I apologise in advance for this blog which is rather remorselessly technical; but it may be interesting at least to some readers of poetry; and these are matters which teachers and students in Creative Writing classes should certainly consider from time to time.
In a recent issue of his journal Areté Craig Raine has an article about ‘the line’ in poetry, arguing that it is the basic unit of meaning, and that it sets a pattern against which the deviations essential to a work of art are measured. This is one of those important subjects poets do, or certainly should, think about constantly, but seldom write about because so much is dependent on instinct, and it’s so very hard to make and defend rules. It is brave of Raine to have a shot at it.
My response is the Leavisite one: ‘Yes, but…’
My first reservation is that he puts too much emphasis on the iambus – the da dum metre. When I was young I quickly decided that the basic unit of English poetry was the pentameter – five stresses, which the line did not encourage you to speak as if they were iambics, though historically they mostly were. There is a brief period when the iambus rules, and you hear the da dum drum beating – in Dryden and Pope, in Dr Johnson – but that historical phase passes quickly. Before and after, while observing the iambic in writing, poets invite you to ignore it in the reading – or at most to hear it only as a ghostly presence, a ghostly absence. The measures are there; but you are not asked to hear them, or sound them in reading.
Ben Jonson said ‘Donne for not keeping of accent deserved hanging.’ What did he mean by this? Only that in reading his poems you have to ignore, forget, pass over, what the poet has not ignored in the writing. Donne’s discipline in ‘A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day’ is extraordinary – five 9-line stanzas, each rhyming abbacccdd, and with the lines being, in order, 2 pentameters, 2 tetrameters, 1 trimeter, and 4 pentameters.
Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s,
Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks,
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world’s whole sap is sunk:
The general balm th’hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interred; yet all these seem to laugh
Compar’d with me, who am their epitaph.
Keats’s Nightingale ode is 8 stanzas of 10 lines, all iambic pentameters except the 8th, a trimeter, and rhyming ababcdecde; but to read them as you would read lines by Pope would sound artificial and absurd.*
My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past and Lethe-wards had sunk:
Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness –
That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
When it comes to the 20th century there is a general freeing up. In the 1950s the idea of speech stresses was common. The basic line was still the pentameter, but you counted, not iambic feet, but where you felt the speech stress fell. The lines were mostly pentameters, but could move around rather loosely between three, four and five stresses.
And then there was Ezra Pound, whose case Raine avoids altogether. Pound said, ‘to break the pentameter – that was the first heave’ (Canto LXXXI). He doesn’t say ‘the iambic pentameter’. It was the norm of the five stress line that he felt was constructing and had to be broken. Pound did it by a general looseness, the rule of instinct, and even of lawlessness, rather than the rule of law – insubordination of the kind which Donald Davie, who thought he was England’s advocate for Pound, nonetheless deplored as a symptom of social and even moral decay.
The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant’s
bent shoulders
Manes! Manes was tanned and stuffed,
Thus Ben and la Clare a Milano
by the heels at Milano
That maggots shd/ eat the dead bullock
[…] but the twice crucified
where in history will you find it?
yet say to the Possum: a bang, not a whimper
with a bang not with a whimper,
To build the city of Dioce whose terraces are the colour of
stars.
The suave eyes, quiet, not scornful,
Rain also is of the process.
What you depart from is not the way
and olive tree blown white in the wind
washed in the Kiang and Han
what whiteness will you add to this whiteness,
what candour?
It is not only the iambus that is gone; so is the pentameter. Craig Raine would probably say the line is still there – and that that was his point; and it’s true that the lines and the line-breaks in that passage, and probably in most of Pound, are important.
But Raine’s article makes an exception to his rule that the line must be a unit of sense. His exception is W.C. Williams famous ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’:
so much depends
upon
the red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
(He suggests, cleverly, that each of these pairs is visually – i.e. in its shape – a wheelbarrow.) I think if you make one exception there will always be more. It is easy to find an absurd example, as he does, of Robert Creeley’s strung out poems; but not difficult, to find one that works.
OUT THE WINDOW: TAYLOR’S MISTAKE
Silver
lifting
light –
mist’s
faintness.
The point here perhaps, as with the Williams wheelbarrow, is the direction, down the page. That is another kind of ‘poem’ – the kind that races over the line and achieves an onward momentum by not allowing the line to be the unit of sense, but part of a larger sense which won’t allow it to stop.
I remember asking myself why James K. Baxter’s open (unrhymed) sonnets were spaced out in couplets when there was nothing, neither rhyme nor the run of sense, that made it necessary or was advanced by it. It was a form he took from Lawrence Durrell; and I decided it was just a matter of eye-and-mind, to make the reader take the poem more slowly and consider the words more carefully. Fourteen unrhymed lines hunched up on a page are not encouraging. They don’t invite, or suggest, an open mind or a relaxed discourse. Spread out, even in pairs which are otherwise lacking any particular utility, they are more inviting. And for the reader to be puzzled, asking, ‘Why these breaks?’ and finding no obvious answer, is keeping attention longer and more carefully focussed.
Slowness or speed – the spacing can collaborate with either, and affect the sense; which is why Anne Carson, in another example Raine offers, has breaks which (he complains) are ‘arbitrary’. Arbitrariness is a little assault on the reader, like a nudge – or even an elbow-jolt. It’s uncomfortable not to be able to cite a rule, or at least a reason, why something is as it is, and why it works or doesn’t; but that, I think, is what poetry has become. More, it is what it has always been. Criticism, saying and showing why poems work or don’t work, was always a matter of preferences dressed up in the uniform of authority. The critic succeeds, not by being ‘right’ (any fool can be right) but by persuasion. You like it? Try to tell me why, and I will try to tell you why I don’t.
Discussing the Carson example Raine says it may seem stuffy to object – ‘a bit like faulting Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings.’ But his way around this is to reiterate his basic point, as if by simple repetition its truth is established:
But the line is the fundamental unit of poetry. The line is the steering wheel that
harnesses the Pegasus power of poetry. You can’t give up the steering wheel,
you can’t relinquish control completely.
It is so because it is so; and there’s a slip into analogies-and-assertions in combo – the line is like the steering wheel in the car, and we all know how important that is! To me these statements are very nearly meaningless. As for the Pollock analogy, it deserves better consideration than the aside it gets: ‘I’m with Giacometti, who characterized Abstract Expressionism as “l’art du mouchoir”’.
One element in the making of modern poems which Raine doesn’t mention is syllabics – something Auden learned, I think, from Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. In About the House, the poems he wrote to celebrate his enormous satisfaction in at last achieving home ownership, Auden offers a sequence of chatty introductions, one poem to each room. ‘This egocentric monologue’ he calls the one addressed to the ghost of Louis MacNeice, about the room in which his writing was done – ‘The Cave of Making’.
After all it’s rather a privilege
amid the affluent traffic
to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into
background noise for study
or hung as a status trophy by rising executives,
cannot be ‘done’ like Venice
or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly still insists upon
being read or ignored: our handful
of clients at least can rune.
The syllable count is loose, but throughout quite a long poem it roughly alternates 15 and 8, producing, not a sense of form so much as an amble – a passeggiata as untidy as the man himself, and as interestingly full of quirky information. I think syllabic poems of this kind challenge Raine’s idea of the line as the unit of sense. It runs on like prose, and the sense runs with it. If we apprehend it as poetry, that has little or nothing to do with the line, and depends on distinction in the language, the grammar and syntax, on wit and intelligence, and on the sense of compression and linguistic economy. Yes it could all be written as prose, and no that would not be the same; so the fact that it is ‘in lines’ is important – but that is not the same as saying ‘the line’ is the ‘unit of sense’. If there is anything of primary importance it is the forward momentum, grammatical and syntactical: in other words, the writing.
It will be useful here if I take an example from my own work, because I can explain the thinking behind it. In my novel My name was Judas I made Judas a poet, and each chapter ends with a poem which in some degree reiterates what has just happened, but also adds to it and sometimes reflects on it. For each of these I used a form I’d used a few times before, the three-line thirteen syllable tercet. This meant the individual lines varied in length, but each three line group added up to thirteen syllables. I had thought of putting a tercet at the front of the book which would explain, or excuse, the form, but decided against it, hoping someone might arrive at it without prompting. So far as I know only one person did – Professor Mac Jackson who is also an expert on Shakespeare’s sonnets. The key was going to be
Thirteen syllables
because there were
thirteen of us.
which is, of course, itself thirteen syllables, the number of Jesus and his twelve disciples. Here is the poem* at the end of chapter 4, in which the boy Jesus, visiting the Temple in Jerusalem, is given the opportunity to offer a pigeon for sacrifice, but at the last moment, when he is supposed to utter the prescribed prayer and hand the bird to the Levite ready with the knife, he releases it, saying that was what Yahweh instructed him to do:
In the beginning
was the word, the
sentence, the text
that made of the
pigeon a paradigm
of the soul
and gave to
the stone he held the
light of the divine.
He was his own
first convert, able
to see himself
burning, bathed
in the white fire of
the noun and the verb.
There are two complete sentences here. The poem could, of course, be set out as five 13-syllable lines, but that would have a different effect and still not alter my argument. It is not the line as unit that matters here but the sense of a march of meaning down the page. That was the effect I was most conscious of in writing these poems – that I was working always for economy, for a movement of sense ahead, and that the syllable count forced me to consider every word and every alternative way of making the same sense – not line by line, not even thirteen by thirteen, but sentence by sentence, and as a poem.
