Canticles to the Earth
Theodore Roethke1 A couple of years ago, an American poet told me that he and his generation had rejected irony and artfulness, and were trying to write poems that would not yield much to the investigations of the practical criticism seminar. And another poet present agreed, yes, he was now looking at English poetry to decide which areas seemed most in need of renovation, and then he was going to provide experiments that would enliven these sluggish, provincial backwaters. As poets, both seemed to be infected with wrong habits of mind. They had imbibed att.i.tudes into their writing life which properly belong to the lecturer and the anthologist: a concern with generations, with shifting fashions of style, a belief that their role was complementary and responsible to a demonstrable literary situation. For although at least one spirit of the age will probably be discernible in a poet"s work, he should not turn his brain into a b.u.t.terfly net in pursuit of it.
An awareness of his own poetic process, and a trust in the possibility of his poetry, that is what a poet should attempt to preserve; and whatever else Theodore Roethke may have lacked, he did possess and nourish this faith in his own creative instincts. His current flies continuously: Water"s my will and my way, And the spirit runs, intermittently, In and out of the small waves, Runs with the intrepid sh.o.r.ebirds- How graceful the small before danger!
But the most remarkable thing about this watery spirit of his is that for all its motion, it never altogether finds its final bed and course. Through one half of the work, it is contained in the strict locks of rhyme and stanzaic form; through the other, it rises and recedes in open forms like floods in broad meadows.
His first book has the quiet life of an old ca.n.a.l. "Vernal Sentiment" would not be an unjust t.i.tle for the volume. All the conflicting elements in Roethke"s make-up are toned down and contained in well-behaved couplets and quatrains. The sense of fun is coy, the sense of natural forces explicit and the sense of form a bit monotonous. It is partly a case of the young man putting a hand across his daimon"s mouth, for although the first poem calls: My secrets cry aloud.
I have no need for tongue.
My heart keeps open house, My doors are widely swung we have to read the whole book to believe it. Indeed the life"s work is neatly bracketed by the first and last lines of this collected volume. We move from "My secrets cry aloud" to "With that he hitched his pants and humped away," and between the rhetoric and the rumbustiousness the true achievement is located.
That achievement arrives from the boundaries of Roethke"s experience: childhood and death are elements in which his best work lives. And love. He grew up in Michigan among his father"s extensive greenhouses: "They were to me, I realize now, both heaven and h.e.l.l, a kind of tropics created in the savage climate of Michigan, where austere German-Americans turned their love of order and their terrifying efficiency into something truly beautiful. It was a universe, several worlds, which, even as a child, one worried about and struggled to keep alive."
Growth, minute and multifarious life, became Roethke"s theme. His second collection, The Lost Son, contained the famous greenhouse poems, a repossession of the childhood Eden. Now the free, nervous notation of natural process issues in a sense of unity with cosmic energies and in quiet intimations of order and delight. They are acts of faith made in some state of grace: I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing, In my veins, in my bones I feel it,- The small waters seeping upward, The tight grains parting at last.
When sprouts break out, Slippery as fish, I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.
Such celebration, however, was prelude to disturbance and desperation. Out of Eden man takes his way, and beyond the garden life is riotous; chaos replaces correspondence, consciousness thwarts communion, the light of the world fades in the shadow of death. Until the final serenity and acceptance of all things in a dance of flux, which comes in the posthumous The Far Field, Roethke"s work is driven in two opposite directions by his fall into manhood.
In the final poems of The Lost Son volume and in all the work of Praise to the End there is an apocalyptic straining towards unity. These are large, sectioned poems, ghosted by the rhythms of nursery rhyme. You feel that the archetypal properties are being manipulated a bit arbitrarily, that the staccato syntax is for effect rather than effective and that in general the sense of fractured relations between the man and his physical and metaphysical elements is deliberately shrouded. These poems are more like constructs for the inarticulate than raids upon it. Yet despite the occasional echo of Dylan Thomas, they retain the authentic Roethke note, the note of energy and quest: Everything"s closer. Is this a cage?
The chill"s gone from the moon.
Only the woods are alive.
I can"t marry the dirt.
