome gets a good going over with a fine metal polish and the wire wheel until any lines or marks have been removed. Since cobalt-chromium is quite a lot harder than steel, the wire does no harm to the surface. Actually the polish is doing all of the cutting, and the brush is only made from steel because anything else will wear down to nothing in seconds. After the first polishing our casting looks like this.

After polishing with the wire wheel, it's nearly finished

Now we need to get that extra bit of lustre, for which we use felt wheels and points and an even finer metal polish. Once this is done and the whole thing has been scrubbed in near boiling water and laundry detergent (that combination will get rid of anything – try it on that tannin-stained coffee mug), it’s ready to have the fit checked and go out to the client.

Polished and cleaned off, the chrome shines forth in all its glory. My work here is done.

We do about five or six of these a day, so several other castings were going through the same stages alongside this one. That takes us from about eight in the morning, when the casting happens, to about three in the afternoon, when it’s time to start making the wax patterns that will be cast into frameworks the next day. It’s a busy life, but you do get to cut things up with power tools; and is that not what man has dreamed of since first he looked upon the stars? Probably not, but it’s not bad.

 

So what do I do all day then?

Many of you won’t be wondering what I do for a living, but I’m going to tell you anyway so that I’ll get out of this nasty habit of only putting up one post a week. To that end, I’m going to walk you through a typical lab process that I’ve had to carry out about nine times in the last week: processing an acetal resin clasp.

Stage 1. The framework fitted down to a duplicate model with the clasps patterned in casting wax

We start with a duplicate model, on which we pattern the clasps in casting wax. This model is then trimmed to within an inch of its life, leaving us with only those parts of it that are supporting the denture and the wax clasps. Then we get out an injection moulding flask.

A flask, already greased with petroleum jelly to aid in devesting.

The bottom half of the flask is filled with plaster, into which the prepared model is sunk, taking care not to allow the plaster to cover the wax patterns. The surface is smoothed out and undercut areas are eliminated. This leaves us with something like this.

The bottom half of the mould, ready for spruing.

The resin will need to get into the mould somehow, so the next stage is to add some sprues. This is done using 3mm sprue wax from a coil.

The finished sprue system

Now the two halves of the flask can be bolted together. The bottom half of the plaster mould is coated with water glass first to ensure that the whole thing separates neatly later on.

Ready to begin topping

Now we put the flask on a vibrating table and slowly pour in more plaster, taking care to keep air bubbles away from the wax. Once the plaster has set the mould will look something like this.

The completed mould, ready for boiling out

After allowing the plaster to set completely (I leave it twenty minutes, which is a bit more than it really needs), the flask is immersed in boiling water for another fifteen minutes to remove the wax. When it’s opened after boiling there’s usually some residual wax, so it needs to be cleaned with boiling water and washing-up liquid. While the kettle’s boiling, it’s a good idea to check for feathered edges in the plaster that will break off in the resin and ruin the clasps. These are removed with a scalpel.

The mould after boiling out

Nice and clean, and with any thin areas of flash plaster removed

Now that the mould is finished, it needs to be coated with separating solution so that the resin won’t stick to it. While that’s drying, we prepare an injection cylinder.

The injection cylinder, resin ingots and plunger

This goes into the injection moulding machine, and a metal cap is placed over it. The hole that forms the beginning of the sprue system sits over the cap, which is all you can see of the whole cylinder assembly once it’s in the machine.

The cylinder in place, we're ready to add the flask

The flask is bolted back together and clamped down in the machine. The injection process is automated, so once you get to this stage you can forget all about it for forty-five minutes.

Ready to inject. The red elastic band is there for a very technical reason, and not at all because that metal shield won't stay up on its own. Oh no

Now that I’ve done something else for three quarters of an hour, the machine has finished its cycle and the job can be removed from the mould. If the earlier stages were done properly, the mould should open cleanly, leaving us with something like this.

What you see on opening the mould after injecting. I've already cut through the sprues with a carborundum disc

Now the investment can be removed, leaving the denture framework ready to be cleaned in the ultrasonic bath. Once it’s been in there for about half an hour, the clasps can be trimmed and polished, leaving two flexible clasps that are more or less the same colour as the patient’s teeth.

The new clasps, ready to be trimmed and polished

And that’s how you process a pair of acetal resin clasps. I know: it’s a wild and crazy whirlwind of excitement in my job, but I like it.