The impression is of a sudden mobilizing of the poet’s will, a clearing of his vision, as if from sitting considering possibilities and impossibilities he stood up to act. Pictures of things no longer interest him much: he wants their substance, their nature and their consequences in life. At once, and quite suddenly, his mind is whole…. He is a renovator of language. It is not that he uses words in jolting combinations, or with titanic extravagance, or curious precision. His triumph is in the way he renews the simplicity of ordinary talk…. The music that goes along with this … is the natural path of such confident, candid thinking…. A utility general purpose style that combines a colloquial prose readiness with poetic breadth, a ritual intensity of music with clear direct feeling, and yet in the end is nothing but casual speech.
This combination of ritual intensity, prose readiness, direct feeling and casual speech can be discovered likewise in the best poems of Lupercal, because in Hawk in the Rain and indeed in much of Wodwo and Crow, we are often in the presence of that titanic extravagance Hughes mentions, speech not so much mobilizing and standing up to act as flexing and straining until it verges on the grotesque. But in poems like ‘Pike’, ‘Hawk Roosting’, ‘The Bull Moses’ and ‘An Otter’ we get this confident, speedy, hammer-and-tongs proficiency. And in this poem from Wodwo, called ‘Pibroch’, a poem uniquely Hughesian in its very title, fetching energy and ancestry from what is beyond the pale and beneath the surface, we have the elements of the Scottish piper’s ceol mor, the high style, implicit in words like ‘dead’, ‘heaven’, ‘universe’, ‘aeon’, ‘angels’, and in phrases like ‘the foetus of God’, ‘the stars bow down’ – a phrase which cunningly makes its cast and raises Blake in the pool of the ear. We have elements of this high style, ritual intensity, whatever you want to call it; and we have also the ‘prose readiness’, the ‘casual speech’ of ‘bored’, ‘hangs on’, ‘lets up’, ‘tryout’, and the workaday cadences of ‘Over the stone rushes the wind’, and ‘her mind’s gone completely’. The landscape of the poem is one that the Anglo-Saxon wanderer or seafarer would be completely at home in:
The sea cries with its meaningless voice
Treating alike its dead and its living,
Probably bored with the appearance of heaven
After so many millions of nights without sleep,
Without purpose, without self-deception.
Stone likewise. A pebble is imprisoned
Like nothing in the Universe.
Created for black sleep. Or growing
Conscious of the sun’s red spot occasionally,
Then dreaming it is the foetus of God.
Over the stone rushes the wind
Able to mingle with nothing,
Like the hearing of the blind stone itself.
Or turns, as if the stone’s mind came feeling
A fantasy of directions.
Drinking the sea and eating the rock
A tree struggles to make leaves –
An old woman fallen from space
Unprepared for these conditions.
She hangs on, because her mind’s gone completely.
Minute after minute, aeon after aeon,
Nothing lets up or develops.
And this is neither a bad variant nor a tryout.
This is where the staring angels go through.
This is where all the stars bow down.
Hughes attempts to make vocal the inner life, the simple being-thereness, ‘the substance, nature and consequences in life’ of sea, stone, wind and tree. Blake’s pebble and tiger are shadowy presences in the background, as are the landscapes of Anglo-Saxon poetry. And the whole thing is founded on rock, that rock which Hughes presented in his autobiographical essay as his birthstone, holding his emergence in place just as his headstone will hold his decease:
This was the memento mundi over my birth: my spiritual midwife at the time and my godfather ever since – or one of my godfathers. From my first day it watched. If it couldn’t see me direct, a towering gloom over my pram, it watched me through a species of periscope: that is, by infiltrating the very light of my room with its particular shadow. From my home near the bottom of the south-facing slope of the valley, the cliff was both the curtain and backdrop to existence.
I quote this piece because it links the childhood core with the adult opus, because that rock is the equivalent in his poetic landscape of dialect in his poetic speech. The rock persists, survives, sustains, endures and informs his imagination, just as it is the bedrock of the language upon which Hughes founds his version of survival and endurance.
