Pylons
How these "statements of steel" pointed me towards other worlds
In a recent essay, I described a walk along a section of the Arakawa River, near Tokyo. I wrote about the experience of hearing the Westminster Quarters, reprised as a school bell, which in my mind were the actually Pompey Chimes from my father’s home football (soccer) team. But as I walked that day, there was another chink in the falsifying curtains of time that let in light from another moment of my past. This one was a visual link to my childhood, however: electricity pylons.
From about the age of five or six, I was aware of these huge metal towers strung together with their heavy, humming cables, which looked like giant crane flies roped together and marching through the English countryside. Since I couldn’t remember seeing the country without them, they never struck me as a disfigurement. They were part of the landscape, just as much as the hedgerows (also made by humans) or the sublime green pastures that had been sown by previous generations of farmers.
I never quite thought of them as cathedrals of electric charge, but when I first saw Exeter Cathedral on a school visit at the age of 9 or 10, I think my genuine awe at that building’s height and size (I’d never seen a skyscraper!) was tempered by my familiarity with the giant, if less massive, pylons back on the farm.
Somewhere among his voluminous writings, Paul Theroux mentions that whenever he saw a train (or was it a plane?) as a child, he imagined himself getting on it, getting away... I didn’t see many trains as a child in Devon—the so-called Beeching Axe of 19631 had got rid of the rural lines by the time I was old enough to ramble the countryside. And the few planes that went overhead, the F-111s, the C-130 Hercules, and the occasional Lightning or Vulcan bomber, were hardly ways of escape. They were more like reasons to hide.
But I had the pylons. I knew that they brought electricity, the thing that powered the huge, hungry freezer in the uninsulated and concrete-floored “utility room," which winked at me with its square green and greedy lights as it swallowed huge hunks of meat to feed our large family through successive winters. I knew that they made possible the first colour TV my father bought in 1970 (and also that they were not quite infallible, as when a summer storm silenced them—and the TV—during a crucial moment of the World Cup that year). And I knew they made it possible for my father to milk a herd of 80 cows on his own in the electric-powered milking parlour.
But the way they looped almost majestically from field to field, then from hill to hill, and then onwards still, grey and ghostly outlines vanishing into the vivid green land, was the closest thing I knew to an invitation to travel, to discover whatever lay beyond the line where the pewter sky met the cerulean grey of Devon soil. They were no Yellow Brick Road, but in my imagination at least, they strode like so many clones of the Tin Man.
I didn’t consider whether they were seeking a heart—a metaphor that would probably have been lost on me at that age. But I did recognise them as seekers, or rather a kind of highway, at a time when the only roads I knew were one- or two-lane country roads that timidly folded along the most indirect of routes. In contrast to those sluggish black rivers of asphalt, the pylons shrugged off all topographical limitations and swaggered across our fields. Nothing, I felt, not even storms, could stop them from showing the way towards those distant places whose names I didn’t know but was destined to visit.
A few years later, I came across another way of escape—poetry. I’ve written before about the transformational power of the poems I read as a schoolboy about the age of 14 or 15. I probably didn’t know how much I wanted to escape what was basically a bucolically happy childhood until I read Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, and all the rest. 2
Pylons and poetry then came together neatly when I came across Stephen Spender’s poem, The Pylons. It’s maybe not one of his best poems, but I enjoyed these lines:
But far above and far as sight endures
Like whips of anger
With lightning's danger
There runs the quick perspective of the future.
I liked how the phrase “whips of anger” injects a sense of urgency and emotion into their glowering presence. His poem gave rise to the term “pylon poets,” one more or less forgotten now, a group that, in addition to Spender, included W.H. Auden, Cecil Day Lewis, and Louis MacNeice. Left-leaning in their politics (in the 1930s, at any rate), this group more or less self-consciously took on subjects of poetry that had been shunned before or represented a new dawn of technology and industry that they felt drawn to. 3
Recently I came across a less celebrated pylon poem by a relatively unknown poet of that period, Stanley Snaith. In Pylons,4 he described
Yet are they outposts of the trekking future.
