Geoffrey Hill’s Odi Barbare poem VI pt3.

So far I’ve been proceeding slowly through this poem in order to arrive at a judgement with regard to quality. Thus far things aren’t looking too promising but least I have a clear idea as to what he’s talking about. The subject here is the British defeat at Isandlwana (1879) during the Anglo-Zulu war. Here’s the first three verses:

I can hack most laureates' roster-homage,

Make a pranged voice nasal through ruptured matchbox;

Brief the act undangerously heroic;

             We will survive it.

This astounding people (Disraeli), their spears

Beating shield-hides, murmuring high a basso,

Hive-like, buzzing rage become torpor almost

            Blood self-enthralling.

Assegais whish-washed in the fleshy Empire

Jelk you inside out like a dumdum bullet;

Death by numbers, one-shot Martini Henry

             Redhot on target.

Before I proceed, I need to stress that all of my knowledge concerning the war and this battle is derived from Wikipedia which I know is occasionally quirky but contains more than enough information to deal with this material. ‘Jelk’ doesn’t occur in the OED although the Urban Dictionary has “an exercise to increase penis size naturally” as its definition for ‘jelq’ and a quick look around the web indicates that ‘jelk’ is an alternative spelling. I really don’t want to go into what’s involved in this particular exercise – suffice it to say that it’s unlikely that Hill is referring to it here. He does have a track record of making up words- ‘clavics’ being the most recent case in point.

My arduous research has led to the fact that the Zulu in 1879 were using two types of assegai. The traditional version was throwing spear and was thrown from some distance at the enemy as you would throw a javelin. The iklwa (so called for the sound it made when being pulled out of the body) had a shorter shaft (about two foot) with a one foot blade and this was used for stabbing at close quarters.

I have no idea whether or not either of these weapons pulled large amounts of flesh out of their victims, as is suggested here and I’m even less clear that the action of any kind of spear can be likened to that of a dumdum bullet. Even in the nineteenth century the use of such bullets was controversial because of the mess that they created in the body and they were banned by the Hague Convention of 1899. The British and the Americans were the only countries to object and I now have this wonderful piece of justification from Sir John Ardagh who pointed out that men could still run on even when wounded by ‘ordinary’ bullets-

“The civilized soldier when shot recognizes that he is wounded and knows that the sooner he is attended to the sooner he will recover. He lies down on his stretcher and is taken off the field to his ambulance, where he is dressed or bandaged. Your fanatical barbarian, similarly wounded, continues to rush on, spear or sword in hand; and before you have the time to represent to him that his conduct is in flagrant violation of the understanding relative to the proper course for the wounded man to follow – he may have cut off your head.”

This has to be one of the best examples of the imperial mind at work as in -it’s the fault of the savages who don’t understand (because they are savages and therefore incapable of understanding) the rules of the game that we are forced to use these barbaric weapons.

Of course, ever since there have been suspicions that troops have modified their own bullets to produce the same messy effect- a suspicion that was examined at the Saville Inquiry.

The other thing to note is that this particular war demonstrated that the use of the .577/450 bullet in the Martini-Henry rifle was a bit of a disaster in that it would jam as the barrel heated up. So ‘redhot on target’ seems a bit odd given that if the rifle was ‘redhot’ then it wouldn’t actually work. This particular rifle was a single-shot weapon which could (at best) fire 12 rounds per minute so it is unlikely that ‘redhot’ refers to the speed of fire.

In response to a previous post on this, one commentator suggested that Hill has more than a degree of guilt about the fact that he didn’t serve in combat and that his frequent references to the two world wars are a means of compensation for him. I have to confess that I was a bit sceptical about this at the time but this particular verse does have more than a smattering of Boys’ Own derring-do about it. We are taken from the whishery-washery of the spears in the body of the corpulent Brits through to the ‘death by numbers’ fiasco in the face of Ardagh’s ‘savage’.

The next verse alludes to the failures of the officer class in this particular debacle and ‘death by numbers’ does seem to encapsulate the way in which the troops were killed although it doesn’t really hold up if you think about it. The battle was more of a rout than a fair fight and if the British had done things ‘by numbers’, i.e. in their normally organised and ruthless way then they wouldn’t have been slaughtered so this particular phrase might refer to the intention rather than to what actually occurred.

It’s the word use that leads me to infer that Hill is excited about this stuff and wants us to be to. There’s an adolescent’s idea of machismo in ‘redhot’, ‘jelk you inside out’ and the whishery washery of the spears which is more than a little odd in one of our finest poets. Of course any combat soldier will tell you that there is lots of fear and very little excitement in the midst of battle but that doesn’t seem to bother Hill…

On the next occasion I’ll attempt to move from ballistics to the officer class….

Thomas Hoccleve and Medieval Mental Health

This has two strands. The first of these is about Middle English poetry and how we ought to pay more attention to those poets who weren’t Geoffrey Chaucer. The second relates to madness and poetry and how Hoccleve in particular has challenged my view of the confessional poem.

I’m a relative newcomer to medieval verse, I’d been put off Chaucer at A level (as with most other things) and since then have been pre-occupied by other periods. My knowledge of the 14th and 15th centuries is scanty and it seemed like to much effort to acquire the context as well as the ability to read Middle English.

Two things then occurred- the internet got better and I decided that rather than move forwards through the canon, which would have meant Dryden and Pope, I would move backwards. The improvement in the internet has meant that there are many more resources on-line and that I now have access to a wide range of books on the period as well as primary texts.

The first thing that I’ve learned is that Middle English is gloriously expressive and this makes me smile a lot. The second thing is that it isn’t ‘fixed’ in that there are huge variations in vocabulary and sentence construction. This ‘mobility’ is much more apparent than it is in the 16th century early modern usage.

So, I’m paying attention to Hoccleve and am being dragged further and further into the work because he throws himself into his poems (in every sense) and he’s really good at feeling sorry for himself. I first came across him on the TEAMS site which is really good for us newbies because it provides both an introduction and translates the more difficult words. The site has Hoccleve’s best known work ‘The Regiment of Princes’ and, on the strength of that, I’ve subsequently bought ‘My Compleinte and Other Poems’ edited by Roger Ellis. I’ve had a recent moan about Ellis’ gloss but it is mostly serviceable even if it makes me cross.

We now come to the confessional. I’m against confessional poetry because most of it strikes me as self-indulgent whinging with more than a little exhibitionism which I find distateful. I accept that this is a personal view but it’s one that I can usually defend. As a bipolar depressive I’m particularly against confessional poems about the poet’s mental health and share Geoffrey Hill’s distaste for the work of Lowell and Plath because of this. I also readily accept that this is about my view of how ‘we’ should respond to and ‘deal with’ our condition. Thomas Hoccleve experienced a bout of mental illness and wrote a poem about his experience which has gone some way to modify the above view.

Before proceeding, it is important to note that Hoccleve is one of literatures great complainers, he complains about not having enough money, about not being paid and about the poor state of his health and therefore qualifies as the leading miserablist of the late medieval period. The other point to note is that he was a senior civil servant, working as a senior clerk in the office of the privy seal and was never poorly paid by the standards of the day. Having this job also implies a thorough knowledge of both Latin and French.