In direct contrast to these wandering tides of the spirit, there follows a series of tightly controlled and elaborately argued meditations and love poems. After the fidgety metres and the surrealism, he begins to contain his impulses to affirmation in a rapid, iambic line which owes much to Raleigh and Sir John Davies, even though in a moment of exuberance he declares: I take this cadence from a man named Yeats, I take it, and I give it back again.
The poems tend to have a strict shape and lively rhythm ("the shapes a bright container can contain!") and deal with the possibility of momentary order, harmony and illumination. Love and lyric are modes of staying the confusion and fencing off emptiness. Within the gla.s.s walls of the poem, something of the old paradisal harmony can be feigned: Dream of a woman, and a dream of death: The light air takes my being"s breath away; I look on white, and it turns into gray- When will that creature give me back my breath?
I live near the abyss. I hope to stay Until my eyes look at a brighter sun As the thick shade of the long night comes on.
There is a curious split in Roethke"s work between the long Whitmanesque cataloguing poem, which works towards resolution by acc.u.mulating significant and related phenomena, and this other brisk, traditional artefact that dances to its own familiar music. Perhaps the explanation lies in Roethke"s constant natural urge to praise, to maintain or recapture ecstasy.
The more relaxed and loaded form includes his best poems, all of which exhale something of a Franciscan love of every living thing, and invoke the notion of a divine unity working through them. They are canticles to the earth, if you like, written in a line that has exchanged its "barbaric yawp" for a more civil note of benediction. On the other hand, when he is not in full possession of his emotion, when tranquillity is missing, then he employs the artificer"s resources of metre, stanza and rhyme to conduct himself and the poem towards a provisional statement. The stanzaic poems always sound as if they are attempting something. The best Roethke, the praise poetry, always gives the impression that the lines came ripe and easy as windfalls.
Ripeness is all in the latest work, which appeared in this country two years after his death. In one of the poems he mentions "that sweet man, John Clare", and one is reminded how both poets lived near the abyss but resolved extreme experience into something infinitely gentle. In the light of their last days, "all"s a scattering, a shining". Their suffering breeds something larger than masochism. Roethke reflects when his field-mouse departs for the hazard of the fields: I think of the nestling fallen into the deep gra.s.s, The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway, The paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising,- All things innocent, hapless, forsaken.
He is outside movements and generations, and his work is a true growth. He seems destined to grudging notice because he echoed the voices of other poets, or because people have grown afraid of the gentle note that was his own, but the Collected Poems are there, a true poet"s testament: Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire; What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire.
Listener, 1968
Tradition and an Individual Talent
Hugh MacDiarmid1 Though he would have been the last to admit any comparison of himself with an Englishman, Hugh MacDiarmid"s poetic career reminds me of Wordsworth"s. Both discovered early a way of affiliating an individual talent to a submerged tradition; both professed a diction that was deliberately at variance with prevalent modes; both wrote cla.s.sic lyric poetry in a short period of intense creativity and followed this by turning their lyric discoveries towards more ambitious goals, producing long meditative poems that wove their personal poetic and public worlds into a single major artistic form. The Prelude and A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle are the central achievements in the Wordsworth and MacDiarmid canons, emerging as plateaus of typical excellence towards which the earlier work was leading and in the shadow of which their later work is inevitably viewed.
Again like the young Wordsworth, MacDiarmid has a sense of an enervating cultural situation-he saw Scottish civilization as d.a.m.ned and doomed by influences from south of the Border-that is intimately linked with his linguistic obsessions. He set out not so much to purify as to restore the language of the tribe, with a pa.s.sion that was as philological as it was poetic. Dictionaries are necessary to his diction. Lallans, his poetic Scots language, is based on the language of men, specifically on the dialect of his home district around Langholm in Dumfriesshire, but its attractive gaudiness is qualified by the not infrequent inanities of his English, for he occasionally speaks a language that the ones in Langholm do not know. You get on the one hand the self-delighting flood of "Water Music" where the Scots and the latinate English furl together in a downpour of energy: Archin" here and arrachin there, Allevolie or allemand, Whiles appliable, whiles areird, The polysemous poem"s planned.
Lively, louch, atweesh, atween, Auchimuty or aspate, Threidin" through the averins, Or bightsom in the aftergait.