Into the thatch-hung consciousness of hamlets
They blaze new thoughts, new habits.
Despite growing up in an obscure part of Devon, I didn’t (and don’t) identify with “the thatch-hung consciousness of hamlets” in Snaith’s arresting but rather generic phrase, which might have come straight out of a tourist board leaflet.
Almost inevitably, the pylon poems and the group’s love of the new were quickly and cleverly parodied:
“Pylons! Arterial roads, semi-detached villas, Butlin’s camps, ping-pong, scooters! Hurrah! But chiefly the pylons.”5
Pylons were new in the 1930s, when the pylon poets were most active. The first in the UK were erected in 1928, in Scotland, and the national grid that depended on them became fully operational by 1938.6 By the 1960s, when I was tottering around the English countryside, the controversy had mostly died down and the pylons were mostly accepted as part of the landscape. Of course, since then we’ve had quarrels about wind turbines and mobile phone masts, among other things. I'm not sure if we’ve yet seen the first wind turbine poets, but I live in hope.
I no longer think of the pylons as pathways or routes into faraway lands. I have travelled to too many places, many of them not connected to any grid and wholly without these statements of steel, to think of pylons as anything other than limited and provisional in their power and reach, even vulnerable.
But, just every now and then, a glimpse of them stretching and tensing their way across a landscape, as near the Arakawa River, will transmit me back to those childhood thoughts and visions—of the pylons boldly crossing what Spender described as “our emerald country.” Then they revert to being my citadels, dotted across Dylan Thomas’ “twice told fields of infancy.” At that moment, their spidery towers and coloured steel webs shimmering in the vivid rays of early autumn alchemise into my manufactured versions of his
“parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels.”
See here for information about this in the UK national archive.
On a different topic, for those interested in the governance of the UK and who gets to decide things, take a look on the page linked to above at the list of speakers for the annual conference of the Institute of Directors in 1962, where these cuts were first proposed. Of the six listed speakers, there are four whose quasi-mediaeval titles seem to qualify none of them to talk on the subject, before you get to the axeman himself, Dr Beeching, and a plain old "Mr" at the end (that’s probably Ed Murrow, the American broadcaster). In fact, “Viscount Chandos” and the “Earl of Home” were serving politicians who had ordinary names. Yet they used these outlandish titles, which must have seemed even then a century or two out of date. The governance of the country remained—and remains—in many ways what it was in the 18th or 19th centuries.
There’s nothing like poets, that bunch of malcontents, to sow uneasiness among the young, as Plato knew.
In a nuanced and fascinating essay for those who want to dig deeper into this, James Purdon argues that ‘Spender’s portentousness opens his poem wide to parody, while his sense of electrification as an historical inevitability pushes him into a queasy alliance with the dangerous pylons, harbingers of a utopian future in which cloud-washed cities, free of industrial grime, compensate for the countryside’s toleration of “the concrete / That trails black wire.”’
My subtitle is adapted from a phrase in his poem, "The statement of their steel." I’m indebted to this ever-informative website by Dr Oliver Tearle for information about Snaith, and you can find the poem there.
See the Purdon essay mentioned in note 3 above.
For these details I'm indebted to this illuminating essay.
I find myself recently often marvel at how ordinary sights or moments can transport me back to a distant past and a faint but familiar mood. Is that the mark time has left us with? 😊
And this beautiful writing of yours did just that to me … Thanks for sharing!
I remember when we were in Mainland America, on road trips, and for this child, born and raised in Hawaii, seeing these awesome giants nestled in valleys and across great stretches of land, left me in speechless wonder. In high school, I fell in love with poetry, particularly, Carl Sandburg's Chicago, and this idea that you could create a poem about something as mundane (and even ugly) as a factory. Thanks, Jeffrey, for another walk down memory lane!