Poetry Notebook

by Clive James

  I saw the porpoises’ thick backs

  Cartwheeling like the flywheels of the tide,

  Soapy and shining.

  ‘Soapy and shining’ counts as notation: he could have put it in a notebook, had the circumstances been conducive. But ‘the flywheels of the tide’ are metaphorical in the most transformative and connective sense of the word: they make the sea a giant engine. At such a time we have the right, indeed the obligation, to bring out the word ‘vision’. These effects are open only to the visionary poet. And once again we have to ask ourselves whether we are wrong to wish them packed tighter together, with all connective matter compressed or excluded. Such an impulse was probably behind the advent of so-called ‘Martian’ poetry, which seemed like a terrific idea at the time: all climax and no build-up. In the seventies and eighties Martian poetry was the dominant poetic tone in Great Britain: exponents such as Craig Raine seemed to see anything as looking like something else. But after Martian poetry became a drug on the market it grew apparent that it might be better to have the narrator rowing out in his little boat to catch the mackerel, before the porpoises dramatically appear.

  •

  Keats lived for such a short span – ten years less even than Byron, who, we ought to remember, died tragically young – that it might strike us as absurd when scholars talk of his ‘development’. But rereading Keats late in my life, I find more and more that everything that came before the dazzling batch of Odes is a development leading up to them: and then The Fall of Hyperion, written after them, still leads up to them. Though his first book, Poems, was a flop, there were always people who could tell he was promising: to anyone with a palate, the succulence of his phrasing was unmistakable. Yet even the longer poems that were meant to be masterpieces have a tentative air when put beside the short poems of his magic year 1819. To put it bluntly, we might conceivably study Endymion in order to read the Odes, but we wouldn’t study the Odes in order to read Endymion. The smaller structure is the more integrated. In Endymion there are some seductive lines about a nightingale but they do not add up to the Ode on the same subject:

  Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

  Barely out of my teens, I said it to the same bathroom mirror that had served me so well when I recited Dowson. ‘They are not long, the weeping and the laughter.’ Suddenly Dowson’s death-knell poem seemed to embody a Keatsian sentiment, one of those fateful premonitions of which the Odes were so brim full, all the more poignant for being packed so tight. In the Odes, if the hero does any languishing, he can do it in a line: in Endymion or The Fall of Hyperion he goes on for a page.

  We can’t call this superiority of the short form a law because it isn’t always true, and is sometimes conspicuously false. Important though Dante’s lyric poems are, we study them in order to read the Divine Comedy, not the other way around. But the Divine Comedy is not only larger; when taken as a whole it is at least as compact as any of the minor poems. The Divine Comedy is a poem in epic form. It is said that there is always someone in Italy who can recite the whole thing from memory, but to believe this you have to take it for granted that someone, book in hand, spent many hours sitting with the reciter in order to check up. Nevertheless the urban legend is indicative of a quality. That it can be got by heart is one of the ways we tend to define a poem. When I arrived in London in the early sixties, Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, in a fair copy written in his own hand, was still on display in a glass case in his house. I got it almost by heart – ‘almost’ because it is very tricky to memorize – and can still recognize any phrase from it. It has always been raided for book titles but Scott Fitzgerald picked the plum: Tender is the Night. When my mind plays tricks, it assigns that phrase to the ‘Ode on Melancholy’: my favourite among the Odes, and indeed among all poems by anybody. And he was just a boy.

  •

  Ungaretti said that the touchstone of poetry was the hammered phrase within the singable scheme. Since he himself occasionally produced poems that were barely a phrase long, we might think that he turned an ideal into a fetish: but surely he was right about everybody else. Poets do their best to pick and mount a phrase so that it will generate music, both within itself and within the structure to which it contributes. Our objection to so much Victorian verse, and to what happened next, is that the phrases went clunk. When they rang clean, that particular small stretch of verse was often singled out later on, in the modern age, as an example of how poetry could defy its time. For just that reason, everyone still admired Tennyson. Eliot, to get his admiration within bounds, had to say that Tennyson had no brains.

  Tennyson was a notable example of poetry getting into my mind by a side door. My science fiction phase lasted years and started early: I had SF books piled high long before I enrolled as a student at Sydney University. One of my favourites was John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes, which quotes Tennyson’s short poem ‘The Kraken’ as an epigraph. ‘In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.’ I was entranced – it was good, solid, horror-show romanticism, worthy of being recited into the bathroom mirror – and therefore I was very ready to follow up on Tennyson when his Idylls of the King got a mention in first year English. I only just enjoyed it, and one of my teachers told me there was a reason: Tennyson’s lengthy capital work was stretched far beyond its content, and to see how the same material could drive an epic I should read Malory. He was right. He had also set a teaching standard which I have ever since tried to follow: never discourage a student from reading something unless you can encourage them to read something better.

