DYLAN THOMAS, DAVID GASCOYNE, W. S. GRAHAM, BURNS SINGER, JOHN HEATH-STUBBS, GEORGE BARKER, C.H. SISSON, STEVIE SMITH, THEODORE ROETHKE, R. S. THOMAS
It was against Dylan Marlais Thomas and his contemporaries that the Movement reacted. Davie quotes Vernon Watkins describing himself and Thomas as religious poets who “could never write a poem dominated by time, as Hardy could.” Here was a way of escaping the contingent world, but into what? Larkin at Oxford was in awe of Thomas; when he discovered Hardy there was a change. Images in Thomas are connected less by syntax or narrative structure than by rhythm. Each phrase and fragment makes sense, but when the reader stands back from the poem its many meanings collapse like a house of cards. One can force from the poems a structural coherence, but only sometimes an emotional or even a sensual coherence. Like Hart Crane, Thomas writes always just beyond his own considerable but essentially instinctive understanding. He dazzles himself and, in performance certainly, conveyed the dazzle to his audience. When he writes Under Milk Wood (published after his death, in 1954) he has brought his medium within his understanding, and a sentimental understanding it is.
He was born in Swansea, Wales, in 1914. His father was a schoolmaster and poet who recited Shakespeare to the boy before he could read. His placid, childish mother was devoted to him. He remembers his early infatuation with the sound of nursery rhymes, the “colors” words suggested to him, the exciting rhythms. This apprenticeship to Mother Goose predisposed him to highly rhythmic poetry: the ballads, Poe, Hopkins, Yeats, Marlowe, Keats for his colors, Lawrence for his passions. He was adamant that Joyce was not in the mix, or the Bible or Freud. The poems bear witness against him.
Pampered, asthmatic, naughty, he went to the grammar school where his father was senior English master. His successes were limited to literary activities. A short boy, he was competitive and wanted to be best or worst at everything. Constantine Fitzgibbon, one biographer, speaks of his “flamboyant idleness.” At seventeen he left school and became a newspaper reporter. After fifteen months he returned home and between 1932 and 1934 composed well over half the poems he published during his lifetime. He enjoyed dissolute roles in amateur theatricals: role-playing became a habit, only—as Robert Nye writes—“none of the masks quite fits.”
Eighteen Poems appeared in 1934, followed two years later by Twenty-Five Poems, and in 1939 The Map of Love with prose and verse rounded off his early career. The collections are much of a piece and many regard them as the best of Thomas; they are more individually his than the more vatic, less obscure work of his most famous book, Deaths and Entrances (1946). During the war he did work for the BBC and published an autobiography, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, in 1940. He died in 1953, aged thirty-nine, during an American lecture tour.
Describing his technique to a young fan, he wrote: “I make an image—though ‘make’ is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be ‘made’ emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual and critical forces I possess—let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict.” The formula is like Lawrence’s for fiction: releasing four characters and letting them work out their own salvations. From Thomas’s conflicting images, as much the product of will as of imagination, he tries to generate “that momentary peace which is a poem.” Earlier, during his fruitful period (1932–34), he wrote to a friend lamenting the increasing obscurity of his work: “When the words do come, I pick them so thoroughly of their live associations that only the death in the word remains.” And he adds, “I am a freak user of words, not a poet.”
The struggle is with words, not rhythms. A fine poem, “Especially When the October Wind,” shows him walking out, the wind “punishing” his hair “with frosty fingers.” Everything he experiences turns to language. His loquacious heart “talks” and “sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.” He hears the “vowelled beeches,” “oaken voices,” “water’s speeches,” “the hour’s word” and reads “the meadow’s signs.” Language displaces the world itself. The wind “punishes the land” too, “with fists of turnips.” Poet and landscape are momentarily fused by a conceit of grammar. Both are extensions of language: nature is speech and so is he.
“He is shut in the twisted tower of his own observation,” says Nye, “a tower where only words are real and can bleed.” Seldom words as specific, denotative meaning, but words as peep-holes through to a world of analogies. More than Sitwell he is addicted to synesthesia. Words suggest, they don’t signify. His misreading of Surrealism, which intrigued him, was like Crane’s. When the language seems to be coming out under pressure, Nye says, it is a “simulated intensity, a confusion of depth with thickness.” The words are forced into one another’s company; the lines, too, sometimes seem arbitrarily yoked, assembled out of notebook jottings. The rhythm line by line is often firmly end-stopped.
Beyond rhythmic repetition, there is syntactical repetition, sentence after sentence in closely parallel structures, or stanzas echoing one another. In “Light breaks where no sun shines” the first, third and fifth stanzas begin “Light breaks where no sun shines”; “Dawn breaks behind the eyes”; and “Light breaks on secret lots”; the parallels continue, close enough so that we are required to glance back and forward. The poem becomes a point of stillness. With heavily end-stopped lines and runs, with so much cross-hatching, the eye constructs the poem rather than reading it. Everywhere there is a lurking and rather furtive eros: “We are the dark deniers, let us summon / Death from a summer woman.” Death, waste, isolation are contained in opaque language that produces moods, the sense of sense, not sense itself.
The elegiac eroticism of Thomas’s early poems is heady, adolescent stuff. The poems are often “about” masturbation; or they appear to be so, the occasion behind a hedge of repeated syntactical constructions, rhythmic repetitions, the intensive vocabulary unsustained by intense rhythm. “And time cast forth my mortal creature / To drift or drown upon the sea” means “I was born”—after five stanzas of lurid gestation—and “I shall die” after one more stanza. Not since Swinburne has such orchestration engulfed sense. Most of the early poems have an interpretable line or couplet that gives access, and once inside things sort of slot into place. He is always building away from relatively simple ideas, exploring a narrow category of experiences. Death—actual, or the death that comes in Elizabethan terms with orgasm—is omnipresent. “The Force that through the Green Fuse,” among his most successful poems, is arresting conceptually: poet and flower, poet and nature, have a parallel vitality. Both are confronted by the fact of death. The poem glosses Robert Graves’s “The Cool Web.” The poet struggles weakly with the “cool web of language” that snares him. Were he indeed intent upon transcending it, he would disrupt syntax, expel the rigid phrasal parallelisms, in favor of a thoroughgoing surrealism (his surrealism is always of the surface); or he would strive for minute accuracy, to deliver himself into an actual world. In “From Love’s First Fever to Her Plague” language is a province, a bandage, perhaps a prefigurative burial, and a preparation for death’s “moonless acre,” my favorite bit of magic in Thomas.
In “Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines” Thomas moves into a different gear. The rhythm becomes varied, supple, answering the weirdness of the diction: erotic, tentative, the lines no longer seem to be end-stopped. The poem flows from line to line, reaches a climax, and recedes. Rhythm is sufficiently varied so that syntactical repetitions come with the emphasis of refrain, not reiteration. Not rhetorical “fibs of vision.”