The onset of the illness is described (in strictly medieval terms) in the first stanza after the prologue of ‘My Compleinte’. I have had to use contemporary lettering throughout because WordPress doesn’t seem keen on ME, I’ve marked with an asterisk where this occurs-

Almygh*ty God, as liketh his goodnesse,
 
vesiteth* folke alday, as men may se,

With los of good and bodily sikenesse,

And among othir, he forg*at not me. 

Witnesse vppon the wilde infirmite

Wiche th*at I had, as many a man wel knewe,

And wiche me oute of mysilfe caste and threwe.

As you might expect, the medieval explanation for mental illness is much more straightforward then ours, no mention of childhood trauma, nor of genetics or excessive substance use but it’s about God not forgetting our inflicted poet.

The last line is a wonderful example of the expressive qualities of Middle English, I can relate to what’s being described, in fact it seems in many ways more accurate than contemporary attempts to portray the onset of mania/depression. Being cast and thrown out of yourself is also gloriously succinct and neatly avoids the details that so many poets dwell on. I’m taking ‘wilde infirmite’ to relate to a period at the psychotic end of mania primarily because other forms of wildness tend to recur and because of how Hoccleve describes the negative reaction of his friends. I may of course be entirely wrong on this but it does seem likely.

Those of us who do recover or have periods of being well do find the reaction of some former friends and acquaintances quite difficult- even in these enlightened times there is still huge stigma attached to mental illness and people often find it easier to sever ties with those who have been ill. Things were not at all different in the early 15th century. Hoccleve reports that is has been five years since his recovery (occasioned by God) and that he is still shunned by his friends:

For th*ough* my wit were hoom come ag*ein,

Men wolde it not so undirstonde or take.

With me to dele hadden they disdein.

A rietous persone I was and forsake.

Min oolde frendshipe was al overshake.

No wigh*t with me list make daliaunce.

The worlde me made a straunge continuance.

Hoccleve explains this rejection as being due to his friends’ belief that his infirmity will recur- which is entirely reasonable given that most periods of illness are episodic- whether treated or not. I’m sure that many of us have experienced that sense of isolation and I know that I have also isolated myself in the fairly recent past What strikes me as remarkable in this passage is (again) the last line which seems to capture what still goes on today. ‘Continuance’ is taken by Ellis to mean ‘face’ but I think ‘countenance’ is more accurate. Most bouts of madness, in whatever form, still kick off a negative societal reaction that is more to do with fear of othernerness than straightforward ‘disdain’.

In conclusion, I’m very glad that I went backwards instead of towards Dryden and Pope primarily because of the joys of the language but also because of the greater differences and smaller similarities between then and now. I’m also becoming more mellow about confessional verse.

Commentaries, Annotations, Glossaries and the Poem

For the past few months I’ve been trying to broaden my reading to incorporate poetry written before 1570 and also to get to grips with the joys of Middle English. Thus far this has involved engaging primarily with Thomas Hoccleve and John Skelton, for both of these I’ve made use of editors which has proved to be a ‘mixed’ experience. I’m also in pursuit of most things relating to David Jones and this morning I received Rene Hague’s commentary on The Anathemata. Obviously I haven’t begun to read this in depth but this from the preface encapsulates some of my concerns:

I very soon met two difficulties. The first was the problem of whom I was addressing, and what knowledge, apt to help him in his interpretation, could I attribute to him. For while it is annoying not to be told, something of which you are ignorant, it is equally, or even more annoying to be told what you have known since childhood: it is as bad as having an obvious joke explained to you. I could only take my own friends, so often better informed than I, as a standard. I found it impossible to be consistent, and in the end I had to write as though simply for myself, with a friend reading over my shoulder.

The second difficulty arose from the impossibility of defining a literal meaning. That exists at no more than syntactical abstraction, which has little use unless it allows the reader to move onward into the intricacies of allusion, allegory, spiritual and even mystical interpretation; and here (even though a commentator may provide a useful starting-point) every reader must do his own work based on his own reading and thinking. Anyone who has studied the great poets closely and for many years will know how endless is that work, and how entrancing.

Needless to say, Hague has now been promoted to one of the Few who write well about poetry and understand the needs of the attentive reader. This balance is a useful benchmark and I would add, from recent personal experience, explanations or definitions that the reader doesn’t understand- I don’t think I should need to consult the OED to understand this kind of explanation. The other infuriation comes from notes/glosses that are wrong, that are factually incorrect and (usually) misleading.

In order to exemplify what Hague is describing, I set out below the sinners and saints in my recent (ish) reading with some examples. I readily accept that each reader brings a different knowledge base and vocabulary to this material but (as ever) this is a subjective view and I’d be grateful for other responses from interested readers.

Roger Ellis on Thomas Hoccleve’s ‘La Male Regle’.

Editors of Middle English poetry place modern definitions alongside the line in question. This particular poem is an extended version of what Drayton categorised as ‘ah, me!’ poetry in that the poet spends a lot of time bemoaning his plight and generally being sorry for himself. These lines are from the second stanza, Ellis’ definitions are in italics:

 And now my body empty is, and bare

of ioie and ful of seekly heuynesse,         sickly

al poore of ese and ryche of evel fare.      in things bringing ease; in misfortune

I would argue that this last line is done an enormous disservice by this inept heavy-handedness. Not many readers will need to be told that ‘ese’='ease’ but if they did then it might be better/more helpful to give the phrase as ‘ill at ease’. With regard to being incorrect, ‘in misfortune’ completely misses the point. I’m not any kind of expert in these things but I can think of many more precise definitions and ‘evel fare’ doesn’t really need an explanation because most of us will be able to define both words for ourselves. It could of course be argued that this edition is aimed at students who might need this kind of assistance, I would then point out that in that case there is an even greater need for precise definition and not what appears to be lazy platitude.

Alexander Dyce on John Skelton’s ‘Diuers Balettys and Dyties Solacyous’.

Skelton was writing about a hundred years after Hoccleve at the start of what is thought of as the early modern period (a decidedly movable feast). This is the second verse of one of his more minor ‘ditties’:

Allectuary arrected to redres

  These feuereous axys, the dedely wo and payne

Of thoughtfull hertys plungid in dystres;

  Refresshyng myndys the Aprell shoure of rayne;

  Condute of comforte, and well most souerayne;

Herber enverduryd, contynuall fressh and greene;

Of lusty somer the passing goodly quene;

Dyce’s edition of Skelton’s verse was published in 1843 and is a delight in that it is hopelessly partisan and idiosyncratic but you can feel the enthusiasm for the work bouncing off the page- the notes can be read on their own merit although it does help to know something of the period. However, Dyce often omits words and phrases which should be glossed and also gives explanations that the interested reader (me) may not understand.

This is how Dyce deals with the above:

Allectuary- Electuary. Arrected – appointed. Redres- relieve, remedy. Axys – (access) fits, paroxysms. Of thoughtful hertys plungid in dystre- Skelton borrowed this line from, Lydgate whose ‘Lyf of our Lady’ begins: “O thoughtful herte plungid in dustressed”. Thoughtfull is anxious, heavy, sad. Herber – arbour.

So, how many of us are familiar with ‘electuary? Was this a common word in 1843 and do we need a definition of ‘redres’ when we aren’t given one for either ‘condute’ or ‘enverduryd’? Because of his enthusiasm I should nevertheless confess that Dyce annoys me far less than Ellis.

