Uncommon Ground

A few weeks ago, on leaving the job I had done for six years, I was gifted a copy of Dominick Tyler's Uncommon Ground.  It combines attractive photographs with short descriptions of some of the words that have been used for British landscape features, partly inspired, like Robert Macfarlane's Landmarks, by the Barry Lopez/Debra Gwartney collection Home Ground. There are some intriguingly obscure words here like 'fraon', a place of shelter in the mountains, which Tyler found in a couple of early eighteenth century Gaelic dictionaries.  But many will be familiar from school geography lessons: tor, meander, blowhole, clint and gryke.  As I remember it the standard geographical terms were taught rather than local British variants: arête rather than druim or aonach.  However in one case I do recall being offered three interchangeable terms - cirque, cwm and corrie - as there seemed to be no collective agreement on what to call these glacial basins.  Tyler groups these under the word 'coire' - the Gaelic original of 'corrie'.  He says coombes are the same thing too which I don't think my geography teacher would quite have agreed with (we had lots of coombes in periglacial Sussex).  The one that Edward Thomas described in his poem 'The Combe', 'dark, ancient and dark', would have been quite difficult to photograph for Uncommon Ground: 'The sun of Winter, / The moon of Summer, and all the singing birds / Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper, /Are quite shut out.'

blowhole!

Uncommon Ground quotes sparingly from writers, but there are three lines from Milton's 'Comus' that mention both 'dingle' and 'dell': 'I know each lane, and every alley green / Dingle or bushy dell of this wilde Wood, / And every bosky bourn from side to side.'  The photograph accompanying this text shows Bunyan's Dell in Hertfordshire, where a large congregation of non-conformists once gathered 'under the canopy of heaven' to hear John Bunyan preach.  Milton's word 'bosky', referring to a thicket of trees, 'was also a word for a state of mild inebriation, perhaps drawing a parallel between a confusion of mind and a tangle of branches.'  I can't find any of these terms in the Landmarks glossaries, which suggests there is less overlap between the two books than you might think.  Robert Macfarlane is happy to admit words coined by poets, most notably Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose poems include: 'twindle' - stream foam dividing into two braids;  'heavengravel' - hailstones, and in the same line of poetry 'wolfsnow' for a sea-blizzard; 'slogger' - the sucking sound made by a waves against the side of a boat; 'shadowtackle' - the shifting patterns of shadow on woodland floors; 'leafmeal' which evokes the way leaves fall one by one and then lie like ground grain, 'silk-ash' - the fine ash covering glowing embers; and 'doomfire', an apocalyptic sunset.

Bunyan's Dell

Uncommon Ground starts with a local word, 'zawn', derived from a Cornish word for a chasm, but reading it through you keep coming across connections with other languages and landscapes.  'Shiver', the Cumbrian term for a fragment of slate derives from the Germanic word for splinter, 'scivero', which in turn, 'in a nice little etymological loop', led to the modern German 'schiefer', slate.  It is pleasing to learn that the Russian word 'Zastrugi' which gives us the name for ridges in snow formed by the wind also means 'the splintering of planed wood against the grain' and 'the undercut bank of a stream' (although even more pleasing would be to learn that Russian has two additional words for these precise phenomena).  This kind of thing made me want to see the global glossary of landscape terms being slowly compiled, according to Robert Macfarlane, by the Arabic scholar Abdal Hamid Fitzwilliam-Hall.  It has occurred to me that this Borgesian encyclopedia may prove insufficiently ambitious if it excludes the rimae, catena and dorsa of the Moon, or the words that will be needed to describe detailed features or atmospheric effects elsewhere in the solar system.  But I suppose I am betraying here my urban sensibility, where the daily experience of nature can seem as remote as those planetary features discerned in telescopes and given Latin names before anyone has been able to experience them.

Black dying trees ooze and sweat and the shells never cease

Outline: an autobiography and other writings was published three years after the death of Paul Nash, in 1949.  The autobiography was unfinished and only takes him up to the age of twenty-five, just before the First World War, although there are tantalising notes covering later years. The book also contains seven short essays (including 'Unseen Landscapes' and 'Swanage, or Seaside Surrealism') but its most vivid pages are a selection made by his wife Margaret of the letters she received from the Front in 1917.  On February 20th Nash's regiment left for France: "Went with my brother officers of the Hampshires to the dullest cinema I have ever watched; returned to the docks, re-embarked, mist fell again.  Stopped.  About 6 o'clock, however, great noise of whistles, hoots, electric bells, guttural shouts - off - we are going to sail. Men break into a sort of cheer and a number in the stern begin to sing "Tipperary" rather doubtfully.  Mist gradually blots out the screeching cranes and bulky pens and the long shapes of dock sheds, and slowly we push up Southampton water towards the sea."

