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Multitudes of soft sounds
make up the music of spring-
a gentle stir of growth
the crisp rustle of daffodils against one another,
the wind communing with young leaves
- Mary Webb, The Spring of Joy
Today, March 25th, marks 145 years since the birth of Mary Webb, our own Shropshire writer, and here in Bishop’s Castle we feel her presence very close to the surface of things.
She is not as widely read now as she once was and her rhyming verse has fallen out of fashion, and even her prose, so lyrical and strange, is often overlooked. But to read her, is to follow her into a remarkable way of being attentive. In her world, the land is alive with meaning, and feeling is not separate from the fields, the weather and the turning of the year.
Webb knew this hill country intimately. The ridgelines, the sudden light, that silence and stillness just before rain. There is something elemental in her writing, with its deep-rooted sense that the sacred is not elsewhere, but here. Her spiritual life is found in nature itself, rather than in any distant or external God. Unusual, especially for a woman of her time.
As the grass grows deep,
and June slips by,
the birds sing only in the cool,
and the burden of the music is taken up by the trees and the fields.
Here at the Poetry Pharmacy in Bishop's Castle we love her work as it reminds us how to look again at what is already around us, and we appreciate her intensity and fierce tenderness.
If you’re new to her, her novels Gone to Earth and Precious Bane are the perfect place to start and will take you deeper into our Shropshire landscape. They are rich, strange, and steeped in a poetic sensibility and describe a world where human lives are inseparable from the rhythms of the earth. She may not be fashionable but today we’ll be keeping her close. You might like to do the same.
Here you can find our list of recommended reading for this overlooked and wonderful writer.
In Dark Weather
Against the gaunt, brown-purple hill
The bright brown oak is wide and bare;
A pale-brown flock is feeding there--
Contented, still.
No bracken lights the bleak hill-side;
No leaves are on the branches wide;
No lambs across the fields have cried;
--Not yet.
But whorl by whorl the green fronds climb;
The ewes are patient till their time;
The warm buds swell beneath the rime--
For life does not forget.
Mary Webb
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