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.

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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 lyrics

of 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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

Broadsheet of Seamus Heaney's 'The Sounds of Rain'.

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

House and land

In a recent blog I ended with some thoughts about Mansfield the poet from which these further thoughts indirectly follow:

1

Before we had our own officially sponsored poet laureate it could be argued that we had an unofficial one in Allen Curnow. Allen died in 2001 before the New Zealand laureateship had been established; but if it had come earlier he would undoubtedly have been our first.

The time I have in mind, however, when Curnow was in his prime as, so to speak, our unofficial public poet was the decade of the 1940s. While World War II raged, and New Zealand played its part in the Middle East and then Italy and the Pacific, we celebrated the centenary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi (1840-1940) and commemorated the 300th anniversary of Tasman’s voyage of discovery (1642-1942). This was the period when Curnow, who I assume could not be drafted into the military for medical (eye sight) reasons, was writing poems that chose, whether we were listening or not, to speak for us all. Resonant phrases from these poems entered one stratum of the national consciousness at that time and have remained there:

Always to islanders danger
Is what comes over the sea.

Or the sonnet about the skeleton of the moa that ends,

Not I, some child, born in a marvellous year
Will learn the trick of standing upright here.

Or ‘The Unhistoric Story’ with its refrain that New Zealand as it developed

...was something different, something
Nobody counted on

‘Landfall in Unknown Seas’ celebrated Tasman’s landing in New Zealand – a beautifully structured sequence which runs through the excitements of preparation for the voyage and anticipation of success (‘time / To go and to be gazed at going’), the exhilaration of discovery (‘There was the seascape / Crammed with coast’), the violence of the first encounter (‘in a flash, in a flat calm / a clash of boats in the bay’) , and the disappointment – followed by a reflection which asks how all this should be remembered and celebrated now that ‘there are no more islands to be found’. The conclusion is that what’s needed is something more truthful than self importance and self-congratulation.

Only by a more faithful memory, laying
On him the half-light of a diffident glory,
The sailor lives, and stands beside us, paying
            Out into our time’s wave
The stain of blood that writes an island story.

All of this, together with the lovely clarity with which Douglas Lilburn’s accompanying music catches the poem’s moods and transitions, put poetry for a moment right into the public arena. The time was right for this, and Curnow had seen the need of the moment and had seized it memorably.

Only a few years later he edited two anthologies of poetry which are generally acknowledged to mark a point in the development of a mature and independent New Zealand literature. Curnow in those days was a literary nationalist; but he was also a literary realist, in the sense that what he cared most about was that our poetry should be an honest record, not a ‘three cheers for us’ one; and this meant recognition of deficiencies, lacks, failures, uncertainties. As Wilfred Owen had said, ‘the true poets must be truthful’. Rather than national pride, Curnow would offer us, in that resonant phrase, ‘the half-light of a diffident glory’.

Possibly the subtlest and frankest of Curnow’s statement of his position in these matters occurs in the introduction to his A Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse when he discusses Katherine Mansfield’s poem ‘To Stanislaw Wyspianski’. He calls it a ‘half-poem’, but praises it because, he says, ‘it allows us to date as early as 1910 the emergence of New Zealand as a characterizing force in the work of a native poet.’ What he finds and admires in the poem is that Mansfield identifies herself as a New Zealander, and that her country, which she appears to have rejected, figures nonetheless as ‘a palpable “here”, a pressure from within, an antagonist’ and so ‘anticipates the conflict of spirit’ in the poets who followed.

Curnow was wanting to be rid of weak nationalist self-assertions, the ‘Kowhai Gold’ kind of thing, that offered the picturesque – tuis and bellbirds, ‘scenic’ bush, mountains and seas, and romantic ‘pioneering’– rather than the tormented inner conscience of the nation; and it was this he felt Mansfield caught in her Wyspianski poem, including

the New Zealand sadness (always there, however deeply buried in the mind) because life here seems makeshift and reality (still sadder illusion) lodged somewhere ‘overseas’.

So Mansfield’s cry from ‘a little land with no history’ seemed to Curnow truthful and to catch a sad reality.

The point about sad or harsh realities rather than scenery is made also in varying ways by that other literary nationalist of the time, Frank Sargeson. In one of his early stories, for example, ‘Chaucerian’, the narrator, who has escaped from a narrow upbringing in a churchy family, has discovered the truth about himself, and about life, in Freeman’s Bay, at that time a central Auckland slum. He writes

It’s a very interesting place. Any New Zealand poet who hasn’t dedicated herself to kauri trees and bell-birds couldn’t do better than go and live there.

My admiration for the Curnow of that time is undimmed. But what strikes me now is how deeply and indelibly negative his nationalism was (‘ the New Zealand sadness, always there...’) When I was young I accepted this because the poems were so good, so beautifully crafted, so eloquent. Perhaps I accepted it also because I felt that sadness in myself, as something out of the air, in the water, inherent in the sense of place and history. At this distance in time that doesn’t seem to me entirely implausible; but if it’s true, I was not conscious of it, and if it had been suggested to me I’m sure I would have rejected it – would have said that the ‘sadness’ was just part of being alive.

