Isabel Rogers, Poet Laureate of Hampshire, has written four poems inspired by her time at Chawton House Library.
This is the first of four poems and was composed in our Long Gallery. This broad corridor was originally used for exercise by the ladies of the house when the weather kept them indoors. A gallery like this was traditionally used as a space for the display of family and other portraits to impress visitors. The heraldic stained-glass windows referenced in the poem were added by Montague Knight between 1910 and 1913. They show the coats of arms of successive freeholders together with their date of accession.
Long Hall
Twenty paces end to end,
an hourglass narrowing
like a waist from the future.
Floorboards cross my path.
They lie to bar my way
not smooth it, each step
a creak of old wood.
It lists like a ship –
cracks, shifts,
slopes to the stairwell.
The house is alive
and nothing is square.
We are cocooned
by inclement weather
and may run mad,
a tiger pacing behind bars
in our soft slippers,
petrichor a heady rush
reserved for gentlemen’s lungs.
There is no view here,
no sweep of landscape
or horizon,
only two windows in one wall,
so we crane our necks
to glimpse the Courtyard
through a dozen coats of arms
set in pocked glass.
We oscillate,
a tacking ship
controlled by the gales
men send to blow us back
to safe harbour.
I can leave at any time.
There are seven doors
but none leads to a land
I can command.
The Long Gallery
Heraldic Glass