Having arrived safely at Le Havre, they sailed down the Seine towards Rouen and the letters provide a lyrical description of the landscape slipping by.  Rouen itself was "quite diverting" and he managed a walk out to a neighbouring village, the wind fresh and larks singing.  On March 7th he wrote from the trenches of the new grass pushing up through the sandbags, "while clots of white dandelions, clover, thistle and twenty other plants flourish luxuriantly, brilliant growths of bright green against the pink earth."  The letter lists some of the sketches he has completed and asks Margaret to send him a copy of the volume of poems just published by another member of the Artists' Rifles, Edward Thomas.  Just over a month later Thomas was killed and Nash knew that the same thing could happen to him.  "But if I am hit it does not matter, and I can think of you at the last and forever after till we meet again." 

 

Paul Nash, We are Making a New World, 1918

© IWM (Art.IWM ART 1146) 

At several points Nash describes the kind of landscape conveyed so powerfully in paintings like We are Making a New World (1918).  In a letter written on Good Friday 1917, he asks Margaret to "imagine a wide landscape flat and scantily wooded and what trees remain blasted and torn, naked and scarred and riddled.  The ground for miles around furrowed into trenches, pitted with yawning holes in which the water lies still and cold or heaped with mounds of earth, tangles of rusty wire, tin plates, stakes, sandbags and all the refuse of war.  In the distance runs a stream where the stringy poplars and alders lean about dejectedly, while farther a slope rises to a scarred bluff the foot of which is scattered with headless trees standing white and withered, hopeless, without any leaves, dead."  Shells pass overhead all day and as the sun sinks "the shapes of the trench stand massy and cold, the mud gleams whitely, the sandbags have a hard, rocky lock, the works of men look like a freak of nature ... Twilight quivers above, shrinking into night, and a perfect crescent moon sails uncannily below pale stars."

The last letter in the selection concludes with regret that his drawings cannot convey this "frightful nightmare of a country more conceived by Dante or Poe than by nature ... The rain drives on, the stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow, the shell holes fill up with green-white water, the roads and tracks are covered in inches of slime, the black dying trees ooze and sweat and the shells never cease.  They alone plunge overhead, tearing away the rotting tree stumps, breaking the plank roads, striking down horses and mules, annihilating, maiming, maddening, they plunge into the grave which is this land; one huge grave, and cast up on it the poor dead.  Is is unspeakable, godless, hopeless.  I am no longer an artists interested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever.  Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and it may burn their lousy souls."

The lanes and fields of Gloucestershire

In talking to others about Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places, I have found that those put off by the book's premise, and the accounts of climbing trees and freezing on mountain tops, have nevertheless enjoyed some of its digressions about writers and naturalists.  A section on Ivor Gurney, for example, in Macfarlane's chapter 'Forest', could stand alone as a fascinating short essay.  It charts Gurney's engagement with landscape from pre-war Gloucestershire, to the 'anti-landscape' of Ypres.  Then, back in England, having been shot, gassed and invalided out of the army, Gurney returned to the countryside, taking long walks, often and night, whilst writing and composing prolifically.  But by 1922 he was behaving increasingly oddly and his 'mental state, always precarious, tilted into unbalance...'

There is a poignant description of the visits Edward Thomas's widow Helen made in the late twenties to see Gurney at the mental asylum in Dartford. By that stage 'his madness was so acute that he was able to communicate only briefly with her, and showed little interest in her presence or her association with Edward.  The next time she travelled to Dartford, however, Helen took with her one of her husband's Ordnance Survey maps of the Gloucestershire landscape through which both Thomas and Gurney had walked.'  They knelt by the bed and traced out the old routes.  As Helen recalled, Gurney "trod, in a way we who are sane could not emulate, the lanes and fields he knew and loved so well ... He had Edward as his companion in this strange perambulaiton ... I became for a while the element which brought Edward back to life for him and the country where the two could wander together."

Naught moves but clouds

Edward Thomas wrote all his poetry over a period of twenty-seven months, from November 1914 to January 1917.  Read in sequence they trace the progress of the seasons, often drawing on his memories of Kent, Hampshire, Somerset, Wales.  Sometimes they describe the landscape of the trenches, and sometimes they mingle past and present.  Here are extracts from different poems that refer to specific months, arranged as a kind of Edward Thomas calender:

February

The rock-like mud unfroze a little and rills / Ran and sparkled down each side of the road / Under the catkins wagging in the hedge

Black rocks with white gulls following the plough

... the sun on the celandines...

March

What did the thrushes know?  Rain, snow, sleet, hail, / had kept them quiet as the primroses.

 ad kept the

After a night of frost, before / The March sun brightened and the South-west blew, / Jackdaws began to shout and float and soar / Already, and one was racing straight and high / Alone, shouting like a black warrior / Challenges and menaces to the wider sky.

April

The April mist, the chill, the calm...

