Selected Poems

Giles Watson
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All poems and illustrations © Giles Watson, 2010.

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Sand Martin................................................................................................................5
Paper Angels............................................................................................................12
Meadow Cranesbill..................................................................................................13
Fly Agaric.................................................................................................................14
Buzza Hill.................................................................................................................16
Holy Vale.................................................................................................................18
Melangell and the Hare............................................................................................19
Pisaura mirabilis.......................................................................................................23
Pyramidal Orchid ....................................................................................................32
Flint Knapper............................................................................................................36
Dillisk.......................................................................................................................39
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Kingfisher
Leaning over a stone bridge, knowing
Daubenton’s bats slept
beneath me, wrapped in leather,
pollard willows, white clouds
reflected intermittently in water,
I glimpsed him.

The flash of a wing,

and he was gone.

I turned to the road,

spirits leaping like a salmon,
and daydreamed nests of fishbone
floating on a blue sea; the courting
of blue-bewinged gods and goddesses,
auburn-bellied, lucky-feathered,
the windcalmed sea like green glass,
sun-pierced to the ocean floor –

then woke from reverie,

and saw he had returned,
whetting his slender bill on willow,
fresh from fishkilling.
A scale spiralled to the water.

A glint of eye, a pinion-flash,

and he flipped like a penny
under the bridge, half-waking the bats
from insectivorous dreams.

The summer slumbers

to the hum of mating mayflies,
coupling and dying by the river,
and in my heat-fed dreams
my eyes chase the halcyon
over peat-brown water
past ranks of wind-rattled reeds
and alders, coned and catkin-hung,
under a blue sky.

Notes: Inspired by Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and personal
observations on the River Thame in Oxfordshire.
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Sand Martin

Delighting not in cottages or towns,

Spurning even barns half tumbled-down,
She is fera natura, disclaiming domestic attachments,
Delighting in wide waters and sandy banks,
Nidificating underground.

Mouse-coloured and diffident,

Vacillating in flight like a butterfly
Bewildered by too many flowers -
Perhaps she means thereby
To catch one, by this imitation -
She flits above lakes, or lonely oxbows
In slow-flowing streams, or hides her brood
Where downland churchyards crumble
Into seas, and tidewashed fingerbones
Blanch on unwalked strands.

She is the cryptogame, the Mystery,

Who sleeps where no man knows.
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Swift

But this wheeling squeal is freedom’s song:

Life lived on wings that never grow tired,

Spiring into space for the sheer height
And light of it. Never alighting, not on stone
Or branch, or byre, never carrying twigs
Or quills, but mating in the air, plunging
Whole fathoms in the heat of it. The shriek
Of love is piercing from the height of it.

Fly in splendour. Go in peace,

To love; and serve no more.
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Funereal Cockatoo
After the fire, the air pungent
With burnt eucalypt, they come
Like death-angels. Their screeches
Scratch the sky until it bleeds.

They descend on the Hakeas, their seed-nuts

Split by explosive heat, grasp each pod
With an outstretched, scaly claw,
And ply them with beaks, hooked and hungry.

After the regrowth, they dig for grubs

In the trunks of trees, rip off strips
Of bark, gouge out a splint of wood
On which they sit, and penetrate

The grub-hole with their long, grey

Hunger-hooks, pull it out plump
And gobble it in three lumps.

The open spaces ache with echoes.

Notes: Inspired by the late eighteenth century Naturalist’s Miscellany, Volume 6. At the
time Shaw first described the Yellow-Tailed Black Cockatoo (Calyptorhynchus funereus),
there had hardly been time to observe its unique feeding habits, described above. The
birds’ use of the “chopping platform” when hunting for moth and beetle larvae in the
trunks of Eucalypts is described by Joseph M. Forshaw, Australian Parrots, Melbourne, 1981,
pp. 71-72. Fire plays a crucial role in the life-cycle of many Australian plants, whose seeds
do not become viable until they have passed through high temperatures. The pods of
plants such as Hakeas are designed to split open and release the seeds when they are
burnt, and this attracts the cockatoos.
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Platypus
Less probable than Piltdown,
Pieces of the Platypus
Were painted disbelievingly
From dorsal and ventral perspectives.

Surely it is stuck or stitched

Together, a duck’s bill
On the body of a quadruped
With beaver’s fur and tail,
And its habits, half mole,
Half otter, a madman’s dream?

The poison spur ridiculous,

Temerity attacking truth,
A faker’s joke, making
This composite monster.

“A degree of scepticism,” wrote

The Naturalist, “is not only pardonable
But laudable.”

But he had tested

The corpse by maceration
In water, found no flaw.

He didn’t know
The beast lays eggs.
Notes: Inspired The Naturalist’s Miscellany, written by George Shaw and illustrated by
Frederick Polydore Nodder, published in twenty-two volumes between 1789 and 1813,
Volume 10. The earliest encounter between a white man and a platypus appears to have
occurred in 1797, when Captain John Hunter observed an aboriginal spear one in
Yarramundi Lagoon, near the Hawkesbury River, just north of Sydney. Hunter himself was a
keen naturalist and a fellow of the Royal Society, and he supplied many specimens and
illustrations to English naturalists. In 1798, he sent his sketch, accompanied by a skin, to
the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle-on-Tyne. From here, they fell into
Shaw’s hands, and he published his description of Platypus anatinus (flatfoot duck) in 1799.
He rightly classified the creature as a mammal, but his description invited the incredulity of
other scientists. The Edinburgh anatomist Robert Knox (now better known to us as the man
who paid for the human cadavers acquired by the murderers Burke and Hare) wrote in
1823: “It is well known that the specimens of this extraordinary animal first brought to
Europe were considered by many as impositions. They reached England by vessels which
had navigated the Indian seas, a circumstance in itself sufficient to rouse the suspicions of
the scientific naturalist, aware of the monstrous impostures which the artful Chinese had so
frequently practised on European adventurers; in short, the scientific felt inclined to class
this rare production of nature with eastern mermaids and other works of art; but these
conjectures were immediately dispelled by an appeal to anatomy.” See Brian K. Hall, ‘The
Paradoxical Platypus’, in BioScience, March 1999.
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War-Re-Taw
Whether he was convict or free
Matters little; his love
Had come along way
To a land where birds screech
And jeer, and spiders
Hide in boots.

A wattlebird flapped from it

When he found it, tall-stemmed
In stony ground.

Thick bracts, bright red,

Like petals. Clustered,
Curled flowers, like crimson
Spider-palps, the whole
A ball, bigger than his fist.

In the absence of roses,

He picked it for her;
The tough stem scratched
His skin in lieu of thorns,

And when toil was over

And the dust washed down,
He gave it to her, and she cried.

Notes: Inspired by the Naturalist’s Pocket Magazine; or, Compleat Cabinet of the
Curiosities and Beauties of Nature, 1800-1801, Volume 2. War-re-taw was the rendering of
Waratah (Telopea speciosissima) used by “the most intelligent residents in New South
Wales…as better according with the pronunciation of the natives.” Widely recognised, as
the NPM already affirmed, as “the most superb flower of New South Wales”, the Waratah
has a large, red inflorescence, and grows best in stony soil.
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Parish Ghosts
I

In wet, neglected churches

Where algal bloom swathes
The windows in a greening blush,
The ghosts are not unquiet:
Little wizened ladies
Rearranging spectral flowers,
Flaunting empty dusters,
Shuffling slippered feet
Down flags and browning brasses.
A sneeze scatters them,
Or a voice, raised
Too loud in benediction.

II

In gaunt, mediaeval churches

Where lords lie in state
Alongside ladies, with alabaster
Arrogance, their gauntlets
Clasped in insincere obsequies,
The ghosts arrest you
With a chain-mailed, curious
Probing, as though to plumb
The powers that make you modern
And question the fates, who gave
Them strength, then let it wane.

III

In private, Templar churches

Where tourists, numb to spirits,
Scrawl in visitors’ books
That the atmosphere is “peaceful”,
Questing ghosts are flickers
At the corners of our eyelids,
Snickering mirages, pulpit shadows
Stretching a yard too far
Down quaking, stone-paved naves.
In their time, they have stabbed
Backs, or laid schemes at beheadings,
Dreaming sharpened axe-falls
And laden, dripping baskets,
Their dark interiors twinkling
With drying dead-men’s eyes.
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IV

But in the grimmest churches

Where bodies are exhumed,
Transplanted, cold as organs
Packed in ice, the mothers
And the sisters, impotent
And desperate, rack and rend
Their skins with airy nails,
And screech their searing
Separations in the visitors’
Wan faces. Cock robins
Fall dead from the firmament,
Hearts torn by ghost-voices.
In the grimmest churches
The dead rage, clamour,
Beseech, beckon, reach
To clutch you, hold
You to their red and
Beating hearts. Their fingers
Ring our fleshy throats
And clench on air.
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Paper Angels

Paper angels in the parish church

Sing like ghosts of insects
Escaping cocoons of tissue-shroud,
Scaling filaments of spider-web
Toward their vault of heaven.
Their antennae have looped themselves
And fused into haloes, as they rise,
Bleached mayflies in a nimbus cloud.
Sunlight tickles them into
Subsonic stridulations, glorying
In their metamorphoses, spiring
On glued and crumpled wings:
White imagoes on frames of wire
Surveying paradise with compound eyes.

