By Kohinoor Dasgupta
In Dart, a 48-page-long poem by Alice Oswald, a river speaks in many voices.
It's the Dart river, of Devon, England.
Its source is in a peaty, swampy wilderness in Dartmoor, the Cranmere Pool. The river runs through 47 miles, with Totnes and Darmouth situated on its estuary, a tidal ria that drains into Start Bay where
"I swim up a dog-leg bend into the cliff,
the tide slooshes me almost to the roof
and float inwards into the trembling sphere
of one freshwater drip drip drip
where my name disappears and the sea slides in to
replace it.”
You see the temptation of following the Dart from source to sea? Many among us have dreamt of following rivers. However, unless we have vigor, unlimited time, and resources, all at the same time, in the right season and political climate, it's impossible to follow say, the Ganga, which originates at Gomukh, in the Himalayas, has a huge watershed and a multi-flow estuary, and is 1,560 miles long. We dreamers, therefore, are grateful to Alice Oswald for Dart. You did it for us, and more than us. A poet's way of listening to a river's soundmarks is different from that of a sound recordist's. A poem is different from a sound recording.
Legends and technology, toil and escape from it, dreams and drownings, fish, birds, parasites, midges, sphagnum and oak, spawn and brash, make up the Dart's phantasmal, switcheroo identities. In a note at the beginning, Oswald, says: “All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings.”
For people out of touch with modern verse, the poem might be even visually daunting. There are chunks of prose. A superficial read-through might leave you cold, wha...ing, but you will, at least, get a sense of the flow and notice the poet's margin "indications".
When you re-read, attentively, the eye accepts the prosy blocks, and you are ready to follow "the sound-map of the river". Poetry follows the footfalls of steel-toe shoes. Utters words like "cryptospiridion" and "monofilaments". It must. The river provides potable water and a (dwindling) livelihood for salmon fishermen.
"The Dart, lying low in darkness calls out Who is it?
trying to summon itself by speaking…”
A walker, an old man who used to be a mountaineer, starts out at Cranmere Pool with his pocket map. He is among people living, dead, mythical, or simply composite memories, whom/ that the river watches or overhears or remembers or mirrors or echoes. A naturalist hides in bog bean and sundew, watching “spiders watching aphids”. There are bank-holidayers, an eel-watcher, fishermen. A poacher.
A bailiff (who on occasion turns into poacher):
"with his torch, taking his own little circle of light
through pole-straight pinewoods,
slippy oakwoods, sudden insurrections of rowans,
reedholes and poor sour fields,
in the thick of bracken, keeping the law
from dwindling away”
Water nymph, deceased tin extractors, woodsman, as well as technicians such as a water abstractor and a dairy worker, are personas pouring into the Dart’s.
The Dart gives us the dairy worker:
"looking down glass lines: bottles on belts going round bends. Watching out for breakages, working nights. Building up prestige. Me with my hands under the tap, with my brain coated in a thin film of milk. In the fridge, in a warehouse, wearing ear-protectors.
"I’m in a rationalized set-up, a superplant. Everything’s stainless and risk can be spun off by centrifugal motion: blood, excrement, faecal matter from the farms
"…. I’m in milk, 600,000,000 gallons a week.
"processing, separating, blending. Very precise quantities of raw milk added to skim, piped into silos, little screwed outlets pouring out milk to be sampled. Milk clarified milk homogenised and pasturised and when it rains, the river comes under the ringmesh netting, full of non-potable water. All those pathogens and spoilage organisms! We have to think of our customers. We take pride in safety, we discard thirty bottles either side of a breakage. We’ve got weights and checks and trading standards
"and a duck’s nest in the leat with four blue eggs.”
(Prose is no longer a stumbling block.)
Precarious is the life of wild creatures of the river, salmon and ducks and seals and crabs. There are nets
"or maybe it's been raining and washed oil off the roads
or nitrates and God knows what else"
and there are adversities the river creatures are born into:
"upriver creatures born into this struggle against
water out of balance being swept away
mouthparts clinging to mosses
round, streamlined creatures born into vanishing
between golden hide-outs, trouts at the mercy of rush
quiver to keep still always"
The Dart is also made of fallen oaks, stones, bones, alluvium, schist and shodes and maybe placer gold.
There are towns and river-meets and bends by the river. The light at Sharpham.
And boats:
"Naini Tal, Nereid of Quarr”
Sometimes the glories of an "eye-quiet world", "where you can see the whole sunrise every morning" reminds you of Huck Finn, who informed us:
"The sky looks ever so deep when you lay down on your back in the moonshine."
So, go on, listen to the Dart.
"put your ear to it, you can hear
cooped up in moss and moving
slowly uphill through lean-to trees
where every day the sun gets twisted and shut
with the weak sound of the wind
rubbing one indolent twig upon another”
Dart won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2002.
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