I sing the cycle of my country's year,
I sing the tillage, and the reaping sing,
Classic monotony, that modes and wars
Leave undisturbed, unbettered, for their best
Was born immediate, of expediency.
In 1926, Sackville-West won England’s Hawthornden Prize for her long poem “The Land.” Clocking in close to 2500 lines, it is an example of a mode of poetry which had long been popular: the pastoral. The speaker is a shepherd and the poem is divided into four parts, each named after one of the seasons. Everything that is to follow is laid out in this first line: the shepherd—following the tradition of the genre—ponders and muses on the perfection of the often wild and untamed British countryside which is the titular property.
Would that my pen like a blue bayonet
Might skewer all such cats'-meat of defeat;
No buttoned foil, but killing blade in hand.
The land and not the waste land celebrate,
The rich and hopeful land, the solvent land,
Not some poor desert strewn with nibbled bones,
A land of death, sterility, and stones.
Twenty years later, Sackville-West picked up yet another honor—the Heinemann Award—for a kind of sequel to “The Land” which was a celebrated of the cultivation and taming of the land which had once been wild. But that is not all the poem celebrates. It is a full-throated shout out in defense of the pastoral mode which and the conventions of traditional poetry which had in the two decades since the earlier poem come under assault by the experimentations of the Modernists. The section “Spring” actually opens with a four-line quote from T.S. Eliot’s Modernist masterwork before the speaker makes a sly allusion to the title of that poem with her pointed insistence that her poem is a celebration of land and not the waste land.
Invading Nature crawls
With ivied fingers over rosy walls,
Searching the crevices,
Clasping the mullion, riveting the crack,
Binding the fabric crumbling to attack
The poem is about the creation of what Sissinghurst Castle Garden. Self-taught as a gardener, the result of this collaboration with her husband has since enjoyed a legacy as the most famous garden created in England in the 20th century. So famous is the garden, in fact, that it for many Sackville-West’s fame as a gardener far eclipses her renown as a poet. Though perhaps neither outweighs her fame as the lover of Virginia Woolf.
Some say, she lived in an unreal world,
Cloud-cuckoo-land. Maybe. She now has gone
Into the prouder world of immortality.
On April 6, 1941 this poem was published in The Observer. Just a week earlier, Virginia Woolf had committed suicide by drowning. “Cloud-cuckoo-land” is an allusion to a play by Aristophanes and its reference implicates Woolf as a dreamer; a person with impossibly high expectations of the viability of the ideal whose optimism is seen by the rest of the world as an eccentricity verging on outright madness.
