Poem & Process is an ongoing series: one poem, and reflections on writing it.
The Path of Stone
Take the hard path of stone - ignore the grass
though tougher on your boots, it cuts straight through
a more direct way, and it’s built to last
you do not want to get lost now, do you?
Though green and lush, lined with trees and flowers
the path of grass is a trick to mislead
meandering along, wasting hours
feet tangled in brambles, confused by weeds.
The path of stone is the civilised course
laid down on top of troublesome nature
pushing her savagery down with our force
triumphing: we become the creator.
For man without his tools will die alone
fearful of nature: take the path of stone.
In 2019, I was appointed Stowe Garden’s poet-in-residence by the National Trust to work on ‘Under the Hawthorn’, a 6-month project conceived as a contemporary creative response to the English pastoral. We focused on the ‘Grecian Valley’ part of the landscaped gardens - a somewhat eccentric Victorian attempt to create Arcadia in Buckinghamshire. It’s a stunning and strange place - Google it for some images! My role was to make some new writing and deliver lots of public and community workshops - exactly the kind of project I love to get into as a poet.
It also saved my sanity.
I interviewed for the job on-site in the midst of huge emotional instability and physical upheaval, just a week after leaving both my home and an intensely dysfunctional relationship.
Sometimes the benefits of my somewhat-precarious freelance artist life can be difficult to feel - especially compared to the relative stability of being employed, with its attendant steady income, sick and holiday pay, and so on. That summer, however, I was deeply grateful for this place-based, workshop-facilitating, public-engaging, poet-in-residence niche I’ve carved out for myself.
Getting the role was a huge relief: not only did it mean income to get through the next months more easily, it also provided me with a professional focus - delivering the kind of work I was good at, in an interesting place where I’d have to learn new things like what ‘Arcadia’ meant and the English pastoral was all about. In my broken state, it was an opportunity to both feel my own value by doing positive work, and have some time and space to do not much - and begin the process of healing.
As a bonus, Stowe was not too far from some good friends I could stay with - who could put me up and console me in my tender and wobbly being with good chat and real ale.
Whew, what a lot of context for a sonnet about a stone path! Is any of that in this poem?!
More poetry-related context for this piece is that it sits opposed to its companion, ‘The Path of Grass’. In touring the Gardens, there’s a place where you can choose between two paths: a stone one, or a grass one. I wanted to reflect on something that feels fundamental to how we are humans: that we believe ourselves to be somehow both part of Nature, and separate from it - that we are animals, and also impose our will on the world in ways other animals cannot. To reflect this, the Stone poem is hard and technical in its metre and rhyme scheme, whilst the Grass poem is loose and wild.
I am more a ‘Path of Grass’ person these days - desiring to be in the flow of things and welcome them as they are, even if that is scary - instead of pushing too forcefully to bend the world to what I want in an attempt to control the unpredictable unknowns of Nature. There’s a middle path here too - which is following an inner balance of these things - and I think a lot of my writing since 2019-2020 is probably trying to walk that one.
You can read ‘The Path of Grass’ in a pamphlet at Stowe - or, perhaps more easily, in Poetry Prescription: Wild Remedy selected by Deborah Alma and published by Macmillan.