Showing posts with label Edward Thomas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Edward Thomas. Show all posts

Monday, December 11, 2017

Why Siegfried Sassoon?



George Charles Beresford: Siegfried Sassoon (1915)


A visitor to the house once asked me why there was so much war poetry in the bookcases in the living room: more specifically, why there were so many books by Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Edward Thomas, and nothing by Wilfred Owen, who is generally regarded as the pick of the bunch? I had to admit she had me there. Why wasn't there any Wilfred Owen? I've since repaired that omission, but it's interesting to me (at least) that it occurred in the first place.

I wouldn't say that I was exceptionally keen on war poetry. Certainly I've read all the usual suspects, and have a number of books on the subject, but it's not really one of my absolute areas of fanatical interest. I do love Edward Thomas, though (as my previous post on the subject should testify). And my fascination with the strange reaches of Robert Graves's imagination remains unabated. Why so much by Siegfried Sassoon, though?



Lady Ottoline Morrell: Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves (1920)


Just about everything to do with the First World War is - quite naturally - very much in the news at present. I've supplied my own tentative bibliography of the subject here. I find some of Sassoon's war poetry as powerful as any ever written: "Base Details," for instance - but also 'Everyone Sang', which is just one of those perfect poems which come out of nowhere sometimes. Not out of nowhere, really, when one comes to think about it: out of four years of suffering and pain and loss of innocence and meaningless machine-age slaughter.

I'm not sure that he's really received his due as an autobiographer, though. Everyone knows Memoirs of an Infantry Office (1930), and most people are aware that it's part of a trilogy, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (his imaginary alterego). But how many readers go on to his second, more directly autobiographical trilogy, The Old Century (1938), The Weald of Youth (1942) and Siegfried’s Journey, 1916-1920 (1945)? And yet it's every bit as charmingly and precisely written, and perhaps even more evocative of the vanished world before the bombardment (in Osbert Sitwell's phrase).



Siegfried Sassoon: War Poems (1983)


Six prose memoirs is quite a substantial legacy. And when you add in the posthumous publications: Rupert Hart-Davis's beautifully crafted collections of War Poems (1983), together with three volumes of diaries (1981-85), not to mention Paul Fussell's elegant illustrated edition of the Sherston Memoirs, Sassoon's Long Journey (1983), he begins to look even more substantial.



Paul Fussell, ed.: Sassoon's Long Journey (1983)


Like Graves, he did have the advantage of having survived: not through any want of trying to get killed on the part of either of them, mind you. For all the editing and re-editing, Wilfred Owen's legacy remains fragmentary and thwarted because there is (comparatively) so little of the harsh, late war poetry we all admire, and so much of the flowery, fulsome pre-war poet. The fact that almost all Owen's surviving letters are addressed to his mother doesn't help, either - and nor does the fact that most of the biographical information we have about him comes through the filter of his rather jealous brother, Harold (himself a most accomplished memoirist).



Wilfred Owen: Poems (1920)


But what is it, finally, that explains my rather compulsive collecting of Sassoon's books? They are very beautifully produced and designed, of course: fine Faber layouts on pre-Second-World-War paper, for the most part. To some extent it's because of the sidelights it throws on Graves, who remains my main man in the field, I must confess (despite the comparative weakness of his own war poetry: his heart was never really in it like Sassoon and Owen).



Robert Graves: War Poems (2016)


I suppose, to some extent, it's because his work shows just how much can be accomplished with limited talents if you similarly limit your objectives. Graves was a far more unruly genius than Sassoon, but did he ever write anything as moving and perfect as the Sherston memoirs? I suspect not. Owen proved himself a far more gifted poet in the few months of mature work he was able to complete, but it was Sassoon who liberated him from his Georgian shackles, encouraged his work, and put up with his adolescent hero worship.

What's more, if you actually sit down and read a collection such as Counter-Attack (1918) from cover to cover, I think you might find it hard to sustain your belief in that label of "minor poet" which now hangs around him. It's a pretty powerful book, with poem after poem on its pages destined for immortality. How many other poets of any era can say the same?



Glyn Warren Philpot: Siegfried Sassoon (1917)







Siegfried Sassoon: Memoirs (1928-45)

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon
(1886-1967)


  1. Sassoon, Siegfried. Collected Poems. London: Faber, 1947.

  2. Sassoon, Siegfried. Collected Poems 1908-1956. 1961. London: Faber, 1984.

  3. Sassoon, Siegfried. The War Poems. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber, 1983.

  4. Sassoon, Siegfried. Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man. 1928. The Faber Library, 1. London: Faber, 1932.

  5. Sassoon, Siegfried. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. 1930. The Faber Library, 2. London: Faber, 1932.

  6. Sassoon, Siegfried. Sherston’s Progress. 1936. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948.

  7. Sassoon, Siegfried. The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston: Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man / Memoirs of an Infantry Officer / Sherston’s Progress. 1928, 1930, 1936, 1937. London: Faber, 1945.

  8. Fussell, Paul, ed. Sassoon's Long Journey: An Illustrated Selection from Siegfried Sassoon's The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. 1928, 1930, 1936, 1937. A Giniger Book Published in association with Faber & Faber. London: Faber / New York: K. S. Giniger Co. Inc., 1983.

