Voices in the Cave of Being

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

Preface / Contents / Poems / Comments I / Comments II / Metrics / Postscript

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Grief of a Girl’s Heart (Anonymous)

I

A familiar scenario—a rural seduction and abandonment by a Luftmensch who may even (after all, this is Ireland) largely believe his own rhetoric. What differentiates it is the stage in this particular story, and the character of the girl.

We feel her poignantly still hoping, for he may not yet have gone, and she understands him, understands his weakness, and his boasting, and his lying, and still loves him, and would be as good for him, in practical terms, as she says.

So there’s the terrible force of her yearning—a strong and decent person trying by sheer force of will and sense of the truth of the situation to make the abandonment not happen.

She can judge him, clear-eyed—“You promised me, —and you said a lie to me.” She knows that the things he promised are not possible (though we’re still in a literal reality with that “suit of the dearest silk in Ireland” and those marketplaces). But she would be, if he could only see it, what his romantic yearnings sketch for him, or at least what would actually be available to him.

It’s not as if she were the voice of dull bog-trotting “practicality,” pooh-poohing romance. She too can speak poetically. She can envisage being splendid in bed. She can see the pathos of his lonely questing. She would be his sweetheart, not just a permanently pregnant wife. (Mercifully she doesn’t seem to be pregnant at the moment, so that’s not the issue.)

But he wasn’t out there in the field that night, and we can feel the cruel auto-intoxication of his lyricism, feeding on itself, one romantic promise topped by another. So that most probably he is lost to her. And there is a painful virtual acknowledgment of that in the last two stanzas, in the conditional voice, “I would…I would…” (in contrast to the “I will” of the first stanza), and the moving, because believable, vigour of, “And if you were hard pressed, I would strike a blow for you,” and then the horror of absolute loss and despair, expressed with its own deeper and more resonant poeticality in the final stanza.

O Donal Oge, what a fool you are, what a romantic fool. And yet maybe he has to go and try. And will she still be there for him (Peer Gynt’s Solveg) should he eventually return?

Think of the work that would have to go into a short story to achieve this complexity—and probably even then missing the emotional essences. A poem does permit not having to say a lot of things.

II

I found “Grief of a Girl’s Heart” in David Bergman and Daniel Mark Epstein’s excellent Heath Guide to Poetry (1983), where it’s described as having been translated from the Gaelic by Augusta Gregory, W.B. Yeats’ patron.

If you look up her translation through Google, you will find that it’s presented as a prose translation. The stanzas are printed as paragraphs, and there are eight extra paragraphs between “our” final stanza and the one preceding it, all of them weak and inessential. It’s as if two different poems had got jumbled up together. For example, “It is early in the morning that I saw him coming, going along the road on the back of a horse; he did not come to me; he made nothing of me; and it is on my way home that I cried my fill.”

I have no idea what the Gaelic original was like, or whether Bergman and Epstein adapted it themselves or found it adapted somewhere else.

So, should we feel obliged to ask which is the real poem or text? Or whether the text that I’ve given here possesses that supposed Coleridgean essence of poetry, “organic unity”?

III

If I hadn’t mentioned the prose version, no one would be worrying about whether or not it was a poem, would they? Obviously it is, at least if we mean that it consists of definite stanzas, that there is a clear relationship between syntax and lineation, and that there is a discernible rhythm to the lines, even if it would be hard to describe formally.

Furthermore (if that’s too minimal a definition), there’s a satisfying progression from what happens in one stanza to what happens in the next, and every sentence adds something of consequence to what’s gone before, and there aren’t unnecessary words or ill-chosen one, and the drama is poignant, and we’re experiencing the strong and deep feelings of a real-feeling young countrywoman.

So I myself would say that certainly it has unity. It’s about a single emotion-charged situation, and it has the kind of flow that we could discern in some graceful or dramatic stretch of physical action (such as a skating routine), or in a song that we like, or in a stretch of moving spontaneous speech, and with what feel like a natural beginning and ending, so that we don’t want more from before it begins or after it ends.

IV

But if the question were about the poem’s “origins,” in an attempt to ascertain whether it evolved naturally inside a poet’s mind (a poet, not a mere “writer,” or “author”) in the way that a plant develops from a seed, well, my own feeling would be, Who knows? Who cares?

Obviously what we have here is a palimpsest, the result of some oral text or texts (probably the latter) in Gaelic being transcribed, and then translated, and maybe altered by the translator before it was printed (maybe in consultation with a friend or two?), and then altered substantially later on by at least one set of editorial hands. Bergman and Epstein are themselves published poets.

And if someone were to feel uneasy about not being able to feel in the presence of the “mind” of an author voicing his or her own poem as it evolves, well, that would be understandable, given the number of poems that do give us that sensation, including a number in my own selection here. But lots of feelings are understandable and wrong, and in fact most wrong feelings are more understandable than right ones, being simpler and cruder.

Personally I like the old gentleman who, when asked by the child why noodles are called noodles, replied gravely, “Well, my dear, they look like noodles, and they smell like noodles, and they taste like noodles, so we call them noodles.” If it looks like a poem and feels like a poem and moves you like a poem (which is to say like a lot of other works that you have no trouble seeing as poems), then it is a poem.

V

In one of his later books, F.R. Leavis indignantly dismissed the suggestion that a computer could write a poem, with its implication of the obsolescence of Man and all that rubbish. But of course it can, at least if you consider the result a poem when you don’t know its provenance.

Obviously the computer couldn’t do so without a lot of “poem” rules having been fed it or absorbed by it when told what to look for. It wouldn’t just sit there humming gently after doing rocket science and then burst into song. But that would be irrelevant to the quality of the resulting text.

In all likelihood, it would be a bad poem, or a banal poem, or, well, simply not a particularly interesting one. But if it were good, so much the better. We can always use more good poems.

To call something a poem, even though we indeed use the word honorifically—about some graceful physical action, say— doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, carry with it any implication of innate merit, any more than does calling something a novel or a play.

People don’t go around saying admiringly, “You’re a real playwright, Bill.”

VI

In saying all of which, I am not, as Leavis (following Lawrence and himself deeply and intelligently Romantic), might have said, seeking to “do dirt” on life.

On the contrary, what I’ve said makes it easier to hang onto the goodness and greatness of great and good poems, unperturbed by any Lowest Common Denominator challenge.

By which I mean, the ploy by which someone who thinks he or she has isolated the minimum features which a group of works have in common, proceeds to treat the higher, richer, subtler forms as if they were really only what you have in the lower ones.

It also makes it easier to experience the poem in front of you as you experience other stretches of memorable speech, which is to say, without immediately wanting to make your way into increasingly amorphous experiences prior to its presence, as if they were the real reality.

VII

And it’s not as though we were getting rid of “mind” or “quality.”

Creative acts of mind did indeed lead to “Grief of a Girl’s Heart” as we have it here.

Some Irish person or persons, somewhere, sometime, felt the pathos in a certain kind of situation and evoked verbally the thought processes of a certain kind of young woman. Augusta Gregory, herself a playwright, read or heard the result, and translated and published it, maybe with improvements of her own. Subsequent readers felt the quality of the good parts, and turned the prose into verse (or had it been verse before she translated it?), and left out the weaker parts. And I too felt the quality of the result, and the poem has stayed in my own mind.

But what is quality? (asked jesting Pilate, and did not wait for an answer). Well, it’s what we all have no trouble recognizing the existence of when we buy one stereo system or pair of jogging shoes in preference to others, and the kind of defining involved can occur in all manner of situations and has nothing to do intrinsically with snobbishness or class.

There are all manner of good qualities in all manner of things, including poems. What we have here in “my” poems are simply some of them, and there are lots of others in a lot of other poems that I admire (see A New Book of Verse ) and some of which are greater than all but a few of the ones here.

In the rest of these notes, I have largely been trying to clarify to myself what kinds of things it is that I myself have been responding to with lasting pleasure in these particular poems.

The Demon Lover (Anonymous)

I

This powerful poem came to me from Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their Understanding Poetry, the grandfather of the Introductions-to-Poetry as we now know them, and itself a splendid anthology.

“The Demon Lover” belongs up there with the escalating drama of the ballad “Edward” (“Why does your brand sae drip wi’ bluid,/Edward, Edward”), in which the refrains and repetitions slow down the uncovering of what lies behind his bloody sword, and allow spaces of the mind to open up in both speakers, mother and son, before, apprehensively, she puts the next question and he gives his next delaying answer, all of it building inexorably to the final ferocity of his “The curse of hell from me shall ye bear/, Such council you gave to me, O,” the facts that both of them have been trying to avoid facing now out there and irrevocable.

II

“The Demon Lover” is a distillation of what must have been a recurring situation over the centuries—the former lover returning to the now settled wife of another man, and asserting the moral claims of his own intense feelings (that convenient gush of tears!), and accusing her of disloyalty. And she fights back at first with the sturdy common sense of “If you might have had a king’s daughter,/Yourself you had to blame”, but weakens because of her own still persisting feelings (“Well, suppose I do go?”). And he pounces on that weakening and promises her magnificence.

And then we have her disquiet at finding the ship without any crew from that social world in which, as he’s claiming, he has made his mark, and her growing sense that something’s dreadfully wrong, and now he’s hardly bothering to soothe her but says pro forma, Oh shut up, I’ll give you a good time, and she recognizes that all her good things have been thrown away and no other good ones will ever come again, and it’s all too late, and it’s damnation.

With a lovely modulation from the natural into the supernatural, so that at first he is the returned lover, and then, allegorically, and with a nightmare-like speed-up of space and time—those hills, that mountain, the sudden giganticism—he becomes a figure of wickedness, a demon.

III

W.H. Auden, who was at his best in his lighter verse, makes an effective use at times of balladic intensifications, with their dreads and yearnings, particularly in “As I Walked Out One Evening.” At one time I had it by heart, along with a number of other poems or bits of poems by him, including most of “Now from my window-sill I watch the night,” which modulates from Yeats-lite (but Yeats could not have written “The silence buzzes in my ear”) into a world of mysterious powerful presences, with strong local details and tones, but no coherent literal sense to be made of those figures.

