The Empty Waterfall: A Malham Cove Poem on Writing Absence
A curved cliff in the Yorkshire Dales, a grieving Victorian poet, and three habits for any writer trying to put on the page something that is no longer there.
Stand at the foot of Malham Cove and you get a strange feeling. You are looking at a waterfall. It has the height, the width, and the curved lip at the top. It is only missing the water.
In my last article, beneath the broken tower at Helmsley, I argued that most ruins have human hands behind them, but that sometimes the weather does deserve the credit. Malham Cove is that exception: a great limestone crescent made by ice and water, with no human hand at all.
It is also the subject of one of the poems in North Yorkshire In Verse — Moor To Shore In Poetry, and it left me with a question. How do you write about something that isn't there any more?
To answer it, I have paired my Malham Cove poem with twelve lines from one of the great poems of grief in our language.
Tennyson, Grief and the Geologist
In 1833 Arthur Henry Hallam, Tennyson's closest friend, died suddenly in Vienna. He was twenty-two and engaged to Tennyson's sister Emily. Tennyson spent the next seventeen years writing short poems about that loss, and in 1850 he published them together, without his name on the cover, as In Memoriam A.H.H. That same year he became Poet Laureate, a post he held for more than forty years.
Something else unsettled him in those years. In 1837 he read Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, which argued that the earth had been shaped slowly by ordinary forces (rain, rivers, the sea) over far more time than anyone had imagined. So the man in this poem is grieving, and he has just been told that even the hills aren't for ever.
Read it for two things. First, the scale: millions of years in a single line. Second, the turn: the last four lines change direction around the one thing he refuses to let go.
From In Memoriam A.H.H., Section CXXIII Alfred, Lord Tennyson
There rolls the deep where grew the tree. O earth, what changes hast thou seen! There where the long street roars, hath been The stillness of the central sea.
The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go.
But in my spirit will I dwell, And dream my dream, and hold it true; For tho' my lips may breathe adieu, I cannot think the thing farewell.
What Tennyson is doing
Where a tree once grew, there is open sea. Where a street now roars with traffic, there was once the stillness of the ocean floor. In four lines Tennyson turns the world upside down and back again.
The second stanza goes further. Hills are what we reach for when we mean permanent, and Tennyson says they are melting like mist. That is Lyell's slow geology, set to rhyme.
Tree and sea rhyme on the outside; seen and been rhyme in the middle. The verse curves round and closes on itself, like a wall bent into a crescent. The pattern is now called the In Memoriam stanza, because Tennyson made it his own.
But in my spirit will I dwell, / And dream my dream, and hold it true. The whole earth is moving, so he looks for one thing that isn't, and finds it inside himself. It is a beautiful ending, and a stubborn one. Farewell is the one word he says he can't bring himself to think, and the poem ends on it. Even while it refuses to say goodbye, the poem has to say it.
The Malham Cove Poem: A Waterfall Without Water
Head north out of Malham village in the Yorkshire Dales and, before long, the valley stops. In front of you is a curved wall of pale limestone, eighty metres high and more than three hundred metres across.
The rock formed more than 330 million years ago in a warm, shallow sea, when this part of the world lay south of the equator. It is full of fossils: corals, shells and sea lilies. At the end of the last Ice Age, glacial meltwater poured over the edge in a great waterfall and wore the lip into the cliff.
There is no waterfall now. The stream that fed it drops underground about a mile before the edge. Above the cliff runs a dry valley, Watlowes, where the river used to flow. At the foot, a beck comes out of a cave in the rock.
Four hundred stone steps climb the west side to the limestone pavement at the top: flat blocks of stone called clints, split by deep cracks called grikes. Rainwater has been working into those cracks since the ice retreated, dissolving the rock a little at a time. Film fans will know the pavement from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. And since 1993, peregrine falcons have nested on the cliff.
Malham Cove Alden Carrow, from North Yorkshire In Verse — Moor To Shore In Poetry
A crescent wall of silvered stone, Once shaped by ice and water's moan— Its curve holds echoes, soft and slow, Of rivers lost and long ago
The steps ascend through bleached terrain, Past moss and grit and stunted grain— Each footfall finds a hollowed grace, Where time once touched this ancient place
The pavement spreads like chessboard worn, By frost and foot and winds forlorn— Limestone clints and grikes unfold, With ferns in shade and secrets old
Birds wheel across the quarried height, Their cries like threads of vanished light— Beneath, the walkers pause and peer, Through myths made still, yet always near
So let the Cove in silence stay, A sculpture wrought in earth's own way— No chisel made this northern dome, But nature's hand and time alone.