  9. Sassoon, Siegfried. The Old Century, and Seven More Years. London: Faber, 1938.

  10. Sassoon, Siegfried. The Weald of Youth. London: Faber, 1942.

  11. Sassoon, Siegfried. Siegfried’s Journey, 1916-1920. London: Faber, 1945.

  12. Sassoon, Siegfried. Meredith. 1948. A Grey Arrow. London: Arrow Books Ltd., 1959.

  13. Sassoon, Siegfried. Diaries 1915-1918. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Book Club Associates, 1983.

  14. Sassoon, Siegfried. Diaries 1920-1922. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber, 1981.

  15. Sassoon, Siegfried. Diaries 1923-1925. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber, 1985.

  16. Sassoon, Siegfried. Letters to Max Beerbohm: with a few answers. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber, 1986.

  17. Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet. A Biography 1886-1918. 1998. New York: Routledge, 1999.

  18. Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches. A Biography 1918-1967. London: Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd., 2003.


Siegfried Sassoon: Diaries (1981-85)


Saturday, November 25, 2017

Doubting Thomases (3): R. S. Thomas



R. S. Thomas (1913-2000)


When I was in the third form at school - I guess that would be Year 9 in the new nomenclature - we used to have our French lessons in a classroom shared with an English teacher.

There were a series of posters around the wall which had been created by that 'other' class (whom we never met, though I came to envy them intensely). What with one thing and another, I spent an awful lot of time in class staring at these posters. They contained a series of short pithy statements, written out with bright crayon illustrations. I never consciously memorised any of them, but I can still recall some of those inscriptions, as well as the pictures that accompanied them:

They said:
Take hold of the nettle
seize it with both hands
and I did
and it stung me.


I don't know where that comes from, and Google has provided me with no assistance. Perhaps it was the poster-maker's own inspiration. A bit dark, maybe, but certainly memorable. Then there was:

And I thought about books.
And for the first time I realized
that a man was behind each one of the books.
A man had to think them up.
A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper.
And I'd never even thought that thought before.


That one seemed a bit banal to me at the time (not to mention, now, a bit sexist). It wasn't till some time afterwards that I ran across it while reading Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and suddenly realised that it'd had been a quote from him all along. All at once that made it sound much more pithy to me, little snob that I was.



Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)


The other wonderful thing I discovered in that first reading of Bradbury's masterpiece was the page where the narrator reads out the last two stanzas of "Dover Beach" to his depressed, suicidal wife and a couple of her friends:
"Dover Beach.” His mouth was numb.

“Now read in a nice clear voice and go slow.”

The room was blazing hot, he was all fire, he was all coldness; they sat in the middle of an empty desert with three chairs and him standing, swaying, and him waiting for Mrs. Phelps to stop straightening her dress hem and Mrs. Bowles to take her fingers away from her hair. Then he began to read in a low, stumbling voice that grew firmer as he progressed from line to line, and his voice went out across the desert, into the whiteness, and around the three sitting women there in the great hot emptiness.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
The chairs creaked under the three women, Montag finished it out:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
That poem completely transfixed me at the time. I didn't know it was by Matthew Arnold, or even who Matthew Arnold was. I took good care to find out after that, though.



Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach (1851)


The last of the three sets of poster texts which have stayed with me from that classroom is the only one that was clearly attributed to an author: R. S. Thomas. Just a few phrases stayed with me from that rather fierce poem until I looked it up again just now. To give you an idea of the tricks memory plays, here are the few bits I remembered:
And he said I will make the poem and I will make it now ... so he took paper and pen, the mind's cartridge ... while the spent hearts smoked in its wake ...
And here's the poem itself, from the volume Tares (1961). I don't know if the title was included on the poster. I suspect not:
The Maker

So he said then: I will make the poem,
I will make it now. He took pencil,
The mind's cartridge, and blank paper,
And drilled his thoughts to the slow beat

Of the blood's drum, and there it formed,
On the white surface and went marching
Onward through time while the spent cities
And dry hearts smoked in its wake.


R. S Thomas: Collected Poems 1945-1990 (1993): 122.


I can't tell you how satisfying it is to see that poem again after all these years, and to correct all the mistakes my memory made in recalling it.

I didn't particularly care for the poem at the time, mind you. It didn't rhyme, which was a big deal to me then. The arrogance of it repelled me, as well as what seemed the impossible self-confidence of those opening lines: claiming to know what your poem will be before you've even written it down.

None of that really mattered, though. That was just mind-chatter. What mattered was the fact that I'd finally seen that a poem could repel you and transfix you at the same time: that it could work on you whether you wanted it to or not. I assumed its author, this 'R. S. Thomas' I knew nothing else about, must be a most fearsome person, and it wasn't till years afterwards that I ventured to read any more of his work.

What I read bore no resemblance to the poem I remembered from the classroom, though. To be honest, in its violence and single-mindedness, it sounded more like Ted Hughes than the mild-mannered Welsh clergyman R. S. Thomas turned out to be. Until I read his autobiography, that is.



