Caroline Gill : part five

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

May I be greedy? The truth is that I return to several poems and poets when I feel in need of a lift. 

Perhaps I can begin with George Herbert, whose marriage of craft and content seems to me to be exemplary. I admire the concrete nature of ‘Easter Wings’. As a child I was fascinated by the final verse of ‘The Elixir’ (‘This is the famous stone ...’). As an adult, I find myself returning to the poem we know as ‘Love’ (‘Love bade me welcome ...’).

I have already mentioned ‘The Lady of Shalott’ in an earlier question, but I feel I must include Tennyson’s classic poem here. I can recite parts of it by heart and am often drawn back to this poem by the narrative, the fairytale element, the imagery of the mirror and the web, not forgetting the wonderful ‘soundscape’ evoked by the shivering aspen and the quiver of raindrops in the stream. 

I have known and loved Cornwall all my life, and would like to mention two poems here that I read over and over again. There are, in fact, many poems about the county that I could mention, written by a variety of authors ranging from Betjeman to Ursula K. Le Guin, and Hardy to W.S. Graham; but for the purpose of this interview, I will restrict myself to ‘Cadgwith’ by Lionel Johnson and ‘Zennor’ by Anne Ridler. Cornwall was home to my elderly relations when I was a young child. It was the setting for family visits, and later for holidays on the Lizard. I chose a verse from the Johnson poem as my epigraph at the front of Driftwood by Starlight, my first full poetry collection, and I nominated ‘Zennor’ as a favourite poem for the BBC’s Poetry Please programme some years ago. ‘Cadgwith’, it seems to me, evokes in a few short lines something of the sense of wonder that I have experienced on the occasions when I have stood under the stars, listening to the waves breaking on the shore of a Cornish cove. ‘Zennor’ fascinates me with its ever-shifting coastal perspectives. The mention of the rocky, sloping hamlet of ‘Amalveor’ in the final stanza seems for a moment to ground the poem, before the sea forces its way back in again in the final line. I find the very name, ‘Amalveor’, evokes the rugged landscape of Penwith, a place that means so much to me.