Voices in the Cave of Being

Contents / Poetry and the Headmaster’s Wife / Among the Monuments / Powers of Style / Personals / A New Book of Verse / Language and Being / Other Rooms / Resources

Poetry and the Headmaster’s Wife

I

In the summer of 1939, when I was ten, I won the annual poetry recitation competition at my North London prep school—Oakleigh Park Preparatory School. It was a prep school in the British sense, one of those many small private institutions in which boys were being prepared to go on to public schools, mostly minor ones, when they reached puberty. But it didn’t at all resemble the univers concentrationaire recalled by George Orwell in “Such, Such Were the Joys,” or the grotty little upper-class sinkhole of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall.

It was a day school on a side-street, some miles from where I lived, in what must have been the dream home of a well-to-do Victorian family—a large yellow-brick house (Italianate?) with grounds roomy enough to accommodate, now, a cindered playground, a tennis court, a couple of loosely mowed grassy areas, and an enclosed garden (verboten) with two or three sheds. At some point, whenever it first became a school, a one-story wing containing three classrooms had been added.

The headmaster and his wife—its owners—were intelligent and civilized people, the predominantly young staff of seven or eight teachers were also decent, and though most of the pedagogy was probably Stone Age by today’s standards, we were kept moving along at a reasonable rate, and without physical or moral bullying.

True, the homework was heavy, an experience I would no doubt have been spared had my parents sent me to the progressive school that they had considered earlier. But the games which we played on Wednesday afternoons weren’t made a fetish of, the school assembly each morning was not an occasion for sermonizings about the Oakleigh Park Spirit, and neither was the prize-giving at the close of our annual sports day. In general, the rituals were serious without being pompous—the kind that schoolboys liked.

The poetry recitation competition was one such ritual.

II

This was my second go at it. The whole school, fifty or sixty boys in their light-blue blazers, was assembled in the two linked classrooms where we met each morning for roll-calls, prayers, and announcements. The judges—a couple of masters and the headmaster’s wife—sat facing us at a table on which stood a large chalice-like silver-plated cup with the names of previous winners engraved on it. And the competitors—I forget how many, but there were some big boys among them—took their turns facing them and disgorging the assigned text.

The previous year the text had been something trippingly stanzaic, by Longfellow, about a town by the sea. As someone who at the age of six, with his mother’s assistance, had memorized all seventeen stanzas of Southey’s “The Inchcape Rock” and enjoyed inflicting them on grown-ups, I hadn’t viewed it as much of a challenge. Buoyed up by the knowledge that I was the youngest competitor, I had rattled it off, omitted a couple of stanzas, and received an honourable mention. The second time felt very different.

III

The assigned text, that summer of 1939, was a thirty-line passage from near the end of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, beginning with the words, “Then rose the King and moved his host by night,” and going on to describe the final battle with the rebel forces of Modred. And memorizing it—my mother’s help confined to hearing me say from time to time what I remembered and correcting my pronunciation of words like “idylls” and “abyss”—had been unusually difficult. When I stood out there in front of everyone and tried to make my way through the poem, I felt like an imposter, someone who shouldn’t really be there at all.

So I was astounded when the headmaster’s wife finally announced that the winner was Fraser, J. And when I went forward to receive the cup from her hands, a cup bigger than any of the sports-day cups, it was with a feeling of strange, bright irreality. Later a schoolmate suggested that I only won because I was a favourite of the headmaster’s wife. It was news to me that I was a favourite—I thought of myself as a perfectly normal schoolboy—but since I probably appeared “sensitive,” there may have been something to it.

Subsequently the cup became an embarrassment to me. The school closed down at the outbreak of war, and I didn’t know who to return it to when my year was up. But when I cycled home through the late-afternoon suburban sunlight with the grail gleaming in my saddle-bag, it was with a feeling of elation—of having gone alone to a place of difficulty and performed well there—that I had never known before and have never, in so pure a form, known since. I had also acquired a poem that I would never forget, a poem of significant energies.

IV

Here it is:

V

The poem—it was a complete work for me—did not instill in me any curiosity about Tennyson, or about Idylls of the King. Nor did memorizing it make me a more literary little boy. I had already discovered the joys of thriller writers like John Buchan and Edgar Wallace, and had no interest in goody-goods like Sir Walter Scott. Nor was the passage a significant presence for me when in mid-adolescence I browsed in my boarding-school library and became possessed by lines like A.E. Housman’s

Tennyson’s muscular blank verse didn’t have the creepy instantaneous effectiveness of his own

which was in the school hymnal. For awhile, the passage was buried for me.

