Mire n. Miry adj.
This month has a focus on two related words, although only one instance of use will be examined here. Next month’s article will continue the discussion.
The words ‘mire’, a bog or swamp, and ‘miry’ (the adjective derived from ‘mire’), are clearly not dialectal or even regional in usage. Although ‘miry’ is perhaps less common than ‘mire’, both words are still known and used, not only in the UK but throughout the English-speaking world. However, they do have a Northern English tinge to them, and a particular Cumbrian flavour. The region is full of place names (toponyms) which contain the ‘mire’ element, Hollow Mire, Cowmire, Mirehouse, Cringle Mire, Mirehousebrow, Cropple How Mire, for just a few examples. Some of these places can be found quite close to Millom, Nicholson’s birthplace, and where he lived for most of his life.
The OED gives the etymology of ‘mire’ as being Early Scandinavian (Old Icelandic mýrr, Old Swedish myr), forms of which are still used in Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish today. Interestingly the word ‘mire’ is also related to ‘moss’, both the plant and the bog, which in the latter sense is definitely a Northern English, Scottish and Northern Irish word (OED). Again, there are Mosses close to Millom – the Duddon Mosses, a Site of Special Scientific Interest, being an obvious example.
The fact that the North-western regions of England were colonized by Viking settlers originally from Western Norway may well explain the prevalence of both ‘mire’ and ‘moss’ place names in Cumbria and Lancashire, and goes a long way towards explaining my feeling that Nicholson uses the words ‘mire’ and ‘miry’ as regional markers in his work.
But there is more to ‘mire’ than at first meets the eye. Like the mud beneath the water in which the air-aspiring lotus grows, important in Buddhist symbolism, the mire and miry waters are laden with deep spiritual and metaphorical significance. This may be traced, perhaps, to Psalm 40 in which the psalmist says ‘He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings’ (King James Bible). The contrast here is between instability and stability, between a potential loss of life and a gaining of it, or – just as in Buddhist lore – between impurity and purity (although the Buddhist lotus symbol more clearly interlinks the two conditions).
Such connotations are also picked up in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in the description of the ‘miry slough’ whose name is ‘Despond’, the marshy ground into which Christian falls and is likely to drown, until he is aided by Help. We know that Nicholson not only read Pilgrim’s Progress as a boy but that it made a deep impression on him, so deep that he calls his first reading of it his ‘only clear memory of any experience which might be called religious’ (Wednesday Early Closing, pp. 92-3).
Methodism, the religion practised by Nicholson in his childhood, also gives the word ‘miry’ a certain resonance in the 19th century hymn ‘My heart was distressed’, which makes explicit what is hinted at more obliquely in Psalm 40:
My heart was distressed ’neath Jehovah’s dread frown,
And low in the pit where my sins dragged me down;
I cried to the Lord from the deep miry clay,
Who tenderly brought me out to golden day.
Refrain:
He brought me out of the miry clay,
He set my feet on the Rock to stay;
He puts a song in my soul today,
A song of praise, hallelujah!
(Words by Henry J. Zelley; refrain and music by Henry L. Gilmour)
There is no direct evidence, as far as I know, that Nicholson might have been familiar with this hymn, as it was more popular in the US than in the UK, nevertheless it is possible that he did he hear it at one of the many concerts or entertainments arranged by the Wesleyan Chapel in his youth.
In fact, the specifically religious (and negative) connotations of the word ‘miry’ continue well into the 20th and 21st centuries with preachers taking ‘miry clay’ as the theme for their sermons, and with various spirituals setting more modern or folk versions of ‘miry clay’ words to music. And the metaphorical applications of being ‘deep in the mire’ or in ‘a mire of indiscipline’ seem to resonate particularly in sports journalism, if Google Search is anything to go by!
Nicholson uses the word ‘mire’ twice in the Collected Poems and ‘miry’ only once, but each time the word carries a positive spiritual resonance, a penumbra of association reaching into the reader’s mind, and asking him or her to probe deeper.
