JOHN HARRIS: RED RIVER POET

Born at Bolenowe in the Red River valley in 1820, John Harris worked for twenty years at Dolcoath Tin Mine before becoming a respected Methodist preacher and celebrated poet. I came across an extract of his long poem The Mine printed on a wall in a gallery at the King Edward Mine Museum and was gripped by the way its music and imagery embodied the violence of mining in a way that I’d not read before. I knew immediately that Harris’s work was a gift to the project, so went off to try to find the rest of The Mine. Fortunately, the John Harris Society has recently published a new anthology of his work, which includes the complete poem, as part of their bi-centenary celebrations to mark his birth.

What I found in the full version of the poem was initially disappointing: the passage I’d read at the museum existed within a much longer work formed from familiar Romantic literary tropes. But then I began to realise this wasn’t so much a failing as a revelation of the pressures operating on Harris as he tried to write his way from the mine to the pulpit. He’d started work on the tin-dressing floors at Dolcoath at the age of eight. With little formal education other than Sunday School, it was extraordinary that he’d managed to write anything, let alone secure the patronage, publication and the audience necessary to create a new life for himself as a writer. Perhaps Harris couldn’t afford to reject the hand that helped him out of the ground. Yet, despite the gothic melodrama and pastoralism included consciously or otherwise to make the poem attractive to contemporary readers, The Mine does not suppress Harris’s thrilling and shocking personal memory of the working conditions he endured. This is particularly apparent in the violent acoustic landscape his verse conjures up, a soundscape that must have dinned itself into him during his many hours of darkness underground at what was then the deepest mine in West Cornwall.

Dolcoath Mine

The poem plots out a disjointed rags-to-riches story powered by providentially-rewarded hard labour, along with a quasi-druidic magical intervention. Its jumble of references feels like the work of a man who, while possessing little formal education, had an excellent ear and intelligent sense of what might play to his advantage: I’m guessing Cornish myths and mysticism sold as well then as they do now. At the start of the poem, a farmer relentlessly prospects for tin in a landscape that resembles the Red River valley, and does so with such single-mindedness he almost loses both his land, his family, and, in particular, his only son, who is forced to travel abroad to find a living. In the farmer’s darkest hour, with the family starving and everything sold off but the emptied farm, an old man comes down from a hill—surely Carn Brea—and uses dowsing rods to find an ore lode on the farmer’s land. Is God working through this old man? Is he some kind of prophet? And what is the significance of the fiery dragon that appears above the lode to signal its richness? Surely the dragon is a symbol of something more devilish than divine? Whatever the case, the simple consequence of the discovery is that the farm becomes a mine, and the farmer a mine owner. The poem describes what must have been a traumatic transition from crofting and small-scale mining and tin streaming, to large-scale, capital intensive steam-powered tin extraction.

As the farmer’s new mine rapidly expands, the poem explores the local, social impact of the Industrial Revolution. The farmer accumulates extraordinary riches that bear comparison to those the Bassett family accumulated from their mines in the Red River valley. So how does this Christian poem justify such immense wealth? It would seem that good things come to those who labour and are divinely chosen to receive wealth and power. The day before the revelation of weird providential design at the tip of a dowsing rod, the farmer is about to give up. His wife tells him to man-up:

But trust in God, who made the mighty hills

And placed the mineral in their hidden cells;

That nothing came of him who ceased to act,

And wept at every steep he had to climb.

The navigator, hoping against hope,

Still steer’d his vessel over darksome seas,

Until new lands were added to his chart.

The general led his armies on and on,

Through days and nights of fever and fatigue,

Until the city sank beneath his tread.

