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The Meads of Love
- Life and Poetry of John Harris
- by Paul Newman
- (hardback
£16.99, softback £7.99)
Harris, John
(1820 - 1884) Cornish poet and miner, born at Bolenowe, near
Camborne, who published several volumes of poetry celebrating his native
landscapes, including Lays from the Mine, the Moor and the Mountains
(1853) and A Story of Carn Brea (1863). Songs from the Earth,
a selection (1977), has an introduction by D. M. Thomas which praises his
'Romantic visionary quality which breathes life into an Augustan
vocabulary.
Harris's
life was the classic struggle against the harshest imaginable
circumstances. Born
1820 in a two-bedroomed cottage high on the slopes of Bolenowe Carn, he
was sent to work down Dolcoath Mine at the age of twelve, an immense and
hellish labyrinth, some two thousand feet deep.
But somehow he managed to combine a life of unrelenting labour with
the rapid production of packed and powerful poems, celebrating his native
landscape around Carn Brea and the scenic splendours of Land's End and the
Lizard. He could not afford
pen and paper but used blackberry juice for ink and grocery wrappers for
paper. In the 1840s, he took
as his wife, Jane Rule, who gave him four children, two sons and two
daughters. When his
second-born daughter, Lucretia, died at Christmas-tide 1855, the
grief-struck poet produced one of the most moving elegies in the English
Language.
At
this stage Harris might well have died, a sick and disappointed man.
But fortunately a friend found him a more congenial occupation, as
a Bible-reader or travelling comforter at Falmouth, where he spent the
second half of his life, until his death in 1884 when he requested that he
should be buried at Treslothan Chapel, at the foot of Carn Brea, the
“pagan mountain” of his childhood.
Biographer
Paul Newman, a St Austell writer and
lecturer, spent many years researching the biography, tracing relatives of
Harris, checking newspaper archives, interviewing specialists and local
historians. Professor Charles
Thomas provides a foreword to the biography, stating that “Mr Newman
combines, as so rarely happens, total empathy with his subject, a certain
and welcome detachment in literary criticism and the impressive outcome of
a lot of hard work.” The book also includes a selection of the miner's
best poems. Hence the reader has the double opportunity to admire both a
brave and resilient spirit and the verses into which he poured so much
craft and care.
Born
in Clevedon, Somerset, Paul Newman was educated at colleges in Bristol,
Weston Super-Mare and Cheltenham. After
working variously as a teacher of English, mill-hand in a cider factory,
photographer, manager of a boating-lake and part-time gorrilla at a
holiday camp, he turned to full-time writing in the 1970s, since when he
has written books and articles covering subjects as diverse as symbolism,
topography, psychology, archaeology and literature. Titles include Channel Passage (1975) The
Hill of the Dragon (1979), Gods
and Graven Images (1987) and commissioned works on the cities of
Bristol and Bath.
In
the mid-eighties, he moved from Somerset to Cornwall and presently lives
in St Austell where he lectures and edits the periodical Abraxas,
a magazine devoted to literature, psychology and ideas,
incorportating The Colin
Wilson Newsletter. He has
conducted many interviews with leading authors, including Colin Wilson,
and his poems and stories have appeared in magazines.
Together
with the sculptor A.R. Lamb, he has shared a poetry collection, In
Many Ways Frogs (1997) and this was followed by Lost
Gods of Albion (1998), a study of British hill-figures, currently
available from shops and bookclubs. His present project is a ‘history of
fear’ from prehistoric times to the present.
(For copies of the above post free, send cash or cheque (£16.99 hb or £7.99 pb) made out to Paul Newman, 57 Eastbourne Road, St Austell, Cornwall, PL25 4SU)
Another essay on John Harris by the same author (also accessible on this website) is:
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