Here is a poetry that communicates before it is understood, where the auditory imagination is entirely capable of penetrating to a basic meaning spoken by the music of the vocabulary, alien though that vocabulary may be. On the other hand, how are you to respond to this, from "On a Raised Beach"?
What artist poses the Earth ecorche thus, Pillar of creation engouled me?
What eburnation augments you with men"s bones, Every energumen an Endymion yet?
All the other stones are in this haeccity it seems.
But where is the Christophanic rock that moved?
What Cabirian song from this catasta comes?
There is an uncertainty about language here, peculiar not just to MacDiarmid, but to others who write generally in English, but particularly out of a region where the culture and language are at variance with standard English utterance and att.i.tudes.
It can be a problem of style for Americans, West Indians, Indians, Scots and Irish. Joyce made a myth and a mode out of this self-consciousness, but he did so by taking on the English language itself and wrestling its genius with his bare hands, making it lie down where all its ladders start, in the rag-and-bone shop of Indo-European origins and relationships. And it is this Joyce of Finnegans Wake who is invoked in the introductory verse of "Water Music": Wheest, wheesht, Joyce, and let me hear Nae Anna Livvy"s lilt, But Wauchope, Esk and Ewes again Each wi" its ain rhythms till"t.
In the poem, the local and the indigenous, which were Joyce"s obsession also, are affiliated to oral and instinctive characteristics of the region and the intensity and volubility of the regional diction, while they embody both personal feeling and technical virtuosity, eschew experiment and cosmopolitan perspectives, indulge in no comparative or all-inclusive mythology of rivers. The man who writes the poem is manifestly literate but opts for a local geography and idiom that aspires to subdue rather than include the world in its little room.
"On a Raised Beach" proceeds on completely different lines. If Burns and Dunbar are tributaries in the stream of Lallans, the portentous and absurd shadow of William McGonagall sometimes haunts MacDiarmid"s English. The epic voice goes epileptic: Diallage of the world"s debate, end of the long auxesis, Although no ebrillade of Pegasus can here avail, I prefer your enchorial characters-the futh.o.r.e of the future- To the hieroglyphics of all other forms of Nature.
In attempting a poetry of ideas MacDiarmid can write like a lunatic lexicographer. What is missing in his phantasmagoric English is what Joyce possessed in such abundance, the sense of the ridiculous, a compulsion to parody. When his brow furrows with earnest ambition and his pedantic Scottish pipe begins its relentless drone we witness the amazing metamorphosis of genius into bore. He decks out the insights of a poet with the egregious jargons of the encyclopaedia and while his intention is explicit in "The Kind of Poetry I Want"-"a poetry full of erudition, expertise and ecstasy", "a poetry like an operating theatre", a marxist-humanist poetry of modern consciousness and experience-his execution is often such as to bring his great gifts to the level of bathos. Yet when he succeeds, as he does with a fluency and dignity in "Island Funeral", the result is an unusually direct and central seriousness, a man speaking to men.
In A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, MacDiarmid retrieves for modern poetry the image of the poet offered by the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads: a man endued with a lively sensibility, unusual enthusiasm and tenderness, a great knowledge of human nature, a comprehensive soul, a man rejoicing in the spirit of life that is in him and delighted to contemplate similar volitions and pa.s.sions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe. The poem is written in Scots and has for its protagonist a man full of Scotch whisky-even that has been adulterated, "the stuffie"s no" the real Mackay"-playing truant in a ditch from a wife that he loves, through one whole moonlit night. Such a persona in such a situation allows MacDiarmid to dramatize an amazing number of moods, express opinions, achieve "pure" and "didactic" effects, be comic, elegaic, satiric or tragic as the drink burns or dies in the speaker. He is more full-bodied than Tiresias, more domesticated than Crazy Jane, more raucous than Crispin, but despite his local accent, he speaks on equal terms with these memorable creations of our time.
