Froom's Frisland

Editor’s Note

The following comprises selected annotations from A Critical Edition of “Midsummer, Looking North” by Humphrey Tench, with Introduction, Commentary, and Apparatus Criticus, edited by Dr. Elspeth Froom, Reader in Speculative Cartography at the University of South Axminster. The edition, eleven years in preparation, represents the first sustained scholarly engagement with Tench’s work since the poet’s death in 1981. Dr. Froom wishes it noted that a rival edition proposed by Dr. Gerald Pettifer of the University of East Wessex was mercifully abandoned in 2019, “sparing the poem further indignity.” The complete edition runs to 78 footnotes across two volumes; what follows is an abbreviated selection. Annotations have been numbered as they appear in the full text. The edition was completed, Dr. Froom notes in her preface, “during a period of enforced solitude which, if anything, sharpened the critical faculties — rather as a blade, denied a whetstone, may be honed against any sufficiently abrasive surface, including the collected works of Dr. Pettifer.”

Midsummer, Looking North

— Humphrey Tench (1923–1981), from Small Meridians (Axminster Poetry Press, 1974)

Selected Annotations

1. “The light comes.” One notes immediately the active verb — light is not merely present but arrives, a visitor with intentions. Tench understood, as few of his contemporaries did, that perception is an event rather than a condition, and that the English language, when wielded by a poet of genuine sensitivity, can make even the simplest observation feel as though it were being thought for the first time. I draw the reader’s attention to an analogous usage in Tench’s uncollected poem “November, Looking East” (see Appendix C, Vol. II), in which rain “arrives like a committee.”

2. The lake in question is almost certainly Darton Mere, a body of water approximately three miles north-northeast of the village of Lower Stodding, where Tench lived from 1969 until his death. I visited Darton Mere in the summer of 2018 and can confirm that the light does, in fact, come slantwise off its surface in the late afternoon, though on the day of my visit it was raining and the effect was somewhat obscured. Ptolemy, my cat, who had accompanied me in his carrier, was unimpressed.

3. “Stones.” Not pebbles, not rocks, not boulders — stones. The precision matters. Tench’s stones occupy the middle register of geological specificity, suggesting objects large enough to be individual but too small to be named. Dr. Pettifer, in a footnote to his own (abandoned) edition, identified these stones as “probably limestone,” a contribution to scholarship roughly equivalent to identifying Hamlet as “probably Danish.” One does not wish to speak uncharitably of a colleague’s work, but Pettifer’s instinct for the obvious has always been so finely tuned that one suspects it came at the expense of every other critical faculty.

4. “No one.” Tench’s phrasing here — “tides / that no one thought to name” — introduces what I shall call the poem’s anonymity principle: the notion that the most significant forces in nature operate without designation, and that to name a thing is, paradoxically, to diminish it. This principle has not, to my knowledge, been identified by any previous commentator, though that speaks less to the subtlety of the observation than to the quality of previous commentators. I once presented a version of this argument at a departmental seminar in South Axminster, where it was received with the kind of silence that can mean either profound engagement or profound indifference. I have chosen to interpret it as the former.

5. “Gull.” Not, as a casual reader might assume, a reference to the seabird Larus argentatus (herring gull) or its various cousins. Tench, who was precise in his ornithology — his notebooks, which I have examined at the Lower Stodding Parish Archive, distinguish between sixteen species of wader — would not have used the generic “gull” when a specific species was intended. The word is, I believe, deliberately ambiguous, carrying within it both the bird and the verb “to gull” — to deceive, to make a fool of. The gull turns against the greying air: it turns, that is, in opposition to the greyness, but also deceives it. The air is being gulled. This reading, which I acknowledge places considerable weight on a single syllable, is supported by Tench’s documented interest in etymological play (see his uncollected essay “Words That Mean Their Opposite,” published in the Lower Stodding Parish Newsletter, Spring 1977, and reprinted in Appendix D of the present edition).

