Poems 1960-2000

by Fleur Adcock

one in defence, one in aggression,

  another to balance out the score.

  *

  Crows flap

  fretting for blood.

  The field of battle

  is a ravening flood.

  There is no safety

  there is no shelter

  the fell tide

  will suck him under.

  V

  He did not fall at Otterburn;

  he did not fall at Humbledowne;

  he fell on the field at Shrewsbury,

  a rebel against the crown.

  He might have been a king himself;

  he put one king upon the throne,

  then turned against him, and sought to make

  a king of my brother’s son.

  Families undo families;

  kings go up and kings go down.

  My man fell; but they propped him up

  dead in Shrewsbury Town.

  They tied his corpse in the marketplace,

  jammed for their jeers between two stones;

  then hacked him apart: a heavy price

  he paid for juggling with thrones.

  Four fair cities received his limbs,

  far apart as the four winds are,

  and his head stared north from the walls of York

  fixed on Micklegate Bar.

  *

  Now let forgetfulness wash over

  his bones and the land’s bones,

  the long snaky spine of the wall,

  earthworks and standing stones,

  rock and castle and tower and all.

  *

  There is no safety

  there is no shelter

  the fell flood

  has drawn him under.

  Notes

  Henry Percy, known as Hotspur, eldest son of the first Earl of Northumberland, was born on 20 May 1364. The Percies were of Norman descent; they controlled the north of England with something like kingly power for several centuries, first as feudal lords and then as Barons of Alnwick and later Earls of Northumberland. They have been described as ‘the hereditary guardians of the north and the scourge of Scotland’.

  Accounts of Hotspur’s life appear in the Dictionary of National Biography and the Complete Peerage and, in a fictionalised form, in Shakespeare’s Richard II and Henry IV, Part I. He was a valiant and precocious warrior, and soon became a favourite with the people. He held such positions as were consistent with his rank and descent – Governor of Berwick and Warden of the Marches – but his chief pleasures were warfare (against the Scots or the French or anyone else) and, as an incidental sideline to this, political intrigue. It proved his undoing. He was killed at the Battle of Shrewsbury on 12 July 1403 in an unsuccessful rebellion against Henry IV, whom he had conspired to put on the throne.

  His character was not entirely admirable, to modern eyes: he had a tendency to change sides and to choose his allies according to their usefulness, disregarding former loyalties; and he was as brutal as any of his opponents when he chose: his fate of being quartered after his death was one which he had himself ordered to be performed on a defeated enemy. However, his personal courage and his even then slightly anachronistic devotion to the ideals of chivalry made him a natural focus for the legends which have clung to his name.

  The ballad is sung in the person of his wife Elizabeth Mortimer (not Kate, as Shakespeare calls her). She was born at Usk on 12 February 1371 and was the daughter of the Earl of March and the granddaughter, through her mother, of Edward III. She married Hotspur in 1379 and they had a daughter (whose date of birth is not recorded) and a son, born in 1393 and named after his father.

  I

  A halting spate: Hotspur was said to have some kind of impediment in his speech, which at times delayed his fiery utterances.

  High is his prowess: This section quotes the traditional elements of the ideal of chivalry.

  II

  Castle Leazes: The pasture-lands north of the city wall.

  ‘Sir, I shall bear this token off…’: The two speeches are taken from the version quoted by Froissart.

  IV

  Otterburn: The battle was probably fought on the night of 19 August 1388, by moonlight.

  Silver crescent: This was the cap-badge of the Percies; their coat of arms bore a blue lion rampant.

  His brother: Ralph Percy.

  V

  Humbledowne (or Humbleton, or Homildon Hill): The battle fought here on 13 September 1402 was Hotspur’s revenge for Otterburn. The English won, capturing the 3rd Earl of Douglas (Archibald, successor to James, the 2nd Earl, who fell at Otterburn) and many other Scots.

  He might have been a king himself : Not by legal succession; but if Elizabeth’s nephew, the young Earl of March, had been set on the throne, Hotspur would very probably have been regent. In any case his popularity was such that the people could well have seen him as a possible king.

  Four fair cities: After his body had been displayed in the marketplace at Shrewsbury it was buried; but a rumour arose that he was still alive, and his corpse was therefore disinterred and dismembered, and the four limbs sent to London, Bristol, Chester and Newcastle to be shown as evidence of his death.

  THE INCIDENT BOOK

  (1986)

  Uniunea Scriitorilor

  Caterpillars are falling on the Writers’ Union.

  The writers are indifferent to the caterpillars.