Postscript: Craig Raine is an old friend and when I sent him this piece he protested that I had not done justice to his argument – indeed, that I had misrepresented it. I wanted to add his protest (and anything further he had to say) to the blog, but he wouldn’t allow that because it ‘had not been written for publication’. So I simply record here that that is what he felt, and leave the reader to discover exactly what he said in Areté itself, in issue 48, Winter 2015. In any case, whether fair to Raine or not, it seems to me what I wrote here about poetic form and the poetic line is of interest without reference to what triggered it. These are matters that should be thought about consciously by anyone/everyone who aspires to write poetry. If you think you can get away with writing stuff that doesn’t go all the way to the edge of the page, but without giving matters of poetic form and its history a thought, you are deluding yourself and should try something else – singing in the bath, for example.
Areté has a surprising range of top contributors, the result partly of Raine’s network of connections dating from the time when he was Faber’s poetry editor, and equally from his many friends in the British literary and academic community. He has been a don at Oxford during the past decade or more, and has recently retired but is still a Fellow of New College. If you wish to subscribe to Areté, or persuade your librarian to subscribe, it can be ordered on line at www.aretemagazine.com
The address is Areté Magazine, New College, 8 New College Lane, OXFORD OX1 3BN, U.K.
And a note to Auckland readers: Dean Parker’s play POLO, currently on at the Sky City Theatre, is not just a left-liberal satirical romp with side-swipes at Judith Collins and the National Party, but more than that – a comedy that becomes a poem about Auckland, a sort of love lyric to our city, whimsical and in the end quite moving.
C.K. Stead
* Oddly there is one irregularity – the last line of stanza 2 is inexplicably an alexandrine.
* ‘The stone he held’ is a reference back to something earlier in the chapter, where the boy Jesus gives an impromptu sermon on a stone,
TADDEO GRANDE
Reading Jonathan Bate’s new biography of Ted Hughes has set me reviewing my own encounters with the poet’s work at intervals over most of my literary life since I bought his first book, The Hawk in the Rain, and gave it to Kay for her 24th birthday in 1957. We still have that now badly foxed first edition which I had inscribed with quotations from the poems themselves:
For Kay
Who sees straight through the bogeyman,
The crammed cafés, the ten thousand
Books packed end to end
in
This mildewed island
Rained on and beaten flat by wind and water.
From
Karl, Bristol, 24.12.57
At the time I was doing a PhD on poetic Modernism, so my attention was focussed on the early years of the 20th century, on the impact of Yeats, the Georgians, the poetry of World War I, and the arrival of Eliot and Pound on the scene. As for contemporary British poetry of the 1950s, I had discovered two years earlier the poems of Philip Larkin and had been keenly interested and impressed; and now here was Hughes. I soon found him an alien temperament. In the back of the book I noted (as was my habit at the time, thinking always of how many poems and lines my own first collection might have to be) ‘41 poems, 974 lines’ – and put it aside. Larkin was more interesting among British contemporaries; and beyond work on the PhD, my keenest contemporary focus remained always on what was happening in New Zealand.
But Hughes is such a large presence he is not one I could go on ignoring forever. Reading this Jonathan Bate biography I’ve felt again that I’ve been resisting Hughes most of my life. There’s an anxiety about this, a habit of critical conscientiousness learned when young, a feeling almost of guilt as if, as a serious reader of poetry, it’s my duty to have an opinion. This is slightly absurd; but these literary-critical questions are worth exploring – there’s usually something to be learned from them, if not about the poet then about oneself.
Aspects of Hughes’s life have been impossible to ignore – most notably his marriage in 1957 to the American poet Sylvia Plath, the birth of their two children, the break-up of their marriage when he left her for the beautiful, thrice married Assia Wevill, Sylvia’s suicide in 1963, and then the impact of the post-mortem publication of her poems. I have that first Faber edition of Ariel, Plath’s posthumous collection which was a sensational public success, with its dark malevolent images of the male, sometimes father, sometimes husband, often both. Ted appears there as ‘the vampire’ who ‘drank my blood’ for seven years, and her own suicide is foreseen and celebrated:
Dying
Is an art, like everything else
I do it exceptionally well
The two books, his of 1957 and hers of 1963, seem to match one another, both with yellow and blue dust-jackets now, after almost sixty years, falling apart. Whereas my reaction to his poems had been one of failure (his or mine) to engage, with hers I felt the force of them, a sense that it was a raw force, rough, even rough-shod, with an edge of hysteria and self-dramatisation. The sense of immediacy was what was most striking, and that made Ted’s poems by comparison seem muffled.
For all of 1965 (the year of T.S. Eliot’s death) I was on leave in London and took part in the Commonwealth Festival readings at the Royal Court Theatre. One of the poets I read with was the Canadian David Wevill, whose wife Assia had left him for Ted, and had borne Ted’s child Shura. Rumour and gossip surrounded him and one looked for lines of distress and thought they were there. His book of poems, Birth of a Shark, published only the year before, was dedicated to her. They had not divorced, and the rumour was that he looked after the Hughes child some of the time, and wanted to preserve the marriage. There were eighteen Commonwealth poets at the Festival and each was commissioned to write a poem. David Wevill’s began
Every man
Carries a scandal
At his heart.
The woodpile hides
A baby or
A dead wife’s bones
And ended
I,
Down the same darkness
Retrieve my lost diamond.
The alliance of Ted and Assia (David’s ‘lost diamond’) we now know went through many ups and downs until 1969 when she too killed herself. Sylvia in her suicide had taken special care that the gas did not reach the children asleep upstairs. Assia on the other hand took her and Ted’s little daughter Shura with her – curled up with her on the kitchen floor so they died together.
When word of this got about, Ted, already in disfavour because of Sylvia’s death, and because of the way she seemed to present herself as his victim, became the object of a feminist vendetta which over the next two decades increased in volume and nastiness. He was reviled, his books stolen and savaged in bookshops, his house set on fire and archives damaged; he was hounded in public places and attacked at poetry readings as Plath’s murderer. Plath’s grave in Yorkshire, where Ted’s family came from, was attacked again and again and his name chiselled off the stone that identified her as ‘Sylvia Plath Hughes’.
Ted’s infidelities were indeed multiple and complex – the woman he was in bed with the night Sylvia died, for example, was not Assia but another; but he was also by now a grieving father and husband, and no feeling was spared for him. His life had become, for the time being, thoroughly politicised; and though there had been no sign of him at the 1965 Festival he continued to publish new work. We lived on Prince Albert Road that year, in sight of the Zoo that figures in his poems, and in ear-shot of the occasional lion roar or wolf howl. Within easy walking distance was the house, blue-plaqued because W.B. Yeats had lived there, where Sylvia died. Our G.P. was Dr Horder who had described Sylvia as ‘a model patient’ and who had phoned Ted with the (surely intended to be accusing/punishing) words, ‘Your wife is dead.’
By now my own first book of poems had been published in New Zealand and my first critical book, The New Poetic, in the U.K. with a U.S. edition pending. Insofar as contemporary British poetry interested me, Auden, the senior figure, was still producing new work, and Larkin seemed the junior, weird and wounded perhaps, but a star. At least equally important, in America Robert Lowell and John Berryman were filling the frame. Lowell, whose Life Studies had so strongly influenced Plath, would soon be moving on to the liberation that his sequences of ‘open’ sonnets represented.
I was conscious of new work by Hughes, but didn’t look closely until Crow (1970, dedicated ‘To Assia and Shura’), whose raw energy I tried hard to like and admire, but which made me wonder sometimes whether he was trying to match Ariel for impact. If he was, he was not succeeding. You can’t manufacture desperation on that scale. Only circumstances in combination with temperament can give it to you; and though Ted may well have had (indeed had created) the circumstances, his temperament was curiously British and unruffled. The wildness of Crow struck me as what the French call voulu – willed, trumped up, meretricious.
Something grabs his arm. He turns. A bird-head,
Bald, lizard-eyed, the size of a football, on two staggering bird-legs
Gapes at him all the seams and pleats of its throat,
Clutching at the carpet with horny feet,
Threatens. He lifts a chair – fear lifts him –
He smashes the egg-shell object to a blood-rag,
A lumping sprawl, he tramples the bubbling mess.
The shark-face is screaming in the doorway
Opening its fangs.
Who was he trying to frighten? Himself perhaps. Now here are some lines by Larkin written around the same time. The poem begins typically, ‘Groping back to bed after a piss’, and has the poet parting the curtains to look up into the interchanging moon-and-clouds of the night sky. It ends
One shivers slightly looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare
Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can’t come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.
The writing is not perfect – the movement of the lines, especially the last, is slightly awkward. But in their tentativeness they seem truthful and don’t aspire beyond the level of the human and fallible. Craig Raine writes that ‘Ted had more charisma than anyone I’ve ever met’, and that he was ‘a spell-binding talker’. I never met him, nor Larkin either, so didn’t experience the ‘charisma’ of the one nor the reputed stammering insufficiency of the other. In the end, as always, it’s the poems on the page that matter – in Hughes’s case so many, and in Larkin’s so (relatively) few.
 |
| Two books; 'The Hawk In The Rain - poems by Ted Hughes' and 'ARIEL - Poems by Sylvia Plath'. |
Meanwhile the Plath dispute raged on, clouding the critical climate. Nothing said about Hughes as poet could seem to stand entirely separate from Plath; and Plath the poet was difficult to separate from Plath the ‘victim’ of Hughes. There were those who took Plath’s side, notably the British critic and Hampstead Ponds swimmer Al Alvarez; and those who took Hughes’s – including the American poet Anne Stevenson, despite the fact that she had been at College with Sylvia. And then there was Janet Malcolm who stood brilliantly between, striking a balance in her book The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. I once in the 1980s travelled in a tour bus at an academic conference with Anne Stevenson, who turned out to be deaf in one ear – so on the return journey I positioned myself on her hearing side and we had our previous conversation over again, filling the gaps. When I told this a few years later to Alvarez he said (of course) that Stevenson was deaf on the Plath side.
