Time Travelling

Rummaging about in old newspapers

I used to be in the habit of posting early drafts of poems on Facebook. I did it in the hopes of a couple of friends commenting on said drafts and providing either encouragement or suggestions for improvement. For the most part, those poem drafts came and went without notice.

I no longer share work in progress, largely because I agreed to become a poet’s Facebook friend and before I knew it, acquired lots of other poet friends. Poet friends are dangerous because some of their friends might be poetry journal editors who think that poems should never have been seen before by anyone other than the writer-  and even then it would be better if they had written it with their eyes closed and were prepared to testify that they have never mentioned the writing of said poem to anyone, ever. Miserable fuckers.

Anyway, Facebook offered me one of those memory things the other day and it was an early draft of a poem which I had written in a bit of Dorset dialect. It was a dreadful draft but became a poem of which I am fond. I went through a phase of writing poems inspired by local history. The Dorset County Chronicle was a rich source of material for poetry as well as providing insights into the past. Some of the stories I discovered were terrible, some were funny; all of them reminded me that life was potentially awful if you were poor, a woman, or if you were different in some way. Plus ca change, eh?

But….back to that Facebook poem and to whatever turns out to be the point of this essay. Re-reading that poem reminded me that the past is a massive influence on writers in general and on poets in particular. Sometimes it presents in the form of a nostalgia and the security that can be felt from knowing that however deeply we might immerse ourselves in the past, the important thing about it is that it is over and we cannot change it or influence it in any way. Sometimes, perhaps, we rummage about in all those yesterdays in order to examine something about ourselves and the lives we live in the now. I am probably one of the rummagers. I travel back in time in a number of ways. Reading old newspapers is one way but museums, architecture and the vestiges of Dorset’s ancient past are others. You are never far from the Iron Age in Dorset. The same is true for the Bronze Age, the Romans and the Neolithic. I find this comforting and love that sense of connection I get standing where I know people stood thousands of years ago or when I hold a worked flint in my hand and know that I am probably the first person to touch it since its maker discarded it.

Time is present in everything I have read and everything I write. Be it a desire to be fully present in the now, in the moment, that nostalgia for time past or a longing to inhabit a different future. It is the companion of all my days. I remember the time when it struck me that the words we use to describe our relationship with time are the same ones we use to describe our relationship with money. We spend, waste, give, invest, squander, lose, make. Why is that?

So, finally a couple of poems that are just me rummaging around in time and seeing what comes up.

Pitch and Toss

Dost think because thou art virtuous,

there shall be no more cakes and ale? Sir Toby Belch.

Them stocks were a girt laugh,

Di’n’t care what the Mayor said.

So what if the church were doin’

its divine office? Bain’t a problem

for us ‘cos we weren’t goin’.

Upright citizens, he said,

were complainin’ ’bout the noise.

We were only playin’ pitch ‘n’ toss,

the Burt brothers had a whole

shillin’ between’em an’ George

an’ me were lookin to win it.

Reckon we wud’ve too if the police

hadn’t come an’ carted us off.

Three hours in the stocks we got,

you’d think we were a circus act

the way the whole of Mill Street

flocked to see us.

Made us famous though,

‘specially I when told ‘em I wud’ve shown ‘em

my divine office but t’ stocks meant

I were sat on it.

Footnote: In April 1843 6 young men, some still described as boys were placed in the stocks outside Fordington Church for 3 hours. The punishment assigned by the Mayor was because they had played pitch and toss outside the church while the Divine Office (Sunday service) took place. They were noisy, someone complained. They were not contrite!

Van Amburgh’s Elephant Bathes in the Sea

Van Amburgh’s menagerie claimed royal appointment;

its presence in the seaside town a sensation;

even the mid-summer sky was dressed

in its blue and gauzy Sunday best to mark the arrival

of Mr Van Amburgh’s Royal Collection.

From the King’s Statue to the turnpike gate,

Weymouth’s pavements heaved with people,

how they had longed for such a spectacle.

Those that could afford the fare and possessed

a spirit of adventure, climbed the elephant’s

embellished howdah,

rode and swayed upon its back,

penny maharajas.

Later, the creature was made to parade

along the Weymouth esplanade.

People cried in wonder at it,

gasped at every aspect of the thing,

its greyness, its fissured oak-bark skin,

the preposterous nature of its fly-whisk tail,

that nose so long, so unlike anything.

Who knows if any were unsettled by

those long-lashed and rheumy eyes?

To the people who followed to the water’s edge

its quietness was as ferocious as lions,

its self-containment far more threatening.

On the beach the elephant fanned its ears,

swayed its head,

greeted the sea,

explored the pebbles offered by waves,

anointed itself.

Buoyed up by water,

the day’s indignities drifted away:

the elephant became itself again.

It played: its trunk a hose, a periscope.

Then tents packed, lions caged,

the elephant, too large, too much

to be enclosed came out of the sea,

walked the roads to the next town,

the next excited crowd.

Frolicsome, the newspaper said

and those who saw would not forget.

Did the elephant, like those who watched,

commit to memory,

its fifteen glorious minutes in the sea?

In June 1842 Mr Van Amburgh’s ‘Royal Collection’ of animals made a tour of Dorset. On 16th June 1842, the Dorset County Chronicle reported on the visit to Weymouth including the elephant sea bathing. Unlike the other animals, the elephant had to walk from one town to the next.