Wednesday 16 October 2013

Cumbrian Adventures

Yesterday we visited William Wordsworth, Robert Southey and Basil Bunting, driving around the Lake District. After the plunging landscape of North Wales, I thought nothing could impress me, but my God. I've never been to Lake Windemere before, but I was gobsmacked. I never realised we had anything so stunning in the UK. Sadly we did not have time in our schedule to visit the Pencil Museum.

Obviously I knew who Wordsworth was before we arrived, but I didn't know Southey or Bunting. Bunting's grave was in a Quaker burial ground, where - in keeping with the principles of Quakerism - all the gravestones are of a uniform size and shape, so no one is raised above anyone else. By contrast, the graves in Southey's churchyard were all huge exercises in morbid ostentation, festooned with cherubs and laurels and big enough to kill a toddler.

Bunting was a conscientious objector during the First World War and spent time in Wormwood Scrubs. He believed that poetry was meant to be performed. He died in 1985.

Robert Southey was a supporter of the French Revolution who grew more conservative as he aged and was eventually embraced by the Tory establishment, becoming Poet Laureate in 1813. He was the first person to write down the story Goldilocks and the Three Bears. He died in 1843.

Here are sample poems by Southey and Bunting - if you like 'em, I really recommend you check both guys out a bit more deeply.

I Suggest (by Basil Bunting)

1. Compose aloud; poetry is a sound.
2. Vary rhythm enough to stir the emotion you want but not so as to lose impetus.
3. Use spoken words and syntax.
4. Fear adjective; they bleed nouns. Hate the passive.
5. Jettison ornament gaily but keep shape

Put your poem away till you forget it, then:
6. Cut out every word you dare.
7. Do it again a week later, and again.

Never explain - your reader is as smart as you.


Sonnet I (by Robert Southey - one of his piece on the slave trade)

Hold your mad hands! for ever on your plain
Must the gorged vulture clog his beak with blood?
For ever must your Nigers tainted flood
Roll to the ravenous shark his banquet slain?
Hold your mad hands! what daemon prompts to rear
The arm of Slaughter? on your savage shore
Can hell-sprung Glory claim the feast of gore,
With laurels water'd by the widow's tear
Wreathing his helmet crown? lift high the spear!
And like the desolating whirlwinds sweep,
Plunge ye yon bark of anguish in the deep;
For the pale fiend, cold-hearted Commerce there
Breathes his gold-gender'd pestilence afar,
And calls to share the prey his kindred Daemon War.

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