Notes: Inspired by a display of paper angels at St Michael and All Angels Church,
Summertown, Oxford.
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Meadow Cranesbill

Since rupture bleeds within me from our parting,

And none can still the pain, or staunch the flow,
I’ll search the hedge, where cranesbill blooms are starting
And pluck them up before their flowers blow.
The dove-foot herbage and the pale-veined petal
I take in claret one and twenty days
With red snails melded, all to raise my mettle
While her choice divides her changing ways.
As pistils thrust through air and carpels close
About the seeds developing within,
I ache to hear what she cannot disclose
And sip the philtre down, through lips grown thin.
But if she should return, I’ll no more bleed
When the cranesbill springs, and shoots the seed.

Notes: Gerard and Culpepper called the blue flowered Meadow Cranesbill
“Dove’s Foot” because of the perceived similarity between the leaves and the feet
of doves. The more common name alludes to the strong resemblance of the
enlarged stylar column and seed capsule to the head and bill of a crane. Gerard
recommended the herb, taken in claret before sleep, for the miraculous healing of
“ruptures and burstings, as my selfe have often proved, whereby I have gotten
crownes and credit”. He adds that “the powder of red snailes (those without
shels) dried in an oven in number nine” should be added to the concoction if it is
to be used on an older person. Elizabethans used the plant not for healing
physical ills, but as the main ingredient in love potions, but it is not clear whether
they added the red slugs as well. More recently, botanists have noticed that
Cranesbills have an unusual method of seed dispersal. W.B. Turrill, British Plant
Life, London, 1962, p. explains: “The long ‘bill’ of the fruit is structurally the
persistent and enlarged stylar column. At maturity the lower two-thirds above
each one-seeded compartment splits away from the compact central portion. The
seeds become detached, but each remains in a carpellary pocket attached by two
threads to the corresponding stylar strip. The stylar strip acts as a spring and
when a certain degree of tension is attained by the drying-out process it suddenly
curls up and breaks away from the central column, with such force that the partial
fruit with a seed at the bottom is shot for a distance of about seven yards...”
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Fly Agaric

I am Big Raven of the Koryac, whale catcher

With the big grass bag, stranded with my whale
Miles from sea. In my bag are the whale’s provisions:
Jerk-bodied krill, ink-stained squid with human eyes.
It is too big for me to carry. So is the whale,
And the gallons of sea water I need to slurry his side.
I shall go unto Vahïnin for aid; he will answer.

“Go to the plains before the sea,” said Vahïnin,

“Look for the spirits of Wãpaq, white soft stalks
Wearing spotted hats. Eat of them, and they
Will help you.” I pulled them by their ground-venting
Volvas, ran my finger past each ring, folded
Like a white foreskin; sniffed, suspiciously
At the bleached and radiating gills, peeled
A little of the flecked and blushing skin,

Then ate, and the gills turned and whirled

Like a white kaleidoscope, combining
No colours, entrancingly. I went back
To the whale, and he had shrunk
To a hundredth of his accustomed,
Blubber-threshing size. I danced for joy,
And flipped up the travelling bag
With my little finger, poised the whale
On my upturned thumb-tip, and capered
For the shore, splashed by foaming surf.

I watched him breeching in the threshed brine,

Submerging with his brothers, and I said,
“Let the Agaric remain upon the ground;
And my children see what it may show.”

Notes: The Koryac revere the Fly-Agaric, eating it to achieve transcendental

states. They believe that the mushroom is endowed with particular power, and
the legend related above is described in detail by John Ramsbottom, Mushrooms
and Toadstools: A Study of the Activities of Fungi, London, 1953, p. 45. Amongst
other hallucinogenic effects caused by the alkaloid muscaridine, Fly Agaric
ingestion causes partakers to perceive surrounding objects either as very large or
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very small. Any reader determined to test this should be warned that Fly Agarics
also contain muscarine, a poison which causes acute gastro-intestinal distress.
Devotees of the agaric, including the Koryac, claim that the muscarine may be
evaporated by baking or drying the mushrooms. Although classed in textbooks as
poisonous, the Fly Agaric is, according to Ramsbottom, eaten readily in the south
of France. It is possible that its level of toxicity is variable according to region; it
is certainly not as deadly as some other Amanita species. The Koryac legend
offers no explanation as to what Big-Raven was doing with a whale so far from
sea.
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Buzza Hill

The spring tide turning, the waves

Stand in queues to enter Porthcressa.
A thrush scuttles, ratlike, too unafraid
To fly. Blackbirds stridulate like crickets.
The air reeks of ramsons, bruised
By my tread, the sky striated,
The colour of Corallina.

Lichens
Grip the broad-grained granite
Of this empty tomb, but once it thronged
With sprites, belted with the leather
Of Laminaria, their menfolk
In britches of kelp, their women
Skirted with Porphyra, with purses
Of bladder wrack, stitched with strands
Of Chorda.

Oh, how they danced

To tunes of fiddles fashioned out of skulls
Of guillemots, and beat on urchin drums,
Made little campfires, cooking limpets,
And built abodes out of cockle shells!
How they stole from the slow folk
Of Hugh Town, who would not lock
Their doors. How they mildewed
The sails of ships, how cursed
Sir Cloudesley Shovel when he hanged
The only man with wit. How the mermen
Rejoiced at his demise, coughing sand
On Porth Hellick.

Now they are charmed

Out of the islands, I am told, and postulate:
Who on earth can banish the makers
Of all charms? I bring a leaf of yarrow
To peer through, and an open mind.

I see not, but I hear: “Howl sowth

Tor leun, pareusi an gwenton.”
Notes: Robert Heath, A Natural and Historical Account of the Isles of Scilly, 1750:
“Fairies are said to have frequented Buzza Hill on St Mary’s Island, but their
nightly pranks, aerial Gambols and Cockle-Shell Abodes are now quite unknown.
Haunted Houses, Giants and Apparitions (so terrible in Scilly some years ago) are
now, by application made to the Knowing Men of Cornwall, all charm’d, cast in a
Spell, or conjur’d out of the islands.” All of the sprites’ clothing is, naturally
enough, made out of seaweed. The charm at the end is a Cornish saying, which
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means, “A southerly sun, a full belly, prepare the Spring.” It was once popularly
believed that staring through a yarrow leaf enabled one to see fairies, and despite
the encroachments of Hugh Town, Buzza Hill, site of a humble but beautiful
megalithic chamber tomb, is certainly the place for them. The birds on Scilly are
famous for their “tameness”. Written after an ascent of the hill on 14th February
2004. Residents of the English mainland should note that by this time, spring is
well established on Scilly, since ramsons and daffodils both bloom in January. A
rather fanciful legend insists that Sir Cloudesley Shovel was washed up on Porth
Hellick, only to be beaten to death by a resident of St. Mary’s who wanted his
ring, after his five ships sunk on the Gilstone Ledges. He had earlier hanged a
seaman who had dared to question his judgement about the ships’ longitude.
Inevitably, all such casualties end up being washed up on Porth Hellick, as does
plastic rubbish from the more recent wreck of the Cita to this day.
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Holy Vale

The floor, an ancient wickerwork of roots of elms;

the ivied trunks are columns in a cathedral of green.

Chiffchaffs, wrens: roof-boss creatures come to life,

peer between the leaves with beady eyes.

Here are the hundred tiny chapels of water hemlocks,

twining woodbines, green and fleshy cryptogams

on gleaming walls of soil. A tracery of twigs,

arching above this choir of hoverflies.
Notes: Holy Vale is an area of moist woodland, watered by a small, fen-like
stream, running from the centre of St Mary’s island towards Porth Hellick. Dutch
elm disease has never reached Scilly, and the majority of the native trees on the
island are elms.
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Melangell and the Hare

The beginning is almost stereotypical:

Brychwel Ysithrog, Prince of Powys
Rallies his hounds; the hare
Zigzags to elude them, eyes bulging.

She has lain low in her form

Until the last moment,
Ears pinned back, squinting,
Denying inevitabilities,

And has shot out from hiding

Like the bolt of a crazed crossbow
Fired by a drunkard
Through a maze of mirrors.

The plot thickens at this point,

Strangely:

She spurts into a thicket,

Where a praying girl kneels,
Crawls inside her skirt
And cowers there, panting.

Brychwel Ysithrog manfully

Tries to hide his bafflement;
His dogs cringe in terror
At the wild girl in the thorn.

Henceforth, we have called them

Wyn bach Melangell,
The girl’s little lambs
Who hide, and lick her legs.

Call it a miracle, if you will,

Or a pagan tale
Pinned on a saint
Who spurned royal suitors.

Or perhaps it was simply true,

And hares feared no human
Until Brychwel Ysithrog, Prince of Powys
Came rallying his hounds.

Notes: St Melangell is the subject of the Historia Divae Monacellae, a vita

composed some time between the late fourteenth and the early sixteenth
century. A late fifteenth century rood-screen in the chapel at Pennant Melangell
depicts the scene described in the poem. The shrine to the saint was dumped in a
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ditch in the sixteenth century, but has recently been restored. Melangell is in the
company of a number of Celtic saints who are reported to have co-existed
harmoniously with a range of wild animals, from Cuthbert’s otters to Brendan’s
sea monsters. Many commentators have theorised that these tales are survivals
from Pagan mythology and practice. This may well be the case, but the author
wonders whether such tales are merely echoes of a time when animals had less
reason to be “man-shy”. The comparative “tameness” of modern arctic hares in
the more remote corners of their distribution might lend support to such a theory.
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Owned by Gulls
Bar Point at low tide. The beach a white hump,
With a single line of weed. Dune grass blued by brine.

On Dune Hill, a string of cairns from the days of Ennor.

Yellow furze, dormant ling, a line of opened tombs.
The petering path, punctuated by thrushes’ anvils
With their own snailshell cairns, and always,
The wind-flayed sternums of gulls, rock-pipits
And once-fearless wrens, the bleached wings still attached.

