Poem of the week: Tourists by Ruth Bidgood

A warm pastiche of an 18th-century travelogue, this is a touching portrait of the tourist’s comical but sincere search for exaltation in Wales

Tourists

Warner, setting out eagerly from Bath
at five on a lively morning
for the inspiring rigours of Wales
with obliging C----, equipped himself for adventure
with a rusty but respectable spencer
(good enough for North Wales, he said).
The travellers’ huge pockets bulged with clothes,
maps, and little comforts; their heads were full
of Ossian, whose horrendous glooms
they were gratified to recognise
one evening on the road to Rhaeadr
(though Ossian had not prepared them
for the state of the road, or the shortage
of bedchambers at the ‘Lion’).
Romantic tourists, no doubt, perpetual
outsiders, but willing to love,
and finding much “singular, striking
and indescribable”. They were comic
(embarrassed at being spotted,
with their pedlars’ pockets, by fashionable females),
but worked hard for their exaltations,
plodding twenty-five miles to Machynlleth
north over boggy mountains, or stumbling
two hours across rocks to find a guide
to Dôlbadarn ruins. They were uncomplaining
on Snowdon in a thick mist (they drank milk
gratefully, but longed for brandy), and did not grumble
when, at Aberglaslyn, salmon failed to leap
(only two would even try). Who can say
that at the end of August, leaving Chepstow
for flood-tide at the ferry, they were taking
nothing real away, or that their naive and scholarly wonder
had given nothing in return?

Related: Poem of the week: Death makes dead metaphor revive by Denise Riley

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