Prose (58 page)

The book proper consists of songs and ballads, folk-poetry, and frankly romantic poems, all chosen for melodiousness as well as romance. There is nothing “intellectual”, “metaphysical”, or even “difficult”, as de la Mare says when he gives
Sabrina fair
 … leaving out the passages most clotted with classical reference. Of Shakespeare, for example, there are only songs; of George Herbert,
Easter,
Virtue,
and
Love
(the one that meant so much to Simone Weil). Donne and Hopkins are mentioned only in the notes; of Donne he says (and this explains many of the selections or omissions): “It is a poetry that awaits the mind as the body grows older, and when we ourselves have learned the experience of life with which it is concerned. Not that the simplest poetry will then lose any of its grace and truth and beauty—far rather it shines the more clearly, since age needs it the more.” Blake, Shakespeare, and Shelley have the most poems; Coleridge, Keats, and Christina Rossetti come next. But it is not an anthology to be judged by names or allotments, and there are many more anonymous and single poems than anything else. The sections have titles like
Morning and May,
Dance, Music, and Bells,
and
Far,
to name but three of the sixteen. But there are also sections on war and death; and under
War
I was very glad to see
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,
which de la Mare calls “magnificent”. (I have always wished it could be the national anthem.) There is a late 17th century poem by William Cleland,
Hallo My Fancy,
that might almost be describing the anthology itself.

In melancholic fancy,

Out of myself,

In the vulcan dancy,

All the world surveying,

Nowhere staying …

De la Mare has some practical things to say about meters (which he used so beautifully himself), and even suggests how to read certain of the poems; but he never speaks directly of any of the usual concerns of the critics; for one, let's say, “imagery”. Instead, the old woman of the introduction tells the boy: “learn the common names of everything you see … and especially those that please you most to remember: then give them names also of your own making and choosing—if you can.” And wouldn't that be imagery? He loves “little articles”, home-made objects whose value increases with age, Robinson Crusoe's lists of his belongings, homely employments, charms and herbs. As a result he naturally chose for his book many of what Randall Jarrell once called “thing-y” poems, and never the pompous, abstract, or formal.

After the poems come the notes, and the book is well worth buying for them alone. It is a Luna Park of stray and straying information. He quotes journals, letters, samplers, gravestones, and his friends; then throws in a few recipes. He discusses the calendar, that “anomalous litter of relics”. He is against rigid rules of spelling, and cruelty to animals and children. Would you like to know the name of Noah's dog? Or the derivation of “cat's-cradle”? Or read the world's earliest poem? They are all here, and de la Mare's transparent delight in what he is telling provokes immediate replies, which is probably just what he intended. One wants to interrupt: “Speaking of birds, Mr. de la Mare,—did you ever run across that pretty notion of Sir John Narborough's, when he spent the winter of 1670 on the bleak coast of Patagonia, that the inquisitive penguins were like ‘little children standing up in white aprons'?” Since this is not in the book, I'm afraid he couldn't have.

At my house as I write there is a four-month-old baby who has just discovered his voice; not his crying voice, but his speaking, singing, or poetry-voice, and he devotes stretches of the day to trying it out. He can produce long trills, loud or soft, and repeated bird-like cries, obviously with pleasure. There is also a little black girl of three who vigorously pedals a tricycle around and around in perfect time to an old Portuguese children's song.
Tere—sínha de Je—sús
she goes, in mixolydian (I think), telling another story about the same Teresa as Crashaw's (who is not in
this
book). And in the kitchen her mother sings one of this year's crop of sambas, “home-made” annually in endless variety by the poor Negroes of the slums, full of topical facts and preposterous fancies:
Come away with me on my little Lambretta,
she sings.

Besides the hundreds of better-known and loved poems he chose, surely it is of this kind of random poetry that Walter de la Mare can make child readers, or us, aware; the kind to which he lent his fine ear with such loving attention. As the boy in the tower room copies his poems, “an indescribable despair and anxiety—almost terror even—seized upon me at the rushing thought of my own
ignorance
; of how little I knew, of how unimportant I was…” Then daylight comes, he puts down his pen and goes to the window: “I was but just awake: so too was the world itself, and ever is.” And in reading this book we can often recapture what children and other races perhaps still share: de la Mare's lyrical confidence.

1958

Blurb for
Life Studies
by Robert Lowell

As a child, I used to look at my grandfather's Bible under a powerful reading-glass. The letters assembled beneath the lens were suddenly like a Lowell poem, as big as life and as alive, and rainbow-edged. It seemed to illuminate as it magnified; it could also be used as a burning-glass.

This new book begins on Robert Lowell's now-familiar trumpet-notes (see “Inauguration Day”), then with the autobiographical group the tone changes. In these poems, heartbreaking, shocking, grotesque and gentle, the unhesitant attack, the imagery and construction, are as brilliant as ever, but the mood is nostalgic and the meter is refined. A poem like “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” or “Skunk Hour,” can tell us as much about the state of society as a volume of Henry James at his best.

Whenever I read a poem by Robert Lowell I have a chilling sensation of here-and-now, of exact contemporaneity: more aware of those “ironies of American History,” grimmer about them, and yet hopeful. If more people read poetry, if it were more exportable and translatable, surely his poems would go far towards changing, or at least unsettling, minds made up against us. Somehow or other, by fair means or foul, and in the middle of our worst century so far, we have produced a magnificent poet.

