Posted on by Liam Guilar

A wasted ‘life’ of The Waste Land

Image: Derek Turner

The Waste Land – A Biography of a Poem

Matthew Hollis, Faber & Faber, 2022, 524pps., £20
LIAM GUILAR is disappointed by a would-be biography of the landmark poem

If any twentieth century poem deserves a biography, it is T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. First published in 1922, it was, and is, an extraordinary poem. Stripped of all the accumulated analysis, commentary, criticism and fashionable condemnation of its poet, it remains as new and startling today as it was a hundred years ago.  

Its significance for many of the century’s literary developments cannot be underestimated. It has also been a fertile source and target for successive fashions of criticism and a starting place for an astonishing number of academic performances.

Matthew Hollis’s The Waste Land – a Biography of a Poem promises to be just that. It isn’t. Instead of telling the story of the poem’s life after it was published, he narrates the lives of the Eliots and Pound up to its publication, reducing the poem to an incident in their lives.

The story of the poem’s creation has been known for fifty years. In 1914, T. S. Eliot had come from America to Europe to study. Instead of working diligently in the philosophy department at Oxford, he had married in haste and abandoned his Harvard PhD. He was determined to become the leading literary critic and poet in London, at a time when London was the centre of the English literary world.

By 1920 he had a secure, well-paid job at Lloyds Bank, a growing reputation as a reviewer amongst the people who mattered, and a circle of the necessary acquaintances. He was also struggling with the knowledge that he had written nothing outstanding since ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ in 1911. He was keen to write a long poem. Great poets wrote long poems and he wanted to be a great poet.

Lurching from one illness to another, unhappily married, and ‘overworked’, his doctors had recommended he take time off and the bank had obliged by giving him three months paid leave. He went first to Margate, and then Switzerland. Soon after returning, having discussed his poem with Ezra Pound, The Waste Land was published to critical acclaim, scorn and baffled incomprehension. It divided the readership then and continues to do so now.[i]

The story was qualified when the manuscript resurfaced and was published in facsimile in 1971. It was then possible to see that the poem was initially twice as long. An assemblage of parts called ‘He Do The Police In Different Voices’, it began, not with ‘April is the cruellest month’, but ‘First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place’. There was a long section in rhyming couplets describing a woman, Fresca, getting out of bed, which reads like Swift doing Pope with all the disgust but none of the rage or energy. What would become the shortest section of the poem, ‘Death by Water’ was originally a long narrative about a sea voyage. It became obvious from the facsimile that Ezra Pound and Vivien Eliot had played a significant part in shaping the final poem. Pound had cut the draft by half.

T S Eliot. Image: Sneh Vatsa. WIkimedia Commons

By the late 1970s, one source put the total of published books and articles about Eliot, his poetry and criticism, at 4,319. A bibliography for the years 1987-2013 adds another 1,624 items. Neither figure includes unpublished dissertations, theses, book reviews and conference papers or lectures. Hollis’s own bibliography runs for over twenty pages. There are at least two biographies of Vivien Eliot and a recent three volume biography of Ezra Pound. T. S. Eliot has been the subject of several, the most recent biography being Robert Crawford’s justly acclaimed two volume life. With all this information available, what hasn’t already been said? 

Hollis tells the story of the poem by tracking Pound and the Eliots through the years leading up to its composition, starting in 1918 but moving chronologically backwards and forwards. He writes eloquently, keeping his story moving, bolstering it with details and anecdotes to bring it alive, as when Eliot’s car breaks down and he must walk home “passed only by a wagon of Boy Scouts and pursued by a line of three ducks” (p.87).

Here, in one place, is a very readable version of many well-known stories. Hollis can make typing sound exciting.

“Eliot’s typewriter had seen better days. […] as he sat before it in the winter of 1921, he centred the carriage and depressed the shift lock. The strikers swung up from the type basket, prompting the escapement forward, letter by letter: a title, concluded as were all titles, with a terminal point.

THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD.

