All That is Wales
Page 35
‘Blaen Cwrt’, too, is a ‘relationship’ poem, beginning as it does by addressing an interlocutor: ‘You ask how it is. I will tell you’ (SM, 10). And this is appropriate since the poem as a whole is about ‘relating’, is indeed about a place that in an important sense really exists only in Clarke’s relating to it, which in turn is inscribed in her relating of it. Equally, it exists only as a place held in common – the stress throughout is on the first person plural, the language is one of encounter with environment (‘Holding a thick root/ I press my bucket through the surface/ Of the water’), the similes are social connectives (‘Our fingers curl on/ Enamel mugs of tea, like ploughmen’), the syntax is a homogenising device (‘All is ochre and earth and cloud-green/ Nettles’), and everywhere there is the semiotics of coexistence (‘Some of the smoke/ Rises against the ploughed, brown field/ As a sign to our neighbours in the/ Four folds of the valley that we are in’). Integration of the self, and simultaneous integration into a community of people and nature, are the poem’s implicit themes, made explicit in the concluding lines:
It has all the first
Necessities for a high standard
Of civilised living: silence inside
A circle of sound, water and fire,
Light on uncountable miles of mountain
From a big, unpredictable sky,
Two rooms, waking and sleeping,
Two languages, two centuries of past
To ponder on, and the basic need
To work hard in order to survive. (SM, 10)
Dealing, as it so obviously does, with the theme of ‘belonging’ – a central topos of the 1960s, almost obsessively figured throughout that decade as a search for ‘roots’ – ‘Blaen Cwrt’ is in danger of appearing to be a dated product of its time. That it can still nevertheless command attention through the power and the measured dignity of its speech may be due partly to those unconscious feelings that, as Clarke later enabled us to see, were secretly animating her attachment to the cottage. For instance, the way these concluding lines seek to contain and pacify instability (‘a big, unpredictable sky’), and their resemblance to an epithalamium – a celebration of the marriage between Wales’s two cultures – acquires a poignancy when read in the light of the tensions in Clarke’s early family background.
Moreover, the poem is very much a portrait of that artist Clarke had, at the time of writing, newly come to realise she was. Her visual acuity, her painterly eye for colour and texture, are abundantly evident throughout (‘The stones clear in the rain/ Giving their colours. It’s not easy/ There are no brochure blues or boiled sweet/ Reds’). The point, as in several of Wordsworth’s greatest poems, is that only to the patiently loving attention of one who is inward with it does this scene ‘give’ its colour and reveal itself as beautiful. And again like the Wordsworth of ‘Michael’, Clarke insists that only to those who know it well will this place entrust its history:
The wattle and daub
Chimney hood has decayed away, slowly
Creeping to dust, chalking the slate
Floor with stories.
Moreover, by so clearly emphasising at the outset her intention to ‘tell’ her reader/ listener not about Blaen Cwrt but literally ‘how it is’ Clarke is demonstrating the power of language and the authority to be a poet that is vested in her by this place. In this respect, the poem is her signature text because (in spite of my references to Wordsworth) the kind of sensuous immersion in, and receptive submission to, the ancient peculiarities of a landscape that is registered in ‘Blaen Cwrt’ is associated in Gillian Clarke’s mind with a ‘feminine’ sensibility. Thus the poem may be read as a celebration of a feminised – and indeed feminising – landscape, centring on the implicit demonstration that Clarke’s way of moving in and setting up home is not the male’s way of taking possession of a property. Rather, she tentatively feels her way, adapting herself gently to what’s there, taking new shape from it, just as
Some of the smoke seeps through the stones
Into the barn where it curls like fern
On the walls.
When Gillian Clarke moved permanently to Blaen Cwrt in 1984 it marked a new phase in her life as a woman and as a writer. Her children were now grown up and she was free to accept a Welsh Arts Council sponsored writer’s residency at St David’s University College, Lampeter. She described this as ‘a change of life … without fracture or disruption. It seems to me that I have turned to face the already known, to know it more profoundly.’17 But as she also wryly noted:
In 1978 I wrote a long poem (‘Letter from a far country’) about a woman who, in the spirit of feminist rebellion, threatens to leave home and family, although in the end, seduced by memory, tradition and the ties of family life, she stays. However, as one friend remarked, on hearing of my present adventure, ‘So the prophecy of “Letter” is fulfilled.’