But looked back on, how pervasive the gloom in those poems now seems! It is a collective grief, a loss, a deprivation. One of his sonnets begins,

The oldest of us burst into tears and cried
Let me go home, but she stayed, watching
At her staircase window ship after ship ride
Like birds her grieving sunsets.

‘House and land’, a wonderfully managed and memorably lyrical poem, ends

The sensitive nor’-west afternoon
Collapsed, and the rain came;
The dog crept into his barrel,
Looking lost and lame.
But you can’t attribute to either
Awareness of what great gloom
Stands in a land of settlers
With never a soul at home.

We are characterized as an unhappy, in effect homeless, ‘land of settlers’. A 1942 verse letter to Denis Glover laments

O I could go down to harbours
And mourn with a hundred years
Of hunger, what slips away there.

These are lines that chime with Charles Brasch’s

Remindingly beside the quays the white
Ships lie smoking; and from their haunted bay
The godwits vanish towards another summer.
Everywhere in light and calm the murmuring
Shadow of departure.

It’s hard to look at the work of that period from this distance and not see in it the ghostly face of the colonial child weeping for Mother England – something which, if it had been put to me in those terms at that time, would have appalled me and I would have rejected. My thought now is that there is no escaping from your actual condition (and I include myself in this). If yours is one of colonialism that will show, even in your struggle to reject and escape from it.

It would have distressed Curnow too, probably, if I had written in these terms during his lifetime. I realize that what I am saying here is not unlike William Blake’s assertion that ‘Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it’. It is like one of those always slightly irritating exercises in literary deconstruction, where the clever critic proves the writer set out with one intention and achieved precisely its opposite. Nonetheless it seems to me looking again at these poems I have known so long and know so well, that they do surrender to their opposites. The poet who aspired to speak for the nation, was telling us we were not a nation at all but a land of sad homeless settlers. And the poet who said others after him would ‘stand upright here’ as he could not, was writing poems which stood upright as none written before him had done, and only a few since.

Allen Curnow and C.K. Stead, March 2001, at the launch of Curnow’s last collection, The Bells of St Babel’s.

2

It was not until 1949, aged 37 or 38, that Curnow got out of New Zealand and to London where in November of that year he wrote his ‘Elegy on my father’, an untypically awkward poem, as if his current state of mind, and present preoccupations, had no room for, or means of coping with, such an important but distant death. Back in New Zealand the following year he wrote a poem, addressed it seems to someone left behind in London, and reflecting painfully on the loss:

I pray, pray for me on some spring-wet pavement
Where halts the heart-print of our salt bereavement,
         Pray over many times
Forgive him the seas, forgive him the spring leaf,
All bloom ungathered perishable as grief,
         For the hulk of the world’s between.

There is something very personal and private here, but it is made public. Perhaps for the last time Curnow is speaking for us all – of our far removal, of distance, of the great, almost unbridgeable gap between here and there. It is a last look at, or from, New Zealand before jet travel became affordable, and e-communication commonplace; before the ‘hulk’ of the world shrivelled to a manageable and almost frighteningly small nut, and national self-confidence became, if not actually at least plausibly, self-sufficient.

Meanwhile he had moved to Auckland in 1951 where he became, I think one can say, a regional rather than a national poet: less a public eminence, but no less a brilliant poet. His 1955 poems, marking the beginning of his relationship with Jeny Tole, were an enrichment in every way. The emotional range expanded together with the enlargement of scene and reference. Before too long Curnow, with his new wife, would become, like the rest of us, an international traveller; and though England, and London as a centre of Anglophone publishing, continued to be important, as it had to be for a son of Christchurch and the Anglican Church, Italy became the place he loved most to visit, an expansion of his poetry’s worldly vision. The sequence ‘Moro Assassinato’, on the murder of the Italian Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, is a reflection of that expansion, and is one of his finest.

Of the Mansfield Wyspianski poem Curnow wrote, ‘Because she addresses a Pole – type-figure of suffering nationhood – she disengages herself from the invidious and belittling contest of England versus “the Colony”. Paradoxically, her lines thus dignify the country they reject.’ Perhaps Curnow felt his ‘Italy’ served the same purpose.

It is hardly surprising that some of the poets who came immediately after Curnow, the ones I think of as the 1922 generation, who were perhaps the children ‘born in a marvellous year’, in the 1960s rebelled against and rejected Curnow’s view of our poetry and of the state of the nation. I was involved in that argument, on Curnow’s side because he was the Master and, simply as poets, most of his detractors (with the exception of James K. Baxter) seemed amateurs by comparison. Now it has receded into literary history, and like all such stories, calls for retelling as distance alters the perspectives.

Permission to reproduce the work of Allen Curnow courtesy of the copyright owner Tim Curnow c/- Auckland University Press.

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Everyone should be aware the BOOKSHOP DAY is coming on October 31st and bookshops throughout the country will be finding ways of making their presence felt. Good luck to them – we depend on them.

