Look to Your Stooking

The late Victoria (‘Vita’) Sackville-West, joint creator with her husband Harold Nicolson of the celebrated gardens at Sissinghurst Castle, Kent, and poet and novelist, published in 1926 an extraordinary tour de force, her 100-page poem about farming and the countryside in the Weald district of rural Kent, titled The Land.

Literary enthusiasts may like to be reminded that it was the Roman poet Virgil (1st century BC) who started this genre with his (Latin, of course) book of four long poems on aspects of agriculture, the Georgics. A translation by John Dryden into English verse was published in 1697. This style of descriptive/instructive poetry was then imitated by John Philips on Cyder (1708) and John Dyer in his long poem The Fleece (about sheep and wool) in 1757.

The marvel is that Sackville-West's twentieth-century verse depicts the Wealden countryside and the life of its farmers so evocatively. At times it plays, as it were, at being instructive (just as Virgil’s verse was):

“Look to your stooking, for full many a field
Of hearty grain and straw runs half to waste
Through heedless stooking, and the proper yield
Leaves half its measure to the rook and daw . . . ”

But most of the time it is descriptive, not just of the appearance of the Kentish Weald, but of its character:

“Now in the radiant night no men are stirring:
The little houses sleep with shuttered panes;
Only the hares are wakeful, loosely loping
Along the hedges with their easy gait,
And big loose ears, and pad-prints crossing snow . . . ”

It would be easy to write several pages in praise of The Land, but I’ll mention just one of the author’s tricks of style: the introduction of ancient English words into her text in a way that reminds one of dialect (she must have been very aware of that), and that matches the timelessness of the basic farming processes that had still not been entirely superseded by tractors and chemicals at the time she wrote.

I have plucked from two consecutive pages of the poem words that I didn’t know before - yet was able to accept without losing the flow and sense of the poetry as I read it: lusk; shrammed; reasty; undern; and winsel.

‘Lusk’, I discovered, was in Chaucer’s time a term equivalent to our ‘lurk’; ‘reasty’, in the sixteenth century, meant ‘rancid’; ‘undern’ denoted ‘midday’.

‘Shrammed’ and ‘winsel’ I can’t find in a standard dictionary, but from the contexts I am willing to bet that they meant ‘shrunk’or ‘wizened’, and ‘windfall’ respectively. I guess that Sackville-West knew them from local dialect (she was born and brought up at Knole in Kent) and probably we should find them listed and defined in Joseph Wright’s mammoth English Dialect Dictionary of 1905.

The Land is wonderful, beautifully written verse, sometimes ‘blank’, sometimes with a rhyming pattern so unobtrusive that it’s only after you’ve read half a page that you realise the rhymes are there; and every now and again it shifts for a while into new rhythms or bursts into lyrical verses that remind one a bit of Clare or Housman or Bridges.

Get yourself a copy.

Look to your stooking