1959

“Writing poetry is an unnatural act…”

Writing poetry is an unnatural act. It takes great skill to make it seem natural. Most of the poet's energies are really directed towards this goal: to convince himself (perhaps, with luck, eventually some readers) that what he's up to and what he's saying is really an inevitable,
only
natural way of behaving under the circumstances.

Coleridge, in
Biographia Literaria,
in his discussion of Wordsworth, has a famous sentence. It says: “the characteristic fault of our elder poets is the reverse of that which distinguishes too many of our recent versifiers; the one conveying the most fantastic thoughts in the most correct and natural language, the other in the most fantastic language conveying the most trivial thoughts.” He then goes on to quote some of George Herbert:

VIRTUE

“Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,

The bridal of the earth and sky:

The dew must weep thy fall tonight;

    For thou must die!”

LOVE UNKNOWN

that begins

“Dear friend, sit down, the tale is long and sad:

And in my faintings, I presume, your love

Will more comply than help. A Lord I had…”

Another Herbert: LOVE

“Love bade me welcome, but my soul drew back,

    Guiltie of dust and sinne.”

and ends:

“‘You must sit down,' sayes Love, ‘and taste my meat.'

    So I did sit and eat.”

This, I later discovered in
Waiting for God,
was Simone Weil's favorite; she translated it and knew it by heart.

The three qualities I admire in the poetry I like best are:
Accuracy, Spontaneity, Mystery.
My three “favorite” poets—not the best poets, whom we all admire, but favorite in the sense of one's “best friends,” etc. are Herbert, Hopkins, and Baudelaire.

THE CHURCHE-FLOORE

“Hither sometimes Sinne steals, and stains

The marbles neat and curious veins: …

Sometimes Death, puffing at the doore,

Blows all the dust about the floore…”

His magnificent poem, THE SACRIFICE

“Arise, arise, they come. Look how they runne!

Alas! What haste they make to be undone!

How with their lanterns they do seek the sunne!

    Was ever grief like mine!”

He has spontaneity, mystery, and accuracy, in that order?

Hopkins, WRECK OF THE DEUTSCHLAND

    “Ah, touched in your bower of bone

    Are you! turned for an exquisite smart,

Have you! make words break from here all alone,

  Do you!—”

THE GRANDEUR OF GOD “it will flame out like
shining from shook foil…”

“I am all at once what Christ is, / since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond.”

Auden's

B [Baudelaire] here—

“Altogether elsewhere, vast

herds of reindeer move across

miles—miles of golden moss

silently and very fast.”

It's accurate, like something seen in a documentary movie. It is spontaneous, natural sounding—helped considerably by the break between adjective and noun in the first two lines. And it is mysterious.

The first lines of D. Thomas's “Refusal to Mourn”:

“Never,

Miss Moore's—[“Plagued by the Nightingale”:]

Frost's—

[Wordsworth, Shakespeare's “Prithee undo this button”—everyone is moved to tears by it; it certainly is the height of spontaneity, and yet it is so mysterious they are still arguing as to whether it's his own button or his daughter's button … ]

Burns:—lacks mystery, maybe—but—weaker in the mystery—

“No matter what theories one may have, I doubt that they are in one's mind at the moment of writing a poem or that there is even a physical possibility that they could be. Theories can only be based on interpretations of other people's poems, or one's own in retrospect, or wishful thinking.”

I'm not a critic. Critics can't rest easy until they have put poets in descending orders of merit; they change the lists every night before they go to bed. The poet doesn't have to be consistent.

Marianne Moore, MARRIAGE, that begins:

“This institution,

perhaps one should say enterprise…”

NEW YORK

“the savage's romance,

accreted where we need the space for commerce—

the center of the wholesale fur trade…”

accuracy: from A GRAVE

“The firs stand in procession, each with an emerald turkey-foot at the top…”

skeleton

FROST: the ghost that “carried itself like a pile of dishes.”

ending of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

Auden here—

a single word does it all

ROBERT LOWELL:

“Remember, seamen, Salem fishermen

Once hung their nimble fleets on the Great Banks.”

hung
suggests the immensity, the depths of the cold stormy water and the tininess, the activity of the small “nimble” ships—and yet it's the simplest sort of natural verb to use—

THE DEAD IN EUROPE

“After the planes unloaded, we fell down

Buried together, unmarried men and women…”

“O Mary, marry earth, sea, air and fire;

Our sacred earth in our day is our curse.”

DYLAN THOMAS:

    “Pale rain over the dwindling harbour

And over the sea wet church the size of a snail

    With its horns through mist and the castle

                    Brown as owls…”

A REFUSAL TO MOURN

“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…”

Baudelaire: “Les soirs illumines par l'ardeur du charbon…” where
charbon
is the telling word—surprising, accurate,
dating
the poem, yet making it real, yet making it mysterious—

Spontaneity—Marianne's “Marriage,” “N.Y.”—

Herbert's EASTER

“Rise, heart; the Lord is risen.”

Hopkins' “Glory be to God for dappled things”—

My maternal grandmother had a glass eye. It fascinated me as a child, and the idea of it has fascinated me all my life. She was religious, in the Puritanical Protestant sense and didn't believe in looking into mirrors very much. Quite often the glass eye looked heavenward, or off at an angle, while the real eye looked at you.

    “Him whose happie birth

Taught me to live here so, that still one eye

Should aim and shoot at that which is on high.”

Off and on I have written out a poem called “Grandmother's Glass Eye” which should be about the problem of writing poetry. The situation of my grandmother strikes me as rather like the situation of the poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as
sight
and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a
glass eye.