Finding Adlestrop

Yes.  I remember Adlestrop —

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly.  It was late June.

In fact it was the twenty-fourth of June: today is the anniversary of the ‘afternoon of heat’ that inspired this much-loved poem.  On this day in 1914 Edward Thomas was aboard the London to Hereford express, climbing up over the north Cotswolds, on his way to the poets’ colony at Dymock in Gloucestershire.  It was, as he recorded in his journal —

[…] a glorious day from 4:20 am and at 10 tiers above tiers of white cloud with dirtied grey bars above the sea of slate and dull brick by Battersea Park — then at Oxford tiers of pure white with loose large masses above and gaps of dark clear blue above haymaking and elms.

Then we stopped at Adlestrop, through the willows could be heard a chain of blackbirds songs at 12:45 and one thrush and no man seen, only a hiss of engine letting off steam.

Stopping outside Campden by banks of long grass willowherb and meadowsweet, extraordinary silence between the two periods of travel — looking out on grey dry stones between metals and the shining metals and over it all the elms willows and long grass — one man clears his throat — greater than rustic silence.  No house in view.  Stop only for a minute till signal is up. 

Another stop like this outside Colwell [Colwall, just west of the Malverns?] on 27th with thrush singing on hillside above on road.

I hope I do Edward Thomas no disservice in observing that it is as much because of circumstance as the poem’s beauty in itself that this poem is so fondly and firmly remembered.  Within three months of that afternoon Britain was at war; three years later Thomas was dead, killed by a shell at Arras.  In March 1963 they came for the station as well: if you turn in your copy of Richard Beeching’s ‘The Reshaping of British Railways’ part 1, section 3, to page 109, the list for England of ‘Passenger Stations and Halts to be Closed’ — a list which reads, Ian Hislop has observed, ‘like the names on a war memorial’ — there it is, the fifth item from the top, ‘Adlestrop’, in cold dispassionate print between Addingham and Ainsdale: so callously tin-eared, so ruthlessly bureaucratic and ignorant, so bone-headedly inevitable, that there is something actually poetic and tragic about its presence on this list.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. 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.

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Thomas recorded the event because he knew it was fleeting, one of those in-between moments that we so seldom remember to remember — but did he realise how fleeting how much of it was?  For it is not only the moment that is now lost, but the country, the world in which it was possible.  Not only ‘that minute’ but most of what was in it and around it: the locomotive, the station, the silence aboard stationary carriages; no doubt most of the birdsong too.  The Dymock colony, the whole reason for the journey — the whole set of circumstances upon which it was contingent.  The railway survives — Brunel’s ‘Cotswold line’ from Oxford to Worcester is still one of Britain’s loveliest —  but of the station, other than the stationmaster’s house, nothing is left but the sign, mounted on a bus stop in the village  — only the name.  

The poem itself seems in retrospect as fragile and precious as the moment it is describing: written just in time, in the last years when such a poem could be made, by Thomas or anyone else.  This one vignette of a single signal-check has been pressed and hardened by the tremendous historical forces around it into a tiny treasured gem, standing not only for itself, but for all those other unwonted moments of ‘extraordinary silence’ that were possible, and about which poems could have been written, in that old world before the war.  Almost by accident, then, we have this snapshot from a time, perhaps the last time, when Deep England could still make a riposte to the modern world, could conspire to bring a modern express train to a grinding halt and ambush its passengers with her shocking stillness.  Thomas’s sketch — which even in finished form retains the jotted-down freshness of his original journal entry — is now as strangely dizzying as one of those old autochrome photographs, so real we can scarcely believe it.

The site of Adlestrop station is between Kingham and Moreton-in-Marsh stations on the climb to Chipping Campden summit; the precise coordinates are 51.9360°N 1.6591°W, immediately north-west of the overbridge carrying the road from Adlestrop to Oddington.  On this cab-ride video of the journey from London Paddington to Hereford, the site can be seen just after the bridge at 1h 16m seconds.  (The former stationmaster’s house can just be glimpsed on the left).

Thomas was absolutely correct, by the way, to speak of ‘Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire’ — the county boundary crosses the railway less than a mile from the station in the up direction. (Its rough position is indicated by a caption on the cab-ride video at 1h 14m 40s; the line it takes is rather convoluted but it makes its final crossing of the railway at the end of the wall of tall trees on the right).  Thomas’s last line was as accurate as it was evocative.