At this point I could repeat what I’ve said elsewhere about commentators on Spenser, Herbert, Milton, Marvell and Wordsworth but instead I’ll move forward to the present and the problem of the introduction.

Ann Hassan on Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Speech! Speech!’

Thus far I’ve only read the introduction the Hassan’s commentary but it does contain one roadblock of a sentence. Following Hague, I’m of the view that the reader should be encouraged to undertake his or her own reading and to do the work of attention in all it’s senses. Early on in her introduction Hassan has this: “Hill’s stock preoccupations (in shorthand the triumvirate of martyrdom, memory and responsibility) are still present.” This glib, albeit ‘shorthand’, observation has no place in such an introduction because it sets out a position rather than encouraging readers to form their own impressions and views. For this reader, I think I know Hill’s work reasonably well and I’m deeply sceptical of a ‘triumvirate’ that omits God and England but I am deterred from preceding by the simple fact that this kind of generalisation isn’t helpful and may portend even more infuriations to come. There’s also a degree of complexity in Hill’s work that makes the adjective ‘stock’ either simplistic or (more likely) wrong. I will continue eventually however because I’m a Hill completist, I haven’t paid sufficient attention to this particular sequence and there are 294 pages for me to get lost in and annoyed with.

Odi Barbare poem VI (pt 2)

On the last occasion I had an extended struggle with the first verse of this poem. I’m now going to try to make further progress with the rest. Here are the first two verses together:

I can hack most laureates' roster-homage,

Make a pranged voice nasal through ruptured matchbox;

Brief the act undangerously heroic;

             We will survive it.

This astounding people (Disraeli), their spears

Beating shield-hides, murmuring high a basso,

Hive-like, buzzing rage become torpor almost

            Blood self-enthralling.

When dealing with the first verse I speculated that Hill might be using ‘laureate’ in the sense that John Skelton used it to describe himself. I now feel a little vindicated as I’ve just come across this from Poem 95 of ‘Speech! Speech!- “…………..Skelton Laureate / was a right rapper: outdance you with your shades / any day…..” I’ll skim gracefully over the image that this conveys and just note that Hill has used the word in its older sense before and it might be useful to bear in mind that Skelton and Hill received recognition from Oxford University.

There now needs to be a slight digression with regard to beating spears. The British cultural landscape is littered with many things, in particular with many attempts to cling to our noble and imperial past. Within that landscape there is a film called ‘Zulu’ which makes great use of the spear beating on shields covered in hide motif. To those of a certain age (me) this is a Significant Childhood Memory because it was very very scary and underlined how strange and difficult some of our imperial subjects could be. And I know that ‘Zulu’ is about Rourke’s Drift and that the later ‘Zulu Dawn’ was about the Battle of Isandlwana which is the subject of this poem.

It will be appreciated that the second verse is much more accessible than the first but probably more troubling because of what it appears to say. Incidentally I can’t tie Disraeli into the italicised quote and the DNB informs me that he was prime minister at the time (1879) but had oaid little attention to African affairs until this defeat and that his primary concern about the defeat was the detrimental effect it had on the nation’s credibility.

I was going to confidently assert that Hill makes no other mention of the Anglo-Zulu War but then I noticed this in Poem 6 of ‘Speech! Speech!’:

.................But surely that's

not all? Rourke's Drift, the great-furnaced

ships off Jutland? They have their own

grandeur, those formal impromptus played

on instruments of the period (speech! speech!)

Incidentally, obtaining a copy of Ann Hassan’s recent and very detailed commentary on ‘Speech!’ has led me to a thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding re-reading of the poem. What I think I need to do here is note a similar use of musical terms.

Hill’s feelings about Empire are more complex than simple nostalgia, it’s fair to suggest that he views the ‘loss’ of Empire after 1945 as a Bad Thing but also harbours few illusions as to its many and varied barbarities. Whilst this Little Englander aspect of Hill’s politics is now hopelessly out of touch, it should be remembered that the British Empire was a very real entity during his childhood and there are many of his generation (my father included) who find it difficult to reconcile fighting and winning the Second World War only to ‘lose’ our imperial possessions.

We now come to the bee-analogy, that the (iconic) beating of the shields makes a murmuring noise and then builds to be like the buzzing of swarming and angry bees. From memory, the filmic shield beating was more percussive than murmuring although one of the other lasting themes is the sheer number of warriors and how these did seem to ‘swarm’ into battle. For this reason I’m not entirely clear whether this is Hill’s imagination or a synopsis of the movie.

The end of the verse is odd and probably sounds better than it should. It’s not clear whether it is the troops or their adversaries who are overcome by torpor although it is much more likely to refer to the troops. The battle was a fiasco, Wikipedia tells me that “while all the officers and NCOs carried rifles, only one in 10 in the ranks was armed with a muzzle-loading musket with limited ammunition[51][52] and many of them started to leave the battlefield at this point” which would seem to indicate paralysis as a result of incompetence rather than an the beating of shields. I rarely argue with Hill with regard to word choice but isn’t torpid better than the noun? Doesn’t torpor signal some degree of poetic affectation?

Neither is it abundantly clear what ‘almost’ refers to – should we read ‘almost become torpor’ or ‘almost blood self-enthralling? Or are we meant to read it both ways? This problem would be helped enormously if I fully understood the last line. ‘Self’ is a very big word for Hill who has borrowed the idea/principle of ‘selving’ from Hopkins and it is never used lightly- it usually signals that there’s something deep or profound going on. Turning to ‘entrhalling’, the OED has these definitions for ‘enthrall’;

• to reduce to the condition of a thrall; to hold in thrall; to enslave, bring into bondage;
• to ‘enslave’ mentally or morally. Now chiefly, to captivate, hold spellbound, by pleasing qualities.

So, the troops could be said to be held spellbound and torpid by the noise of the shields or it is their blood that is enslaved. This doesn’t work because of ‘self’ which might suggest the soldiers and their officers being lulled into a false sense of superiority. The historical record doesn’t suggest that there was a lot of torpor on either side, the British were both outnumbered and out-manoeuvred prior to being slaughtered- which is the subject of the next three verses.

So does ‘self-enthrall’ make sense? It could be argued that we might need to consider all of the poem before a judgement can be made but this verse is a sentence and even poetic sentences should carry some meaning. I have tried to explore the possibilities and to take into account the importance of ‘self’ but it does seem that this particular line sounds much better than it is.

One final question- is it really okay (even if you are a knight of the realm) to equate black African warriors with insects?

Odi Barbare Poem VI- a question (pt 1)

I’m still dithering about Hill’s latest collection. The nature of this dither relates to whether or not it’s any good. I know how I feel about ‘Oraclau’ (not very good at all) and about ‘Clavics’ (quite good as in better than ‘Without Title’ but some way below ‘Comus’). The ‘Odi’ sequence puzzles me and creates that kind of ‘am I missing something?’ readerly anxiety that I’ve written about in connection with Emily Dorman.

In yet another attempt to stop the dither, I’ve decided to pay careful attention to one poem from the sequence that I think I understand in order to try and identify the components of this particular problem.

