Jean Earle : A Naïve Poet?

I have written on this blog about Jeane Earle in the past. I discuss her at greater length in the current number of the online arts and literary journal Horizon Review. It also contains  a number of poems, fictions and articles, and is well worth a look.  THIS LINK leads to my article on Jean Earle in which I argue that her deliberate - and I argue sophisticated - use of 'naïve' techniques constitute part of her honesty as a poet.

Her poem  on Jean-Baptist Giraud's 'naïve' painting 'The Picture of the Tiger Hunt', a detail from which appears on the cover of her Selected Poems articulates the idea directly:

I did not wince because the tiger is pinned by spears,
Stuck and lifted on the elephant's tusk.
Nor for the blood too bright
Nor for the forest leaves
Streaming to blaze the scene,
As in frightening dreams.

No; what moved me was the tiger's hands.
Hands - not paws -
Past all powerful dealing.
Sprawling out wide, loose.
Asking astounded of the continuing spear,
Of the red workaday gleam in the elephant's eye.

So do all creatures, peaceful or tiger, lift hands,
Not paws,
At the flash of death.

The picture was done by a 'naïve' painter.
'Naïve' we call him - and we look for truth.
Hands open and shape NO! Hands, not paws.
Two or four hands - or one, as in a dying flower.

Towards light is the last appeal,
And should evoke tears.

This statement, from her first published collection, could, I argue, be taken as a working principle of all her later poetry both in matters of subject and style. Her statement "we look for truth" I take to be an invitation to look for a similar truth in her writings. This is what I attempt to elucidate in the article.

The last volume published by Jean Earle before she died.

Devil's Blackberries

The idea that blackberries are not to be eaten after Michaelmas Day (29^th September) is linked in legend to the story that the Archangel Michael cast Satan out of heaven on that day and he landed in some brambles and so cursed the berries which ever since have been regarded as not to be eaten after this date. The alternative date of 11^th October is explained by the fact that this was Michaelmas Day in the old calendar.

The legend was put, obliquely, to very effective use by the poet Jean Earle who entitled one of her poems ‘Devil’s Blackberries’:

Late pickers – cut off from sunset

In a ditch of brambles –

From earthed heels let fly

Their lengthening shadows

That shoot up the hill behind,

To a view of the sea.

Far from their source,

These poles-with-pinheads

Stripe the glowing slope

Personalities

All their own. Pity they have no eyes,

Since they are here, to watch

The passionate tide blooding the coast.

The sun goes down, the gatherers creep

Out from the thorns,

Their shadows come to heel.

No one has put the sunset

To any use. Over the hill

The group bedraggles home

Shadows that go before them,

Berries. And worms.

These ‘late pickers’ inhabit the darkness while their shadows, elongated to the top of the slope, could if they had eyes, watch the sunset. Only when the sun has set do they emerge from the ditch, their shadows coming to heel to lead them now home with their wormy berries.

I find this ingenious. The striking imagery conveys a strong visual sense of the scene and the rather spooky dominance of the shadows. An ironic subtext lies behind the simplicity of the surface presentation: the pickers as lost souls inhabiting the darkness, their shadows guarding them against the ‘passionate tide’ created by the sunset (but with ‘blooded’ and ‘passionate’ suggesting further layers of reference) and leading them home with their wormy pickings cursed by the Devil, forbidden fruit indeed! Michael’s role as guardian against the darkness is subverted here and, as often in Jean Earles’ poetry, the dark and the light are construed ambiguously as contrary influences which we live with constantly and of which our unconscious daily activities usually make us unaware.

Jean Earle, the Wordsworths and Honesty

Dove Cottage

If metaphor works by transference of an ideal quality to a material object, metonymy works by transference between two material objects. There will always be some porosity between them but I think this is a good enough working definition of the difference between these two categories of figurative language. I want now to look at metonymy as an intermediate case between simile and metaphor.

In her poem ‘Honesty’, Jean Earle records her feelings about having been given a seed of the honesty flower collected from the garden of Dove Cottage, where Dorothy and William Wordsworth lived and which is now a museum. Jean Earle’s poetry characteristically displays a sophisticated use of the ‘naïve’ style. In her poem about the painting ‘Chasse au Tigre” by the ‘naïve’ painter Jean-Baptist Giraud (a detail from which appears on the cover of her Selected Poems) she says that, in viewing such paintings, “we look for truth”. Her ‘truth-seeking’ in the poem ‘Honesty’ clearly includes the ironic sub-text that the seed was dishonestly obtained. But it is the deeper ‘honesty’ of the main text that I want to discuss. Here is the poem:

Honesty

Always a ‘snapper-up of trifles’ –
Jars from a skip,
those rubber bands
Postmen let fly –
Some sad kitten –
After her trip, she brought me such a thing,
A seed of honesty
From Wordsworth’s garden.