– C.K. Stead

The Here and the There – and the words that give you life

A launch 18 Sept at Time Out Bookshop in Mt Eden was of two new books of poems, Looking out to sea by Kevin Ireland, and Expecting Miracles by Peter Bland, two octogenarians, two characters, not dissimilar, though with the difference it makes to have been born here (Kevin) or born there (Peter). Kevin’s life has fallen into three parts – New Zealand roughly 25 years, England/Europe the next 25, and the rest New Zealand – though this latter third has been complicated by a late (third) marriage to a New Zealander living in Oxford – Janet Wilson, daughter of the late Phil Wilson (fiction writer, one of the ‘Sons of Sargeson’) and herself an academic specializing in Commonwealth literature. This marriage has the two of them hiking back and forth between the here and the there. Kevin was about to take off for the UK the day after the launch.

And that – the hiking back and forth – has been very much UK-born Peter’s life until recently he sorted out his differences with New Zealand Immigration, and his passport, and settled finally in Auckland where at least two, possibly three, of his children are living. Peter’s children, by the way, had done the covers of these two books – Carl Bland had done Peter’s and Joanna Bland, Kevin’s.

C. K. Stead and Kevin Ireland at Time Out Bookshop. Photo by Robert O'Neill.

There was a time when Peter and his New Zealand-born wife Beryl used to make, and announce every second or third year, a ‘final’ decision to settle at one end of the earth or the other – each of these decisions accompanied by the purchase of a house even grander than the last. Perhaps these decisions were partly determined by fluctuations in the rate of exchange. (And possibly my recollections are more picturesque than precise.) But certainly they moved a lot, to and fro between NZ and the UK, moves influenced often by opportunities in the theatre, because Peter has always been actor as well as poet – most memorably for me in the movie of the Ronald Hugh Morrieson novel Came a Hot Friday where he appeared as Wes Pennington along with Billy T James who was the Te Whakinga Kid. Peter was one of the founders of Downstage Theatre in Wellington. He has a wonderful rich voice and is to be heard sometimes as a reader on National Radio.

Peter Bland at Time Out Bookshop. Photo by Robert O'Neill.

The two and fro nature of the Blands’ life is caught in the title of his memoir, Sorry, I’m a stranger here myself... which is also an 8-line poem:

Sorry, I'm a stranger here myself

but I know the seasons
come into it, and wars,
and the shape of a particular landscape
we try to call our own, and the sea
with all that space and distance,
and fellow-travellers we meet on the road,
and the dead of course who were here before us,
and the millions more who have yet to come...

Beryl died in 2009, and some of the poems in Peter’s new collection are a continuation, a step onward but still looking back, from the very moving and eloquent elegies published in his last book. Since the stunning title poem of Kevin’s book is addressed to his younger brother who died two years ago, there was a strong elegiac flavour to the launch, though it was certainly not a sad occasion – not possible with these two, Peter the large (6ft 3 at least) actor who has a big voice and something of the manner of the sad clown; and Kevin, an inch or two shorter, but also large and loud, bon viveur, joker, red wine man. Each is enough to fill a room; as a pair they make a crowd – and their publisher, Roger Steele, almost matching them in size and volume, and fluent in Maori (though there was less of that than his usual on this occasion), is the sort of person anyone would want if there was a launch speech to be made.

What these two poets are on the page is dependable. They have lived through a lot of the flurry and scuffle of modernisms and post-modernisms, not entirely unconscious or unaffected, probably formally less constrained and more inventive than would have been the case if those movements had not occurred, but not too fussed by fashion either; concerned most of all to mean something, to make good sense, to write well, feel deeply and be understood. Octogenarian virtues? Perhaps yes, but not old fogue ones – not at all. They are too lively for that, too adroit, too naturally on-the-page entertainers, engaging your mind, your sense of language, how it plays, and plays out, and... engaging!

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At the Ireland/Bland launch Roger Steele mentioned the recent death of W.H. (Bill) Oliver, poet and historian, who must have been 90. I think of Oliver in conjunction with his near contemporary, fellow poet and historian Keith Sinclair. I knew them both, Sinclair as a colleague and long-time friend, Oliver as a familiar academic acquaintance with whom I had intermittent dealings. There was a great contrast between them – both of exceptional intelligence, Sinclair the healthy pagan, so full of action, energy and impatience, so quick in thought and conversation, Oliver the serious Christian, quiet, measured, dependable: not the contrast of the quick and the dead but of the quick and the careful. For both, poetry came second to history, though I don’t think happily so in either case. Keith would have liked to have been poet first, and I think fiction writer as well. Oliver in his late memoir says of himself at school, ‘if my activities suggested that I wanted to be anything in particular, it was to be a poet.’ But history claimed them both. Each offered, early in a distinguished career, an account of our history, Sinclair A History of New Zealand (1959), Oliver The Story of New Zealand (1960).

Bill Oliver. Photo by Victoria Birkinshaw.

