Drinks with Dead Poets

by Glyn Maxwell

  *

  The Saddlers is busy with breakfasters, I see the clock says eleven-twenty, these are brunchers brunching. I take a little table in the midst of it all. There are two couples, one with a child, three young men in anoraks, a grave old chap my age who smiles, ha! the old ones are the best, it’s only me in a gilded mirror. All except he and I are busy and chatty with the clement weather, its – clemency? Its mercy? If it’s mercy, what had we done?

  I find myself at the Reception desk, leafing through the Book.

  Mrs Adem Amherst Massachuselts October Third.

  So she was here, I knew that.

  ‘That’s not her real name, sir,’ points out the desk-boy.

  Oh is it not.

  ‘Doom is the house without the door, it enters from the sun,’ he adds, evidently changed for life in his black ring-neck sweater.

  Very much so (I say). Dust is the only secret.

  ‘Parting is all we need of hell.’

  I guess. If you work on Reception. (He looks hurt and I smile to heal) Your own self you should have more pity on.

  ‘I’ve not learned that one, sir.’

  That was me. I’m a poet too.

  ‘Sounds good. At the Academy?’

  No, I teach in a room off the village hall. There’s a kettle, d’you have a Father Hopkins staying here tonight?

  ‘I’m checking that, sir. . . no, sir. Actually there’s no one.’

  *

  Samira meets me at the Cross Keys. I suggest we sit in the garden but she has allergies, so I watch the blessed morning through a porthole window, then turn as she’s unclicking a poem from a ringbinder. She’s wearing a turquoise headscarf. She sits back, enlaces her fingers in conference, and waits till she herself says:

  ‘It’s a sonnet.’

  Which is its problem.

  ‘Explain?’

  A sonnet doesn’t have to know exactly where it’s going, Samira, but it’s aware it’s a sonnet. It’s put its good shoes on, has stood up in them. Whereas in this – emotions crash in, thoughts crash in – you didn’t mean them to – there should be white space they come to fill, and gaps of bites they leave behind. The creature of this poem is being buffeted, assailed, it’s not in control of matters. It didn’t choose to write this, it got chosen to by you. I’d break it up into couplets or three-liners, you can keep it bound with your rhymes and that, they can reach across the drops. Whoever it’s about –

  ‘It’s not about anyone.’

  Then, the, You in it – the You in it doesn’t know or care it’s a sonnet and shouldn’t be helping it to set like –

  ‘It’s not about anyone.’

  – cake. Fine. Good.

  ‘There isn’t anyone.’

  Then – be afraid theres no one (I do the scary voice)

  ‘There isn’t no one either.’

  Fine. So show me no one. Can I meet him? (whoops)

  ‘Who says it’s a him? Not that it matters, it’s not.’ She takes the poem back: ‘Can I ask when you will return our last assignments?’ What.

  ‘When we were made to hate someone, or pity them, or have the hots’ It’s just an exercise, you don’t need it back. Jump a hurdle, tone a muscle.

  ‘I don’t have the hots.’

  Did you like that exercise?

  ‘I don’t trust dice. I can’t write things I don’t feel. I don’t want things out there that may be used against me.’

  *

  Heath doesn’t want to sit outside either so he slides in where she was. He already has a beer but didn’t bring any poems.

  ‘Working on something major.’

  I look forward to it.

  ‘Not for you, for format.’

  Oh right. What’s Format.

  ‘Rupture equals structure. Monday afternoons. Me and Bronzo take it.’

  Lily, I’m with you, The Academy. Rupture equals what?

  ‘The equals is an equals sign, it doesn’t say equals, it’s rupture = structure.’

  And Format is – the subject?

  ‘format’s the professor. Small f, italics. He’s cool. He doesn’t self-identify as female or male or anything. He says he has a first name but we have to solve it, he’s left clues all round the village.’

  I think you’ll find it’s Wayne.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Nothing. Why are you taking my course if it doesn’t get you any credits.

  ‘Why? format said you’re old school. Good to know what I’m up against.’

  Up against? You’re not up against me, Heath.

  ‘That’s not your decision, is it.’

  Guess not. What else did format say.

  ‘He said you only know three things but you really fucking know them.’

  Way to go, format. That does sound like me.

  *

  Niall sat watching us through his fringe for a while, leaning by the bar, then when Heath stood up he came over. The two of them did some three-part fist thing, ‘sup. . .sup,’ men have to do nowadays, and then Heath moved off and Niall sat.

  What is up? I wonder.

  ‘I like it here,’ he mutters, surprising us both.

  It’s hard to tell if you do.

  ‘No, because if I didn’t I’d leave, I’d go somewhere where I did.’

  Somewhere where, where would you go, Niall.

  ‘Away.’

  Away. . . (I have to ask, and you have to blame the blue sky) Niall I don’t want you to take this the wrong way but I don’t know where I am or how I got here.

  ‘Oh I know.’

  You know where we are and how we got here?

  ‘No I know you don’t know. I know that about everyone.’

  Sure. Do you know when we can leave?

  At the end of term, I suppose.’