He rolled the platen twice for a two-line drop, and began to type the poem’s opening. But it was not ‘April is the cruellest month’ the line that would become synonymous with the poem, but something altogether different.”

pps.227-8

The dating and sequence of the manuscript’s composition are revealed – which typewriter was used, where, and when. One can only admire the patience that went into the study of typewriter ribbons and paper to excavate this information, while wondering what it adds to an understanding or appreciation of the poem. Hollis also tracks Pound’s editing, Eliot’s dithering over the final shape of the work and the negotiations leading up to publication.

The poem is returned to the human context which produced it: the sometimes spiteful, claustrophobic world of literary London in the years immediately after the First World War. Hollis quotes William Gardner Hale’s famous critique of Pound’s ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ which ends: “If Mr. Pound were a professor of Latin, there would be nothing left for him but suicide”. It stands as a good example of period criticism that could border on libel and be viciously personal. Such treatment humanises the production of literature, as does Hollis’s suggestion that Eliot cut the first page of the manuscript, not because it was tedious, but because it described a visit to a brothel, and he didn’t want to offend his mother.

However, the claim that Eliot was ‘the greatest poet of the twentieth century’ rests to a considerable degree on the fact he wrote The Waste Land. The story of the writing of the poem, as told here, is not the story of an artist in control of his material. 

Neither Pound nor Eliot seemed to know what they had created. As late as March 1922, Pound was describing ‘The Waste Land’ as “a series of poems”. Having allowed Pound to hack the original in half, Eliot was worried the poem, as it then stood, was not long enough for stand alone publication. In January 1922 he was thinking of padding out the final poem and giving it this form: “(1) Sage Homme by E.P.-(2) Gerontion-(3) The Burial of the Dead-(4) A Game of Chess-(5) The Fire Sermon-(6) What the Thunder Said- (7-9 in order unknown) Song-Exequy-Dirge.” (p.361)

Eliot may have gone on to dominate the critical and literary landscape, but in the early 1920s he seems to have had difficulty evaluating his own work. He had tried to convince Wyndham Lewis to publish ‘The Triumph of Bullshit’, a rhyming obscenity which would not have been out of place sung in the communal bath of a 1970s Rugby Union club.

Robert Crawford records that in Margate, Eliot had been “practising scales on the mandolin”.[ii] Not picking out tunes, or singing songs and accompanying himself, but practising scales. It’s a telling image for Eliot the poet: a master of technique who at that time was struggling to find a use for it. The picture that emerges is of someone eager for fame and publication, but with no real idea of what he was doing other than trying to become famous and published.

For all Hollis’s entertaining eloquence, the book feels unbalanced and becomes frustrating as it progresses. The problem lies with the title. A biography which did not tell the life of the subject would not warrant the name. This is not the biography of a poem, which would have been an original contribution to celebrate the centenary.

Ezra Pound. Image: Alvin Langdon Coburn, NPG. Wikimedia Commons

The book ends triumphantly, with Pound vindicated, and Eliot beaming. The last chapter, a coda of sorts, ‘London 1960’, focusses on Eliot’s attempts to challenge Pound’s growing sense of failure. In the rush to the end and the desire to reconcile the characters, the poem goes missing. Eliot’s public ambivalence about it is brushed aside, and the mixture of astonishment and derision which greeted its publication is reduced to two pages of decontextualised quotations. There’s very little discussion of the notes Eliot used to pad out the page count. He helped fuel an academic industry by claiming:

Not only the title but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss. Jesse L. Weston’s book on the Grail Legend: From Ritual to Romance (Macmillan). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston’s book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes do; and I recommend it (apart from the greater interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble.

Whether he’d read From Ritual to Romance is a moot question Hollis skips over.[iii] Given the obvious lack of ‘plan’ in the poem’s writing and the late addition of the title, the statement is at the very least an impressive piece of misdirection.