R. S. Thomas: Autobiographies (1997)


Perhaps I should say "Autobiographies": there are four such works collected in the volume above, all of them written in the Welsh he so painstakingly learned as an adult, but was - much to his chagrin - never able to compose poems in:
For me, being a poet is a full-time job, and although the muse may languish as one grows older, there is a kind of duty upon you to persevere in perfecting your craft, and to secure an answer, though poetry, to some of the great questions of life. Some are still surprised that I write my poems in English, as if it were a matter of choice. I have said many times that I was thirty before I started learning Welsh in earnest. English (my mother tongue, remember) was long since rooted in me, and it is from the depth of his being that poet draws his poetry. If I believed that I could satisfy myself by composing poetry in Welsh, I would so so. But I learned many years ago, with sorrow, that it was not possible. ... But be that as it may, Llŷn is not an escape, but a peninsula where I can be inward with all the tension of our age.
[Blwyddyn yn Llŷn / A Year in Llyn (1990): 151]
I hadn't really thought about that experience of staring at those texts and wishing that I was in that class, where you might be encouraged to create your own poster for your own quotation for quite a few years. A couple of months ago I was talking to Graham Lindsay, though, and he told me about an experience he had as a schoolboy when a relieving teacher gave their class Dylan Thomas's "Poem in October" (plus, I think, "Fern Hill" - which was also extensively excerpted from in the wall texts in my own classroom).

Reading Thomas for the first time was an extraordinary experience for him, and yet he was far too tongue-tied to tell the teacher about it when back at school. No doubt that teacher presumed that his little poetry experiment had been a complete failure. You never know, though. I'm sure that the teacher who got his or her class to create all those posters had no idea that anyone besides them actually read them, let alone was moved, intrigued, provoked by them to such a degree.

It must have been shortly after that that I started to write my own first painfully derivative, clumsily rhymed poems, full of archaic diction and mythological references, just like the nineteenth-century poets who were my models.

There are a lot of striking passages in R. S. Thomas's autobiography:
Today, when I was out in Pen-y-cil and Parwyd, as I was looking down the precipice, there came the old urge to leap down. Almost everyone has experienced it. There is a psychological explanation most probably, but not everyone has a steady enough head to be able to look down, let alone climb down.
[Blwyddyn yn Llŷn / A Year in Llyn (1990): 123]
That one certainly struck a chord. Someone once asked me why I wrote poetry, and I replied: 'To come up with reasons for wanting to stay alive." That must have sounded like a piece of pretentious posing to her, but I'm afraid it was nothing but the strictest truth. It runs in the family, I'm sorry to say.

Then there's this bit:
In 1938 came the awakening .. to a boy with ideals to uphold, the situation was clear enough: Christ was a pacifist, but not so the Church established in his name ... Meanwhile ... under the influence of the beautiful and exciting country to the west he continued to write poetry - tender, innocent lyrics in the manner of the Georgian poets, because that was the background to his reading among the poets. Edward Thomas was one of his favourites and because the latter had written about the countryside, the budding poet tried to imitate him. The more 'modern ' English poets had not yet broken though to his inner world to shatter the unreal dreams that dwelled there. And, alas, the Welsh poets did not exist for him. Who was to blame? The desire to write was within him, but because of the nature of his education and his background, he could only think in terms of the English language.
[Neb /No-one (1985): 44-45].
Those early religious struggles were more quickly resolved in my case, but those problems with 'modernity' took a long time to filter through into my writing, too. For his 1938, put my 1975. I can now see that that poem of his was one of the vehicles of transformation, but I wasn't really aware of it until just now.

Here's a list of the books of his I own:



R. S. Thomas: Collected Later Poems: 1988-2000 (2003)

    Ronald Stuart Thomas (1913-2000)

Poetry:

  • Thomas, R. S. Selected Poems, 1946-1968. 1973. Hart-Davis, MacGibbon Ltd. London: Granada Publishing Limited, 1974.
  • Thomas, R. S. Between Here and Now: Poems. London: Macmillan London Limited, 1981.
  • Thomas, R. S. Collected Poems 1945-1990. 1993. London: Phoenix Giant, 1996.
  • Thomas, R. S. Collected Later Poems 1988-2000. 2003. Highgreen: Bloodaxe Books, 2004.
  • Thomas, R. S. Uncollected Poems. Ed. Tony Brown & Jason Walford Davies. Highgreen: Bloodaxe Books Ltd., 2013.

  • Prose:

  • Thomas, R. S. Autobiographies: Former Paths / The Creative Writer's Suicide / No-one / A Year in Llŷn. 1972, 1977, 1985, 1990. Trans. Jason Walford Davies. 1997. A Phoenix Paperback. London: Orion Books Ltd., 1998.



  • R. S. Thomas: Uncollected Poems (2013)


    Few possessions: a chair,
    a table, a bed
    to say my prayers by,
    and, gathered from the shore,
    the bone-like, crossed sticks
    proving that nature
    acknowledges the Crucifixion.
    All night I am at
    a window not too small
    to be frame to the stars
    that are no further off
    than the city lights
    I have rejected. ...

    "At the End"




    Sunday, May 05, 2013

    Doubting Thomases (1): Edward Thomas



    [Matthew Hollis: Now All Roads Lead to France (2011)]


    I've just been reading a fascinating new biography of Edward Thomas entitled Now All Roads Lead to France, by a certain Matthew Hollis. It's really the first book I've ever come across which seems to do justice to this strangest and most solitary of poets.