In 1984 the poet laureate John Betjeman died, and it was assumed the post would go to Larkin. It was offered, but poetry had deserted Larkin in recent years and he declined. It was then offered to Hughes who accepted – embraced it with an eagerness many found bizarre. The Plath affair had slowly faded from public consciousness, and the poems he now produced as laureate gave new and quite different grounds for anxious attention. As Bate writes, ‘With his belief in the poet as shaman of the tribe and the royal family as embodiment of the land, he took the role more seriously than any of his twentieth century predecessors.’ He was soon the Queen Mother’s favourite fishing companion, and regarded by Prince Charles as a ‘guru’. His 1992 collection of laureate poems, called Rain Charm for the Duchy, had the little rhyming epigraph
A Soul is a wheel.
A nation’s a Soul
With a crown at the hub
To keep it whole.
The title poem of the collection had the sub-title ‘A Blessed, Devout Drench for the Christening of His Royal Highness Prince Harry.’ There was no irony here – this was serious right royal, loyal British stuff.
But while the critics gasped, the wider public embraced him. If he was good enough for the Royals he was good enough for Britain. So now with confidence that many – probably the majority – were on side with him, he began to feel he could return to the subject of that first marriage and Sylvia Plath’s suicide. The result was the 1998 collection Birthday Letters in which he goes over that painful ground in memory. My feeling when I reviewed the collection in the New Zealand Listener was that it was as if we had all been hearing about, and even perhaps attending seminars on, the Hughes/Plath story for two or three decades, and that Hughes had been attending them too – but with the advantage that he had access to the diaries, his and hers, that had kept the record. The poems didn’t strike me as sharp new insights, but as pieces written by someone who knew what we all knew, but knew it better, and was versifying. I also had the memory of Verlaine having said, on reading Tennyson’s In Memoriam, written to commemorate the death of his friend Hallam, ‘When he should have been heartbroken he had many reminiscences’. There was good writing, it was accessible, human, sometimes touching, but lacking economy and the intensity economy brings; or perhaps that should be reversed – lacking the intensity that enforces economy. It was autobiography in verse, on a par with something like Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal of 1939, but without the historical interest.
But the success of Birthday Letters with the buying public was extraordinary. It was said a book of poems had never sold in such numbers since the days of Byron’s fame. What can match celebrity gossip for attracting public attention? The Times greeted it as
The Greatest Book by our Greatest Living Writer
and reported that ‘Hughes gives his account of one of the century’s most celebrated and tragic love stories.’ All around the Anglophone world the news was
that a great poet had ‘broken his silence’. Almost overnight the devil Hughes became Saint Ted, royal favourite and sad rememberer. The British poet
Anthony Thwaite, who had just published his Selected Poems, complained that it received no public attention at all: ‘Taddeo Grande [Great Ted] has
swept the board.’ Once again, and more dramatically even than usual, the ‘Faber poet’ sucked all the oxygen from the poetry scene and left it otherwise
depleted.
Bate acknowledges that critical (as distinct from journalistic) responses were mixed; but his own tone is reverent. He rates Hughes high among the English poets, alongside Wordsworth, sometimes with Shakespeare. One has to take this opinion seriously; but it seems to me there is little or nothing critical, analytical, detailed, to support it. He appears on the whole to be in the grip of a very English kind of nationalistic awe.
Birthday Letters is the collection that gives this biography its shape. Bate takes a line here from Hughes himself – that the whole Plath debacle had deflected him for many years from ‘the true voice of feeling’. ‘Everything I have written since the early 1960s’ Hughes wrote in a letter, ‘has been evading. It was a kind of desperation that I finally did publish them. […] If only I had done the equivalent 30 years ago I might have had a more fruitful career.’
So Sylvia figures in the end as both the cause of a major interruption to the career of a great poet; and yet at the same time, as the subject of his major work. Perhaps there is not a contradiction buried somewhere in this, but to me it feels as if there must be. And when Bate, seeming to follow hints from Hughes, suggests ‘his infidelity to others was a form of fidelity to [Plath]’, I felt there was something shabby either about the poet, or his biographer, or perhaps both. Not that sexual fidelity is a necessary moral principle; but to make it a principle observed by non observance seems devious in the extreme.
When Hughes died in October 1998 there was a funeral service at which Seamus Heaney, Irish Nobel Laureate for literature and professional/international charmer, spoke of ‘a rent in the veil of poetry’. Hughes was cremated and his ashes scattered in a spot he’d chosen on the Duchy of Cornwall, equidistant between three fishing rivers, where his name and dates were chiselled on a slab of granite. The following May, Bate reports, ‘the great and the good of the nation’, including Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and Prince Charles, gathered in Westminster Abbey where Hughes was to be remembered in Poet’s corner. Heaney delivered ‘another silken eulogy, comparing Hughes to Caedmon, father of English poetry, and to Wilfred Owen, to Gerard Manley Hopkins and to Shakespeare. The Prince of Wales described his poet as the incarnation of England.’
I suppose Queen Victoria might have referred to Tennyson as ‘her poet and the incarnation of England’, but I doubt there is another precedent.
- C.K Stead
- C.K Stead
Nine sonnets
My anthology-in-the-head for sleep promotion includes nine sonnets, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth first (one each), then Gerard Manley Hopkins, Yeats (2), Rupert Brooke and Allen Curnow. Of these I notice that only Shakespeare and Curnow use what’s now called the ‘English’ sonnet, established by Shakespeare, which rhymes abab cdcd efef gg; the rest use the Petrarchan form (or something close to it) which divides an octave (abbaabba) from a sestet usually cdecde. The Petrarch sonnet is more tightly locked into its two parts, while the English requires a neat closing couplet of the kind Shakespeare often used to round off a scene – mocked once by (I think it was) Max Beerbohm in a parody of 19th century attempts to write ‘Shakespearean’ plays with a scene that ended
The tone of Milton’s sonnet on his blindness is sombre and full of regret.
My Wordsworth sonnet celebrates Nature and regrets modern industrial life’s disconnection from it.
To my ear there’s an intellectual heaviness, and even a slight clumsiness, about both the Milton and the Wordsworth which makes Shakespeare’s clever and self-aware overstatement seem deftly superior. Not that one has to make a competition of it, setting one poem against another. But the comparison is a reminder that Shakespeare’s sonnets are an endless treasure of richness, compression, difficulty and reward.
Milton’s, of course, is deeply moving – sad because he feels he has been stopped in his tracks, and there’s nothing to be done. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s (‘Thou are indeed just, Lord…’), one of his so-called ‘terrible sonnets’, is one of the most heart-felt cries of pain in literature, and at the same time faultlessly crafted. Every line but one has precisely its ten syllables (line 7 has 11), and yet few of them are strictly iambic. Far from running naturally de da, de da, de da, de da, de da, they invite you to read according to the run of sense, of meaning, of feeling. To be at once so contained and so free is true sonnet mastery:
Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1880
I think what makes it doubly painful to the non-Christian (more particularly the non-Catholic) reader is the sense that this barrenness is self-imposed – ‘elected’, as he says in another poem, ‘The Habit of Perfection’. ‘Elected silence sing to me’: there he embraces the denial of the senses. In ‘Thou art indeed just Lord’ he does not resile from it, but asks God why He is so stingy in rewards – protests that if God were his enemy he could hardly treat his loyal servant worse. And that final line is wrung out of so much pain!
Of the two Yeats sonnets in my head, one (‘While I from…’) is in terms of its form a hybrid. Its octave is the English sonnet form, rhyming abab cdcd; and the sestet rhymes Petrarch-style, efgfeg. Some are half rhymes (‘things’ and ‘wrongs’, ‘once’ and ‘companions’) so they don’t sound on the ear and have to be looked for, seen rather than heard. What’s most remarkable about this sonnet, however, is that it is written as a single long sentence – and part of the difficulty and pleasure for the reader is in recognizing the run of its grammar and syntax, and how it all fits together with its parentheses, and is made to work.
There is a lot of hurt here, and resentment; but it is overcome, like the technical obstacles of the one-sentence sonnet, and the poem finishes with acceptance that is close to indifference. Fame is no longer respected, and the things he values most are just a post for his enemies, characterized as ‘passing dogs’, to piss on.
So that is a very personal poem – whereas my other Yeats example is a quite impersonal attempt to present an event out of mythology – the rape of Leda by Zeus who has disguised himself as a swan.
Yeats prints this sonnet in his book A Vision in which the rape of Leda is an ‘Annunciation’, equivalent to the visit of the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary that engendered Jesus Christ and initiated the Christian era. To me it’s yet another example of how Yeats made great poetry out of ideas that in themselves have little to recommend them.
It’s a very visual poem and commentaries have connected it with Michelangelo’s ‘Leda and the Swan’ – but that painting sticks to the myth, where sneaky Zeus, pretending to be a wounded swan, and caressed by compassionate Leda, commits his rape surreptitiously, almost unnoticed. Yeats’s rape is much more physical and violent – much more real – terrifying, abhorrent to the victim (and possibly also to the reader!)