Hibernia, 1972
A Memorable Voice
Stevie Smith1 Always inclined to the brisk definition, W. H. Auden once declared that poetry was memorable speech. The Collected Poems of the late Stevie Smith prompt one to revise that: poetry is memorable voice. The unknown quant.i.ty in my response to the book was the memory of the poet"s own performance of her verse, her voice pitching between querulousness and keening, her quizzical presence at once inviting the audience to yield her their affection and keeping them at bay with a quick irony. She seemed to combine elements of Gretel and of the witch, to be vulnerable and capable, a kind of Home Counties sean bhean bhocht, with a hag"s wisdom and a girl"s wide-eyed curiosity. She chanted her poems artfully off-key, in a beautifully flawed plainsong that suggested two kinds of auditory experience: an embarra.s.sed party-piece by a child half-way between tears and giggles, and a deliberate faux-naif rendition by a virtuoso.
This raises the whole question of poetry for the eye versus poetry for the ear. Perhaps the versus is an overstatement, yet there are poets whose work is enhanced and amplified in its power to move once we know the characteristic tone and rhythm and texture of the poet"s physical voice. The grave inward melodies of Wallace Stevens become more available if we happen to have heard that Caedmon recording of him reading "The Idea of Order at Key West". Similarly, Robert Frost"s words are enlivened by any memory of his switchback pacing, the hard and fluent contours of his accent. And I am sure that Coleridge"s excitement on first hearing Wordsworth read was as much a matter of how the poem sounded as of what it intended.
But in the case of Stevie Smith, it is not simply a matter of extra gratification from the poems on the page if we happen to have heard her. It is the whole question of the relationship between a speaking voice, a literary voice (or style) and a style of speech shared by and typical of a certain social and cultural grouping. In other words, it is essential to bring to the appreciation of these poems an ear aware of the longueurs and acerbities, the nuanced understatements and tactical intonations of educated middle-cla.s.s English speech. The element this work survives in is a disenchanted gentility, and while I can imagine, for example, the Reverend Ian Paisley making a fine job of Yeats"s "Under Ben Bulben", I cannot imagine Stevie Smith"s idiosyncratic rhythms and metres surviving the hammer-and-tongue of that vigorous North Antrim emphasis.
One is tempted to use words like "fey", "arch" and "dotty" when faced with these five hundred and seventy pages and yet such adjectives sell Stevie Smith"s work short. These odd syncopated melancholy poems are haunted by the primitive and compelling music of ballad and nursery rhyme, but it has been transposed by a sophisticated and slightly cosseted poetic ear into a still, sad, drawing-room music of humanity: He said no word of her to us Nor we of her to him, But oh it saddened us to see How wan he grew and thin.
We said: She eats him day and night And draws the blood from him, We did not know but said we thought This was why he grew thin.
There is variety and inventiveness, much humour and understanding, and a constant poignancy. Her gift was to create a peculiar emotional weather between the words, a sense of pity for what is infringed and unfulfilled, as in the much anthologized "Not Waving but Drowning", or in this one, taken almost at random: I always remember your beautiful flowers And the beautiful kimono you wore When you sat on the couch With that tigerish crouch And told me you loved me no more.
What I cannot remember is how I felt when you were unkind All I know is, if you were unkind now I should not mind.
Ah me, the power to feel exaggerated, angry and sad The years have taken from me, Softly I go now, pad pad.
Stevie Smith reminds you of two Lears: the old king come to knowledge and gentleness through suffering, and the old comic poet Edward veering off into nonsense. I suppose in the end the adjective has to be "eccentric". She looks at the world with a mental squint, there is a disconcerting wobble in the mirror she holds up to nature.
Death, waste, loneliness, cruelty, the maimed, the stupid, the innocent, the trusting-her concerns were central ones, her compa.s.sion genuine and her vision almost tragic. Yet finally the voice, the style, the literary resources are not adequate to the sombre recognitions, the wounded joie de vivre, the marooned spirit we sense they were destined to express. There is a retreat from resonance, as if the spirit of A. A. Milne successfully vied with the spirit of Emily d.i.c.kinson.
The genetic relations which the forms of these poems often bear to the clerihew and the caricature prevent them from attaining the kind of large orchestration that they are always tempting us to listen for. And if they are the real thing when measured by Auden"s definition, they miss the absolute intensity required by Emily d.i.c.kinson"s definition: when you read them, you don"t feel that the top of your head has been taken off. Rather, you have been persuaded to keep your head at all costs.
