Three Regional
Poets
by William Woodrow
English Association Bookmarks
No. 57
English Association Bookmarks Number 57
Three Regional Poets
Studies of the work of George Mackay Brown, Norman Nicholson
and R.S. Thomas
by
William Woodrow
Scope of topic
The links between literature and society create a complex network of ideas: it is not simply a
matter of cause and effect. If the connection were simply linear then most of the poetry
written since World War 1, certainly the most effective poetry, would be predominantly urban
in imagery and in relevance. I do not think this is so.
It is certainly not the case with the three poets referred to above. The reader of their work
cannot imagine them living anywhere other than Orkney, S.W.Cumbria and mid-Wales
respectively.
Each of them wrote with a dialect-inspired vocabulary. All obtained their creative stimuli from
immediate surroundings. Each developed his own philosophy from everyday events. All
possessed a strong sense of history and their work forged a bond between past and present
which raised the characters in their narrative works to almost mythic proportions and created,
in their lyrical and contemplative poems the deeply held religious faith.
Books to read
George Mackay Brown - Selected Poems 1954 - 1992, John Murray
Norman Nicholson - Selected Poems 1940 – 1982, Faber & Faber
R. S. Thomas - Collected Poems 1945 – 1990, Orion Paperback.
Notes
“Decay of language is always a symptom of a more serious sickness.”
George Mackay Brown - An Orkney Tapestry.
One can sit and brood upon such a proposition all day and end by asking more questions
than were there at the beginning.
If I were writing a philological treatise my argument would be to show that all languages (in
the Indo-European group at least) have gone through continuous simplification and that
present day language has shed, for the most part, the complex grammar and syntax of, say,
Classical Greek and Latin, Old Norse and Old English. The same is true of the very ancient
Celtic group, which gave rise to Brythonic and Goidelic: the former being represented by
Breton, Cornish and Welsh; the latter by Scottish Gaelic, Irish and Manx.
The relevance of this linguistic diversion may be seen in the work of our chosen three poets.
George Mackay Brown owed much to the influence of the skaldic verse of the Sagas directly
from his translations of the “Orkneyinga Saga”. Indirectly he absorbed the idioms and speech
rhythms of the natural dialect speakers around him. In this way he synthesised a unique
voice from the “classical” or bardic high style and the vernacular of the ordinary people.
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A study of the language of our two other poets reveals a slightly more “open” influence.
Norman Nicholson’s diction and vocabulary reflected the idiom of the fell farmers about him;
at the same time he followed the traditions of Wordsworth and the “nature poets” (such as
Cowper) for much of his subject matter and the manner in which he integrated people with
the natural world that they inhabited.
In the case of R. S. Thomas we see a man who began life in the Anglo-Welsh atmosphere of
Cardiff, who read Theology and was ordained priest; who then spent the rest of his life in
rural mid-Wales as the parish priest of a scattering of impoverished farmers who were largely
Welsh speaking. To make his bond more secure Thomas learnt Welsh. It is this that gave him
the credibility to write honestly and movingly, but never sentimentally, concerning the
material and spiritual conditions of a largely inarticulate populance.
These three, then, all shared the reservoir of words and phrases common to the communities
they lived in. Their use of language was direct and unselfconscious. Since each worked within
a separate community, it is difficult to find a common factor to link them linguistically. It is
possible (but rather inadequate) to say that the link between poet and community, in each
case, resembled that of John Clare: the mundane expressed with a luminosity and a
penetration that is unsentimental and direct. Clare showed us, as, indeed, our three chosen
writers show us, what Eliot attributed to Webster in “Whispers of Immortality”; namely “....
the skull beneath the skin.”
By contrast, the scholarly cleric of the nineteenth century, William Barnes persisted in writing
his verse in a transcription of the spoken dialect of Dorset. I do not feel that putting the
speech patterns of spoken language into a phonetic form is ever successful as Art. It can only
have had application in the work of the philologist, before the development of the taperecorder. Such attempts in poetry usually lack intonation and cadence. I am glad that none of
our three writers was ever guilty of this error of judgement. Yet they all managed to convey
the very essence of the speech and thought of Orkney, Cumbria and Mid Wales and
maintained both contemporary feelings and a sense of history without anachronism on the
one hand, or patronising the reader of the other.