  So will we be home for Christmas, Niall?

  ‘I thought you’d know, at your age.’

  I thought I’d know at my age.

  ‘Also,’ he falters, ‘I don’t – much want to be home for Christmas.’

  Oh. Okay. Okay if I am? Feel free to join us. Mulled wine, trimmings, Monopoly, Triv.

  At a loss, he rubs his chin as if testing for stubble. There isn’t any, I back off the poor soul:

  Guess you don’t know anything either.

  ‘I know every picture on the walls of this pub and could tell you them if you asked me.’ Though I don’t, he shuts his eyes. ‘Left of the door: horses streaming over a hedge. Next a lady in Edwardian costume. Then a high mountain scene painted by a local. Behind me a map of the clans of Scotland. A white cow with three brown patches – ’

  Show me a poem eh man.

  He sighs like he’d hoped I’d forgotten. Digs two out, stares, disowns them as he passes them over.

  But they’re damn good. Short lines trying to be free, blown back in on themselves, blown back at line’s end to fail and fray and try again, with the white space crying stop there little sailor till Niall hears it and has to.

  I am about to tell him I think he’s really good at this lark.

  And I tried not to, for as long as ever. There’s no going back once someone’s told you you’re good at this lark. I looked right in his eyes through his fringe and still wouldn’t tell him, I was grieving at my power.

  *

  Jackself will do this class outside. This may be the last blue day of the year, the last blue day of my life or the world’s, we are going to find a field for it, a tree to shelter by, and the poets of all time can come and find us, maybe tell us where we are.

  *

  July 22 [1872]. Very hot, though the wind, which was south, dappled very sweetly on ones face and when I came out I seemed to put it on like a gown as a man puts on the shadow he walks into and hoods or hats himself with the shelter of a roof a penthouse, or a copse of trees, I mean it rippled and fluttered like light linen, one could feel the folds and braids of it – and indeed a floating flag is like wind visible and what weeds are in a current; it gives it thew and fires it and bl
oods it in.

  Hopkins’ journals are rich and painterly – he painted – they bubble with his vivid scrutiny. In the spontaneity of the prose – the ‘I seemed’, ‘I mean’, ‘indeed’ – you hear the creature striving to set it all down especially, there’s not usually much time for reflection, very little ‘how this makes me feel’, not even that much God – except when Wales looks so amazing from a hill he feels the need to convert it – anyway all his breath is taken up transporting beauty into words.

  It was a lovely day: shires-long of pearled cloud under cloud, with a grey stroke underneath marking each row; beautiful blushing yellow in the straw of the uncut rye-fields, the wheat looking white and all the ears making a delicate and very true crisping along the top and with just enough air stirring for them to come and go gently. . .

  This isn’t today’s exercise, do it when I’m away, but you should stop right where you are and stare at something, not move until it’s turned to words. Until it’s turned to words so truly the thing itself floats home to heaven. You’ll be crouching there forever but I will give you an A.

  An A means nothing these days,’ Ollie calls out from where he’s stretched in the grass.

  An A star then.

  ‘Got four of them already,’ says Lily equally sadly.

  An actual star then. I dunno, Polaris. Alpha Centauri.

  ‘Keep talking,’ and I do: Look, how bluebells make you feel isn’t part of describing bluebells. Praising God isn’t either. This is:

  In the clough / through the light / they came in falls of sky-colour washing the brows and slacks of the ground with vein-blue, thickening at the double, vertical themselves and the young grass and brake fern combed vertical, but the brake struck the upright of all this with light winged transomes. It was a lovely sight. – The bluebells in your hand baffle you with their inscape, made to every sense –

  Samira has her hand up.

  We’re sitting in a yellow-black meadow, by an oak tree. We walked twenty minutes south-east from the village to get here, Iona said she’d lead us like a nursery class, in a crocodile, she smiled and took the register, here miss, here miss, some of them held hands. On the way we passed a complex of sandy-coloured buildings, grassy squares and water features, which she saw me peering at.

  ‘The Academy,’ she said. ‘No dawdling.’

  We left it behind us and walked over and over the meadow through the longer and longer grass to the greatest of seven trees. From here if you look back you see the long bored roofs of the student halls, the indignant tower of the church. To the east on the hillside I can see the far tunnel where the train appeared that time. The landscape is yellowy bright and peaceful, an autumn surprise.

  I and Niall and Heath are in the shade of the oak, the rest spread out in the afternoon sun like they couldn’t go another step. Ollie’s lying face down and is not his cheerful self. I presume Samira is about to mention allergies again.

  Yes Samira.

  ‘Hopkin says It was a lovely sight. That is how it makes Hopkin feel. That’s not pure description, which you implied it was.’

  Good. Yes. Well. He’s taking a breath. Is Hopkins.

  Lily looks up from her infinite daisy-chain: ‘You always have an answer.’

  Yeah weird that.

  ‘And what does he mean by inscape?’ says someone, obviously.

  I was waiting for someone to ask that.