Down the hill, towards the spume-worn Neck.

Enter this empty, roofless home to your right,

Stoop beneath the rafter that would have been.
Silence, uncanny, unfathomable. Listen
For the wheeze of a Woodcock, clay pipe
Clenched in stained incisors. The air is thick;
It is hard to breathe. Emptiness, like the orbs
Of a gull’s skull.

Then up the slope towards South Hill,

Another house beckons you, the hard-hewn lintel
Perched, precarious as a bird, the low hearth
Lichen-bearded. The same silence, the same thickness,
The same constriction of the throat. You know
That you are breathing ghosts, not air. The half-heard sigh
Of a Webber, worn from kilp-burning, aching
To rest her legs beside the fire that would have been.

And back out into the vacancies of brown bracken,

Along this improbable deer-park wall, by these bluebells,
Half-open, grown wild from some garden long gone.

Owned by gulls, and the ghosts of all that would have been.
Notes: Inspired by a walk on Samson, 9th April 2004. Samson was most recently inhabited
by humans between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, by two families, the
Woodcocks and the Webbers, who made a meagre living from kilp (seaweed burned to
produce raw ingredients for glassmaking), and whose houses still exist in the form of gaunt
granite ruins. The last inhabitants of Samson were forcibly evicted by one Augustus Smith,
whose grandiose plan to establish a deer-park on the island was thwarted by the deer
themselves, who recklessly tried to swim back to Tresco. In prehistoric times, when the
cairns were built, the Isles of Scilly were all one land-mass - a fact attested by the ancient
field-systems which continue onto the beaches and into the sea - romantically known as
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Ennor. Samson comprises two unequal hills, divided by a “Neck”, low to the water. The
island is now a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest on account of the large
numbers of nesting seabirds which occupy the cliffs of South Hill in the breeding season. It
is to be hoped, though any ornithologist would question the accuracy of the word, that
Samson will now remain “uninhabited” forever.
 23

Pisaura mirabilis

Her first labour: making a globe

For the price of a silk-wrapped fly.

Her second, to trundle with it

Over meadow and furrow,
Grass-stem and straw.

Her third, to build for it

A firmament, and hang it there.

Her fourth, to watch, and wait

And guard, a goddess waning.

Her fifth, to tear apart the stars

And set her angels free.

And last, to be no more their world.

Their tabernacle the sky.

Notes: Pisaura mirabilis is a comparatively large wolf-spider, often seen in meadows and
alongside hedgerows. The male woos his mate by offering her a dead fly or other insect,
wrapped up in a silk parcel. After breeding, the female is very distinctive, for she carries
her large, globe-shaped cocoon beneath her sternum, grasped firmly by her falces and
palps, and may be seen hurrying about in this fashion over seemingly insurmountable
obstacles. Before the eggs hatch, she constructs a silken tent, making use of the tops of
grass stems as supports, and hangs the cocoon within it. After hatching, she continues to
assist them by tearing the tent open to let them out. The process is illustrated by a series
of photographs in Theodore H. Savory, The Spiders and Allied Orders of the British Isles,
London, 1945, Pls. 29, 32, 35, 37, 40.
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Araneus diadematus
Our cradle empty, we shall climb
To a high place, to catch the wind
And fly, strewing gossamer as we go,
Singly, flowing without will, to land
Wherever.

We shall know, by the compass

Blotched in white upon our backs,
Where to spin the spokes, and how
To spire the wheel; with one leg, feel
The trembling.

Approach too fast, and we shall quake,

And blur the whorl with shaking
From the underside, the compass
Pointing down, our legs the eight points
Taking.

At night we eat the orb, conserve

The silk, to spin again by morning,
Indelicately, cramming all
Into open mouths, every spoke
Consuming.

We spin the globes of nurture

After mating, span them so,
With loving claws, adore the
Minor worlds we make, compass
Turning.

Entwined in silk, their spinnerets

Are forming, massed bundles
Of eyes, and legs, and fangs
Entangling. Each of us
Expiring.
Notes: Veronica Godines, Araneus Diadematus, animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu.
Theodore H. Savory, The Spiders and Allied Orders of the British Isles, London, 1945, pp.
130-131. The common “Garden Spider” has a characteristic “cross” on its back, and is the
archetypal orb-weaver. Immatures, already orphans by the time they emerge, go out to
seek their fortunes by abseiling more or less at random on air-currents, attached to an
anchor point by nothing but a thread of gossamer.
 25

Fonts and Corbels

A hound stalks upside down
A stag of seven tines;
A snake writhes on her side,
A knot, a hoop, a line.

A fish swims through the air,

A bird flies through a sea,
A squirrel digs a hole,
A rabbit climbs a tree.

A cart before a horse,

A fox killed by a fowl,
An owl is mocked by wrens,
A demon wears a cowl.

A pig plays at the pipes,

A beetle stings a bee,
A woman spreads her legs
And gives birth to a tree.

A donkey bears the Christ,

A monkey wears a crown,
A saint works like a witch,
A hound stalks upside down.

Notes: Inspired by inverted imagery from medieval churches from across the country. The
upside-down hound comes from a corbel in Avon Dasset; the knotted snake and airborne
fish adorn the font at Hinton Parva; the cart before the horse and the pig playing bagpipes
are on a misericord at Beverley Minster; the fox is hanged by geese at Bristol cathedral;
the owl is mobbed by birds at Gloucester cathedral, and so on. Reynard the Fox is
sometimes depicted wearing a cowl. The bird, the squirrel, the beetle and the rabbit are
products of my own fevered imagination.
 26

Coprinus
Pick them under pines, before their shaggy caps have blotched
themselves to ink,
Blooming from the needled ground, where pungent horses’ turds
have mouldered,
And the long stems have risen like corporeal ghosts, bruised by your
fingers.

I like them seethed in milk, as my father cooked them once, when I

was small,
And I ate them with relish, then spat into my sleeve, compulsively,
in fear
Of poison. I remember them so well, still sizzling in their buttered
bath,
In a white dish, and the way their pink-white flesh slithered through
my lips,
A paroxysm of sense. The melting in the mouth of my first initiation.

Notes: The Shaggy Cap, Coprinus comatus, is quite delectable, and never poisonous,
although it should always be eaten before the cap begins to wither and the spores are
released. Its near relative, the Ink Cap, C. atramentarius, is also edible, but should never be
consumed in combination with alcohol, as this causes alarming symptoms, including
nausea and palpitations.
 27

Holdfasts
Weed-flesh, wind-wracked, unbleeding
Clumped and kicked along the strand.
The stench and slickness of it;
Holdfasts clench like claws.

Encrustations craze them, salt caked,

Calcareous. Crabs scuttle, crustaceans
Jerk their joints within them. Stalkeyed,
Secretive; jostling for space.

You should have seen the storm

That wrenched them from rocks
Fathoms down, their forests
Of leathered leaves whirled

By ocean winds. Water

A flurry of whiteness, then
Browned by shreds of weed.

Lifted, cliff high, and dumped,

With shrimps - bug-eyed,
Planktonic, air-drowned
And spasmodic - the holdfasts,
Amputated from concretions,
Writhe in wind, like severed worms.

And all our glib presumptions

Wither with them: we too toil
To build on rock – and wind
And water ruin us.
Notes: Written after a Force 9 gale on St. Mary’s on 27th August, 2004. The holdfasts of
brown seaweeds look like roots, but their function is limited to anchoring the plants to
rocks; they do not absorb nutrients like the roots of land plants.
 28

Gelert
Llewellyn’s bright horn
Echoes far in the morn,
The mountain winds moan.
On his horse, without hound,
The shale clatters around
And he’s riding alone.

He hunts for his prey

‘Til the closing of day,
When the sunset is wan.
With the fowls in his bag,
The deer carcasses drag.
“Where has Gelert gone?”

He comes back to his door;

There is blood on the floor,
And his child’s not there.
He can hear his heart pound,
And he sees his grey hound
Slink behind an old chair.

There is blood on the bed

And upon the hound’s head;
There is blood on his paws.
There’s a dark, spreading stain
On the soft counterpane,
There is blood on his jaws.

And Llewellyn has roared,

He has raised his great sword,
And Gelert lies slain.
His master’s grim scowl,
A blood-curdling howl,
The red blood doth drain.

Llewellyn’s eyes wild

Seek the corpse of his child,
When he hears a soft cry.
From the foot of the bed
The boy raises his head
And the dog gives a sigh.

By the side of the child

Lies a wolf, grim and wild,
Its throat is torn out,
And on the earth floor
 29

Lie the gouts of red gore

Where its blood sprayed about.

So he drops his great sword,

Llewellyn the lord,
And he picks up his hound,
And Llewellyn the strong
Digs a grave deep and long
In the dark-soiled ground.

Now Llewellyn is gone

And no man looks upon
His burial mound.
But the tears of the brave
Will water the grave
Of Gelert his hound.

Notes: This Welsh tale is kept alive by the continued existence of the dog’s grave at
Beddgelert.
 30

The Oak and the Linden

So. It has started. It is good that it should happen
Whilst we are naked. I can look upon your skin
One last time, and as your toes are rooted to the soil
I can stare at the ankles I held in my hand, when first
I removed your shoes. Your shins are bark, and yet
My eyes linger over thighs I licked, all the way
Up the inside, to make you tremble, and, though you
Are old, your hairs are black as ever, where I went down
And drank your juices, to make you writhe.

Now it is a crotch of twigs, and a furrow of wood.