*
Stone and rock figure prominently in the world of Geoffrey Hill’s poetry also, but Hill’s imagination is not content to grant the mineral world the absolute sway that Hughes allows it. He is not the suppliant chanting to the megalith, but rather the mason dressing it. Hill also beats the bounds of an England, his own native West Midlands, beheld as a medieval England facing into the Celtic mysteries of Wales and out towards the military and ecclesiastical splendours of Europe. His Mercian Hymns names his territory Mercia, and masks his imagination under the figure of King Offa, builder of Offa’s dyke between England and Wales, builder as well as beater of the boundaries. Hill’s celebration of Mercia has a double-focus: one a child’s-eye view, close to the common earth, the hoard of history, and the other the historian’s and scholar’s eye, inquisitive of meaning, bringing time past to bear on time present and vice versa. But the writing itself is by no means abstract and philosophical. Hill addresses the language, as I say, like a mason addressing a block, not unlike his own mason in Hymn XXIV:
Itinerant through numerous domains, of his lord’s retinue, to Compostela. Then home for a lifetime amid West Mercia this master-mason as I envisage him, intent to pester upon tympanum and chancel-arch his moody testament, confusing warrior with lion, dragon-coils, tendrils of the stony vine.
Where best to stand? Easter sunrays catch the oblique face of Adam scrumping through leaves; pale spree of evangelists and, there, a cross Christ mumming child Adam out of Hell
(‘Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum’ dust in the eyes, on clawing wings, and lips)
Not only must English be kept up here, with its ‘spree’ and ‘scrumping’ and ‘mumming’, but Latin and learning must be kept up too. The mannered rhetoric of these pieces is a kind of verbal architecture, a grave and sturdy English Romanesque. The native undergrowth, both vegetative and verbal, that barbaric scrollwork of fern and ivy, is set against the tympanum and chancel-arch, against the weighty elegance of imperial Latin. The overall pattern of his language is an extension and a deliberate exploitation of the linguistic effect in Shakespeare’s famous lines, ‘It would the multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red,’ where the polysyllabic flourish of ‘multitudinous’ and ‘incarnadine’ is both set off and undercut by the monosyllabic plainness of ‘making the green one red’, where the Latinate and the local also go hand in glove. There is in Hill something of Stephen Dedalus’s hyperconsciousness of words as physical sensations, as sounds to be plumbed, as weights on the tongue. Words in his poetry fall slowly and singly, like molten solder, and accumulate to a dull glowing nub. I imagine Hill as indulging in a morose linguistic delectation, dwelling on the potential of each word with much the same slow relish as Leopold Bloom dwells on the thought of his kidney. And in Mercian Hymns, in fact, Hill’s procedure resembles Joyce’s not only in this linguistic deliberation and selfconsciousness. For all his references to the ‘precedent provided by the Latin prose-hymns or canticles of the early Christian Church’, what these hymns celebrate is the ‘ineluctable modality of the audible’, as well as the visible, and the form that celebration takes reminds one of the Joycean epiphany, which is a prose poem in effect. But it is not only in the form of the individual pieces that he follows the Joycean precedent; in the overall structuring of the Hymns, he does what Joyce did in Ulysses, confounding modern autobiographical material with literary and
historic matter drawn from the past. Offa’s story makes contemporary landscape and experience live in the rich shadows of a tradition.