Three Habits for Writing Absence
A poem about absence can easily turn into a list of sad words. Lost. Gone. Vanished. Faded. Those words tell the reader to feel something, but they give them nothing to look at. Three habits help.
1. Describe the shape it left
Absence nearly always leaves a mark. A dry valley. A dent in a cushion. A pale square on the wallpaper where a picture used to hang. At Malham Cove the mark is the whole cliff. That curve was cut by water, and it still holds the water's shape twelve thousand years after the falls stopped. It is what my first stanza reaches for: Its curve holds echoes, soft and slow, / Of rivers lost and long ago.
Write the shape, and the reader will supply what made it.
Tennyson does this on a far bigger scale. He never writes "the sea has gone." He puts a roaring street on the spot and tells you the sea was there first. The present thing and the absent thing sit side by side, and you hear the traffic and the stillness at once.
2. Find out where it went
My poem says rivers lost. The river at Malham Cove isn't lost, though. It is underneath. The stream still runs off the moor, then drops into the rock a mile back from the edge and finds its own way through the dark. The water is still there. It has just moved downstairs.
And now and then, it comes back up. In December 2015, after Storm Desmond, so much rain fell that the ground couldn't take it all. For a short while, water poured over the lip of Malham Cove again: an eighty-metre waterfall in the middle of the Dales, for the first time in living memory.
So when you write about something that has gone, ask where it went. The true answer usually makes a better poem than the loss.
3. Measure deep time with something human
Three hundred and thirty million years means nothing to anyone. The number is too big to feel, so poets borrow a smaller ruler. Tennyson uses a street. My poem uses feet: The pavement spreads like chessboard worn, / By frost and foot and winds forlorn. Frost has been working on that stone for thousands of years; walkers' boots have been on it for the blink of an eye. Put the two in the same line, and you can feel the gap between them.
Squeeze the whole life of that limestone into a single day. The rock begins to form at midnight. The ice melts and the great waterfall pours in roughly the last three seconds before the next midnight. Every walker who has ever climbed those steps arrives in the final blink.
Form Can Hold a Shape Too
Tennyson's stanzas curve round and close in on themselves. Mine move in couplets: two lines, a rhyme, and on to the next two. They climb a pair at a time, a little like those steps up the west side.
The first rhymes are stone and moan. The last are dome and alone. The same long, open sound at the beginning and at the end bends the poem back towards where it started. A crescent, if you like. Whether or not a poet plans that kind of echo, the reader feels it. The ear knows it has come home.
Giants, or Nobody
Wordsworth stood here too. In 1819 he published a sonnet on Malham Cove, inspired by a set of engravings of Yorkshire's caves, and faced with that enormous curve he reached for giants, wondering whether they had scooped from out the rocky ground, / Tier under tier, this semicirque profound.
Faced with a shape that size, Wordsworth looks for a maker. Somebody must have dug it.
My poem goes the other way in its last two lines: No chisel made this northern dome, / But nature's hand and time alone.
At Helmsley I said that whenever a poem blames Time, it is worth asking who actually did it. At Malham I asked, and for once the honest answer is nobody. Ice, meltwater, rain and a very long time. No garrison. No general. No order given. Helmsley is a story of decisions; Malham is a story of processes. Both are true kinds of story, and a poem has to know which one it is telling.
I find a kind of relief in that. Yet it is what disturbed Tennyson when he read Lyell: a world shaped by slow forces that didn't seem to care about us at all. So he held on to the one thing he could, his love for his friend. I cannot think the thing farewell.
I don't think either poem is wrong. Tennyson was grieving and needed something that would stay. My poem wasn't written out of grief, and it wants almost the opposite: a place that doesn't need us, a cliff that will go on being itself whether anyone writes about it or not. So let the Cove in silence stay.
And it isn't all absence up there. Since 1993 the peregrines have raised dozens of young on that cliff. A place made by things that have gone, still busy with things that haven't.
That may be the last lesson of an empty waterfall. Absence doesn't always have to be mourned. Sometimes it is how a place got its shape.
Try This in Your Own Writing
Think of something in your own life, or your own landscape, that isn't there any more. A tree that came down. A shop that closed. A path that has grown over.
Don't write about the loss. Write about the space it left. What stands there now? What shape is the gap? Then, if you can, find out where the thing actually went. I suspect the answer will surprise you.
Walk the Rest of the County in Verse
Malham Cove is one of the poems in North Yorkshire In Verse — Moor To Shore In Poetry, part of my British Counties In Verse series. Every poem in it comes from the same habit of attention: the geology, the history and the weather behind a real place, from the high moors to the coast.
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The river went underground. The cove kept its shape.
The reading is the thing. It always was.
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