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Inside the house is silence. We sit and look
across the room.You shift your elbows, smoke
and tap your pipe by turns. I write my words
in my little book. We look across the room,
or read, or meet to talk from time to time.
On Scarberry Hill the shadow under the white cloud spreads
and rolls our way. It’s far away. Perhaps
it won’t come down this far before it stops -
above the white washed house, the tumbling river
washing the valley below. Perhaps we have
to wait until it passes over. Just
a bit of rain, that’s all. And when it’s past,
the sun will shine again. The wind sock pulls
to east. It might yet rain. The moment stays.
As tiny cars are shuttling, changing place
across its darkening pastures, Scarberry Hill
appears to frown. You’re shuffling papers round,
I’m writing in my notebook still. It passes.
On Scarberry Hill the blinding streaks of green
flood out, the sky’s all sun, we wipe our glasses.
Josephine Dickinson is profoundly deaf
- ‘one morning’ she
says, ‘ when I was six years old I woke up and could
not hear a thing’. She studied music, became a composer,
and worked in the Arts world. Then, for the common confusion
of reasons, turned to drugs, found after awhile that she had
a drug habit. Trying to rid herself of methadone dependency
she moved to a remote part of Cumbria. She gave up the drugs,
found freedom and happiness, met her husband Douglas, a hill
farmer who is twice her age.
Some of the poems in her book are a Shepherds
Calendar (my favourites are April and December), a record
of hill farm experiences - the birth and loss of lambs, their
shearing and slaughter, and other sights and events set in
the changing seasons. Amongst these are love poems and meditations
- on objects found, on time and loss and fear - including
the extraordinary echo of an earlier Dickinson, ‘There was a darkness in the air,
/ I looked and saw it speak, / felt it waiting by my back,
/ not savagery ... but near.’ (‘There Was’,
page 73).
‘Scarberry Hill’ is the opening poem in the book.
To me the key to this poem is in the fourteenth line - ‘The
moment stays’. This is of course an impossibility, the
moment never stays, its always moving on or being left behind,
which is why the exhortation to live in the moment is paradoxical.
But if a moment ever did stay it does
so in this poem. This remarkable feat is achieved very simply.
What happens in the poem? Two people are in a room and the
shadow of a cloud passes over a hill. But it is all made
very specific. The hill is Scarberry Hill ( wonderfully named)
and we are told so three times - yet the repetition never
cloys ( possibly because we still have ‘Scarborough Fair’ in our ears?) And
this is how the poem works, by repeating words, phrases, sounds
and thoughts until their significance as musical notes is as
important as their meanings. The two people ‘look across
the room’ (lines 1 and 4); at the end of the poem they
are still doing more or less what they were doing at the beginning
- the ‘I’ is writing three lines from the start
and three lines from the end of the poem. The shadow ( line
6) ‘rolls our way’ but at the same time, ‘It’s
far away’. The house is ‘white washed’, the
river, ‘washing the valley; the words ‘passes’ and ‘rain’ are
also repeated. The poem rocks softly in the moment and at the
same time there is movement outside; the river, the cloud,
the wind, the cars, all are in motion, while the reader is
held still in the quiet room. Then suddenly it’s over, ‘It
passes’, we are no longer held waiting, and there’s
the dazzle of the last two lines, and the delight of the unison
of the two people who, together, wipe their glasses, a neat
and very domestic response to the visionary quality of the ‘blinding
streaks’ in the previous line.
Michael Mackmin
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