Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

(Reproduced with permission - this poem may not be reproduced without permission from David Higham Associates.)

The moors, the flat-topped hills,
The waves rolling through the grey and white mist all the winter, Battering like muffled earthquakes under the bitter cries of seagulls
Against the crumbling rock, against the walls,
Proclaimed that Tidesend was ruled by the Three Norns,
Strident Giantesses of the North,
Peering down above the wave-damp pavements,
Into the town—but where else, too, could Miss Hankey be found, 
          Except in Tidesend, in Heartsend,
          That terminus to every hope, Hopesend;
A kindly, silly mummy, walking, nodding by the sea, 
                    Smiling to herself
Swathed in pale blue or pale pink, the colour of babies' ribbons.

With others of her kind
She had only money in common
—And more of it than most of them :
(Envy increased the roll of their laughter).
But, for her gold pounds, Miss Hankey liked a show,
Carriages and horses, many dresses,
Bonnets, laces, hats trimmed with roses;
She loved, she used to say,
                    Originality and any kind of Novelty.
          Wherefore, towards the end of her life,
She bought a Lonsdale Wagonette,
                    In which she always sat alone, sideways.
On fine mornings she descended from it, on to the Promenade, Helped down by a footman in cockaded hat,
And walked there above the tree-tops
Among the gay and laughing summer crowds,
Dappled with colour, with sunshine, with light reverberant from the sea.

This was the essence of Heartsend, of Tidesend,
This wrinkled old anthropoid
Decked in pale blue under a bonnet
Catching the life, the flicker of crowds.
And I see her, too, helped down once more from her carriage
To rove by the cliff's wild edge,
Above the mosaic sea of March, with its white wings and thunders,
She, caught in the gale, battling with air
          As a drowning man battles with water,
While at her feet the first coltsfoot imaged the sun like a star.

O, where could Miss Hankey be found
                    Except in Tidesend, in Heartsend,
                    That terminus to every hope, Hopesend.
No friends she had—only two nieces,
And their sole prospect of good fortune
Lay in her death : therefore
She did not like to have them round her,
They made her feel older, while she wanted to feel younger
(She preferred
To talk about them with affection in their absence).
She grew more dashing, every day grew younger,
Though dashing in a coy and mincing way,
She loved to recite for Charity from a stage
In character-costume-parts of young village maidens,
To sing demure songs in a cracked old voice full of blushes, Oblivious to laughter, either in the hall
Or from where the three globular Miss Coltrums
Sat giggling icily among prismatic lustres,
Or where high up, above them, lost and swathed in the darkness,
The Three Norns laughed—for Miss Hankey was out of the norm.

Each year as she grew older, she grew younger,
Till her youth in the end defeated her nieces' prospects
In a manner that none could foresee or prevent,
For, at eighty-five years, deductive experience
Assured her of living for several further decades
And so, 
          more money to save, more money to leave to her nieces,
She yielded to her last novelty in June 1900,
Sold her fortune for an annuity,
From which she could spend more and save more as well,
But in July she died.

Then there was nothing left of her,
Except the tumultuous laughter of the Norns
As over the dark tableland they strode, rolling and roaring, Nothing more—except the nieces;
Neither their prospects, nor Miss Hankey, nor the footman,
Nor the coachman; nor the wagonette,
Nor the house, nor the silver, nor the boric, boreal snigger,
Of the three Miss Coltrums, caged in their glittering iceberg,
Nothing more—save only the image
Of a withered anthropoid in a blue dress and bonnet
Walking the cliffs where the first coltsfoot mirrored the sun like a star.