The repetitive, rhetorical style serves him well in “social statements.” “The Hand That Signed the Paper” has a ruminative authority. “Death Shall Have No Dominion” recalls Donne’s “Death, be not proud,” rigid as a dressmaker’s, or shroud maker’s, dummy. The poet displays his language. The elegies, including “After the Funeral,” “Ceremony After a Fire Raid” and “Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” outdo Yeats in their simplifications and emblematizing. The actual human subject is swept, virtually immaterial, into Thomas’s death-centered cosmos.
Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
The majesty and burning of the child’s death.
A long first sentence that inflates and inflates to the awful image—not an image but a deliberate gesture.
Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.
Wonderful, and like “Fern Hill,” a fullness masking an emptiness. Not that we doubt the sincerity of Thomas’s feelings: we doubt the sincerity and the probity of the poem, as we doubt poems that borrow their rhetoric from the Holocaust. It is impossible not to love “Fern Hill,” but hard not to distrust the saccharine sadness that it generates. Thomas weaves spells. He engages language, rather than experience. When the spell releases us, nothing is clarified. There is a kind of authority to the word magic of the early poems; in the famous and popular late poems, the magic is all show. If they have a secret, it is the one we all share, partly erotic, partly elegiac. The later poems arise out of personality.
There are exceptions. “Poem in October,” with its brilliant details, works like “Refusal to Mourn” and “Do Not Go Gentle” against the tragic grain. In “A Winter’s Tale” Thomas’s rhythmic achievement is at its most subtle. The later work is rhetoric of a high order.
A contemporary of Thomas’s was the precocious young Surrealist David Gascoyne, who published his first book at the age of sixteen and at the age of nineteen, in 1935, wrote A Short History of Surrealism, one of the clearest studies of the movement. His early poems have become difficult. Michael Roberts found the work different in kind from that of the other English Surrealists, such as Hugh Sykes Davies and Philip O’Connor. Gascoyne wrote not exercises but necessary statements, generating a psychological surrealism (singularly English, rooted in a self even if that self was disrupted and unstable). Surrealism was less a release from the trammels of a tradition than a new and deeper formulation of them. He is a disciple of Lawrence rather than André Breton: an organized chaos, a scored impromptu. Hölderlin’s madness is sentimentalized. Religion and politics are fused in poems such as “Ecce Homo,” where he invokes “Christ of Revolution and of Poetry”; in his best poem, “De Profundis,” with its echo of Wilde and the Roman Catholic liturgy; in “The Vagrant” and “Night Thoughts,” which Michael Hamburger described as “the most Baudelairean exploration of an urban inferno written since the war.” Interesting as an English Surrealist, his fault for readers today is that he was more English than Surrealist, he did not take the revolution deeply enough into his language, he loved its syntax too much, and he loved the sound of an attributable, own voice, the lyric “I” dressed in a fashionable French costume and, while learning to speak French, never quite becoming French in English.
Instinctively Surrealist in his early work, and more inadvertently surreal in the syntax and imagery of his maturity, is W. S. Graham, a poet who never wanted to earn the French title but wished to be a new voice with new ways of saying, a Scot, or a Celt, or just a poet. William Sydney Graham was born in 1918 in a tenement in Greenock, Scotland, “beside the sugar house quays,” as he says—a rundown urban setting, open to the sea. He was clearly of humble, “unlettered” origins. The sea dominates the imagery of his poems, whether calm, in flood or frozen. He remained a Celt, moving from Scotland, via London, to Cornwall where he found seascapes without urban clutter, just the occasional ruined tin mine with its human echo.
The apocalyptic poets whose focal voice was the Welshman Dylan Thomas’s had a Celtic ingredient in their makeup and their verse. George Barker had enough Irish blood in him to make a play of it. There is a “Scots timbre” to Graham’s voice, and he shares with MacDiarmid, who was for a time his master, a suppleness in tonal change, from raucous to tender, from elegy to anger and back again.
Graham attended Greenock High School, later spending a year at the Workers Educational Association College near Edinburgh. He acquired no further formal education though he became an academic in 1947–48, teaching at New York University. By that time he had published three collections, starting with Cage Without Grievance in 1942, issued by that rare patron of poetry David Archer (who also advanced George Barker’s career) in Glasgow. In 1949 The White Threshold, his first substantial book, appeared.
All of his poems have a location, a plot and setting (or a narrative). It is crucial, if we are not to go off into gaseous symbolifications, to determine that location and narrative poem by poem. It becomes easier as the poet moves deeper into his language and understands the actual dynamic of his own verse rather than the admired dynamic of Thomas’s. It was with The Nightfishing (1955) that he found his feet. This was bad planning in terms of his career: the book appeared the same year as The Less Deceived by Philip Larkin. He was sailing, with the remainder of his apocalyptic freight, into the decade of the Movement, and there was no place for him in it. He suffered years of hardship and neglect. In the late 1960s I wrote to his publishers and discovered that Graham was “dead.” It transpired that he was not dead. He was resurrected and rehabilitated by Penguin, in the trilogies edited by Nikos Stangos in the 1970s. Faber acknowledged that he was indeed alive: it was time for his breakthrough. Which came and went. He did not lend himself naturally to self-promotion; indeed, he found it acutely difficult and repulsive. Thus he has yet to break through in a decisive way.
I was especially taken with his poem “The Thermal Stair,” an elegy for his friend the painter Peter Lanyon, who died in a gliding accident in Cornwall. I wrote and asked the poet for the manuscript. He reinvented it, producing an elaborately “edited” draft, which I bought. Many of his poems were published in P N Review, in particular the “Quantz” sequence. Faber and Faber published Malcolm Mooney’s Land in 1970, Implements in Their Places in 1977 and, posthumously (Graham died in 1986), Aimed at Nobody, doubtful and rejected drafts and a few substantial poems (1993).
For Graham, the first form of poetry criticism was reading a poem aloud. It proved whether a reader understood the basic syntax, character and plot of the poem. The words enter another mouth and are shaped and emitted by other lips with or without understanding. If you passed the reading test you were part of the tetchy and stimulating family.
Malcolm Mooney’s Land includes many poems that seem troubled by the discontinuity of the “I,” year by year, day by day, looking back at earlier poems and unable to make contact with them. In the end it is less the fluid identity that obsesses him than time, the time within which we all swim, and how what we write today stays written from where we wrote it, so that tomorrow or ten years later we come upon it and it speaks from where we were with all that we were and are no more. This disturbs him: he resents the “timeless” stability of the art object while the artist remains time-bound. “Dear Pen/Pal in the distance.” He writes of and to past selves. Time can be spanned by addressing two “art stabilities” to one another: he seems briefly, symbolically, to defeat it.