To go back to Hymn XXIV, the occasion, the engendering moment, seems to involve the contemplation of a carved pediment – a tympanum is the carved area between the lintel of a door and the arch above it – which exhibits a set of scenes: one of Eden, one of some kind of harrowing of hell; and the scenes are supervised by images of the evangelists. And this cryptic, compressed mode of presentation in which a few figures on stone can call upon the whole body of Christian doctrines and mythology resembles the compression of the piece itself. The carving reminds him of the carver, a master-mason – and the relevant note reads: ‘for the association of Compostela with West Midlands sculpture of the twelfth century I am indebted to G. Zarnecki, Later English Romanesque Sculpture, London (1953).’ This mason is ‘itinerant’ – a word used in its precise Latin sense, yet when applied to a travelling craftsman, that pristine sense seems to foreshadow its present narrowed meaning of tinker, a travelling tinsmith, a whitesmith. In the first phrases the Latinate predominates, for this is a ritual progress, an itinerary ‘through numerous domains, of his lord’s retinue’, to Compostela. Even the proper name flaps out its music like some banner there. But when he gets home, he is momentarily cut down from his grand tour importance to his homely size, in the simple ‘Then home for a lifetime amid West Mercia’; but now the poet/observer of the carving has caught something of the sense of occasion and borrowed something of the mason’s excitement. Yet he does not ‘see in the mind’s eye’, like Hamlet, but ‘envisages’ him, the verb being properly liturgical, ‘intent to pester upon tympanum and chancel-arch his moody testament, confusing warrior with lion, dragon-coils …’ Tympanum, of course, is also a drum, and the verb ‘pester’ manages a rich synaesthetic effect; the stone is made to cackle like a kettle drum as the chisel hits it. But ‘pester’ is more interesting still. Its primary meaning, from the original Latin root, pastorium, means to hobble a horse, and it was used in 1685 to mean ‘crowding persons in or into’. So the mason hobbles and herds and crowds in warrior and lion, dragon coils, tendrils of the stony vine; and this interlacing and entanglement of motifs is also the method of the poem.
In fact, we can see the method more clearly if we put the poem in its proper context, which is in the middle of a group of three entitled Opus Anglicanum. Once again the note is helpful:
‘Opus Anglicanum’: the term is properly applicable to English embroidery of the period AD 1250–1350, though the craft was already famous some centuries earlier…. I have, with considerable impropriety, extended the term to apply to English Romanesque sculpture and to utilitarian metal-work of the nineteenth century.
The entanglement, the interlacing, is now that of embroidery, and this first poem, I suggest, brings together womanly figures from Hill’s childhood memory with the ghostly procession of needleworkers from the medieval castles and convents:
XXIII
In tapestries, in dreams, they gathered, as it was enacted, the return, the re-entry of transcendence into this sublunary world. Opus Anglicanum, their stringent mystery riddled by needles: the silver veining, the gold leaf, voluted grape-vine, masterworks of treacherous thread.
They trudged out of the dark, scraping their boots free from lime-splodges and phlegm. They munched cold bacon. The lamps grew plump with oily reliable light.
Again, the liturgical and Latinate of the first paragraph is abraded and rebutted by the literal and local weight of ‘scraping their boots free from lime-splodges and phlegm’ – the boots being, I take it, the boots of labourers involved in this never-ending Opus Anglicanum, from agricultural origins to industrial developments. And in order just to clinch the thing, consider the third piece, where the ‘utilitarian iron work’ in which his grandmother was involved is contemplated in a perspective that includes medieval embroidress and mason, and a certain ‘transcendence’ enters the making of wire nails:
xxv
Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer’s darg.
The nailshop stood back of the cottage, by the fold. It reeked stale mineral sweat. Sparks had furred its low roof. In dawn-light the troughed water floated a damson-bloom of dust –
not to be shaken by posthumous clamour. It is one thing to celebrate the ‘quick forge’, another to cradle a face hare-lipped by the searing wire.
Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer’s darg.
Ruskin’s eightieth letter reflects eloquently and plangently on the injustice of the master and servant situation, on the exploitation of labour, on the demeaning work in a nail forge. The Mayor of Birmingham took him to a house where two women were at work, labouring, as he says, with ancient Vulcanian skill:
So wrought they, – the English matron and maid; – so it was their darg to labour from morning to evening – seven to seven – by the furnace side – the winds of summer fanning the blast of it.
