by Clive James
But once again, the trick demands that the underlying frame should not be broken. When Samuel Johnson called Donne’s numbers ‘rough’, he meant that Donne was not keeping count while he worked his distortions. Quite often, Johnson was right. Donne’s jawbreakers, often coming at the knotty point of a conceit, are always fascinating, but they are still jawbreakers. Poets write jawbreakers when, usually through enthusiasm, they lose touch with the meter they are presuming to supersede. Johnson disapproved of enthusiasm. What even he could never anticipate, however, was a condition in which hardly any reader knew the difference between a procedure varied and a procedure violated. We are in that condition now.
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A critic today, I think, should be able to see that Tony Harrison, famous for composing in couplets, mangles them almost as often as he gets them right. (By academics who can’t count even on their fingers, the wreckage is called vigour, spontaneity, bold re-energizing of a convention, etc.) The same critic should be able to see – it is the same perception, redirected – that Peter Redgrove, say, maintains an unswerving strictness under his seeming freedoms. These three lines from his poem ‘Travelogue’ are based on an elementary iambic pentameter with nothing but lexical brilliance to disguise it:
La Place de Jeunesse is portcullised shut,
dust rests on skiing tanned shop-window dummies,
board pavements echo, you can’t get a drink.
Since I myself try not to write anything that can’t be read aloud, I would have covered the possibility that ‘board’ could be heard the wrong way, but in all other respects I found those lines, when I first read them, as naturally sayable as if they were handwritten in the Tower of London by Sir Walter Raleigh, wrapped in his muddied velvet cloak, and warming his hands at the blaze of his own vocabulary. I don’t believe, however, that smoothness of recitative in itself is enough to make poetry, let alone a poem. Early on, Conrad Aiken had a reputation nudging that of T. S. Eliot as a poet who could narrate in iambic meter. Today Aiken looks empty, and he should have looked that way at the time. His torrential mellifluousness fooled almost everybody, and eventually it fooled the Oxford University Press (American branch) into publishing a complete Collected Poems more than eight hundred pages long. On page 457 appears a poem called ‘Sea Holly’ which has its charm, and on page 797 ‘The Lady in Pink Pyjamas’ would be almost not bad if only a) some of its bravura could be removed and b) he had never written anything else in his life.
I mention Aiken because there is an upside to the fact that the beginning reader in poetry no longer knows much about meter. All the dull poetry that was ever praised for its technique is effectively no longer in existence. Churned out by hundreds of poets, published in thousands of volumes, there was a whole stretch of correctly genteel English poetry composed in the British Empire from the late Victorian era onward until the Georgians were invaded by modernism. It was fully matched by an American equivalent that was far less influenced by Whitman than we might retrospectively wish. All of it – comprising millions of lines impeccably turned – is gone as if it had never been. A student who took John Drinkwater down from the shelf now would scarcely even recognize that he was nothing. Once, he was famous: and not just as the author of a quite good play about Abraham Lincoln. He was a famous poet.
So the idea that a poem can be made poetic by its structure alone is open to question, at the very least. I would still like to contend, however, that any poem which comes to exist without having first been built might be destined for the same pit of oblivion that all the well-wrought dross went into. Such a fate seems especially likely when the poem without form has nothing else to grab your attention either: no little low heavens, no gauze babushkas, nothing to see or even hear. Today’s deliberately empty poetry can get a reputation for a time: there will always be a residency for J. H. Prynne. But it will never be as interesting as the question of how it got there. Some would hold Charles Olson personally responsible, but I fear – fear because of the size and volume of the scuffle I might get into – that the culprit was William Carlos Williams. When he realized, correctly, that everything was absent from Whitman’s poetry except arresting observations, Williams, instead of asking himself how he could put back what was missing, asked himself how he could get rid of the arresting observations. The result was a red wheelbarrow: no doubt intensely significant, but a long way short of those little low heavens.
Interlude
To speak of the poetic moment, and then of the rhythmic framework in which it is contained, brings us naturally to the rhythmic progress from moment to moment, and hence to the question of how, in any poem that strikes us as being integrated, the effects seem joined up by an inexorable progression. From that progression, any poem that impresses us with its integrity is likely to gain an extra poetic charge, sometimes to the point of convincing us that the way it goes is the secret of what it is. In the course of a lifetime there might be several times that a reader comes across a poem that can’t be fully explained but can’t be left alone either. For me, two examples would be ‘Gone to Report’, by Brian Howard, and ‘War of Nerves’ by Frederic Prokosch. Both poets were well-known literary names in the 1940s, and both of them are forgotten now, but each of them wrote a poem whose driving force of argument I still can’t get out of my head even though I have spent half a century wondering about what the argument actually is. (I leave it to the reader to track those poems down. The search will be part of the puzzle: Raiders of the Lost Text!) The Australian poet Francis Webb wrote several strangely beautiful poems whose authoritative coherence refuses to be reduced to ordinary comprehensibility: but Webb was a mental patient. At times in modern poetic history the temptation to let go of rationality has risen to the status of a command, just as, in the history of modern painting, it became compulsory to let go of the figurative. To ignore the results would be wilful obtuseness, yet surely, if only to secure a brief respite from the barely intelligible, it is forgivable to favour those poets who show signs of knowing what they are saying. From them we might get, occasionally if not always, the poem that gains extra vitality from the way it has been made complete. Stephen Edgar’s ‘Man on the Moon’ is just such a poem: clear from moment to moment, and clear in the way that one moment leads to the next, it accumulates so much clarity that you need dark glasses to look at it.
