Going down The Keats Road

The Golden Triangle (Butleigh to the left)

In my previous post, Fecundity and Desire – a flirtation with the concept of a sadomasochistic landscape - I began ruminating about To Autumn before admonishing myself. DON’T GO DOWN THE KEATS ROAD! I wrote in my notebook.

But why ever not? To avoid kitsch and cliché, I suppose, but I like to think I’m cute enough to give the former a wide berth and, as a Latin Catholic, I think the former should be embraced, not eschewed. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense, even if I felt a little like Aragorn – or maybe Legolas – traversing the Paths of the Dead; would walking The Keats Road open a can of worms or a Pandora’s Box?

Well both, as it happens, but not until I’d entered The Golden Triangle.

Enough already! Let me explain.

My first port of call was obviously To Autumn, even though summer was fighting tooth and nail and to maintain its grip on the year. Fighting tooth and nail but not quite succeeding; it took a while for the mist to clear the Cathedral City and when it did the ‘swelling gourds’ and ‘fruit with ripeness to the core’ were all too evident. Summer had tucked her bat under arm and was heading back to the pavilion. 

Season of mists ...

But To Autumn isn’t just a sensual elegy to the passing of the year, it invokes a contested landscape; how you perceive it depends on whose side you’re on. Jerome McGann accuses Keats of deliberately ignoring the political landscape of 1819 - the poem is ‘an exercise in political reactionary’. Rather than addressing social and political unrest Keats devotes himself to ‘the idealised view of nature’. McGann’s criticisms have been refuted by, amongst others, Andrew Motion but he has a point. When academics start lamenting the decline of peasant rebellions in Latin America the prospect of any sort of rural revolution in the English countryside seems impossibly remote; in the deserted or Anglo-Saxonised villages of continental Europe, too. Does To Autumn give the middle classes permission to perpetuate this rural idyll, sanitised and made banal?

... and mellow fruitfulness

As if by magic, the Keats Road led me to The Golden Triangle in search of an answer. The Golden Triangle, to the uninitiated, is a product of modern mythology, though I’m not sure whether Keats would have approved or not. Its points lie in the South Somerset villages of Butleigh, Barton St David and Baltonsborough, none of which, according to local hearsay, have ever possessed any sort of council housing. Its fame – or, perhaps, infamy – is enhanced – or exacerbated – by the influence of the £33,000-a-year Millfield School, sometimes mocked – perhaps unfairly - as an educational establishment for the ‘sporty but thick’. Academic prowess or no, its presence pushes up already-inflated house prices by another percentage point or no.

The result? A pastiche, in places, though not of Poundbury proportions; we must be thankful for small mercies. Somerset rural chic has a dynamic of its own, the peasant replaced, to a certain extent, by the artisan and the academic and a steady flow of creative refugees fleeing the capital. And now we have a Waitrose in Wells I expect to see more of them on my doorstep.

More of them on my doorstep. What on earth am I saying? I am one of them.

From agriculture to astrology: what would Keats say?

Whilst studying Geography and Landscape Studies at Weymouth University (aka Dorset Institute of Higher Education) back in the eighties, my best friend – then a dedicated Marxist - refused to enter stately homes and country houses because they effectively celebrated poverty, inequality and the abuse of power; he wanted them all pulled down. I wonder what he’d make of the Golden Triangle, the hovels of the peasantry now sought after by Guardianistas and neo Kulaks at inflated prices. I like them but then again, I tutor their children so I’m part of the same system. 

Organic peasant chic: the old and the new

Meanwhile there has emerged a current of rural functionalism that has shaped the landscape of the Golden Triangle in the last few decades, village infilling and small housing estates; homes for locals and the less well-off. It started with bungalows but has progressed – if I can use that participle – to become more ‘Somerset’. It’s less bland, but it’s still bland and it tries too hard to be both less bland and more ‘Somerset’; I left the Golden Triangle wondering when – and where – the new Somerset might emerge because we sure as hell can’t go on rebranding the past, Golden Age or not.