Considered simply as literature, the collected writings of George Mackay Brown reveal the
essence of Orkney. The language is very accessible. Furthermore, it is quite vernacular and,
above all, it draws the reader in and transforms his thinking. What sets out to be a
circumscribed, even a parochial account of a People in the making, becomes something that
has a universal application.
The energising force has to be an acceptance of a “religious point of view”. Back in the days
of the Sagas this was pagan and Norse. With the passage of time it became Catholic and
European (despite being enacted on the very fringe of Mediterranean civilisation). George
Mackay Brown created a seamless garment and made his work both realistic and symbolic.
This could not have been accomplished without “stepping outside” the circumscribed world of
Orkney and viewing it from afar. In geographical terms this did not amount to more than
higher education in Edinburgh. At the relatively late age of thirty he entered Newbattle
Abbey, an adult education centre near Edinburgh. At Newbattle he came under the literary
influence of another Orcadian poet and scholar. Edwin Muir. Muir encouraged him and
turned his thoughts back towards Orcadian culture, from which moment he never looked
elsewhere.
However, before his return, Brown graduated from Edinburgh University (in 1960) and did
postgraduate work on Gerard Manley Hopkins.
The mentor / pupil relationship between Muir and Brown was not one of condescension on
the one hand and blind hero worship on the other. In fact, I am reminded strongly of the
association between W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge at the time when Yeats was advising the
younger man to go to the Aran Islands and write and record folklore and legends in the Irish
tongue. Synge went to the Aran Islands but behaved quite differently from Yeats’
recommendations: fortunately.
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Leaving behind him a “foreign culture”, studied only as an academic exercise, George Mackey
Brown returned to his Northern World and there he stayed, to create the universal from the
parochial as only poets can.
The now barren community of Rackwick, subject of the second section of the book “An
Orkney Tapestry”, may be thought of as an allegory for all of Orkney up to the present. The
prose is measured and genuinely conveys a sense of history: totally different from the
whimsical “ye olde” mannerisms of many English popularisers of the past. The poetry that is
interleaved grows naturally out of the prose and is anything but an embellishment. It is
muscular, elliptical and allusive. It is practical and of the earth and sea. It accepts the
demands of Christian ritual much as the hardships and the seasonal changes are accepted:
unflinchingly and with faith tinged with resignation. The words of poetry and prose alike are
the precise stitches that give “The Tapestry” dimensions.
The most accurate non-Orcadian parallel, both in spirit and in style, derives from Ireland’s
barren West. It is the short play “Riders to the Sea” by J. M. Synge. We have here the same
burden of watching and waiting. The women huddled together, girls, wives and widows,
waiting for the safe return of the fishing boats. Such waiting, as Brown puts it, contains “....
folding about them in the darkness griefs more ancient than agriculture”. But agriculture had
its hazards too.
The crofter’s trade a hoarding, folding, flowering,
Of seed from snow.
What the fishermen fold is this,
A sklinter of haddocks
From the breached banks of the sea.
What the women fold
Are the torn nets, a stretch of yarn from the loom,
Sheaf after sheaf of August oats,
In the cupboard cheese and honey and ale and bread,
Shapes in the womb,
Night long as a shroud when the twelve boats
Are drifting lights in the west,
And the ebb ravels itself in rock and sand.”
And then, when survival and sustenance are the simple hope, we have:“A winter bride is ravished with plough and seed
And finds at last
The crag where mother and widow stand.”
* * * * * * * * * * *
Norman Nicholson was more than a poet, more than a dramatist and much more than a
critic. He was all of these things but his individual voice, his uniqueness, are rooted, as we
have commented above, by an imaginative vision and his moral sense. To this has to be
added his staunch Anglicanism and the influences of T. S. Eliot, whose own poetic vision
stemmed from other creative roots entirely.
