December: With Byron and the Shelleys at Cologny

During the December holidays, I did a bit of travelling and went first to Luxembourg for a couple of days, then to visit a friend who lives on the German/Swiss border, and finally to Geneva for one night before flying back to London. Luxembourg, a beautiful (and expensive) city set strikingly across gorges, was new to me. My German friend used to live in Basel - where she still works - and I visited her there a few years ago so I knew that area a bit. As for Geneva, I had been there before, but it was close to thirty years ago when I was a small child. At the time the city hadn't impressed me much (it's not a child-friendly city) but I was curious to revisit it.

Geneva was still quiet, and this time it was cold. I peered at the floral clock, wished the Jet d'Eau was operational (wrong time of year, too windy, or both) and wandered by the lake, listening to the sailboats ringing in the wind. That was my first afternoon, when finally it started snowing fairly hard and I fled to a cafe where I drank a couple of coffees and managed to write a poem.

The next morning it was sunny and beautiful, and I decided to take a bus to the Cologny suburb to find Byron's house, Villa Diodati. Byron rented this villa from June to November in 1816, during an unusually cold and rainy summer. He stayed there with his personal physician, while Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin (later known as Mary Shelley) and Mary's stepsister stayed nearby. Over the course of a few particularly rainy days when the group stayed in at Villa Diodati, reading and discussing fantasy and horror stories, they decided to come up with such stories themselves, which eventually led to the creation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

I had a bit of a hard time finding the villa. First I went much too far on the bus, and as I walked back along the lake, the passersby I asked were either unsure of what I was looking for, or knew about it but didn't know where to go. Eventually, though, I found this:

After a good steep walk up the hillside, I eventually found the villa, which also looked over a beautiful vista of Lake Geneva. It is privately owned, but all I really wanted to do anyway was peer through the gates.

Apparently many writers have ventured to this villa to pay their respects to Byron, the Shelleys and Romanticism. I've never been a huge fan of Byron myself (more so of Percy Bysshe Shelley, while Mary Shelley's Frankenstein just isn't my kind of book), but it was good to catch a glimpse of the atmosphere which inspired these great Romantics - without all the rain.



All photos © Clarissa Aykroyd, 2014.

Poetry on the Slopes of Mount Everest

Everest photo by shrimpo1967. Used under Creative Commons license


Thus far, in a break with the tradition established by T S Eliot, March was the cruellest month this year and seems to have left me pointlessly exhausted for April - hence a slight lack of posting enthusiasm lately, though I have a long list of entries that I absolutely have to write sooner or later...

Today I was watching a documentary on BBC iPlayer about the Eiger, one of the great mountains that is always alive in my subconscious mind. I saw the Eiger a few years ago, and passed through it on the railway up the Jungfrau, and that was one of my travel dreams fulfilled. Watching the documentary, about the tragic and dynamic history of its climbs, played out on the brutally visible "theatre" of its North Face, I realised that I know the names and the stories quite well: the White Spider, the Traverse of the Gods, Toni Kurz, Heinrich Harrer, Chris Bonington, John Harlin, so many others... Some survived and some didn't; it has claimed more than sixty lives. I found it impossible to look at the mountain without a lot of emotion, and the view from the window halfway up the North Face was overwhelming.

I recently finished reading Into the Silence by Wade Davis, an account of the early British expeditions to Everest with Mallory and others, which culminated in the death of Mallory and Irvine in 1924. The book sets the expeditions firmly in the context of the horrors of World War I (which I have never found so vividly, accurately and graphically described) and how this affected the national consciousness.

For the purposes of this blog, a detail which fascinated me was the fact that Mallory brought a poetry anthology with him on the expeditions, and that he spent a lot of time reading it. Published during the war, the anthology was called The Spirit of Man and was intended to rally the spirits of the British public. It was edited by Robert Bridges, who was then the poet laureate.

Mallory wrote to his wife about a month before his death on Everest in 1924, one afternoon huddled in a tent during a storm, of reading from this anthology with his companions: "We all agreed that [Coleridge's] 'Kubla Khan' was a good sort of poem. Irvine was rather poetry shy but seemed impressed by the Epitaph to [Thomas] Gray's 'Elegy'. Odell was much inclined to be interested and like the last lines of [Shelley's] 'Prometheus Unbound'. Somervell, who knows quite a lot of English literature, had never read a poem of Emily Brontë's and was happily introduced."

The actual poetry of World War I would, of course, take poetry into new and frightening areas with the emergence of figures such as Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg, who saw clearly how the world and its certainties were being brutally shattered, and thousands of lives with them. Mallory and his companions were perhaps among the last representatives of an age where men fought, or climbed, for high ideals of conquest and nationalism which turned out to be desperately flawed. But I still love the idea of these brave men reading poetry on the slopes of Everest, and I'm glad that it brought them some peaceful moments.