Here is Oliver’s comparison of the two books: ‘altogether unlike [...] Sinclair’s is nervy, energetic and staccato and mine smooth, restrained and laid-back; his tone is nationalistic and mine determinedly provincial. [...] In these two books two not readily compatible New Zealands each found expression. [...] Aptly enough, these two were fashioned in Auckland and Christchurch. Each of us set out to explore a country which he needed to understand, for his own sake and for that of his contemporaries.’

Of his writing in the 1940 and ‘50s, when he established himself among the new young New Zealand poets, Oliver writes, ‘Considerably influenced by Wordsworth’s Prelude, I worked in a romantic mode and, as tramping extended my horizons in the later 1940s, took from landscape a set of images to express (and as surely to conceal) my hopes and fears. [...] The more decorous of these [poems] were published in Fire without phoenix [1957]. Sometimes it seems to me that I have been looking for the phoenix ever since.’ So the memoir, published in 2002, is called Looking for the Phoenix. He had a late return to poetry, with a collection called Out of Season in 1980, and Poor Richard in 1982. I’m not aware that there were any more after that. In his later life he was best known as Professor of History at Massey University, and editor of our Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, which Keith Sinclair says he (Sinclair, assisted by whisky) persuaded Rob Muldoon to establish. Oliver and his close associate Bridget Williams together designed and edited the Oxford History of New Zealand; and Oliver was involved for many years with the Waitangi Tribunal, and with the University Grants Committee.

While studying in Oxford on a post-graduate scholarship from New Zealand in the early 1950s, Oliver had moved to high Anglicanism, and then, back in New Zealand, to Catholicism, which seems to have lasted a decade or two and then faded slowly away to nothing. He records that he passed through rejection of faith ‘with a sigh of relief and an unaccustomed sense of peace.’

I have all three of his collections of poetry on my shelves, along with the memoir; also a post-primary schools bulletin he wrote in 1960 called Poetry in New Zealand, and a pictorial biography he wrote of James K. Baxter. I find in the back of my copy of Fire without phoenix a note, ‘25 poems, 663 lines’; and then ‘John Wain, A word carved on a sill, 26 poems, about 500 lines’. I must have been planning to put together my first collection for a publisher, and was checking these details to see how mine might measure up.

Oliver had been part of the lively group – Alistair Campbell, Erik Schwimmer, Pat Wilson (not to be confused with Phil Wilson – above) and Hubert Witheford – who in the 1940s at Victoria published the literary magazines Hilltop and then Arachne. Years later, in Palmerston North, he wrote a series of sonnets commemorating the first three, and adding Charles Brasch, James K. Baxter and Louis Johnson. Baxter he remembers as ‘the prodigious poet in his drinking days’ who ‘swept Wellington like a shower of broken glass / blown from the stricken south.’ Brasch was ‘a man at odds with his time’ writing of ‘Virgilian / vines in Otago wastes’. Alistair Campbell was ‘unduly solemn / and that other rare thing Polynesian / though that had not started to matter /as more than a grace note.’ Pat Wilson was ‘one of the wholly innocent’ who ‘valued / light on water, girls with bright names, a clarinet / bubbling with joy, and Blake’s entire absolution.’ Erik Schwimmer was ‘such a deep diver / it was always an open question whether the pearls / he brought up were worth all that shortness of breath.’ Of Louis Johnson Oliver says the critics (I was one of them) ‘were less than fair’ to him, though it was ‘true, in prose / his sentences revealed great gaping wounds’, and he ‘wrote too much’.

Oliver wanted to record an attachment to these poets, he says in his memoir, because (and it’s a commendable and memorable sentence) ‘in their company I first learned that words, if they did not quite earn you a living, at least gave you a life.’

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I’ve been looking at the books of some of those associates of Oliver’s. I have Pat Wilson’s first book of poems, The Bright Sea, published in1951 (price 3/6) – one of those little blue paperbacks done by the Pegasus Press in Christchurch in the 1950s which included Hubert Witheford’s The Falcon mask, and Louis Johnson’s Roughshod among the lilies. Wilson’s poems are sparely written and full of real charm. Oliver says of him, ‘At the time I did not recognise the virtue of his restraint, his distaste for rhetoric and his avoidance of any but the most understated gestures.’

I also have Hubert Witheford’s collection Shadow of the flame, published by Bob Lowry in Auckland in 1950, with woodcuts by Mervyn Taylor. Witheford was another avoider of rhetoric, who had learned stylistic economy from Pound, but had just possibly taken on board some of Pound’s politics as well. At least there is an unpleasant ring to statements like, ‘One cannot regard the trim State housing settlements without thinking they imply the atomic bomb.’ This was in their journal Arachne of February 1951, where Erik Schwimmer praised Witheford as ‘the first New Zealand poet able to express his deepest experience through the medium of hard abstract thought.’

Both Witheford and Wilson took the usual intellectual/academic path of the time, to England. Witheford’s third collection, The lightning makes a difference, published in London in 1962 by The Brookside Press, divides between dissatisfactions in New Zealand, and a sort of dour relief to be at last in England.