There is the navel I have mouthed (how strange

My legs feel, joined in one trunk), and lichen
Grows on it already, the alveoli round your nipples
Are a soft and darker bark. The curve of you
Which I have cupped in my palm, and slept,
Is not so soft, now. And that blessed little goblet
Where your throat joins your collar – oh! Fashioned
For drinking honey! – is a place where moss might grow.
How often I have kissed the curve of that neck,
The twist of that ear. Your lips and tongue
Speak gentle, woodwind consonants. Our roots
Shall grow together. Let down your hair,
That the winglets of your passion may fall upon
My ground, to be scattered with my acorns.

We were ever simple folk. How fitting to be trees.

Notes: Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 8, the story of Baucis and Philemon. The two elderly
lovers welcomed the gods into their house even though they had only the most basic fare
to offer them. For their reward, they were made guardians of a temple, after their valley,
inhabited by people who turned the gods away, was flooded. Their wish was that neither
one of them should outlive the other, so that neither of them would grieve. The gods
answered their prayers, at the end of their lives, by transforming them both simultaneously
into trees.
 31

Beech Pollards
Long Plantation, February 2009

Cut off crotch-high, beech boles sweat

Their reeking love-juice, rank, wet:
Black runnels marking bark,
Sweating waters, gleaming dark.

Limbs spread upward, arched and green

With algal bloom. Groins between
The branches, each slit a stoup
Of fecund spunk, thick as soup,

Slimed by snails, who lodge asleep

Where the fissures gouge in deep.
Here the deer laps, cloven foot
Marking moss about the root,

Cranes her neck to reach the brink.

The trunk agape, bids her drink.
 32

Pyramidal Orchid
(Anacamptis pyramidalis)

Come out from the shade of the yew;

The oaks are done flowering, the broom
Is in full bloom at the edge of the Dene.

Grassland on limestone, a stippled swathe, over

Sheer cliffs, and ocean, smeared grey as oyster-flesh,
Meadowsweet, ruddy stemmed, half grown.

Eyes blurred by sunlight. Orchid spikes

Are smudged purple, applied with palette knife,
Interpunctions in colours of contrast.

The wind is dabbed with butterflies,

Wing-eyes impressionistic, blinking blue.
Little pointillisms, pollinia line their tongues.
Notes: Based on observation of orchids in flower on the magnesian grassland at the edge
of a coastal dene, county Durham, in 1996. Pyramidal orchids favour lime-rich soils, and
are pollinated by butterflies and moths, the pollinia attaching themselves to the insect’s
proboscis. Summerhayes (Wild Orchids in Britain, p.50) reports “as many as eleven pairs
[of pollinia] having been observed on the proboscis of a single moth”.
 33

Pollinia
Norbert Boccius, prior of the merciful brothers
At Feldsperg, taught me patience, poring over
Two thousand, two hundred and fifty illustrations.

I need it now: I shall walk, I am sure, with a stoop

After painting this; my eye has gained a habit
Of squinting, and at night I will see pollen grains

Teased out and glutinous in water, as gardeners

See dandelions in their sleep, after too much weeding.
My painting will be an essay in the sublime writ small:

Four pollinia squashed into water, each grain awash,

Adrift from its conglomerations, floating free
From a network of elastic, magnified a hundred times

Down the barrel of my microscope. Across the channel

Lieutenants too look down barrels, seeing men as so many grains.
At Kew, my ticking watch, a burning light, a glint of brass.

Notes: Franz Bauer was employed by Sir Joseph Banks at Kew, where he painted many
beautiful and meticulous pictures of orchids. He was a talented microscopist, and his
painting (1801) of four pollinia of Bletia purpurea, with their thousands of individual pollen
grains, is testimony to his patience. See Joyce Stewart and William T. Stearn, The Orchid
Paintings of Franz Bauer, London, 1993, pp. 22, 152. Bauer always wrote p as b, and vice-
versa, hence his unusual spelling of Feldsberg.
 34

Uffington Churchyard
I’ll bear with death as a going to ground
A bunkering-down, an embracing of loam,
My skull in the yew’s root. Weeds on my mound
Are heralds bringing a prodigal home.
I’ll rise as an umbel: white lacy flower
And tubular stem with tapering root,
And under my stone I’ll gratefully cower,
Nourish the seed and furnish the shoot.
My coming home will be met by a host
Who’ll rise from their graves on the night of my death.
Grass be my spirit, and nightshade my ghost,
And only the wind shall remember my breath.
But cut down these weeds and my seed cannot grow;
My coffined old soul will have nowhere to go.

Notes: When I arrived in Uffington in 2006, the parish churchyard in summer and autumn
was a glory to behold. Parts of the meadow between the gravestones had been allowed to
grow unchecked throughout the year, and the stones themselves stood in a sea of umbels
and seeding grasses. Since then, a new and stricter regime has converted the churchyard
into a monotonous lawn, and only the yews and the ivy on the gravestones remain as a
reminder that such places can be a haven for wildlife. Ironically, many churchyards in the
city of Oxford are better wildlife-refuges than those in country villages. I should hate to be
buried in a manicured churchyard where wildness was banished beyond the lych-gate, but
the thought of being buried where wildflowers and trees are permitted to grow unchecked
is one of the great consolations of mortality.
 35

Grey Top Shell

Oh my small grey snail of no importance,

Your unfurling, to these strains of Boccherini,

Is like the opening of a flower, your operculum
Conceals these skirts of labial folds, that eye
On its tentative stalk epitomises sense.

Your tentacles sway,

A slow and sliming waltz.

Notes: Inspired by Gibbula cineraria, held inverted beneath a microscope at low

magnification.
 36

Flint Knapper

The struck flakes are translucent

As fingernails, the same size,
And curved like them, knapped
Onto the ground with sparks.

Held up to the light, against

His stone-chafed thumb,
He scrutinises fissures
And imperfections.

This little skin-thin blade

Rejected, flipped into the ling,
The edge left unserrated
For the sake of a single chip.

And though the tip is marred,

And this thin sliver but
A Bronze Age factory second
The height of history makes me faint;

I treasure what was cast aside

Dizzied by the vertigo of years.

Notes: Inspired by a bronze age scraper which I found on East Porth, Samson, Isles of
Scilly on 1st June 2004. The scraper had no secondary working, and had clearly been
rejected because of the flaw at its tip.
 37

Mayfly
I am the last mayfly,
Emerging in July.
Blooms of meadowsweet
Tell me I am late.

Leaf-gilled I lived,
And ate, deep
Among drifts of detritus,
Preparing for this day,
Submerged with the silt
And my larval
Bride to be:

“We shall undulate

On air, we shall pair
Bristle-tailed,
I shall catch you,
I shall clasp you,
We shall fall to ground
Through passion.”

I shed the skin

Of the sub-imago,
My mouthparts gone,
My gut gorged with air,
Dark dun, then
Sex-charged spinner.

Flux-winged I fly,
But she lies limp,
Fallen, with
Extinguished eyes.

I am the last mayfly,

Emerging in July.
Blooms of meadowsweet
Tell me I am late.

Notes: The vast proportion of a mayfly’s life is spent underwater in the larval stage, and
adult mayflies live only to mate. The imago does not possess mouthparts, since it does not
have time to eat. Mayflies are unique among insects in moulting once more after emerging
in their winged form; the pre-moulting adults are darker in colour, and are known
colloquially as “duns”, whilst the final instar are called “spinners”. There are some 2500
species of Ephemeroptera worldwide. See Edmund Sandars, An Insect Book for the Pocket,
London, 1946, pp. 267-69 and Michael Chinery, Collins Guide to the Insects of Britain and
Western Europe, London, 1986, p. 18.
 38

Pardosa amentata
She moves in jerks, and all her eyes
Reflect a patina of rusted leaves,
Stones of bird cherries, rabbit pellets,
Twigs, worm casts, weather-worn
Flints, and acorns grown wrinkled.

Brambles barb her sky, and above

A dim haze of blue and green;
Her bristled legs make rustlings
Like a breeze in miniscule. Beneath
The soft lozenge of her abdomen,
Slung maternally from spinnerets,
The buff orb of her cocoon
Cushions her progeny. Upon it,
Like a spider on a small moon,
A red mite moves in jerks.

Notes: Pardosa (Lycosa) amentata is a small wolf spider. It does not build a web to
ensnare prey, but hunts on foot. The female carries her eggs in a roughly spherical cocoon,
which she attaches to her spinnerets and drags along beneath her wherever she goes. The
mite observed on the specimen described above may have been a parasite, or possibly
only phoretic (“hitching a ride”). Undoubtedly this mite was also supporting a flora of
phoretic fungi, a phenomenon which Robert Dunn (‘The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide’, BBC Wildlife
Magazine, August, 2003, p. 31) whimsically describes as “metaphoresy”.
 39

Dillisk

Shawled in ragged wool, she bends hunchbacked

over rocks, Corallina-crusted, when the full moon
sucks the sea from the shore; plucks with scrabbling
fingers the limp Dillisk from the stone, or rolls up
her grubby sleeve, and picks it where it swells
in swirling ribbons underwater. It clings to her skin
as though it has been smeared with bacon-grease.

Hanging in the kitchen, it withers at the edges, grows

a powdery crust of salt, stiffens like red parchment, till
wet weather leaves it hanging flaccid. Her husband
stomps mud from his feet, sinks into his armchair.
Horsehair stuffing pokes out at the arms. “The sweet smell:
It is here.” Cloying all down the valley. The crisp
white flesh all turned to grey and noisome sludge.

Now, there is only Dillisk.