My next sonnet comes from a lovely little book (though it can be found also in a number of anthologies) At Dead Low Water & Sonnets by Allen Curnow, a hardback of 40 pages published by Caxton in 1949, and which I see I bought from the University Bookshop in Dunedin in 1961 for six shillings. It was still new, so a first edition and a reminder of those far-off times when bookshops paid for stock and kept it until it sold. (A pause here for lamentations!)
Glancing through this little collection (a pleasure because of the book as well as its contents) I’m struck by Curnow’s talent for an opening line that makes you want to read on: ‘Surf is a partial deafness islanders / All suffer from’; ‘Night watchman in some crater of the moon’; ‘Milton made Eve his blonde, but she is dark’; ‘Your “innermost Beethoven” in the uttermost isles’; ‘Rain’s unassuaging fountains multiply’; ‘Old hand of the sea feeling / Blind in sunlight for the salt-veined beaches’. Doesn’t each of those grab your attention and arouse your curiosity? Where will he go next?
My ninth sonnet like all the others has a formal rhyme scheme, which I think of in this context as hand-holds for memory, and as the reason why these, and not unrhymed sonnets by Lowell or the later Baxter, have taken root and are retained. It is Rupert Brooke’s famous ‘The Soldier’. Did it become famous because he wrote it? Or did he become famous because of the sonnet? His death must be part of the equation, and I suspect both must be true. It is certainly not without merit; and yet no educated person can read it without being aware that the war he is celebrating, World War I, produced quite another kind of poetry which, at least for people of literary culture, put this kind into the shade.
Manuscript for "The Soldier" by Rupert Brooke
England, England, England’s, English, England, English: six times in fourteen lines – it doesn’t leave you in any doubt, does it? This is the high tide of patriotism before the dark reality set in. It’s a comforting poem – comfortable, cosy, a lying- in-summer-grass poem, an in-a-punt-with-a-girl-poem, a Cambridge-and-Bloomsbury poem, reassuring that all’s well in the heaven that is England. It is also very accomplished, smooth, like a lovely watercolour. But one does not feel its author has experienced death at close quarters, or experienced the war of trenches and poison gas, of constant shelling, of going-over-the-top and of deaths in thousands on a single day. He did die, but not in battle; he was bitten by a mosquito on his way to Gallipoli, died of septicaemia, and was buried at night on the Greek island of Skyros by a party that included our own Bernard Freyberg who would win a D.S.O. at Gallipoli, and the V.C. in France, and would go on to command New Zealand forces in World War II.
A photo of Rupert Brooke by Sherril Schell 1913
Brooke’s fame was sealed when Winston Churchill made a speech about his death in the British Parliament. His was perhaps at once the posh and the popular war death. It was as if you were congratulated by his poem for giving him the opportunity to die, pro patria mori. The war poems of men like Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg, who died in the fighting, feel more like a reproach.
In a later blog I hope to write about some of the interesting things that happened to the sonnet form in the mid-20th century, when it became ‘open form’. This will be the last until the new year. Happy Christmas!
– C.K. Stead
Love is sweet, but revenge is sweeter far –What I find interesting is how different these formally similar poems are, not just in content but in tone and tightness. Here’s Shakespeare, sonnet 116:
To the piazza – ha, ha, ha, ha, har!
Let me not to the marriage of true mindsThe writing is intellectually taught, asserting and reasserting that love defines and proves itself by constancy – something Shakespeare would challenge elsewhere, of course, even in the sonnets themselves. But the strength is in repetition, compactness, refusal to allow contradiction, and in that finishing couplet. Since the evidence that he did indeed write is the sonnet itself, in front of us, and being read by us, there’s no argument. The case is made – Q.E.D! Specious of course, but this is a love sonnet, and extravagance is called for.
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempest and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not in his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out, even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
The tone of Milton’s sonnet on his blindness is sombre and full of regret.
When I consider how my light is spentMilton was 42 when he went blind and his father had lived to 84, so he saw it as half a lifetime left in the dark. He wants to serve God but how can he do that, blind? He celebrates God’s power, but joylessly; and the acceptance of his own role in the last line is scarcely triumphant.
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide.
‘Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?’
I fondly ask, but Patience to prevent
That murmur soon replies, ‘God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.’
My Wordsworth sonnet celebrates Nature and regrets modern industrial life’s disconnection from it.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,Too much of modern life is occupied, and wasted, in ‘getting and spending’; so in an untypically un-Christian outburst Wordsworth says he would prefer to be a ‘Pagan’ and be brought closer to Nature through one or another of the ‘outworn’ mythologies.
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune,
It moves us not. Great God, I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
To my ear there’s an intellectual heaviness, and even a slight clumsiness, about both the Milton and the Wordsworth which makes Shakespeare’s clever and self-aware overstatement seem deftly superior. Not that one has to make a competition of it, setting one poem against another. But the comparison is a reminder that Shakespeare’s sonnets are an endless treasure of richness, compression, difficulty and reward.
Milton’s, of course, is deeply moving – sad because he feels he has been stopped in his tracks, and there’s nothing to be done. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s (‘Thou are indeed just, Lord…’), one of his so-called ‘terrible sonnets’, is one of the most heart-felt cries of pain in literature, and at the same time faultlessly crafted. Every line but one has precisely its ten syllables (line 7 has 11), and yet few of them are strictly iambic. Far from running naturally de da, de da, de da, de da, de da, they invite you to read according to the run of sense, of meaning, of feeling. To be at once so contained and so free is true sonnet mastery:
Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinner’s ways prosper, and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?
Wert Thou my enemy, O Thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend
Sir, life upon thy cause. See banks and brakes
Now leaved how thick, lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them. Birds build – but not I build; no, but strain
Time’s eunuch and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
I think what makes it doubly painful to the non-Christian (more particularly the non-Catholic) reader is the sense that this barrenness is self-imposed – ‘elected’, as he says in another poem, ‘The Habit of Perfection’. ‘Elected silence sing to me’: there he embraces the denial of the senses. In ‘Thou art indeed just Lord’ he does not resile from it, but asks God why He is so stingy in rewards – protests that if God were his enemy he could hardly treat his loyal servant worse. And that final line is wrung out of so much pain!
Of the two Yeats sonnets in my head, one (‘While I from…’) is in terms of its form a hybrid. Its octave is the English sonnet form, rhyming abab cdcd; and the sestet rhymes Petrarch-style, efgfeg. Some are half rhymes (‘things’ and ‘wrongs’, ‘once’ and ‘companions’) so they don’t sound on the ear and have to be looked for, seen rather than heard. What’s most remarkable about this sonnet, however, is that it is written as a single long sentence – and part of the difficulty and pleasure for the reader is in recognizing the run of its grammar and syntax, and how it all fits together with its parentheses, and is made to work.
While I from that reed-throated whispererThe ‘reed-throated whisperer’ must be the Muse, the inspiration which he used to hear as if from outside himself, but which comes now ‘inwardly’. The word ‘surmise’ in l.4 is odd, but he is thinking again of his fellow-poets of past times and supposing some of them now dead – ‘beyond the fling of the dull ass’s hoof’. This sonnet comes right at the end of a collection Yeats published in 1914, Responsibilities, in which he records the loss of respect for the authority and aristocracy that were symbolized for him by Lady Augusta Gregory and her Irish country estate, Coole Park, where Kyle-na-no was the name of one of seven woods. In that place he has found ‘a sterner conscience and a friendlier home’. Approaching 50, he is feeling his age in these poems, and asks his forefathers to forgive him because his ‘barren passion’ for Maud Gonne has left him with little to offer them – no child, ‘nothing but a book to prove your blood and mine’.
Who comes at need, although not now as once
A clear articulation in the air,
But inwardly, surmise companions
Beyond the fling of the dull ass’s hoof
– Ben Jonson’s phrase – and find when June is come
At Kyle-na-no under that ancient roof
A sterner conscience and a friendlier home,
I can forgive even that wrong of wrongs,
Those undreamt accidents that have made me
– Seeing that Fame has perished this long while,
Being but a part of ancient ceremony –
Notorious, till all my priceless things
Are but a post the passing dogs defile.
There is a lot of hurt here, and resentment; but it is overcome, like the technical obstacles of the one-sentence sonnet, and the poem finishes with acceptance that is close to indifference. Fame is no longer respected, and the things he values most are just a post for his enemies, characterized as ‘passing dogs’, to piss on.
So that is a very personal poem – whereas my other Yeats example is a quite impersonal attempt to present an event out of mythology – the rape of Leda by Zeus who has disguised himself as a swan.
A sudden blow, the great wings beating stillOnce again we have an English sonnet’s octave and a perfect Petrarchan sestet. The writing is vivid and explicit, and contains the (actually bizarre) Yeatsian idea of cycles of history. This rape engenders Helen of Troy and so initiates the new cycle that begins with the Trojan war. The compression of event into image is astonishing. Yeats had taken from Ezra Pound the idea of the ‘luminous detail’, where a very few items can stand for so much they conjure up a whole episode of history: ‘a shudder in the loins engenders […] the broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead.’ The event is a horror for the victim; but the poet wonders whether she had a momentary recognition of its meaning, a vision of the Trojan War and all that is to follow.