Your fear? Not what you knew before,
That ever-clutching, narrowing constraint,
A broader thing, almost a touch of awe,
Meeting what is not you. Not hostile, not concerned,
The wood around you waits.
And you must wait – and watch. Stand in the gentle rain.
Put down your heavy load.

I got to know both Witheford and Wilson in London in 1965 when Douglas Cleverdon of the BBC gave me the task of organising a reading of New Zealand poetry at the Royal Court Theatre for the Commonwealth Arts Festival of that year. I engaged them both to read, along with Fleur Adcock and Basil Dowling, also living in the UK, and myself, there on sabbatical leave.

Witheford was writing new poems, and gave me a carbon copy of a collection, A native, perhaps beautiful, which would be published a couple of years later by the Caxton Press. I reviewed it admiringly in Landfall, focussing especially on his strange and extraordinary poem ‘Barbarossa’, about the Napier earthquake which (like Lauris Edmond) he remembered from his childhood.

After that it seemed Witheford went silent as a poet for 27 years, until his next book, A Blue Monkey for the Tomb, (a collection so slight you have to look twice, and carefully, to recognize its genuine magic) was published by Faber in 1994. Christopher Reid, who had become poetry editor at Faber after Craig Raine, ran a creative writing class, I think in Hampstead, to which came an elderly retired civil servant whose minimalist talent impressed him so much he published a collection. I’m not sure whether he knew at the time that this stranger was known and anthologised as a poet in New Zealand. Possibly not.

The bio note for the book says Witheford was born in New Zealand in 1921, and in 1953 moved with his wife and son to England, ‘where he joined the Central Office of Information.’ (In fact he rose to be its Director.) ‘After his retirement in 1981,’ the note concludes, ‘a return to New Zealand proved briefer than he had envisaged.’

This deliberately laconic note, written, I’m sure, by Witheford himself, can be fully understood only if you have read The Quick Word, the third volume of Lauris Edmond’s autobiography, and know that Witheford appears there disguised as ‘Chester Wadsworth’. Bill Oliver also figures in it, also disguised, as ‘Ted Green’, another of the lovers of this phase of Lauris’s well-documented liberation.

Pat Wilson married in England and remained there for the rest of his life. He was for many years a valued lecturer in the philosophy of education at the University of London’s Goldsmith’s College. A second collection of his poems, At the window, was published by the Nag’s Head Press in Christchurch 1997. He died in 2009.

We were lucky to have (or perhaps in the case of Witheford and Wilson I should to say to share) these poets, and they should not be forgotten.

– C. K. Stead

The poetry of fact

In an interview that marked the end of his tenure as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Sir Geoffrey Hill was asked what he wanted from contemporary poetry. He began – and ended – with a negative. 'I don't want it to be a sort of simpering drizzle. I really do want there to be some sense of order battling anarchy within the very structure of a poem. I think one of the most dreadful sounds in all of modern culture is what I will call the poetry recital chortle, and most contemporary poems seem to me to be written in order to arouse the desire of the listener to chuckle appreciatively.'

Michael Schmidt uses this quotation in his editorial introducing the new PN Review. My feelings about it are mixed. I understand the rather dour intellectual Hill’s dislike of poetry as entertainment/poets as stand-up comics, which I suspect lies behind it. My notion of poetry is, like Hill’s, one of (I will give it capitals) High Art, which of course does not exclude wit. But the gap between ‘funny’ and ‘witty’, between Johnny Depp and Johnny Donne, is a mile wide. ‘Performance poetry’ only matters when the Poetry (capitals again) survives the Performance and lives on the Page. So I can agree with Hill to that extent; but Hill’s own poetry is Hard Work. It has a Miltonic, Old Testament feel about it. You have to be in good intellectual shape to approach it – it requires that of you.

Milton’s God-obsession is comprehensible given the times and circumstances it springs from, and the state of knowledge at that time; but the same dour obsession in the 21st Century seems to me less explicable – in some moods, almost inexcusable. Charles Tomlinson (a poet I’m sure I did less than justice to in my last blog) says in an interview, ‘I happen to think, with Santayana, that “Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with fact.” It’s no longer possible [he goes on] to reinstate seventeenth century, basically medieval criteria of belief – criteria from times when it was virtually possible to believe anything.’

Temperamentally, then, I would prefer, not a less serious, but perhaps a lighter, touch than Hill’s; and intellectually, one that occupied the terrifying real universe science is revealing to us. It will be interesting to see what the new Professor, Simon Armitage, makes of the role. He has said he will try for ‘something a little more contemporary.’ And ‘I feel I’d like to bring things up to date.’

I have a distant interest in all this because a couple of Kiwis in Oxford last year, wanting to move the Professorship offshore for a change, had the idea of nominating me for the post. In the end they threw in their lot with the move to nominate the Nigerian Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka; and the chance of that nomination succeeding was probably effectively scuppered when famous British Melvin Bragg said publicly that Soyinka (my age) was ‘too old and too grand’. It’s a strange notion that one can be ‘too grand’ for Oxford’s chair of poetry, a seat occupied not too long ago by W.H. Auden, Robert Graves, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon. I didn’t think I would be elected (too old, and not grand enough!) but I would have enjoyed the election process – and the job too, if it had come to me.