To tie the poem to the poet is to divert attention from the poem and go ferreting in the dusty scandals of our grandparents’ lives. Instead of asking what the printed poem does, or why it is was so successful or so useful to a fledging critical industry, one can speculate pointlessly about who was the “Man from Cologne” (p.352) or how often, when and where Vivien Eliot “slept” with Bertrand Russell.  

Narrating the lives leading up to the publication of the poem creates a problem of relevance the book ignores. The text runs for 386 pages. 217 pages detail Eliot and Pound’s movements before the poem is begun. When Eliot begins his rest cure in Margate, Hollis has discovered how many days he spent there, whether he had a hot bath, what he spent his daylight hours doing, who he phoned and how much the call cost. We get a potted history of Margate as a tourist resort. The other stories are well known and entertaining but why, for example, does the story of Eliot, Lewis, Joyce and the second-hand shoes have to be repeated? What did the floor plan of the Pounds’ apartment in Paris, or the fact Pound enjoyed boxing with Hemingway contribute to the poem?

The same seems true for the historical excursions. Because they exist at the level of generalised context, Hollis could have picked any distressing incident from 1900-1920.

The first chapter, ‘Armistice’, begins with the story of the death in combat of the last allied serviceman in the First World War. Like the excursions to the Irish wars in 1920, the burial of the Unknown Soldier, and to various international calamities, the link to the poem is never made explicit. Hollis’s Eliot is far too self-obsessed to be affected by what the Black and Tans were doing in Ireland, and there’s no attempt to prove that he knew about them, let alone that their behaviour affected his thinking or writing. A Poundian editor would have cut the first two hundred and sixteen pages: ‘Interesting/ enjoyable/ been done before/ irrelevant.’

Or perhaps there is a sly Eliotic irony at work, and Hollis is undercutting the usual ‘Poor Tom’ narrative. How depressing to have a steady job in the 1920s, earning 500 pounds a year, with an employer willing to give him three months paid leave. How oppressive to have to leave the rural weekend cottage to go to work to earn a living. Robert Graves was more blunt: “Who forced him, during the Battle of the Somme, to attend London tea-parties presided over by boring hostesses?”[iv]

There’s also an inconsistency in the treatment of the material. It is now compulsory for any writer on Eliot to excoriate him for his antisemitism. Hollis does so at every opportunity, but while Eliot deserves the criticism, it’s a modern, retrospective interpretation of the views of a man who was the product of his class and place and time. It draws attention to the things Hollis doesn’t criticise from a similar perspective.

Much of the narrative moves smoothly over the surface presenting the official version which tends to minimise the strangeness of the story. He quotes admiringly from Eliot’s early criticism, but a century has passed in which that criticism has been picked apart. While Hollis sees the relationship between the criticism and poetry as unproblematic, the much more interesting symbiotic relationship between The Sacred Wood (1920) and The Waste Land goes unexamined. In a book about the poem this wouldn’t matter; in a book focussed on the poet it seems like a major flaw.

Far from being objective statements of scientific truth, as some readers were willing to accept, Eliot’s early criticism is a brilliant game of smoke and mirrors, in which T.S. Eliot, Harvard-trained philosopher, wielding an intimidating erudition, justified the kind of poetry T.S. Eliot wrote or wanted to write, and rationalised his inability to produce poetry with the facility of a W.B. Yeats. Hollis quotes approvingly from a letter Eliot wrote in 1927; “The only criticism of poetry worth noting is that of poets” (p.211). The phrase is representative of so much of Eliot’s early writing about literature. It cannot be accurate without the absent qualification: ’Often’, ‘Sometimes’, ‘For my purposes’, ‘In terms of…’. Once the qualifications are added, the statement is revealed as little more than a personal preference.

Ezra Pound is the real hero of this book. Here too the retrospective critique is absent. It is obvious from all the available contemporary accounts that Pound was a tempestuous character, a tireless and passionate advocate for writers he admired. But his criticism and poetry from this period have not aged well.