Had she any idea
How it pleased me? Only a tourist
At Dove Cottage had she ever heard
Of William and Dorothy

Who may well have trodden the soil
This seed sprang from ….

Sowing the scarlet beans; or when Dorothy
Set herbs by moonlight. When she worked alone,
Grieving for William – who had taken joy
Of their life together into his stern hold
And gone for Mary.

Intense and ardent hearts! The seed sent up
A thin stalk, has managed a few flowers
Of a sharp magenta. She who stole me this
Finds it not worth the snatch,
Having no clue
How eloquent to me – yes, as a friend’s dress
Seen against time and light,
Its colour is.

The first thing to note here is that the specific reference back is not to the poems of William but to his sister Dorothy’s Grasmere Journal. The entry for 1 May 1802 begins: Rose not till ½ past 8 – a heavenly morning – as soon as breakfast was over we went into the garden & sowed the scarlet beans about the house”. This was less than six months before William’s marriage to Mary Hutchinson to which the poem also alludes. Dorothy makes several references to the progress of the beans throughout the summer, including “The scarlet beans want sticking. The garden is overrun with weeds”, which immediately follows the recording of letters sent to Annette Vallon and Mary Hutchinson. Arrangements for the wedding and the settling of William’s affairs with Annette dominate the Journal from this point on, as do images of domestic dislocation.

Already, then, it is apparent that there are rich layers of meaning in Jean Earle’s poem. Its apparently artless narrative form, shifting suddenly from the original subject to the Wordsworths and then abruptly to “sowing the scarlet beans” begins a process of metonymic transfer that grows in quiet intensity as the poem develops. There are a number of specific tensions between the brother and sister who shared Dove Cottage which become apparent at this time which I have discussed elsewhere (*) But Dorothy was re-assured by William’s poem ‘Farewell’ which she describes as his “going for Mary” poem. Seen in that light Jean Earle’s “gone for Mary” loses some of its potential force. The life they shared in what is now known as Dove Cottage is not jettisoned by his “Farewell thou little nook of mountain ground” but is left in suspension until both brother and sister will return with “one to whom ye will be dear”. Dorothy records writing out the poem for William on 29 May and then writing to Mary. Her entry concludes: “A sweet day. We nailed up the honeysuckle and hoed the scarlet beans.”

Jean Earle’s poem, then, is rooted in Dorothy’s Journal and the “dreams of flowers” evoked by William in the seclusion of Grasmere are imaginatively linked with the flower she has grown from a seed of honesty. The words of the brother and sister in 1802 resonate in the words of the modern poem which moves subtly backwards and forwards through time. The final change of direction occurs with the phrase “Intense and ardent hearts”, a reference back to the trio of William, Mary and Dorothy and the life they spent together. Jean Earle's own ‘honest’ response to the stolen seed and the “sharp magenta” flowers it produced brings the poem to a close. It is “eloquent” in expressing to her the colour of “a friend’s dress” and therefore familiar and suggestive of intimacy. The fact that it is “seen against time and light” must also affect our response here, particularly if we read it in the context of other poems by Jean Earle for whom light often suggests vision. Time adds depth to illumination. The seed provides a metonymic connection in the colour of its flower with the dress worn by Dorothy envisaged by Jean Earle as her friend.

The likelihood that the seed is a modern descendant of a plant growing there when the Wordsworths inhabited the cottage is remote. Jean Earle only says that they “may well have trodden the soil / The seed sprang from”. So what sort of honesty is attempted here by the poet who finds the magenta flowers “eloquent”? This takes us deeper into the poem’s ‘truth’. We can say that the flower represents the “intense and ardent hearts” of the Wordsworths, enabling the poet to engage with personal feelings of affiliation that the flower triggers. But, as suggestive as the idea of ‘re-presenting’ is, it doesn’t quite capture the organic link that the poet makes between herself and Dorothy. The colour the flower carries in embryo from its Dove Cottage source is “like a friend’s dress” because it brings the light of Dorothy’s life through time to the present. This is more than simile but less than metaphor which would, I suggest, lack honesty in this context. Metonymy here functions in linking the person who grew the flower with the person who wore the dress in a deeply ‘honest’ way in spite of the fact that the “eloquence” with which it does so may, like the way the seed was obtained, and – some might want to argue – the way the experience is constructed – be seen as ironically invoking dishonest practices. But there is no doubting the honesty of the poet in wishing to honour her friend in a poem the integrity of which is beyond question.

(*) 'Rich Layers of Meaning' in New Welsh Review No.33 Summer 1996 from which parts of this blog are adapted.