A Tapestry of Nature, Faith, and Memory
With the publication of his first volume of poetry, ‘Marshwood Vale: Songs of Wayside and Woodland’ in 1995, David Bushrod announced himself as a significant poet, whose principal subject was his own West Dorset countryside. Since then, he has published ‘Abbotsbury: Songs of the Abbey Lands’ (1998), ‘Marshwood Vale: The Complete Dorset Poems’ and, more recently, ‘Sevilliana: Poems of Southern Spain’ (2010).
I first came across David’s poetry when he gave me a copy of ‘Marshwood Vale’ some twenty-five years ago. At the time, my wife, Ruth and I were busy performing ‘The Devil’s Trill’, an opera written by Brian Parkhurst for Dorset Chamber Opera, with a very fine libretto, written by David. It was based on a short story, ‘Absent-mindedness in a Parish Choir’, by Thomas Hardy. I was immediately drawn to the subject matter, as I was living in West Stafford, in the heart of Thomas Hardy’s, and David Bushrod’s, Wessex.
The poems have a haunting undertone, which immediately pricked my interest. I started to see the countryside around Bridport and Dorchester as a living and breathing combination of the present and the past, stretching back to the days of the ancient hill forts, the Roman invaders, the mediaeval abbey of Abbotsbury and the more recent, agrarian nineteenth century. It is as though Bushrod, in some intuitive way, has presented to us a portrait of Dorset, both as she is and, simultaneously, as she has been, filled with legend and folklore: it is as if you might see a Roman soldier, or a fifteenth century monk appear from behind a tree and not feel too surprised!
I recently re-read the ‘Marshwood Vale’ poems and was prompted to investigate how others see Bushrod’s poetry and was surprised to find that no reviews exist. I felt that poetry of this quality deserves to be read and reviewed. The people of Dorset have a fine lyric poet in their midst, who can evoke the spirit and history of their county in vivid style. I have tried to fill the blank space myself by revisiting ‘Marshwood Vale: The Complete Dorset Poems’ and describing the poetry as if to a new audience. The experience has been rewarding. West Dorset will never feel more interesting, more mysterious or more beautiful than seen through the eyes of David Bushrod, a superb Dorset poet.
I should mention at this point that this anthology is complemented by eight magnificent etchings, with aquatint, of local Dorset landmarks, by renowned Devon artist, Roger St. Barbe.
There is no trace of the twenty-first century in David Bushrod’s Dorset poems. His lush, ancient landscape is laid before us like a brocade, full of all the colours and texture of his corner of West Dorset. There are flowers aplenty in this magnificent, natural world, growing among heathland, trees and water; a world populated by birds, butterflies, flowers and animals. But there are no people, at least no living people. Instead, there are places; real geographical features of the West Dorset landscape, that have their own personalities. There are also the spirits of people, long dead, which still inhabit this countryside. We can see Lewesdon Hill, Golden Cap, Eggardon, with the village of Powerstock below. In the distance is Abbotsbury, with The Fleet and its majestic swans. Bushrod’s poems inhabit these places. These physical features are not comfortable evocations of a bucolic, Dorset landscape, rather, they are the mis en scène for his broad spread of imagination, perceptions and emotions. They provide a concrete world in which he can wander, undisturbed, dreaming of long-ago times, ruing the despoliation of our holiest places, cursing the folly of humankind and the wanton destruction of everything that our ancestors held dear. Amid this ancient landscape we find contrasts: despair and optimism, beauty and ugliness, steadfast faith and the supernatural. Above all, we sense, in almost every poem that, behind each stick, each rock, there are the living spirits of those who have gone before: the ancient people of Dorset.
In the poem ‘Marshwood Vale’, Dorset is a tranquil place. Meadowsweet and viburnum grow on the verges of a quiet country lane, next to a ‘dimpling’ stream. Nothing else disturbs the scene. There are hills, but no tall mountains or gaudy waterfalls to attract tourists. The human lives can seem,
‘Still woven through the fabric of the earth.’