  They sit over their wine at the metal tables

  wearing animated expressions and eating fried eggs

  with pickled gherkins, or (the dish of the day),

  extremely small sausages: two each.

  Meanwhile here and there an inch of grey bristles,

  a miniature bottle-brush, twitches along a sleeve

  or clings to a shoulder. The stone-paved courtyard

  is dappled with desperate clumps of whiskers,

  launched from the sunlit mulberry trees

  to take their chance among literary furniture.

  A poet ignores a fluffy intruder

  in his bread-basket (the bread’s all finished)

  but flicks another from the velvet hat

  (which surely she must have designed herself –

  such elegance never appears in the shop-windows)

  of his pretty companion, who looks like an actress.

  The writers are talking more and more rapidly.

  Not all are writers. One is a painter;

  many are translators. Even those who are not

  are adaptable and resourceful linguists.

  ‘Pardon!’ says one to the foreign visitor.

  ‘Permit me! You have a worm on your back.’

  Leaving the Tate

  Coming out with your clutch of postcards

  in a Tate Gallery bag and another clutch

  of images packed into your head you pause

  on the steps to look across the river

  and there’s a new one: light bright buildings,

  a streak of brown water, and such a sky

  you wonder who painted it – Constable? No:

  too brilliant. Crome? No: too ecstatic –

  a madly pure Pre-Raphaelite sky,

  perhaps, sheer blue apart from the white plumes

  rushing up it (today, that is,

  April. Another day would be different

  but it wouldn’t matter. All skies work.)

  Cut to the lower right for a detail:

  seagulls pecking on mud, below

  two office blocks and a Georgian terrace.

  Now swing to the left, and take in plane trees

  bobbled with seeds, and that brick building,

  and a red bus…Cut it off just there,

  by the lamp-post. Leave the scaffolding in.

  That’s your next one. Curious how

  these outdoor pictures didn’t exist

  before you’d looked at the indoor pictures,

  the ones on the walls. But here they are now,

  marching out
of their panorama

  and queuing up for the viewfinder

  your eye’s become. You can isolate them

  by holding your optic muscles still.

  You can zoom in on figure studies

  (that boy with the rucksack), or still lives,

  abstracts, townscapes. No one made them.

  The light painted them. You’re in charge

  of the hanging committee. Put what space

  you like around the ones you fix on,

  and gloat. Art multiplies itself.

  Art’s whatever you choose to frame.

  The Bedroom Window

  A small dazzle of stained glass which

  I did not choose but might have, hanging

  in front of the branches of a pine tree

  which I do not own but covet; beyond them

  a view of crinkly hills which I do not

  etc and did not etc but might have

  in another life, or the same life earlier.

  The cat is fed, the plants are watered,

  the milkman will call; the pine tree smells like

  childhood. I am pretending to live here.

  Out beyond the coloured glass and

  the window-glass and the gully tall with

  pine trees I dive back to wherever

  I got my appetite for hills from.

  The Chiffonier

  You’re glad I like the chiffonier. But I

  feel suddenly uneasy, scenting why

  you’re pleased I like this pretty thing you’ve bought,

  the twin of one that stood beside your cot

  when you were small: you’ve marked it down for me;

  it’s not too heavy to be sent by sea

  when the time comes, and it’s got space inside

  to pack some other things you’ve set aside,

  things that are small enough to go by water

  twelve thousand miles to me, your English daughter.

  I know your habits – writing all our names

  in books and on the backs of picture-frames,

  allotting antique glass and porcelain dishes

  to granddaughters according to their wishes,

  promising me the tinted photograph

  of my great-grandmother. We used to laugh,

  seeing how each occasional acquisition

  was less for you than for later disposition:

  ‘You know how Marilyn likes blue and white

  china? I’ve seen some plates I thought I might

  indulge in.’ Bless you, Mother! But we’re not

  quite so inclined to laugh now that you’ve got

  something that’s new to you but not a part

  of your estate: that weakness in your heart.

  It makes my distance from you, when I go

  back home next week, suddenly swell and grow

  from thirty hours’ flying to a vast

  galactic space between present and past.

  How many more times can I hope to come

  to Wellington and find you still at home?

  We’ve talked about it, as one has to, trying

  to see the lighter aspects of your dying:

  ‘You’ve got another twenty years or more,’

  I said, ‘but when you think you’re at death’s door

  just let me know. I’ll come and hang about

  for however long it takes to see you out.’

  ‘I don’t think it’ll be like that,’ you said:

  ‘I’ll pop off suddenly one night in bed.’

  How secretive! How satisfying! You’ll

  sneak off, a kid running away from school –

  well, that at least’s the only way I find

  I can bring myself to see it in my mind.