[Footnote 6 omitted]

7. “Holds.” The verb here repays close attention, though I suspect it has received none until now. Water does not, in the strictly physical sense, “hold” anything — it supports, it contains, it permits flotation — and yet Tench’s verb implies volition, as though the lake were choosing to maintain its contents in a particular arrangement. I detect in this a quiet radicalism. The passive landscape is, for Tench, an active participant. Compare my discussion of “restitutive cartography” in Frisland and Its Discontents (Froom 2016, pp. 44–67), where I argue that maps do not merely record geography but constitute it — that the act of mapping is an act of will, and that the territory, far from being indifferent to its representation, exists in a state of perpetual negotiation with the cartographer. Tench, I believe, would have understood this instinctively.

8. “Dorse.” This word, which has occasioned some confusion among the handful of readers who have attempted Tench’s work without guidance, derives from the Old English dors (a gathering, a sheltered assembly), with probable cognates in the Middle French dorsée (the enclosed space behind a structure, particularly a granary or mill) and the Flemish dorseken, attested in a single manuscript of the Boerderij-Handboek of Bruges, c. 1347, where it refers to the lee side of a hayfield after harvest. The word thus carries within it a compressed history of enclosure — of spaces defined not by their own presence but by the sheltering presence of what surrounds them. That Tench should have chosen this word, with its freight of agricultural memory, to describe the relationship between reeds and shadow in a lake is, I think, one of the quiet triumphs of the poem.

I am aware that Dr. Pettifer has suggested, in conversation, that “dorse” is a misprint for “dose” or possibly “dorsal.” This is the sort of suggestion one learns to expect from a man whose critical method consists primarily of assuming that anything he does not recognize must be an error. Pettifer once questioned the existence of the Boerderij-Handboek itself, a challenge I would be more inclined to take seriously had he demonstrated, on any previous occasion, the slightest familiarity with Flemish agricultural literature.

9. “The dark.” Tench uses the definite article, granting darkness the status of a known entity — not a dark, which would be particular and local, but the dark, which is universal, archetypal, the dark that has always been waiting. I confess that this line has occupied me for some months now. I find it recurring at odd moments — while feeding Ptolemy, while shelving the B-volume of the Oxford English Dictionary (which has developed a crack in its spine from overuse, rather like Dr. Pettifer’s argumentation), while lying awake at three in the morning. The heating clicks off at midnight. After that, there is nothing between oneself and the dark but the sound of Ptolemy rearranging himself at the foot of the bed.

[Footnotes 10–11 omitted]

12. “Think of nothing much.” This is the line that first drew me to the poem, twenty-three years ago, in the reading room of the Bodleian, on a Tuesday afternoon in October when I had been searching for something else entirely. I was, at that time, still capable of being surprised by a line of verse — a capacity that has been dulled, I suspect, by prolonged exposure to the work of the poststructuralists, who treat surprise the way a customs official treats an undeclared bottle of brandy. But “think of nothing much” stopped me, because it is a line that pretends to be empty and is, in fact, full. The speaker is not thinking of nothing. The speaker is thinking of nothing much — which is to say, thinking of a specific, bounded quantity of nothing, a nothing that has been weighed and measured and found to be much. This is metaphysics disguised as a shrug. Tench, I believe, knew exactly what he was doing.

Dr. Pettifer’s assertion that the line is “padding to maintain the meter” reflects the same critical acuity that led him to describe Tench’s late work as “repetitive,” an evaluation roughly as useful as noting that the sea contains salt. One does not expect illumination from a man who has spent his career mapping territories he has never visited, but even by Pettifer’s standards, the remark was spectacularly unhelpful. I would say it took my breath away, but one must have breath to lose, and the reading of Pettifer’s review of Tench’s late work had already accomplished that.

