Stourhead Gardens / Sun Head — a prose poem with song

Stourhead Gardens in Wiltshire, England, is perhaps one of the finest embodiments of the notion of artifact beating happenstance: that of the aesthetic superiority of human intervention into nature.

Left to its own devices, the natural world is a wondrous thing, to be preserved and respected and admired, but for some, a feeling of something approaching the Sublime only occurs when nature is modified, or appropriated or exploited. There is something compelling about this idea (a prose poem here attempts to cover it), but to broadly summarise: human intervention, i.e. the creation and placement of artifacts within nature is far greater an aesthetic pleasure than the systems of physical and chemical happenstance that end up in nature, via chance and time. This is closer to Longinus (1st century AD) than to the philosophical revival of the concept by the British in the 1700’s.

Put simply, for the later Brits, a simple walk in the Alps was Sublimity. For the Greek writer, a poem about them was Sublime (or a temple to a God associated with them).

At Stourhead, created and landscaped in the 1700’s, the two notions come together. Hoare, the architect, brought to play in garden design a concept of Landscape, of the natural world, but still created a lake out of nothing and placed very carefully around this entirely artificial construct a number of purposefully useless buildings (Follies), some of which directly invoked the ancient Greeks and referenced their greatest works of art.

The following poem and accompanying prose poem ‘notes’ are an attempt to absorb and process this concept of the Sublime at Stourhead.

Stourhead Gardens ✞

If you walk far round
the out of Stour, work
that barbwire fence apart,
in two gates you see the monolith
to honour a star, or sun-head,
in likely Latin, ra. It has a
lightning muzzle made of lead.

To the western well, a decorous sun,
hung but without topping,
no definition. Deferent to
an overcasting fold of cloud
like thin household walls
from new estate agencies,
hard to get a shelf to hold,

and all of them are hearing
of your intricacies.
And the silver brown leaves
take sickle heat, at which
the wind takes running-leaps,
no heat for our immediate place.
Still, days like this are ace.

✞Notes on ‘Stourhead Gardens’

Sun Head

I

At the far North-eastern edge of Stourhead Estate, when the made-up gardens give way to farms (which is a shame) there is a route that you’re not exactly allowed to take, through a barbwire fence that I hold into a smile shape for my circling mate, in case she tears her inflated vest, inflated full of down. Once through, and she was reluctant, one scrambles up a touch, to be faced with an avenue of reaching Dutch and fern tree elms that never get those winter blues, and many other nature things I cannot name for nowt. It is a beauteous scene, and must be significant, you think, like Milton Keynes and its stone-age streets, some depth to daily haunts through ill-understood ancestral fairs and conceits, and it must be said, some stolen football seats, poor Wimbledon FC, rest in peace. The avenue is all turf, straight as a rule on first sight, but straight as a thigh bone if you look closer, neatness has its sad limits. And what’s it all for? Well, that’s the monolith, appearing short and bland, but losing that wisp as you step-by-step, as you try to avoid the cattle trap, a ditch as wide as a burial gap. Within perhaps one hundred steps, you see it clearer, one hundred per cent, a column of course, same as ever, but on top, a hoist

of eye-star glowing gold,

of sun-head resolutely pinnacling.

It does point to Ra, and glints and mocks the ground floor cars and cows and us, the shape makes us think this doesn’t signify Jesus, because it smiles a badly done smile that doesn’t resonate with suffering. It isn’t phallic either, no — you can tell because it has four sides and is very even. It also has a plaque in Latin lines, with no translation — excluding me. I should learn. But this is counteracted by two things:

1: a great, great ladder all up the face, really new and cheap, clear of the ground by perhaps twenty feet. I threaten to climb it. And

2: there is a leaden brace around it, like for knees, knees broken anyway by gymnastics or trapeze, a brace for a club foot, classically. It’s there for lightning, so the sign says (to absorb it) and runs up to the head of sun. Weather tallies up there, it seems. Even though I’ve never been struck and I don’t know science much, this brace is logical, it does makes sense, and I nod approvingly and admiringly, because it is beautiful.