Hymne / Hymn (Charles Baudelaire)

I

Impossible, I would think, to render this poem into English, at least in eight-syllable lines, in a way that would capture its weight and beauty. Hard to believe that it’s the same verse form as in Gautier’s “Sur les Lagunes.”

How is it different? Well, there’s a greater conceptual and figurative density for one thing.

He is addressing her in terms that could almost as well apply to the Virgin Mary (somewhat eroticized). Which is to say that what we have here is an erotics of purity, the beloved adored because of the spiritual values that she brings into his life.

But we’re not given details. It’s more a matter of finding figurative equivalents for the sense of exaltation that he feels. She’s like an angel, an idol, she permeates his being like the way in which a salt breeze can be smelled (indoors?), or the scent of a sachet of dried flowers, or incense, or musk.

Which I suppose ought to make it a bit over-ripely romantic, except that it’s said and done with such conviction and such formal decisiveness.

II

We have the characteristically Baudelairean opening in which something is summed up and defined, in contrast, say, to Hardy’s characteristically unsummatory openings (“Why did you give no hint that night?”). And the praise mounts. She fills his heart with “clarté” (a broad-spectrum term encompassing, according to my dictionary, “light, brightness, splendour; limpidity; clearness”). She’s an angel, an immortal idol.

Her influence spreads through his mind and does something important—gives his unappeased, unsastisfied, hungry soul a taste of eternity (meaning, the possibility of salvation?). Eternity here is a good thing, since it entails continuity and permanence, not just disintegration and drifting atoms in an endless night.

This improvement is pleasurable, too, in more “human” ways. A beloved retreat, a personal hideaway, perhaps a love-nest, doesn’t have to be abandoned but in fact is made sweeter. During the night, probably an erotic night, the forgotten censer is still there, sending out its benediction.

And then, a final stab at finding (but with a sense of the impossibility) an equivalent that will do justice to this incorruptible figure and his joy in her. He does have the possibility of a benign eternity, and it is she, invisibly, by simple virtue of her being, who makes it possible.

Back to the opening summatory praise, with those slight but important changes. She’s not just beloved and beautiful, she’s good and beautiful, and she gives him both joy (probably sexual) and moral health, so that now the final two lines, with their blending of the Chrstian and, perhaps, pagan have been given more content.

III

Formally, the poem is definite, what Ezra Pound would call shaped.

Each stanza falls more or less into two parts. Each stanza, except the last, opens differently syntactically.

First, a prepositional phrase (To the beloved) leads to the suspended conclusion in the fourth line.

Then, a declarative statement (She expands).

Then, a question (How to?)

And then back to the beginning and a recapitulation.

Individual words are weighty conceptually—‘immortalité,” “inassouvie,” ‘l’eternel,” ‘incorruptible,” “verité,” “eternité.”

But actions are going on—filling, hailing, expanding, pouring, perfuming, smoking, expressing, lying. There isn’t a single “is” or “are” here, let alone “seems.” We are propelled forward by this energy of definition, his conviction of the reality and worth of his feelings, his trust, his hope.

IV

And the rhymes help in that propulsion.

After the initial high-pitched linking of “clarté” and “eternité,” we modulate down into the second stanza with the gentler, lower pitched linking of “immortelle,” “sel,” “eternel,” and thence into the third stanza with “inassouvie,” “reduit,” and “nuit.” In so doing, we have also progressed from the brightness of the opening, and the open-air wholesomeness of the second stanza, into the secret erotic places of the night.

And then we get a kind of reverse flow, with “nuit” followed immediately by the same sound in “incorruptible,” itself linking to “invisible,” and the “ay” (é) sounds coming back in with “verité” and “eternité,” and that same sound continued (rising) into the final stanza, with “santé” and “immortalité.”

Moreover, I now see, we have also had a progression wherein all four rhyme words in the first stanza are value words, three of them spiritual, but in the second stanza only one is (“l’eternel,”) and in the third none. With a return back up with three in the fourth stanza and then all four in the final stanza, as in the first one.

V

This kind of quasi-musical organizing is part of what made Baudelaire so important in and to the Symbolist movement, using that term in its broader application (as distinct from the self-defined and publicized movement in the 1880’s).

We have been told nothing, novelistically, about her, and next to nothing, novelistically, about him, except that his spirit is unappeased and that he hungers for eternity. Nor has there been any prescriptive moralizing, or any general ideas presented as such, or any attempt to persuade or summon to action.

And yet by means of figurative language and the musicality that I have described, we have, or at least I do, a compelling sense of the innermost experiencing of a strong mind in a perhaps unfamiliar state of unqualified happiness and hopefulness, where he’s feeling the reality of certain values.

In this instance the values are substantially religious ones. But the feelings of enlightenment, and purification, and a heightened sense of rich possibilities beyond the daily pressures and etiolation of social life, particularly social life as driven forward by scientific positivism and the claims of politics, need not be dependent on literal religious truths.

VI

I have known this poem, along with the ones by Villon and Gautier, since the summer of 1946, when I was lucky enough to spend two exchange months in Paris with distant and newly-moneyed relatives of my stepmother.

They had a Right Bank apartment on the Rue de la Boétie (a street, as I learned the other day, where Picasso and Olga had lived in the 1920s), which contained a white baby grand, several original recent oils (landscapes, still lifes), and a small collection of limited editions with cream, or pink, or pale-blue thick-paper covers, or morocco bindings. We had wine with meals, too. Wine! What nicer way, coming straight from the horrors of boarding school in austerity England, to experience French bourgeois elegance. I don’t imagine the Occupation had been too difficult for them.

I had with me Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems, which seemed to glow with the light of his own vision of Provence. And I managed to have a couple of minutes of sidewalk conversation in the Rue de l’Odéon with Sylvia Beach, the first publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses. I even wrote a handful of poems myself, one of them during a panic attack among the tennis courts at the très-snob Jockey Club, to which I’d been taken shortly after my arrival, wildly out of place in my patched-elbows tweed jacket and shapeless grey flannels. (No, this wasn’t understated elegance à l’Anglais. What an embarrassment I must have been!)

And later, when we were down in the Dordogne staying at Les Eyzies, near the great caves, there was a day trip to a narrow overgrown valley between cliffs in which there was a miniature abandoned Poundian castle, its sandstone battlements sharp-edged against the hot blue sky.

Meanwhile my would-be swinging opposite number was finding out what England could do in the way of a rain-drenched, food-rationed, and probably girl-less English seaside summer.

VII

I knew nothing—nothing—about the current art-and-intellect scene in Paris, not the Cinémathéque, not Existentialism, nothing. I had only just turned eighteen at the start of the vacation. And “French,” in school, had been declensions, prose passages to translate, and Molière’s Le Malade Imaginaire, with those ridiculous little “scenes” that nobody bothered to inform us signal the entry or exit of a character. Those were the days of “standards.”

But the city, in which I walked a lot to save my handful of francs, was still, though I didn’t know it, partly the city of Baudelaire, the Surrealists, Atget. It was also where I was seeking a copy of that then-forbidden book of knowledge, Ulysses, guidebook to the eroticized city of the mind, so that every second-hand bookstore and quai-side stall, with its medley of unfamiliar shapes and titles, was charged with potentiality. Without knowing it, I was on my own kind of small quasi-Surrealist quest.

And I found my way, impelled by the horrific images and frustratingly opaque text in a French magazine in a pre-War seaside boarding-house (what did “Guignol” mean?), to the Théâtre du Grand Guignol in its converted chapel in Montmartre, but it was closed for the summer. And in a used bookstore in the Palais-Royale arcade, smelling of the forbidden (correctly, no doubt, given the history of the Palais Royale), I picked up a copy of the clandestine Don Leon, published in England by the Fortune Press, with Byron’s name as author.

”My” transgressive Paris, mild as it was, was more interesting than the Folies-Bergère and the more nekkid Casino de Paris that my hosts took me to. But I didn’t stumble upon the great Surrealist bookstore Le Minotaure on the Left Bank until the summer of 1949.

VIII

I even got part way into the narrow rue Mouffetard, which felt, and smelt, like essence-of-older-Paris, and which, not having noted its name, I failed to find again on a couple of subsequent visits and so remained an almost dreamlike memory. By the time I eventually got back to it, it had acquired boutiques.

Kate Simon speaks in one of her travel guides of “the Mouffetard smell, a combination of cheese, fish, bodies, discarded greens, overage flowers, urine—the smell of life in packed houses hugging a crowded market for centuries.” The Paris of Jacques Prévert and Marcel Carné, whose Quai des Brumes had been my first French film, experienced from a front-row seat in the lovely little Academy Cinema near Oxford Circus.

I have now learned from Google that the street follows the line of a Roman road and that some of the buildings supposedly go back to the 12^th century.

What has all this to do with “Hymne”? Nothing specific, but I enjoyed the recall.

IX

And yet, perhaps there is some relevance to this temps perdus stuff.

The “inner” Paris that I was experiencing, the Paris of values, was one in which a deeply Catholic poem like “Hymne” could be felt and spoken with perfect naturalness.

Nôtre-Dame, with its unvandalized stained-glass windows and its aura of romantic passions (the Hunchback and so forth) was there on its river island, a polar stone antithesis to the skeletal Eiffel Tower. The medieval Musée de Cluny sat at the intersection of the Boulevard Saint-Michel and the Faubourg Saint-Germain. And inside a low doorway in the foundation of a nearby building a stone spiral staircase led down (too expensively for me) into a purported medieval torture chamber. I got out to Chartres, too, and the stained-glass windows there.

And in the city of Napoleon’s huge black marble tomb in Les Invalides, and the Arc de Triomphe at the end of the immense Champs-Elysées, the idea of glory and gloriousness, as well as of the possibility of ignominy and damnation (the Occupation was only a couple of years in the past) was not something that needed apologizing for with deprecatory nervous coughs.

And you had the dramatic contrasts between the wearying and too-big spaces of the Champs-Elysées and the Place de la Concorde, and the intimacy of the older Paris of the Quartier Latin, and between the rackety, lavatory-tiled, early-modernist Metro (but with those sexy Art Nouveau entrances and those poetic station names—Porte de Vincennes, Porte de Neuilly, and so forth, very Proustian) and the classical calm of the Luxembourg Gardens, with the toy boats on the pool.

