The uses of wood

The heart is warmed by a good list; at an elemental level, the ability to index gives us control. Look at Adam and Eve's naming or Robinson Crusoe's inventory of stores. A while back we added an index to the blog and that got us thinking about why lists were so enjoyable in a poem; handled right (that goes without saying).

A list that I enjoy is one in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene; it is in Canto One of the poem scene-setting and it is a list of tree wood and its various uses. Wow! This part of the poem was written in 1590. Its audience the leisured of Elizabeth 1st's court in England, a time when people had hours to read poetry, and Spenser, a friend of Sir Walter Raleigh had a place at that court - but even so, a list of wood. Spenser was thinking of Virgil no doubt and the Eclogues, the mediaeval shepherd's calendars which explain what agricultural jobs need to be done and when.


But the list is fantastic, it is a detailed list and begins "Much can they praise the trees so straight and high!" and so we discovers elms can be used to prop up vines, the yew springy and pliable is "obedient to the bender's will" and at this time it was used to make long-bows (still a vital part of the English arsenal). And the sallow or willow wood for the mill perhaps to make the turnery, tool handles or to lie underwater as it was also used as plaited basket-work in fish-traps.

And then it is over, 14 lines, a sonnet's length of information in this vast poem. Take a look and do some research and I defy you not to want to write a poem about one of the details that you discover.

 Much can they prayse the trees so straight and hy,
    The sayling Pine, the Cedar proud and tall,
    The vine-prop Elme, the Poplar neuer dry,
    The builder Oake, sole king of forrests all,
The Aspine good for staues, the Cypresse funerall.


The Laurell, meed of mightie Conquerours
    And Poets sage, the Firre that weepeth still,
    The Willow worne of forlorne Paramours,
    The Eugh obedient to the benders will,
    The Birch for shaftes, the Sallow for the mill,
    The Mirrhe sweete bleeding in the bitter wound,
    The warlike Beech, the Ash for nothing ill,
    The fruitfull Oliue, and the Platane round,
The caruer Holme, the Maple seeldom inward sound.


Led with delight, they thus beguile the way,
    Vntill the blustring storme is ouerblowne;


And of course, Spenser was a bit of a geek himself. He invented the Spenserian stanza which he uses in The Faerie Queene. The stanza's main rhythm is iambic pentameter with a final line in iambic hexameter. This latter has six feet or stresses,and can be known as an Alexandrine. The rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc.

Machine poets: the movement of big things

Man and machine, a combination that has existed in poetry since classical times; early English examples include John Donne's The Compass

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the' other do.

and Spenser's dissertation in the Faerie Queene on the uses of wood

    The Eugh obedient to the benders will,

    The Birch for shaftes, the Sallow for the mill,

But at the moment I am interested when machines stand for a certain kind of grit and honesty; less renaissance man who has an interest in science and more alpha male who "likes the movement of big things".

W.H.Auden's factories stand for social truth, Work has been stopped on the powerhouse; the wind whistles under/The half-built culverts while The square munition works out on the old allotments/Needs stricter watching (The Orators 1931); a society of which he is an observer and excluded (Stop all the clocks). But what often appeals to me is the more fifties brand of machine poet. Ted Hughes' Tractor is a badge of manhood endowed with all the pain of a rite of passage:

The tractor stands frozen - and agony

to think of...[]

It defies flesh and won't start

hands are like wounds already

Inside armour gloves...

In the end its superhuman power is mastered and it starts like a Blakean engine or mill. Simon Armitage's poem Very simply topping up the brake fluid (Yes, love, that's why the warning light comes on...) takes the process one step further. The chance of failure that in Hughes's poem is contained within the poet himself is split into a male expert and subservient female persona, the love in question. But Armitage's poem is a cry against the feminisation all men feel when they get out of their depth with machines; it is perhaps a logical step to men (and women) bathing in pies to assert themselves (The practical way to heaven) in Armitage's latest collection Seeing stars (something not so far away from D.H. Lawrence's nudity and wrestling).

This has to end for the moment in a call for machine poems and poets; the series is to be continued...