Before we proceed, I’d like to say a few things about dissonance. Poem 11 from the ‘Clavics’ sequence begins with “Plug in a dissonance to make them wince” which is a bit like saying that these poems contain some naff lines and phrases but that’s okay because I’m aware of this and am letting you know that I’m aware. I don’t have any kind of problem with dissonance providing that it isn’t accompanied by a drop in quality or a diminution of theme.

The other thing that I need to mention is the ‘Sapphic’ verse form which Hill is said in the blurb to use in order to ‘re-cadence’ the form as used by Sidney. This consists of verses with three long lines followed by one short. Each of the fifty two poems in this sequence contains six of these verses. Both ‘Oraclau’ and ‘Clavics’ also used a single but different form throughout. This may not be an entirely Good Thing.

This is the first verse of Poem VI:

I can hack most laureates' roster-homage

Make a pranged voice nasal through a ruptured matchbox;

Brief the act undangerously heroic;

             We will survive it.


          

The first line might refer to poets laureate who are appointed by the crown and expected to write in honour of or (at least) about national events or it may refer to gifted poets in the way that Skelton would refer to himself. Given that verses 4 and 5 place us in or about the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879 then the laureate may be Tennyson who might be said to have written a few ‘roster-homages’. This neat hypothesis gets a bit addled with William Caxton referring to Skelton as ‘late created poete laureate in the university of Oxford’ which might just match Hill’s appointment as Professor of Poetry at the same place. The OED defines ‘roster’ as- ‘ A list or plan showing the order of rotation of duties and service of individual soldiers or troops. Also (esp. U.S.): a simple list or register of soldiers, divisions of a regiment, etc., with various particulars relating to them’ which would seem to tie in with a poem to commemorate or pay homage to those soldiers that were slaughtered in the battle.

The use of ‘hack’ is also worthy of note. I’m now going to sound like Hill but the usually reliable OED has failed me on this occasion. In the British army to be able to hack something is to be able to withstand an ordeal- a meaning which is now commonly used, there is also the literary connotation of working as a hack which usually means reporting for the popular or provincial press. So, given the next line, we might have Hill acknowledging that he can withstand the onerous task of praising a list of the dead and that he recognises that this work might be a bit beneath a man of his talents.

Moving on to the second line, I’m claiming that Hill has used ‘prang’ before but I can’t recall exactly where. I’m taking it to mean crashed or damaged rather than having anything to do with Khmer temples (although….). It can be said that a voice is damaged if it sounds ‘nasal’, as if the speaker has a heavy cold or it could refer to that affected and deeply irritating intonation that is used by some poets when reading their own work. ‘Ruptured matchbox’ can be read as either meaningless or wonderful. Those in the meaningless camp would argue that it is used because it sounds good but actually means nothing and adds nothing to the poem. Those in the wonderful camp would staunchly defend the impossibility of the image because that’s what poets do and point out that a matchbox is both raspy and fragile (liable to break/rupture) at the same time which is reasonably similar to the voice when affected by a cold, we’d also point out that this kind of stuff is one of the reasons that we read and pay attention to Hill’s work.

With regard to ‘brief’ I again have to express some disappointment with the OED which defines the verb as to:

• reduce to the form of a counsel’s brief;
• put (instructions) into the form of a brief to a barrister;
• give a brief to (a barrister), to instruct by brief; to retain as counsel in a suit;
• give instructions or information to;
• shorten, abbreviate, abridge.

None of these cover the way that politicians are prepared and given advice by civil servants prior to making an announcement nor in the sense of ‘briefing against’ something which is how we refer to the actions of lobbyists who want to cast doubt on a proposal. I’m still of the view that Hill is referring to the verb as in to advise (disparagingly or otherwise) that the act (fighting the battle) is undangerously heroic because the adjective doesn’t really make sense. There is of course the possibility that the’act’ is the act of poetic commemoration but that only works if Hill is being heavily ironic. Heroism is usually associated with danger, the heroic action is one that is performed in the face of danger so we could be talking about a false kind of heroism or this could be another case of Hill’s verbosity getting the better of him (see above) or an ironic or sarcastic comment on the faux-heroic pose struck by some poets.

The last line hovers around what exactly ‘it’ might refer to. Off the top of my head, the British empire survived the defeat at Isandlwana and went on to win the war even though the battle itself was an unmitigated disaster. So ‘we’ might refer to the British people or to the small minority of troops that did survive the battle. If we accept that this might be sarcastic then it could also refer to the fate of those who have the misfortune to listen to the ‘roster-homage’.

Hopefully some of these ambiguities will be resolved as I progress through the rest of the poem in subsequent posts and gradually make my way to the problematic final verse. On the next occasion I think we might need to address the iconic nature of certain British films, Welshness and a scratchy nostalgia for something that never was.

J H Prynne and the English Intelligencer

Plough Match 2012 Julian Winslow

I’m a bit worried about Mountain Press. I’ve got all four of their titles and I don’t see how they can possibly maintain this level of quality, unless Neil Pattison does the decent thing and publishes the work that he’s written in the last five years. Their current list has work by three of the very best poets under the age of thirty which I’ll be returning to in the near future and ‘Certain Prose of the English Intelligencer’ which is edited by Neil, Reitha Pattison and Like Roberts.

As with Pierre Joris’ work on Celan’s notes for the Meridian, all of us with any kind of interest in serious poetry owe the editors an enormous debt. This anthology (for the want of a better noun) contains material that is vital to a full understanding and appreciation of All Things Cambridge. It also opens up a challenge to those of us who like to think that we’re radical and engaged in our poetics. Because of this, I intend to try and deal with the material in a number of instalments because (as with Celan) a single account would be very long and doing this over time means that I can have the luxury of changing my mind.

In my head the English Inelligencer (EI) is a kind of Ur-text marking out the time at which British Poetry got serious. I’d come to this view by reading the views and memories of others as none of this material has been generally available. ‘Certain Prose’ (as you might guess) focuses on the prose as the majority of the poetry is available elsewhere.

Neil Pattison addresses the question of EI’s status in his introduction:

Its disintegrating pages have acquired a shabby mystique as avant-garde incunabula, and scholarly pearls extracted from its fugitive pages, along with items of gossip about its protagonists, have acquired a high value in some quarters. This unlikely glamour has not served the Intelligencer well, and has perhaps obscured the worksheet’s true value, which lies not just in the role it played in the lives of its renowned contributors, but also in its underexplored salience for our understanding of the contested place and role of literary poetry in the culture of contemporary modernity, the problems of which The English Intelligencer may pose more acutely than any other journal of its time.

One of the oddest contributions collected here is from Peter Riley entitled “Working Notes on British Prehistory or Archaeological Guesswork One” which treats the end of the Neolithic as the point where humanity took a wrong turn. It also surveys much of the archaeological of the time and puts forward a number of hypotheses. In his introduction Neil describes this as Riley’s “noble, askew and arguably isolated attempt” to translate his personal ‘treasured dream’ into a theoretical position. This may or may not be the case, my main interest is that it was responded to in some detail by Prynne.