Thus, Dorset people can live contentedly, alongside the shades of their ancestors. Sadly, the calm is all too superficial. Far from being soft and benign, the countryside is often fierce and intractable, and the spirits no less so. Very often they inhabit the ruins of buildings, such as St Catherine’s Chapel and the ruined Abbey, as well as the meadows, rivers and trees. The supernatural world and the religious seem to live side by side in these poems. In ‘Lewesdon Hill’ the poet finds ‘paradise’ and ‘serenity’ in the ancient woods, where the souls of the numberless, unknown, people who have inhabited Dorset seem to settle, invisibly, over the land. Bushrod muses that, when the time comes, he would like to join them.
‘And when my spirit shall be free
To wander like the breeze,
I think that it will settle too
Like mist about these trees.’
In this collection, there are moments of contradiction and ambiguity. Bushrod looks back, wistfully, at the civilisations of bygone ages, which, we know, were more unpleasant in many ways than today. Certainly, the lot of the common man involved grave toil and hardship, during a short and painful life. On the other hand, the poet loves the places of natural beauty that still abound. Lewesdon Hill has ‘profound serenity’, which attracts him, or could it be the ‘siren spirit’ of Dorset men who,
‘tilled the soil,
But left no earthly trace.’
‘Siren’ is a potent image here, implying that the woodland can contain malevolent spirits, whose voices can lure people to their destruction.
Bushrod loves Dorset but, in ‘Spring Flowers’, for example, the beauty of the land in Spring is tainted with the ‘odour of decay’. The woodland glade is a ‘golden vision’ with its ‘azure’ sky and trailing bluebells. But we are immediately reminded that soon the decay will set in and erode its beauty. It is as though the poet cannot enjoy beauty totally, because the sense of imminent decay is always at his shoulder. This feeling is echoed in ‘The Blackthorn Year’, where the chaste blackthorn is in a hurry to blossom, only to be betrayed by the bitterness of its Autumn fruit, the sloe. In ‘Song’ the ‘subtle pristine shades’ of spring leaves quickly fade; the Abbey ruins contain the ‘fertile essence of decay’ where nothing seems to last. People cling to memories of the past in order to make sense of the present.
The past and the future, death and decay, faith and treachery meld in poems about the monks of Abbotsbury. It is as though the poet feels an overwhelming folk memory of the betrayal of these people by the capricious monarch who dissolved the monasteries so unjustly;
‘That grim satanic deed,
That act of crafty sacrilege’.
The poet displays real anger in ‘Abbotsbury’ at this heinous deed. A feeling that something right, part of the working faith of Dorset has been needlessly dismantled, something precious defiled. There is more to the dissolution than cruelty or thoughtless greed by King Henry VIII. The sacrilege is ‘crafty’, implying deliberate malice, heedless of the monks’ plight and the ruination of the ancient faith the Abbey represents,
‘Was any sympathy expressed
Or any shame displayed?’
Only the swans remain of the old abbey, now protected by the hand of man,
‘If not the hand of God.’
Loss, faith and betrayal are major themes in many other poems. St. Catherine’s Chapel, in both ‘The Abbey Lands’ and ‘St Catherine’s Chapel’, is a stronghold, which has survived ‘the infidel’s assault’. It is a holy place, abandoned, outcast, indomitable and alone. It has withstood the depredations of both nature and man and is a living monument to the faith of those who built it. But, despite its years of ruin,
‘The echo of our faith can still be heard’.
The chapel, like some ancient dragon, guards the ancient faith. Similarly, ‘Kingston Russell Stone Circle’ is about faith. The sarsen stones remind us of the ancient creed which they celebrated. To Bushrod, it is the faith they represented which is all-important, not the actual creed. Creeds die.
‘Beliefs are mortal as the flesh of man.’