To anyone unfamiliar with Norman Nicholson’s writing, he is probably best approached, in the
first instance, through his prose. “Wednesday Early Closing” and “The Lakes” are especially
suitable. Both give the flavour of the man and both show his sensitive use of words. Even
through his most mundane descriptions, the soul of the poet glows.
Nicholson, however far he journeyed in imagination, was a native Cumbrian all his life. He
knew his lakes and fells intimately and wrote about them on a number of occasions. In fact, I
enjoy his book “The Lakes” far more than Wordsworth’s “Guide”.
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I do not detract from Wordsworth, but I do seriously suggest that Norman Nicholson was a
worthy recipient of the great man’s mantle. This Biblical reflection is apposite because of
Nicholson’s early verse play “The Old Man of the Mountains”. This highly evocative drama,
stylised after the manner of T. S. Eliot, had as its subject the re-incarnation of Elijah on the
Cumbrian Fells.
Although he obviously matured as a thinker and poet throughout a working life of almost fifty
years, his vision was simple and single-minded. As he progressed his language became more
direct, anecdotal and richer in the dialect words of his fellow Cumbrians: yielding a diction
that was “poetic” and colloquial but never self-consciously done for effect - as, for example,
William Barnes did. Perhaps a linguistic parallel might be John Clare, as suggested above,
although Nicholson had a philosophical dimension that was beyond Clare’ capability.
His growth as a poet is best displayed in his “Selected Poems 1940 - 83”. The vision he
displayed cannot be easily demonstrated in a few words. Despite his Anglicanism his view of
man can best be expressed by comparing him with a (seemingly) inappropriate writer:
William Faulkner.
It is not his style or his subject matter (for the most part) with which a parallel is drawn. It
was his literary integrity. Here are the consluding words of Faulkner’s speech of acceptance
of the Nobel Prize.
“The Poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the
props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”
The idea that man must / does endure and prevail will be returned to when considering the
poetry of R. S. Thomas. With Norman Nicholson, whose works are, in a sense, organic, it is
difficult to choose one poem in isolation to represent these ideas. Perhaps “Cornthwaite”
(from the 1981 volume “Sea to the West”) best demonstrates his use of language and his
sense of history. And the ideas of prevailing and endurance are implicit rather than “laid out
in words”.
Cornthwaite, “the clearing in the corn”,
My mother’s maiden name - whose umpteenth great-grandfather,
Off-come from a northern voe, hacked thorn,
Oak-scrub and birch from rake and beck-bank
To sow his peck of oats, not much of a crop.
Lish as a wind-racked larch, he took his trod
Through landscape nameless still to him, until,
Remembering his own grandfather’s talk
of tveit and dal and fjell,
He scratched those words on the rocks,
Naming the Cymric cwms in a Norse tongue.
The land then named him back.
And here, a millennium later, my baptismal card
Clacks echoes of a clearing beneath cracked
Granite and black pines, where the migrant fieldfare breeds
And the ungregarious, one-flowered cloudberry
Is commoner than crowding bramble. Now,
In my own day’s dale, under the slant
Scree of unstable time, I lop,
Chop and bill-hook at thickets and rankness of speech,
Staring in to let light in, and make space for a word,
To hack out once again my inherited thwaite
And sow my peck of poems, not much of a crop.
* * * * * * * * * * *
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R. S. Thomas was something of an enigma. He was deeply affected by the creeping industrial
nature of “modern Wales”. He detested the incursions of the English and therefore he aligned
himself with the inarticulate peasant farmers about whom he wrote with mingled compassion
and exasperation. He was staunchly nationalist in his sympathies and in this respect alone,
when one considers his poetry, he is the most “regional” of all our three poets. In many
ways, in his philosophy and high moral tone, he resembled W. B. Yeats.
One poem seems to crystallise everything for which he stood. It is not one of his regularly
anthologised works but one that is called “Looking at Sheep”.
Yes I know. They are like primroses;
Their ears are the colour of the stems
Of primroses; and their eyes Two halves of a nut.
But images
Like this are for sheer fancy
To play with. Seeing how Wales fares
Now, I will attend rather
To things as they are: to green grass
That is not ours; to visitors
Buying us up. Thousands of mouths
Are emptying their waste speech
About us, and an Elsan culture
Threatens us.