X

Some of these things can rub off on you. It was certainly all very different from the London on whose northern fringe I had grown up.

And the Roman Catholicism of such English poets as I had come across, always excepting the rural-based Hopkins, had been ungrounded (like Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven”) and all too conscious of being Catholic, which is to say, an alien and still suspect presence. I mean, what could you make of a religion that maintained that you were literally eating Christ’s body at what the Anglicans called communion? James Joyce beautifully encapsulates in A Portrait of the Artist the process of writing a Catholic poem, Stephen’s villanelle “Are you not weary of ancient days?”

The full-throated “Hymne,” with its confidence in the possibility of an un-ascetic redemption and transfiguration in this world, and its indifference to whether it was verging on heresy in its mingling of the religious and the erotic, would not have been possible in England.

XI

I wish I had done more during my four weeks in that at that time still semi-mythical city. I don’t recall getting to Les Halles, or to the magical northern boulevards, Boulevard Poissonière, Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, that were beloved of the Surrealists. But I only had ten pounds, at that time fifty dollars, in my billfold.

And at least I came back with Villon’s collected poems and Les Fleurs du Mal, and a couple of issues of Transition from the 1920s (one of them with the first installment of what became Joyce’s Finnegans Wake), and had done my best to buy Gautier’s Emaux et Camées after browsing in my hosts’ de luxe edition.

And one of the de luxe editions on my hostess’s shelves was Rilke’s Rose poems in French (his own), on delicately pink paper. So at least I got a whiff of him.

I never did find Ulysses. But an American edition was sitting, unexpurgated, on the shelves of the public library of a north London suburb near my own after I got back, and the following year the book was published in England.

[I have now read Walter Martin’s lovely and expressively faithful transmutation of Hymne in his dual-text Complete Poems of Baudelaire (1997). A good translation observing the form of the original can put you in mind of that comment by someone or other that Ginger Rogers wasn’t really so special as a dancer, she simply had to follow all Fred Astaire’s steps wearing heels and a gown.]

The Cottage Hospital (John Betjeman)

I

The rhyming is curious and very effective. Which is a dull thing to say about a poem so charged with feeling, but the poem can take care of itself, content-wise, so I shall continue.

The indentations and the endings of the first three lines (feminine/masculine/feminine) make you expect a ballad-like abcb pattern (“A brick path led to a mulberry,/ Whose leaves were turning brown”). But in fact you get the word “feet”—and then another word, “branches” that still isn’t rhyming with anything. And suddenly you get a rhyme (down/ town) and, pause, another rhyme, feet/ heat.

So it feels as if now you’ve arrived. You’ve had a couple of rhymes, and the pattern may be complete—town/ down, heat/feet.

And then it kind of starts up again and the last four lines feel more solid, particularly given those apples and plum espaliers basking upon bricks of brown, and the air swimming with insects.

II

After which, we have the shivery close-up tactility in the second stanza, with the “bright intentness,” the “slithery rigging,” the lithe elastic, the fizzing (brilliant word) hopeless fight.

III

And in the third stanza, the brilliant two-line closure carries us back to the hot, indifferent natural world going about its business, and “swimming” picks up on “drowning,” so that you feel an inflowing of that world in contrast to where and what he now is—the pale green walls and polished parquet, the orderly routines, and his own entanglement in the sweaty sheets of his screened-off bed of death.

I have seen the poem with a different lineation. Which one is the “real” poem? This one here (it’s in Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry) is a poem, the other one is a poem. This poem here is better than the other one.

A cottage hospital like the one in the poem would have been a private nursing home.

Exhortation (Louise Bogan)

I

I would not have known this magnificent poem had Yvor Winters not discussed it in Forms of Discovery.

Hatred is a suspect emotion now. Or rather, it is a weapon in the culture wars whose use people seek to deny to their adversaries.

The glaring eyes, the vibrato in the voice—these testify to the moral certitude of righteous haters, the correctness of their feelings. But to hate back is to be a bad citizen, and shows that you and your opinions don’t need to be taken seriously. People should like one another, and respect one another, and co-operate with one another—except, of course, when the opinions of the other don’t deserve to be respected. Which can be—this delegitimizing and disarming of the troublesome—a major weapon in the arsenal of power-holders or power-seekers.

Hatred is a stage beyond anger. When you’re angry, you still believe in the possibility of dialogue, of changing the outlook of the other. You hate when you realize that there’s no possibility of that, and that you’re simply not there dialogically, for the other. And that what the other is doing is indeed hateful, even if not done with strong emotions. If someone is behaving smoothly, how can they possibly be hateful? But they can. It is the very smoothness, the sheltering behind the magic shields of their official roles, that makes them hateful.

So far as my own limited experience goes, there is more genuinely hateful behaviour among the cultural bureaucrats of the Canadian art world than in the academic one.

II

In “A Prayer for My Daughter,” Yeats wrote, “An intellectual hatred is the worst./ So let her think opinions are accursed.” And you know he’s talking politics and ideology, especially Irish ones. Sometimes dehumanizing people in one’s head can be literally lethal for them.

But there are times when the self, or part of the self, needs to be concentrated adversarially, in the interests of its own self-preservation, as a way of seeing what’s there, the de facto, not just de jure rules of this or that power game.

One of J.V. Cunningham’s epigrams goes:

It’s a zone of being, of real being, not just inchoate ”feelings” that swirl beyond the pale. You don’t want to live there long. It can poison the mind and the body, because there is no outlet in action. But defining the feelings can be a way of stabilizing them and authenticating them. They can be morally legitimate ways of responding to real harms and wrongs.

III

There’s a savage, bleak, stoical acceptance in “Exhortation” of the fact that at times the hateful can win, or at least advance successfully and without any sense of personal insufficiencies. Gerard Manley Hopkins enquired, “Why do sinners ways prosper? and why must/ Disappointment all I endeavour end.?”

I’m sure that Winters is right and that the “dead” in “Exhortation” aren’t ghosts but living power-players in the culture game—critics, editors, publishers, grant-givers, professors, whatever. Some of them, at least, or some types. This isn’t a paranoid poem. It’s a marvelously shaped and resonant affirmation of the hatefulness, in the larger scale of moral being, of certain kinds of insensitivity, shallowness, petty nastiness. It is more “philosophical” and closer to George Gascoigne’s “Lullaby” than Winters’ own powerful “Two Dream Songs.”

I have no idea what experiences lay behind the writing of “Exhortation.” But not all art is an affair of masks (tragic, ironical, and so forth) that can be put on and taken off at will, with behind them always the same comfortably worldly and opportunistic self.

And some defeats and deep-going frustratings cannot be turned aside with the deftness of Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Art of Losing,” As witness the section “Artworld” on the Carol Hoorn Fraser side of this site.

People unacquainted with the academic life may have no idea of how fraught it can be at times, when a whole slew of ideological assumptions may be at work in any conflict, particularly in tenure-and-promotion assessments of individuals, and class assignments.

Winters’ “Two Old-Fashioned Songs” from the late 1950s may be relevant here.

Fra Bank to Bank (Mark Alexander Boyd)

I

In ABC of Reading (1934) Ezra Pound said of this poem, “I suppose it is the most beautiful sonnet in the language, at any rate it has one nomination.” Arthur Quiller-Couch, who had aspired, as he said, to “range over the whole field of English verse…and to choose the best,” had included it in 1900 in The Oxford Book of English Verse, but along with over eight hundred other poems. So it was Pound who retrieved it.

A brief glossing:

Ourhailit/ overcome/ overwhelmed
Ourblawin/ blown over
Til/ to
Blin/ blind
Ingenrit/ engendered/born
Dauphin/ dolphin
Sawis/ sows
Throw/ through

And a confession. It was only after this whole commentary was almost done that I went to the notes in The Norton Anthology of Poetry and learned that “lichter nor a dauphin” meant “more wanton than a dolphin” and not, as I had assumed, simply “lighter” (more freely moving, more sportive).

II

Which gives more force to Yvor Winters’ comment (unamplified) that “the characterizing [two-line] description of Venus…is one of the greatest moments in our poetry,” and to his judgment that this is “one of the most extraordinary poems in our language.”

The poem is so animate, isn’t it? The dramatic scene-setting in the first line keeps up. We feel that figure, driven half crazy, out there running erratically, and no doubt falling or crouching from time, in the woods, like a dog on a scent—but the scent of what? Out there seeking, or out there trying to escape from inner turmoil?

And then we have the powerful firming up of the erotic, like in Ovid’s Metamorphoses perhaps, in which those physical gods (unnamed) are more than just metaphors, but are physically there, in the domesticating language of “bairn” and “wife,” the child accessible to moral condemnation like an ordinary spoiled kid, and then the erotic evocation of roundness and smoothness and shining slipperiness of the body rejoicing in the amoral freedom of its own medium.

“Fra bank to bank” and Rossetti’s “The Woodspuge” make an interesting pair.

III

Some thoughts about language.

From the age of ten until sixteen I was “taught” Latin. I know no Latin. I never have. I cannot read the shortest Latin epigram by Martial or Catullus. The only benefit of that pedagogical experience was to make me sympathize later with students to whom poems that are “obvious” to so-called literates may be almost as obscure as Latin.

In high-school we did our homework on Chaucer’s Prologue the way we did it with Latin, looking up the meanings of words and trying to remember them. I’m sure we weren’t allowed to write them down in the textbook. It would have been bad for our “character,” and probably the textbooks had to be handed in at the end of the term. At Oxford, where we did Anglo-Saxon and Middle-English texts in the same glossary fashion, we were at least able to write the equivalents down. I vandalized my first edition of Sweet’s horrible Anglo-Saxon Reader in that way.

No-one ever helped us to read the texts aloud with a more or less correct pronunciation. In consequence, we entirely failed to acquire the awareness that writers in those tongues weren’t trying to be obscure or, necessarily, saying profound things beyond our comprehension. (It takes an effort, I find, when passing young people in the street speaking Chinese—Cantonese? Mandarin?— to realize that they’re probably just talking about what they had for lunch or who’s going to win the game.) And when we don’t understand them, individual words become overloaded with significance.

