Two West Country Men — a poem
Celebrating the writers Thomas Hardy and John Fowles
They strode out together from the pages of their books,
those two West Country men, bound by belonging and lineage
and, above all, loyalty to the softly folding land they loved.
I walk this same earth, and lie under its trees, reading now.
As I look back, I can see I was always heading west
drawn here, as if a fate spread out before me, calling.
And I remember those stories from my youth and
how the land climbed inside me under that greenwood tree,
on Gabriel Oak’s frown, in Tess’s date with destiny amid the dolmens.
‘Tess, Tess!,’ I called out to her, watching the ground grow flatter,
harder as she walked east, knowing it was a sign of things to come -
in my mind, somehow, flat lands almost always being badlands.
But she did not hear, and although she haunted me and
whispered in the wind as Cathy did to Heathcliff,
I forgot the West Country for a short while and went on my way.
Then at 18, on my birthday, a girl I hardly knew gave me a book
‘You must have it,’ she said, with an urgency only hinted at by hindsight, pressing The Magus by Fowles into the palm of an outstretched hand.
Not long after, perhaps months, perhaps a few years, she died
as if our two beings colluded in a drama outside of time
within a soulscape where writers and readers existed
apart from their creations. As the tale transfixed,
I felt the two men reach out to one another across the century,
over the Dorset fields, across the Wiltshire plains
into the heart of my own young life, again calling.
It took a French Lieutenant’s Woman to cast them together in time.
I realised then how a land and its people formed one living thing
walking the pages of the books of those men
the one foreshadow and mentor to the other.
I too, now, am a Dorset man and this a hymn of
gratitude to the two women whose endings were my beginnings,
one here, one there, revealing the brutal, beautiful
coalescing of land and people, nature and fate
that makes up both this life and that.
© Simon Heathcote