ON A SECOND READING
On a second reading of a poem that has wowed us, we might grow even more interested, but we start to sober up. For my own part, initial admiration for a single poem often tempts me into a vocabulary I would rather avoid. The Australian poet Stephen Edgar’s poem ‘Man on the Moon’ can be found in his collection Other Summers, or – more quickly, and for free – in the selection devoted to his work in the Guest Poets section of my website, clivejames.com. With a single reservation, I think it is a perfect poem, although ‘perfect’ is an adjective I would rather not be caught using. The word just doesn’t convey enough meaning to cover, or even approach, the integrity of the manufacture. I knew that already on a first reading. But on a second reading, I begin to know how I knew it:
Hardly a feature in the evening sky
As yet – near the horizon the cold glow
Of rose and mauve which, as you look on high,
Deepens to Giotto’s dream of indigo.
Giotto is dreaming of indigo because he couldn’t get enough of it: in his time it was a pigment worth its weight in gold. Edgar is always good on facts like that. I could write a commentary picking up on such points, but it wouldn’t say why the poem is perfect, or almost so. The obvious conclusion is that I don’t need to say that. But I want to, because a task has been fudged if I don’t. There are plenty of poems full of solid moments, but the moments don’t hang together even by gravity. So why, in this case, do they cohere?
Hardly a star as yet. And then that frail
Sliver of moon like a thin peel of soap
Gouged by a nail, or the paring of a nail:
Slender enou
gh repository of hope.
We can already see the moments cohering. The indigo sky of the first stanza has supplied the background for the moon, which has become two different things, one growing out of another: the soap paring and the separated crescent of a fingernail, possibly the same fingernail that scratched the soap, but probably not, or he would have said so. These specific but metaphorical details provide the warrant for a general but more abstract statement about hope. Out on its own, the abstract concept of hope could be the town where Bill Clinton was born, or a mantra in a speech by Barack Obama. We don’t know what the poet’s hope is about yet, but here it looks planted securely on firm ground, because of the store of specific noticing that has already been built up:
There was no lack of hope when thirty-five
Full years ago they sent up the Apollo –
Two thirds of all the years I’ve been alive.
They let us out of school, so we could follow
The broadcast of that memorable scene,
Crouching in Mr. Langshaw’s tiny flat,
The whole class huddled round the TV screen.
There’s not much chance, then, of forgetting that.
Now we see where hope was going: all the way to the moon. The Apollo mission landed there in 1969. Add a ‘full’ thirty-five years to this and we can calculate that the poem was written in 2004 or perhaps the year after. Increase thirty-five years by a third and we find that the poet is about fifty-three years old at the time of writing. And he was about seventeen at the time of the landing. So he was in high school, with Mr Langshaw for a teacher: a dedicated teacher, living alone in tight circumstances, here made tighter by the presence of the whole class. The number of boys in the class is the only statistic we can’t work out, but it must have been a substantial number or the word ‘whole’ would not have been used for effect.
Because these two stanzas form one unit, the first bridging syntactically into the next, we can see that the pace has picked up. The first two stanzas of the poem made one statement at a time, but they were just the overture. This is the opera. Or at any rate the operetta: there is an air of lightness to it, mainly conveyed by ‘that memorable scene’, which is a knowing allusion to a time-honoured line of poetry (from Marvell’s ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’), and is obviously put there on the assumption that we also know it, or can at least guess that the heroic elevation of an archaic-sounding phrase is deliberately being used to say that this, too, is history. Those who remember the story of Marvell’s poem will be glad to realize that this time nobody is getting executed. In Marvell’s poem, it is Charles I, and not Cromwell, who bravely faces death, and the diction is a token of the poet’s generous scope of understanding. But to borrow the phrase is also a way for this later poet, Stephen Edgar, to say that literature now must make room for the machines. Readers who go further into his work, as they surely must, will find that Edgar is unusually sensitive to science and technology. They increase his vocabulary, which is lyrically precise over a greater range of human activity than anyone else’s I can think of, with the possible exception of his senior compatriot Les Murray. More of a city boy than Murray, Edgar has fewer words for evoking life on the land. But for all other realms he has whole dictionaries in his head:
And for the first time ever I think now,
As though it were a memory, that you
Were in the world then and alive, and how
Down time’s long labyrinthine avenue
Eventually you’d bring yourself to me
With no excessive haste and none too soon –
As memorable in my history
As that small step for man on to the moon.