His other themes include, in his words, “the lessons in physical phenomena; the mystery and adequacy of the aesthetic experience; the elation of being alive in the language.” In The White Threshold he comes alive. He experiments with sudden, simple, largely monosyllabic lines. He begins using erratic but effective rhyme and slant rhyme. The movement is toward a balladic, three-stress line.
This revolution in his work takes hold with The Nightfishing, a largely autobiographical poem in seven sections, one of the major mid-length poems in the British tradition. The sea is the sea where herring fishing takes place. It is also language. He establishes a continual connection between literal activity and metaphor. The poem moves from uncertainty and instability of medium (sea and language) and voice into action, into physical engagement with the world where the “I” stabilizes. Then the evanescent “I” returns.
Lie down, my recent madman, hardly
Drawn into breath than shed to memory,
For there you’ll labour less lonely.
The rigged ship in its walls of glass
Still further forms its perfect seas
Locked in its past transparences.
Graham lived through three phases. In the first he had no sense of audience, word-drunk, not sentence- or cadence-drunk; no voices, just the crammed word packages. He developed the sense of a single auditor or a small audience, he discovered the supple value of syntax combined with simple diction. A voice emerged, eccentric, beguiling, which we are willing to follow into areas of obscurity and incomprehension. We are willing because the rhythms are compelling. In the late poems, aware of readership at last, he begins to prattle, becoming mere voice, the whole dynamic that underpinned the miraculous “middle poems” surfacing and becoming hectic and unpersuasive, if amusing.
All his poems presuppose a dialogue in which communication is hard, if not impossible: dialogue as two monologues, or as speech answered by silence. Often the partner in dialogue is despised, hated, reviled, insulted.
I know you well alas
From where I sit behind
The Art Barrier of ice.
This is not only a rhetorical pose. It is crucial to his language themes. He is suspended within it. There is almost always a “you.” Communication occurs, but never of prose meanings. The poet becomes instructor, lecturer, punisher. Language is his subject and his master. He wants help with it, he wants help against it; but it is the instrument of his revolt. This is not the “poem about poetry” that we get in the lesser Movement poems, but something urgent.
In a letter written in 1975 he interpolated these lines about Nessie Dunsmuir, his devoted wife.
Now Ness is back, the weather snapping her tail.
O pray sit down and take a pinch of snuff.
Take off your coat. I’ll hang your faded blue Hat
Here. Take off your shirt. Take off your cammer
Band and breeches. Stand for a moment white
In Nature’s bare-buff. Now take off your eyes
Take off your nose take off your mouth take off
All great and little members. Remove your head
And throw it out into the throstle’s hedge.
The surrealizing impulse is alive and eloquent at a time when at last he has readers. He chooses the most hermetic terms to address, not the audience but the friend receiving the letter. In 1972 he writes, again in a letter:
Father Mother I am falling
Into Crete at night with words
Trailing like bubbles above me from
My tons of body. Why have you let
Out of you both to land here
On this enormous, foreign word?
A wonderful poet, his best poems are elegies—to Lanyon, to the painter Roger Hilton and other artist friends—and the monologues, “Johann Joachim Quantz’s Five Lessons” (his masterpiece) and “To My Wife at Midnight,” which celebrates the love of older people bound together by habit, pets and love but divided by argument. Were he a popular poet, his “Lake Isle of Innisfree” would be the poem “Imagine a Forest,” playful and deadly earnest, in which he touches the rawest nerve of Romanticism with tact and subtlety. He is a largely benign monster, strictly inimitable, a little obscure, an acquired taste like all the poets who passed through the Apocalypse and were distracted by Dylan Thomas.
Burns Singer was drawn not by Thomas but by MacDiarmid, and then by Graham, who became his master and friend and with whom he stayed in Cornwall, exchanged letters and ideas, until Singer died at the age of thirty-six in 1964.
Like the two limbs of a cross
Your words, my answers lie
Together in the place
Where all our meanings die.
He achieved a limited popularity in his lifetime and since his death has been almost entirely eclipsed. In 1970 a suggestive but incomplete Collected Poems appeared. The poet and critic James Keery is preparing a complete edition, and it will be possible properly to evaluate this Scottish poet and assess to what degree he affected, to what degree he was affected by, Graham. A serious advocate, the poet Anne Cluysenaar, has written of “The Gentle Engineer” that Singer’s “sense of being part of the universe, not lost in it, allows for a more positive formulation than does [Ted Hughes’s] wodwoism.”
It is my own blood nips in every pore
And I myself the calcified treadmark of
Process towards me:
All of a million delicate engines whisper
Warm now, to go now
Through dragnets of tunnels forwards as my life.
I carry that which I am carried by.
It is hard to think of a more affirmative formulation than that. Singer is a scientist while Hughes is a romantic anthropologist.
James Hyman Singer (he later adopted his mother’s maiden name as his middle name) was born in New York in 1928. When he was four his ne’er-do-well father and long-suffering mother returned to Scotland. His background was unsettled; he had no native landscapes. Jewish, Scottish, American, Irish, Polish, he remained an American citizen though he never returned to live in America. After a checkered education, when he was Graham’s disciple and spent two years in Europe, he became a marine biologist. He told his professor at Glasgow that he wanted to write poems about animals, but his mother’s suicide and his father’s poverty drew him back into the lines of duty. He wrote literary essays, scripted documentaries about the sea, wrote a popular book (Living Silver) about marine life. He translated poems from the Polish, married the black American psychologist and painter Marie Battle, but “the caterwauling insecurity of my belief in myself” stayed with him. He died, apparently of natural causes, in Plymouth while engaged in research. Much of his work was left unpublished. Only one book of poems, Still and All (1957), appeared in his lifetime.
MacDiarmid found Singer obscure, “a rootless cosmopolitan.” It is more a case of his intellectual and formal agility and the intensity with which he feels ideas. He is rooted, as much as MacDiarmid, but not in a dialect, rather in a world that science has clarified and made luminously mysterious. He is also fascinated by Wittgenstein, a catalyst to his own poetic processes. Science and the disciplines of philosophy saved him from the easier practice of poets he admired. The title poem of Still and All develops an analogy between personal language and personal identity. Language is, too, a place in which to move. It has inherent disciplines but is flexible to a degree. It has laws of growth, like a natural organism. The voice that carries it is also carried by it. How well he understands the enjambement:
These words run vertical in their slim green tunnels
Without any turning away. They turn into
The first flower and speak from a silent bell.
But underneath it is always still
Truly awakening, slowly and slowly turning
About a shadow scribbled down by sunlight
And turning about my name. I am in my
Survival’s hands. I am my shadow’s theme.