Until the early 1980s, however, Clarke continued to be circumstanced in those ways upon which she so expressively reflects in ‘Letter from a far country’.
Broadcast as a half-hour radio poem in 1978 but not published until 1982, that work is now accepted as a landmark text in Welsh writing in English. And, most notably in her preface to the selection of her work published in Six Women Poets, Clarke herself has written informatively about the poem. She has explained that it was composed ‘easily in between 10 and 15 hours spread over five late-night sessions when my sons’ drums and guitars had fallen silent for the night’, and has noted that the poem is both
a celebration of life’s good things – clean sheets, the smell of baking, orderliness – with which my mother and grandmother surrounded me [– and] a small contribution towards feminist protest, a meditation on traditional woman’s work written in the form of an imaginary letter, the sort of letter you write in your mind and never post.
That letter, she adds, ‘is a letter from a fictitious woman to all men. The “far country” is childhood, womanhood, Wales, the beautiful country where the warriors, kings and presidents don’t live, the private place where we all grow up.’ More pointedly, she reveals that the poem arose out of a feeling of anger and frustration at the way
the earth – birth, death, caring, nurturing, teaching, nursing, homemaking, were in women’s hands, while the world – public life, money, government, organisation, judgement, war, were in the hands of men. This would, perhaps, suit us well enough, if only both kinds of work were equally valued, but we all know they are not.18
In those phrases from ‘Blaen Cwrt’ that deliberately override the difference between men’s and women’s work (‘Our fingers curl on/ Enamel mugs of tea, like ploughmen’) linger, perhaps, memories of early sex discrimination such as those registered in ‘Letter’:
To be out with the men, at work,
I had longed to carry their tea,
for the feminine privilege,
for the male right to the field.
Even that small task made me bleed. (LFC, 12–13)
And just as, later in the poem, women’s bleeding becomes both a painful monthly fact and a metaphor for the equivocal biological and cultural terms on which woman is granted her unique powers of creativity, so ‘Letter from a far country’ proceeds by recuperating aspects of female experience that males have traditionally stigmatised, and by reconceiving forms of living and writing that had previously borne the imprint only of the male imagination. Such regenerations of form are also, of course, re-genderings of form. Indeed, not only does the poem force a redefinition of the ‘long poem’ as a genre, revealing the inherently gendered and contingent character of its supposedly intrinsic kinds of subject-matter and structure, it is also written in a flexible, and therefore unemphatic, three-stress line that seems pointedly to stop short of the full fig of the masculine iambic pentameter.
It is also important to remember that ‘Letter from a far country’ was commissioned for broadcast on radio, and that it therefore belongs to the ‘genre’ so famously and definitively represented in
Wales by Under Milk Wood. The very rhythm of that work’s celebrated opening – ‘It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black’19 – seems echoed in Clarke’s:
They have gone. The silence resettles
slowly as dust on the sunlit
surfaces of the furniture. (LFC, 7)
Echo, indeed, seems the operative word when writing about ‘Letter’. If Under Milk Wood is a ‘Play for Voices’, then Clarke’s work is a Poem for Echoes. Not only is her poem about the resonances between past and present, it repeatedly figures the imagination itself as an echo-chamber and it turns words into echoes of each other, in lines like ‘the ruined warehouse where the owls stare’ (LFC, 9). ‘Listen!’, she writes, again adopting one of Dylan Thomas’s favourite rhetorical strategies, ‘to the starlings glistening on a March morning!’ (LFC, 10). Yes, both Thomas and Clarke are inspired users of ‘alliteration and assonance’, if we must trundle out those tired terms, but the significance of the fact lies in the radically different ways in which these devices speak the mind of these two poets so decisively divided by temperament and gender. And what is really at issue is their fundamentally opposed ways of conceiving of language.
