A stone in a field
№ 10 | 7 January 2022
With the present threat of hypersonic weapons, and a future threat of fractal bombardment from space, is it best, for now perhaps, to consider a stone just lying in a field?
In a Northamptonshire wood – photo Michael Richardson-Moore (Unsplash)
Eclogue IX
There was a shooter in the woods, who went
quiet when I veered across the coomb
toward his hill. He soon again left dents
in the air, since there was plenty of room
for me to pass, and for him to shoot
in a neighbouring spinney. The moon-
like sun was a low hole commuting
in just over six hours while I took five
to finish the hike. We were destitute
of light in no time after I arrived
back home, as if roosting too like the birds
would have done, if the pheasants had survived
the shoot. The pastoral is a blurb
about the dispossessed farm and foreclosed
mortgage. There is no fowler or shepherd –
just technique that is superimposed,
since the hiker never met the hunter.
We did not talk about the trail we chose –
our unsung competition a junta.
¤ Woodford Halse UK, 2 January 2022
Tell your friends
how much you are enjoying poetry & polis – surely they will too‽
Hiking a region of poets
‘Eclogue IX’ is titled out of respect to Virgil’s ‘Eclogue IX’. New Zealand modernist verse evolved out of Georgianism and its pastorale. Georgianism is the cultural movement from before the first world war, named after George V, inspired by Thomas Hardy and AE Housman.
While New Zealand creative and literary artists had a smoother transition out of Georgianism into modernism than their British counterparts, Virgil wanted us to think of fields on the eve of war, or with war brooding over them and land confiscations. In the case of his own ‘Eclogue IX’, a singing competition that never happens.
I hike about the hill country of western Northamptonshire, northern Oxfordshire and eastern Warwickshire, a region of poets. I do not live far from where James K Baxter went to school at Sibford, where John Dryden stayed at Canons Ashby, and where Sarah Field worked in the kitchen at Edgecote House, nor far from where John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, had his seat at Adderbury. The science fiction poet Frederick Turner was born in Northampton, as was the composer Edmund Rubbra.
Yet the region does not have a brand, as do the Lake District, the Cotswolds, and the Chilterns. It has been fought over since the Bronze Age, as attested by the barrows, hill and forts: the battle of Edgcote (1469), the battle of Edgehill (1642), the battle of Cropredy Bridge (1644), the battle of Naseby (1645), and perhaps also the battle in which Boudicca was defeated in 65 CE, somewhere off Watling Street near Towcester (pronounced ‘toaster’).
I have hiked in all weathers for as long as eight hours, from Woodford Halse and back. I have been to Badby, to Hellidon and Everdon, and the hill beyond which is in sight of Northampton, to Wormleighton where Lady Di’s Spencer family came from, down to Banbury, and out to Adstone, and Chacombe, and Middleton Cheney.
This is sheep and cattle country, arable too, going up to 220 metres, and the planes descending are on their way to Birmingham International Airport. These heavy hills of sedimentary rocks squeeze out rivers that flow into the Thames, the Severn, and The Wash – any direction except towards the Trent. Middle England, just not the Midlands.
Without identity
This is a region that has no state, no identity, no history of its own. Therefore it can stand for any country now that feels it might be trodden on or fought over by a great power. From Finland to Bhutan, from Armenia to the Pacific, small nations going about their business are starting to feel there are Laputas in the sky that might drop something on them. The President of Finland, Sauli Niinistö, remarked in his new year address to the nation:
Whenever avoidance of war has been the prime objective of a group of powers, the international system has been at the mercy of its most ruthless member.
Notwithstanding its treaty with the former Soviet Union and its successor state, Finland has indicated that it is reserving the right to join NATO. We are living in the kind of world in which humane, developed, ethical small nations feel that they have to do this.
It has nothing to do with what Moscow and Beijing call ‘US hegemonism’. It is to do with the sovereignty of good, small nations, and whether the international system is merely a realist playground for the giants. Things have got bad when the Finns talk like this. The revival of leadership cults that infantilise their home populations adds to the retro-30s Radio Gaga feel.
In England, there are ancient rights of way and bridle paths which let riders and hikers cross farmland. Last month in a field on the way to Eydon, I found a stone that I had seen before when the field had cattle in it. The stone fits the palm of my hand. I deliberated whether or not to remove it. Although alone in that pasture, or so it seemed, it had a presence.
I was reminded of the words of one of the greatest mid 20th century poets, Paul Celan (1920–70), when he wrote that he could hear a stone standing. He also spoke of graves in the air, and the air’s bullet wounds.
The stone is on my desk now, in any case. 170 million years ago it lay in an ancient, shallow sea. Was I right to take the stone from the field? Why did I feel I had to take it, and why do I feel so uneasy about it?
