the infinite reaches

I've been participating in an online 'twitter book group' for the last couple of weeks - it's been facilitated by the writer Robert Macfarlane; and the book under discussion has been Nan Shepherd's "The Living Mountain" ...

... you can read a little bit more about the group here and here.

Regular readers will know that I first came across Shepherd's book back in 2017, and I've had a bit of an obsession with the totality of her writing ever since :-)

So, it seems appropriate for today, to blip some verse from Nan Shepherd's only poetry collection - thus the pictured 1934 volume (reprinted for the first time in 2014) ...

... and I've chosen 'Fires' which Macfarlane describes as: "the stand-out poem of the volume, and which to me resonates powerfully with our current moment: sheltering place from the storm, the comfort of kin, a world in turbulence."

Here it is, in full:


Fires
 
Firelight: the quiet heart of a little room
Where the lamp burns low and the shadows hover.
Out of the night are we come, where the gathered gloom
Hangs softly now that the wild hill rain is over,
And all that moves- a star or two- moves slowly;
Great clouds plod to the slouch of the wind their drover.
 
In from the great processional of space,
From the tramp of stars in their careless crossing
Of gulf on infinite gulf, from the foaming race
Where the wind caught at the corries, and the old tossing
Of the fire-tormented rock in the ridge of mountains
Seemed to awake anew in the clouds' new tossing—
 
In from the cold blown dark: from flame to flame—
From the hidden flame of cosmic motion
That roars through all the worlds and will not tame,
Driving the stars on the crest of its own commotion,
To the little leaping flame that our own hands kindled:
In, as the boats come in from the width of ocean.
 
Narrow the room is, shut from infinities.
Only the new-lit fire is keeping
Hint of the ancient fire ere the first of days.
And we three talk awhile to the spell of its leaping,
And are silent awhile and talk again and are silent;
And an older fire than the hearth-fire wakes from sleeping—
 
The fire that smouldering deep in the heart of man
Lies unfelt and forgotten under
Our surface ways, till a swift wind rise and fan
The covered heat to a blaze that snaps asunder
The strange restraints of life for a soaring moment;
And we lift unquiet eyes and stare in wonder
 
At the infinite reaches the tottering flames reveal,
Watching the high defences crumble
And the walls of our self-seclusion gape and reel,
Till with heart-beat loud as a toppling rampart’s grumble
Out from our comforting selves to the ungirt spaces
One with we know not what of desire, we stumble.

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Nan Shepherd (1893 - 1981)

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