Irish Times, 1976
The Labourer and the Lord
Francis Ledwidge and Lord Dunsany1 Francis Ledwidge and Lord Dunsany were both Meath men, much favoured in their birthplace, minor writers who had glimpses of the shaping of Ireland"s future when the mists on the Bog of Allen were occasionally troubled by rhetoric or explosions from Dublin or Westminster or Flanders. Ledwidge"s muse was the hearth-guardian of a labourer"s cottage, Dunsany"s a Gothic beldame in the corridors of Dunsany Castle. A relationship developed between the cottage and the castle, the ganger of the roadworks team playing grateful poet to the n.o.ble lord"s undoubtedly generous patronage. While their surviving letters are by no means cla.s.sics, they do indicate a genuine exchange and nurture in the relationship, hampered by Ledwidge"s modesty and self-taught literariness and Dunsany"s breezy complacency.
Ledwidge was killed in France in 1918, having survived two fronts in Gallipoli and Salonica, and a deep wound in his emotions when the Easter Rising occurred in his absence. His photograph has the tragic melancholy of all those doomed soldiers: but behind it was an unusually sensitive, tenacious and tormented nature. Brought up in poverty by a widowed mother who was the first to give him a sense of kinship with the feminine slopes and levels of the Boyne valley, he was in turn farmer"s boy, roadman, ganger, insurance clerk and soldier. He was nicknamed "The Blackbird" by his friends in the country, but he emerges from the pages of Alice Curtayne"s serene and faithful biography as a worried cyclist, pedalling at dusk to genteel trysts with rich farmers" daughters, or setting off on a bad morning for the works or the office. Miss Curtayne has an exact sense of the texture of that rural world where he came to consciousness, and is at her best in conveying the impact of political movements and public events on the hungry sensibility of a bachelor labourer living in Slane during the first two decades of the century.
His tensions might be represented in his sporting interests-he played Gaelic football for the local team but liked to be in on the cricket which Dunsany arranged each summer; or in his literary affiliations-he was friendly with Thomas MacDonagh, executed in 1916, and wrote his best-known poem to his memory, yet his first volume was introduced to the world by a Unionist peer and published while he was serving with the British Army.
He was actively involved in the labour movement and a pa.s.sionate supporter of the Irish Volunteers who broke from the National Volunteers when John Redmond virtually turned the latter into a recruiting ground for the British Army. Yet despite his manifest Sinn Fein sympathies, Ledwidge himself eventually joined up. Miss Curtayne clears Dunsany of the blame which nationalist opinion has laid on him for coaxing the poet into the ranks, and convincingly outlines the distressing process of the decision, imagining it to happen, typically, on a bicycle. Her book is informed by a nice compa.s.sion, sensible of the pieties and strains at work in Ledwidge"s imagination, and written with a slight pastoral tinge entirely appropriate to its subject. She is no literary critic, but one is grateful for her attentive, unspectacular enterprise in setting down the tale which, including as it does the talk and letters of Ledwidge"s surviving acquaintances, is his right, authentic elegy.
Both Ledwidge and Dunsany dreamt of fame. For Ledwidge it was the possible reward for service and labour in an art; for Dunsany it was a d.a.m.ned irritating quarry that seemed to rise for other chaps though never for him, but, by Gad, he gave it a run for its money. An early introduction to the conspiring realms of the Celtic Twilight seemed to promise recognition and a.s.sociation with great names. He had plays performed at the Abbey and in London, published stories of G.o.ds and magical heroes, entertained Yeats, Lady Gregory, AE and Gogarty (his wife"s diary is excellent on this), met actors and publishers, and began a collaboration with Sidney Sime, the popular ill.u.s.trator. Yet he ended up congratulating himself that photographers and autograph-hunters sought him out on the American lecture circuit.