Nevertheless, to borrow from Conrad’s Marlowe in Heart of Darkness, acquiring it had been “the furthest reach and culmination” of my experience of poetry up to that point. And it took its place, as I now see, alongside certain other poems that had been at work on me. It is that poetic configuration that interests me here, and the part that it played in my literary education.

VI

One way and another, I must have read a fair amount of poetry as a child.

In my nursery there were various volumes with poetry in them, most of them passed down to me from my father’s childhood—a book of nursery rhymes; a copy of Struwelpeter, with its gruesomely illustrated verse warning of the fates awaiting naughty children; a Victorian reader containing “The Inchcape Rock,” accompanied by a steel engraving of waves seething over a twisted black shape like diseased liquorice; several bound volumes of The Children’s Encyclopedia; and no doubt other works that I have forgotten.

There must have been readers, too, in the kindergarten that I attended for three years, run by a sternly imperialist spinster, and at Oakleigh Park, though with one memorable exception (to be mentioned shortly) I cannot visualize any. And I mustn’t overlook—since they too were poems—the hymns in whatever hymnals were used at Oakleigh Park, at my unctuous Sunday school, and in the two churches where from time to time I suffered terminal boredom, one in my suburb, the other in the Wiltshire village where my grandparents lived. But what strikes me now is how little poetry from those years entered my mind in a significant way.

VII

There are fragments from various “improving” nineteenth-century poems, mostly only a line or two: “The boy stood on the burning deck/ Whence all but he had fled”; “I remember, I remember/ The house where I was born,/ The little window where the sun/ Came peeping in at morn,” “One more unfortunate,/ Weary of breath,” the opening of “How Horatius Kept the Bridge.” But I have had to dredge them up; they haven’t been there for me for many years.

And it took the coincidence of finding the last six stanzas of it alongside “The Inchcape Rock” in Southey’s collected poems to remind me of the existence of “Bishop Hatto and the Rats,” which I know I also read. You would think that its nightmarish evocation of the rats swarming up into the tower where the wicked bishop was hiding and stripping the flesh from his bones might have left a few verbal traces on a mind like mine. But no, nothing. Nor can I think of more than a couple of Sunday-school hymns, both of them set to unappealing tunes: “There is a green hill far away/ Without a city wall,/ Where our dear Lord was crucified,/ Who died to save us all,” and “Onward Christian soldiers,/ Marching as to war…”

VIII

What, then, were the poems or passages that stuck, the texts that either I can still recall verbatim or that, when I turn back to the printed page, have a special charge of meaning for me?

Well, I have already mentioned “The Inchcape Rock.” It describes how Sir Ralph the Rover, out of pure malice, cuts loose the bell which the good old Abbot of Aberbrothok (always hard to pronounce, that) had fixed on a buoy over the fearsome rock, and how, returning subsequently to the Scottish coast in a fog at night, his ship founders upon the rock, bearing Sir Ralph down with it.

Before this there had been nursery rhymes, especially (if I can judge from how they push themselves forward now),

and

There were others, and I have those by heart too: “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick,/ Jack jump over the candlestick,” and “Jack Sprat,” and “Hickory dickory dock,” and “Little Miss Muffett,” and “Mary, Mary, quite contrary,” and “Ding dong bell, / Pussy’s in the well.” But the first two were the most resonant for me.

IX

And after “The Inchcape Rock,” there was the book that we read in my kindergarten, an abridgement of Hiawatha, in a soft, dark-green cover, with black art-nouveau curlicues on it.

I cannot now be confident as to what was in that text. I would like to think that I read a passage like:

Or the account of Hiawatha’s journeying through the nightmarish landscape, with its rotting water-plants, sinister shadows, and ominous animal and insect sounds, to the land of the wampum-clad magician Pearl Feather. But I can find no trace of them in my memory. However, I do know that I read certain other passages, for when I reread the poem a few years ago they were there for me with the shock of recognition, such as the account of how

I shall be referring to some of the other passages later.

X

Lastly, there were the two opening stanzas, all that I carried away from it, of a poem in a reader in my last year at Oakleigh Park, “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna”;

When I quoted the lines to a senior colleague he recognized them instantly, but was quite unable to recall the name of the author. As I have found since (the poem was there all the time in my 1939 edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse). It was by Charles Wolfe (1791-1823), and the missing epithet is “struggling.”

XI

These are not, of course, all the texts that I remember from those pre-war years and that played, as I now see, a part in developing my sense of the possibilities of poetry. A handful of others also come to mind, chiefly because of their formal features. If I have remembered the opening stanza of “How Horatius Kept the Bridge,” I am sure that it is partly because of the unbalancing, the postponed closure, that comes with the extra line and rhyme word in the second half of the stanza:

Without that penultimate line (emphasis mine), the stanza would, as Orwell said of a poem of Housman’s, have merely tinkled.

And even the unspeakable Christopher Robin poems of A.A.Milne had interesting metrical effects in them: “James James Morrison Morrison/ Weatherby George du Pree”; or (from a poem that I learned and performed in kindergarten), “Sir Brian had a battle axe with great big knobs on.” I also got by heart two or three of Harry Graham’s Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes: that my mother had typed out for her own amusement, among them

Obviously I enjoyed the pleasures of closure.

XII

And occasionally there were the puzzlements of obscurity.

I can still visualize the sandpit at a children’s home in the country, run by my philanthropic godmother, where a Cockney girl of my own age, probably five or six, baffled me by singing, “I could ride a sarnet/ Upon an ease to Barnet,” words whose meaning she refused to explain when I pressed her, but which, as her shrugging off of my questions implied, were evidently unproblematic to others. If “Without a city wall” in that hymn was odd (why should a hill have a city wall?}, riding a sarnet upon an ease to Barnet (a suburb near my own) took me into my first linguistic vortex.

However, it is the other poems that interest me here. And before I go on to them, I must make a couple of things plain.

XIII

What I have been talking about was an old-fashioned upbringing in which no-one in the Thirties ever “taught” me poetry.

In my kindergarten, along with such other art-related activities as stenciling watercolour flowers, framing pictures with passepartout (and beveling the corners), and building coloured relief maps of Africa and Australia (with plaster-of-Paris) that we had painstakingly drawn, not traced, we read poems aloud, mostly in unison, and no doubt with the exhortation to speak clearly.

I can still recall the sound of childish voices reciting in chorus, on the occasion of King George the Fifth’s Silver Jubilee, a poem by Kipling that we had to memorize and of which all that I can recall, after a fashion, is the opening: “Land of our birth, we pledge to thee/ Our somethings and somethings in the years to be.”

I suspect that the parts of Hiawatha that I remember were also read aloud, and that the absoluteness of certain lacunae comes from the fact that those parts weren’t read aloud, if in fact they were in the book.

But I am sure there was no discussion of the poem, no provision of background information, no hint (thank God!) that there was anything allegorical about the events described in it. And things went on in much the same way at Oakleigh Park. We didn’t “discuss” “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna.” Nor did I ever talk with anyone else about the various other poems that I refer to in these pages. They were simply parts of my private mental ecology.

XIV

Furthermore, whatever impression I may have given to the contrary, I do not have a flypaper memory. I doubt that I can recall more than a hundred lines from Shakespeare, and most of those are from Macbeth, which I “did” a couple of times in high-school for examination purposes. (The parts that I played in highschool drama productions have simply vanished into the sand.) So that such poems or passages as lodged themselves in my memory and still come back easily appear to me to have done so because there were special resonances in them for me.

XV

How, then, do “my” poems hold together in a configuration? What was I getting from them, or responding to in them?

Well, if one sets aside the nursery rhymes for a moment, there is obviously a good deal of death and dying in them. Sir John is a newly-made corpse, wicked Sir Ralph goes down with his ship, Tennyson’s knights perish under one another’s blows “on the waste sand, by the waste sea.”

And the passages that I remember from Hiawatha mostly involve death—the death of the beautiful youth in green and yellow with whom Hiawatha fights for three days; the death of the immense King of the Sturgeons who swallows Hiawatha; the death of the trickster Pau-Puk-Keewa, trapped in the beaver lodge and beaten to death after he has allowed himself to grow to giant size; the death at Hiawatha’s hands of the wampum-armoured and seemingly invincible magician after the woodpecker tells Hiawatha to aim his three remaining arrows at the tuft of hair on the top of his head.

However, the poems about Bishop Hatto, and the boy on the burning deck, and the drowned “unfortunate” also involved deaths, and I didn’t much care for them. So a bit more explaining seems called for. And I see something that fits in with my own subsequent professional interest in chivalric matters.