We didn’t get a sufficient sense of the need at times for a suspended judgment, a hovering over the meaning of a word in a particular line, a recognition that someone writing in a seemingly reasonable manner might not have suddenly lapsed into something incongruous—a false rhyme, a broken metre, a (to modern ears) screwy adjective.

IV

I have glossed some of the words in Boyd’s sonnet. This may reduce slightly the romantic aura of the poem, the buzz of imperfect understanding (as my own was when I first read it, and for some time afterwards). But the power of statement, the muscular summarizing assertions about complex experiences increases as the literal meaning firms up.

How far there is a peculiarly “Scottish” sensibility in these voicings about Love, I am in no position to judge, being only one thirty-second part Scottish by birth (though with a good deal of Scottish romanticism during my boyhood—Flodden Field, Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Hundred Pipers and a’ and a’). If there’s any Cornish poetry, or glamorous Cornish heroics, I’ve yet to hear about them. I myself am half Cornish. D.H. Lawrence loathed the Cornish. I guess there’s something to be said for myth-making about one’s “roots.” But my father didn’t go in for it and I’ve never been to Scotland.

V

Among the worthwhile things that we could have got from all that Latin, but didn’t (or from preparation for the dreaded paper on the English Language in the final exams at Oxford) was a sense of the expressive structure of words and the importance of noting their etymologies when looking up their dictionary “meanings.” I had to figure out for myself many years later, as I say elsewhere, that there are significant differences in meaning between terms like “investigate” and “look into,” “exterminate” and “wipe out.” And that poets with a reasonably full sense of the language make use of that.

But at least we did, back in highschool, encounter the juxtaposition of “incarnadine” and “making red” in Macbeth’s great soliloquy.

VI

A self-cautionary afterthought.

Some months ago my friend from highschool days, the lighting expert and Quaker peace-activist John Lynes, asked me to tape some technical passages from Chaucer in connection with a lecture that he was preparing. And when I went to the Web and a book or two for guidance, I found that in fact the guides sometimes differed.

It occurred to me that asking what the pronounciation of Chaucer would have been when he wrote is a bit like asking what the pronounciation of Yeats’ “Among School Children” would have been in the 1930’s. It would depend on where the speaker was coming from, wouldn’t it, place-wise and class-wise? And London in the late fourteenth-century was home to people from a variety of English regions.

For that matter, what would be the right way of pronouncing the words in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”?

VII

So it’s indeterminacy time again, then, is it? No, simply a matter of an acceptable looseness and a variety of overlapping systems. And you can still say that some readings are more consistent, and more expressive, and sound better than others.

Good poems can be read well in a variety of regional and cultural voices. Five of my seminar students once presented me at the end of the year, out of the blue, with a recording of Shakespeare’s sonnet “That time of year thou may’st in me behold,” which they had taped, one to each pair of lines, plus a final chorus, as a country-and-western. They sang it straight, and it really helped the poem.

I suspect that Charles Bronson—yes, the “action” movie actor—could read poetry well.

Certain kinds of regional or urban voices, with nasty nasal sounds in them and gulped consonants, can be a problem, as is my own. But one can overcome them, for poetry-reading purposes, with a tape-recorder and a bit of patience.

My own advice to students was: Keep enough air in your lungs, speak beyond the mike as if to someone on the other side of the room (meaning, don’t confide to the mike and assume the volume can be brought up later), don’t speed up as you approach the ends of a line (hey, gotta get on to the next one), don’t speak louder or faster when you want to convey emotion, and, if the verse is so-called regular verse, make sure that you haven’t “lost” any syllables in a line.

VIII

Yvor Winters talks importantly about some higher-level aspects of metre in his essay “The Audible Reading of Poetry.” Personally, with one or two exceptions, especially “At the San Francisco Airport,” I find his performances of his own poems a bit programmatically glum for my tastes, like a number of the photos of country people by Paul Strand. But he reads some poems by Williams, Pound, and Stevens magnificently, among them Pound’s “Lament of the Frontier Guard,” by which he was obviously deeply moved, and Williams’ “The Sea Elephant,” and his readings of Hopkins and some earlier poems are metrically impeccable.

His principles (at work also in readings by J.V. Cunningham) apply, with a bit of loosening, to a number of good readings by other poets, Frost and Stevens among them. Cunningham reads best, or at least with deepest feeling, a short passage from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.

Spencer Tracy’s advice to younger actors, according to one of them, was, “Know your lines, speak them to the other person—and mean them.” Which presumably means knowing what’s intended at every point, and not just trying to create a blur of emotion.

Coffee (J.V. Cunningham)

I

I have been familiar with this poem since the late 1950s but still don’t feel that I “know” it all.

Is she away temporarily or permanently? Has he fallen asleep downstairs in a chair perhaps? The word is “dusk,” not “dark.” And yet it feels like what can happen when you wake up in bed in the small hours. The glass may be window-pane glass, or the kind you hold in your hand, may it not? Or both.

The idea of “fleeing” not in order to escape one’s self but to “transpose” is complex. Transpose what?

Escaping from the self seems to suggest trying to forget or shut out whatever painful thoughts are in one’s consciousness at the time. Transposing, then, may be transposing experiences into words and making them more objective, and more endurable. As writing can do. Islands of order. Even, perhaps, archipelagos of order.

Wasting time by not doing what he ought to be doing? Such as preparing classes? Writing publishable articles? Working on a book? In any event, we have the true-feeling evocation of the freed mind (not simply the formless continuum of grey-outs) as a state in which new perceptions and structurings can start forming—with that blessed feeling of being wholly there in a piece of writing that’s going well.

II

“Serious” six-syllable poems are rare. But the lines here don’t skip or stalk.

Note how the first three may indeed suggest a continuing regularity, but then the fourth line isn’t something like, “I felt the breath of fear” (period), and how the enrichment of that “dusk” with the kinesthetic “rolled” is continued in “Not light or dark but drear.”

And then, in a way that Yeats was master of, what looks for a moment like a closure (a sentence having reached potential conclusion at the end of a line), we’re carried forward into the more complex “Unabsolute, unshaped.”

And a line or two further on, we have a similar carry-over whereby “escape,” which it is natural to associate first off with “from,” locks into “Myself,” so that that too gets weighted a bit.

In all this, the potential tidiness of the “form” is overridden expressively.

Enough about technicals.

III

Both in Cunningham’s The Exclusions of a Rhyme (1960) and his Collected Poems and Epigrams (1971) and the slimmer The Exclusions of a Rhyme (1960), “Coffee” comes immediately before the very different “To a Friend, on her Examination for the Doctorate in English,” which begins with octosyllabic couplets that my own mind persists in recalling as iambic pentameters.

It ends eighteen lines later with:

That did not seem to me, at the time, all that great a pay-off for all those dusty hours (and what, a Leavisian might ask, was a literary fact?) But later on, when I had supervisory dealings myself with students, there seemed to be more to be said for achieving “What ignorance cannot assail/Or daily novelty amaze/, Knowledge enforced by firm detail.” And the poem came to feel like a comfort poem for that rite de passage situation, just as Edward Gorey’s Mr. Earbrass Writers a Novel (in his Amphigorey) had been one when I was writing a book myself.

In any event, here were, and are, two poems and two aspects of the life of the mind and the self, one of them intensely private, shutting out the encumbering externalities, the other acknowledging that Caesar and academe exist, that structures are necessary, and that their importance, as ideals, can be independent of the particular fools or scholars who have power inside them.

Night Piece (J.V. Cunningham)

I

The title presumably echoes the title of Robert Herrick’s well-known, or at least well-anthologized, “The Night-piece: To Julia,” just as Cunningham’s “Monday Morning” and “New York; 5 March, 1957” no doubt echo for a number of readers Wallace Stevens “Sunday Morning” and W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” (“I sit in one of the dives/On Fifty-Second street”).

But the presumably marital quiet of Cunningham’s night-piece is very different from the elaborate carpe diem eroticism of Herrick’s poem, with its urging of her to come to him, my love, come to him unafraid through the dark rural night so that he can pour his soul onto her silvery and presumably bare feet.

Which of course would be part of the point, just as the “I” of “New York, 5 March 1957” is very different from the “I” of Auden’s poem, who is skittering apprehensively across the socio-political European landscape with war just a couple of days away.

It is interior spaces that we enter in:

And the halting rhythms are different from those of “Night-Piece,” as are (I hardly need spell it out) the states of being.

II

Cunningham put the two poems, originally separate, together in Collected Poems and Epigrams.

Had he been thinking of the relationship between the two when he “wrote” whichever was the second of them? I haven’t the slightest idea, nor would I know what that hypothesized thinking would feel like. I mostly don’t even know what my own thinking, at least in any describable fashion, feels like before it issues in words. And the writing of a poem can extend across several years until the poet has a text that satisfies him or her, during most of which time she or he may never be thinking about the poem at all.

But of course when you read Cunningham’s hundred epigrams, so various and so rich, you can indeed talk about the “mind” in them, meaning the different kinds of experiencing and organizing that go on in—in, not behind, them.

And the “low” parts—the bitterness and contempt at times, the “ordinary” sexuality—feel as real, as existentially concentrated, as do the “higher” ones.

Neither undercuts the other as being the “real” self. Any more than Edgar Bowers’ moving “Wandering” (about presumably “gay” loneliness and pick-ups in Europe) undercuts the Bowers of the magisterial “From William Tyndale to John Frith,” with its celebration of intellectual heroism in the face of a horrible death, or the Mallarméan purity and difficulty of “Witnesses.”

Personally I prefer the Cunningham of the poems, and feel closer to him there than I do with the prose, which tends to be a bit quirky and dodgy at times. Whereas with Winters I am most excited, for the most part, by stretches in the prose, stretches often that have the compactness and weight and shapeliness that we tend to think of as peculiar to poetry or to short fiction.

