Briny Streams

Feathers, plucked from a wing of the Archangel Gabriel by John the
Baptist’s disbelieving father, rest, as if waiting for a breath of
wind, behind glass in a pillar of Pewsey church. They make a change
from the usual relics of saints’ fingers and fibulae, a suitably
heavenly scam for a sacred landscape with plenty of its own barrowed
bones, buried up there on the chalk flanks of a downland goddess
where the ancient pounded boundary of Wansdyke crests the smooth
dolphin back of the ridge.

The Kennet and Avon canal, having started at the Thames in Reading,
winds westward through Pewsey and a few miles into the Vale sustains
wharves and an inn at a small settlement called Honey Street. In ‘The
Wiltshire Book’ – published in 1957 – the poet Geoffrey Grigson
includes a map that is slightly eccentric in its selectivity. Amesbury and Pewsey are missing, as are many villages, but slap in
the central blank space of the county, between Avebury, Silbury and
West Kennet all marked to the north and Stonehenge labelled in the
south is Honey Street. In the hierarchy of the map’s topography it’s
on a par with Swindon despite being only a tiny hamlet, not even
mentioned in the book. I guess Grigson just put it in for the ring of
the name. In the same way Van Morrison repeats “Honey Street” mantra-wise to invoke a Yeatsian ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’ arcadian lost
world of quiet sleep, silence, dreams, meditation and contemplation
in his song ‘Pagan Streams’ (Hymns to the Silence, 1993). The song is
an evocation of a real place where you can search for white horses on
surrounding hills with some chance of success. Rybury hill fort rises
opposite the thighs of Milk Hill. This is an innocent land of milk
and honey, a place to repair.

Maybe before he committed himself to a fluvial suicide in Reading,
the eighteenth century poet Stephen Duck repaired back here to his
place of birth from where he’d been carried by fame’s ascendancy. A
few miles south of Honey Street on the same straight line between
Avebury and Stonehenge, snug beneath the scarp of Salisbury Plain,
lies the village of Charlton where ‘The Thresher Poet’ had been born
and raised to an agricultural labourer’s life of hardship. Duck had
ambition and awareness, worked extra hours to buy a few books and
then write lines wrung from bitter experience.

“In briny streams our sweat descends apace,
Drops from our locks, or trickles down our face.
No intermission in our works we know;
The noisy threshall must forever go.”

He contrasted the tedious, suffocating mechanics of threshing with
the convivial downland life of piping shepherds.

“The eye beholds no pleasant object here:
No cheerful sound diverts the list’ning ear.
The shepherd may well tune his voice to sing,
Inspired by all the beauties of the Spring;
No fountains murmer here…”

And for everyone who has done their ashen stint of wage slavery
stupefied for want of cash, Duck tells the banal truth:

“Nor, when asleep, are we secure from Pain;
We then perform our Labours o’er again:
Our mimic fancy ever restless seems;
And what we act awake, she acts in Dreams.”

But luck got Duck. Somehow his talent was recognised, taken up and
patronised by the aristocracy, a peasant poet fit for a queen. He was
swept up to a published life. The engraved frontispiece to his ‘Poems
on Several Occasions’ depicts the author’s distant gaze, his long
fingers holding a quill. A feather just like Pewsey’s angelic relics.
In Duck’s village inn, The Charlton Cat, displayed behind glass are
yet more feathers. This time feathers in a cap. Specifically, ‘The
Chief Duck’s Cap’, the chairman’s ritual daffy apparel for the ‘Duck
Feast’, a regular June celebration for a thresher made good. Guess
the menu.

Did Queen Caroline really appoint the poet Keeper of
Duck in St James’ Park? True or not, the fact that this was reported
fits the pathos of an ill-fated joke. Swift, well-feted cynic, black-
winged and quick, couldn’t resist a darting quip at the lowly quack’s
fortune:

“From threshing corn, he turns to thresh his brains,
For which her Majesty allows him grains.
Though ‘tis confest, that those who ever saw
His poems, think ‘em all not worth a straw;
Thrice happy Duck! Employed in threshing stubble,
Thy toil is lessened, and thy profits double.”

Maybe it’s all in a name. Stephen Duck and Edward Chicken – what a
hoot. Rose Mary Davis BA wrote about the poet in a University of
Maine publication of 1926 and quoted correspondence from a librarian
at Reading about the specific location and manner of the poet’s
death. The librarian’s name as printed is Miss Minnie Swedling, but
Minnie or colleague has taken a fountain pen to the copy now in the
Local Studies library to correct this to Swadling. She might have
been thankful that at least the typesetters didn’t miss out the ‘s’
instead.

Poor old Reading, nemesis of literary ambition. Famous
for Oscar in the clink, lost Lawrence manuscripts at the station and
Silas T Comberback, soldier alias of the Ancient Mariner fleeing his
debts. How else could Stephen Duck, Rector of Byfleet, be of local
interest apart from his death? There’s a morbid fascination in the
detail. Did Duck waddle inebriated from the Black Lion Inn for his
final resolution? Was it a trout stream or the muddy carping March
flow of the River Thames that took him down? We don’t need to know.
It’s enough that this flow has gone down from Paradise to a sad flood
plain. One last push to the ocean’s brine where everything begins and
ends.

“…and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks,
and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form
folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like
Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of
heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.”

Weep on in briny streams. What happened to our sense of wonder, why
couldn’t they leave us alone, why couldn’t we just be ourselves? No
concepts. Being free.

Peter Hay, 2002