Parson Hawker

This is of course the famously eccentric Rev. Robert Hawker of Morwenstow on the fearsome North Cornish cliffs. All the details in this sonnet are true - you will find many more in Piers Brendon's very readable 1975 biography. In particular Hawker drove himself to the edge of breakdown by conscientiously collecting the corpses and body parts of sailors whose ships had been wrecked in the ferocious winter storms, burying the remains in his churchyard where the memorials can be seen to this day. He was a fine poet: his masterpiece 'The Quest of the Sangraal' was acknowledged by many, including Tennyson, as being the equal of, if not surpassing, 'The Idylls of the King.'
   Brendon's biography was reissued in 1983 by the late Anthony Mott in his magnificent 'Cornish Library' series - a cornucopia of classic titles about dear old Cornwall.

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Such solace in a cliff-edge, self-built hut,
An opium pipe and wet-ink sprawling verses,
The gulls, those doubters, screaming “but” and “but,”
And wind cracking the blackthorn trees and furzes.

At foot, the sea, man-grinding, pulped with flesh,

Blackly restless, thrashing to bile and phlegm,
Voids gobbets, pail-collected, for a pasch
Of burial beneath a cross’s quartz-flecked gleam.

Inland, the fieldmen cough and rot, their wives

Yearly birth with toothless gasps and paps’
Thin milk; the threadbare gentry grudge their tithes;
And Hawker parches like unharvest'd grapes;

Daily he reads Matins in his rain-struck church,

Shunned by his mud-legged charges though Heaven’s porch.

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© October 2015