“The Transparent Prisoner” is his most sustained poem, exploring not the empowered but those subject to power and constraint. The fifty “Sonnets for a Dying Man” and “Biography of an Idealist” are among the best poems of their time. His is the poetry of process in its purest sense: “For thought is always and only thought: / The thinking’s different: thinking’s in the blood.” Anne Cluysenaar quotes a passage from his uncollected prose: “When a poet presents a series of logical thoughts in a poem, it is not to express the logic of his thoughts and thus to allow the reader to draw their logical corollaries and mnemonics—rather, it is to force the reader through the thinking of these thoughts, since the process of thinking them is an essential part of the experience which he wishes to re-create in the reader. It does not matter therefore if one logical sequence is placed alongside another with which it is logically irreconcilable, provided that both series properly belong to the experience in which they are involved.” Such a view connects with Stevens, with O’Hara and Ashbery, with Sisson and Davie. Evoking a poem in terms of a Cornish landscape held by mist and then transformed by sunlight, he says:
The watered air grew bright with single claws:
So on the fine web spun from something stronger
One man can hold, precarious, complete
His own self’s light that never is repeated
But acts as orrery to all the lights of others:
And that same web grows finer with its function,
More beautiful to praise with each drop held
In that peculiar tension once forever.
Among the poets who emerged alongside Thomas and Graham in the 1940s are several whose vast body of work constitutes, like the substantial volumes of the late Victorian poets, a huge, untamed and increasingly unvisited territory. In Artorius John Heath-Stubbs (b. 1918) creates a long narrative poem on an antique model and scale—out of Landor perhaps—that reveals, as does all his work, how inexhaustible and adaptable traditional formal resources can be. In 1941 he urged “the return to the classical tradition of English poetry,” a mission in which he has persisted in free and formal verse. He is a substantial elegist.
Full of a much rawer energy is George Barker (1913–91). He began prodigiously in the early 1930s and blundered his way eloquently through various styles and rhetorics. Yeats was beguiled: “a lovely subtle mind”—“lovely” being a singularly inapposite epithet—“a rhythmical invention comparable to Gerard Hopkins”—which shows a limited understanding of the subtleties of Hopkins’s verse. Barker was the youngest poet in Yeats’s Oxford anthology. In 1937 Barker wrote his Surrealist epic Calamiterror, about the rise of fascism. His reputation gathered steam; his True Confession, when broadcast on radio, occasioned questions in the House of Commons because of its alleged “obscenity.” Unvarnished candor has never been popular with politicians. As the 1950s progressed, and after Dylan Thomas’s death, he came to represent what new movements and the Movement were set against. Like Graham he was swept off the stage. Nothing stopped him and the flow of verse continued. A late, long poem, Anno Domini, is his masterpiece. Like Yeats, he achieved quite a different sort of clarity in his final work. In one of his last sequences, “Five Poems on the Economics of the Eumenides,” eroticism, satire and elegy are combined by his wayward, resourceful genius. The epigraph reads: “That the Eumenides, though superhuman, are not supernatural,” and the first section begins:
Flagellants of those guardians who attend me,
in spite of your bile and bitterness and your wholly
inhuman passion for needling those who feed you,
when will you see that Venus is always the pay day
of every uncharitable week? Acknowledging the exemplary
emptiness of your soul the absolute zero of
your response to the numerology of our need,
why do you seek to prove that therefore Glastonbury
Abbey was never rebuilt? When the solicitors come
with their sweet-smelling secretaries and documents attesting
that they seek only to serve our purposes, why,
my dear female christs do you instantly take up an
eighteen-foot sjambok? Who are you then? Moneta?
Look down on us from the altitudes of your
Empedoclean Aetna. Only old slippers remain.
Of all the poets roughly contemporary with Thomas, the one who stands apart as a great (nonacademic) critic, political theorist and uniquely gifted poet is C. H. Sisson. With the writers of his generation he shares what the Movement most distrusted, a changing prosody sanctioned by instinct, irreducible to rule. Some of his poems are in exacting Metaphysical forms, some in a free verse that takes its bearings from Eliot and Pound. He is in their direct line, and at the same time in the line of Donne and Hardy. Donne—and Hardy? The affinities (we cannot speak of connections since Hardy was not influenced by Donne or the Metaphysicals) go beyond formal invention and have to do with elaboration of syntax, the admission of the irrational, the unexpected, which reconfigures experience and language.
Sisson’s approach to the writers he admires is to evoke their social and intellectual milieux, sketch in the native landscape and antecedents, the accidents and peculiarities that individuate them early on, and then to consider how they combine and transcend these factors. In an essay on Charles Péguy (1946) he asks, “Is not every sincere life, in a sense, a journey to the first years?” The first years of a life, of a culture, beginnings, break-points and re-beginnings, are all-important. What does art transcend, how does it transcend? This is not to confuse biography with criticism. Criticism follows from it, biography (not of the tittle-tattle sort) clears a ground, clarifies opacities, defines formative prejudices, how consciously they are entertained, what the work makes of them.
Charles Hubert Sisson was born in Bristol in 1914. His father was from Kendal in Westmorland, his mother from Wiltshire. His father became a clockmaker and, later, in Bristol, an optician. It was not a prosperous time for anyone. The landscapes that took hold of the poet were those of the West Country and of Somerset. He remembers in adolescence how he would know a poem was about to happen to him, “and I had not to think about it in case I should spoil it... There is probably something in the nature of poetry which makes it necessary to avoid conscious premeditation.” It was on this point in particular that Sisson and Donald Davie tended to fall out. Sisson was the one poet of his generation with whom Davie entertained a warm friendship. In all likelihood it was because both men, from different perspectives, knew that Pound was at the heart of the century, and both men said so.
Sisson attended the University of Bristol, then studied in Germany and France when the forces of German militarism were gathering strength. He was much affected by what he foresaw: a francophile, he was intensely anxious for France, and for England. He entered the Civil Service in 1936. The next year he married. He enlisted in 1942 and because of his fluency in French and German was sent for two and a half years to the North West Frontier Province (Bengal). He translated Heine, read Dante and Virgil, and wrote the first of his mature poems, caustic and precise.
I, whose imperfection
Is evident and admitted
Needing further assurance
Must year-long be pitted
Against fool and trooper
Practising my integrity
In awkward places,
Walking until I walk easy
Among uncomprehended faces.
