In this episode I tell you about a favourite pipe and its associations with Tolkien and read you a poem of my own about Tolkien smoking. Here's the text of the poem, meanwhile, if you are enjoying these you might want to pop over to my coffee house page https://www.buymeacoffee.com/malcolmg... sometime and buy me a coffee, but of course there is no obligation, meanwhile here is the poem I read in this episode:
Patterns (Tree and Leaf)

Tolkien is leaning back into an oak
Old, gnarled, distinct in bole and burr
As, from the burr and bowl of his old pipe,
Packed with tightly patterned shreds of leaf,
The smoke ascends in rings and wreathes of air
To catch the autumn light and meet such leaves
As circle through its wreathes and patter down
In patterns of their own to the rich ground.


Again he contemplates the tree of tales;
The roots of language and its rings of growth,
‘The tongue and tale and teller all coeval’
And he becomes a pattern making patterns,
A tale telling tales and turning leaves,
From the print of thumb and finger on his pipe
To the print and press and pattern of his books
And all their prints and imprints in our minds,
Out to this grainy patterned photograph
Of ‘Tolkien, leaning back into an oak’.