The characters in “my” poems and passages weren’t clerics or “unfortunates,” let alone poets talking about “O, how oft I wish the sun/ Had ta’en my life away.” Nor were they simply standing like that boy on the burning deck, or sitting, like Little Miss Muffett. They were what used to be called men of action, and the nursery rhymes that had stayed in my mind were also about people doing things—Jack jumping, mice (honorary people) running, Tommy Thin putting pussy in the well, and so on.

But I didn’t, in poetry, thrill simply to strong action, not even when those engaging in it were presented as very worthy.

I did where some of my other reading was concerned. Like other Oakleigh Park boys, I addictively bought boys’ papers like Champion and Hotspur (the kind that Orwell didn’t like) and lost myself in serials about Rockfist Rogan, R.A.F., and Strang the Terrible, in his Tarzanesque leopard skin, battling prehistoric monsters with his huge stone club.

But in poetry I didn’t internalize “How Horatius Kept the Bridge” (in memory I think of it as a poem in which Horatius dies), nor did I especially identify with the success-story aspect of Hiawatha’s killings.

XVI

I think, therefore, that something like the following may have been going on.

The nursery rhymes that had especially resonated for me, as I can now see, were those the most charged with a presence and pressure of being—that strange medley of beggars drawing near the town as the dogs bark and the speaker and hearers listen (“Hark, hark…!); the fine lady a-jingle on her real white horse, made all the realer in contrast to the play horse of the child spectator. And there is something of that pressure and presence in the other poems that I have been talking about.

The deaths that I have mentioned are all the culminations of the lives of people who have freely entered into activities where death is possible.

They aren’t necessarily admirable people. Obviously Sir Ralph isn’t.

But the accounts of their dyings are more charged with life, with heightened states of consciousness (in the case of Sir John Moore the consciousnesses of his mourners) than those of more ostensibly affirmative doings.

Fascinating as was the description of Hiawatha making his birch-bark canoe, with its stars of dyed porcupine quills, it faded beside the account of the yellow-and-green youth’s death at Hiawatha’s hands and subsequent rebirth as corn. And the wide-screen creationist activities of the mighty Master of Life, Gitche Manito, felt a bit threatening:

The “death” passages were less dominative, more open, more charged with strangeness.

XVII

The settings of the actions were important, too.

That final battle of Arthur’s takes place in “the sunset bound of Lyoness,” where “the long mountains ended in a coast/ Of ever-shifting sand, and far away,/ The phantom circle of a moaning sea.” It does so in mist so dense that “friend slew friend, not knowing whom he slew,” and on the day when “the great light of heaven/ Burned at his lowest in the rolling year.”

Sir John Moore is buried at dead of night, by the ramparts, in a silence made palpable by the absence of “natural” noises, and with the aid of lights that have to struggle into being.

The forest—a single, powerful, unbounded thing, like the desert, and the jungle, and the sea—is everywhere in Hiawatha, with its contrasts of light and dark, as in the lines about the shining Big Sea Water and the wigwam of Nakonis and how

At times, too, there is an intensified darkness, the darkness of the beaver lodge, the dark interior of the giant sturgeon after Hiawatha has been swallowed, the darkness and dangerousness of the water up through which rises the sunfish.

XVIII

And “The Inchcape Rock”? Oh yes, yes! Yes indeed!

In the two opening stanzas of “The Inchcape Rock,” the quiet, the calm, the absence of normally present things are palpable.

Or rather, it is motion that is absent, the motion of wind and sea, and of the clapper of the bell. For in the fourth stanza, the trance-like picture springs into life:

XIX

And there are similar, if less dramatic, destabilizings later when Sir Ralph returns from his predatory roving. It isn’t simply foggy or simply a nighttime dark. It is a time when there should have been light, when there could still be light, when one strains to see, to bring visibility, as it were, into being, to restore things to being:

But of course the light isn’t strong enough, and sound too fails them. The bell isn’t there to be heard, the ship simply drifts along, there aren’t even any breakers to warn of the rock’s nearness, and disaster comes with “a shivering shock.”

XX

The destabilizings and defamiliarizings with respect to the locations of these poems go deeper too.

The locations are in a sense self-contained and self-sufficient.

They are not downtown London (Wordsworth’s “On Westminster Bridge”), or guide-book Venice (Byron’s “I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs”), or the galloped-through countryside (Browning’s “How They Brought the Good News”) between Aix and Ghent.