  But now I see you in your Indian skirt

  and casual cornflower-blue linen shirt

  in the garden, under your feijoa tree,

  looking about as old or young as me.

  Dear little Mother! Naturally I’m glad

  you found a piece of furniture that had

  happy associations with your youth;

  and yes, I do admire it – that’s the truth:

  its polished wood and touch of Art Nouveau

  appeal to me. But surely you must know

  I value this or any other treasure

  of yours chiefly because it gives you pleasure.

  I have to write this now, while you’re still here:

  I want my mother, not her chiffonier.

  Tadpoles

  (for Oliver)

  Their little black thread legs, their threads of arms,

  their mini-miniature shoulders, elbows, knees –

  this piquant angularity, delicious

  after that rippling smoothness, after nothing

  but a flow of curves and roundnesses in water;

  and their little hands, the size of their hands, the fingers

  like hair-stubble, and their clumps-of-eyelashes feet…

  Taddies, accept me as your grandmother,

  a hugely gloating grand-maternal frog,

  almost as entranced by other people’s

  tadpoles as I once was by my own,

  that year when Oliver was still a tadpole

  in Elizabeth’s womb, and I a grandmother

  only prospectively, and at long distance.

  All this glory from globes of slithery glup!

  Well, slithery glup was all right, with its cloudy

  compacted spheres, its polka dots of blackness.

  Then dots evolved into commas; the commas hatched.

  When they were nothing but animated match-heads

  with tails, a flickering flock of magnified

  spermatazoa, they were already my darlings.

  And Oliver lay lodged in his dreamy sphere,

  a pink tadpole, a promise of limbs and language,

  while my avatars of infancy grew up

  into ribbon-tailed blackcurrants, fluttery-smooth,

  and then into soaked brown raisins, a little venous,

  with touches of transparency at the sides

  where limbs minutely hinted at themselves.

  It is the transformation that enchants.

  As a mother reads her child’s form in the womb,

  imaging eyes and fingers, radar-sensing

  a thumb in a blind mouth, so tadpole-watchers

  can stare at the cunning shapes beneath the skin

  and await the tiny, magnificent effloration.

  It is a lesson for a grandmother.

  My tadpoles grew to frogs in their generation;

  they may have been the grandparents of these

  about-to-be frogs. And Oliver’s a boy,

  hopping and bouncing in his bright green tracksuit,

  my true darling; but too far away now

  for me to call him across the world and say

  ‘Oliver, look at what’s happening to the tadpoles!’

  For Heidi with Blue Hair

  When you dyed your hair blue

  (or, at least, ultramarine

  for the clipped sides, with a crest

  of jet-black spikes on top)

  you were sent home from school

  because, as the headmistress put it,

  although dyed hair was not

  specifically forbidden, yours

  was, apart from anything else,

  not done in the school colours.

  Tears in the kitchen, telephone calls

  to school from your freedom-loving father:

  ‘She’s not a punk in her behaviour;

  it’s just a style.’ (You wiped your eyes,

  also not in a school colour.)

  ‘She discussed it with me first –

  we checked the rules.’ ‘And anyway, Dad,

  it cost twenty-five dollars.

  Tell them it won’t wash out –

  not even if I wanted to try.’

  It would have been unfair to me
ntion

  your mother’s death, but that

  shimmered behind the arguments.

  The school had nothing else against you;

  the teachers twittered and gave in.

  Next day your black friend had hers done

  in grey, white and flaxen yellow –

  the school colours precisely:

  an act of solidarity, a witty

  tease. The battle was already won.

  The Keepsake

  (in memory of Pete Laver)

  ‘To Fleur from Pete, on loan perpetual.’

  It’s written on the flyleaf of the book

  I wouldn’t let you give away outright:

  ‘Just make it permanent loan,’ I said – a joke

  between librarians, professional

  jargon. It seemed quite witty, on a night

  when most things passed for wit. We were all hoarse

  by then, from laughing at the bits you’d read

  aloud – the heaving bosoms, blushing sighs,

  demoniac lips. ‘Listen to this!’ you said:

  ‘ “Thus rendered bold by frequent intercourse

  I dared to take her hand.” ’ We wiped our eyes.

  ‘“Colonel, what mean these stains upon your dress?” ’

  We howled. And then there was Lord Ravenstone

  faced with Augusta’s dutiful rejection

  in anguished prose; or, for a change of tone,

  a touch of Gothic: Madame la Comtesse

  ’s walled-up lover. An inspired collection:

  The Keepsake, 1835; the standard

  drawing-room annual, useful as a means

  for luring ladies into chaste flirtation