Pastoral

In the poem I’m working on for this session, I’ve tried to incorporate a number of themes directly from the pastoral tradition – the shepherd, an indication of a rural idyll, a distance in the perspective which I’m hoping recalls the particular urban to rural gaze which has been a key perspective in pastoral through most of its history, an intimation of elegy and also the more contemporary concern of pastoral as it shades into eco-poetry. It’s based on a memory I have from when I was perhaps six or seven, of taking a herd of sheep to be dipped in what must have been a public sheep dip with my uncle and my father.  I think the practice must have been discontinued not that long afterwards, since it was basically a large concrete tank of organo-phosphates and I certainly remember in other years that the sheep were treated on the farm with some sort of (no doubt equally noxious) powder.

Here's the current draft (I'll circulate it by mail tomorrow in case that's easier for printing purposes):

Dipping the sheep

Summer, balmy: here’s a milk bath for the ewes,

phosphorescent under the horse chestnut trees.

We funnel them down the hill for this,

their grey blur of panic spilling into the margins,

the green ditches. Bird alarms answer sheep-shouting.

I sang and bounced all the way on the sun-softened tarmac,

near-English child loosed in a tunnel

of hawthorn, wild carrot, cloud-piled sky -

but kept well back from Rose, her teeth under that velvet lip:

a good dog for the sheep and my uncle, the brown cudgel,

emanation of tree roots and cow dung

who drives them into the concrete bath and wades after,

no way soft as a shepherd.

I stand under the horse chestnut trees holding my breath.

The ewes thrash through it, swim-jumping,

the whites of their eyes no whiter

than the fluid they’re trying not to choke in.

No maggots this season.  My uncle hauls them out,

gloveless. You won’t have maggots either

my father says, but he’s not smiling, well clear with the dog.

The blackening trunks of the horse chestnut trees

lean away from this roadside parlour.

Somewhere further up the hill, a magpie rattles.