Pound’s antisemitism is appropriately chastised, but otherwise Hollis takes him at his own evaluation. The reader is positioned to see criticism of Pound’s poetry as misguided, if not driven by malice and envy. To read Hollis you’d think poor Ezra was driven out of London by a conspiracy of jealous mediocrities who simply didn’t understand his genius. The fact that he was a self-appointed expert on a range of topics he knew little about is passed over, as is the fact that much of his criticism from this period consists of aggressive statements of personal preference masquerading as objective truths. The myth of Pound the brilliant editor is based on the idea that he was able to see The Waste Land in the draft and, in his own phrase, perform the caesarean operation to bring to light the poem Eliot wanted to write. 

Joyce’s comment about Pound’s attempts to edit Ulysses is telling on two counts.

I never listened to his objections to Ulysses as it was being sent him once I had made up my mind but dodged them as tactfully as I could. He understood certain aspects of the book very quickly and that was more than enough then. He makes brilliant discoveries and howling blunders[v]

Firstly, if critics have seen method and intention in the manuscript, Pound either didn’t understand them or didn’t care. With The Waste Land manuscript he slashed away at the level of word, line, and passage, regardless of the effect his deletions had on the whole. It was the action of a man with a cast iron sense of his own infallibility and a complete disregard for the writer whose work he was cutting. He noted his reasons in the margins: “Georgian”; “verse not interesting as verse to warrant so much of it”. He either had no interest in, nor understanding of, Eliot’s intentions, which allowed him to hack away knowing that nothing essential would be removed, because as far as he was concerned nothing was essential.

Critics tend to assume that Pound’s editing was entirely disinterested and for the greater good of ‘Poetry’ because that was Pound’s version. However, as Hollis writes, the cutting of the original ‘Death By Water’ is more difficult to justify as “powerful passages had been sacrificed” (p.64). Hollis takes the time to note the similarities between the sea voyages in the original ‘Death by Water’ and the Canto Pound was working on at the same time. He avoids describing this as plagiarism while providing enough evidence to support the accusation. He’s too kind to suggest Pound may have demolished ‘Death by Water’ so his sea voyage Canto had no competitor. Hollis also records that Pound didn’t show the Canto to Eliot when he wanted someone to help him to edit it. Hollis prefers to believe “Perhaps it was Pound’s sense of selflessness that left him unwilling to disturb Eliot” (p.352) rather than an unwillingness to offer up a poem for criticism to someone who might return the recent favour and demolish it on the same grounds – or who might be so crass as to point out the similarities.

Pound’s motives are lost. The truth about the writing of a poem, especially a hundred years after the event, is unknowable, and was perhaps only vaguely understood by the people involved. Hollis’ approach raises so many questions that it cannot answer, at the same time softening the strangeness of this poem’s creation.

Many writers solicit comments on their drafts, but Eliot was eagerly soliciting comments on fragments of an unfinished long poem. This is strange, but the real curiosity, obscured in retrospect, is why he was so willing to put himself under Pound’s direction.

Hollis claims of Eliot’s 1919 Hogarth Press selection of poems that “more than any gathering they would bear the fruits of his [Pound’s] management of Eliot’s work” (p.79). ‘Management’ is aptly chosen. Pound liked to manage his discoveries. But as Hollis also explains, these poems are unimpressive compared to Eliot’s best work: “caricatures wearily reappear; predatory males, wanton females, unscrupulous outsiders, untrustworthy Jews”. The poems exhibit a “claustrophobic formality buttoned up in iambic tetrameter” (p.82). The reviewer for The Times wrote that Eliot was “laboriously writing nothing” and “in danger of becoming silly”. Except for The Waste Land, little that Eliot wrote under ‘Pound’s Management’ advanced his reputation as a poet.

Hollis ends one section of the book with a summary of Eliot’s debt to Pound before the latter left London in 1920. The mystery is not why Eliot felt indebted to Pound for his genuine assistance in getting his work published, but why he was so willing to submit his poetry to Pound’s literary judgement. Was it really so infallible, or merely human as the Joyce comment suggests?