13. “The north is just a word for where / the cold comes from.” Tench’s finest couplet, and one that I have spent the better part of three years attempting to annotate adequately. The difficulty is this: the lines appear to perform a reduction — north is demoted from a cardinal direction to a mere word, a label for a sensation — and yet the reduction is itself a kind of elevation, because it replaces the abstract (direction) with the experiential (cold). North ceases to be a point on a compass and becomes a felt condition. One knows where north is not because one has consulted a map but because one’s hands are cold.

I suspect Tench arrived at these lines without effort, the way certain writers arrive at their best work — as though they had merely been taking dictation from a more intelligent version of themselves. The rest of the poem, competent as it is, reads as the scaffolding required to support this single couplet, in much the same way that a cathedral exists primarily to hold up its rose window, and the buttresses, however impressive, are not the point.

[Footnotes 14–15 omitted]

16. I should note here, by way of contextual enrichment, that Tench’s use of the word “north” in this poem (see line 12, and my discussion in Footnote 13, omitted from this abridgement but available in the full edition) bears a relationship to the phantom island of Frisland that I believe to be more than coincidental. Frisland, for those unfamiliar with the cartographic literature — and I suspect most readers are, given the shameful neglect of speculative cartography in the modern curriculum — appeared on maps from approximately 1558 to 1745, occupying a position south of Iceland that no subsequent expedition was able to confirm. It was copied from chart to chart for nearly two centuries, not because anyone had visited it, but because no cartographer wished to be the one to erase an island without definitive proof of its nonexistence. A negative, as any philosopher will tell you, is extraordinarily difficult to prove.

Tench, looking north, was looking toward the approximate position of Frisland. I do not claim he was conscious of this. I claim something more interesting: that the poem’s orientation — its insistence on northness as a direction toward absence, toward the cold, toward “where the cold comes from” — resonates with the cartographic anxiety of the phantom island. If an island can persist on maps for two centuries through the sheer unwillingness of cartographers to admit error, then a poem can surely persist in the canon through the devotion of a single attentive reader. I intend to be that reader.

[Footnotes 17–18 omitted]

19. I wish to address directly the charge, made by Dr. Pettifer in his review of Frisland and Its Discontents (Journal of Applied Cartography, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 187–189 — one notes the brevity), that my work “conflates cartographic error with literary interpretation in ways that illuminate neither.” This is a view so comprehensively wrong that responding to it feels rather like arguing with a signpost — one knows the signpost is pointing in the wrong direction, but one suspects the signpost has no mechanism for self-correction.

Pettifer belongs to what I have elsewhere called the “positivist cartographic tradition,” a school of thought which holds that maps should depict only what exists. This sounds reasonable until one considers its implications. If we map only what exists, then the territories of the imagination — the Frislands, the Atlantises, the phantom islands that sustained entire navigational cultures — are erased. Cartographic positivism is a form of violence against the possible. I say this without hyperbole. The intellectual impoverishment of a discipline that refuses to engage with the speculative is as real, and as measurable, as the impoverishment of a library that burns its fiction.

Tench would have understood this. His poem, I am increasingly certain, constitutes a kind of map — not of Darton Mere specifically, but of the territory between observation and meaning, the gap where what we see and what we know it to be have not yet collapsed into a single thing. I have attempted to explain this to Dr. Pettifer on two occasions, once in writing and once at the 2017 British Cartographic Society conference in Loughborough, where he responded by asking whether I had “considered taking a holiday.” I had not. The notion that intellectual commitment requires periodic interruption is itself a symptom of the positivist malaise — the assumption that the mind, like a printer cartridge, must be periodically removed and shaken in order to continue functioning. My mind functions perfectly well. Ptolemy can confirm this.