When mist has been forgiven / And the sun has stolen out, / Peered, and resolved to shine at seven / On dabbled lengthening grasses, / Thick primroses and early leaves uneven, / When earth’s breath, warm and humid, far surpasses / The richest oven’s...

May

Thrush, blackbird, all that sing in May...

The sedgewarblers that hung so light / On willow twigs, sang longer than any lark, / Quick, shrill or grating, a song to match the heat / Of the strong sun, nor less the water’s cool / Gushing through narrows, swirling in the pool.

The cherry trees bend over and are shedding / On the old road where all that passed are dead...

June

What I saw / Was Adlestrop – only the name / And willows, willow-herb, and grass, / And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry, /No whit less still and lonely fair / Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

The green roads that end in the forest / Are strewn with white goose feathers this June...

... in the little thickets where a sleeper / For ever might lie lost, the nettle-creeper / And garden warbler sang unceasingly; / While over them shrill shrieked in his fierce glee / The swift with wings and tail as sharp and narrow / As if the bow had flown off with the arrow.

July

Naught moves but clouds, and in the glassy lake / Their doubles and the shadow of my boat.

September

... September hides herself / In bracken and blackberry, harebell and dwarf gorse.

October

The green elm with one great bough of gold / Lets leaves into the grass slip, one by one

November

November has begun / Yet never shone the sun as fair as now / While the sweet last-left damsons from the bough / With spangles of the morning’s storm drop down / Because the starling shakes it, whistling what / Once swallows sang.

... of all the months when earth is greener / Not one has clean skies that are cleaner.   Clean and clear and sweet and cold...

The stranger's bright city

I've been reading the beautifully produced Enitharmon Press anthology, Branch-Lines: Edward Thomas and Contemporary Poetry, in which 56 writers and critics pay tribute to the enduring influence of Thomas's poems. The review in The Guardian notes that 'Old Man' is the Thomas poem that receives most mentions, 'and it's easy to see why, as its insistence on the manifold bewilderments of utterance and reference give it a strikingly contemporary ring.' In the poem Thomas wonders whether his small daughter will remember picking the herb Old Man - a thought made additionally poignant by the death of the poet soon afterwards and the fact that his daughter, Myfanwy, lived on until 2005. Charles Tomlinson's poem 'Old Man, or Lad's Love' recalls meeting Myfanwy Thomas and being given by her a sprig of old man from the bush Thomas wrote about. Tomlinson has grown from this four plants of his own, which stand at the door in the Cotswolds opening up a landscape 'into space and time.'

Branch-Lines is a fascinating and often rather moving book, as many of the poets look back to their own formative years and memories. The contributions often have no direct connection to nature or landscape, but I'll highlight here one that does. U. A. Fanthorpe writes that Thomas comes naturally 'to writers in English, like grass growing' and talks about Thomas's love of place names, as in these lines:

If I should ever by chance grow rich
I'll buy Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch,
Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater,
And let them all to my elder daughter.

Fanthorpe contributes her own poem 'Strong Language in South Gloucestershire' (2000) in which the old names (Sodbury, Nympsfield, Ozleworth, Doughton, Slimbridge, Gloucester) are seen to preserve landscapes from the distant past: 'Soppa's tinpot two acres, / Something holy, a good place for blackbirds, / Dock farm, bridge over mud, / The stranger's bright city.'

Turf rich and fragrant with thyme and burnet

In The Literary Pilgrim in England, first published in 1917, Edward Thomas described the 'homes and haunts' of British writers. He covered a good range of poets and topographical writers: London and the Home Counties (Blake, Lamb, Keats), The Thames (Shelley, William Morris), The Downs and South Coast (Aubrey, Gilbert White, Cobbett, Jefferies, Hardy, Belloc), the West Country (Herrick, Coleridge, W.H. Hudson), The East Coast and Midlands (Cowper, Crabbe, Clare, Tennyson), the North (Wordsworth, Emily Bronte) and Scotland (Burns, Scott). Mostly obvious names, but not all. John Aubrey, for example, is perhaps not as immediately synonymous with a particular landscape as some of these writers, although his magnum opus was a book on Wiltshire antiquities.

Thomas begins his essay on Aubrey by praising the way he was able to isolate telling details: 'who but Aubrey would have noticed and entered in a book the spring after the fire of London "all the ruins were overgrown with an herb or two, but especially with a yellow flower, Ericolevis Neapolitana."' Aubrey seems to have been the first to notice the stones at Avebury which he first encountered in 1648 and later showed to Charles II. Thomas relates that the grey wethers, the 'grey stones scattered sheep like over the slopes' of the Marlborough Downs, were then much more numerous and looked to Aubrey like the scene "where the giants fought with huge stones against the gods, as is described by Hesiod in his Theogonia". On another visit to this country, Aubrey wrote, "our sport was very good and in a romantic country, for the prospects are noble and vast, the downs stocked with numerous flocks of sheep, the turf rich and fragrant with thyme and burnet... nor are the nut-brown shepherdesses without their graces." Sadly Aubrey never quite finished his book on antiquities but hoped that some "public-spirited young Wiltshire man" would polish and complete his "natural remarques."