The subject of redemption is another theme, closely allied to that of faith. Can man redeem himself after a fall from innocence? There is doubt in ‘Song’, where the poet questions: can we shake off the ‘acrid stain’ of worldly experience and start afresh like the fresh leaves of spring? Christianity and optimists might say, yes; the poet is not so sure. Of all poems in this anthology, ‘Powerstock Fields’ brings us closest to understanding his personal position on faith. The butterfly hovers over the fields of Paradise, drinking nectar from golden cups. Do the butterflies remember the toils of their previous existence, tied to earth as caterpillars, ‘Like hapless humankind’? Do they have the faith to know that they will soon,
‘Slip like magic through
A metamorphic veil.’?
This feels like an affirmation of Bushrod’s own faith, a sense that all the trials and vicissitudes of human life are prequels to something miraculous!
There is darkness too in’ Marshwood Vale’. ‘The Ravens’ and ‘Buzzards’ are probably the darkest poems in this anthology. ‘Deep in the shadows of the pine’, the ravens are seen to be living hand in hand with death. Like Charon guarding the Styx, they live at the interface of life and death. They hear the anguished cries of the night and set off in the morning to pick at the bones of the newly dead. Nature combines beauty and death, and one may not be seen without the other.
The poem, ‘Buzzards’ too is about death. The buzzards, safe in their heavenly stronghold, soar above the ‘sublime’ landscape,
‘Like Nemesis they watch the world
Through hooded downcast eyes,’
surprising the rabbit or ‘timid leveret’. On one hand they are part of ‘God’s exquisite plan’, but, to human eyes they represent,
‘The merciless brutality
That darkens earthly life.’
Meanwhile, below, all seems tranquil,
‘And cowslips on the open ground
Flirt lightly with the breeze.’
There is a sense here of the poet’s bewilderment at the juxtaposition between nature’s laws of survival and the innate kindness and sense of fair play, which is the gentler part of human nature. We are left, finally, with the unsatisfying awareness that this is how the world works,
‘part of God’s exquisite plan’.
For David Bushrod the seasons, which are invariably capitalised, evoke traditional images. Spring is a time of hope and youth, Summer of maturity and content, Autumn is a time for reflection and evaluation, while Winter means old age and desolation. In ‘Winter Woods’,
‘The trees, like mourners round a bier,
Forgotten stand, despondent and forlorn.’
Defiantly, Bushrod, raging at the coming of the night, dares winter to leave even the smallest flower, the slightest memory of summer to remain, to warm the grieving heart.
‘Come Winter winds and scour the chilly groves,
Lest any trace of Summer should remain.’
For him there are severe moments of despondency. ‘March 5th’ marks a date when spring announces its arrival to the poet in the form of the first daffodils and narcissi. However, it is not spring that Bushrod is looking for, it is summer, the time in a man’s life of maturity and success in his endeavours. He needs the ‘radiant hues’ of summer to, ‘flush’ his world ‘of bleak despair’. The world with all its wonders is a hard place sometimes.
There is also optimism in these poems. In ‘November’ we see a glimpse of Bushrod, the man, as he describes the frosts of winter, where the trees have shed their ‘Summer cloak’. In a nice irony, the ‘simple clerk’ is lost for words that trees should shed their clothes in the coldest part of the year! Inevitably, April will come and the foolish trees, in ecstasy, will, again, ‘unfold a rustling gown’ for the warmer weather. In ‘Song’ the poet has tried the seemingly wasteful life, ‘across the barren moor’ with its ‘chill winds’. He will now take a kinder, hidden, path to a more sheltered, world of sunshine and love:
‘A verdant loving sunlit world
Within the sheltered vale.’
Three poems, ‘Nightfall on Eggardon’, ‘Summer’s Lease’ and ‘Lines’ stand out from the rest. These are very personal poems celebrating love. ‘Nightfall on Eggardon’ is full of tenderness, a celebration of a young man in love. With faint echoes of Vaughan Williams’ wonderful ascending lark, moving higher and higher away from our sight, but always heard. Bushrod’s lark in fact descends, and ‘folds’ her young to her breast. For them the world is a safe, loving, place. Night too descends and the world is still, apart from the sound of a bat’s wing, ‘beating in the air’ like an anxious heart. The hush is ‘expectant’, as the lover exhorts his maid to take his hand. Time has stood still. For the young man, there is neither past nor future. There is now, and now is the time, under the moon’s ‘exquisite’ light, to taste,
‘Life’s sweetest rapture’.
