Letter to a Land Owner
I learnt one night what it is to have the stars
sown through the utility of the body.
The sun, it went –
cities, networks, roads came to nowhere.
I set up my chapel of the canvas, lay under its sky
and felt how deeply I was momentary –
hearing bog cotton grass, the horses, the air –.
That night I heard with a new aptitude
for the silence – joined with the star herds,
hoof marks crossing the sky over your estate –.
And the creak of a thorn, and the feldspar’s quiet,
and the dew swelling on calyptras of moss
conducted into my earthed body
their antithesis to every other loss.
© Sean Borodale 2023
This week’s poem, recalling the experience of wild camping on Dartmoor, was Sean Borodale’s response on 13 January to a local landowner case against the use of the moorland for this purpose. In a prose-note to the poem, Borodale wrote: “Wild camping is a frail, frayed remnant of deeper engagement, and the writing of this poem is an appeal against the belief that powerful landscapes are only for the wealthy, to be reserved for specific kinds of recreation – hunting, shooting – or as passing photo opportunities.”
The “letter” resists polemic. Borodale sets an example of persuasive protest by recounting some personal impressions and insights crucial to the activity he wishes to defend. As a sonnet, the poem is unusually split into verses, as if the form had been broken open to let in the air. But it retains a trace formality – in manner as in structure. It achieves something that’s often been central to Borodale’s writing – the encounter of human endeavour with more elemental forces. Walking (the Lake District and London), bee-keeping and cookery have been among Borodale’s enabling and not always predictable subjects.
The sonnet begins with an occupation by, rather than of, a place. That place is the sky: it feels so close it tells the speaker “what it is to have the stars/sown through the utility of the body”. The body is like a field, the word “sown” suggests, which has been seeded with stars. Rich harvest is implied, but the simply stated cancellations of the second verse register a lonelier mood. The tent, “the chapel of the canvas” provides a necessary refuge, its artificial sky sealing the speaker into a place of more internal focus. Beehive chapels come to mind. Revelation occurs in the perception of “how deeply I was momentary”. To be “momentary” might assume time to be threatening, but to be momentary “deeply” suggests an analogy with music, and how a single note, of one beat or less, can still be a chord, an embedding of vertical harmonies. Although the musical analogy isn’t made directly, the poem now seems to slip easily into the auditory world, central to which is listening to the minutest sounds, and “a new aptitude for silence”.
Horses connect the camper to the stars again: now he joins forces with the “star-herds” leaving “hoof-marks” over the open ground of the sky. The challenge to the landowner (“your estate”) is gently made, a slant-wise reminder why the poem was written and an assertion of the value of the unowned.
How some of the elements single out for special attention can be registered as audible is unspecified: the sound of the “bog cotton grass”, for example, is left to our imaginations. What is the sound of “the dew swelling on calyptras of moss”? I don’t think these are Zen-like riddles: I think they oblige an involvement of the reader’s imagination. Those lucky enough to be able – sometimes, at least – to find silence in their surroundings would be at an advantage. The “creak of a thorn” is certainly something I’ve heard – it nicely suggests the resistance of a small, sturdy blackthorn to wind and weather.
The poem does a little careful magic with the word-sounds when it brings in the softly conclusive rhyme, “moss/loss” at the end. “Loss” perhaps carries an echo of the desolation hinted in the second stanza (“The sun, it went -”) but now the body has been “earthed”, the loss is minimised. There’s a certainty of redemption – the “antithesis to every other loss”. But most of the claims are quiet, and subtly balanced. Borodale asks the images, and the words themselves, to stay in character as they make their case for a human right to roam that fulfils a primeval human need.
Meanwhile, the campaign to challenge the camping ban is gathering momentum. It’s important that the public debate continues in England, a country which, as the poet has said, is still particularly aligned to its history of acts of enclosure.