The Sun Rising (John Donne)

I

The greater immediacy of this poem over Donne’s more ingenious “The Good Morrow” is partly formal, the varying line lengths and the placement of the lines being functional, as you can see if you left-align them all, as I’ve had to do at one point while getting things ready for the webmaster.

The poem is a lesson in metrics.

Note how different the first two lines in each stanza feel. And yet the marvelously mock-arrogant, swift-moving “Busy old fool, unruly sun” and the lyrically affirmative “She’s all states, and all princes, I” have the same number of syllables.

Note too how the flat, unqualified “Nothing else is.” (i.e., exists) is made more dramatic by its departure from the question form in the lines in the two previous stanzas that correspond to it.

Note, also, how each stanza comes to a momentary completion at the end of the fourth line (an opening eight-syllable line, a four-syllable one, and two ten-syllable ones, with enclosing rhymes—sun/ run). And then we progress from eight-syllable again (“Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide,” etc.) through to the magnificent clinching affirmations of the two concluding ten-syllable lines in each stanza.

You also have, or at least I do, the curious feeling that the last two lines in each stanza are longer—have more syllables in them—then the preceding two, though in fact the syllable count is the same.

This partly comes from the difference between the brisk directness of “Call country ants to harvest offices,” the slowing down with the more complex syntax of “Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime” (with an inescapable slight pause after the diphthong “knows” (in the previous line it’s all short vowels), and then the four-step effect of “Nor hours, days, months,” each word receiving slightly more stress, expressively, than the one before it.

II

All this has the flow of natural speech, so that noting the features that I’ve done is simply a way of preparing the poem better for oral performance. The poem may feel “dramatic” (you’re there), but you’re not peeping through the keyhole at the two lovers in bed, or overhearing a blank verse soliloquy. This is a brilliantly shaped evocation of sexual exhilaration.

It also, to my mind, feels more persuasive than “The Good Morrow” since it’s not being addressed to Her (“What’s he talking about, I wonder? Ah, well, if it makes him happy! He’s such a sweetie”) but to the sun shining into their actual window, with no hint of any anxiety or approaching departure. So that this is not an aubade (a dawn poem of going back to your own cold bed), but a poem of marriage, maybe the morning after the first night of marriage.

And the real elements of the world outside the room— kings, princes, apprentices, schoolboys, harvesters, merchant ships—aren’t metamorphosed into so-called metaphysical conceits, like the famous pair of compasses and the beaten gold in “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.” They’re simply transcended by the inner experience of the two lovers, no doubt naked, as was the custom then.

I see, on dipping into my two-volume Norton Anthology of English Literature, that “offices” deserves to be glossed as chores or duties, and that the East Indies were where spices came from, the West Indies where gold came from. But in any event, I don’t think one’s going to form an image of ants sitting at desks. I assume that they’ll be carrying off fallen grain.

Winters seems right to me in preferring “A Valediction; of My Name in the Window” to “A Valediction Forbidding Morning.”

The title “The Sun Rising” was appropriated by Carol Hoorn Fraser for a painting of hers in the late Fifties.

Sur les Lagunes / On the Lagoons (Théophile Gautier)

I

There are other lovely and/or memorable poems or parts of poems in Gautier’s Emaux et Camées (Enamels and Cameos, 1852-1872) from which this poem comes, a book brought to many anglophone readers’ attention by Ezra Pound’s praise of it, and which I myself first read in the kind of French edition that I describe in the comments on “Hymne.”

“Carmen est maigre” (“Carmen is thin”) is probably the best-known of them now, at least for English-speaking readers, again because of Pound. See those lines in his “To a Friend Writing on Cabaret Dancers,

Pound did have an extraordinary ability to dramatize writing and make you want more of it.

But the three opening stanzas of “Ce que disent les hirondelles” (“What the swallows say”) are unmatched in their succinct evocation of the tristesse of autumn.

And “Sur les lagunes,” with its interpenetration of past and present, and its graceful eroticism, evokes brilliantly that theatrical venusian city, “joyeuse et libre,” joyous and free, that demonstrated that it was possible to be in major decline (“Once didst thou hold the gorgeous East in fee”; said Byron) without succumbing to guilt and despair.

II

My edition of Emaux et Camées, dated 1892, is the one with the “eau-forte par Jacquemart” (the frontispiece etching of Gautier’s head) that Pound alludes to in Hugh Selwyn Mauberly. I found it in 1964 in the large student-oriented Gibert bookstore on the Boulevard St-Michel, at a normal used-book price. Sometimes works become semi-mythical when they’re referred to, without any details, in another work, so that you’re surprised to find them still existing, like some 1920s jazz musician you’d assumed was long dead.

A friend, reading my translation, suggested “which a silly, sighing breeze/Has wafted into the ballet,” “The domes across the azure lagoon,” and “on a marble staircase,” and reversing the order of the third and fourth lines of the poem.

But while we may indeed know that the water is the water of the lagoon, Gautier’s term is waves, and those waves, or at least that water in motion, are what your eyes see as you look across them. You don’t see lagoon, which is more wide angle.

Similarly, when you step out from the gondola onto the marble, that’s what your feet feel.

Gautier also doesn’t seem to want adjectival clusters in which concepts overlap, as in “silly sighing breeze.” It’s still “un soupir de folle brize”ˆ—a noun plus a very specific kind of breeze or wind that’s done the transporting or carrying. (Whether soupir here should really be “breath” or “sigh” is another matter.)

In the first stanza, the energy of the air/tune/melody would be diminished by putting its qualities after whatever it did to our mamas. We would also lose, slightly, the hint of its being a sexual charmer when we read the fourth line before the third. Poems exist in time. With each rereading, one has to shut out once again one’s knowledge of what is coming later.

III

The adjectives in the poem, the signifiers of qualities, are all very simple. The charm comes in other ways.

Part of the weight of the poem results from the fact that every stanza is structured differently, almost as if each were a miniature poem. Look at the first lines in each, whether in the original or in the translation.

And look at the verbs—not a single “is” or “are,” all action, things being done to things— knowing, pleasing, carrying, playing, rising, following, swelling, landing, depositing, living, vibrating, restoring. A perfect demonstration of what Ernest Fenollosa said in his great essay “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” about the importance of active verbs, as he had discovered for himself while reading Shakespeare.

It might be interesting to compare the verbs in Emaux et Camées with those in Eliot’s Poems of 1920, indebted as he and Pound explicitly were at that time to Gautier.

As to which indebtedness on Eliot’s part, see, for example Gautier’s “Carmen is thin, A touch of kohl/ Outlines her gypsy eye” and Eliot’s “Grishkin is nice. Her Russian eye/Is underlined for emphasis.” The opening line of “Sur les Lagunes” is quoted in the epigraph to Eliot’s “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar.”

IV

Here is the opening of Gautier’s “Ce que disent les Hirondelles; chanson d’automne”:

The frisson here, the literal shiver, is intensified in “Hälfte des Lebens” by the great German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin:

The shivery last three lines are a perfect condensed imagist poem. But they wouldn’t have their full weight without what’s preceded them.

V

Is it just me, or is the fall more poetical than the spring?

Hopkins gave us “Spring,” and Chaucer sent his pilgrims off in April, and of course there’s that return-to-life stuff of the Elizabethans, and Hardy charmingly told us what weather the cuckoo liked.

But Keats’ “To Autumn,” the poems here, Lawrence’s “The Ship of Death,” Weill’s “September Song,” Rilke’s “Autumn Day,” McAllister’s “Rites of Autumn,” Ella Fitzgerald and Joe Pass’s “’Tis Autumn”—a strong team.

Oh, and also that poem by Onakatomi Yoshinobu, as translated by Arthur Waley, that Winters calls “the finest English poem which we have from the Japanese:

I guess the fall is more weighted with memories and residues. And what is at work slowly destroying the good things is more inexorable and alien than what flows up from the earth in league with the spring sun.

Counting the Beats (Robert Graves)

Robert Graves was, of course, the twentieth-century British poet celebrating love, and this is his best love poem and, for my money, his best poem, period, and it is very lovely. It benefits from being so general in description (simply “he,” “she,” “here”) that we’re not drawn into an involvement with the rather quirky “character” that we have in Graves, whether in his ironical mode, his presentation of himself as the servant of the Goddess, or his costume dramas.

The poem is remarkably aural, starting with that “(He whispers),” so that we are in a kind of undimensioned space of emotional being, a sort of aural cave whose walls we can’t see, and where the quick-moving first stanza is followed by the increasingly slow-moving second stanza, where you expect the syntax to change as it does in the first stanza, but in fact the same basic assertion is made more slowly in the second line (there’s almost a one-two-three-four-step ascension in “the slow heart beats,” where the ‘weaker’ syllable “heart” is stronger than the strong syllable “slow”) and then more slowly still in the third line, with that “bleeding” now suggesting the dripping as well as the pulsing of blood.

You then have the momentary expansion and lightening of “Cloudless day,” and then that storm bursting from the bitter sky. And the next two stanzas go on from there, coping with that knowledge of finitude, and then back to the perhaps now slightly altered feeling of the repeated second stanza—altered because of their joint recognition of that finitude. It’s now the two of them who have been individuated (she’s asking in the fourth stanza) rather than he alone doing the conventional love-asserting in the first stanza.

For a sense of the poem’s uniqueness, here is another love poem by Graves, one with its own charm, and with a curious metre that I won’t even attempt to define:

The Going (Thomas Hardy)

I

I have loved this poem for over thirty years.

Note the song-like effect of the so-called feminine rhymes in the shortened fifth and sixth lines of each stanza (“follow”/”swallow”), also the shift in every other stanza into what would be the second melody in a song, whether by Cole Porter or Lennon/McCartney.

Note, too, the questions in the first, third, and fifth stanzes, and the statements in the second, fourth, and sixth.

Note also the evocative particularity of “saw morning harden upon the wall” (the wall becoming clearer in the growing light) and of “And reigning nigh me,/Would muse and eye me” (separate from him, there in her own private space).

Note, too, the staccato rhythms of the first three-and-a-half lines of the final stanza, and then the sudden flow forward in the rest of it, enacting the speed of that going.

II

There’s a poem by a bad Victorian poet, Coventry Patmore, that begins:

No doubt Hardy had read it. Patmore was well known back then.