The poem is gentle yet urgent. In the young girl’s answer lies all the hopes and joy of a lifetime for each of them. The expectation is that she will agree.
If ‘Summer’s Lease’ is a response to ‘Nightfall on Eggardon’, the promise of true love has been at least partially fulfilled. From catching fire in Spring, it was, ‘like burning coal’, all through Summer. In the second verse there is a hint of disillusion. So beautiful is her pale face that her lover believes their love will never fail. Sadly, the poet uses the word ‘pall’ as a half rhyme for pale. With a jolt we realise that there is death in the air, or at least the death of this passionate love. Sure enough, autumn’s withered leaves appear, and winter’s cold nips the affair in the bud. The final line is like an anguished beating of the breast,
‘My love did fail.’ Despite all, his love ends, and because of the emphatic ‘did’, it is as though the poet always feared it would.
‘Lines’ is a short poem of only four, simple lines. In it the poet sees his lost love from a great distance of time,
‘Like light from stars a thousand years expired’.
His life is still affected by her beauty, to him she is still young and innocent,
‘Untouched by Time or marred by useless strife’.
To the reader, the whole anthology seems to be a metaphor encapsulated by this poem. There is a longing for a world of beauty, an unspoiled countryside, unmarked by ‘strife’ or war; in short, a world inspired by innocence, just like his lost love.
In ‘Sonnet’, many of the themes of this anthology, life and death, youth and age, toil and failure, may be seen in relation to the poet himself. Bushrod describes, ‘That burning sweet intensity’ of youth, its dreams and ambitions, from the perspective of maturity. All those dead hopes of love and fulfilment can be seen objectively like ‘ash from long-forgotten fires.’ ‘Ash’ is a potent metaphor for absolute death or loss of hope. He poses the question of whether the effort and toil will have been worthwhile, or whether his hopes will wither without bearing fruit, like the dead flowers of a grape vine. He compares his own life to those of the old abbots, who spent all their lives working at the abbey, now razed to the ground.
‘Time and savage circumstances grind
Even great monuments to level ground.’
Here ‘savage circumstances’ is a reminder of the baseness of those who destroyed the monasteries. The half rhyme of ‘grind’ and ‘ground’ are emphatic words, redolent of toil, frustration and fury at the inevitable destruction of a man’s hopes and dreams, which are demolished, like the Abbey, by time and human thoughtlessness.
What is this motivating force which drives the young and directionless onward? The question hangs at the poem’s end. Once again, could it be some force, some deity outside our understanding?
‘Dusk’ is a reflective poem, which looks at a world in chiaroscuro, like the paintings of old masters, artistically combining darkness and light to create a thing of beauty and of mystery. Dusk ‘seeps across the vale,’ killing the ‘radiant’ colours of daytime. The word ‘radiant’ alone invokes an almost mystical brightness, which is eclipsed by sombre evening. The ‘magpie’ world of the night takes over. All is monochrome and there is a juxtaposition between the strange and the familiar. The nightjar, with its churring call has a reputation for the dark arts and haunts the woods by night. In the moonlight, the grey and white badger wakens when most of the world sleeps. There is, however, light amid the darkness. The ‘fiery’ glow worms, also subject of many myths, shed but a pale light and ‘ape’ the ‘distant beauty of the twinkling stars,’. The starlight is brightest, the glow worm’s rays, fabled to light the way of fairies, are duller. Here is darkness and light, a ‘photographic negative of day’. The woods are populated by black and white magpies, badgers, nightjars, and other creatures of the night. ‘Dusk’ is about the wedding of the strange and familiar, black and white, joy and sadness, good and evil, in fact a whole bundle of opposites, which combine to create the world and the lives we know.
