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It’s a small white house beside the sea
where the hills are steep and the sky is low
and sheep meander from scree to scree
and sometimes you see a fishing boat go.
The yellow lamplight welcomes you
to a seat by a fire that warms and glows.
An ill wind flusters outside, it’s true
but it’s calm inside as the darkness grows.
You say, There’s nothing to fear tonight,
I can rest in peace. If it were so
a haven might mean the world was right.
The floorboards creak and the curtains blow.
Sleep meanders from scree to scree
and the hills are dark and the moon is low.
you hear the snuffling of unease
on the stones, by the door, at the back window.
You toss in a sea of quilted dread
as the black mouth opens, long and slow
and swallows you in your safe white bed
dreaming. You are the last to know.
Although Helena was born in Cheshire she
lives in Scotland. Certainly she must have been there for
quite some time, for when she reads her voice is distinctly
Scots, and many of her poems have a background of Scottish
landscape. Particularly the wonderful ‘Mr and Mrs Philpott’ poems: these
two nattily drawn characters are in their mid to late fifties,
quite comfortable materialy, but haunted by existential agonies
and by the uncertainties of relationship in what is for both
a second marriage - ‘Ah George, she moans / in her sleep.
George. It is not his name.’ It is the celebration of
their love that gives the book its title.
I recall feeling gleeful about publishing ‘Coldstream
Cottage’ in The Rialto. From time to time we get a little
spate of remarks from would be contributors on the lines of ‘why
don’t you publish my poems instead of that unrhymed chopped
up prose’, so it was good to publish something with rhymes.
In fact we don’t get many poems with rhymes coming in.
Helena’s poem illustrates important points about the
use of rhymes: they don’t, first of all, have to be strained
for, i.e., you don’t have to be the first person to find
a new rhyme for orange. In this poem the words are all simple,
frequently monosyllabic. Secondly they do have to be unexpected:
if you can guess at the beginning of the line what the rhyme
will be, then you won’t read the rest of the line attentively
and the poet will have failed. It’s alright to anticipate
the rhyme as you reach the last words of the line. In comic
verse the unexpected rule doesn’t come in - it’s
often part of the humour that you know what the poet’s
going to put. Thirdly the poem must not be written to the rhymes.
For example if the meaning of the poem insists that a line
end with ‘trousers’ it is not good practice to
look this up in your rhyming dictionary and then write a line
that is vaguely to do with the sense of the poem but is obviously
there because it ends with ‘boozers’. The exception
is writing to rhyme just for the exercise, i.e., when you pick
a dozen or twenty rhymes out of the dictionary and write something
that uses them all up. And of course wise and skilled poets
are allowed to ignore all these rules. Hm, I hadn’t expected
to write this diversion.
Just to tidy it up, look at the first
stanza of ‘Coldstream
Cottage’: I don’t expect ‘scree’ as
a rhyme for ‘sea’, and in the last line ‘go’ is
a surprise - if I wasn’t anticipating a rhyme I’d
think the meaning was leading me to, maybe, ‘pass’.
There’s no straining here, the poet is creating a picture
of a landscape in ballad form - I can see the place in my mind’s
eye, very bare, desolate, isolated. I think the cleverest word
in the stanza is ‘sometimes’ .
There’s five stanzas in the poem and the middle one is
the hinge - it’s got that most scary phrase ‘nothing
to fear’, ‘nothing’ being the most frightening
thing there is. The poem also ducks out into a wider space
in this stanza, ‘a haven might mean the world was right’,
seems to me to look beyond the small house by the sea to the
chaos of humankind. Then the next line tugs us back into the
here and now of the poem. (Why are creaking floorboards so
scary? Endless parental explanations of wood expanding in the
heat and cooling in the night still don’t count for much
as far as I’m concerned). ‘Sleep meanders from
scree to scree’ is smart as paint, very tidy writing;
it also contains the idea of counting the earlier sheep to
get to sleep. ‘Snuffling’ is true Hound of the
Baskerville’s Halloween style hair-raising, but I really
like the fact that it is ‘unease’ that’s
creeping in. This contributes to the success of the poem, because
we don’t really know what is happening, but we do know
we have moved a long way from the welcoming ‘yellow lamplight’.
Much of Helena’s writing has this
skilful clarity that yet draws to itself difficult questions.
This poem is about fear, and about the fact that fear is
boundless once we give it a foot in the door.
Michael Mackmin
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