It will be interesting to see what Armitage (a pleasant person and talented poet) will make of it.

I will add a recent poem of my own here relevant to the discussion above about the God-obsession and its relevance or otherwise in the 21st century.

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The poetry of fact

On board Apollo 13

on their slingshot return

from the mission which failed to land them on

the moon,

oxygen diminishing

CO2 increasing

temperature dropping and

batteries failing

they had to get a precise

angle of re-entry.

 

Too steep and they would burn,

too fine, they would bounce off

earth’s envelope of air

and away into space for ever.

 

Prayer would not help

though by now the whole world –

the President

the Pope

the people in Times Square –

were praying.

 

To do the job

they needed Physics

and after the Physics,

Maths –

just numbers you could say

or an illustration

of how hard the hard facts can be,

how exacting

and necessary

and how beautiful

when you get them right.

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I was briefly in Wellington about my appointment as Laureate and ran into British academic and Mansfield specialist, Dr Gerri Kimber, on a winter visit from the U.K. and hard at work in the Turnbull Library on her biography of Mansfield’s early years. That evening I heard a very lively talk she gave at the Wellington City Gallery about the discovery she has made in the Newberry Library, Chicago, of a collection of 32 Mansfield poems, only 7 of them previously known – a discovery at once exciting and inconvenient. Dr Kimber is deviser and Series Editor of the Edinburgh University Press four volume Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, and the find is exciting because she considers these poems to be up with the very best Mansfield ever wrote. It is inconvenient, on the other hand, because Volume three has already appeared and is supposed to contain Mansfield’s complete poems and critical writing. So what is to be done with this collection of poems but stuff them in at the end of Volume four, Mansfield’s notebooks, currently being edited and annotated by Dr Kimber and Professor Claire Davison of the Sorbonne?

Katherine Mansfield at her work table, Villa Isola, Menton, France. Ref: 1/2-011985-F.

What makes the find special is that it appears Mansfield put the poems together in 1910 as a single collection and offered it (unsuccessfully) to a London publisher – after which it mysteriously vanished into a private collection. It has therefore a certain unity and coherence, and the freshness of Mansfield at that early stage in her career. Here is an example, showing, among much else, the influence of Russian literature that was so strong throughout her career:

In the swiftly moving sleigh
We sat curled up under the bear skin rugs
And talked of the dangers of life
The afternoon froze into twilight, profounder than night
The trees in the forest through which we passed
Were patterned like monstrous weeds on a lake of ice . .
You told me all your adventures
And though they were very terrible and violent
I could not help laughing, sometimes you ceased speaking
Turned to me with funny gravity
‘I just escaped being killed.’
Then our laughter rang over the snow
I told you of three wrecks I had been in
Of a fire – and the time I was all-but-drowned in a river . .
Ever faster galloped the horses
The moon rose, touching the fantastic land with her silver fingers
How eloquently we described our adventures!
But it was useless.
They flew into space on the wings of our laughter . .
Curled up under the bear skin rugs.
We drove – it seemed – through the foam that breaks over the world edge.
On the one great adventure
That held us in silence and gravity.

In the view of Dr Kimber and Professor Davison ’s these poems show Mansfield moving ‘away from the influence of Wilde and fin-de-siècle symbolism towards the more complex neo-romanticism and early modernism of continental Europe.’

I have always been slightly sceptical about Mansfield as a poet. The last time I offered an opinion on the subject was February 1990 when I reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement a selection of her poems edited by Vincent O’Sullivan. Here are two paragraphs of that review:

There have been half a dozen poems worthy of serious attention, and of those, two in particular have been rightly favoured by anthologists. One is the formal sonnet about the death of her brother in the First World War – a poem as tight, unflinching, strong and clear in its feeling as the best of Wilfred Owen. The other, ‘To Stanislaw Wyspianski’ is a romantic rhapsodic Whitmanesque piece in which Mansfield speaks out as a woman and a New Zealander, and in which one can see a talent not yet disciplined, but not yet curbed either.

For the rest there is a great deal of charm, some examples of the Mansfield wit, and increasingly the sense of a physical decline which robs her poetry of its native vitality. At her best in prose or verse Mansfield has the ability to speak right out of the middle of the note. But her poems look increasingly bruised and defeated. The spring goes out of their step. In the end she is simply sorry for herself. She has every reason to be but it doesn’t make the best use of her talent.

So here is a reason to celebrate Dr Kimber’s discovery – a small collection of poems written by Mansfield before her skies began to fall on her, or at least at a time when she was strong enough to cope with the falling. But how do they stand up? The poem quoted above is a good example: it has youthful vitality, the warmth of human association, immediacy, a sense of fun. It’s like a lamb leaping in spring: it is not only natural to respond with pleasure – it’s inevitable, unavoidable. But lurking somewhere as I read and enjoy is the spoilsport (whispered) question: is it a poem?