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, caught in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Yeats prints this sonnet in his book A Vision in which the rape of Leda is an ‘Annunciation’, equivalent to the visit of the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary that engendered Jesus Christ and initiated the Christian era. To me it’s yet another example of how Yeats made great poetry out of ideas that in themselves have little to recommend them.
It’s a very visual poem and commentaries have connected it with Michelangelo’s ‘Leda and the Swan’ – but that painting sticks to the myth, where sneaky Zeus, pretending to be a wounded swan, and caressed by compassionate Leda, commits his rape surreptitiously, almost unnoticed. Yeats’s rape is much more physical and violent – much more real – terrifying, abhorrent to the victim (and possibly also to the reader!)
My next sonnet comes from a lovely little book (though it can be found also in a number of anthologies) At Dead Low Water & Sonnets by Allen Curnow, a hardback of 40 pages published by Caxton in 1949, and which I see I bought from the University Bookshop in Dunedin in 1961 for six shillings. It was still new, so a first edition and a reminder of those far-off times when bookshops paid for stock and kept it until it sold. (A pause here for lamentations!)
In an earlier blog I wrote of the sometimes tentative, often simply negative, qualities of Curnow’s literary nationalism – his celebrations of what he called ‘the half light of a diffident glory’; but here is genuine affirmation, made possible because made necessary by the occasion, which calls for eulogy. The man is dead, killed in the war with Germany being waged in the Middle East; but if the soldier’s ghost can speak, ‘it must recite / South Island feats’.In Memoriam
Weeping for bones in Africa I turn
2/Lieutenant T.C.F. Ronalds
Our youth over like a dead bird in my hand.
This unexpected personal concern
That what has character can simply end
Is my unsoldierlike acknowledgment
To you, cousin, once gentle-tough, inert
Now, after the death-flurry of that front
Found finished too. And why should my report
Cry one more hero, winking through its tears?
I would say you are cut off, and mourn for that;
Because history where it destroys admires,
But O if your blood’s tongued it must recite
South Island feats, those tall snow-country tales
Among incredulous Tunisian hills.
Glancing through this little collection (a pleasure because of the book as well as its contents) I’m struck by Curnow’s talent for an opening line that makes you want to read on: ‘Surf is a partial deafness islanders / All suffer from’; ‘Night watchman in some crater of the moon’; ‘Milton made Eve his blonde, but she is dark’; ‘Your “innermost Beethoven” in the uttermost isles’; ‘Rain’s unassuaging fountains multiply’; ‘Old hand of the sea feeling / Blind in sunlight for the salt-veined beaches’. Doesn’t each of those grab your attention and arouse your curiosity? Where will he go next?
My ninth sonnet like all the others has a formal rhyme scheme, which I think of in this context as hand-holds for memory, and as the reason why these, and not unrhymed sonnets by Lowell or the later Baxter, have taken root and are retained. It is Rupert Brooke’s famous ‘The Soldier’. Did it become famous because he wrote it? Or did he become famous because of the sonnet? His death must be part of the equation, and I suspect both must be true. It is certainly not without merit; and yet no educated person can read it without being aware that the war he is celebrating, World War I, produced quite another kind of poetry which, at least for people of literary culture, put this kind into the shade.
If I should die think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter learned of friends; and gentleness
Of hearts at peace under an English heaven.
England, England, England’s, English, England, English: six times in fourteen lines – it doesn’t leave you in any doubt, does it? This is the high tide of patriotism before the dark reality set in. It’s a comforting poem – comfortable, cosy, a lying- in-summer-grass poem, an in-a-punt-with-a-girl-poem, a Cambridge-and-Bloomsbury poem, reassuring that all’s well in the heaven that is England. It is also very accomplished, smooth, like a lovely watercolour. But one does not feel its author has experienced death at close quarters, or experienced the war of trenches and poison gas, of constant shelling, of going-over-the-top and of deaths in thousands on a single day. He did die, but not in battle; he was bitten by a mosquito on his way to Gallipoli, died of septicaemia, and was buried at night on the Greek island of Skyros by a party that included our own Bernard Freyberg who would win a D.S.O. at Gallipoli, and the V.C. in France, and would go on to command New Zealand forces in World War II.
Brooke’s fame was sealed when Winston Churchill made a speech about his death in the British Parliament. His was perhaps at once the posh and the popular war death. It was as if you were congratulated by his poem for giving him the opportunity to die, pro patria mori. The war poems of men like Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg, who died in the fighting, feel more like a reproach.
In a later blog I hope to write about some of the interesting things that happened to the sonnet form in the mid-20th century, when it became ‘open form’. This will be the last until the new year. Happy Christmas!
– C.K. Stead
W.B., T.S. and W.H.: ‘Our clients at least can rune.’
At literary festivals I’ve often been asked why my writing name is C.K. Stead rather than Karl Stead, or even Christian Karlson Stead, and the answer is always the same: when I was young the major poets were W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden. They weren’t Willie, Tom and Wystan. And initials were common enough here in New Zealand – R.A.K. Mason, A.R.D. Fairburn. Nor has it ever gone entirely out of fashion – E.M. Forster of course, but more recently A.S. Byatt, C.K. Williams, J.K. Rowling. I’ve had to resist several attempts to convert me to ‘Karl Stead’, not because I have anything against the two monosyllables, but because I don’t want to create problems for librarians and bibliographers.
There is, of course, no such thing as perfect safety. Some years ago a book listing paperback fiction in print awarded all of my novels to the Australian, Christina Stead. Since my first name is Christian it took only a ‘correction’ by a computer, shifting one letter and Christian became Christina.
Of those three major poets of my youth, I have read them all probably more often and with closer attention than any others, so each must have influenced my style and my idea of the role of the poet. From Eliot came the example of the poet critic – because Eliot had done so much to influence, and even revise, the accepted overview of the history of poetry prior to the 20th century. There are always literary people, often themselves writers, aspirant poets, who consider the idea of ‘criticism’ alien to poetry and ‘creativity’. The example of Eliot teaches otherwise. The writing of poetry is a constant making of critical choices – this word or that? this phrase or another? is the tone right? Whether or not poets choose to exercise their critical skill publicly on the poetry of others, they are often the best at recognizing what works in a poem, and what doesn’t, and why. In any history of the best literary critics, it is the poets whose work has lasted – Philip Sidney, Dr Johnson, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, and Eliot himself.
In my years as a university teacher, those three ‘greats’ figured frequently in my courses and in my writing about literary history. Auden was the one whose sheer competence always shone. He had such an ear for assonance, rhyme, alliteration, and such technical mastery for putting them to work. He was also a natural ‘occasional’ poet – a dependable ‘laureate’ for any and every occasion, public or private. And of course he figures in my memory bank of poems returned to in the night:
Look, stranger, on this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.
It seems so effortless, as if a musician is at work; whereas when Yeats triumphs, as he very often does, over the difficulties of poetic form, you feel that it’s more a feat of intellect than of ear and instinct – more like the work of an engineer than a musician. Eliot is different again – at his best lyrically mysterious,
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandolin
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold;
at his less-than-best, offering clunky articles of faith:
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation.
So why do I feel – and why do many of those who write about Auden feel – that he is a performer of verse miracles, a walker-on-water, but never quite the Messiah? It is partly, I think, because he is such a moraliser – and worse, that when he changes his mind about what he wants to be the ‘meaning’ we are to take from his latest parable (I’m thinking here especially of his much discussed political shift from Left to Right) he is able so effortlessly to alter already written, and already famous, poems so they tell us something different – indeed often the reverse of what they meant when they were first published. If the changes can be made so easily, does either version deserve to be taken entirely seriously?
One poem he changed his mind about, first making changes and deletions, and finally declaring it to be ‘trash’ and removing it altogether, was ‘Spain 1937’. Since his death editions have begun to appear which restore some of the originals, so it is possible now to reread the poem as he first wrote it. I think it is a great poem, catching what the Spanish Civil War represented to the Left at the time. Auden came to believe that that political commitment, and the enthusiasm which made it out to be a great Cause, were politically mistaken, intellectually naïve, even morally deplorable. But even if one accepted those judgements (and I do not – it was a civil war fought in defence of a democratically elected Government) they are irrelevant. It is the feeling that matters, not morality or political justice; and ‘Spain 1937’ catches that feeling with strangely whimsical force and truthful nostalgia.
It’s a poem of 92 lines divided into four-line stanzas – long ambling lines, expository, cinematographic, as history closes gradually on the subject, Spain, and the year, 1937. It has been called impersonal, even unfeeling, but to me its rhetorical structure is brilliant and moving. ‘Yesterday all the past’ it begins, and that ‘past’ is at first quite random – more or less whatever comes to mind as representing it, until we get to stanza 6:
Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek;
The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero.
Yesterday the prayer to the sunset,
And the adoration of madmen. But today the struggle.
So this is where the lines, and the history, have been leading us – and the ‘struggle’ was one of those key words in Marxist terminology, signalling where we stood, which side we were on, and in what great cause: the class struggle – the workers, the underdogs, against all who through the ages have claimed privilege and oppressed them.
So now we are in a present in which that conflict is taking place, not just physically in Spain, but everywhere and in everything – in poetry, in science, in nature, in public bars, in ordinary lives: and what all this adds up to is a collective wish, the people asking the Life Force to intervene, ‘to descend as a dove / A furious papa or a mild engineer’, and bring it to a resolution.
But the Life Force throws the request, and the responsibility, back on those asking the question:
‘What’s your proposal? To build the Just City? I will.
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision: yes, I am Spain.