  •

  Philip Larkin once said that the influence of Yeats could be all-pervasive, getting into everything like the smell of garlic. Yet although we can recognize Yeats’s influence on Larkin’s monumental stanza forms (judged by the size and capacity of the stanza, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ is a bigger poem than ‘All Souls’ Night’) we don’t often recognize the echo of Yeats’s voice. The voice that got into early Larkin wasn’t the voice of Yeats or even of Hardy, the poet he loved best. It was the voice of Auden:

  So you have been, despite parental ban

  That would not hear the old demand again;

  One who through rain to empty station ran.

  – from ‘So you have been, despite parental ban’

  It’s Larkin, but every construction in it is taken from Auden. One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him. Even Empson, the most original poet of the thirties generation, was driven to parody; but really ‘Just a Smack at Auden’ is an act of homage.

  Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.

  What is there to be or do?

  What’s become of me or you?

  Are we kind or are we true?

  Sitting two and two, boys, waiting for the end.

  In Larkin’s generation, the most conspicuous victim of Auden’s tone was Kingsley Amis. The case is especially fascinating because later on, when he had shaken Auden’s influence off, Amis became so distinctive: a voice recognizable after a single stanza. But in his early work a single stanza was likely to be riddled with Audenesque effects:

  But love, once broken off, builds a response

  In the final turning pause that sees nothing

  Is left, and grieves though nothing happened here.

  So close to Auden that it sounds as if it might be stolen, ‘the final turning pause’ is one of the many examples in early Amis of fine phrases that tried to cash in on Auden’s knack for a resonant vagueness. Amis, who had a keen ear for a phrase, probably caught himself at it long before he quit, but he kept doing it because everybody else did. Auden’s influence had been so immense that younger poets thought he had changed the weather.

  •

  It is always as if Auden has just arrived. He was the hero of the most conspicuous recent example of poetry getting in by a side entrance. The movie Four Weddings and a Funeral, which quotes Auden�
��s poem ‘Funeral Blues’, sent a lot of people away in search of more poetry by the same author. Faber made sure that their wish was satisfied. You could say that the film’s popularity created an artificial market, but the poem would not have been in the movie if its writers had not been true Auden fans. Similarly, it was out of love for the poems that the creators of the musical Cats set about converting Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats into a stage spectacle. My younger daughter, when I took her to see the show, was as happy as any human being I have ever seen. It was her second time, so she had already learned the words, and sang them silently along with the actors. Faber participated in the profits of the enterprise. Any publisher would like to do the same. It’s comforting to say that poetry never makes any money but the chastening truth is that when it does it makes a mint, although seldom for the poet, who has already passed unto Parnassus, where the accommodation seldom reaches the standards of a Holiday Inn even on the higher slopes.

  •

  Milton trained himself from early on to clog any passage of his verse with learned references:

  Nymphs and Shepherds dance no more

  By sandy Ladon’s Lillied banks;

  On old Lycaeus or Cyllene hoar.

  By the time he reached the great poems, there seemed no stopping the mechanism by which he crammed into them their high quota of learned unreadability. Yet things could have been different. Near the end of Paradise Regained, at the eleventh hour, we find the line:

  Aim therefore at no less than all the world.

  It is Satan, tempting Christ. Untouched by the italics that denote a classical reference, the line is perfectly speakable, even conversational. Is there anyone among Milton’s most diehard admirers who does not, coming across a line like that, wish that all of Milton were like that? Among poets I know who profess to admire Milton, I have never found even one who did not quote Shakespeare more often. But this is a dangerous theme. When T. S. Eliot professed to have acquired a respect for Milton to replace his earlier aversion, F. R. Leavis accused Eliot of treason. Leavis wanted Milton’s reputation kept down. That was a long time ago, but the air is still smouldering in the corridors of English faculties all over the world. And I suppose Milton emerged unscathed from the battle. Certainly it is powerful evidence of his worth that Harold Bloom once proved to Charlie Rose that he could be given a starting point anywhere in Paradise Lost and go on to recite the rest of it. But was there somebody standing by with a copy of the book?

  •

  Dryden had a name for the happy phrase that came unbidden: he called it a hit. ‘These hits of words a true poet often finds, as I may say, without seeking; but he knows their value when he finds them, and is infinitely pleased.’ It is hard to think of Philip Larkin howling for joy except possibly at the sound of a clarinet solo by Pee Wee Russell, but he must have been infinitely pleased when the last lines of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ occurred to him. That uniquely powerful little stretch of writing is all hits:

  There we were aimed. And as we raced across

  Bright knots of rail

  Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss

  Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail

  Travelling coincidence; and what it held

  Stood ready to be loosed with all the power

  That being changed can give. We slowed again,

  And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled

  A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower

  Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

  Of those three linked hits at the very end, the second one, ‘sent out of sight’, strikes me as the miracle among the miracles, because somehow it gets in the sense of the longbows being lifted and the strings let loose. At the start of the line, the phrase is perfectly placed. It’s a fine example of a phrase finding its poem: the hammered phrase helping to generate the singable scheme.