I can imagine the kind of reader who instinctively tries to reduce the intensity in works saying, or thinking, “Aha! So Hardy was being literary” (like the rest of us no doubt). But not all the experiences in literary works come from other literary works.

If anything, the sanctimonious selfishness of that passage might have sharpened Hardy’s determination to set down exactly how things were, and felt, in his own case.

The Haunter (Thomas Hardy)

I

So skillfully is it done, and so functionally, that one may not notice at first that in this marvelous poem, which Yvor Winters rightly judges superior to “The Voice” from the same group, the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth rhyme words are identical from stanza to stanza.

“The Voice “ is a straightforward, plangent articulation of loss and yearning, the yearning to see her again, for her to be there again::

And so on.

“The Haunter” is more complex.

II

He (the speaker? the poet? Hardy?) is conscious of his own emotional inadequacy while she was alive, when he wasn’t speaking the words of love or wanting to do things together with her. And now we have a complex re-seeing of himself, missing her deeply, and wishing she were with him, and speaking to her remembered presence, a seeing presented with a novelistic firmness—he’s wandering restlessly, talking to her, revisiting places where they had been together.

And, in a major further imagining, she is there, speaking, thinking, feeling the words of the poem, attending on him, caring for him, close enough for him to touch if only she were visible.

So she is restored as loving him and forgiving him for his shortcomings, and also he (the maker of the poem) has recreated her, lovingly. It is a poem of comforting, with a sense of her real presence still, not the delusional sounds of the voice, or the more distanced and psychologically detailed figure of Hardy’s “The Going.”

(Nicholas Poburko has brought Montale’s “Xenia” to my attention at this point.)

III

The last stanza of “The Haunter” is particularly poignant. And who is it who is being asked to do that telling and making? A deity? I don’t imagine so.

But I do think we have a recognition of the naturalness of yearning at times for someone else to be there, and how that yearning is a fitting and not a foolish stabilizing of values. So that we are not being invited to feel ironical here about the desire for something else, some “beyond,” but respectful towards her desire (which could, after all, be felt by someone who wasn’t dead) that he be comforted.

So it’s not as if death were simply a passing into a black hole with a door slammed shut on it, or an utterly empty space, the postulated empty space of mechanistic science in those days. Death involves memory, people live on in memory, the dead do not go away all at once like a candle flame snuffed out. As Virginia Woolf knew in To the Lighthouse.

IV

The slightly rocking rhythm, with its alternation of the longer lines with their feminine endings and the shorter ones with their masculine ones (“nightly”/ “know”) is both comforting and functional.

We have a flow-forward of action in the longer ones—“He does not think that I haunt here nightly//That whither his fancy sets him wandering// Hover and hover a few feet from him// But never answer a word he lifts me.” And then a kind of pausing, not always the same, in the shorter ones— “How shall I let him know?// I too alertly go// Just as I used to do// Only listen thereto.

The repeated words in each stanza help to establish that this is not a narrative situation that is leading somewhere, to some kind of resolution or closure. He is there and she is here and it isn’t going to change. But it isn’t going to change, or at least her feelings for him aren’t going to.

It’s a kind of reverse love poem, in contrast to the far more common pattern of a male speaker swearing his own undying love and accusing the lovee of unresponsiveness or fickleness—the fear of being no longer loved; perhaps, the fear of not being worthy of being loved.

There’s something in Paul Tillich’s theological writing somewhere about being accepted because unacceptable.

V

“The Voice,” “The Haunter,” and “The Going” are three of the more than twenty “Poems of 1912/13,” written by Hardy shortly after the death of his first wife, Emma, all in different stanza forms, without a sonnet among them.

The cumulative effect could be called novelistic, or perhaps cinematic, at least if we’re speaking of the script—a variety of “takes” upon a marriage that had been happy initially but fairly soon went sour. Philip Larkin, whose favourite poet Hardy seems to have been, said that she had thought that she was marrying a successful young professional man and he had thought he was marrying an intelligent and well-read woman, and both were disappointed.

It is tempting, I imagine, to treat those poems as if they were part of a piece of fiction, and to build up the whole, or perhaps I should say a whole, relationship from them. And so strong is Hardy’s poetic personality (with over seven hundred poems to his name) that holding back seems a bit, well, ungrateful perhaps?

Especially with the added drama, as we know it, of his literary career—the slow start as a novelist, the big success when it came, the increasing melancholy of the fiction, especially Tess of the Durbervilles and Jude the Obscure, the return to poetry, the long and still responsive/creative old age, warmed by the admiration of much younger writers, including Ezra Pound and Robert Graves, neither of them notably tolerant of their elders.

Graves wrote a poem about Hardy’s near-contemporary Robert Bridges (“The Laureate”) that opens with, “Like a lizard in the sun, though not scuttling/ When men approach, this wretch, this thing of rage, Scowls and sits rhyming in his horny age.” (No, “horny” doesn’t have a sexual connotation here.)

But the poems of 1912/13 are mostly not all that good. Sorry, but they’re not, useful though they may be as material for The Hardy Story. This isn’t one of those situations like the one with Cunningham’s hundred epigrams where some are much better than others but none, I think, is bad, so that you really can feel the play of intelligence without them falling into any kind of narrative or philosophical sequence.

The best of the 1912/13 poems seem to me to be, in addition to the two here, “After a Journey,” “Without Ceremony,” “Your Last Drive,” and “The Shadow on the Stone.” I wouldn’t have known of “The Shadow on the Stone” if it hadn’t been one of the ten poems that Winters and Fields included in the impeccable selection of Hardy’s poems in their anthology Quest for Reality.

VI

However, those best ones are marvellous, particularly when taken together.

And they can be all the more moving if you have read Hardy’s novels, particularly Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge (his best one), Tess of the Durbervilles, and Jude the Obscure, in which the biggest constant is a feeling of unworthiness, a sense of having committed some primary wrong, perhaps to another person, such that you have no right to subsequent happiness

Plus, too, a primitive supernaturalism, despite all the denials of it, wherein you, whether as character or spectator, just know that someone or some thing is going to make sure that you are punished—punished for the sin of hubris, of rising (perhaps not always by admirable means) above your social or moral status.

All of which can make the novels irritating, despite the famous passages of good writing in the first two that I named, and the solid construction of The Mayor of Casterbridge. It’s as if the exasperating Sue Bridehead of Jude the Obscure, struggling to be a liberated new woman, but unable to sustain emotionally the burden of the heretical new ideas, had had a hand in their composition.

So it’s a comfort to feel in Hardy’s best poems, of which there are a substantial number, a mind that is working freely and without predetermined positions and feelings, and which owes that freedom in part to his quasi- musical enjoyment of the expressive possibilities of stanzaic forms, often forms of his own creating.

It’s an especial pleasure experiencing not only the flow of feeling in the best of the 1912/13 poems, but also, when it happens, a kind of self-acceptance and self-forgiveness, a reviving, perhaps, of an earlier and better self, or of one of those selves.

VII

In such poems, “After a Journey” prominent among them, it’s as if we have, as we do at times in To the Lightbouse, “existential” renderings of particular good states of being, of moral consciousness (not necessarily entirely happy) whose worth is not affected by either what has come before them or what may come after them. You can’t ironize them, as you could the happiness voiced in Donne’s “The Sun Rising” if you knew that the marriage went to hell the following year when he caught her in flagrante with the groom.

The poems at their best are the primary “Hardy” reality. If you came upon them without knowing anything about the author, they would not be enriched individually if you then read some of the novels.

And the Hardy who enjoyed being lionized by London society during the success of his early novels but kept his inner self always hidden, even in his letters, and who, as Larkin points out, destroyed documents and manipulated his image in the autobiography that appeared over the name of his second wife, is more elusive still.

If you want to have some idea of what that “inner” self was like, it’s back to the poems, where it’s most to be found.

“The Haunter” was a great comfort to me at one point. I can imagine its being comforting to others.

Church Monuments (George Herbert)

I

Yvor Winters singled out this poem, rightly, as one of the greatest in the language, and I talk about it in “Voicing ’Church Monuments’.”

I loved some of the other poems by Herbert when I read them as a first-year undergraduate, particularly the lines,

But on revisiting the copy of his works that I used then, I see that there are no pencil markings on “Church Monuments.” It must have appeared at that time a “merely” religious poem, rather than the kind of cross-over and modern-feeling poem celebrated by T.S.Eliot in his two influential essays “The Metaphysical Poets” and “Andrew Marvell.”

Thom Gunn has a funny piece of reminiscence somewhere about arriving at Stanford as a graduate student, fresh from Cambridge, and Winters, affably a host to him, inviting his opinion as to what were the best Renaissance poems, and Gunn naming the predictable Leavisian ones, Donne’s “Valediction” among them, no doubt, and Winters, doubtless amused behind his pipe and deadpan expression, because having known what would be coming, saying simply in that (to judge from his recordings) deep voice of his, “You are wrong.”

II

Back in the late 1940s, Winters was a shadowy figure in England, little more than a name, though a name praised on three occasions in Scrutiny, particularly in the course of a 1939 article by the American historian Henry Bamford Parkes, who said that “As a statement of critical principles Mr. Winters’ work deserves wide attention,” and who found his independent-minded judgments of particular (unnamed) authors “often convincing.”

But Winters’ books weren’t available in England, and I myself didn’t get to read anything by him until 1953, when I was enabled to emigrate to the States by the friendship of Mike and Norma Zwerin, who knew about Winters through their friendship with Donald Justice and owned a copy of In Defense of Reason. (Yes, that’s the Mike Zwerin who at age nineteen was the trombonist on over half the numbers in Miles Davis’s The Birth of the Cool sessions and later went on to become a brilliant and at times marvellously funny writer about jazz and other topics.).

I forget when Gunn went to Stanford, or when Donald Davie did, but Winters obviously became for a few younger British poets an important counterweight to Leavis.

Winters talked about far more poems, especially modern poems. He was deeply knowledgeable about the French Symbolist movement and about American poetry. He allowed much more room in his thinking for minor poems, including ones small almost to the point of invisibility. He was a poet himself. And he was passionately interested in the expressiveness of poetic form, including metrics.