The writing appears as a strange manic eddy in the current of his life: "A rough time-table evolved in the years after his marriage: winter and shooting at Dunsany, May and June at first in London, later in Kent, back to Dunsany for summer and cricket, September in Yorkshire always for partridges at Arden Hall with Lord and Lady Mexborough, then Scotland for grouse, before October and November in London." If an actor or producer came to Dunsany Castle, he might dash off a play in the afternoon and hand it over, like an enthusiastic schoolboy, at dinner-time. But while his star seemed to be rising, the intellect of this man saw no need to choose between perfection of the life or of the work. In 1916 he wrote that "genius is in fact an infinite capacity for not taking pains"; in 1934, "the more the intellect is used, the less in my opinion is the man an artist." On which his biographer comments with indulgent irony that Dunsany had an intellect but did not use it in his work, his politics, or indeed at all, except when playing chess.
Mr. Amory is far too indulgent. He does not "read" his man, but records his busy life as the subject might have viewed it himself. It is one way, I suppose, yet I kept waiting for a point of view, a style, an acerbity, something that would place Dunsany"s att.i.tudes and antics. The peer was an extraordinary man, the Tory landlord ("he had 1,400 acres at Dunsany but no interest in farming") and the fantasist (author of The G.o.ds of Pegana, The King of Elfland"s Daughter, typical t.i.tles among the fifty or so to his name, including, in 1934, If I were Dictator!)-both spirits inhabiting the same barbarian frame. There was some quarrel with himself which Mr. Amory might have brought into focus, but, as it is, Dunsany emerges as a character who might be played to perfection by Terry-Thomas in Carry on, M"Lud.
His capacity for self-aggrandizement was immense, his inclination to self-scrutiny nil. There was charm (Kipling was fond of him), kindness (he managed Ledwidge"s publications and helped him with money) and boorishness: an overbearing sense of himself as the cynosure of neighbouring eyes. Even when there were no eyes to see, he behaved dramatically.
He wrote in pencil, coloured crayon or if in ink, with quills, often plucked from geese he had shot himself. Swan quills were even bigger and better, but not so easy to get. For an hour or two all was tense. No one must whistle. The saw-mill ceased.
He once sacked a servant who unlocked the gate to a neighbour during his seance. Certainly what we get from Mr. Amory is nearly the whole story, but there is a better, tarter book immanent in this uncritical record.
Dunsany"s Talks with Dean Spanley, as Mr. Amory observes, has two jokes, "that the Dean can half-remember his former incarnation as a dog and that it is necessary to get him rather drunk before he can, or will, do so; but they are well-sustained." I think they are not. Dunsany was not the man to divide this stale loaf and fish even among a hundred pages of rather large print. It is vacuous whimsy for dog-lovers and those amused by what its protagonist would no doubt describe as "sly humour".
The other reissue, The Curse of the Wise Woman, is much more interesting. Its hero is abroad, engaged on some diplomatic business for the new Irish Free State, and the book is a nostalgic evocation of an adolescence during the Troubles. The emotional division in the heart of a Unionist landlord, living in a newly independent Ireland, is emblematically realized in the setting. The boy hovers between the privileged structures of Eton and his walled estate, and the mysterious lure of the bog and its denizens. The hero"s world is masculine and feudal, its spirit is the gun and dog; the primeval landscape beyond the walls is feminine, its spirit is the wise woman. Both are threatened by the impersonal enterprise of the Peat Development (Ireland) Syndicate. While the characters are two-dimensional and some of the dialogue a parody of stage Irish, these are the const.i.tuents of what might be a myth for the shaping of modern Ireland, and while the author balks it with a happy ending that is imaginatively unsatisfactory and geologically improbable (a tidal wave of bog engulfs the machines), the book contains many exhilarating sportsman"s sketches, and there is a seam of memorable beauty running through the whole story, in the evocations of the mythopoeic bog. It is a pity Dunsany didn"t spend more time and intellect exploring these peaty obsessions.
Listener, 1972
The Poetry of John Hewitt1
John Hewitt"s career proceeds quietly and steadily through movements and fashions at its own pace, "a walking pace", to use his own description. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Larkin and Hughes have all left their traces on the decades they dominated, but Hewitt"s voice matures and relaxes within its own discipline.
The demands of that discipline are implied in his reviews: an emphasis on the poet as maker, a concern for professional standards in the handling of form, a distrust of freedom and extravagance that has not been earned by toil within the traditional modes. Of Padraic Colum he wrote: He is no artless bard, merely instinctive in his song. He knows what he is doing, and from now on will, for me, be the greater man for that.