Before proceeding, I need to make a personal disclosure. I know a bit about the Neolithic, my daughter spends her professional life prospecting potential Neolithic sites in Calabria and we have many interesting discussions about the period and what can be usefully said about it. These discussions (and some reading) have led me to the view that we still know very little and that there appears to be an inherent weirdness/otherness about what we do know. I am therefore immensely suspicious of any attempts to make concrete statements based (at best) on informed guesswork or from our perspective rather than theirs. Riley’s title does recognise the guesswork element but he also puts forward a narrative which is an extended guess. One of the more perceptive hypotheses that he puts forward is about the primacy of the circle and circularity and how this may be connected to the fat lady cult that characterises much of the period

This concern with the distant past may not appear to have much to do with poetry and this may well be the case. I would however draw your attention to the inclusion of a work about stone circles in the ‘reference cues’ list appended to ‘Kazoo Dreamboats’ and that a paragraph is quoted in the last parts of the poem and to the related ‘A Note on Metal’ which first appeared in the EI and was published in the Bloodaxe ‘Poems’ even though it isn’t a poem. I’ll return to these shortly but first I’ll deal with Prynne’s response.

The first thing to note is his prose style hasn’t changed much over the years, we get the occasional sharp bite and the idiosyncratic use of certain words. The second is that his opposing view is quite clearly stated, he gently points out that trade rather than invasion is more likely to have been responsible for changes during this period- a view that has been reasonably standard for the last 50 years even though we still haven’t got our brain fully around what we might mean by ‘trade’ in the Neolithic.

The other good news is that I think that I agree with most of what he says although I’m still puzzling over his use of ‘motive’. Most discussion of the Neolithic revolves around two central concepts- landscape and ritual. The cynic in me would want to suggest that this is mainly because of the big Neolithic monuments/structures that are thought to have been constructed with reference to the surrounding landscape and that these very visible monuments are thought to have been a venue for ritualistic practices.

Let’s start with Prynne on the trap of imposing our own ideas and world-view on the past:

My instinct is that the distribution of local instances of fact which can be grouped (pot and implement typology, for example) has led to imposed ideas of region that are foreign in pre-literate landscape and which are (by unacknowledged retrojection) based on common-law practice concerning land-ownership.

This seems reasonably sensible although the explanation of how this mistake comes about is a little too refined for my liking- I don’t think ‘retrojection’ works in straight lines.

‘Motive’ appears to be a key term in Prynne’s response:

But we have no evidence at all for the tribal pressure of motive, especially when this related to magical practice and manic excursion.

By motive here I don’t mean anything like that legal-ethical notion of willed predisposition, based on the idea of extension dominated by acts of choice. I mean much more the recognition of possibility as a source of compulsion, pointing one’s body towards the land of the dead or what other definition the guardian decrees. And in this sense the divination of purpose is mantic, as it was for Ezekiel, what a man does is what he thus comes to understand he has always desired. The question of future time (what next) is a specific dimension of landscape, which is the magic of parts locked into the physical extension of the whole.

I freely confess to getting lost just after ‘a source of compulsion’. A few paragraphs later there is this:

I think in that sense that the stone circle or avenue is a very discreet and accurate adjustment of these two forces, of presence as the ritual consecration of motive (in the sense I’ve explained earlier). If both movement and memory are sacred arts, then a place which is the same place accumulates special force, just as the body does for the variety of conditions it can reach out for (Shammanistic transport, for example, or starvation or sexual fulfilment). A stone circle at the intersect of several movement-patterns was thus already ritualised, as an act of recognition repeated to the point where it became socially valid, the social disposition of megaliths rehearsing the interchange between accident and purpose carried to its highest pitch. I could see that as a mechanism for hanging on to sanity, or at least for doing so without collapsing into gutless boredom. As you say, movement and situation incorporated, unlike the utterly trivial predictive charades enacted (so it seems) at Stonehenge, by some Gaullist astronomer. That kind of fixation on calendrial accuracy is the deadly enemy of quality: the middle-class merchant fingering his wrist-watch.

I’d like to point out that Avebury is more attractive than Stonehenge because it is more complex and even weirder. Speculation about both sites is good fun and can be quite entertaining but it is always going to be speculation simply because the evidence can be read in so many competing ways. This isn’t to say that I dislike the above speculation primarily because it indicates that an amount of original thought has gone into these issues. This concern with the landscape and the quality of human activity in it is reiterated in ‘News of Warring Clans’ from 1977 and ‘Field Notes’ which is Prynne’s detailed commentary on ‘The Solitary Reaper’ which shows a great deal of careful thought about these issues, especially about the physical experience of being situated in and embodied by the landscape.

We now come to ‘Kazoo Dreamboats’ and Richard Bradley’s essay, ‘The Land, the Sky and the Scottish Stone Circle’ which is one of the reference cues and is quoted verbatim at the end of ‘Dreamboats’:

Yet the recursion cannot be close since the stop key is well out

beyond reach, even in transform assignment. A language may die

also from the record of currency exchange to full pair-convert

transumed in surrender value, decalibrated: or the travel line

from matter to fancy of spirit is invert and pyretic: smoke for the 

mirror, tenant creamery.


     The original cremation pyre was placed where the heavens met the earth

     and where the inhabitants of nearby settlements could observe smoke rising into

     the air. It was also located in the one place on the hilltop where the position of a

     distant mountain would correspond to that of the summer moon. The subsequent

     development of the site gave monumental expression to this relationship,

     gradually focusing that particular alignment until it was narrowed down to the

     space between the tallest stones.

The corridor is and to be the avenue, from particulate vapour to

consign into bedrock, transit of durance it is a formative exit

in naturalised permission, solemn grade-one rigmarole, better

Wiglaf's rebuke and insurance payout. To be this with sweet

song and dance in the exit dream, sweet joy befall thee is by

rotation been and gone into some world of light exchange, toiling

and spinning and probably grateful in this song.

As might be expected, Bradley’s essay says more about this particular stone circle than appears in the quote but the extant evidence does suggest a conscious link between the circle/pyre, the mountain and the sky. The mountain (Lochnagar) is also significant because it is the only visible peak that retains its snow for ‘much’ of the year.

I’ve said in the recent past that I haven’t worked out what Prynne may be intending with ‘Kazoo Dreamboats’ but I continue to feel that being and non-being are an intertwined theme. The above seems to confirm that and to underline Prynne’s long-standing interest in bodies and monuments in the landscape. Incidentally, the ‘sweet joy’ quote is from Blake’s ‘Infant Joy’ and Wiglaf was king of Mercia in the ninth century but I have no idea what his ‘rebuke’ might be about…….

On the next occasion I think that I might have to address Neil’s claims about the contested role of literary poetry and try and work out the difference between the literary and the non-literary- any ideas on this would be wamrly welcomed.

Poetry and the academy (again)

In the early days of this blog I allowed myself the occasional extended rant about the damage that something called the academy does to something we call poetry. The general thrust of this centred around an academic elite having more and more complex discussions with itself and thus locking most ‘serious’ poetry up in a box that excludes the rest of us.

I’d like to be able to report that I’ve mellowed and now appreciate that complex poetry requires complex analysis and that this must be expressed in precise terms which many may consider to be obscure. Unfortunately, recent exposure to academic work continues to confirm the original view although in a slightly modified form.