And this, suddenly and unexpectedly, is another realm, the realm of personal emotion. One of Edgar’s favourite strategies is to set up an area of public property, as it were, before bringing in the personal relationship: a way of spreading inward from the world. The effect, especially acute in this case, is to dramatize his isolation. But as yet we don’t know that the isolation will mean loneliness. Perhaps he and ‘you’ are still together. The portents, however, are ominous. For one thing, she is probably younger than he. She was in the world then, but the wording suggests that she might not have been so for very long. She was on her way to him, down a ‘long labyrinthine avenue’ that sounds as if it has passed through the mind of Philip Larkin. Edgar is fond – sometimes too fond – of echoing Larkin, but he is usually, as here, careful to echo only the cadences, not the wording. Larkin often used a monosyllabic adjective before a polysyllabic one, with no separating comma. The sonorous glissando of the device was useful to give the pathos of passing time. But Edgar undercuts the evocation of inevitability by giving the loved one an air of caprice. She brings herself (good of her) with no excessive haste (what kept her?) and none too soon (finally she deigns to turn up).
On a fine point of technique, rather than a larger point of tactics, the way that the poet, in the penultimate line quoted, gives ‘memorable’ and ‘history’ their full syllabic value recalls Auden, and in the final line of the octet we can hear Empson, as we can always hear him when trochees are laid over an iambic pattern to give a spondaic tread. Since Edgar obviously weighs his words with care, it is safe to assume that he knows Neil Armstrong blew the script. Armstrong should have said ‘one small step for a man’. When he fluffed it and said ‘one small step for man’, he ensured that ‘man’ and ‘mankind’ would mean the same thing and that the sentence would be deprived of its intended contrast. But Edgar seems to be saying that even the giant step for mankind is small – small enough, at any rate, to be matched by the moment in his own history when he and the loved one met:
How pitiful and inveterate the way
We view the paths by which our lives descended
From the far past down to the present day
And fancy those contingencies intended,
A secret destiny planned in advance
Where what is done is as it must be done
For us alone. When really it’s all chance
And the special one might have been anyone.
Here again, a whole argument is bridged over two stanzas, and this time with only a single terminal comma, so that the effect of a lot being said at once is reinforced by the technical fact of compressed syntax. The word ‘inveterate’ gets a hypermetric emphasis, making it sound important enough for us to figure out exactly what it means here, or to look it up if we’ve never seen it. (If we do look it up, we find that the current meanings of something long established and settled by habit are underpinned by a historic meaning of something hostile – an undertone which soon turns out to be appropriate.) In the last line of the stanza we have to deduce, in the absence of the poet’s spoken emphasis, that the word ‘intended’ is an adjective qualifying the noun ‘contingencies’. That’s one of the tasks fulfilled by the comma: to tell us that the contingencies aren’t about to intend anything, but are, themselves, intended. The other task of the comma is to set up a development in which the contingencies amount to a destiny, which turns out to be the wrong idea. ‘Where what is done is as it must be done’ has a playful musicality, but the play is sad, because it isn’t true: determinism is an illusion. Chance rules, and when the repetition in the line is matched by the repetition in the last line, the game is over. The poem, however, isn’t. Casting our eyes down we see that there is more of it to come, although not much more. It’s going to have to cover a lot of distance in a short time if it is to bring these themes together:
The paths that I imagined to have come
Together and for good have simply crossed
And carried on. And that delirium
We found is cold and sober now and lost.
This time the argument is confined to one stanza and has the effect of a summary. We know that there is more of the poem to come, but it could conceivably end here. The separate trajectories of the mission and the moon successfully met each other according to
plan, and the Apollo Lunar Module came down in the right spot. The separate trajectories of the poet and the loved one met each other as well, but each of them kept going. Ecstasy (called ‘delirium’ in retrospect, as if it had been a fever) didn’t hold them together, and the return of sobriety revealed that it couldn’t have. What was ‘lost’ was a big chance, but a chance was all it was. The under-punctuation is an indicator, telling us that he’s had time to work this conclusion out, and that it can therefore be set down economically, as a given. The whole story can be seen in the turn of the second line into the third. The phrase ‘And carried on’ comes out of the turn with a reinforced inevitability. (In the heyday of practical criticism, such an effect would have been called ‘enactment’, but when it was eventually realized that almost any technical feature could be called enactment, the term thankfully went into abeyance.) The idea that if their two paths crossed they might stick together was a wrong guess on his part. Was it the wrong wish? Well, separation seems to have been her decision, so perhaps she was the wrong woman. Maybe delirium wasn’t what she wanted. We are left free to speculate about all those things as the poem spreads outwards again, and makes an end:
