FEBRUARY

AH for pittie, wil ranke Winters rage,

These bitter blasts neuer ginne tasswage?

The kene cold blowes through my beaten hyde,

All as I were through the body gryde.

My ragged rontes all shiver and shake,

As doen high Towers in an earthquake:

They wont in the wind wagge their wrigle tailes,

Perke as Peacock: but nowe it auales.

Kene) sharpe. 

Gride) perced: an olde word much vsed of Lidgate, but not found (that I know of) in Chaucer.

 Ronts) young bullockes

Remembering Poetry

I have an enormous amount of miscellaneous poetry, some passive, some active, in my head at any one time. The passive stuff needs some sort of key to trigger it, like a phrase or image to start the memory processes. Active stuff is almost hardwired for instant recall, such as the lines from the end of Part One of Coleridge's 'Christabel'. (I once knew someone who could recite the whole of T.S Eliot's 'The Waste Land', but that was just showing off!) Remembering, for me, is as much a matter of rhythms and imagery as the actual words. Sometimes the words that I think I remember, even when I'm convinced I remember them precisely, turn out to be slightly different from the actual words of the poet. On one or two occasions when I've discovered this I've still been convinced that my version is was the poet should have written (but that's worse than showing off!).

Here are some lines I thought I'd remembered precisely though I had no memory of their context in a poem:

In elder days of art
Men wrought with utmost care
Each remote and unseen part
For the gods are everywhere.

The lines resonated so I 'remembered' them. But the only thing I could remember about them was that they were from Longfellow. So I looked them up. Here, from Longfellow's poem 'The Builders', are the original lines:

In the elder days of Art,
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part;
For the Gods see everywhere.

So my memory was inaccurate. I'd internalised something that did not have a precise external correlate. But the idea and the form of its expression were what stayed with me. Looking at the rest of the poem I find I don't much care for what Longfellow does with the idea beyond this stanza. The poem as a whole has a rather moralistic tone and , as much as I can also endorse the idea of making the house "where the gods may dwell" I find his expression overall fraught with pseudo-Blakean imagery but tending more towards the homily than the visionary.


So I wish I'd never looked it up. I'm sure I didn't get the verse from reading the whole poem originally and must have seen that stanza quoted somewhere. Perhaps this shouldn't affect the value of the fragment as an inspiring idea. But, somehow, it does.

PORTMEIRION

As a birthday treat, I spent last weekend at Portmeirion . I have visited the place before for the annual lunch of Academi, the organisation for writers in Wales and for the the launch of R.S. Thomas’ recording of himself reading his poetry in a 3-cd set from Sain which was held there when the poet was living in a cottage on the estate.

The village’s current connection with the literary world stems from the fact that it is managed by Robin Llewelyn, a Welsh-language novelist and winner of a National Eisteddfod prose medal. He is also the grandson of Clough Williams-Ellis, the architect who built this extraordinary place between the 1920’s and the 1960’s. It is often referred to as an Italianate village. But this doesn’t go even half-way to describing it. The collection of different structures, all painted in bright colours, ranges from Italianate villas, cottages, pseudo-churches with towers or domes, classical colonnades, statues, ponds, follies and alcoves containing all manner of things. The whole place occupies a narrow valley running steeply down to the sea and looks across an inlet near the town of Porthmadog in Snowdonia.

How does one assess such a place? It is possible to view it as nothing more than a high class theme park created by a romantic eccentric whose time-scale was predominantly ‘retro’. The judgement of Jan Morris, a neighbour of the architect, is that “His early work was recognisably of the Arts and Crafts Movement [but] ended with tentative essays in 1930’s modernism”. It is easy to forget that, in spite of his country squire image (he habitually wore corduroy breeches tucked into yellow stockings and extravagant bow ties), he was quite forward looking on issues such as conservation and the need to regulate urban development. In its early years Portmeirion was a resort of the intelligentsia that Clough Williams-Ellis and his wife Amabel Strachey moved among. But by the 1950’s the public were also being invited in and it grew as a popular tourist destination after the TV series ‘The Prisoner’ was filmed there in the 1960’s.

Nowadays it is at night, when the coach parties have gone, that those staying in the village can relish the trafficless calm of the place and the subtly lit shapes of colonnades, cupolas and towers as ghostly presences in the dark. Statues watch over you as you make your way to the hotel for dinner and the wash of the waves on the hotel terrace are a soothing backdrop to your arrival there. During the day it is possible to escape the crowds by exploring the miles of paths through the surrounding woodlands, themselves containing gazebos, grottoes and swampy hollows full of writhing boughs and twisted branches.

So for me it was an exotic birthday treat. But the final words on Clough William-Ellis and his creation should be left with him. When he was once asked what he stood for he replied “More fun for more people”. His motto, which guided his working practice, was this:

Cherish the Past;
Adorn the Present;
Construct the Future.

