Hi Roger,
I guess writing in strict forms can be (should be) playful for the writer as
well as satisfying for the tradition that's being followed. And I think I'm
the kind of writer/reader that delights in innovation as much as anything
else. When aiming to score (ie write a poem!) why not bend it like
Beckham...
The forms you've chosen (or were given to you) suit the subject in quite a
few ways:
Wasdale's steep sidedness fits the shape - you have words at either side
like the dale has the steepest (and highest) of hills down each side and the
deepest of lakes in the middle...
The old form anglo-saxon form seems appropriate to a place where history is
so evident and contemporary culture is a thin veneer...
... and the acrostic features of the poem illustrate something more
contemporary that's been imposed, overlayed, onto the older structure
(buildings, stone walls, tarmac, gravel car-parks etc.)
And, like the dale itself, it doesn't hide what's there (the acrostic, and
the two sidedness and it's woven alliteration) but you have to look with
interest to find them and see how they work.
It's shape and its sound (the two requisites of a poem) blend and help take
me somewhere I know...
I guess the last half-line - "the desire to remain" - is the day-tourists'
sentiment! And the rhyme sound of rain/remain is the kind of closure that
also belongs to a tourist who's leaving and peering through the windscreen
for roadsigns highlighting brighter places. A different sentiment would
bring into focus other people, locals, seasonal workers, outward bound
instructers, ice-cream sellers, would all have different things to say...
whose valley is it these days? (Does it own its own future or who has the
last say?)
In other words I think, if it's anything, it's the last phrase that maybe
over-diminishes the reader's perception (and perhaps only gives the poet's
perception of one experience).
I guess I'm writing as much about Wasdale as a place here because I really
like the place (in rain, snow, cloud, and sun!) but I'm also trying to write
about what the poem's doing as well...
Ha - as an aside - I always remember in the film The Devils, Oliver Reed
stood by the lake looking altogether out of place (which, since the rest of
the film was set in warm sunny France, he was!)
Bob






>From: Roger Collett <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Pennine Poetry Works <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: new sub: Wast Water
>Date: Sun, 15 Dec 2002 13:40:04 -0000
>
>Arthur has reminded me of an exercise in Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse
>that
>I managed to complicate with an acrostic a while ago:-
>
>
>Wast Water
>
>
>Watery wilderness
>                                washing the wounds
>As the scree-slopes,
>                                 scoured deeply, slide
>Sand and boulders
>                                from the bald bastions.
>The rock looms relentlessly,
>                                             leaving the lake
>With its sombre soul
>                                 shadowed and sunless.
>A cold capstone
>                           covered in cloud,
>That seldom sees
>                             the sun, is sharply
>Etched by everpresent
>                                    sheets of endless
>Rain that remove
>                             the desire to remain.
>
>
>Roger.


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