The humility of the lines is exemplary: the faces are uncomprehended, not uncomprehending. He is not misunderstood but unable to understand. The poems are an attempt. “My beginnings were altogether without facility, and when I was forced into verse it was through having something not altogether easy to say.” The utter difference of India clarified what England meant to him, and what Europe meant. His translation work later in life keeps pace with his poetry, and the radical changes in his poems can be related to his work on Catullus, Virgil’s Eclogue and Aeneid, Lucretius, Dante and others. He takes up a translation task when he needs the freedom to concentrate on rhythm, without having to generate “content.” He characterizes translation work as “fishing in other men’s waters.” “I seem to have undertaken the translations in order to rid the voice of a certain monotony.”
In 1945 he resumed work in Whitehall, rising to Under Secretary and equivalent heights in the Ministry of Labour. He was a severe critic of the Civil Service and his essays caused controversy. In The London Zoo, his first substantial collection, he wrote this epitaph: “Here lies a civil servant. He was civil / To everyone, and servant to the devil.” Yet he is rare among contemporaries in his belief that a writer serves best as a man engaged with the social machine, guarding the integrity of social institutions even as he criticizes and perfects them. He is a Tory in the Johnsonian sense: “One who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolic hierarchy of the Church of England.” But God himself is difficult and often absent, especially latterly.
As a man of social engagement, Sisson admires writers like Marvell for his double vocation, and Barnes, and Swift. Their writing matured in a world of actual responsibilities. In 1972 he retired to Langport, Somerset. He had published seven books: two novels, three collections of poetry, a history of poetry in English of the first half of the century, and a classic tome on public administration. In the year of his retirement he published with Faber his savage appraisal of Walter Bagehot. Since his retirement he has become one of the great translators of our time and a poet whose work increasingly seems to mark the end, within English poetry, of high modernism and—at the same time—of the kinds of satire and lyricism that Hardy brought forward into the twentieth century. In the Trojan Ditch: Collected Poems and Selected Translations appeared in 1974. Reticently, almost out of sight, Sisson had developed through three generations, entirely along his own lines. That development has continued in his later books. Of William Barnes he says, “The avoidance of literature is indispensable for the man who wants to tell the truth.” The “whole tact of the poet” is knowing when “he has a truth to tell.” Literary emotion is for him always factitious.
His poems can seem Augustan, but his poetic logic is, like Marvell’s, a language of association, not analysis (which belongs to prose). The poetry does not anatomize experience: it establishes connections on the other side of reason, communicating to the pulse through its distinctive rhythms. “Reason may convince, but it is rhythm that persuades,” he quotes a French critic as saying. “The proof of a poem—any poem—is in its rhythm,” he declares, “and that is why critical determination has in the end to await the unarguable perception.” Rhythm is authority. In “The Usk,” which Davie characterizes as “one of the great poems of our time,” rhythm is at its most persuasive.
Lies on my tongue. Get up and bolt the door
For I am coming not to be believed
The messenger of anything I say.
So I am come, stand in the cold tonight
The servant of the grain upon my tongue,
Beware, I am the man, and let me in.
Rhythm integrates diverse material, performs feats of lucid fusion. In one of his best poems, the long “In Insula Avalonia,” he taxes rhythm to the utmost, fusing personal, religious and patriotic themes in Arthurian legend (Malory is as present in his verse as Virgil and Dante). He has made the landscapes of Somerset his own much as Barnes and Hardy marked out Dorset. Davie speaks of the interweaving of themes “in a verse which, as it were, goes nowhere and says nothing, which is Shakespearean and at times Eliotic to just the degree that it is Virgilian.” As in Sisson’s theology, body and soul are one and cannot be understood except together. Donne was of the same mind. The verse defies paraphrase: it is the meaning:
Dark wind, dark wind that makes the river black
—Two swans upon it are the serpent’s eyes—
Wind through the meadows as you twist your heart.
Twisted are trees, especially this oak
Which stands with all its leaves throughout the year;
There is no Autumn for its golden boughs
But winter always and a lowering sky
That hangs its blanket lower than the earth
Which we are under at this Advent-tide.
Not even ghosts. The banks are desolate
With shallow snow between the matted grass
Home of the dead but there is no one here...
When I first read his poems I found them rebarbative. It was not until I read “Metamorphoses,” a sequence in unrhymed couplets, that suddenly my ear attuned itself to what he was doing. It was through hearing his verse in all its tonalities that I was able to hear the rhythms of Pound’s Cantos, and to move from that to hearing Bunting and, from a very different part of the forest, Ashbery and O’Hara. Pound transformed Sisson’s hearing, “opening up a new area in consciousness, indicating a point to which you may go from a point you now occupy”; Pound caused “one of those real adjustments of mind which even the most omnivorous reader can expect from only a few writers.” Like the poets he opened up for me, his plain and his Virgilian styles are capable of suggesting various contexts in which a single idea exists and acts. Biblical and classical are not separate strands, the one ethical, the other aesthetic. In our culture they express a similar impulse, only one is redeemed, the other not.
The social urgency of Sisson’s satire knows that the cause is lost. The material basis of “values,” the erosion of traditional and theological views of “self,” “person” and “identity,” the triumph of the golden calf he will not accept. It is a sham deity, for we possess nothing; we cannot even be said to possess memory. We are possessed by existence, and by God; and whether we will or not, by history and our historical institutions which we do well to accept, explore and perfect. We are only in relation to them, in all their ramifications.
What is the person? Is it hope?
If so there is no I in me.
Is it a trope
Or paraphrase of deity?
If so,
I may be what I do not know.
“The Person” ends:
There is one God we do not know
Stretched on Orion for a cross
And we below
In several sorts of lesser loss
Are we
In number not identity.
Our concern with the dynamic surface of reality is such that we lose sight of what Coleridge called the “principles of permanence.”
Clearly we are dealing here with a wholly English phenomenon, a man as English as MacDiarmid is Scottish or Austin Clarke is Irish. It is that Englishness that emerges in the satires and in the increasingly autumnal and elegiac note that the later poems strike, the note of “Burrington Combe,” which goes back to his first years and beyond them, to the legendary and very English figures, northern and southern, out of which his heritage is made. All through his work there is a love of reversed chronology. The novel Christopher Homm is told backward; the first collected poems were placed in reverse order, a poem like “Homo Sapiens Is of No Importance” is a deliberate regression.
Throughout Sisson’s work, even in disrupted free verse and irregular blank verse, there is a sense of rhyme. It is a rare effect, heard most clearly in “Metamorphoses,” “Virgini Senescens” and the acerbic poems about old age. This feeling of rhyme has much to do with balanced phrasing, rhythmic equivalents suggesting firm closure, and assonances that produce a couplet effect even when we are reading unrhymed tetrameters. It is also the effect of an instinctive, accurate parceling out of content in correct contrast phrase by phase, a parceling that does not disrupt the rhythmic movement of the poems.