II

It’s November now, around the 5th, and the weather is confused, the arctic wind coming in and tropic seas from opposite lukewarmed by their long pilgrimage. It all just equals rain with the odd shock of sun and fittingly, when we pass and pause at sun-head it is sunny. There-on it is not — the change goes unnoticed until the start of the valley, and I never really thought of valleys starting …they just were, like air or confidence.

This one though is a lakeshore gone dry, and just below the old water line is a folly of mock-ruined buttercross or market post which might not seem too weird, in an estate full of them, but this one is set up high on an outcrop of artful rubble as if it became by luck a remnant of a castle siege in medieval revelry, the rest knocked down by armaments or sunk into English fields which somehow allow it over centuries and bury whole homes and villages (do they sink or does the world rise ?). Here, the sun keeps everything sort of lit and an overcast has risen up from somewhere, forlorn but nonetheless there. By that I mean it will stop at nothing to dull out the disc of the sun into a low-end sweet like a teacake — this makes the sun-head pillar quite sad in England — in this country the God Ra would not have been invented, she would not have been important enough.

Advanced Egyptian civilisations would, in their made estates have pillars of raindrops or rainclouds to venerate the rain-head, hold their hands around it in reverence, and not know the inscription in Welsh or Nordic or Northumberland writ.

While on the way down we were hit by a running leap of wind, localised, it just leapt out of the bushes and bit. I checked for wind machines in the vicinity, but this is no film set, this is plain old Wiltshire made fairy story by well paid Capability ventures: move that tree, add this wee bridge (over what?) well put a lake in, then a few more, not linked, and going septic and unhealthy for fish and certainly swimming in. Although in November, the shore by the duck plank (the submerged plank to give them a rest from dogs and human feet), has water that’s not crystal exactly but midsome clear. Still no fish though.

III

And that bridge is what Stourhead is about, they laid the whole of it with just the greenest turf, it gets greener the further you move away, which is like a joke on us but adds to its magicality and makes you forget the A-roads and the suburbs of Westbury you drive through on the way. Out by the mock-ruin sums up what it’s about too: the start of the valley, well, all of it, is working farmland, and some Jersey cows, coloured like retrievers, munch on grass playing the part of ancient Greeks or whatever ancients the designer (or the owner with the purse strings, I should say) was winging at. Most of the cows are women cows, and they’re marshalled by big dad, who stands on the path, making himself as wide as possible and swinging his bits as all men love to when the women see. All the walkers were grinning at him and his funny coven, but gave a berth just in case — in mine because my mums old mate was trampled dead on the face-plate by the buggers chasing her dog as if it was worth it and these moments are beautiful in a way because we are back in kingdom with the pitiful animals we left as dimwits in the days of just protectorates and imaginations.

Let’s eat beef, beef, beef into our future.

For a moment, I think of asking the girl I just met, my mate, to marry me, and liked thinking it… thought for a second about what in Stour has made that feeling crop up. Is it the gloom, the nascent wintry wind, the nature of the silly inlets peoples have made? Their nods to fiction-history, and their deprecation of Nature by it not being good enough. The fact of being alone for so long, inks of self becoming black ice bricks laying a melt stain and all the housing estate hearing your name and lament through the cardboard walls in which it’s inadvisable to hang a flat screen tv and all your family and friends know of your intricacies.

Nature Nature, hello you
I have been lush in love it’s true
With you since days I laid a trail
Across your downs in wind and hail
And came home knackered then to play
Shadow of the Beast two then say
“Mum I’m bored of tough
Countryside walks I want to bowl
And eat pizza I’ve had enough”
But the Beast and Nature made me whole
I see that now, I really do
I’m super in love with both of you.

(that was to the tune of Boyzone, pick your favourite one)