What would they say
Who bled here, warriors
Of a free people? Savagely
On castles they were the sole cause
Of the sun still goes down red.
Compendious this poem may be but it does not say much about endurance and prevailing.
For these we must look at poems such as “Death of a Peasant” and works that are too long
to give in full, such as Welsh History and Welsh Landscape. Here we are given such images
as “We were a people taut for war; the hills / Were no harder, the thin grass / Clothed them
more warmly than the couras / Shirts our small bones.... “ The destruction of a culture, of a
language, is the diestruction of a people whose “.... bards perished, driven from halls / Of
nobles by the thorn and bramble”. All this is illustrative of the idea propounded by George
Mackay Brown: “Decay of language is always a symptom of a more serious sickness.”
R. S. Thomas, in the final stanza of Welsh history, broods upon loss of identity for the true
Welsh: the Welsh to whom he gives a voice in all his work.
We were a people, and are so yet.
When we have finished quarrelling for crumbs
Under the table, or gnawing the bones
Of a dead culture, we will arise,
Armed, but not in the old way.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Clearly for R. S. Thomas, it was decay in the use of language (i.e. Welsh) that was the
indicator of the more “serious sickness” referred to. His own return to his “natural tongue”
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was an intellectual response to the strength of his feelings concerning a powerful nationalism.
Once again one is drawn to Yeats and to Tom Kettle and to other poets of the Easter Rising.
Poets and nationalists all; but why, one must ask, did R. S, Thomas write mainly (if not
exclusively) in English?
Norman Nicholson, we have shown, used dialect words and Norse idioms. His concern was
for loss of identity of another kind. His world embodied the Lake District in its entirety. The
“serious sickness” for him was the invasion, not simply by tourists, of the land, but by alien
ideas and the prostitution, by developers and profiteers, of a landscape that had been
created in the antiquity of geological time and moulded to nourish the natural man. Why else
would he have written “The Old Man of the Mountains”?
With George Mackey Brown we turn full circle. After all, he wrote the quotation which we are
using to unify this conclusion. “Serious sickness” in his case was similar to the afflictions of
the other two in this tryptich: loss of identity brought about by the invasiveness of popular
culture from an alien quarter.
It is ironic, therefore, that this collective pessimism should have its antidote in a poem
(extensively used in anthologies) that points a way forward by going back. The poem is by
Edwin Muir, tutor and mentor of George Mackay Brown. It is “The Horses”.
Regarded by some as science fiction, by others as prophetic, it tells of the end of the known
world: the collapse of Civilisation brought about by too big a reliance upon technology and
the pragmatism of a material world. Total destruction but for a colony so remote and reduced
to the simplest of practicalities. Silence..... then the coming of a pack of horses. Once again
the old alliance between man and beast was established. The optimism, cautious at first but
strengthening daily, produced a new beginning:
Among them were some half-a-dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our ploughs and borne our loads
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.
Here, surely, is what all of our three poets were looking for. A situation that is at once
mystical and yet severely practical. With innate pessimism our regional poets ever looked
backwards towards a mythical “Golden Age”. By the application to their poetic sensibilities of
deeply held religious beliefs, they were drawn towards a new creation. Such creation as was
envisaged by William Faulkner in the concluding words of his acceptance speech for the
Nobel Prize, which is quoted above. By balancing George Mackay Brown’s doubts against the
optimism of Faulkner we arrive at an understanding of the preoccupations of non-urban,
regional poets in what remains for them, an increasingly hostiworldlrd.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Further reading
George Mackay Brown Any collection of stories or poems; especially
An Orkney Tapestry
Norman Nicholson
The Lakes - a regional study.
Wednesday Early Closing - Autobiography
R. S. Thomas
Any Poems collected as above.
© The English Association and William Woodrow, 2007
© English Association and William Woodrow, 2007
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English Association Bookmarks Number 57
Three Regional Poets by William Woodrow is Number 57 in the Bookmark series, published by
The English Association
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