He goes on to compute that the woman and the husband earn altogether £55 a year with which to feed and clothe themselves and their six children, to reproach the luxury of the mill-owning class, and to compare the wives of industrialists contemplating Burne Jones’s picture of Venus’s mirror ‘with these, their sisters, who had only, for Venus’s mirror, a heap of ashes; compassed about with no forget-me-nots, but with all the forgetfulness in the world’.
It seems to me here that Hill is celebrating his own indomitable Englishry, casting his mind on other days, singing a clan beaten into the clay and ashes, and linking their patience, their sustaining energy, with the glory of England. The ‘quick forge’, after all, may be what its origin in Shakespeare’s Henry V declares it to be, ‘the quick forge and working house of thought’, but it is surely also the ‘random grim forge’ of Felix Randal, the farrier. The image shifts between various points and embroiders a new opus anglicanum in this intended and allusive poem. And the point of the embroidering needle, of course, is darg, that chip off the Anglo-Saxon block, meaning ‘a day’s work, or the task of a day’.
The Mercian Hymns show Hill in full command of his voice. Much as the stiff and corbelled rhetoric of earlier work like ‘Funeral Music’ and ‘Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings’ stands up and will stand up, it is only when this rhetoric becomes a press tightening on and squeezing out of the language the vigour of common speech, the essential Anglo-Saxon juices, it is only then that the poetry attains this final refreshed and refreshing quality: then he has, in the words of another piece, accrued a ‘golden and stinking blaze’.
*
Finally, to come to Larkin, where what accrues in the language is not ‘a golden and stinking blaze’, not the rank and fermenting composts of philology and history, but the bright senses of words worn clean in literate conversation. In Larkin’s language as in his vision of water, ‘any angled light … congregate[s] endlessly’. There is a gap in Larkin between the perceiver and the thing perceived, a refusal to melt through long perspectives, an obstinate insistence that the poet is neither a race memory nor a myth-kitty nor a mason, but a real man in a real place. The cadences and vocabulary of his poems are tuned to a rational music. It would seem that he has deliberately curtailed his gift for evocation, for resonance, for symbolist frissons. He turned from Yeats to Hardy as his master. He never followed the Lawrencian success of his early poem ‘Wedding Wind’ which ends with a kind of biblical swoon, an image of fulfilled lovers ‘kneeling like cattle by all generous waters’. He rebukes romantic aspiration and afflatus with a scrupulous meanness. If he sees the moon, he sees it while groping back to bed after a piss. If he is forced to cry out ‘O wolves of memory, immensements’, he is also forced to recognize that he is past all that swaddling of sentiment, even if it is ‘for others, undiminished, somewhere’. ‘Undim
inished’ – the word, with its hovering balance between attenuated possibilities and the possibility of amplitude, is typical. And Christopher Ricks has pointed out how often negatives operate in Larkin’s best lines. Lovers talking in bed, for example, discover it ever more difficult
to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
His tongue moves hesitantly, precisely, honestly, among ironies and negatives. He is the poet of rational light, a light that has its own luminous beauty but which has also the effect of exposing clearly the truths which it touches. Larkin speaks neither a dialect nor a pulpit language; there are no ‘hectoring large scale verses’ in his three books, nor is there the stubbly intimacy of ‘oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke’ which he nostalgically annotates among the miners. His language would have pleased those Tudor and Augustan guardians who wanted to polish and beautify their speech, to smooth it for art. What we hear is a stripped standard English voice, a voice indeed with a unique break and remorseful tone, but a voice that leads back neither to the thumping beat of Anglo-Saxon nor to the Gregorian chant of the Middle Ages. Its ancestry begins, in fact, when the Middle Ages are turning secular, and plays begin to take their place beside the Mass as a form of communal telling and knowing. In the first few lines of Larkin’s poem ‘Money’, for example, I think I hear the cadences of Everyman, the querulous tones of Riches reproaching the hero:
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