Mire n. Miry adj. (part 2)
Last month’s word was ‘mire’, and I promised a further examination of it, and of the related adjective ‘miry’ for December’s feature. Unfortunately, having been deep in my own mire of seasonal illnesses, this month’s article is a little late – but still sufficiently within the parameters of December to count, I hope.
In the last article I looked at the significance of the word ‘mire’ in Nicholson’s poem ‘St. Bees’, showing that the word had both spiritual and Northern English connotations. Nicholson’s use of the word there played with paradox, and was positive rather than negative, going against the grain of more common uses of the word to portray states of despair or difficulty. Indeed, Nicholson looks at the mire with much more optimistic knowledge, as this continuation of last month’s feature hopes to show. This time ‘mire’ will be examined in an ecological context, and ‘miry’ will be taken as another word which sparks spiritual revelation.
Someone with such a deep sense of ecology as Nicholson had may well have been aware of the fact that wetland ecosystems, based on peat, have been described as ‘mires’ by biologists, botanists, archaeologists and geologists, since at least the mid-1940s, when the term was proposed by H. Godwin in the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society: “we propose to employ the term ‘mire’, using it in the same sense as that of the cognate Swedish ‘myr’, to denote such units as bogs or fens in their entirety with characteristic morphology, hydrography, stratigraphy and vegetation” (OED ‘mire’ 4.).
According to the website of the Cumbria branch of the Butterfly Conservation charity, ‘Cumbria contains some of the best remaining examples of mosses and mires in the UK’. Like Nicholson, with his perception that the Lake District depended on Greater Lakeland – the whole region of Cumbria from the Solway down to Morecambe Bay, from the coastal dunes across to the Pennines – this conservation group argues that ‘there is so much more to this enormous, varied and beautiful county than just the Lake District National Park’.
Nicholson’s long poem sequence ‘The Seven Rocks’, which was collected in his book The Pot Geranium (1954), contains much that is relevant to an ecological vision – one that places the part within the whole, and clearly sees and understands the dynamic interrelationship of the living and non-living with each other. In Nicholson’s philosophy this interrelationship also included spiritual and theological dimensions, as well as social, biological and geological. As such, it is perhaps not surprising that Nicholson’s Seven Rocks poems not only accurately represent the geology underlying the diverse landscapes and habitats of Cumbria, but are also linked into human nature and to specific virtues. This is the case in the poem ‘Eskdale Granite’ (Collected Poems, p. 46), which represents the virtue of Fortitude. In a mere fifteen lines Nicholson treats the reader to an almost a bird’s eye view of the whole of the dale, from the seashore to the ‘granite pate’ of the fell, that exposed Eskdale rock so popular with rock-climbers and boulderers. The poem catches the essentials of this habitat, including the tidal movements of the sea which affects the flow of the waterweed in the river, the lambs on the fell-sides, the manmade environment of the characteristic packhorse (humped – or ‘cat-backed) bridges, all building up to, and flowing down from, the mountain rock.
But what I want to focus on here are the lines where Nicholson talks of the mire:
Above the salty mire where yellow flags
Unwrap in the late upland-lambing spring
Here the ‘mire’ is clearly a salt marsh, and, even more clearly, describes what is now both a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a Special Area of Conservation at the Drigg Coast, which includes salt marsh as part of the protected habitat. This is where the River Esk – and the Mite and Irt – have their outflow, forming a complex delta-like estuarine environment, which is also part of the broader environment of coastal plain, dale and fell.
A report by English Nature on the West Cumbria Coastal Plain mentions yellow flag as being characteristic of ‘the upper marsh communities’ which ‘are well developed at Drigg where they include slender spike-rush and saltmarsh flat-sedge. Freshwater transitions here are extremely well developed where they are characterised by yellow flag and meadowsweet’. Nicholson has therefore, in the lines quoted above, captured in just a few words the most typical and beautiful of the wild flowers present in the transitional wetland between the salt marsh and the uplands. He has also captured the fact that the human and natural intermingle. Lambing is late because of the canny judgement of the fell-famers: to let the lambs be born too early in the season would subject them to grave dangers of snow or frost. This is not said in the poem – but that knowledge certainly lies behind the careful word-choice.