Villanelle for Benedetto Croce (1866–1952)
The Pompeii disaster keeps happening.
Imagine a body that was buried
by an earthquake – alive and caverning
all of history, and somehow ferried
deathwards and back. Imagine trepanning
a Fiorelli cast of one carried
days-long in darkness’ close taverning
and finding not a skull to quarry,
but a lad of seventeen travelling
his family’s extinction to parry
such night – on until an unspavined
age. Heavy with nicotine, he tarried
long, the archaeologist labelling
into opaque, pearl-like commentary,
layers of Marx, fascism’s japanning
of the state. Once again he was hurried
to the light, for his country’s opening.
His larval thought and labour unvaried
buried now deep beyond fathoming.
¤ Woodford Halse, UK, 3 January 2022
Commentary
A liberal, Italian statesman and Neapolitan philosopher, Benedetto Croce decided to be neither a Marxist nor a fascist. Resolving to resist fascism, he found himself under palace arrest for 18 years – his family home in Naples is quite a mansion.
He became the heir to this house in appalling circumstances. The family were enjoying a summer holiday at Casamicciola when the Ischia earthquake of 28 July 1883 struck. He lost his father, mother and only sibling, his sister. Just as the stone I removed lay in the field, so was an anonymous teenager buried in this massive earthquake for days before he was removed. This is a very New Zealand disaster.
Physical recuperation was one thing, mental recuperation took decades. Philosophy and historical and cultural research were his therapies: he became the philosopher, the statesman, the historian and cultural exponent of his native Campania where the quake happened. This was also the region where Virgil had settled to compose his work and where his ashes were placed in a tomb still standing at Piedigrotta in Naples.
When Minister of Education in 1921, he married his secretary and they had four daughters. However, Mussolini took power soon after, and the fascists trod on smaller states. For Ethiopia, the second world war began in 1935, for Albania it began in April 1939. Before the Anschluss, Italy had contended with Germany for influence over Austria. To compound things, Italy tried to invade Greece after it entered the second world war.
Croce was around to dig Italy out of the rubble of war.
No anti-monarchist, he nonetheless was the intellectual leader of the transition to a republic in 1946. Rising to the task of extricating Italy from the entanglements it had got caught in, and reinventing its international personality for a new role in the world, he kept a clear, skeptical head in dangerous times.
Dropping tungsten rods from space
The bad statesman or stateswoman, and realist geopolitical intriguer, is another kettle of fish. In the sonnet below, no 572 of my collection of 600 odd sonnets written from 2018 onwards, I imagine such a schemer as a King Kong, or Jonathan Edwards for psychopathic speculation.
Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) was one of the first American philosophers, a Calvinist minister in Connecticut. Imagining the sinner as a spider to be thrown in the fire, he was drawing on a theme which one of the first American poets, Edward Taylor (1642–1729) exemplified in his poem ‘Upon a Spider Catching a Fly’.
The wrong kind of statesman or stateswoman would throw people to the spiders, would drop tungsten rods from space in a fractal bombardment, would deploy hypersonic gliders. Are we back to King Kong, and the shooter in the woods? Do we have our hikers over rights of way? Do we have our commons? Do we have a law that parts hiker and shooter without them ever meeting?
The wise owl watches – photo Taiana Bartolomei (Unsplash)
Do we have leaders and thinkers who are like the stone in a field, which we can hear standing, or sense lying in the earth? Or will there be a Celan surviving this era we find ourselves in, wondering why the international system got caught in all the old Westphalian and absolutist traps, wondering where the people had gone and why he had been left?
It is certainly not the fault of Finland, New Zealand or Australia that we live in such times.
Behind the scenes...
If you would like advice and teaching on poetics and the composition of epic poetry, write to
poetry.polis@gmail.com
If you require a bespoke report with reliable international relations advice, write to
hermsprong@protonmail.com
Jonathan Edwards is King Kong
I threw the caterpillars on my rose
Into the webs – like Jonathan Edwards’
spider into the fire. I suppose
I am evil then and go downwards
along this chain – rose worm spider fire.
My skill is placing the caterpillars
In the web and seconding that wire
of death. I must be the gorilla
on the skyscraper – the watchmaker god
Arrested by beauty – to go and scheme
with the web for a flower. No prodding
made me this bad, but pleasure in the theme
Of Jonathan Edwards as King Kong –
the rose eaten – the web so right and wrong.
¤ Woodford Halse, UK, 4 September 2021
The next poetry & polis will be in your mailbox on 14 January
Next week, I shall resume the sombre yet not far from unhopeful Neapolitan theme, discussing love and Eros. Then, the newsletter after that, circumstances in the wider world permitting, will feature music.