Notes: Lily Newton, A Handbook of British Seaweeds, London, 1931, p. 435, says of
Rhodymenia palmata: “This is the Dulse of the Scots and Dillisk of the Irish, used by the
peasants after having been dried. It was eaten uncooked, and among the poorest peasants
of the west coast of Ireland has been said to have been the only addition to potatoes in
many of their meals.” When the potato blight arrived, it was presumably the only food
available.
 40

Charmer of Larks
I could become a charmer of larks.

I send them, skyward-spiring

In dark of winter, afire
With songsters’ envy. One breath
At my antler – roe-shed –
Summons larks to sky.

Ridgeway-walking, wizardlike,
Brandishing one over-long
Whistle-wedged hazel-wand,
I speed them sunward,
Ever diminishing specks,
Scaling invisible stairs,
Emulating stars.

Could I but call them back

To my cupped hand,
I could command
My own little realm
Of infinite impossibility:

Move on to make
Crude moulds in mud,
Clap my tiny hands
And coax clay birds to flight.

Such is pride’s sweet danger,

When a child wreaks works of wonder:
Dust made into creature,
Day-birds turned crepuscular,
Larks deprived of sleep.

Notes: About two years ago, I went to a jumble sale and purchased an old shepherd’s
thumbstick. It has become one of my favourite possessions, because the fork of the stick is
an antler of a roe deer, and one of the two tines has been carved into a whistle, which I use
to control my dog when I am on long walks. This winter, I discovered that the sound of the
whistle when I am walking on the downs is sufficient to set the skylarks into flight, fearful
that their territory has been invaded by an interloper. The effect is almost instantaneous,
but I have now ceased using the whistle on the downs, for fear that I am causing the larks
to waste valuable energy in challenging me. The reference to the making of clay birds
recalls the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, in which the infant Christ models birds out of
mud on the river-bank. He claps his hands, and they turn into real birds, which instantly fly
away. This text has haunted me since I discovered it as a teenager; I suspect it was far too
pagan in spirit to be included in the canon.
 41

The Murdered Seals

I have grown obsessed with seals, and love them
More than most men. I am half-way convinced
That some seals are men in their spare time,
And women who sleep with fishermen, half-awake,
Glistening succubi leaving sheets moist and fishy,
Birthing whelps half-human, mewling little placentals
With lubbers’ eyes.

Two lie dead on Carn Leh Cove,

Across the bay from Old Town, headless on the shingle.
I do not know whether they are true seals or half
The spawn of men; it’s too hard to tell without their eyes.

I found the first in January; father seal or mother seal

I can’t be sure, with the bones already bleaching,
Hinge-joints and shoulder blades protruding
From the scuffed and flaking skin.

I came again
To make a sealbone amulet of her toe, thinking
I should like to be half-selkie too, when I turned
To see a second corpse, limp on the stones
Like a drowned puppy, with puppydog markings
And puppydog fur all blue and waterlogged.

I thought about crying.

But now, my lubber’s eyes

Burn with the bull-seal’s rage, I want to eat
Their murderer like a pilchard, head first,
Or drag him to the deep. He will not sleep
Easy, in his moist and fishy bed.

Notes: Two headless seals found washed up on Carn Leh Cove beach in January and
February 2004.
 42

The White Flower of the Bramble

She’s the white flower of the bramble,
Dew-covered in the morn:
All others merely dusty leaves,
Tangled stems and thorns.

She’s the sweet flower of the raspberry;

I kiss her mouth more red.
Her taste is still upon my lips;
All bitterness has fled.

She’s a healing balm, a soothing herb,

Restoring sense and sight;
My pulse, my secret and my breath,
Respiring pure delight.

She’s the scented flower of apple;

Her perfume lingers still;
She’s a sunny day in winter
That chases off the chill.

She’s the white flower of the bramble;

The crown of stem and root;
And I shall love her all the more
When flower turns to fruit.
Notes: The first lines of each verse are inspired by the lyric of a traditional Irish folk song,
dating before 1789. See Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson, A Celtic Miscellany, Harmondsworth,
1971, p. 110.
 43

Killed for my Country

“What happened in the trenches to turn your heart from me,
When you took your bayonet to fight for all the free?
Have you found another mistress, whom you met behind the lines?”
“No, I spent four years watching schoolboys crippled by the mines.
I have found no other mistress; I have married death and war,
For I’ve killed for my country, now I can love no more.”

“But you promised you would hold me when freedom had been won,
And we kissed before you marched away, shouldering your gun,
Oh, how could such love wane and die amid the gallant host?”
“Ah, but love is but a spectre, and gallantry a ghost,
When your foe’s eyes look into your own saying, ‘What we fighting for?’
And I’ve killed for my country, now I can love no more.”

“But you were noble men and brave when you went to fight the Hun,
Why do you hang your head when the victory is won?
And look, you wear bright medals pinned above your heart!”
“I wear them for my enemy; I blew his head apart.
I watched him flailing in the mud, his hand clenched like a claw;
I have killed for my country, now I can love no more.”

“Then I’ll bid you goodbye though I’ve waited these four years,
I’ll burn your crumpled letters and I’ll wipe away my tears,
For you went to bring home glory, but you come with nought but shame.”
“Girl, you speak just like my Captain, who cried out, ‘Play the game!’
But my reflection in those dying eyes will haunt me ever more:
I have killed for my country, now I can love no more.
 44

Churchyard Blackbird
Black and haloed, my spiller of gold,
Stark and hallowed as a gilded ghost,
Raptured rhymer of the honeyed throat,
Pert proclaimer of embodied thought,
Spell me my tidings, cast my weird,
Illumine my way with a birdlike word
Sprung from the core of the yew's red root
Up through stone and your splayed foot,
In through your gizzard, gritted and green,
Out through your bill, yellower than grain,
Into the air, emblazoned with sun.
Sing and I live; fly, I'm undone.
 45

Dandelion Spring
This spring, dandelions took arms
Against cowslips and primroses,
Prevailing on the field of battle.

Anemones hung helmets,

Celandines were spent,
Coltsfoot spilled stuffing,

Cloud ramparts glowered

Mile-high, reedmace
Serried the ditches.

Cuckoos were clarions,

Swallows swooped: Stukas
Strafing the streams.

This spring, dandelions took arms

Against cowslips and primroses,
Prevailing on the field of battle.
 46

Sea Potatoes
They blow about like eggshells, where the sand
Is dry and bleached as they are; others stained
Brown as their namesakes, in the bilge of rotting kelp,
The spines quite gone. The biggest are parchment-thin,
Brittle beyond belief: a breath breaks them.

Once, these were buried, deeper than human hearts,

Great globs of sea-flesh, encased in shells that bristled
With spatulate spines, each mouth a human orifice;
Each back a hairy mound, like a human cunt.
Lungless clumps of life beneath the sand.

Now, with flesh gone out of them, and all the gummy
Tube-feet withered, all the slime washed clean,
The mucus dried, and the breathing tube
That probed the sand and sought its end, all shrunk,
They break like bloodless wafers in the sun.

Notes: The sea-potato, or heart urchin, Echinocardium cordatum, is found in great

numbers on the beaches of St. Martin’s, Isles of Scilly. It is a sand-burrowing sea urchin
which has lost its radial symmetry, and has highly-adapted tube-feet which stick out from
the shell, including some which extend up through a vertical, mucus-covered tube to the
surface of the sand. When the animal dies, the soft part rots away like that of other sea
urchins, but leaves behind a much more brittle shell. On windy days, these may be seen
blowing about the beach. So brittle are these shells that my attempts to bring them home
with me intact have nearly always ended in failure.
 47

Marchantia
As deep a green as my liver is red
And lobed with equal fleshiness,
Liverworts line the meadow-drain
With their slick upholstery:
Slithers of thallus, anchored
By watersoaked rhizoids,
Their surfaces gleaming,
Wet as vulvas, dripping dew
Back into the stream. Each plant
Wears its sex on a stalk:
Primed gametophytes
Waiting for rain.

Next year, they will invade

Our grandmother’s greenhouse
Perversely scaling the pots
Of tropical orchids, their goblets
Gorged with mist condensed:
The females stellar, rayed;
The males spreading parasols,
Shading a refracted sun.
Notes: Marchantia polymorpha is the largest British liverwort, and is commonly regarded
as typifying all the main characteristics of the order Marchantiales. It often colonises the
banks of streams, but is equally at home in heated greenhouses. The upper surface is
typically covered in goblet-shaped organs, and the gametophyte tissue is borne aloft on
stalks, or peduncles. Male and female plants grow as separate individuals. See Arthur J.
Jewell, The Observer’s Book of Mosses and Liverworts, London, 1955, pp. 27-28.
 48

Sweet Flag
A single thread from the hem of her gown
Has snagged, and now unravels;
The fabric crimped and puckered
Lifts to show her ankles.
She tuts and bustles winningly,
A dimple punctuates her pout.
She bends in vain to smooth it out,

And he stoops to meet her, falcon-eyed

And glowering. He glimpses the cleft
Of her corseted breast, and breathes
A scent of citrus. The hem has dropped
By her slipper-sole; he grasps the thread
And snaps it. A puckered leaf upon the floor
Mirrors the crimping: beguiling flaw,

And beside it, a spadix stands erect.

He smirks; she almost blushes,
Then shuffles on to take her pew,
The iris flowers and rushes
Crushed beneath her velvet foot:
They leak the scents of fading life.
He turns, surveys his wilting wife.

He makes comparison, weighs up fate;

At length, the service ends.
Wolsey takes his jewelled hand,
Shams obedience and bends
His neck to hear the soft rebuke:
“Candlesticks; Calamus on the floor!”
He turns, and follows her out the door.