    [Clifford Harper: Strange Meetings]


    What was he, after all? Not really a war poet, although he's often grouped with Owen, Sassoon and Rosenberg. None of his poems is exactly about the war, though it's looming at the back of almost all of them.



    [Sir Edward Marsh, ed.: Georgian Poetry (1911-12)]


    Not a Georgian, either. He didn't appear in any of Eddie Marsh's five bi-annual anthologies, and - while he knew and was close to many of the contributors - even his nature poetry was somehow in a different vein from theirs: more urgent, embattled, harsh ...



    For that matter, he wasn't really English. He always felt like a foreigner there. But then he wasn't exactly Welsh either. For all his sentimental attachment to the country of his ancestors, he was born in London and it was the countryside of the Home Counties that he knew best, and which he celebrated in some of his greatest poems ...



    He certainly wasn't an Imagist, or a Vorticist, or a member of any of those early Modernist movements promoted by Ezra Pound and his friends in those heady days just before the war (though he did know Pound, and even reviewed him favourably - on occasion).



    [Matthew Spencer, ed.: Elected Friends (2004)]


    He's often seen, instead, as a member of a group of two, consisting of himself and Robert Frost. It was Frost, after all, who coined that phrase about the "sound of sense" which was supposed to characterise the lyrics and blank verse in early books such as North of Boston or Mountain Interval.

    Without Frost, and his friendship and encouragement, it's quite possible that there would have been no poems at all by Edward Thomas, but - despite that - the two still don't sound all that similar. "The Road Not Taken," beautiful though it is, has a kind of cracker-barrel common-sensical tone to it which does not characterise Thomas poems such as "This is no case of petty right or wrong" or "As the team's head-brass" ...

    Here are a few stanzas (the most famous ones) from his long poem "Roads" (1916):

    Now all roads lead to France
    And heavy is the tread
    Of the living; but the dead
    Returning lightly dance:

    Whatever the road bring
    To me or take from me,
    They keep me company
    With their pattering,

    Crowding the solitude
    Of the loops over the downs,
    Hushing the roar of towns
    And their brief multitude.

    They're not really startlingly well-written. He was never entirely easy in his relationship to rhyme. As a prose-writer with over a decade's experience before he turned to writing prose, blank verse was a far more natural idiom for him. But, like Hardy and Melville before him, somehow this slight clumsiness seems to turn to his advantage.

    One never feels that Edward Thomas is saying something for the rhyme, or because the ease of idiom has lured him on. Again and again, it's that slight roughness in the voice that catches the attention, that explain why this body of poetry written between 1913 and 1917 continues to live when other, more facile voices have faded away almost entirely.



    [Edward Thomas (1878-1917)]


      Philip Edward Thomas (1878-1917)

      Prose:

    1. Thomas, Edward. The Heart of England. 1906. Foreword and Wood-Engravings by Eric Fitch Daglish. The Open-Air Library. London & Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1932.
    2. Thomas, Edward. Richard Jefferies: His Life and Work. 1909. London: Hutchinson & Co., n.d.
    3. Thomas, Edward. A Literary Pilgrim in England. 1917. Oxford Paperbacks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.
    4. Gant, Roland, ed. The Prose of Edward Thomas. Introduction by Helen Thomas. London: The Falcon Press Limited, 1948.
    5. Thomas, Edward. Selected Poems and Prose. Ed. David Wright. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.

    6. Poetry:

    7. Thomas, Edward. Poems and Last Poems (Arranged in Chronological Order of Composition). Ed. Edna Longley. 1917 & 1918. Collins Annotated Student Texts. London & Glasgow: Collins Publishers, 1973.
    8. Thomas, Edward. Collected Poems. Foreword by Walter de la Mare. 1920. London & Boston: Faber, 1979.
    9. Thomas, Edward. The Collected Poems. Ed. R. George Thomas. 1978. Oxford Paperbacks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.
    10. Thomas, Edward. The Annotated Collected Poems. Ed. Edna Longley. 2008. Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books Ltd., 2011.

    11. Secondary:

    12. Thomas, Helen, with Myfanwy Thomas. Under Storm’s Wing: As It Was, World without End &c. 1926, 1931 & 1988. Paladin Grafton Books. London: Collins Publishing Group, 1990.
    13. Farjeon, Eleanor. Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years. 1958. Oxford Paperbacks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
    14. Hollis, Matthew. Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas. 2011. London: Faber, 2012.

    I love his poetry. I've loved it ever since I first bought a copy of Edna Longley's annotated edition of Poems & Last Poems sometime back in the early 80s. Most people come to Thomas through the Collected Poems, I suspect, with its slightly carping (and sentimental) preface by Walter de la Mare - and its rather odd ordering of the poems.

    The advantage of Longley's edition (now available, in greatly expanded and revised form, as the Annotated Collected Poems) was its chronological arrangement. One could see where Thomas began and where he ended. The disadvantage was that she couldn't include the extra poems not included in either of those two books, which meant that his very first substantial poem, for instance ("Up in the Wind"), had to be excluded.

