Category: Culture

As you came from the holy land – Sir Walter Ralegh

As you came from the holy land

High Talk by W B Yeats

Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye.
What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high,
And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern stalks upon higher,
Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire.

Because piebald ponies, led bears, caged lions, make but poor shows,
Because children demand Daddy-long-legs upon his timber toes,
Because women in the upper storeys demand a face at the pane,
That patching old heels they may shriek, I take to chisel and plane.

Malachi Stilt-Jack am I, whatever I learned has run wild,
From collar to collar, from stilt to stilt, from father to child.

All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all. A barnacle goose
Far up in the stretches of night; night splits and the dawn breaks loose;
I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on;
Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn.

I only recently realised there were people who didn’t like Yeats. Hearing their objections did at least encourage me to look at his work more critically. The complaint is that he is grandiose, a posturer, a blusterer. I can recognise that about him; he plays the part of the Big Poet, and the attitude can grate. I also think that, at a time when we tend to value gritty authenticity in art, we’re suspicious of someone who is such a glamoriser.

With the McCartney sisters just back from the USA, it’s tempting to focus on the dangerous glamour of Yeats’s nationalism. But actually, he brings glamour to every subject he touches. Partially it’s the lusciousness of the language, but it’s the treatment as well. Take Among School Children. Imagine if Larkin had written a poem about visiting a schoolroom as an aging local worthy, and reflecting on lost youth and mortality; perhaps it would have been bleak, perhaps it would have been wryly humorous. But it certainly wouldn’t have managed to reference Plato, Leda, Quattrocento art, Alexander the Great and Pythagoras.

Anyway, I recognise the fairness of the accusation. I generally prefer the sparer late poems to the floweriness of things like The Lake Isle of Innisfree, and I’m sceptical in the face of some of the more outlandish poems, like Sailing to Byzantium. But I think you can be pretty ruthless in stripping out the overly twee and the overly showy, and still be left with more great poems than any other C20th poet.

One of them, I think, is this one. In some ways it is guilty of exactly the showy gesture-making that makes me wary elsewhere – he’s boasting about and justifying his showmanship with striking and dramatic images; images which, perhaps, don’t mean much. But I love it anyway, for the long lines, the spareness of the language, and the striking imagery. Perhaps it’s because the poem’s central metaphor is rooted in reality, rather than some mystical vision of Byzantium, or faerie Ireland. I like the Crazy Jane poems for the same reason – they feel rooted, physical and placed.

The Crow by John Clare

How peaceable it seems for lonely men
To see a crow fly in the thin blue sky
Over the woods and fealds, o’er level fen
It speaks of villages, or cottage nigh
Behind the neighbouring woods — when March winds high
Tear off the branches of the huge old oak
I love to see these chimney sweeps sail by
And hear them o’er gnarled forest croak
Then sosh askew from the hid woodman’s stroke
That in the woods their daily labours ply
I love the sooty crow nor would provoke
Its march day exercises of croaking joy
I love to see it sailing to and fro
While feelds, and woods, and waters spread below.

Because sometimes it’s enough for a poem to be joyful. It happened to be The Crow, but it could have been one of dozens of Clare poems.

This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison by Samuel Coleridge

Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost
Beauties and feelings, such as would have been
Most sweet to my remembrance even when age
Had dimm’d mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile,
Friends, whom I never more may meet again,
On springy heath, along the hill-top edge,
Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance,
To that still roaring dell, of which I told;
The roaring dell, o’erwooded, narrow, deep,
And only speckled by the mid-day sun;
Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock
Flings arching like a bridge;–that branchless ash,
Unsunn’d and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves
Ne’er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,
Fann’d by the water-fall! and there my friends
Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds,
That all at once (a most fantastic sight!)
Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge
Of the blue clay-stone.

