Poems for World Day - by Alice Oswald
Dart
This poem was made from the language of people who live and work on the Dart. Over a period of two years Alice Oswald recorded conversations with people who know the river. She used these records as life-models from which to sketch out a series of characters - linking their voices into a sound-map of the river, a songline from the source to the sea.
Below is an extract from the final published poem.
Who's this moving alive over the moor?
An old man seeking and finding a difficulty.
Has he remembered his compass his spare socks
does he fully intend going in over his knees off the military
track from Okehampton?
keeping his course through the swamp spaces
and pulling the distance around his shoulders
the source of the Dart - Cranmere Pool on Dartmoor,
seven miles from the nearest road
and if it rains, if it thunders suddenly
where will he shelter looking round
and all thtlt lies to hand is his own bones?
tussocks, minute flies,
wind, wings, roots. ..
He consults his map. A huge rain-coloured wilderness.
This must be the stones, the sudden movement,
the sound of frogs singing in the new year.
Who's this issuing from the earth?
The Dart, lying low in darkness calls out Who is it?
trying to summon itself by speaking...
the walker replies
An old man, fifty years a mountaineer, until my heart gave out,
so now I've taken to the moors.
I've done all the walks, the Two Moors Way, the Tors, this long
winding line the Dart
this secret buried in reeds at the beginning of sound I
won't let go of man, under
his soakaway ears and his eye ledges working
into the drift of his thinking, wanting his heart
I keep you folded in my mack pocket and I've marked in red
where the peat passes are and the
good sheep tracks
cow-bones, tin-stones, turf-cuts
listen to the horrible keep-time of a man walking,
rustling and jingling his keys
at the centre of his own noise,
clomping the silence in pieces and I,
in the pit of his throat, I
summon him just out of earshot
I don't know, all I know is walking. Get dropped off the
military track from Oakehampton and
head down into Cranmere pool. It's dawn, it's a huge sphagnum
kind of wilderness, and an hour
in the morning is worth three in the evening. You can hear
plovers whistling, your feet sink right
in, it's like walking on the bottom of a lake.
What I love is one foot in front of another. South south west
and down the contours. I go slipping
between Black Ridge and White Horse Hill into a bowl of the moor
where echoes can't get out.
Listen,
a
lark
spinning
around
one
note
splitting
and
mending
it
and I find you in the reeds, a trickle coming out of a bank,
a foal of a river
one step-width water
of linked stones
trills in the stones
glides in the trills
eels in the glides
in each eel a fingerwidth of sea
in walking boots, with twenty pounds on my back: spare socks,
compass, map, water purifier so I
can drink from streams, seeing the cold floating spread out
above the morning,
tent, torch, chocolate not much else.
Which'll make it longish, almost unbearable between my
evening meal and sleeping, when I've
got as far as stopping, sitting in the tent door with no book,
no saucepan, not so much as a stick
to support the loneliness
he sits clasping his knees, holding his face low down between them,
he watches black slugs,
he makes a little den of his smells and small thoughts
he thinks up a figure far away on the tors
waving, so if something does happen,
if night comes down and he has to leave the path
then we've seen each other, somebody knows where we are.
