Drinks with Dead Poets

by Glyn Maxwell

  Go, Mr Bannen. The most interesting poet to compare Hopkins with isn’t Alfred Lord Tennyson, or Master Robert Browning, the garlanded superstars of his day – or Dylan Thomas, an echo down the valley – but Long Island’s Walter Whitman, another spring, arguably the wellspring of American free verse, and ours too.

  Most of the canonical poets I grew up on set their souls to verse, in forms that existed already – sonnets, songs, ballads, pentameters. They stripped and breathed and stepped in a wide running river. Not Hopkins and not Whitman. Hopkins’ forms are strained into existence to bear the force of his spiritual joys and miseries, Whitman’s to carry the surge of his awe at earthly plenty. One verse is highly formal, the other seems in flight from any form at all, but they strike me as kindred powers.

  For neither poet are the resources of the poetry of his day enough.

  When I read the best free verse I hear eddies of this feeling, declined perhaps, but echoes of its force – I need this fresh form of mine to carry what I feel alone. This is why so many of the great free verse writers, the originators, seem gnarled and unique, often hard to fathom as people. It’s not a small thing to cry this into the Void — let alone the void – there is nothing YET BEEN MADE to carry my goddamned song!

  People are staring.

  Of course Hopkins is not a writer of free verse, come on, and only I would claim him as one of its forebears (and only when teaching outside in a field in a dream in a coma) but while you listen to some more – he may not want to read us any poems, he may be shy, he may not come at all – maybe bear in mind these things: rap, performance, hip-hop, their ingenuity, their bravado, the babble of close sounds, one word helplessly hatching its neighbour, see if anything strikes you as cousin to this work.

  And before that will someone please open the Pimms, we are here to pretend it’s summer.

  And they do, and Iona’s sending round cloudy plastic beakers blue pink and green, and Lily’s pouring the Pimms in a jug, and Caroline’s adding the chalky lemonade, the fruit dropping in in a clump with a splash, and everyone moves from one posture to the next to accept the gift in the long dry grass, though Barry Wilby mumbles, frowning at some private mishap, ‘Got me dandelion’ n’burdock,’ and the breeze comes, leaves flutter and fall and no one says so, and I can’t stay here forever, I’ll be off soon, I will find out where I am and be off soon, get back to my dear life but in the meantime. . .

  How to keep – is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep

  Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty,. . . from vanishing away?

  O is there no frowning of these wrinkles, rankéd wrinkles deep,

  Dówn? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?

  No there’s none, there’s none, O no there’s none,

  Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair. . .

  There is a pressure from above – the direction from which a believer feels a Presence – a divine downward pressure on the language. This is why the words can’t move far, or change much, it’s like the Presence forcing time into stone into minerals into jewels -bow brooch braid brace lace latch catch key keep - bursting chrysalises into butterflies – lace latch catch key keep back BEAUTY BEAUTY BEAUTY – there is a religious gladness in succumbing to this pressure, a bliss in undergoing it, undertaking it, I shall inch from word to word like an insect, feeling every one though it pleases me or pains me, I shall let each word be heated by the Light as it passes, glow red and glow no more, harm and hurt and heal and help me!

  After seven years of poetic silence, when he thought verse incompatible with his calling as a priest, two things happened to Hopkins. He dwelt on the work of the medieval scholar Duns Scotus, which made him think again, then the drowning of five nuns in a Thames estuary shipwreck forced this from the dark –

  Thou mastering me

  God! giver of breath and bread;

  World’s strand, sway of the sea;

  Lord of living and dead;

  Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,

  And after it almost unmade, what with dread,

  Thy doing; and dost thou touch me afresh?

  Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

  I did say yes

  O at lightning and lashed rod;

  Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess

  Thy terror, O Christ, O God;

  Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night:

  The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod

  Hard down with a horror of height:

  And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.

  The frown of his face

  Before me, the hurtle of hell

  Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?

  I whirled out wings that spell

  Aad fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host.

  My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell,

  Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast,

  To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace

  to the grace.

  I am soft sift

  In an hourglass

  So am I, grace or not, and I will attest in purgatory, in hell – failing these when I make it home to Angel – that the reason this poem is 280 lines long, far longer than anything else of his and way longer than it needs to be, is his boundless joy at making verse again. Any true poet will tell you that, the believers and the non: it’s the joy of mastery fused with the bliss of being mastered, and if not by God by language, by the creditors of oxygen, by time that’s stopped to listen.

  *

  As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

  As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

  Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

  Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

  Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

  Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

  Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

  Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. . . ’

  He didn’t come by train or carriage, he was suddenly there far-off on the hillside, a slight figure resolving as we chatted and watched into a short fair-haired gent approaching in the trim, fastened clothes of his day. By that time Kerri Bedward had hurried here from the village, from the opposite direction, escorted by the beaming stranger in his anorak, saying nothing. Kerri was wondering where on earth we’d got to, so of course I said:

  On earth we got to here.

  ‘The reading’s in the village hall.’

  No it isn’t, it’s right here in the village field (I told her with the late-summer freedom of the dream I’m having).

