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

     It would never do. If Literary Panels, Poetry Competitions, Councils (or councils) beating the drum for a tourist attraction, or weekend superpapers zooming in early on holiday spots, were to try it, it would work so well that it would be worked to death in no time. Not that the Greens would not have loved it.

     No, I am not referring to a scheme for reproducing Turner’s ‘Liber Studiorum’ on beermats or biodegradeable bags.

     You will not have realised that I have been referring to the prospect poem, as written in the 17th and 18th centuries, ‘a species of composition … of which the fundamental subject’, as Johnson wrote at the time, ‘is some particular landscape, to be poetically described with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection or incidental meditation.’

     You might call them National Trust poems: they give admittance to house and gardens. There are encircling hills, though in the early days of the prospect poem the poet tended to stay near the house -‘how modern’, you might say. Later, presumably more romantically inclined, the poet takes to the hills. Mallet seeks ‘the neighbouring steep’

Where, plung’d among the shadows brown,
Imagination lays him down.

     And at this point wouldn’t it be handy if I brought out compelling quotations from an example? In this case all I refer you to is a first-rate example, Dyer’s ‘Grongar Hill’, and to my favourite example, Scott’s ‘Amwell’. Disappointing perhaps, not to have me asserting that to

Hear the thrush while all is still,
Within the groves of Grongar Hill

is every bit as good as hearing Keats’ nightingale.

     Realistic, however. There is a place for minor poets and poems - for one thing there would be no major poets/poems without them. Here there is a case for making something more of a landscape than a self-centred Romantic ramble. Fewer people had time to have taste in the 18th century, but I can’t see that the taste for ‘viewing the landscape o’er’ from convenient hill or mansion has much altered since. Thus the same vehicle can serve for satisfying it, for it would be a fallacy to suppose that, a satisfactory vehicle once found, anything superior needs to be sought or can be found - what aspects, for example, of the non-narrative novel appear in Ulysses that had not already appeared in Tristram Shandy?

Ever charming, ever new,
When will the landskip tire the view!

- writes Dyer -

The fountain’s fall, the river’s flow
The woody vallies, warm and low;
The windy summit, wild and high,
Roughly rushing on the sky!
The pleasant seat, the ruined tower,
The naked rock, the shady bower;
Each give each a double charm,
As pearls upon an Aethion’s arm!
             See on the mountain’s southern side
Where the prospect opens wide,
Where the evening gilds the tide;
How close and small the hedges lie!
What streaks of meadows cross the eye!
A step methinks may pass the stream,
So little distant dangers seem;
So we mistake the Future’s face,
Eyed through Hope’s deluding glass;
As yon summits soft and fair,
Clad in colours of the air,
Which, to those who journey near,
Barren, and brown, and rough appear.
Still we tread tired the same coarse way;
The Present’s still a cloudy day.

     How many people need more than the pastoral convention and the generalisation of Nature? Today we see trees, flowers and water. It is a hobby to distinguish the birds in the trees, the flowers, or the fish in the water. In fact, given the proportionately greater agricultural population in the 17th and 18th centuries, the knowledge of Nature must have been proportionately greater than now.

     Scott had lived at Amwell from a boy but as Hoole, his biographer, says, his poem was not intended to ‘raise in the mind of the stranger any strong idea of the place meant to be described’. Amwell was not the only place to hear

       th’alternate strokes
Of loud flails echoing from your loaded barns
The pallid morn in dark November’s wake

- but I can’t think of a better description.

     If it were disappointing that I could not offer an irrestistible example of a prospect poem, it could be doubly disappointing to look for a modern text of Scott’s poem, despite its having at least a distinctive poetic character.

Prospect poems, on the one hand, have a guide-book matter-of-factness such as Boyse’s

By three fair statues to the left we pass

- sounds rather like Wainwright on the ascent to the Rotunda at Stowe, or Jago’s note to himself in the Argument of Book 3 of Edge Hill to deal with ‘Bremicham. Its manufactures. Coal-mines. Iron-ore. Process of it. Panegyric upon iron’. There are plain, unabashed tributes to local landowners who had educated the landscape and patronised the poet -

      Thanks, Miller, to thy paths,
That ease our winding steps!

     On the other hand, some prospect poets recognise no bounds:

From this chill steep, which midnight’s highest
      shades
Scarce climb to darken, rough with murmuring
      woods,
Imagination travels with quick eye
Unbounded o’er the globe.

     Armstrong advises his reader to have the courage of his aesthetics:

There bid thy roofs, high on the basking steep,
Ascend, there light thy hospitable fires.
And let the winter moon arise,
The summer evening blushing in the west;
While with umbrageous oaks the ridge behind
O’erhung. defends you from the blustering
      north,
And bleak affliction of the peevish east.
Oh, when the growling winds contend, and all
The sounding forest fluctuates in the storm;
To sink in warm repose and hear the din
Howl o’er the steady battlements, delights
Above the luxury of vulgar sleep.

     The writing of prospect poems reached a stage in the 18th century where one critic complained that there was hardly a molehill left that had not been celebrated; it could reach a similar stage again. In the meantime it is frustrating to see the perfect tool for so many jobs lie unused. There are so many Northern towns and cities where from the viewpoint of a nearby moor one could survey industrial dereliction and urban regeneration, shopping malls rising on the sites of satanic mills, across the valley to the nearest motorway, and the sad figure of a rate-capped councillor wending his weary way home.