The Fort
On the way to the grave I revisit Burridge
the double-vallum hillfort,
a pasture now grazed by sheep -
chronicles tell how once escaping the raiders,
with her band of children and a bevy of trusted servants
a Lady isolated here within field’s rounded ramps -
how they’d tramped along the rutted
tracks from Affeton west of Worlington,
crossed the little river at the old pack bridge,
then climbed the wooded slopes
skirting Deer Rocks Wood -
from trees’ undergrowth a pheasant lifts warning
and blackbirds threnody under oaks’ canopy…
I stop near the river
deer tracks vanish into shadow,
a rustle in the blackthorn hedge …
…They bid one another Quiet. Air’s
heady with floral scent
white elderflower fizzing the hedge
green alkanet on the grass at the cross.
Her servants climb the highest ash in the enclosure
shielding their lady and her children,
straddle branches, their tipped-
bud black arrows, crowns of thorns -
Cheldon’s little church tower’s north
across Dart’s valley
and every other which way wooded outcrops
the carolling birds scoring an outer fortress ring –
only beyond West Worlington woods
the reverberating hollow ways –
sounds of volley-fire, cannons,
deadened sounds of a flint locked musket.
Note: Elizabeth Sydenham Stucley was wife of Thomas Stucley, Royalist of the C17 Civil War when Affeton Castle, in Devon, was sacked by Roundheads, in 1654.
Threesome
After Sylvia Plath
Three women
best shoes teetering,
clack down the stony lane—
past Rose’s cottage, past the church—
lichen-bitten, gravestones lean,
deep tilted at their head,
green-lit, as if moss could glow,
stone could murmur.
Arm hooked in arm
the three women
holly-hedged, red-cob walled,
under yew black as sleep,
past the gate, on—on—
the high, holly-hedged boundary
under the red cob wall,
past her front gate on past
and under the churchyard, its flat black yew
Other gnarled women—
singly, in clusters, in silence—
drawn to the lych-gate.
grass seeds between cobble cracks
under the limes, low-limbed, pollarded,
the church door ahead—
We, the threesome, inseparable, hush—
arm in arm, in arm—
Are these the graves of lost children?
Who lives behind the hedge?
Is she the sorceress? Is this the house of spells?
A breath, a fade,
first dip into wet blue fog,
pavement bending, curving,
an old riverbed remembering water.
Note: The author, who spent her childhood in North Tawton, acknowledges selected phrases in this poem are adapted from Sylvia Plath’s short story about North Tawton’s Mother’s Union, titled Mothers.
Runaway
she is
far from home
pure
sound
a lift
a lilt …
lapwings fly south from over Whympstone
away down to Yarrowbury
where once with her sister
she’d taken in the hollow valley
the earthwork enclosures, hillslopes,
combes south of the wood
then crow-flight crossing the next field
with her sisters, grandmothers -
now stones in land’s strata -
used to meet on the crossing-point boundary line –
(feel the jolt of the diggers
landlines ploughed to the very bones)
where the old and new
the roads of choice taken
met, where the two selves split.
His father, he’d said,
stood the day full
at the chantry altar
rumbling the doctrines of the oratory deeds –
her father too.
Not for him, he looked to the land
fought with any contrary men
or neighbours –
plunged his way, panning in
escaped I - runaway
sunk within
warbler, reed-bunting,
robin
warning
She remembers the chase,
his pursuit along the track
beyond, far as the lone-pine tree
a hind’s splashing
fear taking to the deep waterbeds
and waterfowl rustling
meeting reeds – warblers,
urgent
the rush of wings
***
Some days they hear the strain
rhapsodic,
the quaint flute rise
from beneath the thatch,
woman fluttering in Devon wheat.
Down by the quiet pond
I call you near stream’s edge
where the tall reeds bend in wind
O Rosabella O dolze anima Mia.
Note: Isabella Fortescue, born 1515 (daughter of the wealthy Thomas Fortescue of Whympstone, near Modbury, in Devon. Said to have had an Oratory, Whympstone - whose location was in a shallow valley along a long drive with a pine-tree at the entrance – no longer survives. Nearby the earthwork at Yarrowbury, is at the focal point of five parishes. Isabella’s sister is named in the archives apropos land disputes linked with the chantry. ‘O beautiful rose, o sweet heart of mine’, is a late Medieval song. Isabella is imagined as Syrinx, the Naiad nymph pursued by Pan, who was transformed into reeds.
Here in the hedge
the guelder rose
fade of her perfect flowers,
jewel of her scented fruit –
the men still stalk amongst the ways
of the ancient-minded remembering woods,
brother’s bayonet in the deer park,
father’s pacing of the harepaths,
deep in constitutional thought –
She must be Jane.
Some days she’s siren beguiling at her lute,
remembering fated sailors, they return to crowd her,
an ignoble king amongst them.
Her sister, nun, cooped up
in the cell of her confinement _
not exploring the woods or in the sky
or on the streams of watery consciousness
of the finding poem that drew us into the enclosure
with her blood-kin women buried in our map —
neither are found inside the poem
on the surfacing page of the abandoned poem
you could not write, or in the finding way
poem that invites us in to finding a way, an/Other way
to meet other, her/our an/sisterly predecessor kin
Alice, Elizabeth, Katherine — may they tell us
how to write a poem about the semi-disappeared women of the deep past.
Note: ‘Jane’ was one of the 22 children of Lewis Pollard, Justice of the Common Pleas 1514-26. She was born at Grilstone, Bishop’s Nympton, and spent her childhood at nearby King’s Nympton Manor. Jane married Sir Hugh Stucley of Affeton and was mother of at least 12 children. We know a little more about Jane’s life than about many of her female Devon contemporaries, she may have been mistress of Henry VIII when he visited Affeton in 1520: he was possibly father of her son, notorious Captain Thomas Stucley, Catholic recusant and rebel against Elizabeth I. One of Jane’s sisters was a nun… ‘Alice’ Fitzroger/Cheddar, born in 1348, married five times. Heiress of Chewton, ‘Elizabeth’ Fitzroger (1370-1414) was Alice’s daughter from her first marriage.
Don’t forget Cecily
And there are others
who wander round
the edgy margins
of your everyday life
you’ll trace fossils
in the deconstructed face,
and intuit a comfort iconography
in your poetic muse
and those who call you out,
who sometimes flutter by,
or rarely, fly,
will bring to mind
that flourishing florilegium
in your dwindling
greening memory,
as you watch moss
smother
the desolate names.
Julie Sampson's poetry is widely published and she’s been placed in a variety of competitions. She received an 'honourable mention' in the Survision James Tate Memorial Prize, in 2021. In 2009 she edited Mary Lady Chudleigh; Selected Poems (Shearsman). Her collections are: Tessitura(Shearsman, 2014); It Was When It Was When It Was (Dempsey and Windle, 2018) and Fivestones(Lapwing, 2022).
See www.juliesampson.com and @writtenindevon
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