Of Austin Clarke: Clarke, who so often before in his verse-making was as impersonal as a medieval enameller whose care was not for himself but for the chalice and the intricate perfection of his art, now speaks out in his proper person- and one feels the unspoken comment that it is only after such an immersion in the craft that the personal statement will have poetic validity. A few short phrases will suffice to fill out the picture-"Irish poets, learn your trade"; "technically, he is too careless"; "awkwardness not merely risked but fully achieved"; "insecure metrics, commonplace diction". And finally a reminder to myself: "I give no weight or authority to any review of poetry that fights shy of quotation."
Quotation will suffice to show Hewitt"s own tense care in the handling of metre, rhyme and stanza: Tho" many things I love should disappear in the black night ahead of us, I know I shall remember, silent, crouching there, your pale face gazing where the rushes grow, seeking between the tall stems for the last black chick the grebe is cruising round to find, my pointing finger showing it not lost but sheltered only from the ruffling wind.
This has an almost Augustan poise and directness, married to an elegiac, inward note, and inhabits a typical Hewitt area, halfway between statement and evocation. For although he refers to his "strong opinions, vanities", the verse itself rarely raises its voice, relying on tone, understatement and oblique reference to make its more astringent points.
For example, the matter of cultural, historical and religious divisions in the North of Ireland enters the poetry at a personal or dramatic level, never as opinion. A number of these poems reveal a quest for personal ident.i.ty that must strike many of Hewitt"s fellow-countrymen as a remembrance, full of a stubborn determination to belong to the Irishry and yet tenaciously aware of a different origin and cast of mind. A dramatic monologue converts the Ulster planter"s experience into a Roman situation where the citizens of the colony are on the verge of turning native: The use, the pace, the patient years of labour, the rain against the lips, the changing light, the heavy clay-sucked stride, have altered us; we would be strangers in the Capitol; this is our country also, no-where else; and we shall not be outcast on the world.
And this is complemented by the poet"s personal nostalgia for a language, completely possessed. Just as Stephen Dedalus envied the English Jesuit his total inheritance of the English language, Hewitt longs for a fullness of speech: well rubbed words that had left their overtones in the ripe England of the moulded downs and he declares himself ill at ease yet envious also in the presence of the country people whom he embraced for a community of spirit: I"ve tried to learn the smaller parts of speech in your slow language, but my thoughts need more flexible shapes to move in.
Perhaps this two-way pull, back into the grave and eloquent mainstream of English and out into the shifting, elaborate, receding currents of the Irish experience, lies behind Hewitt"s poetic voice, a voice that inclines to plainness but yields to the drift and suggestion of a rhythm, that begins to declare but evolves towards introspection, that seeks "thought" (a favourite word) but occupies itself much of the time with the rough edges of the actual.
Roughly, the pattern shows an early period when he examines himself against his native community; then, after his shift to England in 1957, he sets his lonely present against a rooted past, in terms of a lost community and family; and finally, his sensibility surrenders to an inundation by the far but half-remembered world of Greece. This is an acc.u.mulation of honesty and craft, with its beautiful pointed moments of definition and its inevitable realizations of development. The first poem in the collection, "Ireland", opens a vein that is worked for years: We are not native here or anywhere.
We were the keltic wave that broke over Europe, and ran up this bleak beach among these stones: but when the tide ebbed, were left stranded here in crevices and ledge-protected pools.
Then his shedding of an Ulster past is lodged in the metaphor of "Jacob and the Angel": I will not pause to struggle with my past, locked in an angry posture with a ghost, but, striding forward, trust the sunken thigh.
Later still, in "The Modelled Head", an extremely moving poem of self-examination and revelation, the determination not to let att.i.tudes harden into postures is teased from the poet"s consideration of his own sculptured head- and I am left with these alternatives, to find a new mask for what I wish to be, or try to be a man without a mask, resolved not to grow neutral, growing old.
Perhaps John Hewitt"s attention to the craft of poetry in his earlier period, his devotion to the couplet, the sonnet, the blank verse, the intense and muted lyric, could be regarded as a mask for what he wished to be-faithful to a heritage, rooted within a tradition.