Although brief lives and landscapes such as the account of John Aubrey make for an enjoyable read, they proved a bore to write. In a December 1913 letter Edward Thomas complained: 'Homes & Haunts I have got to Detest, & I believe I have been doing it intolerably ll through indifference & haste to be done with it.' He worked on it through the spring and summer of 1914, finally sending it off to the publishers at the beginning of August. By this time war was imminent and Thomas wondered whether the book would sell. He wrote, 'I am a little at a loose end after sending off Homes and Haunts yesterday. Who will want the thing now? I may as well write poetry.'

Gone – the narrow copse

Earth Shattering: Eco Poems is the latest anthology from Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley, following recent successes like Staying Alive, Being Alive, and Pleased to See Me: 69 Very Sexy Poems. It is full of interest and I’m sure I’ll draw from it in future postings, but here I’m going to concentrate on the introduction where Astley sets his collection in context, discussing recent anthologies and critical writing on ecopoetics. Here are some of the chief sources for Earth Shattering:

• J. Scott Bryson’s Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (2002) defines ecopoetry as a subset of nature poetry with three main characteristics. These are (1) an awareness of interdependence and connectiveness (as in Denise Levertov’s poem ‘Web’); (2) humility in the face of nature; (3) scepticism of hyper-rationality which is usually linked to concern about ecological catastrophe.

• I have talked here before about Terry Gifford’s definition of post-pastoral, which has similar attributes to Bryson’s ecopoetry. Astley describes Gifford’s 1995 study Green Voices: Understanding contemporary nature poetry as the first comprehensive British study of ecopoetry (the essays in Bryson focus on US poets).

• I've also referred to John Elder’s Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature (1985) before here, e.g. in relation to William Everson, and Astley notes its importance as a relatively early study in the field.

• Then of course there is Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth (1990), which Astley praises for presenting ‘ecology and poetry together as one body of thought and feeling.’ I’ve only used this book once here so far, but it's worth saying in passing that The Song of the Earth is one of the best books on landscape in the arts I have read. Jonathan Bate writes so well that you almost feel disappointed when you turn from himto consult the actual books he discusses: a case in point would be William Henry Hudson’s Green Mansions, which was less interesting to me as a novel than the extracts Bate used in The Song of the Earth…

• Neil Astley also acknowledges some of the recent ‘ecopoetry anthologies’: Peter Abbs’ Earth Songs: A Resurgence anthology of contemporary eco-poetry (2002), John Burnside and Maurice Riordan’s Wild Reckoning (2004) and Alice Oswald’s The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet (2005).

The majority of the poetry in Earth Shattering is modern, even though the anthology starts with some of David Hinton’s ‘wilderness poets of ancient China’. But I’ll end this posting with an 'ecopoem' that will be out of copyright, and which provides a link to the previous posting: ‘First Known When Lost’ by Edward Thomas:

I never had noticed it until
‘Twas gone, - the narrow copse
Where now the woodman lops
The last of the willows with his bill

It was not more than a hedge overgrown.
One meadow's breadth away
I passed it day by day.
Now the soil is bare as bone,

And black betwixt two meadows green,
Though fresh-cut faggot ends
Of hazel made some amends
With a gleam as if flowers they had been.

Strange it could have hidden so near!
And now I see as I look
That the small winding brook,
A tributary's tributary, rises there.

Roads shining like river up hill after rain

The final entry in the war diary of landscape poet Edward Thomas is dated 8 April 1917 – he was killed the next day at 7.36 am by a shell blast:

'8. A bright warm Easter day but Achicourt shelled at 12.39 and then at 2.15 so that we all retired to the cellar. I had to go over to battery at 3 for a practice barrage, skirting the danger zone, but we were twice interrupted. A 5.9 fell 2 yards from me as I stood by the f/c post. One burst down the back of the office and piece of dust scratched my neck. No firing from 2-4. Rubin left for a course.'

The Faber ‘Collected Poems’ also reproduces these brief notes Thomas made on the last pages of the diary:

'The light of the new moon and every star

And no more singing for the bird...

I never understood quite what was meant by God

The morning chill and clear hurts my skin while it delights my mind Neuville in early morning with its flat straight crest with trees and houses – the beauty of this silent empty scene of no inhabitants and hid troops, but don’t know why I could have cried and didn’t'

Loose inside the diary there was a photograph and a slip of paper with several addresses and these words:

'Where any turn may lead to Heaven

Or any corner may hide Hell

Roads shining like river up hill after rain.'