It is the same question that lurks when one reads the poems of Janet Frame. There is the immediacy that comes with talent – both have enormous resources of that. But where is the form that distinguishes a poem from prose? This is a very complex question, because form does not have to mean rhyme, or measureable metres, or a count of syllables, or even a pattern that has ever been used before or since. Nonetheless one believes one has an instinct for it and knows it is there – or that it is not. And I note that I had written all this before checking what Allen Curnow says about ‘To Stanislaw Wyspianski’ and finding that, though admiring, and writing about it at some length, he describes it as ‘a half-poem’, and as ‘passionate stumbling prose (for it is barely verse)’.

Would it be fair to say that the recently discovered poem quoted above is charming and skilful but formless? And if I do tend towards that opinion, is mine only a male response – and anyway, does it matter? Maybe we should just take what we are offered and be grateful?

Let the conversation continue!

– C. K. Stead

Mont Sainte-Victoire

The inauguration as poet Laureate went off well, despite the fact that it was NZ Poetry Day and there were readings and book launches going on simultaneously elsewhere in town. A distinguished group of friends, fellow writers, and family, a warm and sociable Minister (Maggie Barry), and a venue (the Auckland Branch of the National Library) nicely prepared by the staff – my thanks to them all.

There was one thing I had intended to say in my speech and forgot, so I will say it here. Some years ago I chaired a session at the Wellington Writers’ Festival, an hour with the distinguished German poet Hans Magnus Enzensburger. Enzensburger was reflecting on the strangeness of the phenomenon of poetry, and said it was the only industry he could think of where the producers exceeded the consumers in number. What I meant to add to this remark was that this fact is a source of poetry’s strength: it can’t be commercialized, or corporatized. It’s one of the few areas of life in New Zealand at the moment not in danger of international ‘investment’. There’s no money in it, and it can’t go bust – which is one of the reasons it survives. So many are doing it, and will go on doing it, privately, even secretly, sometimes hopefully, often with no hope at all that anyone will be interested in what they write, or ever publish it. It’s a reflection of our fascination with language, human kind’s primary tool, and what distinguishes us on our planet. It’s why poetry flourishes during economic depressions, finds work for itself in times of war, goes underground and gains power there under political repression. There is something necessary about poetry, something mysterious, a force. It’s a minority art practiced by so many, even more written than read, but a constant.

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The British poet Charles Tomlinson died on 22 August aged 88. The following is from a memoir I am intermittently writing, this extract about my time as a PhD student on a scholarship from New Zealand at the University of Bristol, 1957-59, where my supervisor was Professor L.C. Knights, and Tomlinson was a member of the English Department:

Another visitor to the Department was the Canadian-born, American-by-adoption, critic Hugh Kenner, already a notable Eliot scholar. I don’t now remember much of his lecture but I remember his natty bow tie and mop of curly hair, and how his at first disconcerting speech (a consequence of deafness in childhood) contrasted with Lionel Knights’s smoothness and fluency introducing him; and yet how the keen intelligence and originality shone through. This was the man who made me aware I needed to know more about Ezra Pound, and who gave the idea of ‘Modernism’ an intellectual edge – made a puzzle and a challenge of it.

One purpose of Kenner’s Bristol visit was to cement his association with Charles Tomlinson, a junior lecturer in the Department, and the only British poet whose work Kenner felt was in tune with important things that were going on in American poetry. I can’t now quite disengage my present overview of Kenner from the much less I would have known about him then. He is author of one of the great books of twentieth century literary criticism, The Pound Era (1972) – great not only for its intelligence and scholarship but for liveliness, originality and readability. Yet Kenner can also seem at times a critic with quite extreme quirks and crankiness, prone to clever but absurd overstatement, like a brilliant drunk in full flight. But in that year he was giving Charles Tomlinson a start he might never otherwise have had, putting him in direct touch with American poets he admired, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, and persuading his own American publisher, McDowell Obolensky, to take Tomlinson’s collection of poems, Seeing is believing, which no publisher in England (Charles said he’d tried them all) would touch.

This was the time when the British poets of the Movement, in reaction against the flamboyance of Dylan Thomas, George Barker and the ‘new Romantics’ of the 1940s, were being defined and displayed in anthologies, from which Tomlinson had been excluded. Hell hath no fury like a poet shut out of a currently fashionable anthology, and Tomlinson was busy scourging the Movement in journals on either side of the Atlantic – in Poetry (Chicago), and in Essays in Criticism (Oxford) where he devoted no fewer than nine pages to the punishment of what he called ‘the Middlebrow Muse’. These reviews were followed up with the same message when he was given the chapter ‘Poetry Today’ to write for the distinctly Leavisite Pelican Guide to English Literature, Volume 7, edited by Boris Ford.