It is less in the poems that orchestrate ideas and more in those that harmonize disparate areas and allusions, where wholeness emerges from a juxtaposition of fragments, that his English vision is clearest. Its historical point of reference is the heart of the seventeenth century, when history abruptly defined the institutions that had seemed natural and given, in particular the monarchy. The works in which writers engaged with events, the conflict between Charles I and Cromwell, and the aftermath, are the most agonized and truthful in our literature. Sisson’s last major sequence is the “Tristia,” the title a tribute to Ovid, ten terse, elegiac epigrams in which he makes unconsoling sense of old age and what an older poet called “the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems.” The ninth “Tristia” declares:
Speech cannot be betrayed, for speech betrays,
And what we say reveals the men we are.
But, once come to a land where no-one is,
We long for conversation, and a voice
Which answers what we say when we succeed
In saying for a moment that which is.
O careless world, which covers what is there
With what it hopes, or what best cheats and pays,
But speech with others needs another tongue.
For a to apeak to b, and b to a,
A stream of commonalty must be found,
Rippling at times, at times an even flow,
And yet it turns to Lethe in the end.
Thus the “technique of ignorance” that a poet must cultivate leads, for a moment, to a stream of commonality that runs variously, that “for a moment” manages to say “that which is.”
Sisson’s modernism has a distinct genealogy. It starts with Hulme and moves through Eliot and Pound, Ford Madox Ford and Wyndham Lewis (about whom he has written brilliantly). It is not a literary tradition so much as a tradition of speech and seeing. Into this modernism he introduces the possibility, without affectation or extreme formal disruption as in David Jones, of a religious dimension. The only comparable English poet in this respect is Donald Davie. Sisson’s verse moves into and then away from “liturgy,” the decisive fusions and assimilations occurring in the poems he wrote around his fiftieth year. There is a falling away from that wholeness of vision. Having attained it, the gap that grows with the years between it and where the poet is now has proved vertiginous and his poetry of negative emotion and thought is some of the most vigorous of the century.
A beguiling poet now undervalued, though she was extremely popular for a time, is Stevie Smith, born in 1903, and—before her death in 1971—a celebrated performer of her work. Somehow she connected with the age. Asked whose poetry, among her contemporaries’, she read, she replied, “Why nobody’s but my own.” Mock innocence and candor combine in her work.
She was born in Hull. Florence Margaret Smith (for so she was then) recalls a childhood in suburban London, where she was taken at the age of three. The story may be her own:
It was a house of female habitation,
Two ladies fair inhabited the house,
And they were brave. For all though Fear knocked loud
Upon the door, and said he must come in,
They did not let him in.
The fairy tale behind this plot and cadence is “The Three Little Pigs,” but these pigs are proof against the wolf. The father went to sea and came home only to get money “from Mrs. S. / Who gave it him at once, she thought she should.” In the house were “two feeble babes,” the younger being the author, and the “babes’ great-aunt, Mrs Martha Hearn Clode.” Mother died, great-aunt died, sister went away, leaving the younger babe to look after the mother’s sister, “The noble aunt who so long tended us, / Faithful and true her name is. Tranquil. / Also sardonic.” The poem ends with an authority that transforms whimsy into something great.
It is a house of female habitation
A house expecting strength as it is strong
A house of aristocratic mould that looks apart
When tears fall; counts despair
Derisory. Yet it has kept us well. For all its faults,
If they are faults, of sternness and reserve,
It is a Being of warmth I think; at heart
A house of mercy.
The patterns of an undemonstrative Edwardian childhood persisted into maturity, enforced by the ethic of duty and by a reserved love and gratitude. Her aunt died and Stevie Smith followed soon after.
She wrote three novels, the most notable being Novel on Yellow Paper (1936). Her poems are full of characters that have strayed in from larger narratives, or out of her own life. Her greatest anger is reserved for God, with whom she continually engages in one-way conversation. Her approach is direct, like a woman attacking a greengrocer for selling bad cabbages. She does not sidestep paradoxes. “How Do You See?” in her last collection is closely argued, a questioning of the mysteries she was approaching. It reveals that, naïve as she sometimes seems, she was well acquainted with academic theology. “Mother, Among the Dustbins” comments directly on a passage from St. Teresa of Avila. Hers is a learned mystification, no less serious for being expressed with wit and in disparate tones of voice. In the end she accepts a kind of anarchic Christianity, upholding the ethical distinctions but dispensing with the cruelty of the story and the dogma. She would aim to be good without enchantment (but instead she devises alternative enchantments).
Her verse is haunted by tributary rhythms which she incorporates into her various characters and voices. There is a formal residue in rhyme and runs of meter, but her anarchic approach will not allow her to follow a form through. There are fairy tales and actual stories seen from fairy-tale perspectives, and echoes of Poe, the Coleridge of “Christabel,” “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Longfellow, the Tennyson of the Idylls and “The Lady of Shalott,” Blake, Cowper, the hymn writers and many others sound. So do popular tunes like “Greensleeves,” which provides the backing for a poem. It is a world of troubled innocence. Mother Goose, Alice, and also Struwelpeter. The way in which popular and deliberate echoes play through the poetry is unique.
Given the preponderance of Victorian and Edwardian models, a diction ruefully littered with “Oh” and “Alas,” the painful rhymes, the doggerel, how does she evade banality? Not through irony but through a wit and tone that wrest sense from cliché and near nonsense. Her humor revives an outworn language. She makes a patchwork quilt of old rags of verse. It is not exactly new but it is bright, wise and silly.
Mr Over is dead
He died fighting and true
And on his tombstone they wrote
Over to You.
Beside this, the innocent artistry with which she speaks of fear, the obsessive fear of death, of other people:
Into the dark night
Resignedly I go,
I am not so afraid of the dark night
As the friends I do not know,
I do not fear the night above
As I fear the friends below.
Mother Goose gave poems to Theodore Roethke (1908–1983), too, but the lost innocence of Roethke’s poetry is touched with tragedy. That tragedy is in part the failure of his later work, a failure from which many of the poets who learned from him also suffered. The compulsion to be seen to develop, the compulsion to generate a mythology or a coherent system, was strong in a generation dominated by figures as authoritative as Yeats, Eliot, Pound and Williams. One could either rebel, as Auden did in a sense; or one could achieve originality. The third course was to try to stow away in another poet’s ship. This is what Roethke did, without being entirely aware of the extent of his dependence. “I take this cadence from a man named Yeats.” And he did. His elegy begins, “I heard a dying man / Say to his gathered kin...” and the second stanza reads:
“What’s done is yet to come;
The flesh deserts the bone,
But a kiss widens the rose;
I know, as the dying know,
Eternity is now.”
