James Schuyler at 100: The Bluet, by Ailsa Holland

Thank you to Ailsa Holland for contributing this first blog post in honour of James Schuyler’s centenary.

James Schuyler’s ‘The Bluet’

‘The Bluet’ has changed for me this year. I used to see in it a recognition of the transformative magic of blue. It made me think of the best blues of my life — the precious lapis of the medieval manuscripts I fell in love with as a student; the shining silk handkerchief a young man wrapped round a milk bottle filled with daffodils; a blue gate with a silver-green pear tree in front of it, which I used to gaze at in perfect contentment; Patrick Heron’s window for the Tate on my daughter’s first visit to St Ives, the day she first said ‘blue’. And of course all those skies and seas of sunny days. I still wonder whether blue in itself can make a moment happy, or whether blue has a special power on memory, making those incidents shine out from the general murkiness of the past like Schuyler’s bluet in the Autumn wood.

In February of this year my mother died. She was a Quaker. We buried her in one of her favourite t-shirts, covered in small blue flowers. Now when I read ‘The Bluet’ I see her, a small woman with a stamina I only began to understand long after I left home. A woman who stubbornly refused to let the brown-grey of the world stop her joy, even though she felt her own and others’ suffering and grief so keenly. She knew that we are always in a season of dying, that we can still, freakishly, be ‘a drop of sky’, whether by marching, by baking scones or by writing poems. To be a Flower, as Emily Dickinson said, is profound Responsibility. And I see my mother on her last Christmas Day, watching my kids play rather unrehearsed carols in her room, her blue eyes bright as springtime.

Ailsa Holland is a poet and writer with a varied practice. Her first collection, The Bodleian and the Bottle Ovens (2023) contained poems made of clay as well as poems of words. Her pamphlet, Twenty-Four Miles Up, was published in in 2017 with support from ACE. Ailsa was the winner of the 2019 Manchester Cathedral Poetry Prize and the runner-up of the 2014 Hippocrates Prize; her poems have also appeared in anthologies and journals. Ailsa is co-creator of the feminist history Twitter project @OnThisDayShe and co-author of On This Day She (2021). She runs Moormaid Press, a publisher of poetry pamphlets. 

You can also find a brilliant and insightful conversation about James Schuyler between Charles North and Martin Stannard here.

Photo credit: Joe Brainard