The Lakeland John Clare

Apologies for my rather lengthy absence. A summer of marking public exam papers is largely to blame, but now all those have been safely gathered in I can return to more congenial tasks.

I have been grateful to serendipity several times while writing my Blog, and this is again the case. I was browsing through one of the many excellent Candlestick Press poetry anthologies the other day, namely 'Poems From the Lake District' and I was struck by a poem, 'Eskdale Dry-Stone Wall' by Tom Rawling, a name I had not come across before. A brief internet search revealed the following:

Tom Rawling (1916–1996) was a teacher, angler and late-developing poet who wrote what Peter Porter called some of the "most unforced collections of nature poems for some years".

His favoured subject was the Ennerdale valley in the English Lake District where he grew up in the early twentieth century.

Rawling was born in 1916 in Ennerdale, then called Cumberland, now Cumbria. Educated at the village school and then Whitehaven Grammar School, he studied History at University College, London. He spent the Second World War in the Royal Artillery and then returned to teaching. For the next thirty years, he taught in primary, secondary and special schools, returning to Cumbria every year, fly-fishing for sea-trout, often with the late Hugh Falkus. Retiring in 1976, he began to write poetry, joining the group that had formed around Anne Stevenson in Oxford during the mid-1970s.

With Stevenson's encouragement, his first poems were published under the title 'A Sort of Killing', in the Old Fire Station Poets series, an early venture by Neil Astley who went on to found the important Bloodaxe Books poetry press, based in Newcastle. A full collection, 'Ghosts At My Back', was published by Oxford University Press in 1982.

However, to Rawling's disappointment, OUP did not consider his work commercial enough for a second book. Later poems were published by smaller presses: 'The Old Showfield' in 1984 and 'The Names of the Sea-Trout' in 1993.

From 1979, Rawling took over the workshop established by Stevenson at the Old Fire Station Arts Centre, George Street, Oxford. Poets associated with this group included Anne Born, Pauline Stainer, Peter Forbes, Helen Kidd, W.N. Herbert, Elizabeth Garrett, Martyn Crucefix and Keith Jebb.

Rawling's poem 'Privy' was shortlisted in the Arvon/Observer International Poetry Competition in 1985.

A new selection of poems and prose pieces was published under the title 'How Hall: Poems and Memories - a passion for Ennerdale.^'There was an accompanying CD of Rawling reading the poems, recorded in 1983.

This is, on the face of it, a fairly unremarkable life, although getting published by OUP is certainly a notable achievement and his influential position in the Old Fire Station Oxford poetry group shows he was very well regarded by his contemporaries, but digging a little deeper hints at a rather more complex character. His fishing friendship with Hugh Falkus, for example, raises some interesting questions. Falkus, known as 'Huge Phallus' by colleagues at the BBC, had an eventful, sometimes tragic life, and was clearly multi-talented, charismatic and physically extremely brave, but he was also an opinionated bully and sexual predator from a very different background. It must be assumed that their mutual love of fishing formed a strong bond, as Rawling appeares to have been faithful to his wife during a long, apparently happy marriage and spent most of his teaching career working with special needs pupils, including the severely handicapped - rewarding but demanding work, which suggests a selflessness, loving patience and lack of ego I assume Falkus did not share.

Having said that, in her introduction to Rawling's selected poems 'How Hall', Anne Stevenson describes him at their first meeting (at a public forum in Oxford to discuss the formation of a writers' workshop) as 'A tall lean, craggy man in his sixties who kept insisting that I was talking too much about my "university taught" ideas, instead of encouraging audience participation.' Given that Stevenson was a poet with an international reputation and Rawling was a comparative nobody, this attitude might be seen as rather extraordinarily presumptuous, not least because Rawling, as a graduate in history from University College London, was hardly a stranger to 'university taught' ideas himself. It is to Stevenson's credit that she swallowed her understandable annoyance and got Rawling to offer his opinion on the correct way forward and this was the start of a mutually supportive personal and professional relationship. My main take-away from this interaction is that, if Rawling left his ego outside the classroom, he certainly brought it with him when poetry was his subject.

Stevenson quickly saw that Rawling's poetry was on a different level from other members of her workshop and his reputation became quickly established with his work admired by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney amongst others. The poem 'Sloe Gin', dedicated to Heaney, shares with the more famous writer the ability to see the transcendent in the ordinary.

Sloe Gin

for Seamus Heaney

Let the first hard frost

expose the spiny twigs

reveal the bear black fruit.

Reach through jutting thorns

 for the blue hazed sloes

ignore the blood on your wrist.

Needle prick. to the hard stone,

watch their transfusion seep

 through the gin. each day.

an agitation of the jar,

and after many days of alchemy,

decant this ruby in your glass

to taste silk sliding fire

of frost and thorns

and bitter fruit.

Rawling's virtues as a poet are straightforward but important. Like John Clare, he is a knowledgeable and clear eyed observer of the natural scene, as this description of a Canada goose illustrates:

In stiff profile, black head

White-cheeked, wooden as a duck-decoy,

She sits close on the heaped mound

Plucked from her own breast

The stanza ends with the lightest of metaphorical touches:

All thought of flight forbidden

By her demanding eggs.