    It did include one of my very favourite poems, though - "The Gallows":

    There was a weasel lived in the sun
    With all his family,
    Till a keeper shot him with his gun
    And hung him up on a tree,
    Where he swings in the wind and rain,
    In the sun and in the snow,
    Without pleasure, without pain,
    On the dead oak tree bough.

    What price The Wind in the Willows now? There's something distinctly unsentimental, knowledgeable about Thomas's view of gamekeepers. He and Frost had a run-in with one once which sayed in his mind for a long time afterwards. He somehow persuaded himself that Frost, by offering to fight the man, had acted the hero, while he, by trying to calm the situation down, had proved his own cowardice. Hollis sees this as one of the motivations that drove him to enlist as a soldier.

    There was a crow who was no sleeper,
    But a thief and a murderer
    Till a very late hour; and this keeper
    Made him one of the things that were,
    To hang and flap in rain and wind,
    In the sun and in the snow.
    There are no more sins to be sinned
    On the dead oak tree bough.

    "Made him one of the things that were." Do you see what I mean about that slight clumsiness, that catch in the throat that makes him phrases stick in your mind whether you like it or not. It's not clear if he admires the crow or not, but he certainly knows him. "There are no more sins to be sinned / On the dead oak tree bough": have you ever come across a more brutally reductionist view of the afterlife than that?

    There was a magpie, too,
    Had a long tongue and a long tail;
    He could both talk and do -
    But what did that avail?
    He, too, flaps in the wind and rain
    Alongside weasel and crow,
    Without pleasure, without pain,
    On the dead oak tree bough.

    Here I think Thomas makes a brief appearance in his own poem: "He could both talk and do - / But what did that avail?" What better summary of the first decade of his adult life? The endless string of books, articles, reviews, each bringing in a pittance - the terrible grinding poverty of his married life, the hungry children, the need he had to retreat from them periodically in order to "spare them" from his black moods.

    One day he took a revolver (or a bottle of poison: it isn't clear) and went out in the woods to kill himself. He was interrupted before he could do it, but ever afterwards he made sure to have the "means" close to hand - he couldn't rest otherwise. He wrote a short story about it, but there's little doubt that it's a real experience he's writing about.

    And many other beasts
    And birds, skin, bone, and feather,
    Have been taken from their feasts
    And hung up there together,
    To swing and have endless leisure
    In the sun and in the snow,
    Without pain, without pleasure,
    On the dead oak tree bough.

    Thomas, an artilleryman, was killed by a German shell which went so close to him that it literally sucked the life out of him (he'd narrowly escaped being blown up the day before by one which proved to be a dud - they'd all been celebrating his narrow escape just hours before).

    He kept a diary in the trenches, and there are even a few lines of verse in it. He had a lot more to say, a lot more development to live through. it's hard to avoid the impression, at times, though, that for him this solitary death was a blessed release.

    Whatever the truth of that, his poetry repays study. He's not one of those writers you can "quite like" - with Edward Thomas, you either love him or are indifferent to him. I find his lines, some of them, sounding in my head almost every day.

    Funnily enough, though he wrote so much in such a short time, the literary critical battles continue over the best way to present his texts. R. George Thomas's 1978 edition of the Collected Poems superseded both the existing Faber text and Edna Longley's annotated edition. Thirty years later, though, her Annotated Collected Poems restores a number of the titles given the poems by Thomas's first post-war editors, rather than the first-line titles preferred by the 1978 editor.

    Who can say who's right? The matter is a complex one, but one which rouses strong passions in his admirers. It seems somehow characteristic of this contrary, complicated man that a stable text of his poems can never really be established for certain.

    I prefer to see it as a series of Thomases, each subtly different, looking up at me from each of the settings which have been contrived for his poems. Hollis has given us one more, but a particularly fascinating and well-informed one.

    Thinking about him got me to thinking about some other "Thomas' poets, though. Coincidentally, I happen to have bought books by all three of them in the past few weeks, so it seemed a good excuse to do a spot of comparing. All Welsh - though in very different ways - all obsessed with death - though, again, quite dissimilarly ...



    [Stanley Spencer: The Resurrection of the Soldiers (1928-29)]


    Wednesday, September 12, 2012

    Top Ten Favourite Poems



    My colleague Bryan Walpert and I are co-supervising a couple of Doctorates in Creative Writing at Massey University, both focussing on poetry. It's not as easy as you might think to keep the critical portion of these projects in balance with the creative.

    The other day, at one of our video conferences, he came up with what seemed to me a very intriguing idea for taking a kind of barometer reading of someone else's aesthetic: he asked our PhD student to send us ten of her favourite poems: or (at least) ten poems that seemed truly extraordinary and moving to her.

    I've done a couple of "top twenty" posts before now: 20 Favourite 20th-Century Novels and 20 Favourite 20th-Century Long Poems, both back in 2008, but this seemed a little different somehow.

    As I see it, the plan is to be as honest as possible about what you really like, as opposed to what you think you should like. It got me to thinking about what would be in my own "top ten" - with stress on the poems that I've actually tried to memorise and thus keep with me, rather than those I simply admire from a distance.