I talk about the two critics on poetry in an article (“Leavis, Winters, and Poetry”) in which I find them closer together than might be supposed but conclude that Winters is the better guide to the subject.

It is a pity that Q.D. Leavis, for I imagine it would have been she, never wrote the review-article on Winters’ book about American fiction, Maule’s Curse, that F.R. Leavis seemed to be promising in 1945.

III

A lot has obviously turned on the continuing dichotomy of Romanticism and Classicism, and the particular obnoxiousness of Classicism’s vapid half-brother Neo.

Leavis, himself a classicist who could read Aeschylus in the original, knew, as did E.M. Forster, the harm that had been done by the public-school mens sana, dulce et decorum variety (sound mind in sound body, sweet and fitting to die for your country, Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier,” etc.), including the then powerful British academic hostility, in the name of good form, to the “roughness” of writers like Hopkins, Eliot, and Lawrence.

In his 1939 article, Parkes spoke of Winters’ off-putting inability at times “to distinguish between writers who achieve formal mastery through a genuine mastery of experience and those who use the traditional forms but never grapple with experience at all”—specifically Bridges, Elizabeth Daryush, and T. Sturge Moore, a trinity whose names have probably continued to haunt such reputation as Winters has in England.

Roy Campbell’s epigram about certain (unnamed) South African poets is almost too well-known to need quoting here, but I shall quote it.

You can see the same attitude lingering in the antithesis of heroically expressive Ted Hughes, with “experience” by the quart, vs. narrow-gutted Philip Larkin. But Larkin (“Oxford,” not “Cambridge”) is much the better poet, his poems far more deeply charged with significant feeling, and he himself, in the collection Further Requirements, an excellent critic of poetry.

I comment briefly on Bridges, Moore, and Daryush in the review-article “Winters’ Summa.” I have been unable to share Winters’ enthusiasm for them (the trouble with even Bridges’ best poems is that no problem-solving goes on in the course of them), but they are a very small part of the many good and great poems that Winters drew attention to over the years. On which see A New Book of Verse.

Morning Swim (Maxine Kumin)

I

I am grateful to Maxine Kumin (pronounced Kewmin) for her instantly given permission to a total stranger to use this lovely poem. I’m pleased to report that her Bringing Together; Uncollected Early Poems, 1958-1988 is now out.

II

The opening scene, in the first four couplets, is comfortably defamiliarized—out there alone and secret, nude, the everyday conceptual markers (sky/ water/ air) gone, the consciousness of “self” virtually coterminous with the shifting cocoon of visibility inside the whiteness.

And it’s a bit casual at the outset, the head “empty” (not fine-frenzying), the casually tossed adjective “cotton” (white and fuzzy?), the near-rhyme of “come”/ “wherefrom,” no capitalization of the second line, and a strong enjambment over to the next couplet, with one syllable less now in the third line, which throws a slightly increased emphasis on “oily,” balancing with “nude”.

The flexible rhyming (“come”/ “wherefrom,” “floor”/“air,” “out”/ “mouth”), the “omitted” syllables in several lines (“I set out, oily and nude,” etc), and the capitalization only at the start of sentences help keep it comfy.

III

There’s greater definiteness in the next three couplets, each self-contained, with the absolute absences, the strong night fog, the bathrobe, the pegs, the deliberate, slightly erotic entry into the water.

IV

And then we have the lovely lift-off into a merging with nature that reminds me, different though the poems are, of what goes on in Marvell’s still unique (and also erotic) “The Garden.” The poem is now driven forward with a more regular beat and more energetic verbs—“twitched,” “hummed,” “drank.”

And the quiet exhilaration of being absolutely there builds— the rhythm, the vibrato in the nasal passages, the thrash of the feet, the bubbles leaving the mouth, the water, the merging, and the feeling, voiced in the words of that majestic hymn, of being in an animate universe where there is something protective and benign and permanent beyond the immediately problematic present.

The hymn, though never a favourite of mine as a kid, comes back to me from that moving episode in the movie A Bridge Too Far in which wounded and exhausted British paratroopers at Aachen are waiting at dusk for their German captors to come and take possession of them, and a voice, no doubt Welsh, starts singing that hymn and slowly other voices join in.

Having just looked the words up on Google (by Henry F. Lyte, 1847), I wonder if that isn’t the greatest poem among the English-language hymns.

Is there a name for the interlinked repetition (syntactical parallelism) of “I hummed…I hummed,” “rose in…”?

V

I came upon Kumin’s poem in Philip Dacy and David Jauss’s Strong Measures; an Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms (1986).

There are other fine poems there, especially, for me:

Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” (“The art of losing isn’t hard to master”),

Martha Collins, “The Story We Know” (“The way to begin is always the same. Hello”),

Marilyn Hacker, “Sonnet Ending with a Film Subtitle” (“Life has its nauseating ironies”),

Joan LaBombard, “By the Beautiful Ohio” (“Now at the dark’s perpetual descent”),

Judith Moffett, “Mezzo Camin” (“I mean to mark the Midway Day”),

Theodore Roethke, “I Knew a Woman” (“I knew a woman, lovely in her bones”),

May Sarton, “Dutch Interiors” (“I recognize the quiet and the charm”).

I see, now, that all but one of those eight (nine, with Kumin’s) are by women. Perhaps there’s a lesson here about the notion that free verse is the most expressive and self-liberating, as in that dreadful anthology by Helen Vendler whose title I cannot now recall.

VI

The editors’ introduction to Strong Measures opens with the discouraging words, “The revolution is over. The war has been won. As Stanley Kunitz has said, ‘Non-metrical verse has swept the field.’”

But of course, as they go on to point out, it, hasn’t really, and they show that there’s plenty of opportunity for being playful, tender, grittily colloquial, and so forth, without any loss of one’s self, in poems that make some use of repeated patterns, including rhyme and metre, whether established or nonce.

They quote Maxine Kumin as saying finely: “The poems that are the hardest for me to write are the ones I work most passionately at getting into matching stanzaic patterns and rhyme schemes, because in a paradoxical way that liberates me to say the hardest truths.”

VII

It is a pity, though, that in their evident desire to foreground “accessible” works—particularly, I imagine, for the benefit of any students who might turn to the book—they have passed over the kinds of strong and more difficult poems by Edgar Bowers, Helen Pinkerton, Thom Gunn, and others that had been celebrated by Yvor Winters, for over three decades the most knowledgeable and emphatic American proponent of traditional forms. At least Bowers’ “Dark Earth and Summer,” Gunn’s “In Santa Maria del Poppolo,” and Alan Stephen’s “Prologue: Moments in a Glade,” with its awesome rattlesnake, wouldn’t have taken them too far beyond their preferred range.

The selection from Cunningham could have been stronger too (how about “Coffee,” “Doctor Drink”, and “To My Wife”?). And Winters’ own “At the San Francisco Airport” and “Two Old-Fashioned Songs” fell within their chosen post WWII period.

One reason I keep mentioning Winters is my dislike of the strategy of demonstrating one’s own originality by refraining from mentioning this or that “controversial” and pioneering (which is to say, risk-taking) figure from whom one has in fact learned a lot.

Incidentally, right from the start he saw quality, not gender. Here are some names of, at the time, living poets whom he praised: Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Mina Loy, Maurine Smith, Adelaide Crapsey, Louise Bogan, Pearl Andelson Sherry, Elizabeth Daryush, Janet Lewis, Agnes Lee, Ann Stanford, Ellen Kay, Catherine Davis, Helen Pinkerton.

VIII

Annie Finch’s anthology A Formal Feeling Comes (1994) consists entirely of more or less formal poems by living women. The writers’ accounts of why they have been swimming against the tide are interesting reading, especially Caroline Kizer’s robust assertion that “One of the problems of free verse…is that it is damned hard to remember.… Memorization, I believe, should go hand in hand with the reading and learning of poems.” Her own “A Muse of Water” is probably the most technically accomplished poem in the book.

My own other two favourites are Marilyn Hacker’s splendid multi-stanza re-doing of the strategy of Villon’s “Où sont les neiges d’antan” in terms of well-known women more generally from across the centuries, and her “Dusk: July,” in sapphics, a love poem that actually feels like the utterance of someone in love.

Everything Tells Me You Are Near (W.S. Landor)

I feel proprietary about this poem. I came upon it in an old multi-volume edition of Landor, sort of scrunched down in a corner (the poem, I mean), with ugly lineation and typography—unloved, you might say. The first two lines alone are worth having the poem for.

Through Google I’ve recently learned of the huge Château de Chantilly, some twenty miles north of Paris, set in the heart of what one of the tourist sites calls a vast estate in one of the largest forests near the city, actually three forests (Chantilly, Halette, Emenonville). So “forests,” plural, is the right term in the poem.

There were elaborate gardens, with a canal, fountains, a cascade or two, and smaller houses, including, no doubt, play-houses like the Petit Trianon at Versailles. It all sounds rather Fragonard. With lots of art in the Château.

So she hadn’t just stopped off at some country inn for a bit of picnicking. And what he’s calling her back to is quiet and intimate—that little grotto, those tiny twisted horns, her flowers. Are he and she cohabiting (they’re our fields), or is he simply living in the same village?

The editor had given the poem, in brackets, the title of “To a Lady in France,” which implies that he’s writing from England. But everything tells him she is near, so that can’t be the case.

What sort of date? Landor was born in 1775, the poem feels mature, there’s no hint of political troubles. So it would have to be nineteenth century.

I suppose I could go and do a bit of research in the dark stacks. When was he living in France? I see I’m assuming that the poem was addressed to an actual woman.

The Mower to the Glow Worms (Andrew Marvell)

I

One of the most charming older poems of serious play.

Tiny but magical natural phenomena—glow-worms, with a dash of nightingale and will-of-the-wisp—are recruited into a love poem as lamps, comets, and lantern-bearers (or torch-bearers), and bring with them the larger activities of the social world out there beyond the immediacy of this love-relationship, this man waiting for his lady love to come to him through the rural night. Singers work at their singing, comets reveal, or are thought to reveal, impending disasters, men make mistakes in their sexual seekings.