‘The poet is the father of his poem, its mother is a language; one could list poems as race horses are listed – out of L by P,’ wrote W. H. Auden, demonstrating how easily a male author betrays his gender when writing about writing.20 But elsewhere in his essays Auden more usefully distinguishes between a poet who ‘thinks of the poem he is writing as something already latent in the language which he has to reveal’, and one who ‘thinks of language as a plastic passive medium upon which he imposes his artistic conception’ (SE, 134). Absolute though such a distinction undoubtedly is – and applicable though Auden would have it be only to ‘formal’ and ‘free verse’ poets respectively – it does help us understand Clarke’s obstetric relationship to language in ‘Letter from a far country’, a relationship that is, of course, inseparable from her encouraging receptivity to the past, as that is present alike in place and in woman’s ambiguously ‘given’ place. It is evident that, as she confessed elsewhere, ‘I love to find clues in language and stories to show old complexities.’21
For Gillian Clarke, ‘Letter from a far country’ was in many respects a threshold poem; it marked a liminal stage in her life both as woman and as writer. On the other hand, The Sundial – her first substantial collection of poems, published after the writing but before the publication of ‘Letter’ – is more of a summation of her work to that date, and a retrospective exhibition of her achievements. The volume’s title is well-chosen; language throughout the book struggles to track heat and light, to catch in its sounds and cadences ‘the savage roar of the trapped sun/ Seeding the earth against the stop of winter’ (S, 27). And in the concluding poems in The Sundial death is repeatedly viewed in this light, as in the visionary, not to say apocalyptic, last verse of ‘Harvest at Mynachlog’:
We are quiet again, holding our cups
In turn for the tilting milk, sad, hearing
The sun roar like a rush of grain
Engulfing all winged things that live
One moment in the eclipsing light. (S, 50)
Reading some of these poems is sometimes like stepping into one of the light-storms of a painting by Turner or being caught in the energy field of one of Van Gogh’s quivering canvases. Not that Clarke’s imagery is all of light; she is attracted equally to the headlong liquefactions of water, seeing the river in her poem ‘At Ystrad Fflur’, ‘ra[cing] for the south too full/ of summer rain for safety’ (S, 22). The provenance of such writing is mixed, connecting back as it does with Romantic vitalism (in both its nineteenth-century and twentieth-century modernist forms), the hyperbolic Welsh praise tradition, and the feminist poetics of fecundity. Other aspects of that poetics are apparent when Gillian Clarke beautifully notices at Ystrad Fflur ‘a river blossoming on stone’. The phrase both conveys a sense of female in relation to male (with a sidelong glance at Moses?) and suggests hard matter’s hidden other self – the secret sap which runs through the veins of rock. And in this last respect it connects with the language and imagery of concavity that recurs in The Sundial, the caves and skulls and shells that turn some of her poems into verbal equivalents of paintings by Georgia O’Keefe, to whose work she was later to address a poem.
Several of the poems in The Sundial carry the signs (and stigmata) of female consciousness as characterised by Clarke in her prose writings. In her essay ‘The King of Britain’s Daughter’ she later recalled how ‘as a child I used to play a game which I called “big and little”’ (HPW, 123). In other words she saw how a stone could become a planet and the setting sun a pebble about to drop. Grown up, she was to realise that much of woman’s life involved such abrupt changes in scale, a constant movement between interior and exterior, domestic and public, family and world. No better example of the habit of imagination thus inculcated could be found than her perception, in ‘Two Points of View’, of the resting red combine harvester (that macho machine) as standing ‘still and powerful/ As a ladybird resting between flight’ (S, 46), or of her Blakean vision (yes, men can see this way too, as she would readily admit) of the curlew:
She dips her bill in the rim of the sea.
Her beak is the ellipse
of a world much smaller
than that far section of the sea’s
circumference. (S, 36)
Another of the qualities of her female vision is apparent in ‘In Pisgah Graveyard’, where ‘The warmth tumbles here like a giant sun/ Flower dying and full of glossy seed’ (S, 27). There, not unlike Virginia Woolf, she demonstrates such a sensitivity to atmosphere (of places or relationships) that it is as if she possessed the poetic equivalent of a psychic’s gift for perceiving ‘aura’ or as if she could feel the amniotic fluid of life.
