.

So many things were churning in his mind
When scrambling down the track towards the cove,
To take especial care or drop behind
Them both, decide perhaps it might behove

Him to feign injury before his friends,
Avert the worst accurst day of his life,
Reverse his steps, the coward who intends
To yield before a hint of mental strife.

The voices in his head said “No, don’t go,
For this is bluster, braggadocio,
And sheer bravado, putting on a show
For those below, as you must surely know.

The subjugation of your Everest
Does little to augment the sum of joy
On earth, no greater for your vain conquest
Nor growth in health nor wealth will we enjoy.”

A self-indulgence this can only be,
Though steeped in needless fears and pointless dread,
The footpath led the way through rock debris,
The boulders all around them widely spread.

His friends, oblivious to fearful thought,
To nagging pains he felt deep down inside
His very core of being. Quite distraught
Was he beneath his overweening pride.

But credence he could scarcely ever give
To vague portentous hints, unwonted fears,
For dreams should not dictate the way we live
Nor night-time sorrows turn our days to tears.

And down the track three climbers made their way,
Between the granite boulders, heaps of stone,
And one of them would die that fateful day
Who climbed with two but sadly died alone.

He died alone that fateful day. He died
For no more reason than his self-esteem,
For nothing but that vain and arrant pride,
Could engineer fulfilment of his dream.

Too late by far for any to beseech
Them now. They raced, ignoring their sixth sense,
In haste to reach that great impending breach
That faced them and their misplaced confidence.

A bowline held the gear around each waist,
The crag grew near and one of them felt queer,
Too late by now to leave the wall disgraced.
No matter for these climbers who appear

Externally too very cavalier
To dread a fall. But one of them was full
Of fright that fateful day and fighting fear,
The hidden terror pounding in his skull.

He led the route straight up though with a lack
Of holds on fist-jams with the odd layback,
The tiniest of ledges let him pack
Two wedges in an overhanging crack.

And on pitch three he climbed above a nose
Of rock obtruding three yards into space,
With holds scarce big enough for twinkletoes
To grip the wrinkles of its granite face.

A micro-wedge gave little confidence
Jammed in the most exiguous of cracks,
Protection of such little consequence,
No spot to waver, nowhere to relax.

Towards a faint handhold he made a lunge,
The movement let his quaking foot slip free,
The wedge sprang out, he took a mighty plunge,
His arms outspread, his head towards the sea.

He made no shout to us nor flailed about
Nor scrabbled hopelessly, but seemed subdued,
For nothing could avail him now without
The kindly intercession of Saint Jude.

He made no shout, an utter waste of breath
For nobody could save him from this grim
Inevitable imminence of death,
Nor time had he to make his peace with Him.

No help for it, he plummeted earthbound,
A hundred feet he fell without a sound
To hit the rocks and debris on the ground,
The gulls abounding, laughing all around.

And still they laughed and wheeled about and still
Their raucous screams, unchecked by all they’d seen,
Crescendoed with a will, the air they’d fill
With shrieks and cries and everything between.

The gulls were gliding in their element
And floating on the thermals high above.
Their capabilities are heaven-sent
And shared by auk and petrel, hawk and dove,

But not by man nor any of his kind,
To avian propensities unknown,
For unpowered flight was never man designed
As Icarus and Daedalus had shown.

Three climbers on this Cornish cliff, one dead
And two forever chastened by his fall.
Forever both were filled with awful dread,
So cowed were they before that granite wall.

And surely better had he not been born,
The bliss of twenty years unmissed? Had he
Foreknowledge of that brutal end forlorn
Would he have begged to be or not to be?

His stricken partners on the crag no more
Could reach him than could soothe his dying groans
As he lay helpless on the shingle shore,
His shattered bones among the broken stones.

.

.

Peter Hartley is a retired painting restorer. He was born in Liverpool and lives in Manchester, UK.

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21 Responses

  1. David Watt

    Peter, your detailed and descriptive narrative had me nailed to my seat.
    You have strengthened my conviction that climbing is for mountain goats and certainly not for me. Thanks for an enthralling poem.

    Reply
    • Peter Hartley

      David – and certainly not for me either. Since crippling arthritis hit my right knee I wouldn’t even be able to get one foot off the ground now. Thank you for the kind remarks.