II

Note the high-pitched diphthongs of the rhyme words in the first stanza (“ay” is higher pitched than “igh,” beginning nearer the front and top of the mouth and being more pinched). And then we have the drop-down in the second stanza with “end” and “all.” And then a rise again to “ay” in both rhymes in the third stanza (unless there was a change in pronunciation over the years). And the lift-up continues at the start of the final stanza in the celebratory assertion about Juliana, with a comfortable drop down into what would surely have been “ohm”/ “ohm.”

III

The final stanza is an especially lovely expression of happiness, no less real-feeling for being spoken by a conventional pastoral character.

He’s not one of those overworked shepherds, though, but a mower. And there are grasses there to fall at some point, perhaps to this particular mower’s scythe, but with a slight speech emphasis, surely, on “grasses,” it being at this point only the death of grasses, not of soldiers or princes. And nightingales sing, and glow-worms glow, and this is real country, and you can imagine being out there walking in it yourself at night.

The offered torch-bearer services aren’t needed because now that she’s come (physically? into his life?) he doesn’t care where he is.

IV

Thomas Hardy liked glowworms, to judge from the memorable scene in The Return of the Native in which two characters throw dice at night out on the heath by their light, with, after a bit, a ring of free-grazing ponies looking in on them.

It is a poetic episode, a beautiful nexus of attitudes and feelings that it might be hard to put into plainer words but gives you the impression that it either evolved as it was being written, initially minus the glow worms, let alone the ponies, or had come in a flash, an image in the mind’s eye—gambling/ glow-worms/a peculiarly human competitiveness?

V

You really can’t avoid using the P word (“poetic”) in that sense, can you? But what does it mean, or what do I myself mean when I use it? I still don’t really know. And I certainly can’t offer a definition.

But maybe there’s a heightened feeling of being there, in that moment or brief stretch of time, with old structures falling away, and something new and unexpected and sort of marvelous or beautiful going on, what the French call l’insolite, the unusual, the unprecedented. Something that you can’t simply arrive at methodically.

And oh dear, yes, there are indeed moments when a new and important configuration is suddenly seen or sensed in a glimpse, a flash (more overworked metaphors), as in “inspiration,” a breathing into or inhaling.

In the movie Topsy-Turvey there’s that lovely moment when the utterly “impossible” W.S. Gilbert, now by the looks of it terminally blocked in his efforts to come up with a fresh idea for a libretto, suddenly glimpses a shape that will, as it turns out, generate his and Arthur Sullivan’s best work, The Mikado.

We’re not given any details. All we see is the change, the relaxing, coming over that tense unlovely face, and the eyes widening slightly as if he’s now glimpsing beyond, and a tiny smile starts to form. And then, pow!, we’re given a sunburst of music from the completed opera in performance.

It’s mysterious, but there’s no mystification. He is holding the partly sheathed sword with which he’s been imitating Japanese swordplay, after buying it at the exhibition where he and patient Kitty have seen a scrap of Kabuki-type theatre. And we know that somewhere for him now is the nexus “sword/beheading” that’s at the centre of the plot.

VI

I guess there’s some overlap here with that state that J.V. Cunningham talks about in “Coffee” where the mind becomes temporarily unencumbered and unconstrained, and there’s neither fear nor haste (both of them past- and future-driven), and something new can start forming in the present. After which, of course, it’s a lot of bloody hard work again.

VII

There are words, “beautiful,” and “poetic” among them, that you really shouldn’t try to define and tame and put to work dragging a cart. You can’t construct a worthwhile aesthetic system around the idea of beauty. But woe to art—or to your aesthetic—if you never want to exclaim, in a sort of verbal equivalent of the spontaneous laugh that acknowledges that something’s funny, “That’s beautiful!”

Rites of Autumn (Claire McAllister)

I

It was a thrill coming upon this magnificent poem in the Partisan Review in 1954, all the more because I had been able to have two or three conversations with the author five years before.

It simply pulses with colour, and warmth, and light. If I had to choose for a desert island, I’d consider taking this lusher and more Southern-feeling autumn in preference to Keats’s statelier and by now perhaps a bit shopworn one. It’s all so animate—the lights grazing, lamps flickering, trees blazing, corncobs grinning. “The pheasant tails that streaked across the wind/ Come streaking through the wheatfields of the mind”—marvelous! You can feel the fruit growing red and round and ripe, smell the burning underbrush.

The nearest visual analogies to the richness of the poem are in some of the great 1980s series of watercolours by Carol Hoorn Fraser (see “Trees” on the CHF side of this site).

And it’s not all scene-painting. There is, as Leavis might have said, an individual sensibility there, meaning that you can feel her feeling the year passing, and other things too, and they are her own feelings and experiencings and you can’t simply move in with your own all ready to slot into place—a “romantic,” intensely, but a self-aware romantic.

It’s a celebration of plenitude and continuity, but with a consciousness of possible losses, and of the passing of the straightforwardly imaginative adventurings of youth, at times literally gun in hand.

And it builds to those memorable generalizations in the fourth and fifth stanzas, most of which have stayed with me, the way that ones by Yeats and Auden have, since I first read the poem.

II

The management of the stanzas is magisterial, and I have only just realized something.

The effect I’d noticed was the result of the shortened “Grew red and round and ripe,” and then the stepped indentation that makes you feel that those lines are sort of stretching away from you, so that you have to follow them to see where you are going. And so, perhaps, you want them to be a bit shorter so that you don’t have to chase too far after them.

In any event, you do come back to the more four-square assertions of the first four lines in each stanza. And there’s an increased momentum in almost all of them, vis-à-vis the preceding lines, a matter of length, or syntax, or the kind of action described in them— “Underbrush lay burning in a ditch”//(“Grew red and round and ripe”), “The scent of shoots and bramble smoking brought”//(“Dropping in the orchard of the heart”), etc.

But the shortened lines can have a weight of their own just because they’re shorter, and because, as Hugo Dyson, a lecturer with no special reputation (not a C.S. Lewis or J.B. Leishmann) pointed out during my first undergraduate term, apropos of Marvell’s Horatian Ode, when lines shorten you tend to want to increase their length to match the longer ones.

So there’s nothing mechanical or formulaic here in the peculiar “music” of the poem.

III

As to which music, see by way of contrast the statelier progression of the close of Allen Tate’s “The Mediterranean,” in which, after sharing in a succulent beach picnic that creates a feeling of kinship with travelers centuries before, on that great sea, center of our civilization, we’re given an image in which

IV

I also like how “Rites of Autumn” doesn’t advance with strict linearity.

The second stanza is more meditative and “personal” than the first (an “I” rather than “we,” who’s seeing, thinking, almost weeping), but in the third we’re back again into the straightforwardly pleasurable particularities of the past.

And then we get the lift-off (“O milkweed blowing from the milkweed pod”) into the magnificent affirmations of the fourth stanza, and finally the calmer and more meditative lyricism of the final stanza, its two last lines contrasting richly, in the “interior” complexity of her thought, with the more dramatic complexities of the minds of those two valiant creators, Cervantes and Mozart, in the previous stanza.

V

The author had turned up in Oxford with my name given her by a mutual acquaintance in Dublin. With her long red hair, pale beautiful face, and gliding walk in a long green plaid skirt, she was the spirit of poetry, come across the sea from Ireland and living in a gypsy caravan near one of the colleges. I would guess that she was about nineteen.

She never saw the following, retrieved now from long-buried papers

The emphasis is meant to fall on “your,” not “bright,” but I’m not sure it does, and I couldn’t fix it. The poem was mere hopeless yearning, of course. There was a lot of yearning at Oxford in those days, when there was one female student to every five males.

But she sort of liked one or two bits of the following, brought back uncertainly now by memory:

“He was indeed an altered Toad” (The Wind in the Willows)

Hopeless yearning, adolescent guilt, fuzzy Audenesque symbolism, and neither of the poems ever worth trying to publish.

But I’ve sometimes wondered, reading some of the things that American academics have said with such certainty and ingenuity about poems and poetry, how many of them have known what it’s like to write poems, even if only for a few immature years, as their own “completest mode of utterance” (I.A. Richards phrase).

The two poems came, so far as I can recall, at a single sitting and were virtually unrevised. “Organicism”?

Here, for whatever it’s worth, is one more poem, from the fall of 1948, which also “came.” I haven’t seen it for over forty years. I appear to have been reading something by Edward Thomas. Or Lawrence. I didn’t try to publish this one either.

This was the garden in which, the following spring, I read Marvell’s “The Garden” in the first edition of his poems (folio), taken out from the college library, with its gorgeous thick-textured rag paper and antique fonts. I was making small pencil marks on it as I read. I think I erased them after the week’s essay was written. (Evidently I didn’t see books as sacred texts, but what could you expect of a grammar-school boy?) Holywell Manor was a college residence.

VI

Do I like “Rites of Autumn” because I knew the author? Did anything in it remind me of her when I first read it? Did I hear her “voice” in it at any point? To the best of my recollection, the answer to all three questions is no. Did anything in it bring back for me anything that I had heard her talk about? Again, no.

Would I have attended to it if I hadn’t recognized the author’s name? I’m pretty sure I liked the poem before I came (shock of recognition) upon the author’s name at the bottom. It was so different from the at that time more cerebral American norm—Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Karl Shapiro, etc.

When I chose the poem for the mini-anthology here, did I intend to talk about knowing the author (no, I hadn’t planned to go autobiographical about any of the poems) or to introduce my own poems? No, absolutely not. One thing simply led to another, perhaps as in the writing of a poem?

Is it vanity that makes me include my own poems here? A bit, perhaps. It’s nice to be able to give oneself just a touch of literariness. And, after all, I do, as Nihilism, Modernism, and Value may indicate, belong in that troubled age-group that included Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes, and I worked out my own kinds of solutions to some of its problems.

But what I have come to realize while doing these commentaries is that in one way and another, in fact a variety of ways, what is coming across or being built up, collage-like, is the actual multifariousness of the experiencing of poems, of being, if you like a “reader” of poetry.

And of the idea of a “self.”

Continued...

 

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