Just past half way through quite a long poem, Spain is named for the first time. What happens here and now will determine the future for humankind; and what happens depends on ‘your choice’ – on what collectively ‘you’ want.
Now there are images of people who have come to Spain, as Auden did, answering the call of history to join the International Brigades:
They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch
Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;
They floated over oceans;
They walked the passes, they came to present their lives.
The poem takes us forward into the future, which can only be whimsically described because no one can know what it will be – except that it will be better if the ‘call’ has been answered. ‘Tomorrow the rediscovery of romantic love’:
Tomorrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lakes the winter of perfect communion;
Tomorrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings: but today the struggle.
There is no escape from the responsibility of now: you have to make a judgement, you have to take sides. Here is the final stanza:
The stars are dead; the animals will not look:
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.
There is something very particular and, perhaps, for readers new to his work, peculiar, about those early Auden poems. It is partly the flavour of its time, and he was one of those who defined it. He called the 1930s a ‘low dishonest decade’; but there is a nostalgia goes along with it – like the memory of one’s first smell of Paris plumbing and cheap hotels. I find the whole movement of ‘Spain 1937’ very affecting, especially the way it slowly focuses on its subject, turns it into a question, and departs, rather regretfully, as if the poet knows already, or guesses, that the Cause is destined to fail.
After the end of World War II, Auden wrote more poems that were domestic in content and (finding his precedents in the work of Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop) syllabic in form. But here is a poem, a formal Petrarchan sonnet, that belongs squarely in that 1930s Leftist phase. It was at first named as number 12 of a sequence, in the collection called Look Stranger, and later given the title ‘Meiosis’, which the Concise Oxford defines as, ‘Biol. A type of cell division which results in daughter cells with half the chromosome number of the parent cell’:
Meiosis
Love had him fast but though he fought for breath
He struggled only to possess Another,
The snare forgotten in their little death,
Till you, the seed to which he was the mother,
That never heard of love, through love was free,
While he within his arms a world was holding,
To take the all-night journey undersea,
Work west and northward, set up building.Cities and years constricted to your scope,
All sorrow simplified though almost all
Shall be as subtle when you are as tall:
Yet clearly in that ‘almost’ all his hope
That hopeful falsehood cannot stem with love
The flood on which all move and wish to move.
Here’s what I think it means. ‘He’ in the poem is a nameless male who is having sex with a nameless woman, and the ‘you’ addressed is the sperm which, released, will fertilize her egg. The ‘little death’ (as in French) is their orgasm. The sperm (‘you’) that ‘never heard of love, through love was free’. The journey it is freed to take is inside her body (the ‘world’ held in the male’s arms); and its ‘set[ting] up building’ is the development of the foetus in the womb.
Now the sestet looks forward to a future in which ‘almost all / Shall be as subtle when you are as tall’ – everything will be as ‘subtle’, as complicated, as difficult, when ‘you’ are grown to adulthood. But the hope for the future is in that ‘almost’, which allows for the idea of improvement. It is a poem against the idealism of romantic love, which still permits the idea of ‘progress’.
It’s exceptionally clever but by no means perfect. I admire the formal ingenuity without quite conceding that everything he wanted to say is really said. But form, as always in poetry, is important – and you should always read with one eye on that aspect. The poet, especially one like Auden, wants you to see and enjoy what he has done with the language, and if you only read to be moved or excited, you are selling the craft short.
I think it was in the 1970s I was lecturing on Auden and came on the fact that there were some early notebooks of his in the British Museum. I wrote asking whether I could have copies made and was told yes, if Mr Auden had no objection – but I did need his written approval. I knew he had recently moved from what had been his regular summer retreat in Italy (hence the poem ‘Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno’) to Kirchstetten in Austria, and I wrote to him there. I got no reply.
So I wrote again, this time mentioning (tentatively and politely) what I thought was a grammatical error in the 5th and 6th lines of the poem ‘Meiosis’: ‘Till You the seed […] that never heard of Love, by love was freed.’ Since the subject of the sentence is ‘You’, the verb should be ‘were’. Of course if the subject was ‘seed’ then the verb could be ‘was’ – but (as I read it) it wasn’t, and so it couldn’t be. This is what I wrote to Auden, calculating (rightly as it turned out) that an accusation of grammatical error would lure him far enough out of his Kirchstettin cave to respond also to my permission request. Here’s his reply, which was handwritten:
W.H. Auden's letter to C.K. Stead.
April 26th 1969
Dear Mr Stead
Your letter of March 15th has only just reached me.
Of course you can have a photo copy of that Notebook if you want it.
Meiosis:
I think ‘seed’ is one of those nouns that can take either a singular or a plural verb, so was is intentional.
With best wishes
Yours sincerely
W.H. Auden
I had my permission. The grammatical point had only been a means of getting to him and is not important; but I still think the subject of that sentence is ‘you’, not ‘seed’, so the verb should be ‘were’ (‘you [...] were free’); and if the subject is ‘seed’, and he meant it in the plural, as his letter suggests, then again, the verb should have been were, not was (‘seed[s][...] were free’). So I suspect his reply was one he hadn’t given much thought. The seed is surely the single sperm that fertilizes the egg.
Auden’s Kirchstettin retreat is the subject of his charming late collection About the House, which includes the poem he called ‘The Cave of Making’ about the room where he did his writing. It is dedicated to the memory of Louis MacNeice (1907-63), the first of the MacSpaunday group (as the South African Roy Campbell called them) to die, and it contains lines that might be called Auden’s ‘defence of poetry’.
After all, it’s rather a privilege
amid the affluent traffic
to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into
background noise for study
or hung as a status trophy by rising executives,
cannot be ‘done’ like Venice
or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly still insists upon
being read or ignored: our clients
at least can rune.
PS: Here is a poem by Harry Ricketts remembering his days as an undergraduate at Oxford when for part of each year W.H. Auden, old and famous, was a notoriously untidy (even grubby) resident in a cottage belonging to his old College, Christchurch.
On Not Meeting Auden
And did you once see Auden plain?
Well, no, though I could have any time
in late ’72, early ’73.Sightings were reported daily
on the Broad and High: “He was wearing
slippers, man!” “He was holding plastic shopping bags.”He would hang out in the café
in St Aldate’s, down from Carfax Tower
(where helmeted boys hammer out the quarter-hours),but we never went: too Christian.
Besides, old fart with a ruined face,
what could he tell us about life, about poetry ‒anything? We had beads, long hair,
Afghans and grants, ideals and flares.
We hitched to Greece, got Crow, got stoned, got the lyricsof Ziggy Stardust, Transformer.
We knew exactly what Dylan meant
by that line: “I didn’t realize how young you were.”
So Harry Ricketts is suggesting the young saw Auden as ‘out of fashion’ by then, and were more interested in Ted Hughes (author of Crow), Bob Dylan and ‘flower power’ – a time I too remember vividly. I will be writing about Ted Hughes in a later blog.
– C.K. Stead
At home in my head with Keats and Coleridge
I mentioned in a recent blog having a large anthology of poems in my head – ‘by heart’ as we say – memorized long ago, when I was young and tended to retain any poem admired enough to be read and re-read. One that got fixed there when I was 14 or 15 is Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. A use I put these poems to is to get myself to sleep if I have woken in the small hours with a set of thoughts, problems, anxieties, which go around and around, and won’t let go, or let me go. I resort then to one of those many remembered poems, letting it loose like a guard dog to take up, engage, occupy the part of the brain that can’t otherwise be made to give up its wake-making hold on me. It doesn’t usually take more than two substantial poems (often one is enough) to get me back to sleep.
This may not suggest a very attentive way of ‘reading’ poetry, but in fact these are poems I know better than any others. One becomes very aware of form, especially of the rhyme-scheme, which offers handholds for memory – and the hesitations and rechecking for correctness mean also a fuller awareness of the poem line by line, phrase by phrase, even word by word.
Keats may have said, did say, that poetry should come ‘as naturally as the leaves to the tree’; and no doubt when he was at the top of his form, as he is in the nightingale ode, that is how it arrived for him – the mind working in high gear, so quickly that there seemed neither time nor need for calculation. It is what poets (some poets, not all) through the ages have called – often mocked by academics and other prosifiers, who don’t believe them – ‘inspiration’; and in that state the poem could seem simply to ‘arrive’, even to arrive in tight verse forms. It’s not that there is no ‘work’; only that the work is so rapid and effortless it feels like something given from outside, from beyond. The nightingale ode is eight 10-line stanzas, iambic pentameters, except for the eighth line of each stanza which is an iambic trimeter – and the whole rhyming ababcdecde.
There’s a lot in it about escaping from the horrors of the real world, in which Keats’s brother was dying of the disease, tuberculosis, that would in turn take him. These imagined escapes are by means of drink or drugs; but ultimately through beauty itself, the song of the nightingale, which I had never heard until recently, sitting out in my daughter’s London garden, in fact in Queen’s Park, not too far from Hampstead where Keats heard it and wrote his ode. One of my daughter’s friends, a well-equipped modern young woman, whipped out her cell phone and recorded it.
Keats begins with ‘a drowsy numbness’, as if he’d taken hemlock, or ‘some dull opiate’. But the drug is only an ‘as if’. His mood is a response to the bird-song, ‘being too happy’ in the happiness of the bird. He asks for ‘a beaker full of the warm south’, so he can escape from those things which ‘thou among the leaves hast never known’ – the sad reality ‘where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies’, and where beauty cannot last. In the fourth stanza it is not Bacchus that is carrying him away but poetry itself.
