The Open Ruin: Whitby Abbey Poem, Poe's City In The Sea And The Places That Keep Talking
The drowned city fell silent. The ruined abbey never did.
For the last few weeks these articles have walked Somerset: the moor, the gorge, the levels, the marsh. This week I am coming home. We climb the 199 steps to a clifftop in my own county and stand in front of a ruin that half the world has heard of without quite knowing why.
We begin, though, with a different ruin altogether. One that nobody visits. One that nobody could.
Two poems about ruins by water: Edgar Allan Poe's The City in the Sea, and my Whitby Abbey poem from North Yorkshire In Verse — Moor To Shore In Poetry. Between them sits a question worth asking before you write about any place at all. Is the thing in front of you open, or is it closed?
Edgar Allan Poe: More Than Halloween
I had filed Poe, without examining it, under Halloween. That is a disservice to one of the most precise technicians who ever wrote in English.
He was born in Boston in 1809. Both his parents were actors. His father left, his mother died before he was three, and he was taken in, never formally adopted, by a merchant family in Richmond, Virginia. He fell out with them over money and never really recovered. He wrote poems, stories and some of the sharpest literary criticism of his age, and he was poor for almost all of it. He died in Baltimore in 1849, at forty. Nobody has ever satisfactorily explained how.
The City in the Sea is an early poem. Poe published a version in 1831, aged twenty-two, under the title The Doomed City. Then he did something I find quietly moving: he kept it. He carried it for fourteen years, worrying at it, and in 1845 published it again, reworked and retitled, in the same collection that carried The Raven.
Listen for two things. First, how much of this poem is made of things that arent happening. No light from heaven. No ripples. No swellings. No heavings. Poe builds his city almost entirely from what it lacks, the way Tennyson built Avalon out of the weather that never reaches it.
Second, count the people. There is Death, sitting on a tower. There are the dead. That is the entire population.
The City in the Sea, by Edgar Allan Poe
Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently—
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free—
Up domes—up spires—up kingly halls—
Up fanes—up Babylon-like walls—
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers—
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.
There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol's diamond eye—
Not the gaily-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass—
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea—
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.
But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave—there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide—
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow—
The hours are breathing faint and low—
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.
A Wilderness Of Glass: The Stillness In Poe's Poem
The stillness is the whole poem.
Nothing in that city moves, and Poe makes sure you notice. For no ripples curl, alas! / Along that wilderness of glass: a wilderness made of something perfectly flat and perfectly clear. He even reaches beyond the frame to tell us that somewhere out there are seas less hideously serene. Other water moves. This water has stopped.
And the city underneath is intact. That is the part that unsettles me. The towers are time-eaten, but they tremble not. The friezes still show the viol, the violet, and the vine. There are diamonds in the idols' eyes and jewels on the dead, and every one of them is exactly where it was left.
It is perfectly preserved and completely finished.
The city still has its treasure and its architecture. What it has lost is anybody who could look at them. One consciousness remains in the whole poem, and it is Death, on a tower, looking gigantically down. Death interprets nothing. Death presides. Nothing down there means anything any more, because meaning needs somebody to do the meaning.
At the very end, something finally moves. The waves redden. The towers sink a little further. The last three lines are among the bleakest in the language: Hell rises from a thousand thrones and does the city reverence. Hell approves. The ending is confirmed.
Poe wanted an ending with nothing left over, and he built one. That silence is the poem's achievement.
Whitby went the other way entirely.
Whitby Abbey: A Saint, A Cowherd And A Vampire
On the East Cliff at Whitby, a ruined abbey stands on a headland above the North Sea. You reach it by climbing the 199 steps from the harbour. People have been counting them for centuries. It is impossible not to.
Around the year 657, a woman named Hild, later St Hilda, founded a monastery up there for monks and nuns together. In 664 the most important church meeting in early English history took place on the same headland: the Synod of Whitby. On the surface it was about how to calculate the date of Easter. Underneath, it was about whether England would follow Rome or Ireland. King Oswiu ruled for Rome, and the shape of English Christianity turned on that one decision.
The story that matters most to a poet happened a little later, in Hild's own lifetime. There was a man at the abbey named Cædmon, a lay herdsman who couldn't sing. At feasts, when the harp came round, he would get up and leave before it reached him. One night he went out to the cattle shed and slept, and in his sleep a figure asked him to sing about the creation of all things. He did. He woke up a poet.
Bede wrote the story down in 731. What survives is Cædmon's Hymn, nine lines of praise, often called the oldest surviving poem in English. The first English poet we can name was an embarrassed farmhand who ran away from parties. A memorial cross to him stands in St Mary's churchyard, at the top of those same steps. I think about that more than is probably reasonable. English poetry begins with somebody too embarrassed to take his turn, walking out into a cattle shed, and finding the thing he couldn't do waiting for him there.
Hild has a legend of her own: that she rid the headland of snakes by turning them to stone. The coiled fossils, ammonites, still wash up on the beach below.
The abbey didn't survive so gently. The Anglo-Saxon house was abandoned in the ninth century under Viking raiding. A monk called Reinfrid refounded it around 1078, and the great Gothic church you see today rose from the 1220s, until 1539, when it was suppressed like all the rest.
