by Fleur Adcock
the traffic’s as abominable as ever,
and there across the Thames is County Hall,
that uninspired stone body, floodlit.
It makes me laugh. In fact, it makes me sing.
To Marilyn from London
You did London early, at nineteen:
the basement room, the geriatric nursing,
cinema queues, modish fall-apart dresses,
and marriage at Stoke Newington Registry Office,
Spring 1955, on the rebound.
Marrying was what we did in those days.
And soon enough you were back in Wellington
with your eye-shadow and your Edith Piaf records
buying kitchen furniture on hire-purchase
and writing novels when the babies were asleep.
Somehow you’re still there, I’m here; and now
Sarah arrives: baby-faced like you then,
second of your four blonde Christmas-tree fairies,
nineteen; competent; with her one suitcase
and her two passports. It begins again.
BELOW LOUGHRIGG
(1979)
Below Loughrigg
The power speaks only out of sleep and blackness
no use looking for the sun
what is not present cannot be illumined
Katherine’s lungs, remember, eaten by disease
but Mary’s fingers too
devoured and she goes on writing
The water speaks from the rocks, the cavern speaks,
where water halloos through it
this happens also in darkness
A steep bit here, up from the valley
to the terraces, the path eroded by water
Now listen for the voice
These things wane with the vital forces
he said, little having waned in him
except faith, and anger had replaced it
One force can be as good as another
we may not think so; but channelled
in ways it has eaten out; issuing
into neither a pool nor the sea
but a shapely lake afloat with wooded islands
a real water and multiplied on maps
which can be read in the sunlight; for the sun
will not be stopped from visiting
and the lake exists and the wind sings over it.
Three Rainbows in One Morning
It is not only the eye that is astonished.
Predictable enough in rainbow weather,
the drenched air saturated with colours,
that over each valley should hang an arc
and over this long lake the longest.
Knowing how it happens is no defence.
They stop the car and are delighted.
But some centre of gravity is upset,
some internal gauge or indicator
fed once again with the routine question
‘This place, now: would it be possible
to live here?’ buzzes, rolls
and registers ‘Yes. Yes; perhaps.’
Binoculars
‘What are you looking at?’ ‘Looking.’
High screed sides; possibly a raven,
he thought. Bracken a fuzz of rust
on the iron slopes of the fell
(off the edge of their map, nameless)
and the sky clean after rain.
At last he put the binoculars down,
drove on further to the north.
It was a good day in the end:
the cold lake lapping against pines,
and the square-built northern town idle
in sunlight. It seemed they had crossed borders.
Driving south became a return
to nests of trees in ornamental colours.
Leaving, he left her the binoculars
to watch her wrens and robins until spring.
Paths
I am the dotted lines on the map:
footpaths exist only when they are walked on.
I am gravel tracks through woodland; I am
field paths, the muddy ledge by the stream,
the stepping-stones. I am the grassy lane
open between waist-high bracken where sheep
fidget. I am the track to the top
skirting and scaling rocks. I am the cairn.
Here on the brow of the world I stop,
set my stone face to the wind, and turn
to each wide quarter. I am that I am.
Mid-point
Finding I’ve walked halfway around Loughrigg
I wonder: do I still want to go on?
Normally, yes. But now, hardly recovered
from ’flu, and feeling slightly faint in the sun,
dazzled by early spring, I hesitate.
How far is it around this sprawling fell?
I’ve come perhaps three miles. Will it be four,
or less, the Grasmere way? It’s hard to tell.
The ups and downs undo one’s feel for distance;
the soaring views distract from what’s at hand.
But here’s the tarn, spangled with quick refractions
of sunlight, to remind me where I stand.
There’s no way on or back except by walking
and whichever route I choose involves a climb.
On, then, no question: if I find myself
lacking in energy, at least I’ve time.
It will be cooler when I’m facing north –
frost often lingers there – and I’ll take heart
from gazing down again on Rydal Water.
The point of no return was at the start.
The Spirit of the Place
Mist like evaporating stone
smudges the bracken. Not much further now.
Below on the other side of the village
Windermere tilts its pewter face
over towards me as I move downhill.
