Glacier
The miles-deep Greenland glacier’s lost its grip,
sliding nine miles a year towards the sea
on its own melt-water. As, forty years ago,
the slag-heap, loosened by a slip
of rain-swollen mountain stream, suddenly
gave with a roar, taking a primary school,
crushing the children. The century of waste
has burned a hole in the sky over the Pole.
Oh, science, with your tricks and alchemies,
chain the glacier with sun and wind and tide,
rebuild the gates of ice, halt melt and slide,
freeze the seas, stay the flow and the flux
for footfall of polar bear and Arctic fox.
****
While English is Gillian Clarke’s mother tongue, her poetry is steeped in the music of the Welsh language she learned as an adult, and in the Welsh poets’ tradition of social accountabilty. She was born in Cardiff in 1937, studied at Cardiff University and served as national poet of Wales from 2008 to 2016.
Glacier was first published online in July 2008. Clarke already had a history of addressing ecological themes in her work, not least in the searing, close-to-home poems about the depredations of the foot and mouth outbreak, included in her collection Making the Beds for the Dead. Ahead of its time, Glacier responds passionately to the threatened decimation of the Arctic ice sheet. The subject hadn’t received enough attention in the UK at the time. Since the summer of 2019, when the death and “funeral” of the massive Icelandic glacier, Okjokull, attracted a brief flare of publicity it should have become easier to tune in to Clarke’s eco-poetry, and to what many other important 21st-century poets are trying to teach us – not always through fear and guilt, but through appealing to our senses, including the sense of beauty.
A poem has to be more than its surface message, however prescient, however wise. This is a beautiful sonnet for all seasons. (Yes, “sonnet” I declare, despite the 13 lines!) Perhaps, though, it resonates for an additional reason just now, when anxieties about human health seem to have obliterated what had begun to be a deepening awareness of, and activism against, climate change. A lot of our new anti-pandemic measures have helped the environment, but – let’s not forget – only as a by-product of our relentless anthropocentrism. They may not last.
Technically, what I admire about Glacier is the combination of formal compression and easy-flowing rhythm and assonance. This fluidity of movement also affects the larger narrative. Already, in the third line, there’s a shift of focus from the strongly registered “establishing shot”: “The miles-deep Greenland glacier’s lost its grip, / sliding nine miles a year towards the sea / on its own melt-water.”
After the caesura, references to “forty years ago” and the “slag-heap” wind the reel back to another terrible, neglectful “slippage” – the Aberfan disaster of 1966. A mountain consisting of 150,000 tonnes of colliery waste finally collapsed, as many had predicted, and destroyed Pantglas junior school and nearby houses; 116 children and 28 adults were killed. It’s as if the poem were saying to the insouciant passer-by, “If this analogy doesn’t bring you to your senses about global warming, nothing will.”
All the qualities that distinguish the poem as poem – the skilfully handled syntax, the metrical deftness, the play of sounds – contribute, almost ironically, to its mimesis. The flow and pulse help us register the melting of the ice, the loosening of rain-drenched slurry. And yet, at the same time, they allow the poem to sing beyond disaster.
The loss of the glacier and the loss of life in Aberfan are attributed to the same source in “that century of waste” (line seven). Two rhymes hollowed out in line eight, “hole” and “Pole”, exhibit the century’s wounded texture, like rents in the ozone layer. And now the “turn” of the 13-line sonnet occurs, and the speaker’s voice lifts into invocation. True, it has doubts about the ethical nature of the science it invokes – a performer of “tricks and alchemies” – but perhaps at this point only a miracle could halt the avalanche?
Somehow, the speaker’s identity seems less that of the poet, more identifiable with some Arctic “elemental” – animal or bird or the ice itself. After gazing out at vast horizons, the poem’s eyes are looking around and down to the nearer landscape. White or yellowish-pelted, the polar bears pad, magically hushed, into the last couplet, that muffling assonance of “f” sounds blending them into the snowscape. But the poem also makes them visible, and reminds us they are sacred.
Clarke’s translation of Y Gododdin comes out from Faber next year, when a new collection of essays and a journal, Roots Home, will also be published by Carcanet. Gillian Clarke’s most recent collections include Ice, Selected Poems and Zoology.