The first use of ‘mire’ comes in the poem ‘St. Bees’ (CP pp. 21-2). The village of St. Bees is on the coast of Cumbria, south of Whitehaven and situated close to St. Bees Head, now designated as a Heritage Coastline and – like the Duddon Estuary – a Site of Special Scientific Interest. The poem was published in Nicholson’s first single-author collection Five Rivers (1944) and is clearly set in wartime, making reference to the Home Guard and to ‘foreign bombers’. We know that during the war Nicholson regularly travelled up the coast from Millom to St. Bees to deliver his Workers’ Educational Association series of lectures to an audience at the public school there, ‘which, in war-time, was housing not just its own staff and pupils, but also those of Mill Hill, so that the membership was made up largely of teachers and wives of teachers of two of England’s famous public schools’ (NN ‘Memories of the WEA’; see also Kathleen Jones’ biography of Nicholson). We know too that Nicholson was particularly keen at this time on the (metaphysical) poets of the 17th Century, and that he taught a short course on these writers.
The poem ‘St. Bees’ combines the influence of the Metaphysical Poets with Nicholson’s deep interest in locality, to produce a poem of wartime set against the timelessness of the legend of St. Bega, a Celtic saint whose name forms the basis of the present-day St. Bees.
The poem opens with a verse-paragraph which describes the setting: St. Bega’s Church (the Priory Church of St. Bees) and St. Bega’s Head (St. Bees Head), both of which hint at a near-mystical ‘As above, so below’ philosophy, since the spire of the earthly church chips against the masonry of the night, and the cliffs are envisaged as buttressing the ‘stained-glass sky’ (moon and stars, or perhaps a gloriously vivid setting sun). The night-sky, metaphorically speaking, is seen almost as a great cathedral.
After imagining the transit of ‘intelligent new stars’ above the ‘holy thoroughfares’ (holy, I imagine, because St. Bega once walked there), Nicholson reveals that these ‘stars’ are in fact planes, intent on bombing the industrial coastline of Cumberland. The Home Guards who are on night duty by railway, presumably to guard the important coastal line, hide their torches ‘And curse the moon that gives them light’:
They long for nights as dark as mire
When sea is one with shale and shore,
When the black wind from the cold fell
Freezes their bones and the foe's oil.
And then an apparent miracle occurs as a gale ‘rips out summer’s / remnant leaves’ and scatters the bombers, or as ‘blizzard, hail and storm’ blot out the landscape and paradoxically keep the ‘starving courage’ of the Guards ‘warm’. ‘Mire’, with its connotations of deep impenetrable muddy blackness, in this poem is to be longed for, topsy-turvying the usual state of affairs in which mankind is presented as desiring clarity, light and stability.
The poem ends with a quatrain which links the 1940s Home Guards back to the early medieval Irish princess, Bega, and makes apparent the reasons why adverse weather, darkness, mire and muck are so desirable. Bega, so the legend says, begged the Lord of Egremont for land so that she could found an Abbey. He laughed and said he would give ‘as much land as snow fell upon the next morning’, that being Midsummer Day. The next morning the land where St. Bees Priory now lies was covered in snow ‘for three miles together’, and the gift was made.
In times of war, the parallel unlooked-for gift is that the mire-dark night, the gales and blizzard, deflect the enemy bombers from their purpose. The Home Guard did not pray for this ‘miracle’ but know how to cheer it when the expected bombs do not fall. This metaphorical mire brings joy, not ‘despond’, and Bega gazes with gladness from her ‘haloed rocks’ at the help given by natural phenomena to the beleaguered inhabitants of this north-western region. And beleaguered they were since the shipyard at Barrow, steel and ironworks up and down the Cumbrian coast, the coal and iron mines, the chemical factories, ordnance works and RAF bases were all potential targets for the Luftwaffe. Barrow-in-Furness was badly bombed in the war, Millom was bombed in 1941, and at least one bomb hit Whitehaven too. The Home Guard were in St. Bees and the surrounding towns and villages for a good reason.