A single thread from the hem of her gown

Has snagged, and now unravels;
The fabric crimped and puckered
Lifts to show her ankles.
He crushes a leaf of Calamus;
Its cloying leaves him cold.
She lets it drag. Her eyes are fixed

On basket, axe, scaffold.

Notes: Acorus calamus, the Sweet Flag, is so named because its leaves are superficially
similar to those of Iris pseudacorus, the yellow flag iris, alongside which it grows in marshy
places and on the banks of rivers and streams. It is not an iris, however, but a member of
the Araceae, and its closest English relative is the Cuckoo Pint or Lords and Ladies: a
relationship which becomes obvious when Acorus flowers, since both plants have a phallic
 49

spadix. Acorus is an introduced plant, and was grown by the herbalist Gerard in his garden
in Holborn. It became established in the Fens, and has since colonised marshy areas all
over the country, although it is a shy flowerer. In the absence of flowers, the leaves of
Acorus can be differentiated from those of Iris pseudacorus by their asymmetrical midrib,
and by their tendency to pucker at one edge of the leaf, just like the snagged hem of a
garment. Acorus was highly valued as a “strewing herb” – a plant which was strewn once a
year on the floors of churches and other buildings along with others such as those of
meadowsweet – because it has a scent reminiscent of tangerines when crushed. Perhaps
the name “flag” is related in some way to the flagstones on which it was strewn. The smell
is certainly sweet, but I find it slightly nauseating. During the reign of Henry VIII, Cardinal
Wolsey was, according to Mrs Leyel, “censured for his extravagance in the use of this herb,
which was very expensive because of the cost of transport.” My assumption that the smell
of Acorus might have played its part at the first meeting of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn is of
course pure conjecture, but not at all unlikely. See: Mrs C.F. Leyel, Herbal Delights:
Tisanes, Syrups, Confections, Electuaries, Robs, Juleps, Vinegars and Conserves, London,
1937, p. 263; Geoffrey Grigson, An Englishman’s Flora, St. Albans, 1975, pp. 466-7; Richard
Mabey, Flora Britannica, London, 1996, pp. 384-5.
 50

Burnet Moths
Burnet moths, congregating to mate
On a head of knapweed, sway
In the breeze, their loving arrangement
Top-heavy, like the flowering of some strange
Iridescent orchid: a spotted wing is a labellum,
A dark body: a curling spur,
The hooked antennae: black pollinia,
Awaiting fertilisation, a pulsing, fecund bloom.
Notes: Personal observation at Seven Barrows, near Lambourn. Apart from knapweeds,
the pyramidal orchid is itself a favourite resting place for these moths, but their own
flower-like appearance is undeniable, especially when they are clustered together. The
labellum is the lip, or landing platform, of an orchid; the spur is a receptacle for nectar, and
the pollinia are devices which attach themselves to pollinating insects for distribution to
other flowers.
51
 52

Louseworts
I have become an admirer of lopsidedness
In louseworts; it is one of nature’s little joys.
The hood, a ruddy cowl, stands askew
Above the lower lip. The bees the plant employs
As couriers, unwitting, stand aslant,
And brush the poking stigma with their pates,
Then push the plant’s pink labia aside
To suck the nectar. The lousewort waits
As anthers, brushed by hairs, release
Their load; and all around the fenland seems to pant.
While sundews flinch and butterworts exhale,
The bee, bewildered, seeks another plant,
For parasites caress before they harm,
And stealth knows all the perquisites of charm.
Notes: There are two species of Pedicularis in Britain: the meadow lousewort (P. sylvatica)
and the marsh lousewort or red rattle (P. palustris). Both have slightly asymmetrical labiate
flowers which allow bees to land on one side of the lower lip without colliding with the
hood. The stigma protrudes beyond the hood, so that it brushes the head of any insect that
lands on the lip, picking up the pollen grains adhering to it from an earlier visit to another
flower. Inside the hood, the stamens are exactly positioned so that the bee cannot access
the nectar without being smeared with more pollen. Louseworts are also partially parasitic,
deriving a portion of their nutrients from the roots of other plants. They were once blamed
for transferring lice to sheep, but in fact, the opposite is true: louseworts contain a natural
insecticide. I wonder whether this is produced to prevent bees from chewing at the outside
of the corolla and stealing the nectar without coming into contact with the anthers; this is
certainly their habit with plants such as monk’s hood. See G. Clarke Nutall and H.
Essenhigh Corke, Wildflowers as they Grow, London, c. 1914, pp. 21-22.
 53

Willowherb
Last winter, incendiaries ignited
A bloom of flame in your bedroom,
And the gramophone gouged
Through ‘Lili Marlene’ one last time
Before the bakelite buckled
And the window-glass turned liquid,
You lying there on the counterpane
As though asleep. The Luftwaffe
Droned your orisons as the rafters
Turned to ash.

And now, high summer –

Your house a withered flower –
The ruins are rank with willowherb,
Your open fireplace gutted, alive
With a rash of pink. A hundred weeds
Spire skyward, their summits flowers
Unbroken, painted magenta. Between six
And seven this morning , the blooms beneath
Opened, stamens primed and ready,
Domed above a gift of nectar.

One storey below, in the willowherb’s

Wall-less house, the styles wear bold
White crosses, beckoning bees
In a mute semaphore. Beneath these,
Pods curve and crack, their seeds
Aloft, alighting where your paraffin fire
Burst in a blaze of gold.

The first war coughed up poppies

From the cold and ruptured earth;
The second, willowherb, for there were
Not widows, but wraiths, with their
Seeds borne on the wind.

Notes: After the Blitz, one of the first plants to colonize bombed buildings in London was
the Rosebay Willowherb. Although it has never looked back since the Second World War, its
remarkable proliferation in the twentieth century had been noted as early as 1912 by G.
Clarke Nuttall, Wild Flowers as They Grow, Volume 1, pp. 89-96. Nuttall also provides an
unparalleled description of a single flower-spike of the willowherb, from the unopened
flowers at the top, down to the seed-pods at the bottom of the spike. The scene I have
described is imagined, but was reproduced many hundreds of times in wartime London.
 54

On an Edelweiss in the Back of Shröter’s Alpine

Flora
There it sits, transfixed and flattened
Between the green and floral-patterned
Endpapers. Nine woolly bracts, and within
An embroidered silver star, fringed
With silk, held in place with the serrated
Edging from a book of stamps, labelled
In pencil: “Santa Maria, July 1952.” Where
Did she send them: those postcards stamped
With gum licked by the same wet tongue?
Was she quite out of breath when she held it
To her breast? Or cold, detached, exact,
Pasting it in place with a narrowed eye
And a pursed lip, flattening it precisely?
Did she kiss its flannelled face, or snap
The cover, a sprung trap, after depriving it
Of sky?
 55

Birthwort
What did the nuns at Godstow want
With Birthwort? Its stench attracted only flies,
And they writhed, imprisoned and foetal,
Goggle-eyed inside its green and swelling wombs.

Its virtues not far removed from vices, its signature

A vulva prematurely opened, its work the grief
Or relief of expectant mothers. The flowers: pale
Lopsided alembics in the grass, ditch-deep.

What do I, sick of sun at Godstow, want

With Birthwort? A plant that outlives bone,
Religions, stone, and budges not one inch
In five hundred years. The flies reborn

Like ghosts of embryos: little slain ones

Raised to life.
Notes: Aristolochia clamatitis was rather provocatively described by Professor E.F.
Warburg as “a good abortifacient, only found in England in nunneries, where it is an
introduced plant.” It is certainly true that the plant survives on the sites of monastic
gardens, and Richard Mabey, Flora Britannica, (1996), p. 38, observes that “the plant clings
on amongst the nettles at the ruins of Godstow Nunnery outside Oxford.” In 2008, I sought
the plant out myself in a fit of obsession, but it took me more than an hour to find it,
blooming in profusion in a wooded ditch beneath one of the convent walls, at least 500
years after it was first planted there. Aristolochia is certainly poisonous, but the shape of
the flowers was reminiscent of the human womb and birth canal, making its own ironic
appeal to adherents of the Doctrine of Signatures. Like Cuckoo Pint, Birthwort flowers have
backwards pointing hairs which help to temporarily imprison flies (attracted by its foetid
smell), in order to increase the likelihood of pollination. See also Geoffrey Grigson, The
Englishman’s Flora, 1975, p. 243, and Lesley Gordon, A Country Herbal, 1980, p. 23.
 56

Arrowhead
Stamped with characters of beauty, their veins
Like waters at a confluence of streams, arrowheads
Point heavenwards. The traceries of their leaves
Are essays in divine proportion: three lobes
Of an arch, mirrored in the initials
Of her half-forgotten, inverted Book of Hours,
In the stained glass of her chapel, in the niche
Of the piscina where her fingers dipped
Before the benediction, and mirrored also
In the shadow of one leaf, which makes
A window to the riverbed. I too wish to dip
My outstretched hand in that dark and holy water.