  Then the beaming guy in the anorak saying nothing said politely: Academy property, this meadow as it goes, but you’re more than welcome to use it, Mr Maxwell, just inform us next time.’

  I’m informing you by being here. And there is no next time, there’s only time. Here comes Father Hopkins.

  The beaming guy mislaid his beam, reset it, then turned to face wherever it was needed next. Kerri walked forward in a sulk to meet our arriving guest, and Iona, a better lady than me, passed me lemonade to offer him.

  *

  ‘I say móre: the just man justices;

  Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

  Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —

  Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

  Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

  To the Father through the features of men’s faces.’

  He lowered his book down and we clapped. He’d said he’d read for ten minutes but he read for almost twenty. Barry unzipped a big blue sports-bag that turned out to be full of rolls and fruits in paper bags, and we sat ar
ound all lunching, dining, the sun was lower now than summer, it’s autumn, fall, it was trying to say it kindly.

  I didn’t know how to address him, so I plunged in at the height: Father Hopkins, would it be all right if my students asked some questions?

  Of course he’d just taken a big bite of a roll so we all laughed as he nodded and waved with a muffled yes, and Iona started out with the understatement of the ages: ‘It’s so lovely to hear you read your work.’

  He’d sat down in the shade but his eyes were in the late sun now and he shielded them as he sought her in the blaze:

  ‘My verse is less to be read than heard,’ he began politely,

  See? (I hissed to Lily who was nearby) he’s a performance poet. . .

  ‘It’s oratorical, the rhythm. I don’t write for the public. . .’

  ‘Their loss, eh!’ Barry chortled, and I cut in before he could ask Dr Hoskins where he gets his ideas –

  Wouldn’t you like people to read you?

  He smiled and shrugged, ‘It’s the holier lot, to be unknown.’ He meant to leave it at that but couldn’t quite: ‘it always seems to me that poetry’s unprofessional,’

  You mean it isn’t a profession?

  Far off towards the village I glimpsed the Academy chap crossing the field with Kerri. To do what instead of this?

  Hopkins went on:

  ‘That’s what I’ve said to myself, not others to me. No doubt if I kept producing I should have to ask myself what I meant to do with it all – but I’ve long been at a standstill, and so the things lie.’

  Samira had her hand up, but Lily advanced, blocking his view of her, and wagging grapes at him: ‘After you’ve had some grapes, can you say about what it was like to burn all your poems that time cos I could never do that even when they’re rubbish I do like burning things just not my own shit right?’

  He lowered a branch of grapes to his palm, and said nothing for a moment.

  There’s nothing you have to answer, I said: Samira what’s your question?

  Lily glanced round with scorn and Samira’s eyes flashed back in retort:

  ‘I want to know what Sprung Rhythm is, it’s not been properly explained at all.’

  At this the poet looked up, put a grape in his mouth and thought a little, said this, as if trying to remember, as if trying to piece together, ‘Winter of’75. . . the Deutschland, in the mouth of the Thames. . . My rector said he wished someone would write a poem on the subject. I’d – long had, haunting my ear – the echo of a new rhythm. Which now I realized on paper.’

  Samira scribbled in shorthand, looked up, ready for more.

  ‘It consists in – scanning by accents or stresses alone – without any account of the number of syllables. A foot may be one strong syllable, or many light and one strong. I don’t say the idea’s new -there are hints of it in music, in nursery rhymes. Ding, dong, bell; Pussy s in the well, Who put her in? Little Johnny Thin!

  Someone snickered and he broke off shyly. I rushed to his aid:

  Got that, everyone? Now it’s explained.

  But it wasn’t, for he added:

  ‘It’s the nearest to the – native, natural rhythm of speech, the least forced – the most rhetorical and emphatic.’

  Ollie spoke: ‘Where did you sort of – get it from, Brother Gerard?’

  (‘Get it from! Lily scoffed, ‘like on eBay’)

  ‘So far as I know,’ said Hopkins, reaching for his lemonade, ‘it existed in full force in Anglo Saxon verse. . . in great beauty. In Piers Ploughman – ’

  A fine work (I told them) I studied it at Oxford -

  ‘– in a degraded and doggerel shape.’

  Oh. He ploughed on as the students giggled and he brushed away old Langland: ‘I’m coming to the conclusion that it’s not worth reading.’

  ‘There’s you told, chief,’ Lily gleefully whispered, and Gerard, sensing, said kindly to me: ‘Of Oxford I was very fond. I became a Catholic there.’

  You were Balliol (I ventured) I was Worcester (as we do) hey we were neighbours!

  Heath couldn’t give a shit: ‘What d’you reckon to Whitman.’

  ‘How about Dylan Thomas?’ piped up Ollie and I said stick with Whitman.

  ‘He don’t know about Dylan Thomas,’ said Barry Wilby out of the blue.

  Whitman (I said again), what do you think he’s up to?

  Gerard sighed at length and got comfortable on the rug.

  ‘I can’t have read more than half a dozen pieces. Enough.’

  ‘Enough for what,’ said Heath the way Heath does.

  ‘To give a strong impression of – his marked, original manner. In particular his rhythm.’

  Do you think it resembles yours? (I wondered.)

