This morning I started reading Gavin Maxwell’s great book “Ring of Bright Water” in which he describes living alone on a remote Scottish coast and befriending an otter. Published in 1959 it captured something in the zeitgeist and became a best seller, and its magic has lasted. The book has already enchanted me.

But I have come through the back door into the book. I have entered through the poetry of Kathleeen Raine (1908-2003), a poet who speaks to me but seems to be out of fashion. Raine lived with Maxwell in his paradise and loved him, but it was an unrequited love because Maxwell was gay. Frustrated, Raine argued with Maxwell and cursed him. She subsequently felt that her curse had killed the otter that Maxwell loved and caused Maxwell’s premature death from cancer.

I knew something of this story, including that “Ring of bright water” is a line from a poem by Raine, but stumbled into more after reading Raine’s oddly titled poem “In answer to a letter asking me for volumes of my early poems.” The poem begins:

“You ask me for those poems of Paradise

I wrote in heart’s blood for your sake.”

I’ve read the poem again and again, finding more each time as you do with strong poems. I then read her poem “Message to Gavin,” which ends:

Since not again can I be with you in life

I would be with you as star with distant star,

A drop of water in the one bright bitter sea.”

This will all be too romantic for some, possibly many, but I lapped it up. I explored more and learnt that Maxwell quotes a great chunk of poetry from Raine at the beginning of “Ring of Bright Water”—but without attribution. Nor does he acknowledge that the title of the book comes from her. I learn as well from a blog in the Women’s History Network that Raine was crucial in establishing Maxwell as a writer. https://womenshistorynetwork.org/but-why-this-here-and-now-only-when-i-loved-i-knew-remembering-kathleen-raine-1908-2003/

I’m immediately taken back to Wifedom, the biography of Elaine Orwell, the wife of George, that makes clear how Elaine was crucial to Orwell’s career and writing and yet hardly every acknowledged by him and written out of the many biographies of George. https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2023/09/24/the-horrors-of-patriarchy-in-both-wifedom-and-one-of-anthony-tollopes-last-novels/ The story of Raine and Maxwell seems to be another story of outrageous patriarchy, and I think that the whole story is to be told in a forthcoming novel by Kirsten MacQuarrie, Remembering the Rowan. I’ve ordered the book, which is due to be published next month.

I thought of all this as this morning I read Raine’s unacknowledged poem at the start of “Ring of Bright Water.”

The Marriage of Psyche

He has married me with a ring, a ring of bright water
Whose ripples travel from the heart of the sea,
He has married me with a ring of light, the glitter
Broadcast on the swift river.
He has married me with the sun’s circle
Too dazzling to see, traced in summer sky.
He has crowned me with the wreath of white cloud
That gathers on the snowy summit of the mountain,
Ringed me round with the world-circling wind,
Bound me to the whirlwind’s centre.
He has married me with the orbit of the moon
And with the boundless circle of the stars
With the orbits that measure years, months, days, and nights,
Set the tides flowing,
Command the winds to travel or be at rest.

At the ring’s centre
Spirit or angel troubling the still pool,
Causality not in nature,
Finger’s touch that summons at a point, a moment
Stars and planets, life and light
Or gathers cloud about an apex of cold,
Transcendent touch of love summons my world to being.