What does it mean, I wonder, that at the poem’s centenary in 2014, a special train was organised to recreate the ‘unwonted stop’, slowing down at the old station so that the lines could be read over the loudspeaker?  Here is a video taken from aboard the train —

— and here is another from the overbridge itself, where the poem was also read as the train rounded the curve.

I cannot help feeling that something deep and beautiful is happening here.  These people have come to a particular place at a particular time — in other words, come on pilgrimage — for the sake of a much-loved, long-remembered poem.  Poetry often seems to be at its strongest when it works through the memory, and this poem, in touching not only our minds and hearts but the English landscape and time itself, has become a kind of memorial — one not of marble or granite, but made up of all four of those elements: minds, hearts, landscape, time.  Thus, just as the poem has come to stand for a whole vanished world, so this remembrance of the poem was a remembrance of that world.  To remember Adlestrop is to remember England.  And, even though it has been blotted out of the landscape and is no more than a memory, Adlestrop station still persists; it still somehow belongs to the English landscape, and the poem keeps it there. 

So for that minute a lost world lived again, proven still to abide in many minds and hearts; and poetry sustained it, poetry summoned it into sight.  Poetry is deeper than we know; it is as deep as England, as history, as life itself.

Notes on the ‘Lent Rondel’

Long-suffering readers may have noticed the blog tradition of reposting every Ash Wednesday a short poem I wrote a few years ago, the ‘Lent Rondel’.  This gives me the chance not only to inflate my blog statistics by regurgitating old material, but also once again to fail to resist the temptation to fiddle around with the poem a little bit more.  One kind and especially long-suffering reader, my friend Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh, poet and author of the Irish Papist blog, suggested that I explain the thinking (which he presumed there had been; I told you he was kind) behind the original composition of the poem and these subsequent yearly tinkerings.

Well, here goes.  I think most poets would agree that a poem is not something one sets out to write, as one sets out to write a letter or a diary entry.  A poet does not get up in the morning and say, ‘Today I shall write an Ode to Spring’ and have it all down by 5 p.m..  It is all usually much deeper, stronger and more mysterious than that.  A poem begins, as far as I can tell, with a tiny moment of germination: a spark of realisation or conception, a recognition that a poem ought to exist — or even that it already exists, and that the task at hand to work out its exact form — or ‘find out’, as the ‘famous men’ do in that wonderful passage of Ecclesiasticus.

But a poem seldom arrives in a single brilliant flash of inspiration, leaping whole and sound into the mind and onto the page.  I think a lot of people these days have forgotten this — especially people who think they aren’t interested in poetry.  A poem is made by a combination, even a dance, of inspiration and craft, one taking over whenever the other momentarily runs out of steam.  Robert Frost said, ‘A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being.’  The bad news is that writing poetry therefore often involves hard work.  But the good news is that it is not just the preserve of a chosen few; I am sure that most people could write a decent poem if they put their mind to it.  There is nothing Calvinist about it: it is a matter of both grace and works.

The sensation of writing a new poem is rather like trying to remember an existing poem that is just out of reach of the memory — and of course there is no anthology in which to look it up.  In this sense, it is also like a crossword puzzle whose solution lies not on the back page or in tomorrow’s edition but in the heavens somewhere, taking form on the page only after a good deal of thought and discernment.  It is also like prospecting a mine, working one’s way down likely seams in the hope of striking gold.

It is also comparable to the work of a sculptor, in that the finished product is to some extent there all along.  Just as a sculptor gets rid of all the extraneous stone around the work’s true form, the poet has to get rid of the extraneous words, trying and retrying different phrases or with verbs conjugated differently, putting words in end-on or trying slightly different meanings, until, ideally, the perfect marriage of form and meaning is found, everything fitting as soundly and naturally as plain speech, and having the ring of truth. 

For this reason, one thing the poet feels is the need to get out of the poem’s way.  A true poem has a force and a life of its own, pushing itself into the world, asserting its existence; it has to be written, weighing on a poet’s conscience until it has emerged (and thereafter lifting blissfully from the shoulders, leaving euphoria behind).  As Charles Causley said, ‘If I didn’t write poetry I think I’d explode.’  This is consistent with one measure of all the truest and greatest art, which is that life feels unimaginable without it.  Imagine a world without Handel’s Messiah; imagine no Wordsworth, no Dickens, no Constable.  Remember the sight of Notre-Dame de Paris in flames; how unbelievable it seemed that it might cease to exist.  