  He had the last of his grapes and threw the sprig off in the meadow.

  ‘I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be – more like my own than any other man living.’

  He let that take its course. Then he smiled around our rapt assembly: ‘As he’s a very great scoundrel this isn’t a pleasant confession. Also makes me more desirous to read him – and more determined that I won’t.’

  ‘Ha! Why’s he a scoundrel?’ Lily wanted to know, and Hopkins shook his head as if he’d gone too far and let’s not stray from the work. He leaned and took a piece of Dutch cheese Iona had cut for him and held out on the cheeseboard.

  ‘There’s something in my long lines like his. That the one would remind people of the other. Both are irregular rhythms. There the likeness ends.’

  ‘D’you rate it though,’ Heath pressed him.

  ‘His – his savage style has advantages, and he’s chosen it, he says so. But you can’t eat your cake and keep it. He eats his offhand, I keep mine. I notice a preference for the alexandrine.’

  Long line, six stresses –

  He nodded: ‘I’ve the same preference. I came to it by degrees, I didn’t take it from him.’

  (Enough on Whitman) You know, Father Hopkins, I once found a form I couldn’t stop with, like you, I mean, with sprung rhythm, for me it was terza rima – it seemed infinite to me.

  He looked puzzled.

  ‘English terza rima is – so far as I’ve seen it – badly made and tedious.’

  Well (I said, nettled into the following nonsense) it maybe was, then, before, I mean but that was before, I mean, who knows, I’ve not done it yet oh and Shelley, Ode to the West Wind! (everyone’s looking at me) Caroline.

  ‘Yes. . . yes I love your poems, Reverend Father,’ she said, resuming slicing a peach, ‘but I wonder do you think they are hard to understand? Sometimes, just a tad?’

  ‘No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness,’ he said crisply.

  ‘Oh I don’t mind that at all,’

  ‘Obscurity I do try to avoid. . . but as melody is what strikes me most of all in music – and design in painting – so design, pattern – or what I’m in the habit of calling inscape – is what I aim at in poetry.’

  In the silence I pray skywards no one asks about inscape, and they don’t, because they’re tiring, but Hopkins, gazing off towards the nearest neighbour-oak to ours, says quietly, of it, piece by piece: ‘To be determined and distinctive is – a perfection, either self-bestowed – or – bestowed from without.’

  I drink to that. (And I drink to that.)

  Lily pipes up, ‘I’ve got a question but I forgot it, so just hang on Brother Father Your Graceful Holiness, hang on while I remember?’

  He smiles, presents his palms to say of course, and meanwhile Heath steps in, no truck with the honorifics: ‘What d’you reckon to Wordsworth, mate?’

  ‘Inimitable. Unapproachable.’

  ‘Yes!’ Lily cries in delight, ‘That’s what it was, my question, Keats! We know him, he was cool he threw up, do you rate him?’

  Gerard lifts a hand, takes a breath, and Lily gapes in expectation of success, with which the priest now handsomely provides her:

  ‘Astonishing,’ is the verdict, unequa
lled at his age. Scarcely surpassed at any. One may – surmise whether – if he’d lived – he’d not have rivaled Shakespeare.’

  ‘Yesss,’ Lily hisses, fists clenched in victory, and also, also, more like a personal question, and not being funny right, but how d’you know a good poem, does like your head come off and stuff?’

  Hopkins is smiling, maybe trying to catch up, so –

  How do you know a good poem? (I translate for the good fellow). He ponders and says: ‘Lines and stanzas should be left in the memory. . . I’m sure I’ve read and enjoyed pages of poetry that way. Sometimes one enjoys and admires the very lines one can’t understand. If it were done when ’tis done – is all obscure and disputed, though how fine it is everybody sees and nobody disputes.’

  Nobody disputed. The wind blew quite chill now and I heard someone shiver aloud. And I murmured as I uprose and staggered, knowing where Hamlet was going with that: The be-all and the end all. . .

  *

  What else was there. . . We were standing for a while, I remember, for when I rose they rose for the onset of leave-taking, and someone saw the first star, was it Ollie? though Samira said it’s Venus and Lily muttered is it bowlocks.

  And Gerard took some wine, I recall, some red I think, I see him standing there with us, jolly in our group in the dusky meadow, it was as if our picnic went on informally, upright, and I think at that point Samira asked a question about the Classics. She knew them well, tended to bring them up, and wondered why he didn’t allude to them more often.

  Are you doing that to be different?’

  He snorted at this and had a bit of a rant, I remember: ‘The Greek Gods!’

  ‘They’re not in your poems at all, are they,’

  ‘Totally unworkable material – ’

  ‘What? How can you say that?’ she shrieked, thrilled to have set him off –

  ‘– which chill and kill every work of art they’re brought into,’

  Oh my god this man is a crazy man!’

  ‘Not gentlemen or ladies!’ he cried, cowards, without majesty, without awe, foresight, character!’

  ‘He’s just written off most of English literature,’ she informed us,

  ‘What did Athene do after leaving Ulysses?’

  ‘She – wait,’

  ‘Lounged back to Olympus to afternoon nectar! Nothing can be made of it!’