They are defined simply by their properties—a rock off the Scottish coast, a fort or walled town (“Corunna”) with soldiers; mysteriously named woods and waters on a remote unnamed continent; Lyonesse,

There are no single-state fixed settings that serve as pictorial backdrops.

XXI

Things are impermanent and unfixed in other ways, too—not as they “ought” to be.

A hero, our hero, has not only died or been killed but must be buried furtively, without even the minimal elegiac sounds of military obsequies (not even a single drum-beat, a single bugle-call). The beautiful yellow and green youth, in a sense, gives himself to Hiawatha in death, and welcomes that death, so that, while sad, it ceases to be merely sad:

And of course “The Inchcape Rock” is a whole complex of defeated expectations.

The Abbot’s envisaged permanent safety for sailors is destroyed in a moment when Sir Ralph cuts the bell’s rope; the other ships that Sir Ralph envisages foundering on the reef seem not to have materialized (at least there is no mention of them); the Scottish coast that is meant to be “there” for his own plunder-laden ship isn’t there—has become a mere absence of sounds and a sensed lurking menace.

Nor is Arthur’s final fight at all the sort of thing that it should have been:

Furthermore, the destabilizings—and re-stabilizings—that I am talking about are inseparable from various formal features of the poems.

XXII

I shall put Hiawatha to one side now.

I suspect that it lay buried in my mind and contributed (along with a large framed colour reproduction in my bedroom, bought for me by my mother, of a painting of three Indians on horseback gazing across a valley to distant rocky hills) to my sense of “America” as a zone of dramatic possibilities, of beautiful strangeness. It may even have contributed to my being drawn, as a graduate student, to Minnesota, rather than to Michigan or Wisconsin. One shouldn’t underestimate the power of such imprintings.

But the versification of Hiawatha, with its insistent, unflagging falling-forward trochaic movement serves only to affirm a steady forward-moving action or series of actions, without significant checks or pauses of surprises; and each brief closure (a death or whatever) is immediately followed by another push forward to the next event, the next doing. It is relentlessly progressive, but in a somewhat muted fashion, with no peaks of elation or troughs of despair.

As I have said, I remembered almost literally no lines from it, probably for those reasons.

Whereas I did indeed remember—will probably never forget—the highly structured mini-dramas of “Hark, hark, the dogs do bark” and “Ride a cock horse/ To Banbury Cross,” the former with its closure on those incongruous and unexplained silken gowns, the latter with its rapid progression from the child’s cock-horse to the expansive spendour of “And she shall have music wherever she goes.”

XXIII

It is that kind of structuring that is at work in the best part of “The Inchcape Rock.”

There are memorable (at least I remembered them) individual lines and couplets in the poem: “The good old Abbot of Aberbrothok / Had placed that bell on the Inchcape Rock” (a stabilizing practical goodness); “Down sank the bell with a gurgling sound” (a painful finality, a lost goodness); “For where we are I cannot tell/ But I wish I could hear the Inchcape Bell” (dramatic irony); “Sir Ralph the Rover tore his hair,/ He cursed himself in his despair” (crime really doesn’t pay); and the concluding “A sound as if with the Inchcape Bell/ The Fiends below were ringing his knell” (the wicked are damned—and a very good thing too.)

But the best part of the poem is the stretch of three stanzas (5 through 7) leading up to Sir Ralph having himself rowed out to sink the bell.

XXIV

When I returned to the poem after a fifty-year absence, I felt (like Proust’s Marcel and his little madelaine cookie) a special thrill, a sense of surprise and expansion, when I came to the lines

And now I know a bit more about how those lines work.

They come out, in their directness, after a somewhat cluttered and abstract stanza:

After the “When…then…and” syntax, the semantically overloaded “know” of the slightly elided “knew the perilous rock,” and the compression of a variety of responses and responders into “blest the Abbot,” the sun shines with an absolute thereness, and one accepts the absoluteness of “All things were joyful on that day,” given the immediate concreteness of “The seabirds screamed as they whirled around” and the attending of “And there was joyaunce in their sound.”

The shift to perception intensifies in the next stanza, as one jumps (via those seabirds) from the wide-angle “The Sun in heaven was shining gay,/ All things were joyful on that day,” to the cinematic long-shot of “The buoy of the Inchcape Rock was seen/ A darker speck on the ocean green,” followed immediately by a cinematic cut to a figure doing something unrelated to all this (“Sir Ralph the Rover walked his deck”), which is followed in its turn by the act of his perceiving the bell (“And he fixed his eye on the darker speck”).

