indescribableJ is desperately phoning round, because what looked like an hour 'patch' job, is now looking at a sizable section that will slide if we have another bout of bad weather. Not a good time - not that I thought we had got away scot-free, but...damn it. Friends are looking at the roof tomorrow and have just delivered the ladders round. P2 has moved his bed, clearly worried about the damp spreading (now about 1.5 foot across).
Cornish Poet Jack Clemo - Day 2
Snowfall at Kernick - By Jack Clemo
Here with a burly flutter and sting
The snow-blast scampers winnowing,
And dribble of foam-flakes seeps and bores
Through clay-clump thickets, under doors;
While flurry of snow mist rises where
The waggons tug till rails are bare.
The smoke is battered round the stacks;
Soot falls with snow on trolley tracks.
Even the mica-channel planks
And narrow walls of settling-tanks
Are frilled and ice-splashed there between
The frozen pools now sickly green
The pit-edge merges with the fields,
A softened gash the clay-bone shields;
Beyond it in the valley's fold
Virginia woods loom taut and cold.
Here with a burly flutter and sting
The snow-blast scampers winnowing,
And dribble of foam-flakes seeps and bores
Through clay-clump thickets, under doors;
While flurry of snow mist rises where
The waggons tug till rails are bare.
The smoke is battered round the stacks;
Soot falls with snow on trolley tracks.
Even the mica-channel planks
And narrow walls of settling-tanks
Are frilled and ice-splashed there between
The frozen pools now sickly green
The pit-edge merges with the fields,
A softened gash the clay-bone shields;
Beyond it in the valley's fold
Virginia woods loom taut and cold.
I am plodding away on my 'Identity and Nationhood' assignment - I have almost finished with Jack Clemo. Might move on to John Harris, as he describes mine workings in greater depth (as he was a miner a hundred years previously) than Clemo's observations of the clay pit (top surface and as part of a non-functioning landscape).
21:24
647 on Jack Clemo - I am moving on to John Harris' In Dolcoath Mine. Just how I am going to tie this together is beyond me right now. There is some part of me that wishes I had done the Arthur Caddick/Lanyon Quoit and John Harris/Lands End - mostly because the two poems compare the rock structure of Cornwall, whereas I chose the mining works because of the county's industrial age. Dolcoath is short and the comparison shouldn't be a problem, but I am aware that his best mining poem The Mountain Prophet goes on FOREVER. OK if you have 2,000 words; not so good when you have already writing half of a 1,150 essay.
