Plain talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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Melvyn Bragg's article which I quoted in my last column gave me some kind of inspiration. I set myself the task of singling out poems which deal with places: cities, towns, rivers and hills. I called it geographical poetry.

Bragg believed that the British Isles were the "most scrawled over, word worked, scribbled and scripted on the planet: layer on layer from century on century." Lines have been laid down, built on, buried, resurrected: fields, streams, cities, villages -- few if any are without words to describe, decry, celebrate or analyse them. He comes to the conclusion that the British are a writing people and that those who have done the writing have been nourished by the landscapes and cityscapes and "returned that sustenance in unravelled treasures of poetry and prose, chronicling and imaging the lives lived here over 2000 years."

Thus I started my journey through my Golden Treasury and tried to follow Bragg's route. Spenser was my first choice and I read and re-read his poem Prothalamion with its detailed landscape descriptions. It is a long poem but I shall select a few lines which read like an architectural blueprint.

"There in a meadow by the river's side

A flock of nymphs I chanced to espy...

And each one had a little wicker basket

Made of fine twigs, entrailed curiously

In which they gathered flowers to fill their flasket..."

Then he moves on asking

"Sweet Thames! run softly till I end my song"

Then I came to Gray's Elegy written in a Country Churchyard. Going through this beautiful poem one cannot but wonder at the details of the place and the movement of people.

"The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness, and to me."

Another of Gray's geographical poems is Ode on a distant prospect of Eton College. Here, apart from some nostalgic memories, we have a description of the College with its "distant spires and antique towers" where

"... grateful science still adores

Her Henry's holy shade;

And ye, that from the stately brow

Of Windsor's heights th' expanse below

Of grove, of lawn, of mead survey,

Whose turf, whose shade, whose flowers among

Wanders the hoary Thames along

His silver-winding way."

From Gray we move on to Shelley whose poems on Italy can act as a guide to the country. In his Stanzas written in dejection near Naples he tells us that "The City's voice itself is soft like Solitudes".

He then continues:

"I see the deep's untrampled floor

With green and purple seaweeds strown;

I see the waves upon the shore,

Like high dissolved in star- showers, thrown:"

In his poem Upon Westminster Bridge Wordsworth tells us that

"Earth has not anything to show more fair;

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This City now doth like a garment wear

The beauty of the morning: silent, bare

Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples, lie

Open unto fields, and to the sky,

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air."

In his two poems Yarrow Unvisited and Yarrow Visited Wordsworth creates a poetic image of the town with Stirling Castle and the banks of the Clyde and Tay. In Yarrow Unvisited he wrote:

"...And with Tweed had travell'd;

And when we came to Cloverford,

Then said my 'Winsome Marrow,'

'Whate'er betide, we'll turn aside,

And see the Braes of Yarrow."

We get more details of the city in Yarrow Visited :

"And is this -- Yarrow? -- This the stream

Of which my fancy cherish'd

So faithfully, a waking dream,

An image that hath perish'd?

Yet why? --- a silvery current flows

with uncontroll'd meanderings;

Nor have these eyes by greener hills

Been soothed, in all my wanderings

And, through her depths, St Mary's Lake

Is visibly delighted..."