Notes: The poem refers to Charles Collins’ painting, Convent Thoughts, currently housed
in the Ashmolean museum. John Ruskin praised the leaves of Alisma plantago-aquatica, the
Water Plantain, as models of “divine proportion” which endorsed his theory of gothic
architecture, claiming in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) that they are “shapes
which in the everyday world are familiar to the eyes of men, [and with which] God has
stamped those characters of beauty which He has made it man’s nature to love”. In a
review in which he defended the aesthetic merits of Collins’ painting, Ruskin maintained: “I
happen to have a special acquaintance with the water plant Alisma Plantago ... and as I
never saw it so thoroughly or so well drawn, I must take leave to remonstrate with you,
when you say sweepingly that these men [Pre-Raphaelite painters] 'sacrifice truth as well
as feeling to eccentricity.' For as a mere botanical study of the Water Lily and Alisma, as
well as of the common lily and several other garden flowers, this picture would be
invaluable to me, and I heartily wish it were mine.” Unfortunately for Ruskin, he had made
a grave error of identification, for there is no Alisma in Collins’ painting, but there are
Arrowhead plants (Sagittaria sagittifolia), in the bottom left hand corner of the painting. For
a more detailed discussion of Ruskin’s mistake, see Elizabeth Deas, "The Missing Alisma:
Ruskin's Botanical Error", Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies (Fall 2001): 4-13.
 57

Ricochet
Muffled against frostbite, Albert Markham
Saw them on the frozen Arctic Ocean,
Some miles north of land, searching for seaweed.
There perhaps, he first watched them ricochet,
Startled by the sight of his sledge-hounds,
Skittering across the ice on their hind legs only,
White against the white of the always-light.

Arctic hares come to graze in herds, on saxifrage,

Purple like heathers the height of lichens,
And on stunted willows with permafrosted roots,
Grouping against the gaze of the gyr-falcon.
Try to track one with your eye; the one hare
Weaves among the weft of the multitude,
White against the white of the always-light.

The Ellesmere hares are a race apart

Sharing the wastes with musk-ox, wolves,
And by October, with the growing dark.
Unafraid of man on this frontier, far
From the zones of his pyrrhic wars,
Curious of his cameras and paraphernalia.
The flash gun ricochets in always-dark.
Notes: Arctic hares do sometimes go out on the frozen ocean in search of seaweed, as
observed by the polar explorer Albert Markham in 1876, but they more commonly subsist
on the low growing tundra plants mentioned in the poem. The Ellesmere island hares are
classified as a distinct subspecies, Lepus arcticus monstrabilis, on account of their unusual
size (individuals weigh between three and five-and-a-half kilograms). When startled, they
have an unusual, kangaroo-like method of locomotion, known as a “ricochet”, but it is, in
fact, notoriously difficult to frighten them. Unlike other hares, they form large, and
sometimes enormous, herds, apparently because this makes it harder for predators to
track specific individuals. Arctic hares are so unused to human activity that seemingly
frightening noises such as the starting-up of an engine are regarded by them as quite
neutral. They tend to regard human beings with curiosity rather than distrust. Their year is
divided into two; at the height of the Arctic summer, it is light for twenty-four hours a day,
and between mid-October and mid-February, it is perpetually dark. See Jerry Kobalenko,
‘Hares on High’, in BBC Wildlife, Vol. 20, No. 12, December 2002, pp. 45-50.
 58

Sleeping in Greenwood
From ‘Outcasts in Greenwood’

Clutching a gaunt branch, leafless and deep-grained,

Over the spreading dew, over the deer’s spoor,
Under a crow’s wing, I slept as the day waned.

No more the strength ebbed, no more the eye strained,

Winning the lone fight, fighting the lost war,
Clutching a gaunt branch, leafless and deep-grained,

Broken and brought low, beaten and bloodstained,

Racked by the healed wound, healed by the torn sore
Under a crow’s wing, I slept as the day waned.

Not by the priest purged, not by the smoke sained,

Cursing the gained good, nursing the found flaw,
Clutching a gaunt branch, leafless and deep-grained,

Lauding the lorn lie, loathing the truth feigned,

Testing the craven mettle, fretting the settled score,
Under a crow’s wing, I slept as the day waned.

Lord where the rich rotted, slave where the fool reigned,
Peeling the clean skull, picking the clenched jaw,
Clutching a gaunt branch, leafless and deep-grained,
Under a crow’s wing, I slept as the day waned.
 59

The Outlaws’ Commission

From ‘Outcasts in Greenwood’

So, the little one, the bear, seeks guidance

From the crow: “Where among mortals shall we
Wreck, good one, whom among men shall we eat
And whom, hiding and mantled, shall we let be?”

And when the creeping, weeping crow casts off

His hollow hood, he knows by stars he must recite
The hidden code of carnivores, and gaunt crows
Whose stropped beaks and teeth defend the right:

“Look you, brawling bear, to harm no plowman

Who fears, and sweats to leave some shallow furrow,
Likewise, hurt no scrounging knight, nor any careless squire
Whose sword is but his harrow,

For these, though uncouth, are serving Death,

And worship heaven’s Queen.
And never molest that uncouth guest
The yeoman who goes lost, or lovelorn, by the green.

These poor, prating bishops, archiepiscopal paupers

Who never stoop, who barely hesitate to pray:
We rakes shall ravage where they fail and fall
As rooks strip dead and rotting birds of prey.

That high and helpless knave of Nottingham,

Who wants to pluck my plumes, or make me tame -
He is civil law, but I am serfdom’s lore -
So stretch your string and hunt him, like his game.”

Then up spoke Scathelocke, the cringing wolf

Whose howl’s a wake of watchfulness by night,
“The word of truth has fled, and hope lies dead –
The only test of worth lies in the fight.”
 60

Winter in Greenwood
(From ‘Outcasts in Greenwood’)

I never knew before that trees could hate,

Or starlight spread a plague within the bone.
In summer when I hawked, or sought the hart,
I mopped my brow, knew nought of winter’s bane.
But here I eat, from my own looted plate,
The meat so green my gall must rise and churn,
Where crow-men roost, and fox-faced ruffians prate,
Where wolfsheads yawn and milk-gorged nightjars churr.
My bones ache, my bare nose seeps beneath
A borrowed hood, my back on loam.
The bent twigs drip, and from the withering north
The wind makes wrack, and leaves my horses lame.
I strain to swallow pride, like dripping phlegm,
And seek the crow’s bent form in ghastly dawn
Where he hunches low, above a feeble flame
As sickly as the lips of infants drowned.
I plead with him, “At once strike off my head
Or let me go.” Within the hood, his breath is held.
 61

Cú Chulainn and the Morrigán

It was a shriek to clot blood, or curdle milk;
The night air hung in clumps about our room.

I saw his buttock flash white in moonlight, the skins

That lined our bed strewn behind him.

With his britches I pursued him, grabbed

His sword, his gleaming battleaxe, his shield.

His chainmail weighed me down. His breath

Hung behind him like a stain in crystal night.

Her horse, blood-red in blenching moonshine,

Tramped on a single leg, the chariot pole

Pegged to his bleeding head, rammed

Through his body, out his sanguine, puckered arse,

His whinny made angels writhe. And She

Was red as him, her eyebrows gore-tinged, her cloak

Dipped in dregs of battle. Beside them, a man

Drove a cow by hazel-fork, with tonking bell, inanely grinning.

My husband, goosepimpled in the dark, his bollocks

Taut with cold, bellowed, “I am Cú Chulainn, cattle-master

And you, a cow-stealer. Submit, or feel my sword.”

And she of the reddened brow strode up to him,

Riled him with riddles, till he clutched the chariot wheel

And wept with rage. Her screech made mud clots

In the puddles where they stood.

I felt ridiculous,
Out at midnight, clutching britches, sword and axe

And a chainmail suit, for a man, alone and naked.

On his shoulder, a croaking crow.

Notes: The Ulster cycle records a number of encounters between Cú Chulainn and the
battle goddess, sometimes known as the Morrigán, and sometimes as the Babdh. This
poem records a typical meeting between the two, from the perspective of Cú Chulainn’s
wife. See Miranda Green, Celtic Goddesses: Warriors, Virgins and Mothers, British Museum
Press, 1995, pp. 44-45: “The hero was lying asleep one night when he heard a fearful
shriek and rushed, naked, outside, his wife following with his weapons and his clothes. He
encountered the battle-fury in the image of a red woman, with red eyebrows and a red
cloak, riding in a chariot to which was attached a single red horse with one leg, the chariot
pole passing through its body and secured to its forehead with a peg. Next to the vehicle
walked a man holding a fork of hazel, driving a cow. Cú Chulainn challenged the
appropriation of this animal, since he was guardian over all the cattle of Ulster. The couple
responded in riddles… the apparition disappeared save for the fury herself who remained,
in the form of a crow.
 62

Rogationtide
Beating the bounds of the parish, I saw
The old gods on the outskirts, skulking in the woods.
It was all moonbreak and sunglow. Woodwales jittered.

Walking back through the graveyard, I heard

The wights on the gravestones, howling of the Flood.
They were jeering and gaping, as their tarsals clattered.

Passing close by the lychgate, I felt

The nightingales wounded, dreaming of dark.
There was japing and jarring. The fern-owls waited.

Going in through the narthex, I smelt

Fumes from the fox-spraint, stinking of blood,
With its dripping and clotting, lust unsated.

Pressing hard by the altar, I tasted

Sloe gin fermented, and bread made from bark.
The Lady was waiting; the flowers withered.
Notes: Inspired by a misericord representing the month of May, in St. Mary’s Church,
Ripple, Worcestershire. At Rogationtide in the Middle Ages, the congregation ‘beat the
bounds’ of the parish in a procession. A garlanded figure of the Virgin Mary was carried
before the procession, so the tradition certainly performed the function of a fertility rite.
 63

No Puesc Sofrir Qu’a la Dolor

I cannot stop my tongue returning
To probe this throbbing, fractured tooth.
So too my heart: flowers bring yearning
When blossoms break, rekindling youth.
All through the woodland, sounding song,
With sweet, enamoured natures, birds
Spin joy to shroud my pensive words.
Then how shall I probe, rehearsing wrong?
Songs of birds, in meadow and field –
These renew me – to these I yield.
Notes: Paraphrase of an octosyllabic lyric by the troubadour Giraut de Bornelh (b. 1140, d.
c. 1200). Born “of relatively humble parentage” at Exideuilh, near Périgueux, Giraut gained
a reputation as the father of the troubadors. There are only two surviving examples of his
music. For a beautiful recording of this song, interpreted by the incomparable Maria Lafitte,
try the Naxos CD, Music of the Troubadours, Ensemble Unicorn, 1999.
 64

Quan Vei Lauzeta Mover

When I see the hovering lark
Spire the sky for joy and art,
He seems compelled to so embark
On flight by his delighted heart,
And envy grips me that this smudge
Of feathers, lit with solar fire,
Flies so lightly. I begrudge
His bold, precipitate desire.

