Poetry review – THE ALDERBANK WADE: Nick Cooke considers a Civil War ‘novel in verse’ by Alan Morrison
The Alderbank Wade
Alan Morrison
Culture Matters
ISBN 978-1-912710-86-7
pp 121 £12
In his preface to this ‘novel in verse’, his thirteenth poetry collection, Alan Morrison recounts how as a young socialist, fired by Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill, he developed a keen interest in the Civil War/English Revolution period and its immediate aftermath, culminating in a fictional account, drafted in 1997, around the dramatic events of the 1640s and 1650s. However, the intended novel was soon shelved as he became subsumed by a passion for poetry, and the idea of revisiting the project only surfaced after he published a Republican-themed collection, Wolves Come Grovelling (Culture Matters, 2023). The result is this book, a 121-page poem in seventeen sections, composed from memory rather than ‘versifying’ the novel. It consists of couplets he describes as ‘semi-rhyming’, which in effect means a mixture of full rhymes, half-rhymes and ones that at times require considerable flexibility in being described as even partially rhyming (witness ‘here was’/‘politics’, ‘Gideon’s’/‘that is’, ‘the mass’/‘papish’, and sundry examples in the quotations below).
Morrison sets himself the challenge of composing every section, all of them several or even many pages long, in just one sentence each, drawing upon all the resources of the English punctuation system, as well as myriad cohesive devices and other modes of connecting clauses. This definitely facilitates the flow of the poem and the narrative it relates, even if certain editors counselling against the over-use of semi-colons and dashes might raise the odd eyebrow.
The story, narrated by young and idealistic Roundhead soldier Jared Amory, revolves around his childhood friend and role model, Gideon Wade, who early in the Civil War is disowned by his Cavalier-supporting farmer father, for defecting to the Parliamentarian cause. Having ascended through the hierarchy to become a captain, the brooding and intellectually restless Gideon goes on to achieve an impressive military victory, capturing the Cavalier stronghold of Alderbank House. However, Gideon’s growing doubts as to the legitimacy of Cromwell’s rule lead to his rebelling against the new regime, with the so-called ‘Lord Protector’ himself allegedly turning into a Parliament-disdaining autocrat (dubbed by Jared a ‘rustic / Bumpkin-king, but as powerful as any monarch’). Deeply disillusioned, Wade founds a Leveller/Digger self-sufficient community at Alderbank House, in Hampshire, joined by the hero-worshipping Jared, acting as his secretary, and later as the copywriter of political ‘broadsides’ advertising Wade’s radically egalitarian form of ‘prelapsarian’ eudemonia.
Morrison tells his tale with a fanatic’s relish of historical detail, as he reminds us of the fragmented religious background to the conflict:
Master Wade’s Anglicanism was a lighter weight
To wield, & he was willing to accommodate
Archbishop Laud’s commands, & scarcely hid
His amusement at how our worship was affected
For he saw we ‘Puritans’ as pious complainers
Who stifled life with God-fearing gloominess –
The growing divisions affect families in a way the ingenuous Jared hasn’t anticipated:
But it had never occurred to me back then
That in a mere couple of years I’d be forbidden
By my father to ever speak with any Wades again
With the oncoming hostilities since as Cranmer-
Raised Anglicans of Laudian leanings they were
For the King, Royalists…
This is before Gideon changes allegiance. When the two onetime friends meet again, Jared has become a Roundhead scribe-cum-poet, of ‘gentle, sensitive – though melancholic – nature’. Instructed to take a message to an officer, he finds that it’s Gideon, whom he finds recognisable though much altered:
he was, indeed,
The playmate of my formative years, Gideon,
Our Gid, though now older-looking, more so than
His actual years, the war had aged him, & he was
Shadier of brow, & darker-faced perhaps because
He was unshaven, & seemed weather-beaten,
His chestnut brown hair now cropped in
The Roundhead style like my own straw mantle…
But though Gideon’s new hairstyle may suggest a permanent and straightforward transferal of loyalty, the events of the coming years expose the complexity of the man, whose shady brow and darkness of demeanour bespeak his ‘unwonted capacity for radical ideas, obscure / Opinions, independence of feeling exceptional for / The son of a simple smallholder’. Labelled the ‘Alderbank Wade’ pejoratively rather than as some form of honorary title, he ends up attracting distrust from both sides of the ongoing struggle.