Were the Fresca couplets such a bad imitation of Pope? Pound told him “You cannot parody Pope unless you can write better verse than Pope-and you can’t.”[vi] Why did Eliot timidly accept this verdict? If he were following Joyce and using a range of historical styles, why didn’t he just shrug and follow Joyce in ignoring Pound’s dismissive comment?

The answer lies in the psychology of T. S. Eliot, and in his specific state of mind while he was writing the poem. Both are unknowable. What we do know is that he did not repeat the process and seems to have felt uncomfortable about the end product for the rest of his life.

If this really were the biography of the poem, then its life in the twentieth century should have been its focus[vii]. Eliot was born a year after the attempt to introduce an Honours school of English Literature at Oxford University was voted down. It was not until 1894 that resistance was overcome. If scholarship were replaced by criticism, how could the study of English Literature be more than “mere chatter about Shelley”?[viii]

The question haunted literary studies until they self-destructed in just over a hundred years. Poetry like Pound and Eliot’s, baffling to a contemporary reader bought up on Kipling, Yeats and the majority of poetry in the bookshops, supported the rise of the professional explainer and with it the cult of the ‘difficult poem’. If T.S. Eliot and The Waste Land did not exist, university English departments would have had to invent them to justify their existence.   

The Waste Land became an almost inexhaustible resource that could be quarried for allusions and biographical connections. It challenged established ideas about originality and plagiarism. Critics could announce that they had finally unearthed the poem’s meaning only to have their findings challenged by other critics. The notes provided starting points for careers. To be ‘The Greatest Living Eliot Scholar’ became a desirable title. With the inevitable reaction against Eliot’s perceived ideologies, the poem could be a target for every new fashion of criticism that could prove its own virtue by finding faults with the poem and the poet.

Yet despite all the critical attention, paradoxically, after The Waste Land, a single history of poetry in English becomes impossible to write. Despite Pound and Eliot’s insistence that their version was the only correct one, there are now many competing, sometimes mutually exclusive, assumptions about what a poem is and should be. The Renaissance or the Romantic Period mark definite shifts in the writing of poetry but the same cannot be said for the ‘Modernists’.[ix] Today, highly regarded poetry is being written which reads as though The Waste Land or the Cantos were never written. The temptation to naturalise all this could be resisted and a biography of the poem would have been a good place to start.

Despite all this chatter about Pound and the Eliots, despite the proof that the final version was an accident, The Waste Land remains: 433 brilliantly memorable lines. Whether Eliot knew what he was doing and whether Pound hacked away indiscriminately are questions that ultimately can’t be answered, and might not be worth asking.

Eliot’s undeniable ability to turn a memorable phrase and pack it with meaning – “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” – to create resonant images – “A woman drew her long black hair out tight/and fiddled whisper music on those strings” – and his superlative ability to manipulate sound and syntax (read the poem aloud for yourself) transformed what one admiring critic called “a cultural scrap heap” into a unique, never to be repeated or successfully imitated piece of writing. A hundred years after it was published, it still feels strange and new, still divides readers, and still rewards repeated re-reading. And its biography is yet to be written.

[i] On 29 December 2022 the New York Times published an article by a Mathew Walther entitled, ‘Poetry died 100 years ago this month’ with the line ‘I’m convinced. Eliot finished poetry off.’ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/opinion/eliot-waste-land-poetry.html

[ii]  P.389. Crawford, Young Eliot. From St. Louis to the Wasteland.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015

[iii] “Eliot’s first edition of Jesse Weston’s book is in the Houghton Library in Harvard with his inscription ‘This is the copy I had before writing The Waste Land’. It is virtually unannotated. Pages 137-40 and 141-4 remained uncut.”, Crawford, Young Eliot, p.352

[iv] ‘These be your Gods Oh Israel’ in Collected Writing on Poetry, Paul O’Prey (ed.), Carcanet, 1995

[v]  Letters of James Joyce Vol. 1 ed Stuart Gilbert, New York, Viking Press 1957 p.249

