Chris Barlas is a full time Varen resident so that qualifies loosely for this next bit of news. Talking to him recently I discovered that he is a writer, having authored many television and radio drama scripts, as well as much miscellaneous journalism. He was also very active on behalf of writers in the major UK writers’ organisations. Writing seems to run in the family because Chris’s great grandfather, John Evelyn Barlas, was a Scottish poet of the 1890s, closely associated with the decadent and aesthetic movements. He was also a socialist, a leading speaker at some early meetings of what became the Labour Party, but gradually embraced anarchism. Described as a “bosom friend” of Oscar Wilde (whose short work The Soul of Man under Socialism appears to have been heavily influenced by John Barlas), he moved in London literary circles, rubbing shoulders with the likes of WB Yeats, Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson. Sadly from his early thirties he increasingly suffered from bi-polar disease, which, during manic phases, led him to frequent run-ins with the police, once being bound over on Wilde’s assurance. He ended his days in a Scottish asylum outside Glasgow. Today, his poems are little known but a biography published this year aims to put that right.
Oblivion
Oblivion! is it not one name of death?
Nay, is not lethe death's most dismal name,
Death growing hour by hour within our frame,
Death settling slowly in our brain, the breath
Of the soul ebbing, so that he who saith,
I am to-day as yesterday the same,
Lies, for his thoughts are fled like smoke from flame,
And like the dew his sorrow vanisheth.
Changed is the river, though the waves remain,
Which rocks of slowlier-changing circumstance
Plough up in every day of chafing foam.
Changed is the river, gone,gone to the main,
Yesterday's dream and last year's happy chance,
And the hear't thoughts again return not home.
John Evelyn Barlas
It is so thought provoking ... and relevant and it certainly makes me want to read more.
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