I’ve walked my boots clean in gravelly streams;
picking twigs of glittering holly
to take home I’ve lacerated my fingers
(it serves me right: holly belongs on trees).
Now as the early dusk descends behind me
dogs in the kennels above Nook Lane
are barking, growling, hysterical at something;
and from the housing estate below
a deep mad voice bellows ‘Wordsworth! Wordsworth!’
The Vale of Grasmere
These coloured slopes ought to inspire,
as much as anything, discretion:
think of the egotisms laid bare,
the shy campaigns of self-projection
tricked out as visits to Dove Cottage
tellingly rendered. Every year
some poet comes on pilgrimage
along these valleys. Read his verses:
each bud of delicate perception
sprouts from a blossoming neurosis
too well watered by Grasmere –
in which he sees his own reflection.
He sits beside a tarn or ghyll
sensitively eating chocolate
and eyes Helm Crag or Rydal Fell
plotting some novel way to use it.
Most of the rocks are wreathed by now
with faded rags of fluttering soul.
But the body finds another function
for crags and fells, as Wordsworth knew
himself: they offer hands and feet
their own creative work to do.
‘I climb because I can’t write,’
one honest man said. Better so.
Letter to Alistair Campbell
Those thorn trees in your poems, Alistair,
we have them here. Also the white cauldron,
the basin of your waterfall. I stare
at Stock Ghyll Force and can’t escape your words.
You’d love this place: it’s your Central Otago
in English dress – the bony land’s the same;
and if the Cromwell Gorge is doomed to go
under a lake, submerging its brave orchards
for cheap electric power, this is where
you’d find a subtly altered image of it,
its cousin in another hemisphere:
the rivers gentler, hills more widely splayed
but craggy enough. Well. Some year you’ll manage
to travel north, as I two years ago
went south. Meanwhile our sons are of an age
to do it for us: Andrew’s been with you
in Wellington. Now I’m about to welcome
our firstborn Gregory to England. Soon,
if Andrew will surrender him, he’ll come
from grimy fetid London – still my base,
I grant you, still my centre, but with air
that chokes me now each time I enter it –
to this pure valley where no haze but weather
obscures the peaks from time to time, clean rain
or tender mist (forgive my lyrical
effusiveness: Wordsworthian locutions
are carried on the winds in what I call
my this year’s home. You’ve had such fits yourself.)
So: Gregory will come to Ambleside
and see the lakes, the Rothay, all these waters.
Two years ago he sat with me beside
the Clutha, on those rocks where you and I
did our first timid courting. Symmetry
pleases me; correspondences and chimes
are not just ornament. And if I try
too hard to emphasise the visual echoes
between a place of mine and one of yours
it’s not only for art’s sake but for friendship:
five years of marriage, twenty of divorce
are our foundation. It occurred to me
in August, round about the twenty-third,
that we’d deprived ourselves of cake, champagne,
a silver tea-service, the family gathered –
I almost felt I ought to send a card.
Well, that can wait: it won’t be long before
you have my blessings on your twentieth year
with Meg; but let this, in the meantime, be for
our older link through places and your poems.
Declensions
Snow on the tops: half the day I’ve sat at the window
staring at fells made suddenly remote
by whiteness that disguises them as high mountains
reared behind the bracken-covered slopes
of others whose colour yesterday was theirs.
In the middle distance, half-stripped trees
have shed pink stains on the grass beneath them.
That other pinkness over Windermere
is the setting sun through cloud. And in the foreground
birds act out their various natures
around the food I’ve set on the terrace wall:
the plump chaffinch eats on steadily
even in a hail-shower; tits return when it’s over
to swing on their bacon-rind; a dunnock hops
picking stray seeds; and the territorial robin,
brisk, beady-eyed, sees them all off.
I am not at all sure that this is the real world
but I am looking at it very closely.
Is landscape serious? Are birds? But they are fading
in dusk, in the crawling darkness. Enough.
Knowing no way to record what is famous
precisely for being unrecordable,
I draw the curtains and settle to my book:
Dr William Smith’s First Greek Course,
Exercise Fourteen: third declension nouns.