He also walked in the footprints of Hopkins and Dylan Thomas. Earlier he took a leaf from Auden’s book, and Louise Bogan’s, and Stanley Kunitz’s. This is not so much a matter of enabling influence as of partial ventriloquism. His larger themes can come too close to Wordsworth’s, though American critics see Emerson there. Like many of his contemporaries he endured mental illness and was hospitalized several times. For him these were spiritual traumas that put him in the class of Smart and Blake. Whitman delivered him at last to another kind of derivativeness, and his free verse in his last book takes new risks. He was fifty-five when he died suddenly of a heart attack. His work in each of its phases is accessible and full-voiced, and it is hardly surprising that he had an impact on poets as different as Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, James Dickey and Seamus Heaney. He is an attractive shortcut to a dozen different destinations.
“To go forward (as a spiritual man),” he wrote in 1948, “it is necessary first to go back.” His return is not like Sisson’s, to identify the things of which he is made, but to find things lost, things overlooked. His is a romantic temperament that values the “I” more highly and credits it with more given identity than a classical poet would. The styles that follow from the “I” will rhapsodize when they find a useful fragment, a small epiphany. “Silence of water above a sunken tree.” It is in his book The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948) that he is most himself and comes closest to his personal source. The “greenhouse poems” are about experiences far enough back in time, yet powerful enough in memory, to enable him to be “objective.” The relatively open forms he adopts make it possible for poem to intersect with poem, giving a firm semantic coherence. The sequence continued in later books, and the “personal source,” muddied when he tried (as he concedes that he has done) to compete with Yeats and Eliot, remains his best Muse.
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
The trick was to set out the experience without emotional or interpretative language, to let the images and events be, and mean by being. It was a way of building back the past with immediacy and raptness, a way of avoiding self-pity and distorting rhetoric. To speak a whole self: Is this a form of narcissism or a psychological quest? The unresolved tensions when breakdown threatens or he imagines his own demise display integrity of spirit. Narcissism would be self-regarding, and though he had at times a high estimation of his poetic skills he was humanly uncertain and unsteady: he could not have held his own gaze long in the legendary pool. He does not confront himself; he gradually puts pieces together. He gets inside. “Beautiful my desire, and the place of my desire.” But the “I” that feels that desire is not always worthy of it.
His promising beginning—Auden and Winters both praised his first book—stoked his hope and ambition. Indeed that early success was a kind of poison, because Roethke wanted to succeed not in his own terms only; he wanted to be recognized as successful. As a teacher he was undeniably successful, according to the poets who studied with him and those who studied his poems. In 1947, after teaching in various universities, he took a post at the University of Washington, where he remained until his sudden death.
In “My Papa’s Waltz” he writes,
You beat time on my head
with a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
Experiences become vital again, so much so that they reforge a link between his past and his present and, in their potent typicality, include the experience of others, making a kind of archetypal “nature,” resonant without rhetoric. This strategy goes far deeper than the “deep image” which some of his contemporaries and successors sought, abandoning traditional forms and the contingent world in favor of the seductions of the unconscious and of dream. Roethke writes: “One tulip on top, / One swaggering head / Over the dying, the newly dead.” The pace is perfect, the flowers and their emblematic value equally real.
The sun glittered on a small rapids.
Some morning thing came, beating its wings.
The great elm filled with birds.
The birds bring into a day newly illuminated a restless freedom. His dependence on other poets for structure, mythology and actual style shakes our trust in the poet; but no one can deny the original power of the poems that seek to make him whole.
He naturally could not hear how some of his poems derived: the language of Yeats, Eliot or Thomas was so much a part of him, of his natural hearing, he knew their work so well, that it must have seemed his. Young poets have this problem: they are made of what they read to begin with. It is when a poet reaches the age of forty or fifty and is still following other writers’ leads that we sense a problem. In Roethke’s case the problem may have been psychological rather than literary. Yet he is not alone: Crabbe in his later years imitated Wordsworth, who earlier had learned from Crabbe. Heaney suddenly, in his mid-forties, begins to sound like Lowell—for a time. Roethke attacked his critics in the essay “How to Write like Somebody Else.” His individual voice never vanishes completely, and the loose-limbed movement he learned at last from Whitman, with a long free line, gave him in The Far Field, published posthumously in 1964, what might have been a new beginning but was in fact an authoritative end. Yet it is less from these poems than the earlier ones that other poets have taken their bearings.
I would unlearn the lingo of exasperation, all the distortions of malice and hatred;
I would believe my pain: and the eye quiet on the growing rose;
I would delight in my hands, the branch singing, altering the excessive bird;
I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form...
One influence Roethke did concede: the prose writings of Thomas Traherne, as though his greenhouse and Traherne’s garden occupied the same spiritual space. A confusion Roethke never resolved was spiritual: Did he discriminate between psychological breakdown and spiritual crisis? Between himself as a child of Prussian antecedents and Adam in the Garden, without antecedent? He is not the first poet to diffract the troubles of autobiography through spiritual rhetoric. Poetry is not spilled religion, nor is it religion spilled over autobiography. The modern writer who achieves something like a spiritual dimension is, like Eliot, Jones, Davie, Sisson, Jennings, Hill, a writer who understands the discipline of self-effacement, and the poetry of such a writer will often explore the difficulty and failure of that discipline. It was always so, with Traherne’s contemporary Henry Vaughan, with Herbert, with Smart and Cowper. Ah, Roethke might reply, but not with Blake. Exactly: He may be the source of the problem. “I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form” is a momentary spiritual perception, but the poem does not stop long enough at that longing or take on board the weight of the word “imperishable,” which sets imagination outside time and its material world.
A troubled poet of the spiritual—it would be limiting to call him a religious poet—born in the same generation as Dylan Thomas and the Apocalyptics—as Sisson and Smith, with their different forms of belief and styles of address—is R. S. Thomas. Dylan put modern Welsh poetry on the map, making stereotypes in Under Milk Wood that the Welsh have to live down, and reaching an enormous audience with his seductive rhetoric. R. S. is an antidote to that kind of Wales and that kind of poetry. His readership has grown slowly because he has not courted it. He has pursued a double vocation, as poet and priest: the humility of his poems, as much as the exasperated anger that at times sounds like hubris, are aspects of an integrity of purpose. He inhabits the “moonless acre” that Dylan evoked. Joy is a rare commodity in the world of his verse.
One thing I have asked
Of the disposer of the issues
Of life: that truth should defer
To beauty. It was not granted.
Duty and faith clip the wings of desire, curb the tongue when it wishes to sing or lament. Poetry for him, as for Davie, is considered speech, and though he has been a prolific poet, his best poems seem to have been wrested from a reluctant language.