[vi] Qtd p.127 in T. S.Eliot. The Waste Land. A Facsimile And Transcript Of The Original Drafts Including The Annotations Of Ezra Pound, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., New York, 1971 

[vii] There’s a good summary up to 1995 in John Harwood’s, excellent, iconoclastic, Eliot to Derrida. The Poverty of Interpretation, St. Martin’s Press, 1995

[viii] The remark is attributed to Edward Augustus Freeman, then Regius Professor of Modern History

[ix] It’s obviously possible to argue about when the Renaissance or the Romantic period began and ended, but it would be wilfully obtuse to argue that the majority of poetry written after 1650 is not markedly different to the poetry written before 1550. And the same would apply to 1750 and 1850

Posted on by Daniel Gustafsson · 1 Comment

The Lure: A Prelude

DANIEL GUSTAFSSON has published volumes of poetry in both English and Swedish, most recently Fordings (Marble Poetry, 2020). New poems appear in Temenos Academy Review, Pennine Platform, in several anthologies by Black Bough Poetry, and in Sunken Island: An Anthology of British Poetry (Bournbrook Press, 2022). As an occasional scholar, with a PhD in Philosophy, Daniel has a special interest in William Blake and currently draws much inspiration from A. N. Whitehead. Daniel lives in York. Twitter: @PoetGustafsson   

The Lure: A Prelude

Waking as one, my world and I,
roused from slumber, the reeds shiver
in lapping light. The lake’s astir,
tongue teasingly tugging the shore
to coax me out: calling always,
lure and likeness of life within.
   
I’m soon vested: sandwiches made,
the rods arranged ready to go.
Eager angler, I’m out the door.
   
Grass glistening, globules threaded
on limber straws: lines and sinkers.
A spider-spun, spangled network,
its catch of dew caught in the light.
   
The boat lies wedged, banked and heavy
with last week’s rain. Leaves infuse it,
and dead insects dapple the brew.
Bent to my task, I bail it out,
labour gladly, lungs relishing
the tinctured air: tang of iron
and scent of birch, sweet yet bracing.
   
Lightened at last, I launch myself,
push the boat out through parting reeds
to wide-open weltering surf.
The lake expands, its long body
roiling in light, rippling silver:
a shade-shifting, shimmering form,
its dragon-scales drawing me out.
   
An ageing craft’s creaking oarlocks;
the wood weathered, worn to a sheen
where other hands have held their own;
planks though peeling plunging anew.
   
Facing backwards, I’m born forward
beyond myself: surface yielding
new perspectives, a narrow hull’s
widening wake. World-conjuring,
the more meeting the making eye
builds under me, bowls me over,
and wraps me round. I row gently,
my line trailing, trawling the light
for pike and perch, peace and wonder.
   
It hooked me once, heart in my mouth,
breath of my breath, this bright expanse.
   
Those far-reaching, first adventures
out on my own, the elements
drew me closer: the driving wind’s
grandfatherly grasp on my waist
keeping me true through coarse furrows;
wood and water weighing me up.
   
A featherweight, fledgling pilot
growing my wings, the grebe taught me.
That sleek diver slipped dauntlessly
into darkness, under currents,
to soar again: a sun-crested
anointed one, needling the deep’s
thick hinterlands, threading skylines:
a journeyman joiner of worlds.
   
The summer-long susurrations
din distantly, disembodied:
screeching bathers, screens chattering,
growl of tyres on gravel roads.
   
Always turning, tacking eastwards
now westering, the water’s course
flows where it feels. Far from certain,
familiar shores, I moved with it:
nearer something, nameless as yet.
   
Wheels within wheels, the whirling stuff
spins spiralling, spooling outwards.
   
Rowing the boat or being rowed,
I’m intimate with ultimates:
pulse and pattern, the pull onwards
out of mundane into mystic
entanglements. Taking it slow,
a two-handed hold on the twin
strands of the world, my strokes braiding
NOW and EVER, I know my way.
   