Here is a link to Gray's 'Elegy', which Irvine had liked - its Epitaph does seem especially poignant in light of the fact that Mallory and Irvine were to die so soon afterwards.


ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD (Thomas Gray)

England's West Country: Coleridge, Shelley, Mayne...and Baskerville Hounds

At the end of December a friend and I spent a few days in the West Country - mainly Devon, with a quick foray into Cornwall and Somerset. Reports that Devon was an entirely underwater county proved to be more or less unfounded, and although there was definitely quite a lot of rain, there were also many sunny intervals. Most importantly, Dartmoor featured some satisfyingly foggy moments.

Dartmoor has probably been on my must-visit list ever since I read Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (a long time ago) and the only slightly less-known story 'Silver Blaze', both of which feature a fairly well-known detective named Sherlock Holmes. I would be at least mildly interested in visiting almost every place I have ever come across in a book; even if they are not terribly exciting places in themselves, the literary associations will add and add and add to them. If the place is beautiful and wonderful in itself, though, few things could be more wonderful.

Approaching Dartmoor by train with Sir Henry, Dr Watson describes what he sees in vivid terms: "Over the green squares of the fields and the low curve of a wood there rose in the distance a gray, melancholy hill, with a strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance, like some fantastic landscape in a dream." Later, as they approach Baskerville Hall by carriage:


We had left the fertile country behind and beneath us. We looked back on it now, the slanting rays of a low sun turning the streams to threads of gold and glowing on the red earth new turned by the plough and the broad tangle of the woodlands. The road in front of us grew bleaker and wilder over huge russet and olive slopes, sprinkled with giant boulders. Now and then we passed a moorland cottage, walled and roofed with stone, with no creeper to break its harsh outline. Suddenly we looked down into a cuplike depression, patched with stunted oaks and firs which had been twisted and bent by the fury of years of storm. Two high, narrow towers rose over the trees. (from The Hound of the Baskervilles)


My friend, less enthused by Holmesiana than I am and a little tired of driving, still drove me obligingly all over the moor, and the above descriptions were exactly what I found. At one point we plunged into a cloud; later, in a moment of madness, I braved the wind and rain and ran up the eerie and beautiful Haytor. Here is a picture:

I was struck by how utterly vast Dartmoor seemed. Its skies were wider than I imagined; maybe it's partly that TV screens make it small, but I felt that I had to go there to really understand. Although we did not drive all around its edge, I had a very strange feeling that the moor was larger inside its boundaries than ordinary physical dimensions would permit, and that I had passed into a place which was utterly detached from the soft and lovely countryside around it.

On a more poetic note, the West Country held more poetry associations than I had imagined. In Lynmouth, we found Shelley's Hotel, although this may or may not have been the exact building where Percy Bysshe Shelley and his young bride stayed during their honeymoon. I was even more fascinated by the Coleridge associations. We had lunch in Porlock, a beautiful town on the north coast which yielded a sinister Person from Porlock, who disturbed the drugged-up and dream-haunted Samuel Taylor Coleridge and prevented him from giving us the fullest possible account of 'Kubla Khan'. Near the Quantock Hills, we stopped briefly at the Coleridge Cottage, where he wrote 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', among others. Here is a picture:

We based ourselves in a flat kindly lent by a colleague, in a very small town called Hatherleigh. I discovered that this was the birthplace (or at least place of baptism) of Jasper Mayne, a clergyman, translator and poet who lived in the seventeenth century. This rather fascinating poem, 'Time', is his:


TIME (Jasper Mayne)

TIME is the feather'd thing,
And, whilst I praise
The sparklings of thy looks and call them rays,
Takes wing,
Leaving behind him as he flies
An unperceivèd dimness in thine eyes.
His minutes, whilst they're told,
Do make us old;
And every sand of his fleet glass,
Increasing age as it doth pass,
Insensibly sows wrinkles there
Where flowers and roses do appear.
Whilst we do speak, our fire
Doth into ice expire,
Flames turn to frost;
And ere we can
Know how our crow turns swan,
Or how a silver snow
Springs there where jet did grow,
Our fading spring is in dull winter lost.
Since then the Night hath hurl'd
Darkness, Love's shade,
Over its enemy the Day, and made
The world
Just such a blind and shapeless thing
As 'twas before light did from darkness spring,
Let us employ its treasure
And make shade pleasure:
Let 's number out the hours by blisses,
And count the minutes by our kisses;
Let the heavens new motions feel
And by our embraces wheel;
And whilst we try the way
By which Love doth convey
Soul unto soul,
And mingling so
Makes them such raptures know
As makes them entrancèd lie
In mutual ecstasy,
Let the harmonious spheres in music roll!