This is typical of Rawling's method; the reader is not kept at a distance by an elaborate persona or linguistic gymnastics. What you see is pretty much what you get, and the result is often profoundly moving. Rawling's main subjects are his home district of Ennerdale, the farming community in which he was raised and his family, particularly his parents. It is when writing about them that his mood usually darkens, as in this extact from 'Hands':

Her hands knotted, my nails bitten

Waiting for my father, while our dinner

Dried and he drank all day

In the Conservative Club.

....

Only when she nursed the stricken child

My dying father, did the hands seem free,

The first time she dared to pour a whisky

For me, thirty years too late.

So it is that a richer, more troubled, more complex personality emerges, one that is brought memorably to bear on his great passion, fly-fishing. I am no expert, but his poems on this subject seem to me masterly. Take 'Fisherman to Salmon'

Audacious your odyssey,

Salmo the Leaper;

You were so near your redd

Your shrunken gut

Forbade all feeding,

Urged you to ripen;

But you came to my lure,

Betrayed yourself

For a feather.

The technique is simple, effective and self-assured. The nod to anglo-saxon models in the first two lines is undemonstrative, but the sense of tradition persists in the use of 'redd' (an archaic scots term for a spawning ground). The relationship described is intimate, with an almost sexual frisson at the conclusion. 'Torridge Salmon' is again sensual in nature, perhaps with a dash of cruelty?

Gentle with soft mouthing surprise

With a gleam unexpectedly golden

Deep in the stained pool,

She came for the feather,

Found the hook.

What followed was the craft of killing.

Her virgin scales cling to my hands.

'The Names of the Sea-Trout' might be addressed to a lover,

He who would seek her in the clear stream

Let him go softly as in a dream.

Indeed, it is the eroticism of these fishing poems which leaves the strongest impression and which seems to me to be Rawling's greatest and most individual achievement. This is not to underestimate the power of his descriptions of the natural Erskdale scene, or the vivid, and often disturbing, family portraits, and the consistent quality of his work in general commands respect; his output is comparatively small but is a genuine treasure-trove. There are many poems I'd like to share with you but will restrict myself to 'Winter Digging', a useful companion piece to the more famous Heaney poem on the subject, 'Multiple Handicaps', a moving insight into his life as a special needs teacher, 'Three Flowers' (in memory of his wife Eva) - a rare, but poignant, conventional (rather than piscine) love poem and, finally, the poem that originally piqued my interest in Rawling, 'Eskdale Dry-Stone Wall'

Winter Digging

The feel of wood,  worn to my hand,

 The heave of the body’s lever.

This heavy loam holds more

than the weight of winter rain.

I carry compost, cover it.

Until the times shine silver.

For the buried seasons seed-bed.

That the frost and sun

Will consummate.

Always the land continues.

Blisters, muscle ache.

A clinging shirt.

Are less than tokens of old toil,

And yet, how close and tight

The fit of earth in fingernails,

The bond with those who bred me..

Multiple Handicaps

Neon-light demons

Menace him mute,

Wasting muscles fell him.

We hold him, enfold him

To shuffle and whisper,

Comfort his crying.

They want to ascertain

His academic level.

Can he enumerate demons?

Each day he’s dying

While they build their paper

Pyramid around him.

Three Flowers

In memory of Eva Rawling (1918-1992)

1.Crocuses.

Your ashes were scattered on bare

February ground,  but almost at once

Spring. is your resurrection.

Up comes the snowdrop, virginal, pure,

Then crocuses. cloth of gold.

round the lilac trunks, display

the golden girl you were.

All gone to dust. But see

how the saffron petals spread

to cup the sun, life's warmth,

just as you opened your arms to me

at the last in your hospital bed.

2. Fritillary

melagris,  sweet honey. of the fields,

blooms once again in our garden.

I cut a stem for your specimen vase,

it stands demure with downcurved head,

six petals patterned dark and paler purple,

ancient chequerboard, heraldic,

the colours slightly blurred,

like an old banner laid up in church,

a faded statement of well worn virtues.

With modest pride. it shows itself,

displays your hatchment to haunt me.

3. Cow Parsley.

Anthriscus sylvestris, cow parsley

milky ways. with its million stars

the fringe of the old ditch.

we both agreed should stay wild.

How you loved its Queen Anne's lace,

the delicate fronds of its fern leaf,

though it drooped if taken indoors.

Idly. I crush a leaf in my fingers,

and at once. we're walking close, clasped.

in a London park, 1942 or 3. I think,

at last, an evening pass from barracks.

You spread your mac among cow parsley,

lovingly. we lay down together, the earthy

scent of bruised stems comes back,

the blaze of our bodies united.

  Eskdale Dry-Stone Wall

See, here by the holly tree

Above the highest meadow,

The Eskdale dry-stone wall,

A warted lichen-dappled caterpillar

That clasps and humps the how

Shuffles across the scree’s frost litter,

Creeps round the shoulder of the fell,

A line of beauty

Not made to please the eye.

Ever since a glacier cost them wide

The Stones have called to everyone

To put them back together again.

The waller understood.

 How stones want to bed

 Inward leaning on each other,

Through stones, tying them together,

Still in their moment of mutual tension,

Standing for intake and enclosure won

 From forest or stolen from common.

Many backs ached, segged hands bled

In this Labour, great as a pyramid.

Built for the lord by the dispossessed.

See, here by the holly tree

Where an off-comers tread

Has broken down old history,

The inner stones are stained.

With holly berry red.

Tom Rawling's work is readily available on Amazon and e-Bay. I hope you enjoy his poetry as much as I have.