The Pump
Peter Daniels, of North London Area Meeting, was awarded first prize in the recent Times Literary Supplement Poetry Competition.
What is the background to the poem?
The poem was triggered by a photo I took of the pump in the yard at Bridport Meeting House. However, the poem isn’t particularly about Bridport: it’s some imagined location with a pump like that.
There have been other pumps I’ve known, such as the one in the yard of a farm near where I grew up, already embedded in Birmingham suburbia but still a working farm, or another pump at a cabin in Wisconsin where I have stayed. There are plenty of pumps in other people’s experience, which helps the poem to speak to readers, and when I showed it to my mother she immediately thought of the farm where her grandparents lived.
Why do you write poetry?
A poem is made of words, which we all speak, but it has to have some element you can’t explain, and that has a lot to do with the music. A poem’s sound reminds us the words are physical, made with our mouths, as well as being tokens of meaning. The joy in the grappling is finding the best way to make the most of both aspects.
Do images often prompt a creative written response?
I don’t feel very happy being inspired by pictures per se (‘here’s something Rembrandt made earlier’) but I often use my own photos to start off a poem like a notebook entry.
There is a real sense of capturing the object, the thing, in ‘The Pump’.
Yes, that is very important. ‘No ideas but in things’, said the great modernist poet William Carlos Williams. We explore the past through things because it’s one of the chief ways we remember. The thing and the word and image are so deeply associated – I have an image of a thing for probably every concrete noun. It’s how children learn their vocabulary, or at least I did.
Why is Quakerism important to you?
Quakerism for me is a recognition of life, and the need to find a relationship with existence, which is how I would define God. Sitting quietly and waiting is essential, but so is ministry, listening to God. Because I work in words, the space around them is also part of what matters: that’s how ministry needs to be, too.
The Pump
After piped water, the pump becomes redundant,
the handle chained down at the side: at rest, if you like.
The pump turns into “what we used to have”,
but no one’s minded to get rid of it.
With war declared they strip it down and oil it
in case Hitler bombs the reservoirs, but
water stays on tap. It’s part of the yard,
the paving in dark blue brick sluiced out
with a broom down to the drain.
A piece of ironwork painted green,
rusting into the wall, all of a piece.
It’s what they call “the vernacular”.
Flowers in tubs do brighten it up, the pump
redone in white, the name of the foundry and the date
picked out in black. It punctuates the composition,
sets off the door to the kitchen, the stone basin
where they used to put the bucket
planted up with nasturtiums that trail.
The place all spruce for the visitors,
now the redundant pump can stand for
all the strength it took the kitchen girl to crank it
and crank it till the steely water came up at last, and at last
she could find time to become somebody’s grandmother.
Somebody look at the pump and think of her.