I read a lot of history and spend many a happy hour arguing in my head with views and perspectives that I don’t agree with. I’d like to be able to read about poets and poetry that interests me, especially work produced between 1580 and 1670 (ish) although I wouldn’t be adverse to reading outside these parameters. The problem is that I can’t finish the vast majority of those that I’ve tried. I start off with the best of intentions but soon get weary and decide not to proceed any further. This weariness is usually due to:

• the points being made don’t seem to be well-founded;
• an ideological agenda is being pursued which requires the author to shoehorn the work into a box that doesn’t fit;
• academic eagerness leading to an ‘over-egging’ of the pudding;
• increasingly convoluted arguments to make a very small point;
• an emphasis on the wrong things;

There are some critics that I read with enormous pleasure even though I disagree with almost everything they say, I read and re-read Stanley Fish on anything and I do the same with Jacques Derrida on Paul Celan. I also read Geoffrey Hill and J H Prynne on anything but my primary motivation stems from my interest in their poetry.

I do appreciate that there are academic trends and that these develop over time, I also understand that academia is competitive but it does seem that academic success is more likely if authors produce work that questions the prevailing status quo (and is well written).

I do not want to single out particular books but I have started about ten that have been published in the last five years. I’ve been attracted by the subject matter and the thesis that’s set out in the introduction and have started with more than a degree of enthusiasm because all of these books promise to do what I think ought to be done.

The over-egging of the pudding is particularly tiresome, it does seem that there is a tendency to develop entire theories on the flimsiest evidence. Some historians also fall into this particular trap but there is a growing trend which emphasises the things that we don’t actually know rather than those which we can only guess about. I’m not inherently against speculation but I am of the view that authors should make it clear when speculation is taking place.

I have tried to be reasonably broad in my reading, I’ve engaged with works about individual poets, about groups of poets, works with a political bent and those with a theological/philosophical angle and none of these have lived up to the promises set out in the introduction. Some of this can be very dispiriting, I’ve been taken through many pages of context and supporting evidence only to arrive at a ‘point’ that is so small as to be meaningless. I’ve been through pages of ideologically right-on posturing to arrive at a ‘point’ that is laughably wrong (as in factually incorrect).

We now come to specialisms and context. I am familiar with the history of this particular period and am therefore reasonably aware when authors provide only partial or inaccurate context. There may however be many readers who ‘only’ have a background in literature and would often struggle to make a judgement about the context that is provided. I’m not suggesting that this is deliberate but too often sweeping generalisations are made in order to prove a (usually speculative) theory. The other side of the coin is represented by J H Prynne who spends many pages in his ‘Love III’ commentary emphasising just how complex and obscure certain theological debates were in the 1620s.

we now come to over-complication which is usually due to putting forward a hypothesis on very, very thin evidence but can also stem from being overly-enamoured with theory. The love of theory is (to say the least) unfortunate because it can often deter the hapless reader (me) who ‘just’ wants to know a bit more about the poems. I could go on for a very long time about how the work of Edmund Spenser has been hijacked and fought over by various theoretical perspectives to such an extent that the poetry has been largely forgotten, looking at recent academic work would lead the neutral observer to conclude that Spenser only ever wrote about Ireland and that this was done in order to promote and strengthen a profoundly dodgy (technical term) imperial project. Needless to say a few critics have attempted to buck this trend but they do tend to get swamped by this kind of errant nonsense.

I’m not in any way adverse to theory but do nevertheless feel that theoretical concerns should be used to inform our understanding of the work and not the other way round. Literary theorists also suffer in the main from a very simplistic view of how things work/worked in the real world. There seems to be a number of straight lines that go from society to any particular poem, so we have a burgeoning economy or a flourishing legal profession or religious controversy having a direct and discernible influence on the way that poems are put together. I shouldn’t really need to point out that life is inherently messy and doesn’t always follow the lines that we draw for it. The refusal of some literary critics (from a variety of theoretical perspectives) to understand and accommodate this unfortunate fact is especially frustrating.

It’s also interesting to note that historians tend to do better on poets than literary critics do on history. Roy Foster has produced the definitive work on Yeats and Edward Thompson’s book on Blake and the Muggletoniansis an absolute delight.

In conclusion, with a few honourable exceptions, the academy continues to produce work about poetry that is incredibly introspective and usually inaccurate. This does enormous disservice to the work and to the interested but non-academic reader.

David Jones’ “The Fatigue”

The above poem was published in 1974 in the Faber collection “The Sleeping Lord and other fragments” and deals with the crucifixion, the working party of the title is the Roman soldiers detailed to accompany Christ to the cross. Before we go any further I need to make a plea from the Sadly Neglected Poets section of this blog.

I can just about understand the neglect suffered by Hoccleve, Skelton and Drayton, I can even appreciate that some may want to overlook/ignore the work of R S Thomas but I cannot understand why a poet of Jones’ talent and originality should be known more for his work as an artist than as one of the great modernist poets of the last century. The really odd thing is that he was recognised as such by both Eliot and Auden but now seems to be relegated to the third or fourth division. I accept that “The Anathemata” is very difficult but it’s also wonderfully difficult and “In Parenthesis” is by far the best poem from the trenches that we have.

Moving on to “The Working Party”, the good news is that it is nowhere near as tricky as “The Anathemata” and comes with an introduction and lots of footnotes. The even better news is that it’s very good indeed because it takes an unusual perspective and tells the ‘story’ in a way that is soaked through with compassion and humanity.

Jones converted to Catholicism in the early twenties and the Catholic faith and liturgical practice are major themes as are the Roman Empire, Welshness and the experience of ‘ordinary’ soldiers. All of these are present here. In his introduction Jones says:

I have (as in each other the other fragments) made the personnel of the Jerusalem garrison to be of mixed recruitment. Thus the NCO is from the urbs itself, while some of his men are Celts from Gaul or Britain.

and:

But if I may have falsified some of the historical accidents I have done so with deliberation in order toconvey a far more important historical truth: the heterogeneous composition of the forces of a world-imperium.

Jones’ attitude towards the Roman empire is ambiguous in that he saw it as both brutal and ruthless but he describes its inner workings with a kind of appalled and awed fascination. He was born inLondon but his father was Welsh and all of his work is littered with signs and tokens from the culture of that broken land (I have been reading R S Thomas…).

Jones identifies the three main sections of the poem as:

• ninety lines of a dialogue between a Roman NCO and two privates of Celtic origin;
• about a hundred lines of “soliloquy or reflection made in the context of Catholic Xtian tradition and theology” on the crucifixion;
• over seventy lines devoted to the administration of the empire from Rome before ending with a description of the “location and allocation of the men detailed”.

I want to deal with each of these in turn but need to point out that you don’t need to believe in God to appreciate what Jones does nor do need to be Welsh or have an enthusiastic interest in the Roman empire. I don’t fall into any of these categories and yet am almost overwhelmed by the strength and beauty of the work.

Jones is particularly adept in the demotic, his characters are believable and contain more than a little humanity. This is the NCO:

  D'you reckon you're tutelar deity of the whole of Salem city,

Upper and Lower and extra-mural perimeter as well? Not

Water Gate nor Fish Gate neither, but somewhat left of

Old Gate to the right of Arx, Birket Post West inclusive, with

y'r centre on Skull Hill, that's you bit of frontage

                         Skull Hill's your lode

the tump without the wall.