Bungalows and rural functionalism in The Golden Triangle

 Next post: Landscape and Negative Capability 

Meanwhile, back in Über-Somerset ...

 References

Jerome McGann: Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism, MLN (1994)

Andrew Motion: Keats, University of Chicago Press (1999)

Nicholas Roe: John Keats and the Culture of Dissent, Clarendon Press (1998)

My own Private Ida

There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier

Than all the valleys of Ionian hills.

The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen,

Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine,

And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand

The lawns and meadow-ledges midway down

Hang rich in flowers, and far below them roars

The long brook falling thro' the clov'n ravine

In cataract after cataract to the sea.

Behind the valley topmost Gargarus

Stands up and takes the morning: but in front

The gorges, opening wide apart, reveal

Troas and Ilion's column'd citadel,

The crown of Troas.

 Tennyson, Oenone

The Greeks might have their Mount Ida, the Japanese Mount Fuji, the hippies over in Glastonbury have their knobbly Tor but yesterday the unfeasibly handsome María Inés de la Cruz and I came across our own little paradise. Our very own Pico Bonito; a part of South Somerset that will be forever northern Honduras.

It’s fair to say that during our prolonged hibernation beneath the duvets in La Villa Ramblanista our thoughts have wandered to warmer climes; it was all I could do to tear María from the laptop where she was searching for a cheap flight back home to El Salvador. ‘You’ll be lucky,’ I told her, ‘we haven’t even got enough money for a cheap day return to Weymouth.’

So for the first time this year we flexed our pale limbs under the warm, West Country sun – well, my limbs are pale, hers are, as ever, a deep golden brown – our thoughts were still very much on the exotic. After nibbling on a pasty in the sublime surroundings of Wells Market Place we drifted out to and along the old railway line that, once upon a time, connected the ecclesiastical with the agricultural: Wells to Shepton Mallet It was there that Maria noticed the shapely outline of Dulcote Hill. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ she asked. I nodded, images of the beautiful Pico Bonito flashed before our eyes like cartoon pound signs.

Dulcote Hill, Somerset

Pico Bonito, Honduras

It’s difficult to find any accurate information on Pico Bonito. It’s now the focus of a national park, in the Nombre de Dios mountains not far from the Caribbean port of La Ceiba and the Moskita coast. We’ve been there before, of course, but we’ve never got much further than the crystal-clear Rio Zacate. Apparently the first successful ascent didn’t take place until the 1950s and since then only a handful of attempts have been made.  The expedition takes a good ten days at best up vertiginous slopes with dense vegetation.

The ascent of Dulcote Hill, in contrast, doesn’t take more than a good ten minutes scrambling through thicket and scrub and in the absence of poisonous snakes such as the fer-de-lance the only threat to our safety came from slipping through the rusting fence designed to keep the likes of us out of the quarry. I’ll tell you something for nothing; there’s nothing like a ‘Private: Keep Out’ sign to prompt a Ramblanista sortie into the forbidden.

If the north, south and west slopes of Dulcote Hill are precipitous, its west face is a vertical wall of rusty-grey rock because it is, of course, a disused quarry. Just as well our summit celebrations weren’t over-effusive; one false move and either of us could have toppled over the edge. It was a languid afternoon so María and I lay under the sun enjoying the sublime view of England’s most exquisite Cathedral City.

In a couple of years’ time both María and I will be celebrating an important birthday; as we hopped and skipped our way back down to the picture-book literary village that is Queen’s Sturge, an unspoken we discussed what we might do by way of a party. You didn’t have to be a psychic to know what we were both thinking. That evening, sipping on out gin and tonics back in La Villa Ramblanista, the intolerably handsome María Inés de la Cruz fired up the laptop.

‘Shall I?’ she asked, her voice hoarse with anticipation. I nodded. ‘Cheapest flight from London to La Ceiba won’t be any less than eight hundred quid - call that a grand come 2013.’

‘We’d better start saving then ...’