Landmark, by Owen Sheers

On this sleepy Sunday I’ve been rooting through my boxes of books (still not unpacked from university) and I pulled out a lovely collection of poems that I’d forgotten I owned. I say owned, I mean pinched from my secondary school on the last day of term. Owen Sheers’ Skirrid Hill is an earthy, crisp and suggestive book of poems about cultural inheritance and changing identities, moving between modern cities and rural Wales. Though there are obvious parallels between Sheers and other ‘nature’ poets such as Seamus Heaney and R.S Thomas, for me his work evokes older sensibilities. When I re-read the collection, my thoughts ran to another Welsh poet named Henry Vaughan, who wrote in the early 17^th century. He too explored the disjunct between man and nature, the marks we make on our landscape, and the marks made upon us. In the preface to the collection, we are told that Skirrid comes “from the Welsh . . . Ysgariad meaning divorce or separation" – in a reading of the following poem, ‘Landmark’, I’m going to explore this thought.

Landmark 

Afterwards they were timeless
and they lay that way for a while before standing
and dressing, reclaiming their clothes

from the white-blossomed branches of the blackthorn tree.
And already they were part of things again:
his watch, her ear-rings, their clumsy shoes.

They noticed the telephone wires, the time,
even the broken rug of a long-dead sheep
folded at the bottom of the bank.

On going they stopped to turn and look back,
holding each other as if to let go would mean forever,
and they saw where they had been -

a double shadow of green pressed grass, weight imprinted.
A sarcophagus, shallow among the long stems
and complete without them.

By Owen Sheers

In ‘Landmark’, we enter the scene of the poem just a fraction too late. We are belatedly witnessing the ‘afterwards’, the denouement, without having seen the main event. The event of the poem is secondary to a prior scene, a scene that Sheers gradually intimates – a couple have most likely just had sex, and are hidden away behind ‘the branches of the blackthorn tree.’ Here I’m reminded of the dreaming speaker in Keats’ The Fall of Hyperion, arriving too late to the banquet and desperately gorging on the left over fruits. The flashes of intimacy have been withheld from us, and these ideas of privacy, of withholding and of a lapsed moment of bliss are at the heart of the poem.

In the first stanza, Sheers’ articulation of time establishes an ethereal quality in the poem, as he notes that ‘afterwards they were timeless’ and that they ‘lay that way for a while…’ It appears that the couple are suspended in their after-moment – they may have been lay for ten minutes, or ten years – it feels as though their awakening is only precipitated by our presence as the reader, as the witness. The lack of specificity in terms of both time and identity creates the first whisperings of an association between this couple, and the classic depiction of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Sheers teases out this parallel in several ways. The syntax of the first stanza echoes the linguistic devices often found in Biblical verse. The methodical progression of each sentence, along with the anaphora of ‘and’ in lines two, three and five, and the slight internal rhymes (standing, dressing, reclaiming), each contribute to the measured tone. The imagery strongly evokes Edenic tropes – after the unseen moment of bliss, perhaps sin, there is the ‘reclaiming of clothes’, the world of material ‘things’ and the ‘clumsy’ humanity that typifies the fallen state of man. The clothing here is a modern imagining of the fig leaf; the clumsiness is the loss of grace. The couple are laden with material signifiers of their change in, and removal from, nature, and Sheers’ language mirrors this, emphasised by the short clauses and listing of objects:

‘And already they were part of things again:

his watch, her ear-rings, their clumsy shoes.’

The natural, primal scene becomes irretrievably linked to a modern world, from the purity of the white-blossom exchanged for telephone wires cutting through silence, and even the ‘long-dead sheep’ re-imagined as a household object, a ‘rug.’ The couple begin to ‘notice’, to awaken as it were. The final image of the first line of the first stanza and the first line of the third oppose one another – from timelessness we have moved to the present, more definite ‘time.’ For me the poem seems to accelerate as soon as the couple begins to dress. Within the stanzas, the listing creates a quickened pace, and each taut little tercet seems to act as a point of removal, as another pace away from that initial timelessness and bliss, and from our natural place in a natural environment. This movement is emphasised in the fourth stanza. The phrase ‘On going they stopped’ is an odd one, oxymoronic in essence. I think that this moment is a crucial one within the entire collection, as it seems to perfectly describe a point of hesitance, of being torn between two states – the moment before the full separation or remove. The image of the couple, holding one another and briefly looking back, again evokes the image of Adam and Eve leaving Eden together, so far removed from their prior incarnations that they ‘saw where they had been’ from the same detached perspective as the reader. This is a shift from the previous inferences of sacred intimacy. Traditionally, blackthorn trees were used to make hedges, emphasising the secrecy of the moment before the poem, but now the couple look openly at the scene as we do.

In the final stanza Sheers fully realises a thought that echoes through the poem. We see the marks made on the couple by their things, but what mark do they, or their preternatural selves leave on the land? The image of a ‘double shadow of green pressed grass, weight imprinted’ is remarkably allusive, and in this line, and this stanza, Sheers taps into several different histories and mythologies. The idea of the shadow draws us back to the notion of an prior self and a secondary moment, even echo, but Sheers renders the imperceptible idea of a shadow tangible, giving it body, colour, making it into a physical scar on the landscape. The concept of an ‘imprint’ is something I find completely fascinating - it evokes the moment of impression, again it emphasises the idea of something secondary and derived, and it’s explored throughout history, from Descartes’ ‘wax argument’ to the concept of ‘love at first sight’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

However, these images all describe something that is directly linked to a prior creator – the thing that makes the imprint, in this case the couple. Sheers negates this notion in his final sentence. The image of the ‘sarcophagus’ – yet another mythology - symbolises death, but also preservation. The idea that the shadow, an imprint, that an echo of the primal scene can be ‘complete without’ what made it is the twist of the poem, as it were. That’s probably far too simplistic an assertion, but that’s what the Landmark is. It is an echo of something primal and vital which draws together many histories and mythologies, be they religious, spiritual, or even the simple intimacies of a couple in the countryside. The quiet intimacy should not be forgotten, the couple remain bound together throughout the poem, despite their distinction from the natural environment. So, although we witness a separation as the couple move away from nature, a part of them is irretrievably left behind in the ‘green pressed grass.’