And now we are on the brink of the miracle: two of the most beautiful stanzas ever written in English. Stanza 5 describes the garden or wood that can’t be seen in the darkness but can be so vividly imagined while the nightingale sings.
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But in embalmed darkness guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild,
White hawthorn and the pastoral eglantine,
Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves
And mid-May’s eldest child
The coming musk-rose full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
I remember coming on a passage in Shakespeare (possibly in A midsummer night’s dream) which had clearly influenced these lines; and in Wordsworth’s poem ‘Michael’, on the line ‘Murmur as with the sound of summer flies’ to which the last line here owes so much. That is as it should be. (It’s called literary history!) Poets speak through one another. As T.S. Eliot puts it, ‘Good poets borrow, great poets steal.’ Here is the thief Keats, not merely stealing from Wordsworth, but improving on him.
But now the poem steps a pace beyond the bird’s unseen, imagined world, into the mysterious realm of death. The man who knows he must go there wishes it could be now, at this moment of beauty:
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing and I have ears in vain –
To thy high requiem become a sod.
These were the lines which captured me completely at the age of 15, even though I was not sure I understood them. He wants to die – that’s clear – yielding somehow to the principle of Beauty represented by the song. But part of the magic and the mystery is in the conjunction of sounds: ‘thy high requiem’ – those three words sing together; but so do ‘requiem become’. And then ‘a sod’ is so final, such a shutting of the door of the grave on the mystery of the song.
But now Keats the poet has a poem to finish. He has brought us to this high point and must bring us down again. So the next two stanzas are the mechanics of verse-making, of ‘finishing’, bringing us, like a space-ship that has landed on the moon or Mars, back to reality and the present. The nightingale was ‘not born for death’. It has been apprehended, not as mortal bird, but as eternal symbol, pure beauty –
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heard of Ruth when sick for home
She stood in tears amid the alien corn.
This, the seventh stanza, ends in the word ‘forlorn’, which is the sign-post back to the present and its sad reality. The last stanza may be mechanics, contrivance, but it serves its purpose.
Another poem I have by heart is Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ which I have sometimes thought the finest lyric poem in English – though Coleridge was so uncertain of it he had to be encouraged by Byron to publish it. It had come to him in a dream brought on by opium and reading the 17th century travel writer, Samuel Purchas. He seemed to believe he was writing a narrative poem, and that the interruption of its composition by a visitor (the famous ‘Man from Porlock’) had caused him to lose not just the thread, but the inspiration, and the poem.
In fact it is perfect just as it is. It has a landscape and a precise geography. The waters of ‘Alph, the sacred river’, rise from a ‘deep romantic chasm’, flow ‘five miles meandering with a mazy motion’, and then sink away into ‘caverns measureless to man’. On this fertile yet mythical ground, with its appearing and disappearing river, the great Khan, Kubla, has ordered the building of a ‘pleasure dome’ – and it is imagining this marvel that induces in the poet his vision of ‘a damsel with a dulcimer’:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played
Singing of Mount Abora.
It’s the loss of this vision he laments at the end of the poem, because if he could have held on to it, then all should see what he has seen, and recognize his power, the power of poetry itself:
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ‘twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome, those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes! his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
The poem has in effect enacted itself, and nothing is lost. It has risen, like the sacred river; has flowed a given distance, and then sunk away; and finally reflected on its own magical occurrence, and on the sense of loss that, like all good things, it has come to an end.
There is, I think, only one weak line in the whole 54 lines – ‘Enfolding sunny spots of greenery’, which really does sound flat and filler-ish. Otherwise it marches magically, lyrically, without a single mis-step, and with a system of rhyming that is not a system at all, but random and yet always ‘right’, faultless – mellifluous and alliterative. The only unintentional effect is the comedy of the line, ‘As if the earth in fast thick pants were breathing’ – and Coleridge is not to blame that ‘pants’ was to become in subsequent years an article of clothing; any more than Shakespeare was when he had Antony say to Cleopatra (with even worse effect)
Leap thou, attire and all
Through proof of harness to my heart, and there
Ride on the pants triumphing.
Poets must not be held accountable for the shifts in linguistic habit and the changing meanings of words in times beyond their own. Within a few lines of the opening of his narrative poem Lara, Byron has written
Far checkering o’er the picture-window plays
The unwonted faggot’s hospitable blaze;
And gay retainers gather round the hearth,
With tongues all loudness, and with eyes all mirth.
Recently I came on a copy of de Quincey’s Reminiscences of the Lake Poets, given me by my late colleague (and before that, my teacher) poet M.K. Joseph. De Quincey has a lot to say about Coleridge, whom he pursued (because he was famous) and then ‘exposed’ (because he was famous) as an opium addict and thief of other men’s ideas, particularly German metaphysicians, pretending that when their ideas appeared in his work it was only the accident of ‘like minds’. Somehow de Quincey contrives to write all this while insisting that his admiration of Coleridge’s genius is immeasurable, and that they are friends. He also describes Mrs Coleridge as ‘in person full and rather below the common height; whilst her face showed to my eye some prettiness of rather a commonplace order.’ He tells us that the marriage was not happy, and that ‘Coleridge made me a confidant in this particular.’
With a friend like that, who would need enemies?
I have been re-reading an extraordinary poem by Andrew Johnston, ‘The Sunflower’. It’s an elegy, for his father, quite a complex poem in 12 line stanzas, with intermittent rhyming. To me it is very clear in its broad meaning, and less than clear in its detail – a good combination of elements because one does not feel that one or three readings have done with it; that it has been used, and used up. It is full of sadness and reverence but is also a celebration. It contain different understandings of life (‘your god to us is dead’) and of death and what does or does not follow, as if we have been offered a glimpse of a family divided on the Big Questions, but not fatally, or even sadly divided – as if the divisions were agreed upon, and set aside as matters to be resolved later, or never.
if I see thee
on the other side, when I am dead,
I’ll know there is an other
side.
which reads like a dark joke, and yet a statement of fact. How else is it possible to know you’ve been wrong on such matters than by finding yourself in the afterlife you denied? And it’s not as if in the non-believing poet’s experience there is nothing numinous. There is the sunflower, and something like a moment of vision on a cross-channel ferry, when ‘fatigue’s mysterious flower spoke perhaps in tongues’.
What strikes me most about this 150 line poem (12 x 12 + 6) is the perfect tone and pitch. It has reverence without sounding churchy or false. The intellect is constantly at work , arguing with itself, trying to make sense of the puzzle of life’s presence and then its absence; asking the questions that usually come too late.
In my last three years as Professor of English at the University of Auckland I ran a creative writing course (the University’s first) and Andrew Johnston was a member. So were Greg O’Brien, Chris Price and Tim Wilson, all well-known now, any or all of whom (with others less well-known) I may write about in a later blog.
L-R: Andrew Johnston, Tim Wilson, Hugh Stevens, Ross Lay, 1985. Photo by C.K. Stead.
Andrew, who now lives and works as a journalist in Paris, can be seen on the left of the picture above. Behind him, with enormous hair, long tan boots and tasselled jeans, is Tim, who became known as a TV presenter, and has emerged more recently as a fiction writer. Sitting on the couch is Hugh Stevens, who went on to do a PhD at Cambridge that became a book about Henry James. He taught at York, and then at University College London, where he is now a senior lecturer. The one standing, wearing a beret, is Ross Lay, a talented young poet at the time who has since disappeared from my radar. In the background is one of Colin McCahon’s ‘Rocks in the Sky’ series, which I regret to say I later sold.
What surprises me most about a picture like that is to reflect that these, whom I continue to think of as young, are now the age I was when I was their professor.
Johnson’s poem ‘The Sunflower’ can be found in his 2007 Collection, SOL published by V.U.P. An earlier collection, The Open Window, was published in the U.K. by Arc in 1999.
Frivolous footnote. I have more than once tried to make up a limerick about the ‘man from Porlock’ whom Coleridge blamed for ruining ‘Kubla Khan’ – this one, for example:
That nasty old party from Porlock,
Committing his infamous door-knock,
Put a curse on the verse
Of Coleridge – and worse
Left laughing and tugging his forelock.
– C.K. Stead
Irish poets and poetry
I have a large anthology of poems in my head, not because I have set out to ‘learn’ them, but because when I was young and got attached to a poet’s work, and read it often, some of the poems would stick – and have remained there. When Allen Curnow and I lectured on W.B. Yeats at the University of Auckland, he to the M.A. class, I to stage 1, we used to talk about Yeats and between us could assemble any of the better known poems without opening a text. This was early in the 1960s, and I suggested he and I should write a book about Yeats by exchanging letters about the poems we were discussing. I was about to publish my first critical book, The New Poetic, which had a chapter on Yeats, and I was being urged by a publisher with connections to T.S. Eliot’s widow to write an Eliot biography; but I felt too swamped by the business of preparing new lectures to take on anything so large. An exchange with Allen about Yeats, on the other hand, seemed only an extension of our conversations, and not too daunting, especially because each reply would at once suggest a direction for the response.
I think it was a good idea and could have been an unusual and valuable contribution to Yeats studies, but Allen was not keen. His private life at the time was complicated; and I had the impression he was nervous of whether he would ‘measure up’ and which of us might shine brighter. I should simply have sent him the first letter as a prompt. A few years later we were indeed exchanging letters about poetry – our own (more his than mine of course) across Tohunga Crescent, where we were neighbours after he and his second wife, Jeny, moved to live there after their marriage in 1965 – and this kind of exchange was to continue for the rest of his life.