Her initial assertion is part of the same 19th century response to the crisis of faith that saw Philip Henry Gosse, among others, declare that fossils were placed in the ground by God to test man’s conviction. The destruction of traditional methods of farming and the exploitation of dispossessed labour is justified by the virtuous toil of one heroically determined individual. This is not a poem of reforming protest against venture capitalism and an oppressive social order. No, we have a clear alignment between mining, colonial exploration and violent conquest: West Cornwall is a peripheral land the farmer needs to ruthlessly (re)conquer and exploit like a colony. What the miner harvests underground contributes to the imperial project of empire in a way that echoes his son’s departure to prospect for gold in what might reasonably presumed to be the South African gold fields: both are doing their duty. However, during his time away, the son describes how he once, ‘walked o’er graves,/ And mounds of rotting bones/ When stars were blinking in the deeps of heaven’. It’s a shocking recollection, even in the gothic mood of the poem. It comes out of nowhere, is unnecessary for the function of the poem, and in its contrast of heaven with ‘mounds of rotting bones’, seems to question the mysterious ways of God that led the farmer’s son to this charnel landscape. No more is made of it, however: the young man falls into step with his father’s providential destiny and accepts his fortune. But it’s there in the poem, cropping up like a moment of traumatic recall that cannot be glossed over. If the ‘mounds of bones’ are the cost to indigenous people’s of colonial conquest, then the father, too, is involved in a similar project, but involving the landscape and the bodies of his fellow Cornishmen. Despite never leaving his own plot of land, he, too, is part of British Empire’s mapping, besieging, dominating and extractive enterprise; he is bleeding the land of tin, ‘tapping’ and ‘draining’ its ‘veins’ until it is exhausted.

The poem establishes ‘winning’ tin to be as heroic as the acts of those more conspicuous hero’s of empire, the ‘navigator’ and the ‘general’. It is a form of heroism that superficially justifies the wealth of the farmer and the bequest of that wealth to his son. However, when the father and son survey their empire from a hilltop, the poem again betrays its inner compulsion to bear witness to Harris’s experience. What they see and hear from their high eminence is prefaced with a line that seems to echo, with pitch-perfect irony, the deep silence of the vale Coleridge listens to in his poem ‘Frost at Midnight’, a poem that begins with the line, ‘The frost performs its secret ministry’. There’s nothing secret or silent about the vale in Harris’s poem:

A mine spread out its vast machinery.

Here engines with their huts and smoky stacks,

Cranks, wheels, and rods, boilers and hissing steam,

Pressed up the water from the depths below.

Here fire-whims ran till almost out of breath,

And chains cried sharply, strained with fiery force.

Here blacksmiths hammered by the sooty forge,

And there a crusher crashed the copper ore.

Here girls were cobbing under roofs of straw,

And there were giggers at the oaken hutch.

Here a man-engine glided up and down,

A blessing and a boon to mining men:

And near the spot, where many years before,

Turned round and round the rude old water wheel,

A huge fire-stamps was working evermore,

And slimy boys were swarming at the trunks.

The noisy lander by the trap-door bawled

With pincers in his hand; and troops of maids

With heavy hammers brake the mineral stones.

The cart-man cried, and shook his broken whip;

And on the steps of the account-house stood

The active agent, with his eye on all.

Below were caverns grim with greedy gloom,

And levels drunk with darkness; chambers huge

Where Fear sat silent, and the mineral-sprite

For ever chanted his bewitching song;

Shafts deep and dreadful, looking darkest things

And seeming almost running down to doom;

Rock under foot, rock standing on each side;

Rock cold and gloomy, frowning overhead;

Before; behind, at every angle, rock.

Here blazed a vein of precious copper ore,

Where lean men laboured with a zeal for fame,

With face and hands and vesture black as night,

And down their sides the perspiration ran

In steaming eddies, sickening to behold.

But they complained not, digging day and night,

And morn and eve, with lays upon their lips.

Here yawned a tin-cell like a cliff of crags,

Here Danger lurked among the groaning rocks,

And oftimes moaned in darkness. All the air

Was black with sulphur and burning up the blood.

A nameless mystery seemed to fill the void,

And wings all pitchy flapped among the flints,

And eyes that saw not sparkled mid the spars.

Yet here men worked, on stages hung in ropes,

With drills and hammers blasting the rude earth,

Which fell with such a crash that he who heard

Cried, “Jesu, save the miner!” Here were the ends

Cut through hard marble by the miners’ skill,

And winzes, stopes and rizes: pitches here,

Where worked the heroic, princely tributer,

This month for nothing, next for fifty pounds.

