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Note on Country Matters

We’re said to have Wordsworth to thank for recollections of childhood.  It’s a genre and poets go on adding to it.  The batch to which this piece belongs has called out an open-latticed style, not at all like that of the ‘infernal fictions’.  My father, a sapper in the Royal Engineers, was in the great escape from Dunkirk in 1940, and brother Bill and I were lucky to be evacuated with our mother to a village in which my father’s camp was only a hundred yards up the lane.  I acquired then, like many townees of the time, my first deep sense of the countryside.  The allusion to Robert Graves’ ‘female trinity theme’ is to The White Goddess, where his search for the pre-patriarchal triune goddess reminds one of the three Jungian archetypes: crone, earth mother, maiden.  Syllabics again.¹ 

Alan Marshfield

¹ I first encountered syllabics in the work of Marianne Moore.  Some say the technique is artificial; to me all verse is, and that’s the pleasure of it.  There are languages like French which count syllables only; others, like Spanish, which count syllables and stresses; and yet others, like English, which traditionally count just stresses.  Modern revolutions have added syllabics, sprung rhythm and free verse and the choice is wide.  (back)

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