As for St. Bega’s miraculous snowfall, and Nicholson’s ‘unprayed-for’ gales, blizzards and hail, the headland of St. Bees does indeed create its own micro-climate, and unusual weather phenomena may often be observed there.
***
The second use of ‘mire’ and the only use of ‘miry’ in Nicholson’s Collected Poems will be explored in December’s Word of the Month (2014). And that article will have definite seasonal significance!
NOTES
Because Nicholson talks about St. Bega praying for snow to fall in midsummer, it’s clear that he is referring to the legend as narrated in the Sandford manuscript (c. 1675) and not the version from the Life of St. Bega (13th century Latin narrative). The perhaps more authentic version of the legend (from the Life) which describes the Priory Land as being free from snow when snow has fallen elsewhere, and which concerns the monks of the Priory rather than St. Bega herself, would not have suited Nicholson’s purposes in this poem.
For comments on the ‘snow miracle’ and on the St. Bees microclimate: http://www.stbees.org.uk/history/essays/bega_todd.html
For the Sandford manuscript [search for ‘Abbie’; the scanning of the book is not perfect, but the gist of the story is clear]: http://www.archive.org/stream/cu31924104091438/cu31924104091438_djvu.txt
For more about the village of St. Bees in the Second World War: http://www.stbees.org.uk/history/books/100years/lights_out.html
For images of St. Bega and other sculptures:
http://www.stbees.org.uk/miscellaneous/sculptures.html
For information about Cumbria’s Viking Coast: http://www.cumbriancoastline.co.uk/?Cumbrian_Coast:The_Viking_Coast
For information about the Whitehaven bomb: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/47/a3856647.shtml
For information about a 2nd World War German bomb raid on Millom:
http://www.newsandstar.co.uk/service-to-remember-the-victims-of-raid-on-town-1.795954
Kathleen Jones (2013) Norman Nicholson: The Whispering Poet, Appleby: The Book Mill.
Norman Nicholson (1994) Collected Poems, edited by Neil Curry, London: Faber and Faber.
Norman Nicholson (1975) Wednesday Early Closing, London: Faber and Faber.
Antoinette Fawcett
November 2014
This month has a focus on two related words, although only one instance of use will be examined here. Next month’s article will continue the discussion.
The words ‘mire’, a bog or swamp, and ‘miry’ (the adjective derived from ‘mire’), are clearly not dialectal or even regional in usage. Although ‘miry’ is perhaps less common than ‘mire’, both words are still known and used, not only in the UK but throughout the English-speaking world. However, they do have a Northern English tinge to them, and a particular Cumbrian flavour. The region is full of place names (toponyms) which contain the ‘mire’ element, Hollow Mire, Cowmire, Mirehouse, Cringle Mire, Mirehousebrow, Cropple How Mire, for just a few examples. Some of these places can be found quite close to Millom, Nicholson’s birthplace, and where he lived for most of his life.
The OED gives the etymology of ‘mire’ as being Early Scandinavian (Old Icelandic mýrr, Old Swedish myr), forms of which are still used in Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish today. Interestingly the word ‘mire’ is also related to ‘moss’, both the plant and the bog, which in the latter sense is definitely a Northern English, Scottish and Northern Irish word (OED). Again, there are Mosses close to Millom – the Duddon Mosses, a Site of Special Scientific Interest, being an obvious example.
The fact that the North-western regions of England were colonized by Viking settlers originally from Western Norway may well explain the prevalence of both ‘mire’ and ‘moss’ place names in Cumbria and Lancashire, and goes a long way towards explaining my feeling that Nicholson uses the words ‘mire’ and ‘miry’ as regional markers in his work.
But there is more to ‘mire’ than at first meets the eye. Like the mud beneath the water in which the air-aspiring lotus grows, important in Buddhist symbolism, the mire and miry waters are laden with deep spiritual and metaphorical significance. This may be traced, perhaps, to Psalm 40 in which the psalmist says ‘He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings’ (King James Bible). The contrast here is between instability and stability, between a potential loss of life and a gaining of it, or – just as in Buddhist lore – between impurity and purity (although the Buddhist lotus symbol more clearly interlinks the two conditions).