It is not my intention to read too much into David Bushrod’s poetry, but his images of darkness and light, and night and day, certainly hint at the poet’s fluctuating moods. ‘Dusk’ represents a mid-way moment between the ‘radiant’ light of day and the plunge into darkest night, where colours ‘die’. To the poet, it represents the inevitable ‘shapeless gloom’ of the diurnal cycle. There is some light in this state of gloom,
‘The distant beauty of the twinkling stars.’
but mostly it is full of words like ‘haunts’, ‘ghostly, and ‘gloom’. Fortunately, the night will, inevitably, become day and the world, once again, full of radiance.
In ‘White Hart’, Bushrod encounters another mythic creature, the rarest of the fallow deer which haunt the Powerstock woods. A white hart is said to represent mankind’s spiritual aspirations. It is also said to be uncatchable. This is a gentler poem, in which the deer evokes a whole society, long vanished; of heraldry, hunting hawks, knights and ‘highborn ladies. To complete the picture, there is even a ‘negro page in attendance’. The deer looks at the poet with a glance hinting of ‘sorcery and dark romance’ and then stalks haughtily away. The word ‘stalks’ in this context is yet another neat irony as, of course, it is the deer which is usually stalked! The poet is mesmerised and immediately imagines a hunting party. The people appear superficial, resplendent on horseback, but more like characters from the scene of an Aubusson tapestry than real predators – a hunting scene more than a hunt. Certainly, the white hart, shrouded in its ‘regal sheen,’ presents the more potent imagery. The poet dreams of past times and past people such as these.
What other ‘spirits’ inhabit this Dorset soil? In ‘Abbotsbury,’ there are the Benedictine monks of ‘The Abbey Ruins,’ who arrived with ‘blistered feet, built the Abbey and tilled the soil, only to lose their lands and wealth when the monasteries were ripped down. In ‘Lewesdon Hill’ there are the Marshwood men who tilled the soil, ‘but left no earthly trace’, reminding us of yet another work of Ralph Vaughan Williams, based on a passage from Ecclesiastes, ‘Let us now praise famous men’:
‘And some there be which have no memorial, who are perished as though they had never been’.
In ‘Harvest Song’ there are reapers, who sharpen their scythes, creating sounds which still echo through time. To Bushrod, their memory, if not their names, will live for evermore.
In ‘Remembrance Day’, with a nod to those who died bravely in Flanders fields, poppies represent the people of Dorset, who used to live ‘about the shepherd’s folds.’ Now the fields are full of nettles and ragwort, weed infested, where ‘nothing beautiful will ever grow’. The poet tells us that finer flowers grew here at one time, the fields stained with ‘richer hues.’ This can only be seen as an indictment of modern man and modern times, further evidence that Bushrod is seeking for a better world and finding it in the past.
Bushrod’s observations are full of emotion, and for ‘emotion’ you could substitute ‘imagery’. As David recently reminded me, it was Aristotle who said that it is imagery that turns verse into poetry. Bushrod’s work is embroidered with imagery. His metaphors range from simple, yet apt description,
‘Beneath the wrinkled brow of Eggardon
Like braided nets the fields stretch far away.’ (‘The Spirit of the Vale’)
to the more complex,
‘More like a fortress than a saintly shrine’,
of ‘St Catherine’s Chapel’, the image becoming more complicated as the poem progresses,
‘Like some proud outcast now it stands alone,
Defending with indomitable will
Something more precious than the crumbling stone.’
Until, in the last line, the metaphor is resolved, and we realise that the chapel, the ‘fortress’, the ‘proud outcast’, like a lone crusader, is defending the echoes of faith that resonate within the ancient chapel. The loss of faith and traditions in the Dorset countryside is one of the poet’s most powerful themes in this anthology.
‘The Abbey Ruins’ sees the few remaining stones of the Abbey as touchstones to the faith we have lost,
‘Like ivy round a withered tree
We cling to fragments of the past.’
The past, like the tree, is dead and yet we hold, desperately, onto it, seeking ‘stability’, in a confusing world.