Although the ‘salty mire’ is not the main subject of this short poem, it is an essential part of the whole living landscape. The granite pate of the unnamed fell which looms above the dale represents fortitude – strength, endurance, and even courage – the virtue that allows fear to be overcome. I can imagine how Nicholson perhaps came to this understanding – for the communities living in the Eskdale area, now as in earlier times, the coast, the salt marshes, the rivers, the dale, the crags and the fell are one complex whole, all interdependent each on each. The flux of sea and dune and marsh and mire are faced by the slower changes of the fell – the granite formed millennia since, and which will endure for millennia still, imperceptibly wearing away and adding its granules of stone to the sand, silt and sediment which flows via the three rivers, Esk, Irt and Mite, to the sea. Actions and interactions such as these have helped to create the salty mire – flow from the land and flow from the sea meeting in the salt marsh. Once again, we see that Nicholson probes deeply into the language to examine words which might seem negative, and shows us that they are words to be relished – playing their part in the whole, much as the actual mire does within the environment.
Similarly with ‘miry’ – the adjective formed from ‘mire’ (by the language’s own ecological process). This is used only once in Nicholson’s poems – yet it picks up on the association between the miraculous and the mundane which I felt also occurred in the St. Bees poem, the subject of November’s Word of the Month. In the well-known poem ‘Carol’ (Collected Poems, p. 68), which sets the Nativity of the Christ Child on a Cumbrian farm, one of the miracles which occurs is the revelation that although the farm is ‘miry’ and ‘frozen’, the fire of life is sparked within the roots of the resting crops (perhaps potatoes, or some other winter root crop, such as carrots or turnips). In fact, it is precisely at this period of slowing down and turning inwards, that new energies are created.
The farm is miry in several ways – wet, dirty, trodden down by the hoofs and feet of the creatures which dwell there, perhaps even set in a mire – and all that miry-ness is, in the depths of winter, frozen and cold. But even at this dark time, new life is springing up, nourished by the very elements which seem so negative, even miserable. That is the paradox of ‘mire’ – the spiritual meaning which Nicholson releases in the word.
Mary held her Child above
The miry, frozen farm---
And by the fire within His limbs
The resting roots were warm.
Simple words – but also containing a quite radical re-imagining of the Christmas story, one that includes the humblest and mutest elements of life within it, giving them almost human needs. These are roots which will feed humans and animals alike, and they sprang from the dirt, and from torpor. The new sun-like child-life symbolically warms them – and that is the transformative miracle which Nicholson has spied in the mire.
Wishing you all a good festive season, with plenty of linguistic, spiritual and ecological revelations. The next Word of the Month should appear in early January, and will also have a seasonal link.
Antoinette Fawcett
December 2014
Last month’s word was ‘mire’, and I promised a further examination of it, and of the related adjective ‘miry’ for December’s feature. Unfortunately, having been deep in my own mire of seasonal illnesses, this month’s article is a little late – but still sufficiently within the parameters of December to count, I hope.
In the last article I looked at the significance of the word ‘mire’ in Nicholson’s poem ‘St. Bees’, showing that the word had both spiritual and Northern English connotations. Nicholson’s use of the word there played with paradox, and was positive rather than negative, going against the grain of more common uses of the word to portray states of despair or difficulty. Indeed, Nicholson looks at the mire with much more optimistic knowledge, as this continuation of last month’s feature hopes to show. This time ‘mire’ will be examined in an ecological context, and ‘miry’ will be taken as another word which sparks spiritual revelation.
Someone with such a deep sense of ecology as Nicholson had may well have been aware of the fact that wetland ecosystems, based on peat, have been described as ‘mires’ by biologists, botanists, archaeologists and geologists, since at least the mid-1940s, when the term was proposed by H. Godwin in the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society: “we propose to employ the term ‘mire’, using it in the same sense as that of the cognate Swedish ‘myr’, to denote such units as bogs or fens in their entirety with characteristic morphology, hydrography, stratigraphy and vegetation” (OED ‘mire’ 4.).
According to the website of the Cumbria branch of the Butterfly Conservation charity, ‘Cumbria contains some of the best remaining examples of mosses and mires in the UK’. Like Nicholson, with his perception that the Lake District depended on Greater Lakeland – the whole region of Cumbria from the Solway down to Morecambe Bay, from the coastal dunes across to the Pennines – this conservation group argues that ‘there is so much more to this enormous, varied and beautiful county than just the Lake District National Park’.
