Canto X Literary Map of Exeter & Devon connection:  Barnstaple; Henry Williamson 

Canto X – Barum on the Taw

 “Though sad at heart

Across the watery way a weary while must he

Stir with his hands the rime-cold sea,

Tread exile tracks: full pitiless is fate!”

-        The Wanderer

They were there to witness the timber lumps

heaped and squabbled into a burh

and later saw the flash of shears

and traded riches bleed and blur;

from this peopled paean, came a town

of rosy brick – the inner tower rising

higher and higher –

an ever-leering, two tongued

four-faced-liar.

Unnoticed and forgotten, hiding

amidst the bony bric-a-brac

in their holts and hollows –

they did not expect the man to follow

their brown, bouncing thread –

shellshocked, gassed, fractalized,

Williamson ceased to understand man

and his works and turned to them;

those needle-tooth citizens – slick

and bloody-whiskered wanderers,

whacking their clubs with all the moxie

of Jupiter’s thunder – they were honest,

more so, perhaps, than the world

he had left behind – they did not trick

or faun or placate their prey but sought

and pursued and pincered and refused

to waver a single obsidian eye

from the Salmon’s lidded peeping

but ripped and tore and tailored

crop circles from the carcass.

He trailed after their sodden paws

and parted reeds and crouched below

their clapper bridges, sharing

an apprehension of hunting hounds

and baying horns, watching from afar

this people’s strange ruck and reason –

knowing that he himself could not condemn

when more than any ideal or whim

he would rather flee his chequered reality

bury his flags

and become one of them.

Back to top