Now I hasten to clarify that I am not making such claims as this for my rondel.  My point is that most poets feel that their poems have a life of their own, insisting on their own existence.  A true poem is no work of mere ego; it is called out of you by forces beyond yourself; the words ‘discernment’ and ‘vocation’ come to mind.  Even so, it can be tough going.  You never really rest until it is finished, and you always know at some level if it is not, however you may wish to deny it: this or that line or phrase doesn’t quite ring true; this or that word sits oddly or lumpishly.  You always hope for the winds of inspiration to save you from too much craftsmanship.  ‘Will you choose,’ as Edward Thomas cried, ‘choose me, you English words?’.  Or, in the words of Yeats:

A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Better go down upon your marrow-bones

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these […]

So, as far as this Lent Rondel is concerned, the original ‘spark’ that I remember arose from noticing the rhyme of the words ‘Lent’ and ‘repent’ (which I can hardly have been the first to do).  This nagged away at me until the tell-tale sequence of thoughts arrived: ‘those words are interesting — that would make a good poem — ah yes, it probably is a poem, and I have to find out it what it is’.  What came into my mind was a picture of a short, bracing message of encouragement at the start of Lent.  The briskness of rondel form would fit, I felt, and this at least gave me a ready-made shape for the poem — rather like the grid of the crossword-puzzle.  I then hit on the phrase ‘hold fast’ (which is what I think of as a ‘twin-truth’ — a double meaning whose two senses reinforce, not contradict, each other) and thought a good refrain would come from this.

Now, looking at my notes, I am about to undermine everything I have just said about poetry being long, arduous work, as by my own standards I seem to have got the first draft of this down startlingly quickly — ‘within an hour, between 10 and 11 pm on 13 February 2018’ (once an archivist, always an archivist).  Most of my efforts generally take me months.  Even so, every Ash Wednesday since I have dithered over the refrain and the punctuation.  Originally it was the slightly purple-tinged ‘O followers of Christ, hold fast’, but I soon settled on this:

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast;
Be not afraid; keep faith; keep Lent. 

Something still didn’t feel right, though, and I fiddled around with it several times, including with the punctuation (like Oscar Wilde, taking all morning to put in a comma, and then taking it out again in the afternoon):

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast.
Be not afraid; keep faith, keep Lent: […]

But this year I decided that the second line needed to run more freely, and recast it entirely —

All friends of Christ, hold fast, hold fast;

Fear not these desert days of Lent. 

— which I hope is an improvement.  It feels right to begin with the salutation (‘All friends’…), and to put the two ‘hold fast’s next to each other since, after all, they are saying something slightly different.  After all this trying to be clever, the second line is simpler and does not overload the refrain.

So far, so much dithering.  Yet the first round after the refrain, ‘…all people pent / in pleasure’s prison, bravely cast / Your senseless sin aside at last’ came to me almost whole and entire, and I have always been happy with it.  The only later alteration I made was from the original ‘needless sin’ to ‘senseless sin’, with its serpentine and sin-suggestive sibilance, but that sort of ‘tightening up' is par for the course.  I was also pleased at the way we land on the line ‘Believe the Gospel and repent’ (which hopefully call to mind the priest’s words as he smears our foreheads with ash, ‘Repent and believe the Gospel).  That fell into my lap like a gift (as per Edward Thomas’s appeal).

The part that was hardest to write at first was, in fact, the part that is a also little more awkward for the reader, the lines beginning ‘For by God's Son, who underwent / The Cross…'.  This perhaps makes sense in that something slightly more complicated is being said, and of course I had only just enough rhymes for this very tight poem: it’s no good having a set of three very good rhymes (‘Lent’, ‘repent’, ‘pent’) if you can’t reach a total of five at all.  However, I am satisfied enough of having avoided anything contrived even with these lines.  (And perhaps it is no bad thing if a mention of the Cross should cause a slight stumble in the rhythm).  I have altered very little about it, except that ‘thirst and hunger’ was originally ‘hunger’s hardness’: sometimes — and perhaps especially in a Lenten poem — plainer is better.

So there we are: a simple guide to writing a Lent Rondel, and agonising over it for four years.  

In response to Maolsheachlann’s request, I have dug the different versions out again and found to my surprise that the changes were less significant than I remember.  I really was fiddling around with colons and semi-colons for several years, unable to work out what was wrong with the refrain until this year’s re-casting.  (One of my questions was whether you have two colons in the same sentence?…)

2018–2019

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast:

Be not afraid: keep faith, keep Lent.

All grunged-up souls, all people pent

In pleasure’s prison, bravely cast

Your needless sin aside at last:

Believe the Gospel and repent.