Over the years my view of Yeats became less reverent. I had begun by defending him in a Leavisite English Department (University of Bristol) where I had gone in the late 1950s on a scholarship from New Zealand to do a PhD, and where the view of the great Irishman had been less than wholehearted and unequivocal. Now, while still seeing him as one of the major twentieth century poets, and admiring his great skill in labouring ideas up from prose drafts into stanza forms (his usual working method), I sometimes felt one was made too aware of the labour: ‘hard work’ poems, they were. There was sometimes a clumsiness that did not destroy the poem but could make it fall just short of what it might have been. I thought of the Keats precept, ‘If poetry come not as naturally as the leaves to the tree, it might as well not come at all.’ This was altogether too absolute – ‘shoulds’ in poetry are seldom wise. But it was clear that whatever the many merits of Yeats’s later poems, they did not arrive like leaves in spring.
And it was more than a technical matter, a matter of verse-making. There was also his Irish posturing (‘That we in coming times may be / Still the indomitable Irishry’); his glorification of war and his contempt for the poets of World War I who had paraded their suffering; his romanticism about ‘peasants’ and ‘country gentlemen’: so much of it was at least ridiculous, and even politically dangerous. Did great verse have to be – could it be – intellectually jejune?
One of his poems that remains in my head is ‘Easter 1916’, his great (and yes, it probably is great) commemoration of the sixteen rebels shot by the British for their part in the rising of Easter 1916, a poem for which I had written what became pretty much the standard, often reprinted critical exposition. ‘Easter 1916’ is in a simple stanza form of four three-stress lines rhyming (and half-rhyming) a,b,a,b, the stanzas running continuously without gaps, and containing passages of rare beauty:
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moorhens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live,
The stone’s in the midst of all.
Lovely lines – and the next bring us back to the reality of Easter 1916, and the thought that these brave rebels perhaps died needlessly; that certain qualities of flexibility and patience might have served them as well and saved their lives: ‘Was it needless death after all?’ The image of the stone in the stream is beautiful, but ‘Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart.’
It’s when he tries to characterize some among the rebels who were known to him personally that the verse begins to look clumsy, unpolished, laboured:
This man had kept a school
And rode our wingèd horse;
This other, his helper and friend,
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken vainglorious lout,
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song.
He wants to say that one of the rebels was a poet, but brings in that tired old trope about the winged horse (which he signals must be pronounced wingèd to get the full three stresses for the line); and then, for the rhyme with horse, says that the poet’s friend, another of the sixteen executed rebels, was ‘coming into his force’. Dear god! Meaning he was improving, I suppose, maturing, but what a lazy and cluttered utterance it is! And then one feels one knows what ‘daring’ thought means; but ‘so daring and sweet his thought’ to my ear is like singing la-la-la to fill an emptiness, as if for a moment he has forgotten what he meant to say next. After that he begins to lay into (without naming him) John MacBride, whose crime (the ‘bitter wrong’ he did) was that he married the great unrequited love of W.B’s life, Maud Gonne. But even MacBride is forgiven – ‘Yet I number him in the song’: all sixteen of them are forgiven their ‘ignorant good-will’, their shrill speech, their banality which he used to joke about ‘around the fire at the Club’, because everything has been ‘changed, changed utterly’ by the failed rebellion. Comedy has turned to tragedy: ‘A terrible beauty is born.’
The poem is retrieved and gathers to its great (again yes, I think so, even if the wearing of the green is slightly embarrassing) rhetorical climax:
I write it out in a verse –
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
So my attitude to Yeats became more complicated over the years. I still admired him, respected his great feats of verse-engineering, and even more his capacity for lyrical delicacy as in ‘The wild swans at Coole’ – but at the same time I felt he sometimes allowed himself to be bullied by poetic form, and in old age became in effect a ridiculous right-wing reactionary. This made, I think, for a richer and more complex view of his work, and it was reflected in my second book on 20th century poetry, Pound, Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Movement, which appeared in 1986 in the UK and the US, and which, since the year of its release, I have never re-read. (One day I will do that, and perhaps report here!)
1986 was the year I left the University of Auckland finally. I had been easing myself out during the previous five years, and was now departing permanently (though retaining the Professor Emeritus title, and a sense of loyalty and gratitude to the institution). I taught for two terms of that final year and then, in August, took off to lecture at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, the happy place of Yeats’s not always happy childhood, where the clear waters of Lake Innesfree rush out into the estuary of Sligo Harbour.
I flew to Dublin and then needed to find my way onward by rail. At the airport I asked how I would get to the Dublin railway station. ‘Is it Connolly or Pearse you’ll be wanting?’ the young woman asked. So I learned that those executed rebels of Easter 1916 are remembered and honoured in the naming of public places.
The one among them ‘who rode our wingèd horse’ was Thomas MacDonagh, and many years before my Sligo visit I had found and bought a book of his poems, a first edition. Later, I wrote a poem about him:
Easter 1916
(For Seamus Heaney
to whom I gave the book)Irish Thomas MacDonagh
thirty years ago
in that dusty Oxford bookshop
I found your poems
published by Hodges Figgis
Dublin, 1910.Songs of myself you called them:
how lovingly
you must have turned
these long-ago pages
dreaming of fame
and your country free.Alas, Thomas MacDonagh
shot by the British,
it's not your poems live on
in the mind of your country.
It's your dying,
your death.
I gave the little book to Seamus Heaney after hearing his first lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford in I think 1989. I had gone to hear it with Craig Raine, who had been Heaney’s poetry editor at Faber, and a passing reference to MacDonagh gave me the thought that I should do that. I knew as a loyal Irish Catholic Heaney would value the book; but I gave it to him also because he had expressed gratitude to me for that early book, The New Poetic – not for my defence of Yeats and ‘Easter 1916’ (though I’m sure that was appreciated) but for what I had written about T.S. Eliot. As a young man, Heaney told me, he had been unable to read Eliot until he read my book. In the title essay of his book The Government of the Tongue, and again in a lecture called ‘Learning from Eliot’, he goes on about this at some length.
He had sent me a broadsheet of his poem ‘The Sounds of Rain’, no 9 of 15 copies, signed and inscribed ‘for Karl Stead with “the feeling of an immense debt”’ – a line from the poem itself, which was an ‘in memoriam’ for Richard Ellmann, critic-biographer of Yeats and of Wilde. So in this matter of acknowledgements, I felt my debt was as great as his, and I tried to balance the score with the gift of that rare MacDonagh book. I’m glad I gave it, and still wish I had it – which is as it should be. ‘The Sounds of Rain’ appeared in Heaney’s 1991 collection, Seeing Things.
At Sligo I had made some new friends, among them the brilliant Harvard critic Helen Vendler, the Yeats biographer Roy Foster, and the wonderfully sociable editor of the Yeats letters, John Kelly from Oxford and his clever and beautiful wife, Christine. The following May we all met again, this time as members of an invited group of ‘world experts on Yeats’, to discuss the theme of ‘Yeats the European’ at the Princess Grace Memorial Irish Library in Monte Carlo. We presented and listened to papers (mine slightly out of key with the unequivocally affirmative note of my colleagues), did a lot of good eating, drinking and talking, and were taken to see the shell of the soon-to-be demolished Hotel Idéal Séjour, where Yeats had died in 1939. His son Michael, an Irish Senator and Member of the European Parliament, and his daughter Anne, a painter – both the subject in childhood of now famous poems by their father – were among the delegates; and Michael reminisced about playing in the garden of the hotel during W.B’s final illness.
Next we were taken by bus to the Roquebrune cemetery where Yeats was first interred. The cemetery is limited in space and situated on a hillside, the graves mostly above ground, so the dead spend a given period in or under whatever tomb or monument is built for them, and are then removed to an ossuary to make room for the newly dead. The body of Yeats spent the years of World War II there and then was disinterred and taken on an Irish warship to be buried, as his poems had instructed, ‘under bare Ben Bulben’s head/ In Drumcliffe churchyard’ in the countryside outside Sligo. One hot day during the Sligo summer school I had walked to the grave, and read on it the famous inscription he had ‘commanded’:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death –
Horseman, pass by!
So I could say now that I had visited both of the Yeats graves! But could I claim that with confidence? A strange moment early in the Monte Carlo conference was an assurance the delegates received that any stories we may have heard suggesting that wrong bones had been sent to Ireland were mistaken. The French authorities wanted us to know that no mistake had been made, and that it was indeed the remains of the great poet that had been handed over to the Irish warship for transfer and re-interment. This reassurance only fuelled the rumour, which almost everyone had heard, and fired further speculation.
Disagreement on this matter continues, and it has been suggested at least once, and in the Irish Times, that French official papers indicate bones had been taken from the Roquebrune ossuary and ‘assembled’ by guesswork by officials who had no certainty about the choices they were making. There is even an English family who believe their loved one and not the poet was in the coffin handed over to the Irish ship. Could an Englishman be buried in the grave of the great Irish nationalist? Tiens!
One final irony: the Irish Minister of Foreign Affairs who approved the transfer and accepted the bones as those of W.B. Yeats was Sean MacBride, son of W.B.’s great love, Maud Gonne and the ‘drunken vainglorious lout’ and Easter 1916 hero, John MacBride. I think I hear someone having the last laugh. The accent is Irish but I can’t be sure about whose voice it is.
– C.K. Stead
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