    Anyway, for what it's worth, here - in alphabetical, rather than chronological, order - is my top ten (today, at any rate: next week the list might be completely different):


    Jack’s Top Ten
      Alphabetical (by surname):

    1. W. H. Auden: “The Letter” [1927]
    2. Gavin Ewart: “Sonnet: How Life Too is Sentimental” [1980]
    3. Robert Lowell: “For the Union Dead” [1964]
    4. Marianne Moore: “Poetry” [1919]
    5. Ezra Pound: “Lament of the Frontier Guard” [1915]
    6. Kendrick Smithyman: “Colville” [1968]
    7. Stephen Spender: “Cadet Cornelius Rilke” [1933]
    8. Edward Thomas: “Adlestrop” [1917]
    9. Ian Wedde: “Barbary Coast” [1988]
    10. W. B. Yeats: “The Circus Animals' Desertion” [1939]

      Chronological (by date of publication):

    1. Ezra Pound (1885-1972):
      “Lament of the Frontier Guard” [1915]
    2. Edward Thomas (1878-1917):
      “Adlestrop” [1917]
    3. Marianne Moore (1887-1972):
      “Poetry” [1919]
    4. W. H. Auden (1907-1973):
      “The Letter” [1927]
    5. Stephen Spender (1909-1995):
      “Cadet Cornelius Rilke” [1933]
    6. W. B. Yeats (1865-1939):
      “The Circus Animals' Desertion” [1939]
    7. Robert Lowell (1917-1977):
      “For the Union Dead” [1964]
    8. Kendrick Smithyman (1922-1995):
      “Colville” [1968]
    9. Gavin Ewart (1916-1995):
      “Sonnet: How Life Too is Sentimental” [1980]
    10. Ian Wedde (1946- ):
      “Barbary Coast” [1988]




    From the very first coming down
    Into a new valley with a frown
    Because of the sun and a lost way,
    You certainly remain: to-day
    I, crouching behind a sheep-pen, heard
    Travel across a sudden bird,
    Cry out against the storm, and found
    The year’s arc a completed round
    And love’s worn circuit re-begun,
    Endless with no dissenting turn.
    Shall see, shall pass, as we have seen
    The swallow on the tile, spring’s green
    Preliminary shiver, passed
    A solitary truck, the last
    Of shunting in the Autumn. But now,
    To interrupt the homely brow,
    Thought warmed to evening through and through,
    Your letter comes, speaking as you,
    Speaking of much but not to come.

    Nor speech is close nor fingers numb
    If love not seldom has received
    An unjust answer, was deceived.
    I, decent with the seasons, move
    Different or with a different love,
    Nor question overmuch the nod
    The stone smile of this country god
    That never was more reticent
    Always afraid to say more than it meant.


    [1927]


    It's interesting that Auden never rewrote this poem, even in the complete overhaul of his canon he undertook for the 1966 Collected Shorter Poems (which appalled so many of the admirers of his early work). There's an incantatory quality about it which has always fascinated me, and which made me like it long before I had any real understanding of what it was about. It is, after all, the poem he chose to begin his Collected Poems with, despite the fact that there are some earlier ones reprinted later on in the text ...



    When our son was a few weeks old he had bronchial trouble
    and picked up a cross-infection in the hospital
    (salmonella typhimurium) through sluttish feeding –
    but a hospital never admits it’s responsible –
    and was rushed away behind glass in an isolation ward,
    at the point, it might be, of death. Our daughter,
    eighteen months old, was just tall enough
    to look into his empty cot and say: ‘Baby gone!’

    A situation, an action and a speech
    so tear-jerking that Dickens might have thought of them –
    and indeed, in life, when we say ‘It couldn’t happen!’
    almost at once it happens. And the word ‘sentimental’
    has come to mean exaggerated feeling.
    It would have been hard to exaggerate our feelings then.


    [1980]


    I really like this poem. Ewart is more associated with light verse than serious poetry, but that's what gives it its sting, I think. That MC sitting beside him in the picture above and cracking up at what he's reading is actually the great Peter Reading ...




    [Robert Lowell (1917-1977)]


    "Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."



    The old South Boston Aquarium stands
    in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
    The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
    The airy tanks are dry.

    Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
    my hand tingled
    to burst the bubbles
    drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

    My hand draws back. I often sigh still
    for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
    of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
    I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

    fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
    yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
    as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
    to gouge their underworld garage.

    Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
    sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
    A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
    braces the tingling Statehouse,

    shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
    and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
    on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
    propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

    Two months after marching through Boston,
    half the regiment was dead;
    at the dedication,
    William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

    Their monument sticks like a fishbone
    in the city's throat.
    Its Colonel is as lean
    as a compass-needle.

    He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
    a greyhound's gentle tautness;
    he seems to wince at pleasure,
    and suffocate for privacy.

    He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
    peculiar power to choose life and die –
    when he leads his black soldiers to death,
    he cannot bend his back.

    On a thousand small town New England greens,
    the old white churches hold their air
    of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
    quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

    The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
    grow slimmer and younger each year –
    wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
    and muse through their sideburns . . .

    Shaw's father wanted no monument
    except the ditch,
    where his son's body was thrown
    and lost with his "niggers."