[Footnotes 20–24 omitted]

25. Returning to the question of “dorse” (see n. 8), I note with satisfaction that the word has begun to appear in subsequent critical literature — tentatively, to be sure, and without the etymological depth that my own research provides, but present nonetheless. Professor Adler of the University of Wollongong, in a recent paper on “Neologism and Nostalgia in Late Twentieth-Century Pastoral Verse,” cites my edition as having “established the lexical provenance of ‘dorse’ beyond reasonable dispute.” I am gratified by this recognition, though I note that Adler’s paper misspells “Froom” on three separate occasions, introducing a variant, “Froome,” that I can only hope does not become established in the critical literature through the same mechanism of uncorrected repetition that sustained Frisland on the maps.

26. A word about funding. The present edition was completed without institutional support, the University of South Axminster having declined my grant application on the grounds that “the projected readership does not justify the expenditure.” I reproduce this phrase because it deserves to be studied as an artifact of the managerial mind — the assumption that the value of a scholarly enterprise can be calculated in advance by counting the number of people likely to read it. By this logic, most of mathematics should be defunded immediately. The Riemann hypothesis has perhaps two thousand qualified readers worldwide. Tench’s poem, I would argue, requires only one — but that one must be properly equipped.

I do not wish to dwell on the matter of funding, except to observe that the University of East Wessex, Dr. Pettifer’s institution, has maintained a Chair in Applied Cartographic Studies at a cost of approximately £340,000 per annum for the past fourteen years. The Chair’s output, during this period, has consisted of eleven papers, a co-edited conference proceedings, and a textbook that is used in two universities, one of which is East Wessex itself. I mention this not out of any desire for institutional comparison — such comparisons being, as a rule, as illuminating as comparing a sonnet to a tax return — but because the funds currently allocated to Applied Cartographic Studies would, if redirected, support a Chair in Speculative Cartography for approximately eighteen years, during which time considerable progress might be made on problems that Pettifer’s department has shown no interest in solving. I include a projected budget in Appendix F.

[Footnotes 27–29 omitted]

30. On the matter of line 14 and its closing image (“their own dull council long past me”), I should like to note that “dull” is doing more work than it appears. Tench does not say the stones are dull. He says their council is dull — their deliberation, their governance. The stones are parliamentarians of the most tedious variety, sitting in permanent session, debating nothing, adjourning never. And yet — this is the twist that I believe has escaped every reader of this poem except myself — the dullness is a form of authority. The stones outlast the speaker because they are dull. Brightness is what gets you killed. Interest is what gets you forgotten. The dull endure.

Tench understood this. I believe I understand it too, though my understanding has led me to conclusions that my department — what remains of my department, which is to say Mrs. Gough and the shared printer — has found uncongenial. Specifically: that the purpose of criticism is not to serve the reader but to serve the text, and that the text requires not interpreters but advocates. Devoted ones. Permanent ones.

I would propose — and I recognize this is not the conventional venue for such proposals, but the conventional venues have been, in my experience, unreceptive — a restructuring of university English departments along lines that prioritize depth over breadth. One scholar per poem. A lifetime appointment. The scholar and the poem, together, for as long as it takes. The cost would be considerable but not prohibitive. I estimate £2.1 million annually, nationally, assuming a cohort of approximately sixty poems and a salary structure comparable to the current Reader grade. I include detailed calculations in Appendix G.

31. I am told — by the department secretary, Mrs. Gough, who takes a kindly interest in my work, or at least in my continued presence in the building — that my office has begun to alarm the cleaning staff. The walls are, I admit, extensively annotated. I have found it useful, when working through the more intricate cross-references, to write directly on the plaster, as the available desk space was exhausted some years ago by the card index (seventeen shoeboxes, alphabetized, cross-referenced by line number, keyword, and phantom island). Mrs. Gough has suggested, delicately, that I might consider “a nice whiteboard,” which is rather like suggesting that Michelangelo might have considered a nice sketch pad. The work requires the space it requires. Ptolemy is in agreement on this point and has, by way of demonstration, extended his territorial markings to include the filing cabinet and the lower portion of the door frame.

