Rye Castle Museum

This third selection of Said About Rye  comes from Poems of Rye  (1979).  Patric Dickinson  (1914-1994) lived in Rye from 1947 and published and broadcast poetry for over 30 years.  He also wrote plays, an autobiography, and translated the complete Plays of Aristophanes and Virgil’s Aeneid  The first of these poems comes from the five part Sketches of Rye with which the book begins. These were commissioned by the Rye Festival of 1979.  Both were among the poems read at the Festival.  

Topographical

Van Dyck drew it from the South
From the river, seeing a plateau,
The great church riding eastward
In its tideless ocean of faith.

From the East, coming over the marsh
Or from the golf-club it’s a pyramid
With the church tower at the top.
A black silhouette in the twilight.

Turner halfway from Winchelsea,
From the West, romantically stationed
Upon some dangerous sea-stropped
Causeway of his imagination.

Drew Camber Castle flaoted away
Almost hull-down to the east
And Rye in a spotlight,  half Italian,
And half as it were a volcano.

With smoke and fire belching
From the church, it is always the church
That crowns the unique town.

From the North you come down hill
From the mainland then climb again,
Up this rocky hillock like a moraine heap:
Rye is an island, St Mary’s Mount.

Is also a castle, should have a drawbridge,
There are aeons of life in this pyramid,
Fire in this volcano,–
Is also like a beautifully jewelled broach
Worn at South England’s throat,
As land gives way to channel:
The Tillingham mates with the Brede
And both mix in the Rother
The sweet and the salt waters,
Below Watchbell Street and under
The eyes of the Ypres Tower,
Last dry land or first island,
A place between past and future,
A historic present to speak of
In a language of salty silence
That is sweet on every tongue.

Rye

It seems solid enough as you come through the Landgate
And the streets climb up to the church
That, like a stranded ark,
       Straddles the hilltop.

But Time is different here,
The streets are full of beggars
You cannot see, who speak
The tongues of centuries
     To the deat tourists.

‘We have always been perverse
And unprofessional beggars,
Fort we want to give, not take,
To offer you this town’s
     Particular nature.

‘It is not what you see
As you trip on the cobbles
And say the houses are quaint,
Nor was it ever like that,
     It is our presence.’

The town keeps whispering
Its history–fishermen, merchants–
Lifetimes that have been built
From unimportant scraps
     To construct a clement

Enclave and sanctuary,
Once you have understood this,
You will feel Rye within,
And be disposed to come back,
     If you ever leave it.