John Haines and the Poets
Jackie Tweedale
Edward Thomas had reviewed Frost’s book of poems, ‘North of Boston’, favourably and the poems gained a wider and appreciative audience. On July 18th, Frost went to visit Thomas at his home in Steep, Hampshire for a couple of days. They discussed the possibility of Thomas going to America to see if he could fare better there, maybe as a lecturer, but Thomas could not decide what to do for the best. On 28th July, Rupert Brooke read some of his poetry at The Poetry Bookshop in London. No one knew then, that this would his last visit there. In Europe, Austria declared war on Serbia. Russia began to mobilise with Germany demanding they stop. Russia’s refusal led to Germany declaring war on Russia and France.
Visitors to the poets in Dymock continued, and one regular visitor was John “Jack” Haines, a Gloucestershire solicitor. He loved poetry, literature, the countryside and was a knowledgeable botanist. A friendship grew up between Frost and Haines based on their love of walking and interest in the local flora and fauna. Haines was often seen walking with his vasculum (a tall glass container for collecting plant specimens).
Haines, having read Frosts poems in ‘A Boys Will’, and hearing that he was living in the Dymock area, decided to try and meet him. Whist walking to Leddington, he asked a man he met if he knew where he could find Robert Frost. As soon as the man spoke Haines knew that he had found him.
Haines taught Frost the names of the trees, plants and animals of the Leadon Valley on their walks in the lanes and fields and on the Malvern Hills. Frost’s son, Carol, taught the Abercrombie boys and Haines how to skim stones and make javelins out of tree shoots. Thomas taught them how to play cricket. It was to be Haines’ memories, recollections and later articles in the 1930’s in the ‘Gloucestershire Countryside’ magazine that kept alive this moment in time.1 He was the first to use the term ‘Dymock Poets’ to describe this group of individual poets who gathered here in 1914 and the years before the war.
Later the Reverend Gethyn Jones wrote about the poets in his book ‘Dymock through the Ages’.2
The poets did not live in isolation but mixed with the local people on walks, in shops and pubs and in the fields. They were allowed to gather local apples. People recalled meeting them as school children and playing games of marbles, Hop Scotch, hoop rolling and being taught the names of flowers and plants
Haines was to write
‘There is a small country road which runs from Newent nearly parallel with the Dymock road, but a little nearer Gloucester, and passes through the most beautiful country away to Bromsberrow Heath and the Malverns. Three miles beyond Newent it crosses the Leadon, here a very beautiful little river, very unlike the dirty ditch it becomes at Over, at Ketford Bridge close to where our city has its secondary waterworks. Beyond Ketford Bridge you pass through deep-set lanes of red clay fringed with flowers and ferns to the little hamlet of Ryton, half brick half-timber, backed by the happily named Redmarley Hills, and in springtime a golden gush of daffodils’.3
1 Sean Street. The Dymock Poets. Seren (Poetry Wales Press) 1994
2 Rev. J.E Gethyn-Jones. Dymock Down The Ages. Alan Sutton. 1951
3 Sean Street. The Dymock Poets. Seren (Poetry Wales Press) 1994
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