Such connotations are also picked up in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in the description of the ‘miry slough’ whose name is ‘Despond’, the marshy ground into which Christian falls and is likely to drown, until he is aided by Help. We know that Nicholson not only read Pilgrim’s Progress as a boy but that it made a deep impression on him, so deep that he calls his first reading of it his ‘only clear memory of any experience which might be called religious’ (Wednesday Early Closing, pp. 92-3).
Methodism, the religion practised by Nicholson in his childhood, also gives the word ‘miry’ a certain resonance in the 19th century hymn ‘My heart was distressed’, which makes explicit what is hinted at more obliquely in Psalm 40:
My heart was distressed ’neath Jehovah’s dread frown,
And low in the pit where my sins dragged me down;
I cried to the Lord from the deep miry clay,
Who tenderly brought me out to golden day.
Refrain:
He brought me out of the miry clay,
He set my feet on the Rock to stay;
He puts a song in my soul today,
A song of praise, hallelujah!
(Words by Henry J. Zelley; refrain and music by Henry L. Gilmour)
There is no direct evidence, as far as I know, that Nicholson might have been familiar with this hymn, as it was more popular in the US than in the UK, nevertheless it is possible that he did he hear it at one of the many concerts or entertainments arranged by the Wesleyan Chapel in his youth.
In fact, the specifically religious (and negative) connotations of the word ‘miry’ continue well into the 20th and 21st centuries with preachers taking ‘miry clay’ as the theme for their sermons, and with various spirituals setting more modern or folk versions of ‘miry clay’ words to music. And the metaphorical applications of being ‘deep in the mire’ or in ‘a mire of indiscipline’ seem to resonate particularly in sports journalism, if Google Search is anything to go by!
Nicholson uses the word ‘mire’ twice in the Collected Poems and ‘miry’ only once, but each time the word carries a positive spiritual resonance, a penumbra of association reaching into the reader’s mind, and asking him or her to probe deeper.
The first use of ‘mire’ comes in the poem ‘St. Bees’ (CP pp. 21-2). The village of St. Bees is on the coast of Cumbria, south of Whitehaven and situated close to St. Bees Head, now designated as a Heritage Coastline and – like the Duddon Estuary – a Site of Special Scientific Interest. The poem was published in Nicholson’s first single-author collection Five Rivers (1944) and is clearly set in wartime, making reference to the Home Guard and to ‘foreign bombers’. We know that during the war Nicholson regularly travelled up the coast from Millom to St. Bees to deliver his Workers’ Educational Association series of lectures to an audience at the public school there, ‘which, in war-time, was housing not just its own staff and pupils, but also those of Mill Hill, so that the membership was made up largely of teachers and wives of teachers of two of England’s famous public schools’ (NN ‘Memories of the WEA’; see also Kathleen Jones’ biography of Nicholson). We know too that Nicholson was particularly keen at this time on the (metaphysical) poets of the 17th Century, and that he taught a short course on these writers.
The poem ‘St. Bees’ combines the influence of the Metaphysical Poets with Nicholson’s deep interest in locality, to produce a poem of wartime set against the timelessness of the legend of St. Bega, a Celtic saint whose name forms the basis of the present-day St. Bees.
The poem opens with a verse-paragraph which describes the setting: St. Bega’s Church (the Priory Church of St. Bees) and St. Bega’s Head (St. Bees Head), both of which hint at a near-mystical ‘As above, so below’ philosophy, since the spire of the earthly church chips against the masonry of the night, and the cliffs are envisaged as buttressing the ‘stained-glass sky’ (moon and stars, or perhaps a gloriously vivid setting sun). The night-sky, metaphorically speaking, is seen almost as a great cathedral.
After imagining the transit of ‘intelligent new stars’ above the ‘holy thoroughfares’ (holy, I imagine, because St. Bega once walked there), Nicholson reveals that these ‘stars’ are in fact planes, intent on bombing the industrial coastline of Cumberland. The Home Guards who are on night duty by railway, presumably to guard the important coastal line, hide their torches ‘And curse the moon that gives them light’:
They long for nights as dark as mire
When sea is one with shale and shore,
When the black wind from the cold fell
Freezes their bones and the foe's oil.