But what follows that in the next stanza?—for of course a following is called for, an answering of the hovering question “And what then? What did he think, or do?” Nothing expected, instead a swerve away from the buoy into an odd, an effervescent good humour, a stirring of energies:

And then the closure, the springing of the trap: “But the Rover’s mirth was wickedness.” After which the rest of the poem takes its more or less straightforwardly ironical course.

XXV

I am not making things up here—claiming a precocious critical insight, though I suppose that in some ways I was a bit precocious.

I can remember the frisson, the sense of something not quite right, evoked by the stanza about the general bright joyfulness (perhaps that “screamed” had something to do with it), and the shock, the revelation of alarming possibilities and inversions, of “But the Rover’s mirth was wickedness.” And I now see better what was going on in the poem formally, including the energizing of the repetition in “It made him whistle, it made him sing.”

XXVI

Likewise I can now see why I should have remembered the first two stanzas of “The Burial of Sir John Moore” and forgotten all the rest of the poem, including such eminently forgettable stanzas as:

A factor, an indispensable factor in that first stanza, is the oddness, the destabilizing oddness, of those near-rhymes, “note/ shot” and “hurried/ buried,” which (especially when followed by the smoothly perfect rhymes of the second stanza, make the mind keep pushing slightly, as it were, in an effort to restore complete order. This time perhaps (as one reads) there will be a more mellifluous sound there to echo that diphthong “note”; but no, once again there is the flat “shot” and the compounding imbalance of “buried.”

Some things are perfectly normal in nursery rhymes, of course. The nursery rhymes that I remember were full of imperfect rhymes and an ordering that didn’t settle down into stasis, but retained something of the flavour of improvisation, as in the rhyming of

or the sprung rhythms (noted by Gerard Manley Hopkins) of “Ding dong bell/ Pussy’s in the well.” Those were not serious poems, though.

XXVII

But it is in the passage from Idylls of the King that the unbalancings and tensions that I have been talking about are the most elaborate and important. And to that passage, so educative about the possibilities of poetic form, I shall now turn.

Here it is again

XXVIII

As I have said, I found the passage very difficult to memorize.

I can still recall being alone in our dark and narrow drawing-room, with the intimations of dignity of its ponderously ticking grandfather clock, and glassed-in bookcase, and upright piano, and etched portrait of Admiral Monk in half-armour and full-bottomed wig, and being at the same time alone inside the oddly-textured and shifting spaces of the poem, and being quite sure that I was never going to be able to make my way through it—to see and embody the sequence of doings in it.

Partly, of course, the passage is very general.

The “sunset bound of Lyonesse,” with its fragments of forgotten peoples, its long mountains, its “coast/ Of ever-shifting sands,” and the far-off “phantom circle of the moaning sea,” did not, even then, fit with my sense of the southwest coast of England as experienced in a summer holiday in Dorset or via photographs of the Cornish cliffs in The Children’s Encyclopedia. “By fire to sink into the abyss again”? When had that happened?

And the fighting was very general too, with no names of individual knights—Sir Lancelot, Sir Perceval, etc.—and no descriptions of armour, pennants, and the like. There was nothing about stages in the battle, the lines of horsemen getting ready to charge, the foot-soldiers, and the rest. There were no colours in the scene. (By then, as a service-middle-class boy, I had a repertoire of images of medieval warfare.)

XXIX

But far more important than all this was how the lines went.

The passage was not a picture or pseudo-picture to be scanned or skimmed. Even now I never, as it were, turn to the ending, or to stretches along the way, when I recall it. It was a sequence to be worked through, enacted, appropriated—a sequence that only lived (for my purposes) as held-in-suspension, spoken-aloud words.

And what has struck me recently about how the verse goes is the almost continuous large or small unbalancings, the movements in direction that are not, in terms of what has been given thus far, the expected directions.

XXX

Let me get down to specifics and go quickly through the passage from start to finish.

I shall talk very largely in terms of what I see now. But once again, I shall be trying to transpose and remain faithful to those kinaesthetic feelings that I had as I tried, I forget for how many weeks, to put together from the words of the poem a three-dimensional event or sequence of events that I could confidently narrate.

XXXI

One reads (or says):

But the parallelism (a parallelism in which “pushed” is kinaesthetically strong enough to match “rose” and “moved”) is deceptive.