Birch on the shore, all bent with years
yet leaf-laden, leaning over
the glimmer-glass. Gliding along,
inching forward with oars lifted,
a fleeting span flexing its wings
holds a moment the heron’s gaze:
protean calm, a present tense
then loosening, launching futures.
   
A boy again, bending open
my can of worms: cold to the touch,
fingers fumble to fix metal
in squirming flesh; skin finally
barbed and bursting, bodies lowered
to sightlessness, I sit and wait –
my hope ebbing then high again
reading the signs, ripples nibbling –
with bated breath. The bobber goes
and I with it, out of my seat,
a young victim in yearning’s jaws,
wriggling rapture reeling me in.
   
Hours of this, hours of that,
basking simply in being here.
   
The lithe lilies, lotus-kindred,
climb from cloudy to clearer skies:
floating candles flame waterborne,
constellations of calyxes.
   
Remaining yet what youth made me,
loyal to worlds of leaping streams,
of tarns brooding bright and tarblack
on depths above, I dub myself
lover of lakes: these language-games
surfaces play, sounding heaven.
   
Where mouthing waves weave their music,
overlapping in interlace,
the weft calling, warp answering,
it’s antiphons all the way down.
   
I cast around, catching a few
damned slippery dazzling moments.
Galled by others that get away,
learn to take what time lends me.
As gusts gather, the golden plane
creased then cresting, I cross for home.
   
Swill at my feet, swirling remnants
of guts and blood, the gill-filtered
lees of the lake. Late suddenly,
this halcyon, heart-opening
day of dawnings dims to a close.
   
The un-ageing, ever-flowing
re-arranger revels in change:
a mottled sky’s moving image
shoulders blessings to shrug them off;
a hoard of hoards harbours the lost,
bears our bruises for beauty’s sake.
   
Altering still, it’s always there:
first of figures, fathering more,
mother of all our metaphors.
   
A leaden sun sinks in the lake.
Past perishing, I pull with me
the reef-ravaged wrecks of myself.
Now earth looms up, aspens lining
the darkened shore: deep presences
robed in silver, in rapt repose
watching the sky that watches them.
   
The moon making its milky way
from shore to shore, shedding comforts,
the blue hours blacken at last.
Jetty glimmers at journey’s end.
   
I moor the boat, making it fast
loosely enough to let it drift.
Close to home now, I climb the slope
heaving my bags, hung with buckets,
gear and tackle; my gifts, my take:
lucky burden, lifting my own
weight in wonder, wanting nothing.
   
Now scattered lights school overhead;
swooning treetops swim among them.
Flaton the sheets, I’m floating too.
Spent bodily, buoyed in spirit,
my restless dream rocks me to sleep.
   
This boundless night: a net bursting
with precious catch, a pregnant void
heavy with stars. I’m still hauling,
drawing droplets from dry valleys
and failing ponds, fishing for pearls.
   
I know it’s here, nursed in the deep,
that grit-cum-grace growing brighter
with hidden strength. The heart’s wellspring,
joy’s genesis, rejuvenates,
daring me now decades later
to re-affirm – rich in salvage,
lapped by other living waters –
the first poem’s first utterance:
this yearning world’s YES to its call.
   
Posted on by Liam Guilar

Verses for a vanished town

Ravenser Odd

Michael Daniels, Poets House Pamphlets, 2022, 26 pps, £7
LIAM GUILAR admires an evocation of the eroding East Riding

This is Michael Daniels’ first collection – the traditional slim pamphlet.  The publisher, Poets House Pamphlets, of Oxford, has produced a fine object, printed on good paper, with understated, subtle artwork to enhance the text.

The story of Ravenser Odd deserves a poem. It was a settlement which lasted less than two hundred years at the mouth of the Humber on Britain’s eastern coast. A sand or gravel bank was created by storms at the mouth of the estuary in the early 13th century. By the 1230s, there is documentary evidence of people living and trading there and it was granted a royal charter in 1299. It became a very prosperous sandbank. At one point there was a chapel, warehouses, a jail and a windmill. There was a weekly market and two fairs a year. The town sent two MPs to Parliament.

