Teignmouth
by John Keats (1795-1821)
[‘Some Doggerel’ sent in a letter to B.R. Haydon]
‘HERE ALL THE SUMMER COULD I STAY’
For there’s Bishop’s teign
And King’s teign
And Coomb at the clear Teign head -
Where close by the stream
You may have your cream
All spread upon barley bread.
There’s arch Brook
And there’s larch Brook
Both turning many a mill;
And cooling the drouth
Of the salmon’s mouth,
And fattening his silver gill.
There is Wild wood,
A Mild hood
To the sheep on the lea o’ the down,
Where the golden furze,
With its green, thin spurs,
Doth catch at the maiden’s gown.
There is Newton Marsh
With its spear grass harsh -
A pleasant summer level
Where the maidens sweet
Of the Market Street,
Do meet in the dusk to revel.
There’s the Barton rich
With dyke and ditch
And hedge for the thrush to live in
And the hollow tree
For the buzzing bee
And a bank for the wasp to hive in.
And O, and O
The daisies blow
And the primroses are waken’d,
And violets white
Sit in silver plight,
And the green bud’s as long as the spike end.
Then who would go
Into dark Soho,
And chatter with dack’d-hair’d critics,
When he can stay
For the new-mown hay,
And startle the dappled prickets?
(The poetical Works of John Keats, edited by H.W. Garrod. London, Oxford University Press, 1956, p. 442)
It is strange how a poem can suddenly connect with your life. As I struggled into Soho Square for a meeting on the 27th August 2003, after a brief holiday in Devon, these verses suddenly came back to me. And ‘struggled’ was hardly too strong a word. A gang of heavy security men were trying to restrict passage down Sutton Row into the Square, in an attempt to help prepare for the Rolling Stones concert that evening. Even at 11 in the morning the crowds were beginning to gather. Meanwhile the police were telling them they had no right to restrict entry. It is true that I was off to meet with business men, not critics, dack’d hair’d or otherwise, and that while in Devon the family never made it down to Teignmouth. But the connection was there.
Keats called this poem ‘some doggerel’, and his Oxford University Press editor duly relegated it to the Trivia section of the poetical works. But is it really trivial doggerel? Keats’ own disparagement of Endymion put me off reading that great poem for years, so one should be wary of his judgement on his own works. Perhaps ‘doggerel’ only really describes the deliberate burlesque of the last verse, where the critics, with their hair all dacked, rhyme so badly and unexpectedly with the prickets whom the poet disturbs in his country rambles. And even here one is mainly impressed by Keats’ command of English vocabulary. (A pricket, my dictionary tells me, is a two year old male fallow deer with unbranched horns. I cannot discover what dacked hair is or was.)
The poem shows a simple delight in English place names, their descriptive capacity, and the way that descriptions of places might become names of places in their turn. Capital letters are distributed to help blur the distinction between place names and place descriptions.
Teignmouth (incidentally it is pronounced ‘tinmuth’ by the people of Devon) is at the mouth of the river Teign, so it describes the place, as well as being a place name. Bishopsteignton, as it is now called, is a village about two miles up river from Teignmouth, and beyond that is Kingsteignton. On the opposite side of the river are Combeinteignhead and Stokeinteignhead. Keats expands the first of these into a line of verse,
And Coomb at the clear Teign headwhich is more a description of the place than a place name (a coomb, or combe, is a valley running down to the coast. Arch Brook runs along the bottom of the valley into the Teign.) Then ‘Wild wood’ seems to be a place name, although it also describes the place, while ‘Mild hood’ seems to be a description, although it sounds more like a place name than ‘wild wood’ does. And what is the ‘Barton rich’? A barton is just a farm, or a farmyard, but there are numerous places called Barton scattered over England. Certainly the area round Teignmouth is rich in Bartons: within five miles are Court Barton, Higher Rocombe Barton, Buckland Barton, and a Barton in the suburbs of Torquay. Newton Marsh must be in what is now Newton Abbot, but was there a marsh in Newton Abbot, or did Newton Abbot have a place called Newton Marsh? Certainly there would be a Market Street there, as there seems to be in every market town of England.
The magic of the place names evokes the English countryside, and creates a holiday mood. Free to wander, the poet finds a benevolent nature, feeding or making homes for creatures that inhabit it, from the salmon in its river to the wasp in its bank. He also finds girls to admire, revelling in the dusk. Perhaps he would like to emulate the green thin spurs of the gorse bushes ...
Then,
And O, and Osuggests singing with joy as the flowers open, as if the poem is after all a song, but, with the melancholy of,
And violets whitealso suggests a sigh. Perhaps a sigh for the end of this and all holidays: the dacked haired critics sit in Soho, ready to chatter with the returned poet.
Sit in silver plight,
The poem is not without its mysteries. What precisely is dacked hair? What is a spike end, and what is the significance of the green bud having the same length as one? And where does Keats’ quotation, ‘Here all the summer could I stay’, come from?
An email from William Shaw of 4th April 2005 tells us more about the topographic allusions of Keats’ poem:
. . .Having just come back from a week staying there myself — I own a shack on the river bank — it’s lovely to read it as a slightly illogical perambulation round the river.
For what it’s worth, the first verse is as you say a play on the towns that surround the Teign with the river in their name; Bishopsteignton on the north side, Kingsteignton on the west end, and Coombeinteignhead on the side. Though he appears to be also referring to Coombe Cellars, just down from Coombeinteignhead on the river itself, next to the stream that runs through the village. Here Keats would undoubtedly have been served a cream tea. The Inn was famous for being a smuggling haunt and became a tourist destination in the 19th century — and still is. I had a particularly grim pub lunch there last Wednesday. It was the setting for the creaky novel Kitty Alone by the Victorian novelist and hymn writer Sabine Baring-Gould.
If you travel east from there along the south bank of the river, you come to Arch Brook, a really pretty muddy inlet. I guess there might have been mills here too in Keats’s day . . .
And between Kingsteignton and Newton Abbot lies what’s now called Hackney Marsh. The market town of Newton Abbot grew rapidly when the railway arrived and expanded onto the marshes. The famous race track there is built on marsh land and as a result the going is often heavy. I can’t say I’ve ever seen any ‘maidens sweet’ down there, nor on Market Street, which is now home to a horrid multi-story car park. Having been born there in the local hopital opposite the Cider Bar, I can’t imagine it ever did pretty, let alone maiden.
I’d hazard that Barton is Ware Barton — once one of the big farm houses around Kingsteignton, now a campsite whose lands presumably went down to the riverbank at what is now Wear Farm.
William
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