  Being in the right spot can make a phrase powerful even when it might seem frail heard on its own. Consider the placing of Louis MacNeice’s lovely phrase ‘the falling London rain’. It comes at the very end of his poem ‘London Rain’ and seems to concentrate all the phonetic force of the poem:

  My wishes now come homeward,

  Their gallopings in vain;

  Logic and lust are quiet,

  Once more it starts to rain.

  Falling asleep I listen

  To the falling London rain.

  This is the least obvious version of the hit: when ordinary words become extraordinary because they are in the right spot. The most obvious version is when one or more of the words is doing strange work. When Auden saw the proofs of one of his poems he found that the printer had saddled him with ‘and the ports have names for the sea’ when what he had written was ‘and the poets have names for the sea’. He decided to stick with the misprint because it was less predictable.

  But the Auden hits that really stun us happen when a whole phrase gets transformed by its new use:

  The earth turns over, our side feels the cold.

  By a mental mechanism that can only be guessed at, he saw the connection between the Earth turning and himself turning over in bed. With the second phrase, ‘our side feels the cold’, guessing becomes entirely inadequate. Does he mean that our side of the bed is a simile for Europe torn by politics? Better for the reader to just enjoy the feeling of disorientation – or rather, of being oriented toward everywhere, a sliding universality. After the war Auden wrote a masterpiece of a lyric that was all hits from start to finish: ‘The Fall of Rome’. Since there isn’t a line in it that does not demand quotation, the poem is a cinch to learn. But few poems are packed as tight as that with memorable moments. Quite early in Endymion we come across

  Now while the silent workings of the dawn

  Were busiest.

  The cadence is unforgettable, but there is nothing else like it for miles on either side. It’s a hit. One can imagine a critical work of great length which would consist of nothing but hit moments extracted from poems from the beginning of time, with a paragraph attached to each quoted moment speculating on how it came into the poet’s mind. An entertaining book, perhaps, and an enticing introduction to poetry: but as for the critical content, speculation is all that it would be. The truth is that Seamus Heaney had no clue where he got his picture of the porpoises as the flywheels of the tide: it was just something he could always do and the other boys couldn’t.

  •

  Looking back through these pages, I catch myself in a posture about the ‘Ode on Melancholy’. Like any other work of literature, it is my favourite only when I am reading it. One of the characteristics of a work of art is to drive all the other works of art temporarily out of your head. If comparisons come flooding in, it means that the work’s air of authority is a sham. No such fears with the ‘Ode on Melancholy’, which, at the time I first went mad about it, I could recite from memory – well, almost. In the matter of memorization, length sets severe limits. Hence the absurdity in the final scene of the movie Truffaut made out of Ray Bradbury’s supposedly prophetic dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451. People walk around in the forest reciting Anna Karenina, etc. A nice idea, but wishful thinking, even when applied to poems. In the old Soviet Union, where, for obvious reasons, there was a great emphasis on memorizing contemporary poems, the manuscript still counted. People remembered things only until they could get them safely written down.

  Interlude

  When Don Paterson asked me to write an introductory essay for Picador’s projected collection of Michael Donaghy’s critical writing, I saw immediately how such a piece might fit into a Poetry Notebook. So far I had several times touched upon the connection between poetry and the criticism of poetry, but I had not pursued the matter. When talking about Donaghy, the subject was unavoidable. He had put the adult part of his short lifetime into resolving just those two forces: to create, and to understand. His career also raised the topic of the relationship, in modern times, between Britain
and America, as it was acted out in the literary haunts of London. Questions of national origin need not necessarily play a crucial part in the appreciation of a poem, but they often play a part in the history of how poetry gets written. Donaghy never lost his American voice, but there was an element in his critical prose that might not have been expected: definitely not from Deadwood, he was a deep believer in the formal element. Even when they sounded casual, his poems were dedicated to that conviction. His work was an example of the daunting thoroughness by which Americans, when they put their minds to it, can be better at making our stuff than we are, starting with moleskin trousers and elastic-sided boots. Daunted though we might be, however, we need to remember that this branch of American cultural imperialism is no more threatening than a dream come true. We wanted a world of the arts, and we got it. Donaghy enjoyed the cultural paradoxes that came with international territory. Even beyond his untimely death, his every paragraph is alive with delight, as critical prose ought to be.

  THE DONAGHY NEGOTIATION

  First published as the introduction to Michael Donaghy, The Shape of the Dance, 2009

  Michael Donaghy’s death at fifty was a cruel blow but he had already done enough as a writer of poetry to establish himself firmly among recent poets who matter. His achievement as a writer about poetry, however, is still in the process of being assessed and absorbed. The first and best thing to say about his critical writing, I think, is that it was necessary, even when that fact was not yet generally realized. If we can see now why his views on poetry were so vital, it is because they help us to recognize what was missing. Nobody else in his generation had such a generous yet discriminating scope. It is still the kind of scope we need, but now we have his example. He called true poetry ‘the alchemical pay-off’, and his criticism shows how prose can be that too.