‘In Pisgah Graveyard’ is in part an elegy for Dewi Emrys, that most maverick of Welsh-language poets of the twentieth century. There, next to a ‘poet’s grave that tidies his wild life’, she feels a deep affinity with one whose passion for language was so unbridled:
This roughest stone of all, a sand-stone pod
Bursting with words, is Dewi Emrys’s grave.
And all around the living corn concedes
Fecundity to him. (S, 27)
In these images, so suggestively bisexual in nature, can be sensed a generous acknowledgement of indebtedness to, and kinship with, the male poets of Wales’s past. This bond, which is also a double bind, closely resembles those feelings towards the male writers of Ireland that Eavan Boland so carefully and caringly expresses in Object Lessons:
As I read the poems of the tradition, it could often seem to me that I was entering a beautiful and perilous world filled with my own silence. As I struggled to become my own subject – in poems I could hardly write and in a literary tradition which blurred the feminine and the national – these poems were enabling and illuminating. As a woman I felt some mute and anxious kinship with those erotic subjects which were appropriated; as a poet I felt confirmed by the very powers of expression which appropriated them. (OL, 237–8)
Several poems in The Sundial implicitly explore Clarke’s place in the male-voice chorus of Welsh poetry. In ‘Dyddgu Replies to Dafydd’ she enables the mute object of the praise of Wales’s greatest poet to become a speaking subject, and she thus empowers a woman to speak her own differently erotic love poem, to yearn for
when the wind whitens the tender
underbelly of the March grass
thick as pillows under the oaks. (S, 21)
And in the companion poem ‘At Ystrad Fflur’, Gillian Clarke quietly claims, in the name of her female self, not only the place where Dafydd ap Gwilym is buried but also the traditions of praise poetry and canu bro which had previously been virtually a Welsh male preserve. In her poem the landscape becomes vividly female in body, culminating in a sensation of how
desire runs
Like sparks in stubble through the memory
of the place, and a yellow mustard field
is a sheet of flame in the heart. (S, 23)
It is almost as if it has taken a woman to recognise, and in that sense fully to awaken, the riotous ‘desire’ that is pent-up in this location, that latent passion which is the true legacy of Dafydd ap Gwilym and which is the hidden blazon of puritanically and politically oppressed Wales.
Of course, Gillian Clarke’s poetry in The Sundial is not always so startlingly and convincingly vivid. Her poetics of deliquescence and of liquefaction, her extravagantly sensuous language, and the ringing diapason of her affirmations can sometimes seem altogether too lush and luscious. And she herself put her finger on the dangers and difficulties inherent in her early practice in an uncharacteristically impatient review of Conundrums, Jan Morris’s book about changing sex. While emphasising (perhaps too uncritically for her own good as a poet) that ‘to be female is to live a woman’s life, an essentially seasonal, physical, body-conscious life from an early age’, she also properly objects to Morris’s sentimental view of the female nature: ‘I must insist that we come good, bad and indifferent, placid or passionate, gentle or fierce, as men do.’22 What one sometimes feels the want of in The Sundial is precisely such a full mediation, through the medium of poetry, of women’s complex fate, her incorrigibly human, as well as gendered, nature.
Nevertheless, the abiding impression left from reading Gillian Clarke’s early poetry is one of exhilaration at the headlong, head (and body) strong energy of its innovativeness. She was to go on, of course, to a new phase which also amounted in her case to a new life, and in the process she not only consolidated her talent but also developed and extended it. But there can still be felt in her early writing all the unrepeatable vigour of the adventure and excitement of self-discovery. It was then that self-awakening was achieved by ‘shak[ing] words awake’, and that poetry first became for her ‘an unconscious act of revelation’.23 And behind that whole process lay the determination, as she put it in ‘Letter from a far country’, to be – both as woman and as poet, but in such very different senses – the girl who ‘stays. To mind things’ (LFC, 8).