#1 Rising Five

Norman Nicholson On How Writing Helps Us Live

‘Rising Five’, N. Nicholson, Selected Poems 1940-1982 (Faber & Faber, 1982), p.27

Don’t wish your life away. That’s how this poem boils down. A child’s innocent assumption of five a few months early becomes a leap from cradle to grave. Don’t wish your life away, Norman Nicholson tells us in a voice as sharp as beckwater and as sturdy as the fells. Do the other thing, flagged in the mirroring of ‘alive’ and ‘living’ at the poem’s start and end: live.

But it’s not that easy. Life rushes. I write this in a pocket of a Sunday afternoon as the day fades, tea beckons, bed calls. I worry I might not have time to continue this in the week - when will the weekend come? Even my first real encounter with Nicholson was a hurry, racing through a painfully long commute to attend his 110th birthday party. It left me looking forward to reading more of his poetry, and now that I have, I look forward to next year’s birthday celebration, and all the while I await my next chance to write. And what little now I’m present for is divided up - notifications bleating to be answered, work to manage, chores to do, shows to watch, books to read, sleep to steal. I just can’t wait until I have more time.

Stop, Nicholson tells me. Think about what you’re doing with what you’re saying. It’s not uncommon for him to open his poems with speech: he weaves Cumbrian dialect in at the top of  Millom Old Quarry (‘They dug ten streets from that there hole’), Five Minutes (‘I’m having five minutes’), and Old Man at a Cricket Match (‘It’s mending worse’) among others. It’s one way that he preserves the daily reality of Millom, the town he lived in almost all his days. More than that, though, his intense focus on the local allows him to examine the implications of familiar craic. What is the philosophy here? How does this child see the world?

Answer: in a way that makes Nicholson nervous.

Mortality haunts this child’s turn of phrase. Day becomes night, now become soon, living becomes dead: that repetition of ‘not’ and ‘but’ becomes a drum beat counting down. Nicholson published this poem in his 1954 ‘The Pot Geranium’, aged forty, entering into the May (or rising June) of his life. He finds the child a haunting reflection. ‘We drop our youth behind us like a boy throwing away his toffee-wrappers,’ he writes, mirroring the child’s ‘toffee-buckled cheeks.’ The determiner ‘a’ abstracts the child into an avatar of youth, one that the pronoun ‘we’ invites both Nicholson and the reader to find themselves in. The four year old still has toffees in his mouth, but for Nicholson and the reader, the wrappers have slipped away. There is an anxiety here, I think, about the new generation coming through. Despite being only fifty-six months old, this child has his own eyes to stare ‘at me and the meadow.’ Perhaps what he sees is the ‘new buds pushing the old leaves from the bough.’

Norman Nicholson

So, the child’s words force Nicholson to face his mortality. Like its poet, the poem has a profound attention to how our way of talking shapes our perspective. The child’s idiom engulfs the world around it - finding fruit in flower, rot in fruit. The refrain extends it dominion over plants and seasons, calendar time and lived time. For a child at this delicate and impressionable age, Nicholson offers an intervention: be careful how you speak, be careful how your words warp space and time around you.

Crucially, this attention to language’s power is also the solution. How do you stop time from passing you by? You turn your ‘cones of light’ to something and look. If the child’s years are rattling by, if soon is performing its sly transmutation to now, Nicholson slows down time by showing us the buds, the shoots and the stems in close detail. Here, a rich language of ‘unbuttoned’, ‘frills’ and ‘creases’ comes through, and we see how Nicholson’s own childhood lexicon fashioned his perspective on the world: he grew up living above his father’s outfitters. 

One by one, Nicholson puts into words these subtle transformations. Spring does not just arrive as the done deal of a noun, he shows us, but rather plays out in a process of verbs: ‘bubbling and doubling.’ He situates the seasons not in their rapid progress but in their context and events: ‘after blossoming’ He pauses the dusk to linger between day and night; only then can we appreciate the ‘dust dissecting tangential light.’ He even performs this magic trick on the child: four and five may seem interchangeable to him, but Nicholson deepens those years into fifty six individual months (or perhaps a week more). His choice of words, then, and the precise focus they bestow expands space and time. His words discover the ‘now,’ and make it possible to live there. Indeed, they make it possible to ‘live’ at all.

I chose this poem for this inaugural post because I want to slow down. Since leaving university my life has been a rush of milestones accelerated by a deep longing to do all the things I’m now in a position to do: to read more, to bake more, to do good work, to have more adventures, to find meaning, to live. Yet as I rush through books searching for ideas or stretch myself in a dozen directions trying to keep up with my interests, I find myself launching constantly to the next thing, never taking the opportunity to appreciate where I am. I’m struggling to enjoy the view from the windows because I’m always trying to climb out of them.

‘Rising Five’ salves this desire to rush. It’s Nicholson giving a template for living a meaningful, rooted life. Nicholson spent almost all his days in Millom, and believed it was the ‘intense concern with what is close to us’ that brought awareness of ‘that which is enduring in life and society.’ In this blog, I want to learn something from that spirit. Limpet Bay is a space where I can carve out a time to gather my thoughts rather than endlessly unspooling them, a blank page as a meeting place for encounters with poetry, history, literature, film, and the world. It’s somewhere to live out an intense concern with what is close to me, and hopefully share things that might become an intense concern close to you.

Let’s take life slow.

Next time: the best poem you’ll ever read (from the perspective of a cow)

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• Shout out to the Norman Nicholson Society, who’ve recently succeeded in purchasing Nicholson’s home to turn into a museum! They’re such lovely people, and organised the 110th birthday celebration where I first heard - and was astonished by - his poems. (Unrelatedly, that was also the night I learnt how to knit.)

• Yes, I did get that ‘intense concern with what is close to us’ quote from Wikipedia; I couldn’t find a publication of the speech to quote. Sigh. There goes my Master’s degree.

• Not sure if this notes section will appear in future posts. But I’m enjoying the energy right now.

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