My letters, awkward from years of non-use,
sprinkle over the page like birds’ footprints,
quaint thorny symbols, pecked with accents:
as I turn the antique model sentences:
The vines are praised by the husbandmen.
The citizens delight in strife and faction.
The harbour has a difficult entrance.
Weathering
Literally thin-skinned, I suppose, my face
catches the wind off the snow-line and flushes
with a flush that will never wholly settle. Well:
that was a metropolitan vanity,
wanting to look young for ever, to pass.
I was never a Pre-Raphaelite beauty,
nor anything but pretty enough to satisfy
men who need to be seen with passable women.
But now that I am in love with a place
which doesn’t care how I look, or if I’m happy,
happy is how I look, and that’s all.
My hair will turn grey in any case,
my nails chip and flake, my waist thicken,
and the years work all their usual changes.
If my face is to be weather-beaten as well
that’s little enough lost, a fair bargain
for a year among lakes and fells, when simply
to look out of my window at the high pass
makes me indifferent to mirrors and to what
my soul may wear over its new complexion.
Going out from Ambleside
1
He is lying on his back watching a kestrel,
his head on the turf, hands under his neck,
warm air washing over his face,
and the sky clear blue where the kestrel hovers.
A person comes with a thermometer.
He watches a ceiling for three minutes.
The person leaves. He watches the kestrel again
his head pressed back among the harebells.
2
Today he will go over to Langdale.
He springs lightly in his seven-league boots
around the side of Loughrigg
bouncing from rock to rock in the water-courses
evading slithery clumps of weed, skipping
like a sheep among the rushes
coursing along the curved path upward
through bracken, over turf to a knoll
and across it, around and on again
higher and higher, glowing with exaltation
up to where it all opens out.
That was easy. And it was just the beginning.
3
They bring him tea or soup.
He does not notice it. He is busy
identifying fungi in Skelghyll Wood,
comparing them with the pictures in his mind:
Purple Blewit, Yellow Prickle Fungus,
Puffball, Russula, two kinds of Boletus –
the right weather for them.
And what are these little pearly knobs
pressing up among the leaf-mould?
He treads carefully over damp grass,
patches of brilliant moss, pine-needles,
hoping for a Fly Agaric.
Scarlet catches his eye. But it was only
reddening leaves on a bramble.
And here’s bracken, fully brown,
and acorns. It must be October.
4
What is this high wind coming,
leaves leaping from the trees to bite his face?
A storm. He should have noticed the signs.
But it doesn’t matter. Ah, turn into it,
let the rain bite on the warm skin too.
5
Cold. Suddenly cold. Or hot.
A pain under his breastbone;
and his feet are bare. This is curious.
Someone comes with an injection.
6
They have brought Kurt Schwitters to see him,
a clumsy-looking man in a beret
asking for bits of stuff to make a collage.
Here, take my stamp-collection
and the letters my children wrote from school
and this photograph of my wife. She’s dead now.
You are dead too, Kurt Schwitters.
7
This is a day for sailing, perhaps,
coming down from the fells to lake-level;
or for something gentler: for idling
with a fishing-line and listening to water;
or just for lying in a boat
on a summer evening in the lee of a shore
letting the wind steer, leaving the hull
to its own course, the waves to lap it along.
8
But where now suddenly? Dawn light,
peaks around him, shadowy and familiar,
tufts of mist over a tarn below.
Somehow he is higher than he intended;
and careless, giddy, running to the edge
and over it, straight down on splintery scree
leaning back on his boots, a ski-run
scattering chips of slate, a skid with no stopping
down through the brief mist and into the tarn.
9
Tomorrow perhaps he will think about Helvellyn…
SELECTED POEMS
(1983)
In the Unicorn, Ambleside
I want to have ice-skates and a hoop
and to have lived all my life in the same house
above Stock; and to skate on Lily Tarn
every winter, because it always freezes –
or always did freeze when you were a girl.
I want to believe your tales about Wordsworth –
‘Listen to what the locals say,’ you tell me:
‘He drank in every pub from here to Ullswater,
and had half the girls. We all know that.’
I want not to know better, out of books.