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast:

Be not afraid: keep faith, keep Lent:

The thirst and hunger will not last,

For by God’s Son, who underwent

the Cross, we know that we are meant

For endless life when pain is past.

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast.

2020

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast:

Be not afraid: keep faith, keep Lent.

All grunged-up souls, all people pent

In pleasure’s prison, bravely cast

Your needless sin aside at last:

Believe the Gospel and repent.

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast:

Be not afraid: keep faith, keep Lent:

The thirst and hunger will not last,

For by God’s Son, who underwent

the Cross, we know that we are meant

For endless life when pain is past.

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast.

2021

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast.

Be not afraid; keep faith, keep Lent.

All grunged-up souls, all people pent

In pleasure’s prison, bravely cast

Your senseless sin aside at last:

Believe the Gospel and repent.

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast;

Be not afraid: keep faith, keep Lent:

The thirst and hunger will not last,

For by God’s Son, who underwent

The Cross, we know that we are meant

For endless life when pain is past —

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast.

And here again for good measure is the current and, I hope, final version!

All friends of Christ, hold fast, hold fast;
Fear not these desert days of Lent. 
All grunged-up souls, all people pent 
In pleasure’s prison, bravely cast 
Your senseless sin aside at last: 
Believe the Gospel and repent. 
All friends of Christ, hold fast, hold fast;
Fear not these desert days of Lent.
The thirst and hunger will not last, 
For by God’s Son, who underwent 
The Cross, we know that we are meant 
For Heaven’s home when pain is past — 
All friends of Christ, hold fast, hold fast.

Wishing all readers a very blessed Holy Week.

Ten Poems for National Poetry Day

Since it is National Poetry Day, there is no excuse not to compile a list (though inexhaustive) of some favourite poems that I think are worth sharing.  I think they might also appeal to any readers who consider themselves new to, or unfamiliar with poetry… or even ‘averse to verse’!  If they can be read online, I have given links to them.  Here they are:

1. ‘Moonlit Apples’ — John Drinkwater.  A poem to be whispered at midnight… ‘And quiet is the steep stair under.’
2. ‘Paddington: Mother and Son’ — John Masefield.  Perhaps the simplest and the greatest war poem I know; its whole weight rests on the slow and remorseless beat of the four final words.  It is not online but is included in this anthology; a good local library ought to have a copy.
3. ‘The Trees’ — Philip Larkin.  Why is it that only Larkin’s sour poetry ever seems to be quoted?  He was capable of sincerely beautiful poetic utterances: this is an example.
4. ‘In Memoriam: Easter, 1915’. — Edward Thomas.  Another war poem whose weight rests upon a few words, ‘left’, ‘should’ and ‘never’, and whose meaning drops into the mind slowly but catastrophically.  I have written about it more here.
5. ‘A Chorus’ — Elizabeth Jennings.  This poem sets off with great momentum and soaring majesty but gradually lowers its voice until, in the last lines, both its subject matter and its register are intimate and almost confessional.
6. ‘The Old Liberals’ — John Betjeman.  It can be read about half-way down this page.  I find this poem very moving, even though I still don’t completely understand it and am not sure how seriously to take it.  ‘Sad as an English autumn, heavy and still’ is one of the truest lines of poetry I have ever come across.  And there is something about the easy conversational glibness of saying ‘Ask at the fish and chips in the Market Square’ that is also powerfully sorrowful.
7. ‘Pilgrimages’ — R.S. Thomas.  It is about Bardsey Island, the ‘island of twenty thousand saints’, just off the edge of the Lleyn Peninsula at the tip of N. Wales.
8. ‘Love bade me welcome’ — George Herbert.  Another intimate poem: its gentleness has survived intact for nearly four centuries.  ‘But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack / From my first entrance in […]’ is a line so light and so even that its gentle beauty could easily go unnoticed.  And neither has time diminished the anguished remorse and disbelief in the protest ‘I, the unkinde, ungratefull?’.  Ralph Vaughan Williams also set it to music.
9. ‘Woolgathering’ — Wilfrid Wilson Gibson.  It can be read halfway down this page.  A whimsical utterance in plain English which can easily be learnt by heart.
10. ‘A Gable Wall’ — Maolsheachlann O Ceallaigh.  This poem, full of movement, lifts up ordinary life in order to celebrate it, as does most of his poetry.  I always enjoy, and strongly recommend, the rest of his blog as well.

There are many other poems that I could have mentioned… doubtless I will find an excuse to post them in the future!

‘Easter, 2015.’