In July 1890 a Dublin-born theatre manager arrived in Whitby on holiday. His name was Bram Stoker. In the town library he borrowed a book on Wallachia and Moldavia and found a name he liked. Five years earlier, a Russian ship called the Dmitry had run aground on Tate Hill Sands, right below the cliff. Stoker renamed the wreck the Demeter, filled its hold with boxes of earth, and by 1897 Dracula was in print.
One headland. The first poem in English, a saint who turned snakes to stone, and the most famous vampire on earth.
Whitby Abbey: A Poem From North Yorkshire In Verse
This is an early poem of mine, from the first of these county books, and I write differently now. It is also the one closest to home, which I suspect shows.
Whitby Abbey, by Alden Carrow
The abbey stands where cliff winds tear,
its arches hewn from salt and prayer—
A frame against the seaborne mist,
where history walks and shadows twist
The gulls cry loud where monks once sang,
their hymns replaced by tempests' clang—
yet grace still clings to every wall,
as brambles rise and memories fall
From Dracula's steps to Saxon lore,
the legends spill from shore to shore—
Each tale a thread through time's refrain,
as dusk returns to stake its claim
The graveyard leans with ageless weight,
its stones like clocks that measure fate—
while tides below reflect the sky,
and whisper truths they won't deny
So let the wind and ruin speak,
of past pursuits and futures bleak—
For Whitby's soul, in rock and sea,
will always be what it must be.
The Open Ruin: A Question For Anyone Who Writes About Place
Both poems are about a ruin by water. Only one of them is still talking.
Poe's city is closed. Everything in it points one way, down, and when the poem ends it has ended. There is nothing further to say about that city, Poe knew it, and that is exactly what he was after. When a poem's job is to show you an ending, going silent is the right answer.
Whitby Abbey went the other way. I want to be careful here, because it didn't choose to. Whitby simply turned out to be the kind of place that could hold more than one story at a time.
Think about how badly those three stories fit together. A seventh-century saint. A shy cowherd who woke up able to write. A Victorian novel about a vampire. They aren't in the same key. They are barely in the same universe. If you sat down to decide which one is the real Whitby, you would have to throw two of them away, and everyone who visits knows, instinctively, that you mustn't. The Dracula tour and the Cædmon cross are a few minutes apart on foot, and neither has ever made the other untrue.
A closed subject wants one reading. Poe's city is the model: you write it once, and it is done.
An open subject can carry several stories that don't agree with each other, and the damage happens when you try to settle them. Pick a winner and you haven't clarified the place. You have shut most of it down.
There are three ways to tell them apart.
1. Try forcing a verdict. Ask yourself which story about this place is the true one. If answering feels like tidying, the subject is closed. If it feels like vandalism, it is open, and you should leave it alone.
2. Look at what is left when the poem ends. A closed subject, done well, leaves nothing over. An open one leaves the reader holding a question rather than a conclusion. That loose end is the door, left open on purpose.
3. Ask whether the place will outlive the poem. Poe's city only ever had to be written once. Whitby is still standing. People are climbing those steps this afternoon, and somebody will write about it again next year, and in fifty years, and in five hundred. If I close it down to one meaning, I have used it up for everybody who comes after me. If I leave it open, it can take in whatever arrives next, the way it took in Stoker twelve hundred years after Cædmon without either of them losing a thing.
That is the job. Not to have the last word on a place. To make sure it can still have more.
The drowned city fell silent. The ruined abbey never did.
Read Whitby Abbey In North Yorkshire In Verse — Moor To Shore In Poetry
Whitby Abbey is one of the poems in North Yorkshire In Verse — Moor To Shore In Poetry, part of my British Counties In Verse series alongside the Cornwall, Cumbria and Somerset volumes. It walks my own county from the high moors to the coast, and it is the book I would hand to anyone who has climbed those steps, or means to.
You can order it online from Amazon, Waterstones, Blackwell's and Foyles, and further afield from Books A Million, Powell's, Hugendubel and Thalia. It is a faintly surreal thing to know that someone in Berlin or Portland, Oregon, could order a book about a Yorkshire clifftop and have it land on their doorstep. I'
m not quite over it.
There is no publisher's marketing budget behind this series, so three small things make a real difference:
Order a copy from whichever bookseller you prefer, for yourself or for someone who loves the Yorkshire coast.
Leave a review once you have read it. A few honest lines on the bookseller's page help the next reader find it.
Tell one person who loves poetry, or Whitby, or both.
Listen To The Podcast, And Choose The Next Guest Poem
This essay began as Episode 44 of Alden Carrow's Poetry Podcast. Each week I share two poems: a guest poem from the wider world of verse, and one of my own from the fells, the coast and the weather. New episodes arrive every Wednesday morning on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube. Subscribing is free, and it means the next walk finds its own way to you.
If there is a poem you would like to hear in a future episode, whether a classic, something modern or a favourite you have carried for years, email me at aldencarrow78@gmail.com. Every suggestion goes into the draw for a signed copy of North Yorkshire In Verse — Moor To Shore In Poetry. The next guest poem will come from one of you.
Thank you for reading, for slowing down with me, and for climbing all those steps.
The reading is the thing. It always was.
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