The action does not stop at the end of the line, nor does “push” have an object comparable to the host that Arthur moved. Instead, Modred (Modred solus, as it were) pushes “back to the sunset bound of Lyonesse”; and the parallelism is not completed there.

Instead, as one waits for further news of the two armies (or two adversaries), we get a verbless piece of further information about Lyonesse:

[Recent thought: Could I have been misreading this part all these years, and the pushing be what Arthur was doing to Modred? If so, I can only plead that the passage invites the misreading, at least by a ten-year-old,]

XXXII

And now we have, or so one would think, reached a closure and momentary resting point, before getting back to the real center of attention, the doings of the two men.“Arthur did this, Modred did that, and (in case you’re interested), Lyonesse was a place with its own drama, rising volcanically from the sea and eventually sinking back into it again.”

And the line-endings signal closure—“Lyonesse…abyss” (will there be more near-rhymes?), and then the clipped “again” (“agen”). But the “real” business of the passage is still on hold, and this closure is false:

[no, again a pseudo-parallelism]

Is there more to come, now that we have embarked on information-giving about that region?

No, now at last, after a nine-line stretch that feels like more than nine lines, we get the sudden terse return to the main business:

XXXIII

But even here the symmetry is less than perfect—is in fact just a little odd, in that one has to think for a moment about who is doing what: “There the pursuer could pursue no more,” and the pursued could not (or did) do something? No, not “the pursued” (or something similar) but “he that fled (unnamed) could “no further fly the King”; with a sort of backward motion or reversal whereby the grammatically objectless pursuing (by an unnamed pursuer) modulates into the more dramatic flying of a he who (as if now blocking his way) cannot fly the King.

XXXIV

So one stretch of the poem has now come to completion.

Now for what we have been waiting for, the real action, the battle.

[the feminine ending assisting the obviously incomplete syntax after the finality of “King”]

Good, very definite, and the repeated “waste” helps to stabilize things, albeit with a slight semantic flutter [“waste” meaning more than just “empty”? If so, what is missing that should be there, or present that shouldn’t?]

So, then, what was the battle like? What happened next?

But no, we are given a negating of sorts, or at least a momentary further withholding, even in two lines that form a self-sufficient unit:

[what, that he didn’t win?]

[the strangeness emphasized by the slow six-step ascent of like this last dim weird battle”]

Then a line of straightforward amplification—“A death-like mist lay over land and sea”—with an air of completeness, but followed by a series of suspensions or near-suspensions, including that effect (of which W.B. Yeats was a master) whereby a statement appears to have been completed at the end of a line [“till all his blood was cold’] only to be continued in the following line.

The words at the ends of the lines, too, are mostly active ones—verbs, verbs in that position almost for the first time:

Again a closure in that last line.

XXXV

And now we move forward into actions that are, as it were, self-sustaining, rather than being presented as parts of a subordinate clause or clauses. Except that now the emphasis is on perception—how things appear—rather than on actions:

And as the passage continues, after the slightest of pauses, we do not have people doing things, but simply things happening, in a de-individuated way

It was odd to be speaking so long a sentence with no main verb. And there was one more oddness to come.

XXXVI

It always seemed to me, having finally arrived at that “mist,” as if I had reached the end of the passage.

In fact, though, it continued for four-and-a-half-lines more, but in such a way as not, somehow, to be clearly adding something new, or at least something obviously richer and stronger than what had come before.

And the feeling of something dangling was increased by there still being no main verb.

Things had now taken over altogether.

XXXVII

The description continues, I believe, but, despite having had to teach the Idylls in second-year English one year, I have no idea what comes afterwards, any more than I do with respect to what preceeds the whole passage. “My” battle ends there.

The passage is a complete poem—a poem that had given me a “serious” acquaintance along the way with reversed feet (“Back to the sunset bound”), additional syllables and near-elision (“from the abyss”), syntactical inversion (“a land of old upheaven”), familiar words with unfamiliar meanings (“sunset bound”, “clash of brands), two kinds of enjambment, transitive verbs used intransitively (the chill of the mist drew down with the blood of him who breathed it) , archaic syntax (“shrieks after the Christ”), and long sentences and lots of parallelism and near-parallelism.

XXXVIII

So there it is, then, something embedded in my mind for half a century, like the Inchcape Rock.

It is a gift from Oakleigh Park Preparatory School—from whoever it was who picked that passage for us in the summer of 1939. And where the humanities were concerned, it was the most precious gift that I received there.