The shadow of the Great War seems to have lain particularly heavy across these last few months.  Perhaps it will not clear until 2018, and probably we would be sadder and wiser if it did not.  Several things have led me to brood on it: listening to a great deal of English music from that era (Grainger, Quilter and early Howells), my ever-deepening interest in Edwardian poetry, including those who were in fact lumped together as the ‘Georgians’ (Masefield, W.W. Gibson, Edward Thomas, Bridges, Drinkwater, etc.) and also an awareness of my own age, which a hundred years ago would surely have destined me for the trenches.  All of these — music, poetry and youth — that war wounded, even where it did not stamp them quite out.

Even Easter is darkened, and though I feel reluctant to post the following poem of Edward Thomas, I think there is a duty to read it this year, and indeed to learn it by heart [1]:

IN MEMORIAM (EASTER, 1915)

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood

This Eastertide call into mind the men,

Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should

Have gathered them and will do never again.

These lines need to be read twice at least, because there are at least two phases to the blows with which, one by one, they smite the reader.  The writer and journalist Peter Hitchens has on several occasions written powerfully about this poem, and about how ‘it gently takes you by the hand and then suddenly, fiercely makes you weep' [2].  Indeed it does, and in several ways.  For one thing, it seems to rest upon three wholesome English words, ‘left', ‘should' and ‘never', whose plainness seems to rarefy into gleaming rock under the poem's immense weight.  Nevertheless, the poem's full sense is hidden until ruthlessly unveiled by those very last words 'never again'.  

Then even these words let fall a second blow, as modern readers realise with Hitchens that ‘No Englishman gathers flowers for his sweethearts in the woods any more. That world is dead. Everyone who lived in it is dead, having had no time to pass on its customs to his sons and daughters’ [3].  This poem measures and records the extent of the war’s pernicious reach: into the very earth of an English woodland floor and, almost unseen, into the present day.  Most men these days, no doubt along with their girlfriends, would squirm and scoff at the idea of gathering flowers — and at the old music and old verse — and we know they would — and that war is why.

Flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood, Easter, 2015.

Everything in this poem’s vision is upside-down and back-to-front, so the unexpected presence of those flowers becomes the proof of the unnatural, indeed inhuman, absence of young men, and an encounter with a clump of flowers begets thoughts of distance, dissipation and death.  It is also worth remembering that the poem was written in Eastertide.  Thomas has not only the ordinary life of ordinary folk in mind; he surely sees a hideous inversion of Easter itself.  Where Mary Magdalene came upon an empty tomb that proclaimed the nearness of the resurrected Christ, Thomas finds a flourishing flower-bed declaring the end of England.  Where Easter was the day of Christianity’s birth, was the war the death of Christendom?  

This is Peter Hitchens’ view: he gives the Great War as the first point at which Britain, and indeed Europe, ceased as a whole to believe Christianity seriously.  He thinks it ‘safe to say that the two great victorious wars of the twentieth century did more damage to my own country than any other single force.  The churches were full before 1914, half-empty after 1919, and three-quarters empty after 1945.  And I would add that, by all but destroying British Christianity, these wars may come to destroy the spirit of the country’ [4].  I suppose there is little surprise that the British people as a whole lost their faith afterwards.  I may not praise them for it, but neither do I feel willing to blame them.

And yet, and yet… there is still a faith to uphold; the churches await us still; there is a crucifix in them all; the empty tomb remains; the old question is still asked of us.  It may be that the Great War has so changed the course of history that it will in time bring this country, even Europe, to an end.  This seems likely, for in many ways ours is a dying civilisation, and there is much sorrow in store for those of us who are fond of Britain.  Believers in God, however, must take themselves in hand.  There is plenty of hope in this country still, if sought in the right places, and the Church as a whole is alive and healthy, and forbids us to despair.  And even if all civilisations rise and fall, Easter remains undiminished.  All the sins of men were paid for on the Cross; even the Great War was paid for on the Cross, and Easter triumphs over even the Great War and even all the sins of men.  That is not said glibly by me, but plainly by Christ.  The vision of Easter remains clear, if we can manage, and have the courage, to behold it.  

-----------------

[1] Thomas, Edward.  Collected Poems. (London, Faber, 2004).  p. 63.  See also ‘The Cherry Trees’, p. 112.

[2] http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/01/how-shall-we-mark-the-centenary-of-the-great-war.html

[3] http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/05/how-do-you-make-grown-men-weep.html

[4] Hitchens, Peter. The Rage Against God (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). p. 57.