      Reply
  2. James A. Tweedie

    Your well-told tragic tale gives new meaning to both the idea of “overreach” and that of the ironically-named, Peter Principle. Fortunately, I have never experienced such trauma in my life although I tempted such fatal outcomes several times in my late teens and early twenties While idly scrambling in the High Sierras.—the brashness of youth, indeed.

    Reply
    • Peter Hartley

      James – thank you for the comment, and I don’t think exponents of the Peter principle would ever last too long pitted against a rock face like the one described, the route being aptly named “Suicide Wall”. The crux moves might have been “within my level of competence” at ground level but over a hundred feet up I’m glad I had a good leader and fortunately neither of us fell off.

      Reply
  3. Jeff Eardley

    Peter, your travellers tales always enthrall and entertain and this one is a classic roller coaster of daring and death. It brought to mind my only brush with the air ambulance and mountain rescue when my walking companion slipped and plummeted seventy feet down a rockface in the Peak Hamlet of Birchover, smashing himself up very badly. I remember the feeling in the pit of my stomach when I thought he was dead. Superbly composed and a joy to read. Thank you again.

    Reply
    • Peter Hartley

      Jeff – Many thanks for your comment and for sharing your own experience of a near fatality in the Peak District. A very good friend and colleague of mine from the art gallery where I worked had been going to climb with me one weekend in May 1980 in the Peaks but for one reason or another we failed to make contact. He went off climbing on his own and the next thing I heard, on the Monday, was that he had been killed in a fifty-foot fall from Gardom’s Edge. I never went rock-climbing again after that.

      Reply
    • Peter Hartley

      Thank you, Cynthia. You are very kind. I must admit the last line of it wouldn’t have been quite the same without Hamlet though.

      Reply
  5. C.B. Anderson

    A small matter of diction: In the first stanza, you end the last line with “behove,” which, as far as I can tell, is not a word, though it looks like a plausible alternative past tense of “behoove.” In any case, the infinitive form, “behoove,” is required after the auxilliary verb “might.”

    Reply
    • Peter Hartley

      Mr Anderson – this is the third or fourth time that, while ignoring my poetry, you have attempted to correct my English simply because I write English English as opposed to American English. You are apparently unaware (unlike every other member of SCP) that there is a difference. You say that as far as you can tell “behove” is not a word. Allow me to quote from Fowler’s Modern English Usage: “behove, behoove. The first spelling is the better; indeed the second is virtually obsolete except in the US where it is preferred.” Apart from the USA have you never been to any other country where they speak English as a first language? If you had you might have come across the word behove (which, incidentally was once pronounced behoove, as in the American spelling). As far as I am aware English usage has not been proscribed by SCP and until it IS I shall continue to write English as it is written in England because that is where I live and that is what I was taught.

      Reply
      • C.B. Anderson

        Please accept my apology, Peter. I should know better than to challenge you when it comes to anything pertaining to valid lexemes. And, as a matter of fact, I have never even been to Canada. Had I troubled in the first place to consult my more comprehensive dictionary, I would have found “behove” with a chiefly British note appended. But you can imagine what the word looked like to a fairly literate speaker of American English.

        You complain of my “ignoring [your] poetry,” but initially I thought it unnecessary to express my reservations about the poem. If I have any problem with it, though others might disagree, it is that you forewent economy of expression in developing your ideas, which made the poem a bit longer than it needed to be. It was a thorough investigation of a tragic event, but what it lacked was some snap, crackle and pop.

      • Peter Hartley

        CBA – Thank you for your gracious apology. Regarding my forgoing economy of expression, I don’t think that I have ever felt a particular need to strive for brevity or to make it an issue in this or in any other poem that I have ever written. In the poem in question the slow pace was dictated by my trying to build up tension and to give a little detail on the thoughts and psychology of the rock-climber as we went along, building up to the inevitable fall. But perhaps it IS overlong. You have certainly given me food for thought for the future. Thank you for that.