And then an apparent miracle occurs as a gale ‘rips out summer’s / remnant leaves’ and scatters the bombers, or as ‘blizzard, hail and storm’ blot out the landscape and paradoxically keep the ‘starving courage’ of the Guards ‘warm’. ‘Mire’, with its connotations of deep impenetrable muddy blackness, in this poem is to be longed for, topsy-turvying the usual state of affairs in which mankind is presented as desiring clarity, light and stability.
The poem ends with a quatrain which links the 1940s Home Guards back to the early medieval Irish princess, Bega, and makes apparent the reasons why adverse weather, darkness, mire and muck are so desirable. Bega, so the legend says, begged the Lord of Egremont for land so that she could found an Abbey. He laughed and said he would give ‘as much land as snow fell upon the next morning’, that being Midsummer Day. The next morning the land where St. Bees Priory now lies was covered in snow ‘for three miles together’, and the gift was made.
In times of war, the parallel unlooked-for gift is that the mire-dark night, the gales and blizzard, deflect the enemy bombers from their purpose. The Home Guard did not pray for this ‘miracle’ but know how to cheer it when the expected bombs do not fall. This metaphorical mire brings joy, not ‘despond’, and Bega gazes with gladness from her ‘haloed rocks’ at the help given by natural phenomena to the beleaguered inhabitants of this north-western region. And beleaguered they were since the shipyard at Barrow, steel and ironworks up and down the Cumbrian coast, the coal and iron mines, the chemical factories, ordnance works and RAF bases were all potential targets for the Luftwaffe. Barrow-in-Furness was badly bombed in the war, Millom was bombed in 1941, and at least one bomb hit Whitehaven too. The Home Guard were in St. Bees and the surrounding towns and villages for a good reason.
As for St. Bega’s miraculous snowfall, and Nicholson’s ‘unprayed-for’ gales, blizzards and hail, the headland of St. Bees does indeed create its own micro-climate, and unusual weather phenomena may often be observed there.
***
The second use of ‘mire’ and the only use of ‘miry’ in Nicholson’s Collected Poems will be explored in December’s Word of the Month (2014). And that article will have definite seasonal significance!
NOTES
Because Nicholson talks about St. Bega praying for snow to fall in midsummer, it’s clear that he is referring to the legend as narrated in the Sandford manuscript (c. 1675) and not the version from the Life of St. Bega (13th century Latin narrative). The perhaps more authentic version of the legend (from the Life) which describes the Priory Land as being free from snow when snow has fallen elsewhere, and which concerns the monks of the Priory rather than St. Bega herself, would not have suited Nicholson’s purposes in this poem.
For comments on the ‘snow miracle’ and on the St. Bees microclimate: http://www.stbees.org.uk/history/essays/bega_todd.html
For the Sandford manuscript [search for ‘Abbie’; the scanning of the book is not perfect, but the gist of the story is clear]: http://www.archive.org/stream/cu31924104091438/cu31924104091438_djvu.txt
For more about the village of St. Bees in the Second World War: http://www.stbees.org.uk/history/books/100years/lights_out.html
For images of St. Bega and other sculptures:
http://www.stbees.org.uk/miscellaneous/sculptures.html
For information about Cumbria’s Viking Coast: http://www.cumbriancoastline.co.uk/?Cumbrian_Coast:The_Viking_Coast
For information about the Whitehaven bomb: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/47/a3856647.shtml
For information about a 2nd World War German bomb raid on Millom:
http://www.newsandstar.co.uk/service-to-remember-the-victims-of-raid-on-town-1.795954
Kathleen Jones (2013) Norman Nicholson: The Whispering Poet, Appleby: The Book Mill.
Norman Nicholson (1994) Collected Poems, edited by Neil Curry, London: Faber and Faber.
Norman Nicholson (1975) Wednesday Early Closing, London: Faber and Faber.
Antoinette Fawcett
November 2014