Saying it Slant

“Say it slant” was Emily Dickinson’s advice to herself when writing poetry. She wrote her verse in a way that the editors of her day regarded as eccentric, if not illiterate. The earliest appearances of her work were in heavily edited form, replacing her frequent use of dashes with standard commas, semi-colons and stops. By doing so they edited the vitality out of her deceptively simple verses. Inspired, rhythmically, by the drag and pull of sung hymns, she also sought to discover, in the angle of view upon her subject matter, that which is not revealed by straight talking and asked questions like:

… who laid the rainbow’s piers

… who leads the docile spheres
by withes of supple blue?

and

Who counts the wampum of the night
to see that none is due?

In pursuing such questions she ventured phrases dynamically linked to other phrases avoiding standard punctuation which contained rather than released the meanings she sought. Her first editor was, it seems, bewildered by her unwillingness to contain her verse in this way, describing her as “a cracked poetess”. Later editors did what they thought they had to do to publish her, though more recently we have been given the poems as she wrote them.

She was not the first poet to suffer in this way. I think of Thomas Wyatt’s “They fle from me that sometime did me seek / With naked fote, stalking in my chamber” where “in” in that second line was rendered by an early editor as “within”. Just think of the loss of rhythmic power that causes. If Wyatt suffered from the intrigue in Henry VIII’s court, how much did he also suffer from an editor draining his poem of the menace it contained with this and other amendments?

Angles, slants, fractured rhythms, poems as confrontations with otherness, rushing over dangerous rapids or poems that run serenely along an even stream, mellifluously entertaining us with pleasing images and worthy insights? The opposition is, I know, unnecessarily crude and there is certainly a place for poems in the latter category in both lyrics and long narrative verse. But my emphasis is on this from Emily Dickinson:

There’s a certain Slant of light
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –
Tis the Seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, tis like the Distance
On the look of Death -

Policing the G20

There has been much publicity about the policing of the G20 protests in London following the death of a paper seller who wasn't even part of the demonstration. There have been a couple of further high profile complaints and a number of others, one of which from my son.  He was helping a woman who had fallen when  a policeman who did not have numbers displayed on his shoulders hit him across the face with his baton. He has lodged a complaint.

More generally a petition has been set up to oppose the use of the tactics of  'kettling', (the corralling of everyone into a confined area from which no-one can exit, often for hours at a time) batons and other aggressive police tactics at entirely peaceful protests. 

If you would like to sign this petition you can do so  HERE

Ted Hughes' Ovid

Ask anyone what they think was the most significant work published by Ted Hughes at the end of his life and the answer will probably be Birthday Letters, poems detailing his response to the suicide of his wife Sylvia Plath but held back until just before his death in 1998. But ask me and I’d say his Tales From Ovid published in 1997. The blurb on the back of my copy, which I’ve recently been re-reading, claims that “it is as if Latin and English poet were somehow the same person”. My Latin isn’t good enough to fully judge the accuracy of that judgement of the quality of the translations, as literal translations, but they certainly present Ovid’s stories in a fluent, pithy and highly readable form. They work perfectly as verse, as narratives and as versions of these tales from the Ancient World recycled by Ovid in the Rome of Augustus and recycled since by, among others, Chaucer and Shakespeare. Given the importance of Ovid to Shakespeare and the importance of Shakespeare to Hughes (see his Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being) it is appropriate that he should have tackled this final task and given us his own versions at the end of his life.

The American classicist Bernard Knox has questioned the precise accuracy of these translations but it could be argued that Hughes did what Ovid himself did, picking up, as Hughes puts it in his introduction, “the current of human passion … where it combusts and levitates, or mutates into an experience of the supernatural”. This enactment of metamorphoses, the transference of human experience from one plane to another, as much as the bodily transformation that represents this in the tales, is captured superbly by Hughes. In the range of stories from the amusing to the horrific, Hughes’ language remains pliable and direct with no sense of artifice or of the language getting in the way of the experience which is all too common in translations. Just listen to this on human frailty and passion:

Like a great tree that sways,
All but cut through by the axe,
Uncertain which way to fall,
Waiting for the axe’s deciding blow,
Myrrha,
Bewildered by the opposite onslaughts
Of her lust and her conscience,
Swayed and waited to fall.
Either way, she saw only death.
Her lust, consummated, had to be death;
Denied, had to be death.

(Myrrha, who desires only her own father)

Or this on the metamorphic process:

No weapon was to hand – only water.

So she scooped up a handful and dashed it
Into his astonished eyes, as she shouted:
‘Now if you can, tell how you saw me naked.’

That was all she said, but as she said it
Out of his forehead burst a rack of antlers.
His neck lengthened, narrowed, and his ears

Folded to whiskery points, his hands were hooves,
His arms long slender legs. His hunter’s tunic
Slid from his dappled hide. With all this

The goddess
Poured a shocking stream of panic terror
Through his heart like blood.

( Actaeon after discovering Diana bathing)

If Hughes sometimes uses vocabulary that is peculiarily modern, it is deployed to magnificent effect. Here finally, is Apollo:

In his left hand the lyre
Was a model, in magical code,
Of the earth and the heavens –
Ivory of narwhal and elephant,
Diamonds from the interiors of stars.
In his right hand he held
The plectrum that could touch
Every wavelength in the Universe
Singly or simultaneously.
Even his posture
Was like a tone – like a tuning fork,
Vibrant, alerting the whole earth,
Bringing heaven down to listen.

Spenser's Glosses

As for the Spenser quotes over on the right... why is it that I find the glosses so fascinating in The Shepheardes Calendar? Apparently they were done by Spenser's associate Edward Kirke who, it has been noted, "sometimes unconsciously, sometimes of set purpose, fails to express his author's intention" (E de Selincourt). Ostensibly part of the project of redefining English poetic diction (not for the last time) they capture in their very irascibility the tone of the fascination of the current of platonic mysticism in the protestantism of the period with the pastoral ideal, while needing to dismiss the pagan superstitions which might be associated with it. That marvellous gloss on 'Ladyes of the lake' with its dismissal of the 'lowd lyers' who perpetrated Arthurian myth together with the desire to precisely define the nature of nymphs is a glorious example.