BooksChatter: ☵ Lost Land of the Britons

Remains of Elmet, by Ted Hughes

Six years into her posthumous life,
My uncle raises my mother's face
And says Yes he would like a cup of tea.

Her memory still intact, still good
Under his baldness,
Her hands a little plumper, trembling more
Chatter his cup in its saucer.

Keeping their last eighty years alive and attached to me.
Keeping their strange depths alive and attached to me.

This might seem an odd way to start a book of poems which chart the present and lost landscape of the Yorkshire moors, but on the other hand it is exactly the point of the book. You might as well substitute the line: 'Keeping its old hills alive and attached to me'.

The sixty-three poems which make up 'Remains of Elmet' explore the wind-blown vistas and lost histories of the Calder valley, west of Halifax, 'the last ditch of Elmet, the last British Celtic kingdom to fall to the Angles'. The poems were initially written to accompany a set of black and white images taken by photographer Fay Godwin. And that is the point of the poems - they are poems describing loss - the loss we all feel for our own past, and the corresponding loss, not only of Elmet itself, but of the mills and farms that succeeded it in more recent history.

The poems cover a range of experiences, from a football match to loach fishing in the local canal. But the book really comes into it own in describing the dark crags, immense skies and weather of the valley. Hughes does this in visionary terms. The chapel in Heptonstall forms a constant backdrop to the series, and this lends an almost messianic quality to some of the poems. Describing millstone grit in 'Wild Rock', he writes

Tamed rock.
[...] a soul-grinding sandstone.

Roof-of-the-World ridge wind
and rain, and rain.

Heaven - the face of a quarry.

And in 'Tree', he talks of a bent moorland tree as a priest who

Fulminated
Against heather, stones and wild water.

Excommunicated the clouds
Damned the wind
Cast the bog pools into outer darkness.

It is of course a highly austere view of Christianity. But Hughes uses the same language to conjure the wonderful wild soul of the moorland. In 'Bridestones', he uses the analogy of the seriousness of chapel-going:

Holy of holies [...]

Crowding congregation of skies.
Tense congregation of hills.
You do nothing casual here'.

Elsewhere, this imagery becomes ecstatic.

Where the mothers [title]
Gallop their souls

he writes in the opening poem. And in 'Hill Walls',

It set out -
Splendours burst against its brow
Broke over its shoulders.
The hills reeled, meeting the blast of space.

This energy of rock and weather becomes explicit in my favourite poem from the series, 'Haworth Parsonage' (I have to admit here to being a huge fan of Emily Bronte's 'Wuthering Heights' - and the purchase of the blu-ray copy of the 2011 film with its soundtrack of rain, gale and stone spurred me to write this blog). 'Infatuated stones', the poem begins:

Hills seeming to strain
And cry out
In Labour.

Three weird sisters.

[...] The brother
Who tasted the cauldron of thunder
Electrocuted.

But 'Remains of Elmet' is not a work which romanticises the Caulder valley. Another theme of the book is the inherent poverty of the landscape. In 'The Sluttiest Sheep in England' he describes sheep

that never
Get their back ends docked. Who
Doctors their wormy coughs? Maggots
Bring them down in quarry dead ends
and the fluke reigns.

They get by
On the hill subsidy [...]
Or pose, in the rain-smoke, like warriors -

For sheep here, read the whole hard history of the valley's human inhabitants.

As I said, these poems are about loss. The untitled introductory verse I quoted at the start ends with a description of 'The huge fish, prize of a lifetime' caught by his uncle.