Poems: 'Above Ickornshaw, Black Huts', imagery

Image credit Leeds University Library

In the notebook paragraph headed 'Ickornshaw Grouse Shooting Huts' and in the first drafts of the poems, the word for a Nazi-Germany prison camp - 'Stalag' - is repeatedly used. The huts are equated with 'prison camps, stalags, numbered huts' and described as 'every shed / a numbered stalag'. The darkness of the huts here is conveyed as a moral as well as a physical darkness, and this is continued into a second notebook where a hut becomes a 'death chalet'.

In later drafts and in the final version of the poem this focus has changed. Instead, the perception of the hut as a 'beach hut on the coast of the moor', which also appears in the first descriptive paragraph, has been developed. Outside 'tarred pavillions or lodges' 'locals sit [...] / on deckchairs'.

The final version of the poem retains a darkness, but one which is uncanny rather than political. Freud described the uncanny as 'unheimlich' or 'unhomely', something that is unnerving precisely because it derives from what is (or was) homely or familiar. In their deckchairs, locals wait for 'shipwrecked souls / to crawl / from the moor's sea'. The imagery here (the moor and the deckchairs) are familiar, but the events unfolding are not and the poem's conclusion is ambiguous. Are the locals observers of their landscape or protectors? Will they extend a helping hand or will they shoot on sight?