 Project an imagined line from that tump, cutting Cheese

Gully back to this same block of silex where you now stand

and you've got y'r median point of vision - now hold it.

                       That's how we keep

the walls of the world

                       sector by sub-sector

maniple by maniple

                       man by man,

                       each man as mans the wall

is as squared, dressed stone
                       fronting the wall but one way

according to the run of the wall.

It's whoresons like you as can't keep those swivel eyes to front

one short vigilia through as are diriment to our unific and expand-

ing order.

So, we have the Roman equivalent of a platoon watch complaining because one of his guards has reported something occuring outside the area he’s supposed to be watching- which happens to be the site of the crucifixion. This has the effect of placing the reader on those walls too and into the mindset of the lower echelons of the army. The middle section in verse is a refrain about the extent and strength of empire that recurs at the end of the poem and is one of the ‘points’ that Jones wants to make. ‘Cheese Gully’ is the only part of this that is glossed – “Cf. the Tyropoeon Valley which ran north-south through the Upper and Lower divisions of the city and means the valley of the cheese-makers.” I confess that I had to look up ‘silex’ and ‘diriment’ and am now of the view that we ought to make much more use of the latter.

The above records a banal, everyday event in the first century but Jones manages to situate it within the context of empire/imperialism and also, with the reference to Skull Hill as ‘your lode’, to anticipate what is to follow. None of this is overstated and the tone of the speech accurately echoes the voice and attitude of thousands of contemporary NCOs even though ‘whoresons’ does come as a bit of a shock.

I’ve said this before but if poetry is in part about bearing witness then there are very few who fulfil this function better than David Jones who manages in a very short space of time to involve (in its widest sense) the reader in what is being described.

This is from the second section:

   And others of you to be detailed

                        (not on other fatigues)

for the spectacle

                        at the sixth hour

in Supplementary Orders

                        not yet drafted

for the speculatores

                        those who handle the instruments

who are the instruments

                        to hang the gleaming Trophy

on the Dreaming tree

                        and to see

on the leaning lignum

                        the spolia-bloom

where shine the Five Phalerae

                        that till the hard war

and for his racked-out limbs

                        (extensis manibus...)

the dark-bright armillae

                        Quis est vir qui babet coronam?
 
for the spined-dark wreath

                        squalentam barbam
 
without the circuit-wall

                        of his own patria.

                        Where the Spoil of Spoils

hangs to Iuppiter

                        and the trophies

are the Conqueror

                        ...himself to himself

on the Windy Tree.

Most of the Latin is glossed and the rest can be looked up quite quickly. The ‘speculatores’ are glossed as “a special branch of the service directly responsible to the provincial governor for the carrying out of executions”. As well as the Latin, there are references to Anglo-Saxon, Welsh and Norse traditions all of which are explained but the Point that I want to make is that this is incredibly beautiful in capturing the poignancy of the scene perhaps because of the wide range of references that are used. What also shines through is the humanity of Jones as witness. I’ll accept that there’s a degree of obscurity going on- “Quis est vir qui babet coronam?” is glossed as “a translation of a line in poem by the 14th century Welsh Poet Gruffud Grygg, reading: Pwy yw’r gwr piau’r goron, ‘who is that man that owns the crown?’”. The overall effect however is still stunning, in contrast to the routine tones of the first part and building up to the magnificent last two lines- which are glossed as being from the Nordic ‘Havamal’.

The last section is a complete contrast again for now we are observing the processes and structures of empire:

By how an inner cabinet plot the mappa mundi when key

officials and security agents forward their overlapping but dis-

crepant graphs

  by whether the session

                        is called for after

                        or before, noon

  by whether a hypocaust has fouled its flues

  by how long the amphora is off the ice

  be whether the wind 

                       blows moderate from trans-Tiber

or with a nasty edge

                       straight up the Tirbutina

As can hopefully be seen, none of this matches the level of difficulty found in ‘The Anathemata’ even though it addresses many of the same themes. As Jones notes in his introduction, ‘The Fatigue’ is interrelated with two other poems (‘The Wall’ and ‘The Tribune’s Visitation’) which are also set in Jerusalem at the time of the Passion and all of these give greater voice to Jones’ faith and his view of empire. The other two are both accomplished poems of a very high standard but ‘The Fatigue’ stands out for me because of the switch in focus and perspective that re-frames this pivotal act removing from it the conventional narrative and enabling us to see it with a fresh pair of eyes.

J H Prynne and “then”.

I’ve written before about Prynne’s recent ‘Discursive Commentary on ‘Love III’ by George Herbert which runs to 92 pages and can only be described as forensically detailed. I’ve also drawn attention to the 11 pages that Prynne devotes to the word ‘then’. In the intervening months I’ve read a lot more of Herbert’s work and used these pages to think aloud about the various difficulties that his life and work present.

Mainly because I’ve had a few days of disenchantment with poetry, I want to give some more attention to what Prynne has to say in those 11 pages and to try to understand how he thinks about poetry. As will hopefully become clear, this commentary is more revealing about Prynne the poet than his commentary on ‘The Solitary Reaper’. This is the full text of the poem-

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,

               Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack

               From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

               If I lack'd any thing.


"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";

               Love said, "You shall be he."

"I, the unkind, ungrateful? ah my dear,

               I cannot look on thee."

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,

               "Who made the eyes but I?"


"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame

               Go where it doth deserve."

"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"

               "My dear, then I will serve."

"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."

               So I did sit and eat.

Prynne is of the view that ‘then’ on line 16 is pivotal because it signals the moment of grace when the sinner accept’s God’s love and vows to ‘serve’ him. Previously I have complained that Prynne does not give sufficient attention to the very wide spectrum of belief with regard to the workings of grace in the 1620s. Having re-read these 11 pages I have now to concede that this theological breadth is acknowledged as is the (to us) obscurity of some of the ‘points’ of debate.

The salutary lesson for me in this is about the nature and value of attention. I like to think of myself as an attentive reader in that I read and re-read and try to notice as much as possible about a poem. However, I would not have given the above poem anywhere near as much attention as Prynne does and I may have ‘weighted’ my attention more on to line 5 because I think it’s one of the best lines ever to be written. The extensive scrutiny that Prynne that Prynne deploys here shows I think how much his own work is conscious of the significance and complexity of every single word and his focus on ‘then’ shows a willingness to examine all aspects of meaning and intention.

The other point that Prynne makes is that Herbert didn’t write this as a simple account of his own moment of grace, he wrote it primarily to involve the reader in comparing his or her own experience of faith and giving consideration as to when (if at all) the commitment to ‘serve’ might occur.

This leads inevitably on to a question of consistency because this reading would seem to imply that there’s a certain amount of catechizing going on which might be at variance with this from page 7:

Also the consistently modest pitch of the dramatic scenario is set not as a form of entrapment but as an enablement; not as a catechism, in which the questions are formal elucidative prompts to prescribed doctrine, but as clear responses to fears in conscience, that are due to confusion and irrational apprehensiveness.”

