This week’s poem is “I Feel I am at the End of my Tether” by Simon Armitage and I have chosen it for Rachel and her walking group.
inching upstream as the universe tilted, mirrored
Simon Armitage (1963—)
till we burst their colours with a fistful of cinders.
Poem 456. I Feel I am at the End of my Tether
I feel I am at the end of my tether
and don’t want to go on any longer.
Not like those climbers on Malham Cove—
dipping backwards for their bags of powder,
reaching upwards for the next hairline fracture,
hauling themselves from my binoculars.
And without enlargement they take on the scale
of last night’s stars in Malham Tarn,
inching upstream as the universe tilted, mirrored
till we burst their colours with a fistful of cinders.
I follow a line
from the base to the summit, waiting
for something to give, to lose its footing,
for signs of life on other planets.
This is a short free verse poem that appears at the end of the chapter “Horton-in-Ribblesdale to Malham” in Armitage’s book “Walking Home” though it first appeared in his 1993 collection “Book of Matches”.
He recounts a feeling of ennui, of reaching a point where there is no point in continuing—in the words of Javert in Les Misérables, “There is no way to go on!”—and contrasts it with looking through binoculars at climbers scaling the heights of Malham Cove in Yorkshire. Each climber is seen to dip their hands into the bag of powder that gives them a better grip on the rocks and searching for the next crack that will help them upwards so that they slowly rise out of the field of view.
Without the benefit of magnification, the climbers are tiny specks like the stars reflected in the peaceful water of the nearby Malham Tarn. The universe turns and the stars move just as infinitesimally across the surface of the Tarn as the climbers move up the face of the rocks. Only when the smoking remnants of the fire are tossed into the water is the resemblance broken.
Armitage scans the rocks though he realises he will only see gross movements such as the rapid descent as someone loses their grip and falls. He likens the struggle to discern the tiny movements to that of astronomers attempting to find signs of life elsewhere in the universe.
I like the way Armitage expresses the struggles of the climbers, coating their hands with the powder and cautiously probing upward for the next fissure and the contrast he shows between the close-up view offered by the binoculars and the distant specks visible with the naked eye. I love the idea of the cinders of the fire breaking up the fires of the stars and the idea of distant planets as a metaphor for the distant climbers, visible only by subtle hints.
The exhaustion expressed at the beginning of the poem is quite apposite for a book on walking the Pennine Way and in such a book it could only appear in the chapter where Armitage passes through Malham Cove.
I chose this poem because Rachel and her walking group have been on holiday in Yorkshire all week and have visited Malham and the Limestone Pavement as well as other areas of the Pennine Way. It is also two years since Rachel walked the Pennine Way by herself, an incredible achievement.
I have been unable to find a performance of the poem online.