Nicholson’s long poem sequence ‘The Seven Rocks’, which was collected in his book The Pot Geranium (1954), contains much that is relevant to an ecological vision – one that places the part within the whole, and clearly sees and understands the dynamic interrelationship of the living and non-living with each other. In Nicholson’s philosophy this interrelationship also included spiritual and theological dimensions, as well as social, biological and geological. As such, it is perhaps not surprising that Nicholson’s Seven Rocks poems not only accurately represent the geology underlying the diverse landscapes and habitats of Cumbria, but are also linked into human nature and to specific virtues. This is the case in the poem ‘Eskdale Granite’ (Collected Poems, p. 46), which represents the virtue of Fortitude. In a mere fifteen lines Nicholson treats the reader to an almost a bird’s eye view of the whole of the dale, from the seashore to the ‘granite pate’ of the fell, that exposed Eskdale rock so popular with rock-climbers and boulderers. The poem catches the essentials of this habitat, including the tidal movements of the sea which affects the flow of the waterweed in the river, the lambs on the fell-sides, the manmade environment of the characteristic packhorse (humped – or ‘cat-backed) bridges, all building up to, and flowing down from, the mountain rock.
But what I want to focus on here are the lines where Nicholson talks of the mire:
Above the salty mire where yellow flags
Unwrap in the late upland-lambing spring
Here the ‘mire’ is clearly a salt marsh, and, even more clearly, describes what is now both a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a Special Area of Conservation at the Drigg Coast, which includes salt marsh as part of the protected habitat. This is where the River Esk – and the Mite and Irt – have their outflow, forming a complex delta-like estuarine environment, which is also part of the broader environment of coastal plain, dale and fell.
A report by English Nature on the West Cumbria Coastal Plain mentions yellow flag as being characteristic of ‘the upper marsh communities’ which ‘are well developed at Drigg where they include slender spike-rush and saltmarsh flat-sedge. Freshwater transitions here are extremely well developed where they are characterised by yellow flag and meadowsweet’. Nicholson has therefore, in the lines quoted above, captured in just a few words the most typical and beautiful of the wild flowers present in the transitional wetland between the salt marsh and the uplands. He has also captured the fact that the human and natural intermingle. Lambing is late because of the canny judgement of the fell-famers: to let the lambs be born too early in the season would subject them to grave dangers of snow or frost. This is not said in the poem – but that knowledge certainly lies behind the careful word-choice.
Although the ‘salty mire’ is not the main subject of this short poem, it is an essential part of the whole living landscape. The granite pate of the unnamed fell which looms above the dale represents fortitude – strength, endurance, and even courage – the virtue that allows fear to be overcome. I can imagine how Nicholson perhaps came to this understanding – for the communities living in the Eskdale area, now as in earlier times, the coast, the salt marshes, the rivers, the dale, the crags and the fell are one complex whole, all interdependent each on each. The flux of sea and dune and marsh and mire are faced by the slower changes of the fell – the granite formed millennia since, and which will endure for millennia still, imperceptibly wearing away and adding its granules of stone to the sand, silt and sediment which flows via the three rivers, Esk, Irt and Mite, to the sea. Actions and interactions such as these have helped to create the salty mire – flow from the land and flow from the sea meeting in the salt marsh. Once again, we see that Nicholson probes deeply into the language to examine words which might seem negative, and shows us that they are words to be relished – playing their part in the whole, much as the actual mire does within the environment.
Similarly with ‘miry’ – the adjective formed from ‘mire’ (by the language’s own ecological process). This is used only once in Nicholson’s poems – yet it picks up on the association between the miraculous and the mundane which I felt also occurred in the St. Bees poem, the subject of November’s Word of the Month. In the well-known poem ‘Carol’ (Collected Poems, p. 68), which sets the Nativity of the Christ Child on a Cumbrian farm, one of the miracles which occurs is the revelation that although the farm is ‘miry’ and ‘frozen’, the fire of life is sparked within the roots of the resting crops (perhaps potatoes, or some other winter root crop, such as carrots or turnips). In fact, it is precisely at this period of slowing down and turning inwards, that new energies are created.
The farm is miry in several ways – wet, dirty, trodden down by the hoofs and feet of the creatures which dwell there, perhaps even set in a mire – and all that miry-ness is, in the depths of winter, frozen and cold. But even at this dark time, new life is springing up, nourished by the very elements which seem so negative, even miserable. That is the paradox of ‘mire’ – the spiritual meaning which Nicholson releases in the word.
Mary held her Child above
The miry, frozen farm---
And by the fire within His limbs
The resting roots were warm.
Simple words – but also containing a quite radical re-imagining of the Christmas story, one that includes the humblest and mutest elements of life within it, giving them almost human needs. These are roots which will feed humans and animals alike, and they sprang from the dirt, and from torpor. The new sun-like child-life symbolically warms them – and that is the transformative miracle which Nicholson has spied in the mire.
Wishing you all a good festive season, with plenty of linguistic, spiritual and ecological revelations. The next Word of the Month should appear in early January, and will also have a seasonal link.
Antoinette Fawcett
December 2014