To me Tomlinson appeared as an interesting specimen of one kind of Englishness, a man whose father sometimes believed, and liked to claim, he was of Royal blood on the wrong side of the blanket, and that he had married beneath him in that his wife, the poet’s mother, had been a Leicestershire mill-girl. Tomlinson senior had lost his job as foreman in a factory that made jam-pots, but was expert at fishing in the canals – which must have made the Eliot lines especially redolent to the son when he first encountered them in ‘The Waste Land’:

While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck.

As a student at Cambridge Tomlinson had not been happy until, I think in his second year, Donald Davie became his tutor. Davie, who can’t have been many years older than his charge, was also a poet, alert to what was happening in the American poetry scene, a critic as readable as Kenner but less eccentric, and interested especially in the syntax of poetry which he characterized as ‘articulate energy’. He and Tomlinson formed a bond that lasted a lifetime.

After graduating, and teaching unhappily in a school in Camden Town, Tomlinson scored a post as private secretary to the British writer Percy Lubbock, then living in Italy, in Lerici; but he was dismissed after three weeks, probably, he thought, because his genteel employer found his flat Midlands ‘a’ vowel unacceptable. Lubbock, he said, believed even ‘ants’ should be pronounced ‘aunts’ – but he allowed Charles and his wife Brenda to stay on there in a villino adjoining the gardener’s cottage, thus giving the Tomlinson sensibility an Italian airing from which it never looked back. It was a region the couple were to return to often.

Tomlinson was seven years my senior and, though only a junior lecturer, was my senior also in status. We were amiably aware of one another without being close, and met regularly in graduate seminars, presided over by Knights and attended by most of the English Department staff. In 1958 he and Brenda had just moved to a rural location with the wonderfully English address of Brook Cottage, Ozleworth Bottom, Wotton-under-Edge. There was no phone, and never would be one. If a phone-call was necessary they climbed the hill to a pay-phone. Charles and Brenda had met while in their teens and were still married at his death 70 years later. The cottage was to remain their home. They would travel a great deal, but always come back to it. Their two daughters grew up there. Charles was also admired as a painter but I don’t recall that I ever saw any of his work.

Many years later, at a conference in Tubingen on poetry and regionalism, he and I would reminisce warmly about the L.C. Knights days in Bristol. By that time, I noticed, the Midlands accent was pretty-much gone, replaced (though perhaps not with absolute security) by what used to be called R.P. – received pronunciation – meaning ‘correct’. Knights had long since moved back to Cambridge, to the King Edward VII Chair, where F.R. Leavis, his old colleague and more famous contributor to the critical journal Scrutiny, who would probably have liked that eminent seat for himself, referred to him as ‘Professor Judas’. This Regius chair should have been the ultimate academic triumph for Knights but when I visited him there, and he walked me in Queen’s College gardens, and took me to lunch in the College, it was soon apparent he was not altogether happy. To Frank Kermode, who would succeed him there, he reported his dissatisfactions and remarked, ‘Oh for the road not taken!’. I have no idea what this alternative road might have been.

Tomlinson stayed on in the Bristol Department his whole working life, in the end I think occupying the Winterstoke professorship, the one Knights had held in the 1950s.

But in 1957 I was (perhaps without good reason, certainly without careful consideration) put off his poetry partly just by his manner in person, a look of depleted energy, in fact of such profound, unrelenting weariness, I felt if it was not an illness it had to be an affectation; and by something in the lines themselves – a kind of disengagement, as if the words had been chosen with immense care, but with a faint feeling of distaste.

To Charles Brasch I wrote that Seeing is Believing was probably a good collection, certainly displaying ‘a sharp visual perception driving a keen intelligence – but a little precious, a little gutless.’

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The extract ends there. I wish I could say the effect of Tomlinson’s death has been to make me recognize my error, but I have looked again at some of his poetry and find there’s a difference of temperament so absolute that my mind begins to shut off when I read him. Two critics I greatly admire, American Hugh Kenner and British Donald Davie, have told me I am wrong about Tomlinson. But where Davie finds in his work ‘an exquisitely accurate register of sense impressions’, I run up against what seems to me a wall of abstraction and effete discourse.

These are the critical conversations poetry constantly requires those of us who are serious about it to have – and there are no right answers, no final resolutions.

Try for yourself. Here are some lines by Tomlinson which Davie strongly recommends because, he says, they ‘insist upon the Otherness of the non-human world.’ Perhaps they do, and you will see what he means. They come from a poem called ‘Cézanne at Aix’, so I assume the mountain is Mont Sainte-Victoire, which Cézanne painted so often:

And the mountain: each day
Immobile like fruit. Unlike, also
–Because irreducible, because
Neither a component of the delicious
And therefore questionable,
Nor distracted (as the sitter)
By his own pose and, therefore,
Doubly to be questioned: it is not
Posed.  It is.  Untaught
Unalterable, a stone bridgehead
To that which is tangible
Because unfelt before. There
In its weathered weight
Its silence silences, a presence
Which does not present itself.

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Mont Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cézanne, via Wikimedia Commons.

– C. K. Stead