[Footnotes 32–36 omitted]

37. The now-standard definition of “dorse” (see n. 8) — a sheltered assembly, a gathering defined by enclosure — provides, I think, a way into the poem’s architecture that I had not previously articulated. The poem is a dorse. It holds its contents — the light, the stones, the gull, the dark — in the same way a room holds furniture: not by force but by surrounding them. And the commentary performs the same function at a larger scale.

I had intended to develop this observation further, but I find that I have been staring at the wall above my desk — specifically at the section where I have mapped the cross-references between “dorse,” “Frisland,” and the seventeen known uses of the word “north” in Tench’s uncollected work — and I have lost, I think, about forty minutes. Ptolemy has moved from the desk to the filing cabinet and back again. The observation will keep. Observations, like stones, keep their own counsel.

38. I have been corresponding with Tench on the matter of the semicolon in line 8, which I believe to be a later editorial insertion rather than an authorial choice, though his responses have been, as of this writing, somewhat delayed. Tench died, of course, in 1981, which places certain practical limitations on the exchange, but I have found that the act of writing the letters — addressed to “H. Tench, Esq., Lower Stodding, via the Usual Channels” — clarifies my thinking in ways that purely internal reflection does not. Ptolemy often sits on the outgoing correspondence, which I choose to interpret as endorsement.

[Footnotes 39–41 omitted]

42. The question of phantom islands returns, as it must. In the eleven years I have spent with this poem, I have come to understand that Tench was not merely looking north. He was looking toward something that should have been there and was not — the island, the landmass, the firm ground that the maps promised and the sea refused to produce. This is the human condition in fourteen lines. We are all looking north. We are all expecting Frisland.

I have drafted a petition — available for signatures at the Department of Speculative Cartography, South Axminster, or by post — requesting that a small uninhabited island in the North Sea, currently designated OS Grid Reference HU 4763 (approximately 0.3 hectares, basalt, no permanent structures, current population: seabirds) be renamed “Tenchland” and designated a Site of Literary Importance. The petition has, at the time of writing, one signature, plus Ptolemy’s pawprint, which I am treating as a second. The island’s coordinates are 60°43’N, 0°52’W. I have written to the Ordnance Survey. I have written to the Scottish Government’s Islands Team. I have written to the International Hydrographic Organization. I recognize that the renaming of a geographical feature in honor of a poet whose work is known to, at a generous estimate, eleven people may strike some as disproportionate. I would remind those people that Frisland occupied the maps for two hundred years on the strength of no people at all.

43. I should like, in closing this selection, to say a word about what is owed. Not to me — I require nothing, having long since learned that the scholarly life is its own compensation, in the same way that a hair shirt is its own compensation, or a monk’s cell, or any other dwelling-place chosen not for comfort but for proximity to the thing that matters. What is owed, rather, is owed to the poem. Tench gave us fourteen lines. We have given him, in forty years, nothing: no critical edition, no collected works, no biography, no entry in the Oxford Companion, no conference panel, no reading group, no podcast, no commemorative postage stamp, no blue plaque on the cottage at Lower Stodding (which I have visited, and which is now a holiday let called “Mere View,” a name of such aggressive blandness that it constitutes, in my view, a form of cultural vandalism).

I intend to annotate this poem until it cannot be ignored. I intend, that is, to continue. The edition you hold — assuming you are holding it, assuming it has found a publisher, assuming the proposal I submitted to Axminster University Press in 2022 and again in 2023 and again, with revisions, in 2024, has been accepted — represents roughly half of what I have to say. The other half is in shoeboxes. Some of it is on the walls. Ptolemy is sitting on a portion of it. But it exists, and it is patient, and if the world has so far failed to notice, that is the world’s business. Frisland went unquestioned for two centuries. I can wait.

The remaining annotations, comprising Footnotes 44–78, together with the Appendices, Index of Phantom Islands Referenced, Concordance of Tench’s Complete Works, and Dr. Froom’s proposed curriculum for a National Programme in Speculative Cartography (with budget projections through 2045), will appear in Volume II, forthcoming.