Now, my friends emerge
Beneath the wide wide Heaven–and view again
The many-steepled tract magnificent
Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea,
With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up
The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles
Of purple shadow! Yes! they wander on
In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,
My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined
And hunger’d after Nature, many a year,
In the great City pent, winning thy way
With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain
And strange calamity! Ah! slowly sink
Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun!
Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,
Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds!
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!
And kindle, thou blue Ocean! So my friend
Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,
Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round
On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem
Less gross than bodily; and of such hues
As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes
Spirits perceive his presence.
A delight
Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad
As I myself were there! Nor in this bower,
This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark’d
Much that has sooth’d me. Pale beneath the blaze
Hung the transparent foliage; and I watch’d
Some broad and sunny leaf, and lov’d to see
The shadow of the leaf and stem above
Dappling its sunshine! And that walnut-tree
Was richly ting’d, and a deep radiance lay
Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps
Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass
Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue
Through the late twilight : and though now the bat
Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters,
Yet still the solitary humble-bee
Sings in the bean-flower! Henceforth I shall know
That Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes
‘Tis well to be bereft of promis’d good,
That we may lift the soul, and contemplate
With lively joy the joys we cannot share.
My gentle-hearted Charles! when the last rook
Beat its straight path across the dusky air
Homewards, I blest it! deeming its black wing
(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)
Had cross’d the mighty Orb’s dilated glory,
While thou stood’st gazing; or, when all was still,
Flew creeking o’er thy head, and had a charm
For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom
No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.

There are days when I think that Kubla Khan and Rime of the Ancient Mariner are Coleridge’s most important poems, for their uniqueness and strangeness. And other days when I think that Gothic pantheism, for all its crowd-pleasing melodrama, was really a dead-end, and it’s the conversation poems like this one which really matter.

There is of course no need to make a choice.

As a birdwatcher, I’m always intrigued by the different ways that ‘nature poets’ (Clare, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hopkins, Lawrence, Hughes) look at nature. I do mean ‘look’; it’s not just the different spin people choose to put on their experiences, it’s what kinds of thing they see. Shelley doesn’t see the skylark at all, but a blithe spirit – a metaphor, in fact. Wordsworth seems to see landscapes; he’s the classic fell-walker type, who sees the great sweep of the hills but doesn’t see the flowers under his feet (unless there’s a host of them). Coleridge has much more of an eye for detail. The Nightingale is a really accurate poem about a birdwatching experience.

This poem also represents much that’s been a malign influence on poetry in the past 200 years, though. The effusiveness (19 exclamation marks in this poem), the emphasis on personal emotion, the sentimentality – even in this poem I think they could be toned down. Still, I find Coleridge a very likeable figure and I think writing like this needs to be recognised:

[…]
Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance,
To that still roaring dell, of which I told;
The roaring dell, o’erwooded, narrow, deep,
And only speckled by the mid-day sun;
Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock
Flings arching like a bridge;–that branchless ash,
Unsunn’d and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves
Ne’er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,
Fann’d by the water-fall! and there my friends
Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds,
That all at once (a most fantastic sight!)
Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge
Of the blue clay-stone.

Cut Grass by Philip Larkin

Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer’s pace.

I know that for some people – Matthew Caley, for example – Larkin represents everything that’s wrong with British poetry and Britishness: parochial, reactionary, old-fashioned, pessimistic, unambitious, and nostalgic. And there’s truth in the caricature – his poems have a fairly narrow frame of reference, he’s politically and technically conservative, and gloomily misanthropic.

But he only reads as old-fashioned if you equate ‘modern’ with ‘modernist’. He may be writing in metre and rhyme, but his language doesn’t stray into the archaic or strain for the poetic. The poems read as of their time – the mid/late C20th. I also think his poems are tougher and more clear-eyed than the nostalgic, parochial image might suggest. His own prejudices are never far away, but they don’t seem to swamp the poems. When you read a lot of Larkin poems together, the cumulative effect is misanthropic and reactionary; but the poems taken individually are more thoughtful and more detached than that.

He’s also just very very good at writing poetry. His poems are not generally flashy, and it’s possible to underrate how well he maintains a natural, almost colloquial voice within quite demanding stanza forms. His vivid, immediate description is also more sophisticated than it appears.

When I made a comment earlier that I seemed to have chosen a lot of minor poems by major writers, this was one I had in mind. But I’ve changed my mind. It may be shorter than Whitsun Weddings or Church-going or Aubade, but it’s still a major poem. The colour-theming of white and green, the use of dimeter, the play of vowel-sounds, the eerie way it makes the stillness of summer into something deathly – great stuff. It actually makes quite an interesting companion piece to the Marvell, though I wasn’t thinking of that when I chose it.

Next up – This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.