The drip drip drip…

From ‘‘Washy clouds and a weepy sky floating upside down’: Simon Armitage’s Arctic expedition.” (The Guardian, October 7 , 2023)

…Poetry has taken me to all points of the compass, from South Korea, to Tasmania, to the interior of the Amazon rainforest, and this year to the Arctic Circle. As someone whose inner lodestone is innately tuned to the gravitational pull of the north, this felt like a date with destiny. […]

This part of the Arctic is devastatingly beautiful. Sky-scraping mountains sweep down to the coast, and without buildings to act as reference points the scale is dizzying and disarming – you don’t know if you’re a David or a Goliath among the stony valleys, sharp aretes and pointed peaks. The sense of alienation and disorientation was intensified by the 24-hour July sunlight, but the most bewildering aspect of the whole expedition, for me, was the heat. The temperature hovered around 11C for five days, and for much of the time I wandered about in shirtsleeves, jeans and a pair of trainers. The thermal long johns never came out of the suitcase. Only the mountaintops were snow-covered…

Several glaciers calve into the water at the head of the adjacent fjord, and at frequent intervals the noiseless tranquillity was broken by the sound of collapsing or rupturing ice. One evening we cruised among the floating debris, ice that fizzed and crackled as it melted, the floating ruins of what felt like some catastrophic event…

The drip drip drip of climate change is the tick tick tick of a countdown to calamity. Across the entire polar territory the permafrost ain’t so permanent or frosty any more, and structures – both natural and human-made – are starting to tilt and sink as the once frozen ground exhales its captive carbon into the air…

“Atlantification” seems to be the scientific buzzword for the way our temperate climate is extending into the polar region, drawing non-native flora and fauna towards higher latitudes, unbalancing complex and delicate ecosystems. It also feels like the right word to describe the relentless flow of plastics and other pollutants from south to north, and to explain why the stomachs of skuas and fulmars are full of cigarette lighters, condoms, fishing lines, bottle tops and the like. In 1880 the 20-year-old Arthur Conan Doyle sailed to the Arctic on the SS Hope. Ostensibly employed as the ship’s surgeon, his diary from that journey is an unapologetic record of butchery, documenting the greedy slaughter of whales and seals and the shooting of polar bears as target practice. Words were my only trophies; I returned with a handful of poems. But as a member of a species inflicting such degradation and humiliation on the natural world, my shame and embarrassment were far greater.

The Summit by Simon Armitage

When I met the glacier face to face
there was no coming together
of skin and ice,
just washy clouds and a weepy sky
floating upside down
in a silver lake, and the eyes
looking up from the water were mine…

to say the arctic looks like this
or looks like that, to breathe
its cool breath then scratch a name
in the visitors’ book
and give the glacier a human form:
tongue, body, mouth and heart …
In any event

I was too late.
Looking up from the milky pool
I saw the whiteness in retreat,
the bedraggled hem of the bridal train
heading into the heights
towards deeper winter and truer north,
trailing a stony path.

When I met the glacier face to face
there was no close encounter
of ancient snow and body heat,
just weepy clouds and a washy sky
hanging upside down
in a zinc-coloured lake, and the eyes
staring out of the water were mine.

— Simon Armitage, from “The Summit.” (The Guardian, October 7 , 2023)