Dead, Mad or a Poet

The storyteller Eric Maddern has just completed the second leg of a story tour entitled "What the Bees Know" (of which he has much experience, as a bee keeper at his Cae Mabon retreat). Throughout the tour he has used bees as a "metaphor for what we're doing to the planet," he tells the BBC here. (This may be a case of synecdochic thinking, but as Maddern is an Honorary Chief Bard of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, we will presume a more holistic approach). In the course of his interview with the BBC he reminds us of the legend of Cadair Idris, one of the mountains of his neighbouring Snowdonia range. The story goes that anyone spending the night in the "Devil's chair," the hollow or seat of the mountain, wakes up dead, mad or a poet. This was a tale we were told growing up in Shropshire - what a great testament, I now think, to the power of landscape. The Victorian poet Felicia Hemans, according to her poem "The Rock of Cader Idris," teetered on the brink of outcomes one and two, before happily settling on number three:

[...]
I lay there in silence-a spirit came o'er me;
Man's tongue hath no language to speak what I saw:
Things glorious, unearthly, pass'd floating before me,
And my heart almost fainted with rapture and awe.
I view'd the dread beings around us that hover,
Though veil'd by the mists of mortality's breath;
And I call'd upon darkness the vision to cover,
For a strife was within me of madness and death.
[...]
I saw what man looks on and dies-but my spirit
Was strong, and triumphantly lived through that hour;
And, as from the grave, I awoke to inherit
A flame all immortal, a voice, and a power!
Day burst on that rock with the purple cloud crested,
And high Cader Idris rejoiced in the sun;-
But O! what new glory all nature invested,
When the sense that gives soul to her beauty was won!

Spring Coppice

I grew up in a house not far from Spring Coppice, Lyth Hill, Shropshire. By my day the 1970s sprawl of Bayston Hill village had spoilt the surrounding area, but Lyth Hill always had something special about it, no matter how beset with Sunday walkers and misbehaving dogs. Relatively few walkers go all the way to the coppice, but the rewards are many – Bluebells, Snowdrops, just enough trees to get lost in. It was interesting, too, as a place where work had been done. Any small wood kept for the purpose of periodical cutting to near ground level may be considered a coppice. That “periodical” is crucial; coppicers must know just how much timber to take from the trees, and when, to allow them to continue to flourish. The trees return this care with further growth. It’s a labour of the hand and the head that enforces a symbiotic relationship between man (usually man) and tree. The term “coppice” is both a noun and a verb – reflecting the doing that goes into using and maintaining such a woodland.

In Tennyson’s The Princess there’s a lovely use of this evocative word: “Said Ida; ‘let us down and rest;’ and we / Down from the lean and wrinkled precipices, / By every coppice-feathered chasm and cleft, / Dropt through the ambrosial gloom to where below / No bigger than a glow-worm shone the tent / Lamp-lit from the inner.” It’s a feeling that every wild camper knows (although not necessarily with princess in tow).

But it wasn’t Tennyson who was the presiding literary spirit of our Shropshire coppice, but Mary Webb. Living in nearby Spring Cottage from 1917-1927, the author famously gained inspiration from the Shropshire landscape. Webb’s literary reputation has waxed and waned over the years – following her early death, then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was fulsome in his praise, but later readers (including, famously, Stella Gibbons) were less impressed. Whatever we might think of her novels, I’ve always found Webb’s “Spring of Joy” nature journals thoughtful and instructive – albeit unfashionably religious and somewhat over-written for contemporary tastes. Perhaps we might do better to understand Webb as primarily a nature writer, and not as a kind of non-modernist novelist of the modernist era. With the current resurgence of interest in all things “green,” Webb is worth further consideration. In naming this blog I invoke Webb’s attentive and wondering attitude towards the natural world – whether on her doorstep or beyond.