‘Location is where we start from’
The spirit of place in poetry:
 In
poetry the spirit of place is apparent when the landscape or natural
setting has a role to play that makes it an integral part of the poetic
experience. This could occur when the poet’s interaction with nature is
the actual subject of the poem, as in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ where
nature is perceived as a joyfully disturbing presence. Or the landscape
could occupy the poem’s foreground, as it does in Keats’ Ode to Autumn’
in which the autumnal scene in all its variety takes centre stage.
It could even maintain a presence from the background of the poem as
it does in Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’, who having abandoned Oxford is seen
roaming the Oxfordshire countryside in his pursuit of gypsy-lore.
|
Seamus Heaney |
The spirit of place could even be felt through the natural imagery to
which a poet may resort to explain his thoughts and feelings, as
Tennyson does throughout the lengthy ‘In Memoriam’.
All these examples are from the 19th century, when the countryside
still dominated. At the turn of the century and into the early years of
the 20th, the so-called ‘Georgian’ school of poets continued to feature
landscape in a largely derivative and sentimental manner.
But in the post-1914 modern age, the inexorable ascendancy of
industrial and urban expansionism has seen the countryside receding
steadily as a presence both in actuality and in poetry. Urban, wartime
and surreal settings have proliferated, with poets tending to feature
interior experience with little reference to the natural world whether
for context or for imagery.
The refreshing exceptions are Hardy and Frost and the early Yeats,
who continued to be rooted in the natural world. Or occasionally a
modern poet would specifically evoke a past landscape for historical or
nostalgic reasons, as Eliot does in his ‘Four Quartets’ or in his
untypical vignette of ‘Landscapes’. The resultant reluctance or
inability to have recourse to a diminishing natural world in their
imaginative experience of life has led many poets to express a sense of
regret, loss and anxiety, which Phillip Larkin captures well in ‘Going,
Going’:
“I thought it would last my time - The sense that, beyond the town,
There would always be fields and farms, Where the village louts could
climb Such trees as were not cut down;…- But what do I feel now? Doubt?
Or age, simply?....It seems just now, To be happening so very fast,
Despite all the land left free For the first time I feel somehow That it
isn’t going to last, That before I snuff it, the whole Boiling will be
bricked in Except for the tourist parts - ….And that will be England
gone, The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,…There’ll be books; it will
linger on In galleries; but all that remains For us will be concrete and
tyres…..I just think it will happen, soon.”
Hence, what dominates most poetry today is a sad pusillanimity in
regard to the treatment of scenery. Keats did said, “Scenery is fine,
but human nature is finer”. However, the treatment of human nature today
is the poorer for the neglect of scenery, which Keats never intended nor
was guilty of, in moving on to more serious subjects.
This is why it is so refreshing to come across a modern poet like
Seamus Heaney, the present Poet Laureate of England, whose poetry
literally breathes the spirit of place. His poems are firmly rooted in
his native Ireland, particularly the renowned Irish bog, which
influences not only his settings but his language and his thinking. Here
is the poem “Bogland” in its entirety;
“We have no prairies To slice a big sun at evening - - Everywhere the
eye concedes to Encrouching horizon, Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye Of a
tarn. Our unfenced country Is bog that keeps crusting Between the sights
of the sun.
They’ve taken the skeleton Of the Great Irish Elk Out of the peat,
set it up An astounding crate full of air. Butter sunk under More than a
hundred years Was recovered salty and white. The ground itself is kind,
black butter Melting and opening underfoot, Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They’ll never dig coal here, Only the waterlogged trunks Of great
firs, soft as pulp. Our pioneers keep striking Inwards and downwards,
Every layer they strip Seems camped on before. The bogholes might be
Atlantic seepage. The wet centre is bottomless. “
The poem reads like a defiant assertion of the right of his native
landscape to being featured. Notice how the language recreates the
sensation of the bog so that we feel it as a living presence and hence
an embodiment, from the poet’s viewpoint, of the Irish personality and
destiny.
‘Lovers on Aran’, which is really a seascape, features the Aran
Islands, better known to us as the forbidding setting of Synge’s one-act
tragedy, ‘Riders to the Sea’:
“The timeless waves, bright, sifting, broken glass, Came dazzling
around, into the rocks, Came glinting, sifting from the Americas To
possess Aran. Or did Aran rush To throw wide arms of rock around a tide
That yielded with an ebb, with a soft crash? Did sea define the land or
land the sea? Each drew new meaning from the waves’ collision. Sea broke
on land to full identity.”
This beautiful poem is actually a love poem wherein the experience is
evoked entirely by the loving depiction of the scenery. It recalls
Frost’s four line love poem, ‘Devotion’, and the individual styles of
both poets is worth comparing: “The heart can think of no devotion
Greater than being shore to the ocean – Holding the curve of one
position, Counting an endless repetition.”
Heaney has seemed to be something of a rara avis. But of late,
happily, there has been a reaction against the tendency of modern poets
to neglect the landscape and forfeit the spirit of place.
One of those in the forefront of this movement is Maxine Kumin, an
American poet, who expresses its rationale as follows: “In a poem one
can use the sense of place as an anchor for larger concerns, as a link
between narrow details and global realities. Location is where we start
from.”
This trend of restoring landscape is like a fresh breeze blowing
through the ‘landscape’ of contemporary poetry. When a poet is able to
invoke the external world through his intimate relationship with it, his
poetry is provided with an additional dimension and his readers with
added value. In our next article we hope to feature a Sri Lankan poet
who has succeeded in evoking the spirit of place to his own and his
readers’ benefit. |
