Rehomed, Renamed
As part of the 2024 Summer School, Newcastle University's Writing Poetry MA students were poets-in-residence at the Great North Museum Hancock. Around the museum you can find poems written by the students during the Summer School.
The professional writing residency with the GNM:H encouraged new ways to engage with the museum’s collections, history, and modern cultural presence. It allowed the students to explore new perspectives to the way they approach writing.
Further information about the Writing Poetry MA can be found on the Newcastle University website.
Writing Poetry MA | Postgraduate | Newcastle University (ncl.ac.uk)
Sport
Is it that they really
liked the fight-back?
a foe that showed itself
worthy the exertion
it took to be in at the death.
Or is the otter,
spitted but still spitting
in the teeth
about to tear it,
the necessary apex
of a form merely?
a point of painterly drama.
It’s interesting, too,
how the otter’s catch
is displayed like a sacrifice.
In Hancock’s tableau
of a falcon on a heron,
a liberated eel
slips away.
To swim another day.
And chase its own prey.
What they were trying to say –
Landseer and Hancock
and their ilk –
was that savagery
is universal:
becoming victims
does not transform brutes
into innocents.
And what I want to know
is whether they said so
to justify
their culture of sport
or because hunting yields
inside knowledge.
Did they know
more of their foe
than our scrupulous
research and observation
will ever show?
Charlotte Dormandy
The works referred to in this poem are Landseer’s Otter-Hunt: Spearing the Otter in the
Laing Gallery and John Hancock’s The Struggle with the Quarry: Gyrfalcon, Grey Heron
in the Great North Museum. Both museums are in Newcastle.
The Ballad of the Heron in the Silken Gown
After The Struggle with the Quarry
All folks believe within the Shire
This story to be true
And they all run to Hancocktown
The cave and trough to view
It was a bird, in Scotland born
Follow my love come over the strand
Was taken prisoner and left forlorn
Inside the museum of Northumberland
They fell upon her all at once
They mangled her most cruelly
Pull off, pull off thy silken gown
To rot in sand o’er salt’d sea
And there behind your back unseen
Viewed within the leaves still green
He caught her round the middle seam
And tumbled the eel into the stream
the strings he framed of her yellow hair
their notes made sad to the listening ear
and glintin is his hawkin’ e’e
It’s little matter what they do now
Her life bluid rudds the heather brown
Word went east and word went west
And word is gone over the sea
They took your life and libertie
Now the ruin of the north county
Well turned well turned swift minstrelsy
Well turned well turned for me
The cage shall be made of glittering gold
And the door of the best ivory
And aloud for us the bird does cry
Follow my love come over the strand
The salt tears staring from our eyes
For the fall of the heron in Northumberland
No more along the Banks of Tyne
She’ll rove in autumn gray
No more she’ll hear at early dawn
The lav’rocks wake the day
Mary Wilson
In response to the exhibit all verses were taken and arranged (and very slightly amended in places by the poet) from The Northumbrian Minstrelsy, A Collection of the Ballads, Melodies and Small-Pipe Tunes of Northumbria (first published in 1882 by the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle-upon-Tyne).
The following Ballads were used in the making of this poem
Derwentwater
Derwentwater’s Farewell
Lord Beichan
The Cruel Sister (or Binnorie)
The Death of Parcy Reed
The Fair Flower of Northumberland
The Laidley Worm O’ Spindleston Heugh
The Outlandish Knight
As both a poet and a folk singer I was interested to explore the link between this museum exhibit and the collection of folk songs, prompted by antiquarian instincts, in the Victorian era.