The Single Poetic Theme of Life and Death

Putting small sections of my library at a time onto the Library Thing site is a slow process, but I find it stimulates me to re-visit authors as I sift the books I have by them. I recently put on books by Alun Lewis who wrote the following to his wife Gweno from India during the Second World War:

“although I’m more engrossed with the single poetic theme of Life and Death, for there doesn’t seem to be any question more directly relevant than this one, of what survives of all the beloved, I find myself unable to express at once the passion of Love, the coldness of Death (Death is cold), and the fire that beats against resignation, ‘acceptance’. Acceptance seems so spiritless, protest so vain. In between the two I live.”

These words were quoted by Robert Graves in an introduction to a volume of Alun Lewis’ poems published in 1945. By this time Alun Lewis was dead and many have found his death to be foretold in the poetry and short stories he produced during those last years. He had corresponded with Graves about ideas which eventually appeared in The White Goddess, a volume which Graves subtitles “an historical grammar of poetic myth” but which later became a manual for many pagans and neo-wiccans seeking a theoretical basis for the revival of Goddess worship. Lewis, though, very much took on Graves’ ideas as an inspiration for his poetry. The “single poetic theme” identified in the quotation moves inexorably from Life to Death leading up to the poet’s actual death (possibly from suicide) in Burma in 1944. Consider ‘Goodbye’ which he wrote for his wife to mark the occasion of their last night together before his embarkation for India:

We made the Universe to be our home,
Our nostrils took the wind to be our breath,
Our hearts are massive towers of delight,
We stride across the seven seas of death.

Here Love triumphs over Death and the mementoes of their night together will sustain them : “And I will keep the patches that you sewed/On my old battledress tonight my sweet”. But the imagery of Lewis’s poems moves inexorably from this saccharine offering to his wife towards Darkness. The outbreak of the War elicited “Dark closes round the manor and the hut”, in itself a conventional enough response to the War. But in India he became increasingly prone to write of Darkness as an ideal state rather than as a metaphor for the condition of the world. His feelings emerge in poems like ‘The Mahratta Ghats’:

Who is it climbs the summit of the road?
Only the beggar bumming his dark load.
Who was it cried to see the falling star?
Only the landless soldier lost in war.

In hospital in Poona a fellow soldier fights against death:

Great velour cloaks of darkness floated up.
But he refused, refused the encircling dark,
A lump of bitter gristle that refused.

But Lewis became obsessed with “the encircling dark”. The “bitter gristle” of Life was increasingly less attractive than “the darkness that there is” figured as deep and containing. In ‘The Jungle’ he wrote of “the black spot in the focus”, an image that came from looking up at the Sun through the enclosing trees, but it also becomes a metaphor for the blotting out of meaning. He saw “The face distorted in the jungle pool/That drowns its image in a mort of leaves”. Here in “the cold orbit of an older world” he lived as a ghost amid a “green indifference” and darkness awaited in the bite of a snake, the swipe of “annihilating paws” or the blow from a “flashing sword”.

Similar themes emerge in the short stories he wrote at this time, although the medium of prose seemed to better facilitate the confrontation and rejection of the impulse to embrace Darkness. In the poems the metaphysical engagement with Darkness seems to lead out of the world as the parallel engagement in the stories seems to affirm the world’s values. In ‘The Jungle’, “the humming cultures of the West” seem far away and fade further as the poem develops. In a story written at about the same time, ‘The Orange Grove’ a soldier becomes totally lost, driving with the corpse of his friend next to him on what seems like an increasingly meaningless journey except that his need to hand in the dead soldier’s identity tag remains his sole purpose. In the poems such purposes cannot be held onto. But the poet in many ways seems less defeated than the prose writer who sustains himself by such tokens of meaning. For the poet, the landscape of Darkness was fully worked out before he set foot in India and provided it own deeper sense of purpose. In The White Goddess, Graves cites Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, Spenser’s Phaedria and Malory’s Nimuë as literary analogues to the Goddess who carried the ailing ego into welcome oblivion. Though he says that “Coleridge had a stricter poetic conscience than Keats” as his presentation of the Nightmare ‘Life-in-Death’ in The Ancient Mariner does not honey the bitter pill in the way Keats does. As for Alun Lewis, Graves repeats part of the quotation about “the single poetic theme” in his Introduction to The White Goddess, asserting that for Lewis “there was no choice”.

Whether Lewis understood the theme identified by Graves in quite the way the latter interpreted it is open to question. Graves’ view was clear cut: “For though she loves only to destroy, the Goddess destroys only to quicken”. Lewis certainly engaged with these ideas as defining his vocation as a poet. But he also lived them and his experiences of Life and Love were, it seems, continually juggled against Death as a beckoning reality. Here are final lines of what seems to have been the last poem he wrote :

Or does the will’s long struggle end
With the last kindness of a foe or friend?

Ianuarye

You naked trees, whose shady leaues are lost

Wherein the byrds were wont to build their bowre:

And now are cloth'd with mosse and hoary frost,

Instead of bloosmes, werewith your buds did flowre:

I see your teares, that from your boughes doe raine,

Whose drops in drery ysicles remaine.

{More from Colin Cloute - (who knows not Colin Cloute?) - as the year progresses}