As I said, Oakleigh Park was a good school, and we appropriately wore the figure of Pegasus, the winged horse, on the pockets of our light-blue blazers. I have never regretted not going to the “progressive” school that my parents had considered. One did in a sense feel at Oakleigh Park that one was moving onward and upward (“Per ardua ad astra”), and had the war never come, I would no doubt have gone on to a much more congenial secondary school than the all-too-Orwellian boarding-school that I ended up in.

But I remember very little of the formal teaching at Oakleigh Park, and what I do remember—the shape and feel of Latin tables and of math assignments that made me teary-eyed with anxiety at home—is largely unpleasant. History, Latin, French, Math—virtually total blanks. I cannot remember anything that I was told about any of those subjects by any of the masters.

No, the verbal things that I do remember, with greater or less vividness, are almost all extracurricular.

XXXIX

I can remember an older master reading to us on two or three occasions, as a reward, from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s marvelously titled romance Poison Island (though nothing seemed to happen in it). I can remember the opening sentence of a dictation by a grimly humorous younger master from something called A Hangman’s Diary: “The beheading sword was a heavy two-handed weapon, the proper use of which required great skill and strength.”

From time to time, too, an even younger one would tantalize those of us sitting near him at lunch by giving us glimpses—some of them, I have since realized, pure fabrications—of horror movies like Son of Frankenstein and The Black Cat that were playing at local theatres and from which, as with flaming swords, we were shut out by the censor’s classification of “H” (for horror? Horrific?). “Oh please, sir, do go on sir, how did he skin him, sir?”

In a sense, as I now see, it was with the unofficial culture that the poems and passages that I have recalled with particular pleasure belonged. They were all, the Tennyson passage included, melodramatic texts, with zones of mystery and danger in them.

But they were not merely melodramatic, and I think that in them I was able to enter in a literary way into what, for a child, were complex modes of being and feeling with respect to “action.”

XL

Strange things happened in the nursery rhymes without any simple black/white, good/bad pigeonholing.

The killers of Cock Robin display no reluctance about admitting to that deed. Little Tommy Thin may have put pussy in the well, but we’re not told that he was bad and that Little Johnny Stout was good, nor are their names morally antithetical. Are the three blind mice pitiable or impudent, the knife-wielding farmer’s wife scared or cruel? Are the beggars pitiable or sinister or both? Why should the candle to light us to bed be followed immediately by the decapitating chopper?

It isn’t a dichotomized world. And in the serious poems, likewise, there isn’t a simple dichotomizing in which Good confronts Evil and triumphs over it. Sir Ralph defeats himself; we do not know how Sir John died or see the enemy forces; and at times there is no obvious moral reason why Hiawatha should be the slayer rather than the slain. This is not a world of permanent and correct wins and stabilizings. It is a world, in fact, in which losing is more common than winning.

But if there are defeats in the poems, the poems themselves are not defeatist, unlike some of those whose Weltschmertz (“The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers/Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away”) thrilled me in my unhappy adolescence.

Because of the formal and rhetorical features that I have spoken of, there is a creative ordering in them, an ordering process, into which the reader is drawn, even when what is described is disorderly or the vitiation of order. There are energies there, energies of the perceiving mind, that persist whether what is being described is a win or a loss.

XLI

And there is one last verbal inheritance from Oakleigh Park that I must mention.

It is the opening verse of the magnificent hymn that we sang slowly (it does just trip along on the printed page) at the end of the breaking-up ceremony each term, in the same large double classroom where I competed for the cup:

That hymn, I now realize, must have had a peculiar resonance that summer for the small staff, at least six of whom, including the headmaster, were young enough to be eligible for military service.

And the choice of the Tennyson passage, as I also now realize, may not have been altogether fortuitous.

There is nothing in it of the assurance—the assurance of asking—of “O God, our help in ages past.” Essentially, it is a symbolist poem, or at least a poem whose nominal clarity of expository outline (“There was this battle, and I’ll tell you about it”) is constantly disrupted.

But for all the confusion described in it, all the absence of conventional rewards, the battle was one that had to be fought, and Arthur had to go on striving to perceive things correctly in that fearsome mist and keep up his courage.

One way and another, I would say that the very different resonances of the two poems, epitomes of a good deal of other poetry, have gone on working in my mind ever since. If, as may well have been the case, it was the headmaster’s wife, Mrs. Long-Brown, who chose the passage for the competition, I owe her a good deal more than a cup.

1990

 

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