Ronald Stuart Thomas was born in Cardiff and raised in Holyhead of Welsh parents who were not Welsh speakers. Studying classics at the University College of North Wales in Bangor, he began to learn Welsh, pursuing it among his other studies as he prepared for ministry in the Church of Wales at St. Michael’s College, Llandaff. He was ordained in 1936. He makes important play of his Welshness, earning, as he puts it, the hyphen in Anglo-Welsh. As his writing has developed so has his sense of a nation, its culture and its precarious political and spiritual situation. He has written important prose in a complex and untranslatable Welsh, but his verse has been in his mother tongue.
His first collection published in England, Song at the Year’s Turning (1956), incorporated two earlier collections, some new poems and a radio play, The Minister. John Betjeman in his introduction reassured readers: “R. S. Thomas is not at all literary.” He took poetic form for granted in his early work. Poetic and prosodic theories were of no interest to him. The poems are written with assurance, but throughout there are dozens of limp and off-the-peg phrases. In his later work he questions his language and achieves an entirely different quality of writing, effectively a different kind. His earlier poems deal with his parishes in rural Wales, his relations with his flock, with the landscape and with his God. He was described as a “Christian realist,” which fails to take into account the poems based on Welsh legend, the personal lyrics, and the later political and prophetic pieces. But much of his work, until his retirement in 1972, was pastoral in both senses.
Collections appeared regularly. Readers accustomed to his relatively formal and conventional poems began to experience misgivings. Things were changing, in Not That he Brought Flowers (1968) and then most markedly in H’m (1972). Free verse, strange line endings, new subject matter, doubts of a more profound nature than had been expressed before surfaced; doubt and formal change went hand in hand. The received forms, the habitual language, could not cope with it. In Poetry for Supper (1958) he had written:
Verse should be as natural
As the small tuber that feeds on muck
And grows slowly from obtuse soil
To the white flower of immortal beauty.
But verse ceased to be so natural, the soil was obtuse and the spirit grew impatient with it. The poet-clergyman of the early poems gives way to a man who writes now as a clergyman, and now as a poet: different voices.
The power of the early poems is in the fusion of the two roles, with the paradoxes it entails. They rapidly evoke background, then dwell on a particular image or incident, and a meaning or moral is released. With rustic parishioners his response veers between helpless impatience with their unthinking stolidity and passivity, and a grudging admiration for their simple, elemental lives. Iago Prytherch is a presence in his landscape, “Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills, / Who pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud.” We are near Wordsworth’s “Michael” in such verse. When Thomas writes “There is something frightening in the vacancy of his mind,” we understand: there is something equally frightening in the visionary fullness of the poet’s mind, drawn to its rugged opposite.
“The natural” he defines as the unreflective, unclean, habit-governed servant of the land and of the years. The body itself is a “lean acre of ground that the years master.” If this is nature, then cleanliness, reflection and indeed intelligence are not natural; and their attraction to Prytherch, as a moth is drawn to a naked flame, is the paradoxical essence of vocation. He tries to step away and in “A Priest to His People” despairs of the unreceptive and here unnatural peasants.
For this I leave you
Alone in your harsh acres, herding pennies
Into a sock to serve you for a pillow
Through the long night that waits upon your span.
We do not find consistent vocabulary or perspective in Thomas: he is with his flock and then against it; he believes and then he doubts. He is a poet of feelings, whose feelings day by day issue in poems of thought: indignation, awe, sympathy (not empathy), love of beauty—all find the same rhythms, imagery and vocabulary. He often bids farewell to the peasants and their poor lives, but he returns directly. Each poem enacts. What is affecting and memorable is choice of metaphor—those pennies, for instance—for the poems are not innovative in form, rhythm or diction.
Increasingly, he comes to see morality in terms of political responsibility. Moral responsibility flows from faith and a love of the beautiful, a desire to find the same order and beauty in man. When he fails, a humane misanthropy comes into play, a rejection of the imperfectible. Or he turns to Welsh history to find, in the heroisms of the past, some elucidation of the inert present. In “Welsh History” he is forced to conclude:
We were a people bred on legends,
Warming our hands at the red past.
We were a people, and are so yet.
When we have finished quarrelling for crumbs
Under the table, or gnawing the bones
Of a dead culture, we will arise
Armed, but not in the old way.
A prophecy for the collective: but this history has at best a muted issue in the present. It inspires vivid images—“the woman with the hair / That was the raven’s and the rook’s despair”—but they are elegiac.
There is no present in Wales,
And no future;
There is only the past
Brittle with relics...
and it is not enough. His exasperations are bitter and passionate. The future means depopulation. Technological improvements to farming reduce the rural community and erase the old ways. “The cold brain of the machine” develops its cruel, reductive logic. It even destroys Prytherch. In Tares (1964) he concludes:
It is too late to start
For destinations not of the heart
I must stay here with my hurt.
He is at heart “on the old side of life.” He finally becomes as one with Prytherch and speaks, if not for him, at least with Prytherch’s soil and the graves of his people under his feet. Thomas registers his Welshness; from book to book he becomes more didactic. First he witnesses, then he rails and prophesies.
Though he is not experimental until his later work, he is inventive: many poems are a single unfolding sentence, not subtle in syntax but inevitable. He will rhyme three-line stanzas a-a-a b-b-b, admitting an awkwardness of which he makes skillful—Hardyesque—use. There are numerous fourteen-line poems, which first follow the dynamic of the sonnet and then play subtle variations on it. As he begins to release himself from meter and rhyme, cautiously and courageously effecting a change to a hit-or-miss art that leaves many of his readers behind (the change begins decisively with H’m), he admits, in place of the spirit of Yeats which has assisted him, the spirit of Hughes. He rails against God, he travels, his scope widens. Wales becomes not so much his subject as his pulpit; or he leaves it behind and tests his own emotional and libidinal nature. Has he read Pound? In “Pavane” he writes:
Convergences
Of the spirit! What
Century, love? I,
Too; you remember—
Brescia? The sunlight reminds
Of the brocade. I dined
Long. And now the music
Of darkness in your eyes
Sounds. But Brescia,
And the spreading foliage
Of smoke! With Yeats’ birds
Grown hoarse...
Here is intimacy, a poetry overheard and belonging to a love that is more than pastoral, a poetry that addresses a woman, and Yeats (or God) as a master in whose service “I / Do not wish, I do not wish / To continue.”
John Wain held Thomas up as an example of how a poet who abandons form damages himself. But Wain was wrong, and Davie points out why. What Thomas was painfully learning to use in a verse that, though still pentameter based, does attain remarkable freedom, is the enjambement as a rhythmic principle, not an arbitrary break. And even when end words don’t rhyme, they fall visually and aurally into relationships that, like rhyme, produce a separate rhythm of sense. At first his new prosody depended entirely on line ending; as time has passed and the poet has become confident in the form, making it his own, he has broken ground newer and more fertile for other Welsh poets than the rhythmic blur and shimmer of Dylan Thomas.