    The ditch is nearer.
    There are no statues for the last war here;
    on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
    shows Hiroshima boiling

    over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
    that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
    When I crouch to my television set,
    the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

    Colonel Shaw
    is riding on his bubble,
    he waits
    for the blessèd break.

    The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
    giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
    a savage servility
    slides by on grease.


    [1964]


    I talk a bit about this poem in my post on The Literature of the Civil War. I do think it's a great example of the "State of the Nation" poem, something I say more about in my Jacket2 column here...




    [Marianne Moore (1887-1972)]



    I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
    all this fiddle.
    Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
    discovers in
    it after all, a place for the genuine.
    Hands that can grasp, eyes
    that can dilate, hair that can rise
    if it must, these things are important not because a

    high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
    they are
    useful. When they become so derivative as to become
    unintelligible,
    the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
    do not admire what
    we cannot understand: the bat
    holding on upside down or in quest of something to

    eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
    wolf under
    a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
    that feels a flea, the base-
    ball fan, the statistician –
    nor is it valid
    to discriminate against “business documents and

    school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make
    a distinction
    however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
    result is not poetry,
    nor till the poets among us can be
    “literalists of
    the imagination” – above
    insolence and triviality and can present

    for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,”
    shall we have
    it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
    the raw material of poetry in
    all its rawness and
    that which is on the other hand
    genuine, you are interested in poetry.


    [1919]


    Moore famously repudiated this poem, and cut it and cut it until it finally consisted of an abridged version of the first three lines (minus the "beyond all this fiddle"). Paul Celan translated the whole thing into German, though, which to me is pretty much a guarantee of its quality. Here it is in its complete, original form ...



    By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
    Lonely from the beginning of time until now!
    Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
    I climb the towers and towers
    to watch out the barbarous land:
    Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.
    There is no wall left to this village.
    Bones white with a thousand frosts,
    High heaps, covered with trees and grass;
    Who brought this to pass?
    Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?
    Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?
    Barbarous kings.
    A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,
    A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom,
    Three hundred and sixty thousand,
    And sorrow, sorrow like rain.
    Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning,
    Desolate, desolate fields,
    And no children of warfare upon them,
    No longer the men for offence and defence.
    Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,
    With Rihoku’s name forgotten,
    And we guardsmen fed to the tigers.


    [1915]


    Those early poems from Cathay are some of Pound's finest, I think. I suppose one could argue that it's a translation rather than an original poem,, but given the complicated mode of transmission from Ernest Fenollosa's notes from the Japanese, it seems better to concentrate on how it superimposes a kind of World War One landscape on the original Chinese one ...



    That sort of place where you stop
    long enough to fill the tank, buy plums,
    perhaps, and an icecream thing on a stick
    while somebody local comes
    in, leans on the counter, takes a good look
    but does not like what he sees of you,

    intangible as menace,
    a monotone with a name, as place
    it is an aspect of human spirit
    (by which shaped), mean, wind-worn. Face
    outwards, over the saltings: with what merit
    the bay, wise as contrition, shallow

    as their hold on small repute,
    good for dragging nets which men are doing
    through channels, disproportionate in the blaze
    of hot afternoon’s down-going
    to a far fire-hard tide’s rise
    upon the vague where time is distance?

    It could be plainly simple
    pleasure, but these have another tone
    or quality, something aboriginal,
    reductive as soil itself – bone
    must get close here, final
    yet unrefined at all. They endure.

    A school, a War Memorial
    Hall, the store, neighbourhood of salt
    and hills. The road goes through to somewhere else.
    Not a geologic fault
    line only scars textures of experience.
    Defined, plotted; which maps do not speak.


    [1968]


    I have a good deal to say about this poem in my post A Visit to Colville. It's one of Kendrick's finest, I think ...



    Rolled over on Europe: the sharp dew frozen to stars
    Below us; above our heads, the night
    Frozen again to stars; the stars
    In pools between our coats, and that charmed moon.
    Ah, what supports? What cross draws out our arms,
    Heaves up our bodies towards the wind
    And hammers us between the mirrored lights?

    Only my body is real; which wolves
    Are free to oppress and gnaw. Only this rose
    My friend laid on my breast, and these few lines
    written from home, are real.


    [1933]


    This is kind of a weird choice, I suppose. Again, it might be my taste for incantatory eloquence which made it stand out for me among Spender's early poems. It wasn't till later that I realised it was made up of phrases culled from Rilke's impressionistic early short story "Cadet Cornelius Rilke". It's hard to say if that makes it a translation or an original poem. Can that be regarded as a real distinction anymore, in fact?




    [Edward Thomas (1878-1917)]



    Yes. I remember Adlestrop –
    The name, because one afternoon
    Of heat the express-train drew up there
    Unwontedly. It was late June.

    The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
    No one left and no one came
    On the bare platform. What I saw
    Was Adlestrop – only the name

    And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
    And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
    No whit less still and lonely fair
    Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

    And for that minute a blackbird sang
    Close by, and round him, mistier,
    Farther and farther, all the birds
    Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.


    [1917]


    This is the first poem I ever read by Edward Thomas, but I've loved his poetry ever since. I could easily have chosen any of a number of others, but this one still appeals to me deeply. He manages to get away with the poeticisms in stanza three and even gets them to work for him in a strange way, I'm not quite sure how ...




