Bewick Walks To Scotland: Sequence (A) Newcastle Poem by Sally Evans

These are my drawings and paintings of birds,
stored sheaves under the workbench, propped
behind casket or candlestick. I never stopped
adding to my notes, colours rather than words.
You see they are creased, I used them as templates.
Often would I stare at the blank horizon,
a carefully folded sheet in my grip,
as my mind took off, perhaps some quip
of Cunningham's ringing rhyme in my brain,
skylarks carolling upward in dry air
or quick hares starting sideways in confusion.
From Kenton or from Carter Bar,
from Cheviot, could I contemplate
a Scottish range to North or West
or both the Irish and the German main?
I was gated by hedged starry footpaths,
sea-coasts and meadows were mine
and westerly Wylam, wildlifed seclusion,
the quiet of cottaged reaches of the Tyne.

Beefore I drew for business or delight
or learned here or in London Town my trade,
engraving on wood and copper, letters, blocks,
flourishes, cressets churches might desire
or august corporations fancy,
Ralph Beilby training me in technique,
my brother following me in my learning,
I, as a country-knowledgeable lad
who looked to every teacher with the need
of finding peak or slope or grandstand,
a way of looking from a visionary day,
an answer without question, burning, once
touching the surface of our empirical clay,
our geological not theological empire,
I left my nursery and walked to Scotland.

We knew, we knew, exalted Nature
and lauded Science held truth and glory.
We challenged those besotted fools
of counties Palatine or graded schools
or courtly finery. We had found coal
with fossil ferns, saw their significance.
We had held traffic from the Tyne
with Holland, the Enlightenment, from Leith
and Cherbourgh of the Auld Alliance,
we knew of Jutland and of Denmark,
our local language flowed towards Oslo,
and Birmingham and London fed from us,
oh yes, depended on us, old Newcastle.

That stuffy buffer, my future self
(if not, there'll be no denial)
leaves gaps in his guesswork here,
supposing the young man austere,
reflecting an elder, a young blond pilgrim
he calculates will appear.
The narrative's incomplete.
I cannot recount my life
in a regular series of I-sentences.
All I have to say I have figured.
By circumstance and chances triggered,
my craftsman hand, so attuned to the pen,
relies on moments, not the words for them.

In trying to tell you what it was like,
circling in Scotland, a headlong hike,
in my knowledgeless and youth-full state,
I must speak from the young man, not from the old
nor from the busy cutter of a fast-selling line
of book illustrations. it is the craftsman
in the making that I am, not yet the craftsman.

2003
[Thomas Bewick]
sequence of 20 poems.