Stones, ruins and fossils all remind us of the transient nature of human life. Stones have long lives. In ‘The Kingston Russell Stone Circle’, the stones are not simply a stone circle, they are ‘a bridge through time’, to the long-lost religions of forgotten priests and men. Beliefs are mortal and therefore transitory. These stones are the fossilised testament to those beliefs. Fossils provide a potent image in ‘Golden Cap’. As the poet hunts for fossils, the ‘dross’ of his mind shifts, and he remembers happy times in his youth. His memories, like the ammonites,
‘Washed clean by the sand and sediment.’
A piece of carved stone is found incorporated into the wall of a house. It has come from the old Abbey building. Perched high on a wall, it is, variously, described as, ‘Cradled’, ‘tightly clasped’, ‘protected’, ‘an infant held in loving arms’. From its ‘pulpit’ the relic like an old Abbot, perhaps, berates the observer,
‘You once had faith but not today.’
Still fulminating against the destruction of the Abbey, Bushrod uses the image of a jackal, breaking the bones of a still warm corpse and picking the bones clean, to describe the cruel actions of King Henry VIII’s men.
Nature, too, provides fertile sources of imagery in this anthology. In ‘The Blackthorn Year’, the blackthorn, harbinger of spring, covered in ‘chaste white’, becomes a witch in winter, whose branches, ‘gnarled and sharp’, stretch ‘like fingers up towards the moon’, an image of dark mystery and the occult.
In ‘The Summer Woods’, bluebells and foxgloves in full flower represent fulfilment and content, while the
‘Soft monotony of doves
Half drowsing in the shade’
adds a peaceful background to the ideal afternoon. ‘Monotony’ is a perfect description of the turtle dove’s song on a timeless summer afternoon. Immediately, the sense of optimism diminishes. As the flowers fade, there is, ‘A tremor in the fir’, the nightjars ‘churr’ and the poet feels ‘The breath of winter stir’.
The poetry in ‘Marshwood Vale’ seethes with potent images, to the extent that, if you read the poems through in one hit, as I have done recently, you will reel from the intensity of the emotion it evokes. It is heady stuff, and as well to be taken one or two poems at a time!
Much of ‘Marshwood Vale, The Complete Dorset Poems’ evokes the past and the present of a landscape of breathtaking beauty. It is the unspoiled, innocent Dorset that the poet loves. Joy is still to be found in the untouched corners of this land. There is joy too in David Bushrod’s poetic style. He clearly delights in the construction of his poems. Within the apparent simplicity of his poetic form, where every word and every rhyme is meticulously crafted, the poetry gleams like a polished jewel. The poems are lyrical and express emotions ranging from tenderness to real anger, in forms which are traditional and do not interfere with their subject matter. Very often the verses are quatrains, with iambic rhythms. This does not make them humdrum or ballad-like. On the contrary, it takes a poet of great skill to fill such simple structures with the intensity and passion found in this anthology. The obviously different structure is that of ‘Sonnet’. If anyone doubts Bushrod’s poetic skill, this poem will demonstrate the quality of his art. The poem is in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet in which he displays the burning intensity of a man who sees his hopes fade and his dreams recede. He asks:
‘What drives us on or lures us from afar,
Who neither wisdom have nor guiding star.’
The packaging is traditional, the poetry heartrending, asking questions which all of us have asked ourselves, with no hope of any meaningful answer.
We have only to read ‘The Spirit of the Vale’ to understand, emphatically, the main thrust of this ‘Marshwood Vale’ collection. It is tradition which squares the circle of history, and it is the loss of that tradition which irks Bushrod the most. The loss, or wilful destruction, of traditional life has resulted in the fragmentation of our links with the past and our sense of belonging to our countryside. As he says, you can still find the ‘ancient yoke’ in use today. This is as may be, but I suspect that ‘yoke’ here means both a coupling with the past and the system which held the ancient people to their landscape. Whatever the case, David Bushrod is emphatic,
‘Old customs, old beliefs are often best,
So let the rustic spirit of this land
Defend us with the greatest strength and zest,
From every speck of progress that is planned.’
He couldn’t have made his position any clearer than that!
If you know Dorset, love Dorset or live in Dorset, David Bushrod’s poetry is for you. You won’t forget it!
Robert Eshelby
6th July 2025