I’m of the view that the poem is a great poem because it manages to do several complicated things at once and does so in a way that seems plain and simple. I’m also of the view that the poem’s primary purpose is to describe the workings of grace in a way that ‘ordinary’ readers could understand and identify with the poet as reluctant sinner. As I understand it, a catechism is a form of religious instruction in a question and answer format which appears to be what’s going on here. I’m not denying the possibility that this is an account of Herbert’s own experience, nor am I denying the brilliance of the poem but I still read it as question and answer elucidation. This may of course be due to my absence of faith (Non-Dawkins faction) but I don’t think that this would make me any more sympathetic to Prynne’s view. I’m not willing to take up an extreme position on this, I don’t share Cristina Malcolmson’s view of Herbert as “a poet writing public verse, committed to nationalistic Protestantism, and perhaps seeking promotion to
higher office until the end of his life” but I don’t understand Prynne’s reluctance to see the poem as any more than “responses to fears in conscience”.

This reluctance is odd when it comes from a poet who thrives on ambiguity and sees it as an essential element of modernist verse. This is compounded by the fact that ‘fears in conscience’ isn’t a particularly clear phrase whatever they might be the result of.

The pages on ‘then’ contain many gloriously obscure quotes from preachers of the time as well as from Donne’s poems and sermons, all of which serve to underline the complexities and nuances involved. There’s also a quote from Blair Worden that doesn’t seem to be relevant to the period in question but this may be because I’m not convinced by anything that Worden writes.

There is, of course, the charge of over-reading- that Prynne is reading far more into these 1 lines than they actually contain. I don’t think that this is the case because of the subject matter and the fact that the poem was written at a time that was so very different from ours and both of these elements need the attention that Prynne gives them. I can also concede that the detail may be a bit dense for those readers that don’t have an active interest in 17th century religious thought and practice. For those of us that do, it may be that Prynne doesn’t go far enough, especially when giving consideration to some of the guest’s responses.

I’ll conclude by pointing out that the discussion on ‘then’ begins with pointing out that there is a backward looking use as in ‘in that case’ I will serve and a forward looking use as in ‘now, therefore’ I will serve and that Herbert may well be making use of both- ‘If God has done this for me’ and ‘I now commit myself to a life of service to Him’. The point here being that grace could only function if it was accepted and recognised as entailing a lifetime of service.

I think that this confirms what we already knew, that Prynne applies intense attention to the words that make up a poem and that he seems, unlike Geoffrey Hill, to think like the rest of us. He also shares that annoying habit that we all have of letting our eloquence get the better of us- from time to time.

R S Thomas and the first poem.

I’m guessing that most of us can recall the first poem that dragged us into this curious means of expression, the first poem that demonstrated what poetry is about and what it can do. I’ve said before that mine was R S Thomas’ ‘Welsh Lanscape’, a poem that hit me with the force of a sledgehammer in an English class in 1968 when I was thirteen. Since then I think I’ve always understood that poetry is in some way special without wanting to work out what that specialness might be about.

This poem wasn’t being taught or explained to me, it was something I came across by chance in an anthology.

I think that I also need to point out that there was nothing in my personal background to suggest an affinity with things poetic, a family engaged in small-scale commerce with no experience of higher education and my interests at the time being focused on sport. So, it wasn’t as if I’d given poetry some attention, it simply hadn’t crossed my field of vision until that afternoon and suddenly/instantly I knew that:

• poetry could do things that prose couldn’t;
• these things were reasonably simple but worked really well;
• this particular poem hinted at other tricks that poetry could perform.

In order to illustrate this, I set out below this poem in its entirety:

To live in Wales is to be conscious

At dusk of the spilled blood

That went to the making of the wild sky.

Dyeing the immaculate rivers

In all their courses.

It is to be aware,

Above the noisy tractor

And hum of the machine

Of strife in the strung woods,

Vibrant with sped arrows.

You cannot live in the present,

At least not in Wales.

There is the language for instance,

The soft consonants

Strange to the ear.

There are cries in the dark at night

As owls answer the moon,

And thick ambush of shadows,

Hushed at the fields' corners.

There is no present in Wales,

And no future:

There is only the past,

Brittle with relics,

Wind-bitten towers and castles

With sham ghosts;

Mouldering quarries and mines;

And an impotent people,

Sick with inbreeding,

Worrying the carcase of an old song.

I am the first to admit that the above isn’t perfect but it does contain a lot of really good and effective material. The line that has stood out most in the last forty four years is ‘Vibrant with sped arrows’ because it marks the point of revelation, the realisation that very few words could do many different things at once and in a way that made more ‘sense’ than prose. At the time this line struck me because it was speaking of strife but also of the passing and trajectory of time as it is played out across the landscape. The ‘strung woods’ is also wonderfully redolent of many different things- musical instruments, execution, stress all of which tie in with the description og the arrows. ‘Sped’ is also a wonderful way of describing something in flight.

Of course, it is the first line that initially caught my eye and I think it did so because the clarity of the statement, without equivocation or ‘fluff’ challenged my assumption that poetry had to be somehow vague and evocative rather than precise.

The imagery of spilled blood would also have appealed to my then interest in the violent and gory and I probably wouldn’t have noticed the tie in between bleeding and the ‘carcase’ of the last line. The description of the skies as ‘wild’ suggests a land beset by storms which is oddly set beside the ‘immaculate’ rivers, an adjective freighted with religious connotations- Thomas was a parish priest.

The other extraordinary indicator of what poetry can do comes with the “thick ambush of shadows, / Hushed at the fields’ corners” which functions in ways that ‘ordinary’ or ‘unheightened’ language never can and I like to think that it was this that led me to an understanding of the kind of transformational magic that poems can do. This might seem pretentious and grandiose to suggest that a thirteen year old can grasp all of this from a single poem. It could also be argued that I’m still avoiding defining this particular kind of magic.

So, what follows is a personal and subjective description of this magic using ‘Welsh Landscape’ as the sole example because this saves me from endless digression and because what I understood in 1968 hasn’t changed in any significant way since. The poem tackles a huge theme, the history and fate of the Welsh nation, and does so with an intense precision. The ‘no present, no future’ statement is both angry polemic but also a kind of resigned elegy for a country that once had its own life and identity but whose past is now said to be ‘brittle with relics’. You don’t need to be familiar with the troubled history of the Welsh nation because the poem gives you this sense of defeat and decline but the magic is in the images that surprise and startle – the strung woods that are said to be vibrant but in the sense of resonating with the flight of arrows and the ambush of shadows that is said to be thick and lurking at the corners of fields. Both of these would seem overblown in prose but poetry transforms the words to create something beautiful but also something that makes more ‘sense’, is more accurate than ordinary language could ever be.

The last line is particularly effective, the notion of ‘worrying’ rather than ‘hunting’ or ‘pursuing’ this carcase makes perfect sense and more so because of the ambiguity that Thomas can do so well. I would also argue that the ‘carcase of an old song’ provides a conclusion that fits perfectly with the many ‘points’ of the poem from what time does to living things, to the various forms of song and singing, the heady mix of this poem with the Bardic tradition.

So, this magic seems, for me, to be tied up with the compression of bigger thoughts, feelings and ideas, with the production of beauty which is somehow different from the aesthetically pleasing and with the original and the startling. I’d also throw in Geoffrey Hill’s principle of ‘technical efficiency’ as contributing to the magic because the effect is primarily spoiled by inefficiency as in ‘noisy tractor’ and ‘for instance’ in the above.