In an introduction he wrote for John Burnside’s “Steinar undir Steinahlíthum” (“Stones under the Cliffs”) in his book Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science (2006), Robert Crawford says the poem was inspired by a photograph of an abandoned Icelandic settlement. The deserted farms of Iceland, says Crawford, “testify to the hopes of Norse settlers that set out from their sheltered fjords over a thousand years ago … to wrest a living on oceanic islands from the Hebrides to Iceland”. For a while they were successful: spring came early, cattle could be wintered outdoors in sheltered spots and native barley flourished on the hillsides. But the warm ocean currents that provided winter pastures also meant it rained throughout the year. This drained nutrients from the soil, and when the forests disappeared the land reverted to deserts of stone and gravel.
Burnside’s poem, first published in the TLS in 2004 and then in The Good Neighbour (2005), opens and closes by considering this process of dissolution before the settlers “trailed out through the mist / to try their luck elsewhere”. But, as Crawford says, theirs is far from being a story of abject defeat: “I find Burnside’s poem intensely sympathetic as it conjures their hardness and tenacity … perched between the mountains and the sea – an awe-inspiring model of human resourcefulness and courage”. The central section of the poem, however, draws an explicit comparison between the drenching rains that defeated the settlers and the Biblical Flood “sweet with God’s intent, and crystal clear”. It is here, in the contrast between theological and ecological accounts of belonging, that the poem’s real meaning becomes apparent. Burnside believed – with Heidegger – that we understand the world only by dwelling in it as authentically as possible. Noah sails to “another Eden, undeserved, yet claimed”, while Burnside’s settlers have to move on “with all they might have been, could they have stayed”. But in their earned connection with the land they are, perhaps, the more truly blessed.
Steinar undir Steinahlíthum
Nature offers no home (James P. Carse)
Each day the evening was smaller;
and what they left behind, dimmed lamps and sheets,
figments of glass and tinder, what they used
to build these narrow houses on a marsh
they thought had reached a standstill, all the goods
and moveables they prized were filmed with peat
for weeks, before they trailed out through the mist
to try their luck elsewhere.
They should have guessed
how earnestly the land conducts itself
and how it longs for stories to contain:
households and fiefdoms laid down in the dirt,
the thumbprint on a harness or a knife,
a cotton doll, a candy-coloured skirt,
gas-stoves and ledgers falling through the earth
as softly as a snowflake falls through light.
The flood they knew from reading in the Book
was sweet with God’s intent, and crystal clear:
the quiet man, his face turned to the dark
above his head, his mind a sieve of doubt,
and how his neighbours wondered when they caught
the smell of fresh-hewn wood, cedar or pine,
where, two by two, the creatures probed the air,
near panic, as they sensed the storm’s descent.
The whole house slept on deck, beneath the moon,
the younger children leaning from the ark
and peering down through fifty feet of rain
to where the grass had filmed with roe and spawn,
another Eden, undeserved yet claimed
according to a stranger’s covenant.
But this was something else: a slighter thing
and less precise: surrender to new mire,
a failure in the science of belonging,
an aberration, fading on the air.
No rainbow issued from the Father’s hand,
only the small abandonment of fire
and something hidden rot-cold in the land:
their loves and fears, their registries of blood,
surrendered to their depths, time without end,
with all they might have been, could they have stayed,
prosperous cities, scribbles in the mud,
unnumbered children, tarnish on a blade.
JOHN BURNSIDE (2004)
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