As Gideon becomes a form of prototype Colonel Kurtz, embattled and isolated in what effectively is a besieged compound, Jared finds the truth hard to both comprehend and confront:
Part of me wanted to know the truth, but then
Another part of me preferred not to lest I become
Disillusioned in someone in whom I had long
Believed, nor did I want to have the memory of all
We had built tarnished by the bitter hint of betrayal;…
Admittedly, those lines could have benefitted from a spot of ellipsis, with the second ‘part of me’ avoided or re-phrased, and at other times the lawn could have stood another mowing, in similar terms. There are pluses and minuses in the fact that though Morrison does not draw directly on his discarded work of fiction, he deliberately constructs his poem as if it were one. A major advantage is that the novelistic minutiae ensure the picture we gain is complete, and the poet’s enthusiasm for his subject becomes increasingly infectious. That picture includes some compelling minor characters, such as Gideon’s beleaguered brother Rufus, who inherits the Wade farm after his father’s death and his elder brother’s disownment, and works all hours to maintain it, despite crippling ill health, including violent epileptic fits, exemplifying a different though comparable form of courage from that of his more able-bodied sibling – another survivor against the odds, at least until the end.
Jared comes to feel sure ‘that if Gideon had betrayed anyone it had / Been himself’, but, growing in human awareness, asks a crucial question:
had not we all in our convoluted
Ways betrayed ourselves in some measures
Through these tumultuous years of strife?
If I initially half-yearned for a little more derring-do in Morrison’s tale, I came to appreciate his decision to focus on his story’s psychological and emotional facets. When we do get some real battlefield action, as Cromwell’s men burn down Alderbank House, it’s the more powerful for its rarity, with the by now trademark dashes serving to heighten the scene’s chaotic jumpiness:
I was horrified to
See the House and grounds ablaze, lit up in inferno
Against the darkening skies – screams & shouts hurled
Themselves through the smoke-thick night that smothered
The senses and choked the breaths – then came a deafening
Thud of what sounded like thunder, an explosion,
Presumably from the gunpowder barrels stored
In the cellars under Alderbank –
That last detail – an implied echo of the Gunpowder Plot – is the poem’s true climax, as the blast throws Jared from his horse’s saddle ‘to the tumbling ground’, an unseating that symbolises his jarred confidence in the ‘changeable’ Gideon’s ability to negotiate the situation he’s engendered.
In the preface, Morrison states his objective is ‘to show how each individual protagonist wrestles with divided loyalties and nuances and contradictions of their own minds as they navigate their way through those grievously divided times’. In my view he has succeeded, in a way that is meticulous, ambitious, engaging, and thought-provoking. While ultimately an account of bitter disillusionment, the poem also celebrates the tortured heroism of souls like Gideon, whose integrity in the face of ubiquitous corruption and moral backsliding proves their own tragic downfall.
Jun 11 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Alan Morrison
Poetry review – THE ALDERBANK WADE: Nick Cooke considers a Civil War ‘novel in verse’ by Alan Morrison
The Alderbank Wade
Alan Morrison
Culture Matters
ISBN 978-1-912710-86-7
pp 121 £12
In his preface to this ‘novel in verse’, his thirteenth poetry collection, Alan Morrison recounts how as a young socialist, fired by Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill, he developed a keen interest in the Civil War/English Revolution period and its immediate aftermath, culminating in a fictional account, drafted in 1997, around the dramatic events of the 1640s and 1650s. However, the intended novel was soon shelved as he became subsumed by a passion for poetry, and the idea of revisiting the project only surfaced after he published a Republican-themed collection, Wolves Come Grovelling (Culture Matters, 2023). The result is this book, a 121-page poem in seventeen sections, composed from memory rather than ‘versifying’ the novel. It consists of couplets he describes as ‘semi-rhyming’, which in effect means a mixture of full rhymes, half-rhymes and ones that at times require considerable flexibility in being described as even partially rhyming (witness ‘here was’/‘politics’, ‘Gideon’s’/‘that is’, ‘the mass’/‘papish’, and sundry examples in the quotations below).
Morrison sets himself the challenge of composing every section, all of them several or even many pages long, in just one sentence each, drawing upon all the resources of the English punctuation system, as well as myriad cohesive devices and other modes of connecting clauses. This definitely facilitates the flow of the poem and the narrative it relates, even if certain editors counselling against the over-use of semi-colons and dashes might raise the odd eyebrow.
The story, narrated by young and idealistic Roundhead soldier Jared Amory, revolves around his childhood friend and role model, Gideon Wade, who early in the Civil War is disowned by his Cavalier-supporting farmer father, for defecting to the Parliamentarian cause. Having ascended through the hierarchy to become a captain, the brooding and intellectually restless Gideon goes on to achieve an impressive military victory, capturing the Cavalier stronghold of Alderbank House. However, Gideon’s growing doubts as to the legitimacy of Cromwell’s rule lead to his rebelling against the new regime, with the so-called ‘Lord Protector’ himself allegedly turning into a Parliament-disdaining autocrat (dubbed by Jared a ‘rustic / Bumpkin-king, but as powerful as any monarch’). Deeply disillusioned, Wade founds a Leveller/Digger self-sufficient community at Alderbank House, in Hampshire, joined by the hero-worshipping Jared, acting as his secretary, and later as the copywriter of political ‘broadsides’ advertising Wade’s radically egalitarian form of ‘prelapsarian’ eudemonia.
