`Cindery In-Betweens'

At last, I’m reading Charles Tomlinson, who published his first book of poems in 1951 and will turn 81 in January. My excuse is ignorance abetted by laziness, which, of course, is no excuse. I’ve seen his name, notably in Hugh Kenner, but never took the obvious next step. Here’s the poem, “The Marl Pits,” from Selected Poems: 1955-1997, that turned me around:

“It was a language of water, light and air
I sought--to speak myself free of a world
Whose stoic lethargy seemed the one reply
To horizons and to streets that blocked them back
In a monotone fume, a bloom of grey.
I found my speech. The years return me
To tell of all that seasoned and imprisoned:
I breathe the familiar, sedimented air
From a landscape of disembowelings, underworlds
Unearthed among the clay. Digging
The marl, they dug a second nature
And water, seeping up to fill their pits,
Sheeted them to lakes that wink and shine
Between tips and steeples, streets and waste
In slow reclaimings, shimmers, balancings,
As if kindling Eden rescinded its own loss
And words and water came of the same source.”

Tomlinson was born in Stoke-on-Trent, in the West Midlands – Arnold Bennett country. On one level, the poem is a coming-of-age story, the escape of a young provincial from “stoic lethargy.” But the twist on an old theme is Tomlinson’s desire “to speak myself free of a world.” He transcends this industrial wasteland by reclaiming it, as language and theme. In musical language, Tomlinson distils his theme: “kindling Eden rescinded.” In another poem first published in The Way In and Other Poems (1974), “At Stoke,” he writes, more conventionally: “By ash-tips, or where the streets give out/In cindery in-betweens…”

As to “marl”: an old word, at least from the 13th century, with myriad meanings. Spenser used it in The Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare in Much Ado About Nothing (Act II, Scene 1): “To make an account of her life to a clod of waiward marle?” In this sense the Oxford English Dictionary defines it plainly as “Earth, soil; the ground.” In Paradise Lost, Milton uses the word to mean, according to the OED, “the ground of Hell; (symbolically) the torments of Hell,” as in “His Spear../He walkt with to support uneasie steps/Over the burning Marle.”

By the early 19th century, with the Industrial Revolution under way, “marl” evolves to mean “volcanic ash or slag.” This is Tomlinson’s sense. His poem takes its place in the English literary tradition of ravaged industrial landscapes. Think of Blake and Ruskin. In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle writes, “Is that a real Elysian brightness... Is it of a truth leading us into beatific Asphodel meadows, or the yellow-burning marl of a Hell-on-Earth?” Especially, think of a hundred scenes in Dickens, as in this passage from The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), Chapter 45:

“In all their journeying, they had never longed so ardently, they had never so pined and wearied, for the freedom of pure air and open country, as now. No, not even on that memorable morning, when, deserting their old home, they abandoned themselves to the mercies of a strange world, and left all the dumb and senseless things they had known and loved, behind--not even then, had they so yearned for the fresh solitudes of wood, hillside, and field, as now, when the noise and dirt and vapour, of the great manufacturing town reeking with lean misery and hungry wretchedness, hemmed them in on every side, and seemed to shut out hope, and render escape impossible.”

Or this, from Chapter 7 of The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), by George Orwell:

“I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan. All round was the lunar landscape of slag-heaps, and to the north, through the passes, as it were, between the mountains of slag, you could see the factory chimneys sending out their plumes of smoke. The canal path was a mixture of cinders and frozen mud, criss-crossed by the imprints of innumerable clogs, and all round, as far as the slag-heaps in the distance, stretched the 'flashes'--pools of stagnant water that had seeped into the hollows caused by the subsidence of ancient pits. It was horribly cold. The 'flashes' were covered with ice the colour of raw umber, the bargemen were muffled to the eyes in sacks, the lock gates wore beards of ice. It seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul water.”

W.H. Auden was born in York and his family moved to Harborne, Birmingham, when he was one year old. As a child, he was imaginatively absorbed by the limestone landscape of the moors and the declining lead mines of the North. One of his brothers became a geologist and Auden’s poetry is studded with geological, mining and industrial references. This, from “Letter to Lord Byron” (1937) is closer to Tomlinson’s vision:

“Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery,
That was, and still is, my ideal scenery.”