Where large parts of The Mine can be heavy in religious allegory, this section releases a torrent of precise physical description and naming that captures both the complexity of the mining operation and my sense that Harris has, whether he likes it or not, struck the mother-lode of his inspiration. The stuff keeps tumbling out. He points and points: look here; no here; no here. The simple list-like syntax gives the poem a breathless sense of disorder and inundation: our senses are overloaded by the violent music of the verse and its mouthfuls of glimmer and mineral darkness. At times the sentences recover themselves enough to shape the all-surrounding din and chaos into the miner’s perspective of being enclosed in solid rock. There’s a sulphurous whiff of Milton in ‘chambers huge’, as if Satan from Paradise Lost had fallen not into the vast abyss between heaven and earth, but down a mineshaft just outside Camborne. Harris just has to get it all in: the sounds, the heat, the little details of sweat running down a body; the powerful sense of industrial forces and natural order over-ridden: ‘the hissing steam/ pressed up the water from the depths below’; and those ‘slimy boys’ working in the tin slimes, recovering ore from the orange-red mine tailings, taking us back to the eight-year-old Harris’s experience of the mine above ground. All this is overseen by the ‘active agent’ who surveys the diabolical cash-generating paradise of the mine as if he were God, or a prison warder in a panopticon prison. The mine-owner and his son occupy a more elevated position, which, in its clean-handed remoteness indicates their greater position of power. They view the activity from the distance necessary to dehumanise and objectify it, as a Romantic poet or painter might view a valley to estrange, enclose and aestheticise its overwhelmingly particular details. But the poem does not not follow the spatial conventions of recessive planes of contextual information, but leaps about among the details, before descending down the mine where no oversight is possible; where only a miner can really see what’s going on; or where a poet with a miner’s knowledge can take us when tooled up with the hammers and drills of verse. In doing so, the poem moves from the exterior view to the inner space of memory, an action that shifts the perspective away from an inventory of ownership to a remembered, faith-testing experience that questions the values that can more easily be held above ground and on hilltop. Whatever Harris’s intention, our sympathy is no longer with the farmer/mine owner, but with the heroism of the miners underground—miners less providentially favoured, or who have, presumably, not worked hard enough to own their own mine.

We are given this extraordinary insight through the eyes of a landowner at ease with his providential success. The contradictory impulses and divided loyalties in the poem are clear. And it’s this sense of tension that reveals the pain and complexity of the poem as it fails to resolve the conflicts between literary convention, religious faith and direct experience. One particular line in this passage hints at either the unfulfilled ironic potential of having these different forces vying with each other, or of the power of conventional literary tropes to replicate themselves in the texts seeking to justify their own literary authority. Of the mineral goal towards which the mine’s ‘vast machinery’ is driving the miner , the poem says: ‘Here yawned a tin-cell like a cliff of crags’. In that simile’s moment, it’s as if the crags of Wordsworth and the Lake District had suddenly sunk underground into this world of extreme and dangerous labour in order to add literary value to the ore, a descent that has the bi-product of haunting the above-ground Romantic spiritual exploration of the landscape with the cost in sweat and lives of those sustaining the Industrial Revolution and the philanthropic capitalists who doled out stipends to Romantic poets.

Success in the poem is finally figured out in the form of a tamed, idealised, and vague version of Nature. There is an Eve in the poem, and she wafts around an Edenic garden among flowers and along riverside walks, all of which are hard by a landscape of slime, crushed rock, broken bodies and dark voids. It’s hard not to think that Harris is referring to the mine-owning and fabulously wealthy Bassett’s who had their family seat at Tehidy, and who screened off their parklands and house from the profoundly disturbed landscape of the Red River valley with a plantation of trees. While the poem may strain to justify the existing social order implied in this Edenic vision, its proximity to landscape destruction and mass financial precariousness only serves to heighten the tortured internal devisions and derangements within a working-class poet trying to make a go of his chance to live a better life above ground by pen and preaching. It’s this attempt to wrestle experience into submission by faith and literary convention, and the refusal of experience to give in, that makes the poem such a good way through which to explore the politics and representation of the Red River valley.

You can find out more about the work of John Harris Society and the bi-centenary celebration of his birth here.