  6. Margaret Coats

    A gripping story, Peter, and like Cynthia I am very much struck by the “foreknowledge stanza.” At first it seems irrelevant and out of place, but including it makes this poem more profound than a fine psychological tale of overreach and misadventure. I think I know your answer to the basic question. The climber, as any living being, desires life, and would not want to sacrifice twenty good years of it to avoid a horrid death. But you also indicate that he had not made his peace with God, implying that he fell to Hell. For many of our contemporaries, the conviction that there is no afterlife, and surely no hell, justifies almost any behavior. They would not sacrifice twenty years, even foreknowing the fall at the end. But what about someone who wished to make peace with God, and by his own fault wasted all opportunity to do so? Would he give up life to avoid Hell? Or could he, with foreknowledge, have chosen not to make this climb? Correct theology tells us that even God’s foreknowledge does not unalterably cause events where human free will has a choice. This takes the reader back through the poem searching more carefully for all the indications of the climber’s spiritual state. Really good question–and difficult to answer.

    Reply
    • Peter Hartley

      Margaret – Thank you very much for your comment on my climbing poem and I always welcome your astute and thoughtful analyses of my work. To the question posed in the penultimate stanza my answer would have been no, I would not have wanted to live those twenty years in the knowledge that I would end my days as the victim in that scene of concentrated pain and horror. I am certain of that. I know because when I fell on Mount Fuji more than half a lifetime ago for many months, years perhaps, I nursed a resentment, (not directed specifically at my brain surgeon with whom I continue to exchange Christmas cards to this day!) that I had been “brought back to life” from eight days in a coma only to have to undergo the possibly agonisingly painful process of death once again at some future date. So I would have begged “not to be” to a question that for me is rhetorical. My attitude is that of a depressive personality but surely for anybody there is a point beyond which the dubious joys of existence can be no recompense for the pain of our dying.

      Reply
  7. Jan Darling

    Thank you Peter – coming from a land of craggy outcroppings and certain drops to death – I could almost smell the landscape you describe and I enjoyed every gasping line. I empathise with you regarding English English and the other as it’s spoke in diff’rent climes and I greatly admire Susan who has such a powerful grasp of language. And let me mention how b***** irritating it is to finally give in and look for a word in Rhymer.com. I hadn’t realised that there were so many good Limey words that have alien pronunciations. You create deliciously detailed pictures – in this case you treated me to a mini movie.

    Reply
    • Peter Hartley

      Jan – many thanks for your generous response to my poem and chiefly for telling me that you feel you have been “treated to a mini-movie.” What finer response could any writer of narrative poetry hope for? And yes, Susan (whose ears are burning with pudgy gluts as we speak) has a grasp of arcane, recherché and sesquipedalian vocables second to none.

      Reply
  8. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    Peter, this breathtaking, heartbreaking poem is exemplary on many levels. The poetic devices used to create an atmosphere that’s palpable are admirable. Your use of internal rhyme is masterly and I especially like your employment of monorhyme which, for me, sets or enhances the mood. In the third stanza with all that “bluster, braggadocio,/And sheer bravado…”, I am shouting out “no, no, NO!”. And the howling sound of “earthbound/ ground/ sound/ around” had me howling inwardly for the sheer tragedy of the situation, captured (as Jan says) like a “mini-movie”… such is the power of your poem. I also love your poem for the questions it poses, questions that Margaret addresses clearly and sensitively. Your answer to Margaret is swirling around my head like a tempest, stirring up many questions of my own… which I’m certain to mull over. Peter, I believe this tour de force of a poem is one of your finest. It’s an absolute privilege to read.

    My ears have been burning with pudgy gluts of late, and I thank you and Jan wholeheartedly for your far-too-kind but wonderfully encouraging words.

    Reply
    • Peter Hartley

      Susan – Thank you so much for what must be the most generous paean to a poetic endeavour of mine that I have ever received, especially when, as you may note from another comment on that poem, it has not been altogether favourably received. As “Calais” was engraved on Queen Mary Tudor’s heart when she popped off, so shall your comment be tattooed in pride of place on my right atrium. And as one among just two or three others whose opinions I most highly regard, your appraisal I shall cherish long after the poem that precipitated it has been forgotten. From your comment I can see that you have followed and understood everything, every little nuance, every refinement that I was trying to communicate, even down to the howling onomatopoeia which I might have known that either you or Margaret would have picked up on. It is one of the very few narrative poems that I have ever composed (pace “The Butcher of Barcelona”) and I am so gratified that it has received from you such wholehearted approval. Thank you again, and again and again.

      Reply
      • Susan Jarvis Bryant

        Peter, you are most welcome… and, please do not forget to enter the poetry competition this year!!

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