‘The Swan Lady of Hilsea Moat’ by Portsmouth poet, Pauline Hawkesworth, was published in the wonderful collection, This Island City: Portsmouth in Poetry(2010), and is included here with the kind permission of the poet. It is a remarkable poem, taking an everyday scene – the swans that inhabit the Creek near Hilsea Lines – and investing it with both a magical quality and a sense of deep, but elusive meaning. The mysterious titular figure – a lady feeding bread to the swans – somehow folds into the figure of the birds, and there is a curious but invigorating tension in the poem between quotidian detail – cheese, crisps, chocolate – and the ethereal presentation of landscape, subtly alluding to medieval Romance and its Keatsian and Tennysonian re-workings: an ordinary Portsmouth scene becomes Avalon, its sometimes unlovely creek becomes ‘an ancient moat’, and, above all, imagination demonstrates its unceasing power to transform.
’The Swan Lady of Hilsea Moat’
I can tell you her hair is raven
her eyes owl like, mouth of rose-hip red.
That she travels into the dark-wood
keeping to the edge of an ancient moat.
How the presence of swans
first announces themselves
as drifting white clouds
the size of children.
In her arms cakes of wheat bread,
something swans relish
as we might love chocolates,
or cheese, or crisps.
There is a mist they emerge from
as though sweeping out of Avalon
bringing magic potions
with folded wings.
It is at dusk when this happens
and women and swans
enter the land of mutual love,
exchange tokens.
When she returns to her home
in front of circling photographs of swans
she wears a white dress,
sleeps in white bed sheets.
Her underclothes purest white –
powders her face into white clouds.
Pauline Hawkesworth (b. 1943) was born in Portsmouth and lived with her parents and sister Marian in the corner shop of her grandmother in Laburnum Grove (where another Portsmouth author, Olivia Manning, also lived). The family moved to the suburb of Drayton in 1954. She left school at fifteen and worked as a telephonist for estate agents Young and White. She joined the WRNR and was stationed in the underground complex at Fort Southwick. Pauline married architect Rex Hawkesworth in 1961 and has two daughters Ruth and Lee.
Her first book, Dust and Dew (1969) was published by Mitre Press and reached universities both in the UK and USA. A short film about it was made by BBC South at the time. Her first published poem was in Script in 1971. Pauline has three further collections, from open competitions. These are Developing Green Films (1998, from the Redbeck Competition, judges Geoffrey Holloway and Patricia Pogson); Bracken Women in Lime Trees (2009), one of three winners for publication in book form by Indigo Dreams; and Life-Savers on All Sides (2017) Her poems are of place and the natural world, they inhabit the ‘twilight zone’, ‘a world beyond our senses’, and ‘transfigure the ordinary’. She has won and been placed in many competitions and has poems in many anthologies, her favourite being The Spirit of Wilfred Owen (2002). Hawkesworth also produced a booklet of poems entitled Marshland Ballad. In 2021, she won the Southport Writers’ Circle Open Poetry Competition. Pauline is President of Portsmouth Poetry Society.
Pauline broke the Portsmouth Schools 100 yards record as a junior, and was an active member of Portsmouth Atalanta Athletic Club. She was a Coach, Track and Field Judge, and administrator for many years. With her husband Rex, as lead coach, their athletes won over thirty Hampshire County titles, and two girls represented England at 400m. They have coached for over fifty years.
Pauline is secretary to Rex and his architectural practice, a member of St. Francis Church, has an allotment, and is extremely fond of dogs.
If you have any comments, queries, or suggestions about any of the map entries, please contact the Map Director, Mark Frost: mark.frost@port.ac.uk