  So I find my place in a book I’ve had since school and boom out like a bird reminding all souls what we’ve come for:

  I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon,

  in his riding

  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

  High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

  In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

  As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl

  and gliding

  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

  Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

  ‘A-B-B-A-A-B-B-A,’ Niall notes to himself: ‘the rhyme scheme.’ ‘You’re havin a laugh,’ says Lily.

  ‘He’s right,’ says Ollie.

  ‘Who asked you,’ asks Lily Bronzo, and Heath says ‘what’s inscape.’

  I was sitting on the grass to read, now I’m kneeling and alert. This is where poetry brings me, upward to my knees:

  So three brand-new things you’ll meet when you meet Hopkins. Inscape! Instress! Sprung Rhythm! You can ask him about the first two, they’re his own words, or if you’re shy go and look in the books in the wood. I’m more interested in the third.

  ‘Should we be taking notes?’ wonders Caroline from behind great Jackie-O shades.

  ‘It doesn’t feel like class,’ says Lily, poking a straw in her juice-carton, ‘it feels like coming outside for a story. It’s too nice to take notes guys.’ She’s right. I tell them:

  Newsflash, it’s not October it’s July! It’s not autumn it’s still summer! I forbid any mention of coldness or darkness, the colours brown and orange are not to be entertained!

  At least say those in-thing words again,’ Caroline pleads, ‘I have no idea what they are.’

  No!

  Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

  Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

  Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

  The accents are for stress. They differ between editions, and he’s not consistent with them, but we keep Emily’s dashes so we keep Gerard’s accents. Odd punctuation’s always a signpost that something’s not bedded down in the culture, something’s bristling, woken up. For you don’t have to read much Hopkins to see that — as with Emily, sixteen years older and three thousand miles away – the style stood in almost total isolation from the traditions and conventions of the time.

  They went unknown. Emily left barely a mark on her day. Gerard wrote poems at Oxford, burned them all, trained to be and became a Jesuit, and after seven years’ abnegation started writing poems again. But, apart from the odd glimpse in little journals, Father Hopkins S.J. saw nothing in print. His great friend Robert Bridges is now perhaps as well known for getting a volume of Hopkins published as he is for being one of the Poet Laureates. Poets Laureate. Whatever.

  By then it’s 1918, twenty-nine years after Hopkins. At last his lamp could shine as it should and now he stands where he stands.

  ‘How’s he getting here, do we know?’ asks Caroline, and I don’t. I haven’t checked anything with Kerri, for damn the village hall I just wanted to be in the sunshine while it lasted.

  Prosody lecture. Short. What I just read you, the first half of’The Windhover’, is clearly not iambic (da-DUM) or trochaic (DAD-um) or dactylic (DA-da-dum) or anapestic (da-da-DUM) – which brings us to the end of my Prosody Lecture – but at various times it’s any of these. It just deploys them where it needs to.

  Hopkins – like me, as it happens – thought Greek rules of prosody were useless for English. What he wrote in he called Sprung Rhythm, the sources of which were alliterative Old English and rhyme-rich Old Welsh. Each stress is followed by one un-stress (‘MOR-ning’) or two un-stresses (‘MAS-te-ry’), or three un-stresses (‘RUNG up-on the’). These endlessly varying forms are deployed wherever Hopkins feels them or finds them.

  Another word for this is, arguably, prose.

  If you – like me again, as it happens – find it physically uncomfortable, literally nauseating – to apply rules of prosody to poetry, you can at least hear that the inner rhythms of a Hopkins poem change incessantly like prose.

  And yet there’s no major poet in English who sounds less like prose:

  Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the
stooks rise

  Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behavior

  Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier

  Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

  I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;

  And, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

  Not prose. Well spotted. Stanzaic patterns, outrageous rhymes – how about behaviour I wavier I Saviour I gave you a? in your face, Byron the alliteration, assonance – all these are strung too tight for that – but it’s the rhythm we re looking at. Trying to make a thing of Sprung Rhythm, God forbid trying to write in it – feels like missing the point. Some poets want to know how they’re doing what they’re doing. I don’t, Hopkins did, he was a skilled draughtsman.

  Here’s the creature turning its head, scratching and gasping as its scribbles in a journal:

  (Hey look) Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise around;(look up there) up above, what wind-walks! (oh my) what lovely behavior of silk-sack clouds! (I wonder) has wilder, willful-wavier (what’s it like?) meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

  That seems to me like his journal on fire. As if he retrospectively named something that burst from him like water from, well, a spring – ecstatic heightened prose that he shaped into verse-forms.

  What would a poet look like if he or she wrote in ecstatic heightened prose that wasn’t shaped into verse-forms?

  For the lands, and for these passionate days, and for myself,

  Now I awhile return to thee, O soil of Autumn fields,

  Reclining on thy breast, giving myself to thee,

  Answering the pulses of thy sane and equable heart,

  Tuning a verse for thee. . .

  I wait a bit. When the wind blows and chills us I remember it’s October, but am damned if I’ll be cold. The sun is shining and I’m listening.

  Heath is sitting there cross-legged, head down, head up:

  ‘Whitman.’