    [Robert Cross: Ian Wedde (1946- )]



    When the people emerge from the water
    who can tell if it’s brine or tears
    that streams from them, purple sea
    or the bruises of their long immersion?

    They seem to weep for the dreams they had
    which now the light slices into buildings
    of blinding concrete along the Corniche.
    Is it music or news the dark windows utter?

    Day-long dazzle of the shallows
    and at night the moon trails her tipsy sleeves
    past the windows of raffish diners.
    The hectic brake-lights of lovers

    jam the streets. My place or your place.
    They lose the way again and again.
    At dawn the birds leave the trees in clouds,
    they petition the city for its crumbs.

    The diners are cheap and the food is bad
    but you’d sail a long way to find anything
    as convenient. Pretty soon, sailor boy,
    you’ll lose your bearings on language.

    Language with no tongue
    to lash it to the teller.
    Stern-slither of dogfish guttings.
    Sinbad’s sail swaying in the desert.

    Only those given words can say what they want.
    Out there the velvet lady runs her tongue
    over them. And she is queen of the night –
    her shadow flutters in the alleys.

    And young sailors, speechless, lean
    on the taffrail. They gaze at the queen’s amber
    but see simple lamps their girls hang in sash windows.
    Thud of drums. Beach-fires. Salt wind in the ratlines.

    Takes more than one nice green kawakawa
    leaf, chewed, to freshen the mouth
    that’s kissed the wooden lips of the figurehead
    above history’s cut-water

    in the barbarous isles’
    virgin harbours. That hulk shunned by rats
    bursts into flames.
    And now the smoky lattice of spars

    casts upon the beach
    the shadow-grid of your enlightened city.
    And now I reach through them – I reach
    through the eyes of dreaming sailors,

    faces inches from the sweating bulkheads,
    blankets drenched in brine and sperm.
    Trailing blood across the moon’s wake
    the ship bore out of Boka Bay.

    Trailing sharks, she sailed
    for Port Destruction. In Saint Van le Mar,
    Jamaica, Bligh’s breadfruit trees grew tall.
    In Callao on the coast of Peru

    geraniums bloomed like sores
    against whitewashed walls.
    The dock tarts’ parrots jabbering
    cut-rates in six tongues.

    The eroding heartland, inland cordillera
    flashing with snow – these the voyager forgets.
    His briny eyes
    flood with chimerical horizons.

    ‘I would tell you if I could – if I could
    remember, I would tell you.
    All around us the horizons
    are turning air into water

    and I can’t remember
    where the silence ended and speech began,
    where vision ended and tears began.
    All our promises vanish into thin air.

    What I remember are the beaches of that city
    whose golden children dance
    on broken glass. I remember cold beer
    trickling between her breasts as she drank.

    But my paper money burned
    when she touched it. The ship
    clanked up to its bower, the glass towers
    of the city burned back there in the sunset glow.’

    Cool star foundering in the west.
    Coast the dusty colour of lions.
    The story navigates by vectors
    whose only connection is the story.

    The story is told in words
    whose only language is the story.
    All night the fo’c’s’le lamp smokes above the words.
    All day the sun counts the hours of the story.

    Heave of dark water where something
    else turns – the castaway’s tongue
    clappers like a mission bell.
    Unheard his end, and the story’s.

    Raconteurs in smoky dives
    recall his phosphorescent arm
    waving in the ship’s wake.
    Almost gaily. But the ship sailed on.


    [1988]


    One necessary constraint on this choice of poems was length. I was originally going to include Paul Muldoon's extraordinary elegy Incantata as one of my ten, but it's just too long to reprint or really take in at a sitting. This, too, is quite a long poem, but I felt that I had to include it even so. I say more about it here, but its true significance remains mysterious to me: mysterious, but somehow immensely alluring.




    I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
    I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
    Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
    I must be satisfied with my heart, although
    Winter and summer till old age began
    My circus animals were all on show,
    Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
    Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.


    II

    What can I but enumerate old themes,
    First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
    Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
    Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
    Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
    That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
    But what cared I that set him on to ride,
    I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride.

    And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
    'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;
    She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
    But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
    I thought my dear must her own soul destroy
    So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
    And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
    This dream itself had all my thought and love.

    And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
    Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
    Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
    It was the dream itself enchanted me:
    Character isolated by a deed
    To engross the present and dominate memory.
    Players and painted stage took all my love,
    And not those things that they were emblems of.


    III

    Those masterful images because complete
    Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
    A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
    Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
    Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
    Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
    I must lie down where all the ladders start
    In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.


    [1939]


    Well, what can you say? The aging Yeats reinvents himself yet again, "Lion and woman and the Lord knows what" - how can you just keep on getting better and better and simpler and simpler over the course of a fifty-year career?




    So there you are: that's my ten. They do say some slightly disqueting things about my taste, I suppose. Nine out of my ten poets are men; nine out of my ten poets are dead; all of them are white ...

    Having ruled out straight translations, though - and also longer poems - I guess it's kind of inevitable that I should gravitate to the kinds of poems I loved when I was a kid: eloquent, even grandiloquent at times, but with the Modernist fetish for simplicity constantly undermining their verbal flourishes.

    What would your list look like?



    [Doug Savage: Savage Chickens (2005)]