Castle Poetry

Extracts from
ON WARWICK CASTLE

*

One year floods rose,
one year they fought in the snows,
one year hail fell, according to the Cantos (Canto IX, to be precise)
and that year there were metal-tipped arrows loosed from embrasures
and hot pitch
dropped out of diabolic machicolations
and other fourteenth century garrison defences 
and holes cut for cannon
and two dank side rooms in Guy's Tower – one possibly a bedchamber
the other reserved for calls of nature – 
GARDEZ LOO! and down it went.

And þa mudde þær wæs so thicce þæt wuden patens motan we weren
Forþæt ure feet he may not stynk 

And the old man bent with his shovel under that filthy drop 
and there were many flies there and a breathless heat
in the white tents before battle and a young boy 
with his skull dented by a mattock and the want & the waste of it 
and still the rallying cry 'For Warwick!'


* 

One year we played in the snow,
one year famine gripped us,
one year we embraced the Renaissance - 
but was it chiaroscuro or sfumato? 
Here Launcelot
('Capability' Brown, not Camelot) first laid lawns, forced fields
into green sward, raised
the cobbled rake of the yard, heard King Arthur's fire
fly from the flint and the jangle
of horse-bit, crupper and curb.
So the Faerie Queen herself
might have come to Warwick in 1572, accompanied
by all her court. 
I put down the book, try to imagine it. 
A peacock shrieks behind the fence. Bells on the air, somewhere
a church tower. Hot lunch
in the medieval banqueting cafeteria, 
then a leisurely walk
through roses to the conservatory. 
And here he comes: the peacock
with his strutting blues and greens, like earth seen from space,
lapis-eyed king of tennis lawns and formal gardens, 
his angry scream
the gene-cry of a dying race. Pavo crisatus, with his dainty crown:
once ridden by an Indian goddess, now 
a Roman delicacy
pecking at leaf-mould with wrens and thrushes
in this sunlit shrubbery. 

*

On the other side of the castle, two ice-houses: dual entrances
set into the bank, red brick 
crumbling, ten steps down
into the dark, a murky white fire
burning the long chute,
its throat roughened with diamonds, water 
white as a lantern’s wick. 

*

Master John Smythe,
Guner to his Majestye Highness was a prisner in this place
and lay here from 1642 - tell the

Here, he's interrupted by the blade breaking or a tour guide, descending.
There are rules even in darkness.
For a really serious breach, 
the guide book tells him,
such as plagiarism or pastiche,
a man might be hung alive in chains near the scene of his crime.
‘Tell them,’ he was to have finished, ‘I am a traveller in time,
a master smith
forged here in the shadows. I fall. 
I stop. My flesh decays.
Yet here my name remains until
the very end of days
when there may be time
for the courtyard gift shop, after all. Follow the signs.’ 

*

The long poem ‘On Warwick Castle’ - from which these extracts derive - was first published in the Warwick Laureateship pamphlet On Warwick, from Nine Arches Press, 2008. Jane Holland is an award-winning poet and novelist, and the editor of Castle Poetry, and just thought readers might like to see her own pyrotechnics (with a castle theme).