I, who thought myself well-versed

In love, am but a novice still:
I can’t forbear to love, though cursed
With wants that she will not fulfil
Although she owns my heart and life
And at her whim she keeps the world.
Apart from her, and wrought with strife,
Wantonly my hopes are hurled

Around a firmament so wide

I lose myself. Before me pass
Those memories – cruel they abide –
Of how I glimpsed her in the glass.
The glass entrances now as then,
And its enchantments all are cruel,
So I am held, hopeless as when
Narcissus gazed into a pool.

I’ve done with ladies, I like to say –

More likely they have done with me –
I once stood for them in the fray
But now I shrug and let them be.
Since none of them will help me scale
Her heights, I reach their depths and plumb
My foolery. In short, I fail:
Through singing high I am struck dumb.

And where has Pity flown? This bird

Flits by with greater weight upon
Its wings than she; no poet’s word
Can move her, for she has none.
Pity save me, I stoop, I trip
To catch her footfalls, trap her breath
Yet never have it in my grip.
I long for life; she chooses death.

With her, it’s valueless to pray;

My supplications drip like rain.
 65

She looks displeased, and turns away,

So I shall not beseech again.
This fool desists, and longs to die,
Interred in some cold, secret place
And like the bird, takes wing to fly
From love and loss and dull disgrace.

Tristan, find a fool or king

To make your verses and adore
This lady. Or let the skylark sing:
He is a better troubadour.

Notes: Paraphrase of a song by the troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn , who was born c.
1130-1140 at the castle of Ventadorn in Limousin, apparently the son either of a baker or a
foot-soldier. He entered the service of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and later, of Raimon V, Count
of Toulouse, before retiring to a monastery and dying in the last decade of the twelfth
century. There are 45 surviving poems by Bernart, 18 of which have extant musical scores.
A marvellous interpretation of this song, sung in the original Occitanian language – and far
more up-beat than might be expected – can be heard on the Naxos CD, Music of the
Troubadors, Ensemble Unicorn, 1999. In the interests of retaining at least some of a
modern audience’s sympathies for the poet, I have truncated the fifth and the sixth stanzas
of the original into one verse. The abridged section insists that in proving untrustworthy,
the poet’s lady “does show herself true woman”: a notion which was not uncommon in the
twelfth century, but which Bernart would no doubt himself have jettisoned were he alive
today.
 66

Bei M’es Qu’eu Chant

Right it is to sing of love:
The air is fresh, days are bright;
Meadows, hedgerows thrill the sight.
I hear the warbling above
Of little birds – trunks their nave,
Leaves their vaults – so help me, Love,
Greenfinch, goldfinch there above –
He who sings, his love to crave,
Like a lover must behave.

I am not a lover, but

A suitor. I do not fear
Grief or pain. I shed no tear
For pride, my eyes sealed shut
To wrong. I fear – fear itself.
But, to her I bend my art
And dare not reveal my heart
But must keep it dark in stealth:
I have found her hidden wealth.

I have learnt not to compare

Her allure with anything:
A rose is a tawdry thing,
But she is fresh. Would I dare
Describe her body? God’s grace
Made mouth, eyes, the world to light.
My one complaint: far too bright
The beauty shines from her face,
Too pure for her worldly place.

To the king, my worthy song!

Who nurtures joys through his laws –
King bereft of earthly flaws –
He alone can right this wrong.
Carcassonne he must regain
From Montagut, by the sword:
He will be my worthy Lord.
French or Arab, Cathar’s bane,
Bare your neck, and writhe in pain!
Notes: Paraphrase of a lyric by the Provençal troubadour, Raimon de Miraval (fl. 1180-
1215). The poem begins as an almost stereotypical troubadour lyric, but the sudden, angry
twist in the final stanza reveals a poet hoping – perhaps with his own measure of cynicism -
to maintain the tradition of courtly love in the face of that most cynical of wars, the
Albigensian Crusade. Raimon was almost certainly a Cathar, and therefore had recently
been declared a heretic by the papacy as an excuse for the French annexation of
Occitania. His castle at Miraval, to the north of the Carcassonne, was seized from him and
his three brothers by Albigensian crusaders in 1209 or 1211, and here he looks forward to
its recapture by one of his patrons: perhaps Count Raimon VI of Toulouse, who was
ultimately defeated by the crusader Simon de Montfort in 1213. It is difficult to ascertain
 67

the exact beliefs of the Cathar ‘heretics’, since we have received most of their ideas
through the filter of their conquerors and the loaded questions of the Inquisition. They are
said to have been dualists who believed that spirit was good and flesh was evil, and
therefore denied the incarnation of Christ. This seems paradoxical, given that the major
cultural contribution of Occitania to the outside world was the idea of ‘courtly love’, in
which a male courtier vaunted an earthly lady almost to the point of idolatry, thereby
instigating one of the only noble mediaeval traditions that was not misogynistic or flesh-
denying. I have tried to convey some of the tensions implied in this paradox in the third
stanza. It must also be noted that the politics of courtly love were often intertwined with
more worldly matters, and courtiers often sought the favour of noble ladies in order to
improve their social position. Precisely what is meant by the lady’s “wealth” or “worth”
(“Non aus mostrar ne retrair/ Mon cor qu’ill tenc rescondut,/ Pois aic son pretz conogut”) I
have left for the reader to decide. Maria Lafitte may be heard singing the original on
Ensemble Unicorn’s CD, Music of the Troubadours, 1999.
68
 69

Ar Me Puesc Ieu Lauzar D’Amor

Love is satisfactory now;
Neither sleep nor food he steals.
Cold and heat blench not my brow;
Fatigue stops snapping at my heels.
Bedded, my insomniac prowl:
I am not slave to stealth nor sex.
I am no easy man to vex,
I hire no envoy in a cowl,
I have no next, subtext or ex –
I’m cleaved from her, by dice or hex.

I have greater satisfaction;

Betraying not, fear no betrayal,
Fear no traitor, no attraction.
‘Gainst jealousy, I’m clad in mail.
Nor am I angry serf, nor slave,
Nor am I wounded, made to yield,
Nor do I cower beneath my shield,
Nor do I pine for hope, nor rave
Of cruel Love. My fate is sealed:
My heart ripped out; the blood congealed.

Nor do I beg, or claim to die,

Nor in languor freeze, nor burn,
Though she is sweet, avert my eye:
She is not mine; I do not yearn.
I do no homage, sure that she
Is not a lord. I don’t submit
To be her servant, cringe or spit
Like some low thrall. My heart is free.
I’m not her captive. Chains don’t fit.
I abscond. I jink. I quit.

The victor alone deserves praise,

And not the conquered. That’s a fact.
The victor shall his garland raise;
The cringing loser shall attract
A gaping grave. It’s true that he
Who wins his spirit from desire
Quenches the destroying fire.
He strips off flesh – is flensed and free –
This man alone steps from the mire
To hurl his cares upon the pyre.

I despise the priest’s prim prayer

Grovelling to woo the will of God
And bend His ways. Be warned! Beware!
 70

Such suppliants deserve the sods

Of soil that sink their souls! They stink
Of feelings, fondly felt, these fools!
Worth to the worthy! Fate befalls
The churl; his cold chains clink.
When Cupid’s crossbow fires, he feels
It in his flesh. Fraud always fails.

No fickle fancy makes me blink.

No dithering desire defrauds
My will. My love takes flight. Flesh fades.

Notes: Paraphrase of a contrafactum to Giraut de Bornelh’s ‘No puesc sofrir’, by the

troubadour poet Peire Cardenal (b. 1180, and died nearly a century later). Peire adopts the
rhyme scheme and syllabics of Giraut’s original, but then, in a show of poetic bravado,
maintains the scheme for a further four stanzas and three additional lines. Just to put any
poetic competitors in their place, he also alliterates the final thirteen lines more
consistently than I have done here. Peire was fortunate to be writing in the Occitan
language, in which the word-endings –ir and –atz are relatively common, so that the same
rhyme scheme could be carried from verse to verse. This is not possible in English without
the result sounding forced, so I have introduced new rhymes for each verse. I have
deliberately combined archaisms with anachronisms in order to give some impression of
the clashing sounds of the line-endings in the original, especially in the first verse. Apart
from its verbal pyrotechnics, the poem is notable in other respects. It loudly – perhaps too
loudly – eschews a whole range of courtly conventions: the love-messenger, the
submission of knight to lady, the doing of homage, and so on. Still more significantly, its
scorn for the flesh may represent a truly ascetic spirit, or may merely signify a bad case of
amatory sour grapes – but given its Occitan context, an Inquisitor would certainly say that
it smacks of the Cathar “heresy”. My paraphrase amplifies this element of the poem
somewhat. Maria Lafitte attacks this lyric with even more than her customary verve on the
Naxos CD, Music of the Troubadors, 1996.