Morrison tells his tale with a fanatic’s relish of historical detail, as he reminds us of the fragmented religious background to the conflict:
Master Wade’s Anglicanism was a lighter weight
To wield, & he was willing to accommodate
Archbishop Laud’s commands, & scarcely hid
His amusement at how our worship was affected
For he saw we ‘Puritans’ as pious complainers
Who stifled life with God-fearing gloominess –
The growing divisions affect families in a way the ingenuous Jared hasn’t anticipated:
But it had never occurred to me back then
That in a mere couple of years I’d be forbidden
By my father to ever speak with any Wades again
With the oncoming hostilities since as Cranmer-
Raised Anglicans of Laudian leanings they were
For the King, Royalists…
This is before Gideon changes allegiance. When the two onetime friends meet again, Jared has become a Roundhead scribe-cum-poet, of ‘gentle, sensitive – though melancholic – nature’. Instructed to take a message to an officer, he finds that it’s Gideon, whom he finds recognisable though much altered:
he was, indeed,
The playmate of my formative years, Gideon,
Our Gid, though now older-looking, more so than
His actual years, the war had aged him, & he was
Shadier of brow, & darker-faced perhaps because
He was unshaven, & seemed weather-beaten,
His chestnut brown hair now cropped in
The Roundhead style like my own straw mantle…
But though Gideon’s new hairstyle may suggest a permanent and straightforward transferal of loyalty, the events of the coming years expose the complexity of the man, whose shady brow and darkness of demeanour bespeak his ‘unwonted capacity for radical ideas, obscure / Opinions, independence of feeling exceptional for / The son of a simple smallholder’. Labelled the ‘Alderbank Wade’ pejoratively rather than as some form of honorary title, he ends up attracting distrust from both sides of the ongoing struggle.
As Gideon becomes a form of prototype Colonel Kurtz, embattled and isolated in what effectively is a besieged compound, Jared finds the truth hard to both comprehend and confront:
Part of me wanted to know the truth, but then
Another part of me preferred not to lest I become
Disillusioned in someone in whom I had long
Believed, nor did I want to have the memory of all
We had built tarnished by the bitter hint of betrayal;…
Admittedly, those lines could have benefitted from a spot of ellipsis, with the second ‘part of me’ avoided or re-phrased, and at other times the lawn could have stood another mowing, in similar terms. There are pluses and minuses in the fact that though Morrison does not draw directly on his discarded work of fiction, he deliberately constructs his poem as if it were one. A major advantage is that the novelistic minutiae ensure the picture we gain is complete, and the poet’s enthusiasm for his subject becomes increasingly infectious. That picture includes some compelling minor characters, such as Gideon’s beleaguered brother Rufus, who inherits the Wade farm after his father’s death and his elder brother’s disownment, and works all hours to maintain it, despite crippling ill health, including violent epileptic fits, exemplifying a different though comparable form of courage from that of his more able-bodied sibling – another survivor against the odds, at least until the end.
Jared comes to feel sure ‘that if Gideon had betrayed anyone it had / Been himself’, but, growing in human awareness, asks a crucial question:
had not we all in our convoluted
Ways betrayed ourselves in some measures
Through these tumultuous years of strife?
If I initially half-yearned for a little more derring-do in Morrison’s tale, I came to appreciate his decision to focus on his story’s psychological and emotional facets. When we do get some real battlefield action, as Cromwell’s men burn down Alderbank House, it’s the more powerful for its rarity, with the by now trademark dashes serving to heighten the scene’s chaotic jumpiness:
I was horrified to
See the House and grounds ablaze, lit up in inferno
Against the darkening skies – screams & shouts hurled
Themselves through the smoke-thick night that smothered
The senses and choked the breaths – then came a deafening
Thud of what sounded like thunder, an explosion,
Presumably from the gunpowder barrels stored
In the cellars under Alderbank –
That last detail – an implied echo of the Gunpowder Plot – is the poem’s true climax, as the blast throws Jared from his horse’s saddle ‘to the tumbling ground’, an unseating that symbolises his jarred confidence in the ‘changeable’ Gideon’s ability to negotiate the situation he’s engendered.
In the preface, Morrison states his objective is ‘to show how each individual protagonist wrestles with divided loyalties and nuances and contradictions of their own minds as they navigate their way through those grievously divided times’. In my view he has succeeded, in a way that is meticulous, ambitious, engaging, and thought-provoking. While ultimately an account of bitter disillusionment, the poem also celebrates the tortured heroism of souls like Gideon, whose integrity in the face of ubiquitous corruption and moral backsliding proves their own tragic downfall.