The town suffered from a growing number of floods from the 1320s onwards, and the wealthier families began to move themselves and their money out. By the winter of 1356-57, Ravenser Odd had been abandoned. Then the land on which the town had stood was swept away in a final tempest in 1362. The storm, which inundated land on both sides of the North Sea, was so bad the Dutch gave it a name: the Grote Mandrenke[i].

It’s the stuff of folk tales, made better by the fact it’s true. An internet search reveals its continuing fascination. “Yorkshire’s ‘lost Atlantis nearly found’ after 650 years under water” reads one strange headline from 2022[ii]. As a story it can obviously be read in different ways: the contemporary enemies of the settlement might have seen its destruction as divine retribution. Today, it’s easy to see it as a symbol of nature’s indifference to human concerns, or a warning for those living along the same coast which in some places is being eroded at 30ft a year[iii].  Rather than pushing an interpretation, Daniels lets the story speak for itself.

The booklet is a sequence of linked poems that move chronologically through the history of the settlement. They are all written in terza rima. A note tells the reader this was chosen because “Dante’s development of terza rima was contemporaneous with Ravenser Odd’s highpoint”. If this seems an odd reason to choose a form, anyone who voluntarily writes in terza rima must be admired for making his own life difficult. The success of Daniels’ attempt is evident in the way the rhymes don’t intrude. The poems move smoothly, and there’s no sense that a rhyme has been forced or the lines padded to fit the form. The verse is spare, in keeping with the feel of medieval chronicle or folk tale.

From the start, the sequence announces that the specifics of the settlement’s history are also being used to contemplate the claims the dead have on the living. It begins:

What is it to be held in mind
by someone else, to dwell as ghost
or presence there? The drowned recline
in chambered mud, yet still we host
them in our heads, subdued and dim.
It isn’t us who need them most.

The link to The Divine Comedy inevitably evokes Dante’s concern with the dead, but it also illustrates an important difference. Dante’s dead are individuals with names and histories; Daniels are the nameless dead who remain undistinguished. “The dead know things we’ve never learned- / how hard it is to stay alive”.

The gardens they had tended went.

The cabbage rows were heaved and sloughed

as if the aching care they spent

to sow and plant was not enough,

as if the tilled and tidied beds

were cheap as salt and air. The rough

sea came and went all spring […]

Playing on the name, Ravenser Odd produces Odin’s ravens; thought and memory, who provide a bird’s eye perspective. They also appear as tiny pictures at the start of each poem.

The bird’s eye perspective means the poem deals with people, not individuals – the dead, not specific corpses. There is an unnamed feudal Lord; “…life was his to make the worse, / he was their breath, their bread, their meat”. Like most modern depictions of feudal lords, this one’s a sadist, but the strength of the writing means it’s unclear whether his story, and the story of the fishing vessel The Silver Pit which follows it, are retellings of chronicle events, or inventions of the poet.

The sea is the individuated character in the poem, and its restless power runs through the collection. When the end comes it ignores

such mortal dreams, but saved its breath

to asset strip the sinking town

of shattered timber, nail and lath-

The two ravens see the final calamity:

The people’s final prayer rose up,

petitioning their lonely god.

The ravens read their trembled lips

to scavenge scraps of uttered word,

then spat them back as raucous noise,

disemvowelling all they heard.

The pun in that last line is impressive, standing out in a collection where the diction is mostly conversational. The ruined voices of the dying and the dead are reduced to sounds the poet has been trying to hear, but which having been converted to noise, are lost. Even the final devastation of the land on which the town stood is a minor incident in a much larger tragedy. There is no conclusion, and if there is a moral to be drawn from the story Daniels thankfully leaves it up to the reader.

This is a small, impressive collection. The poet’s website (https://www.michaeldaniels.co.uk) contains files of him reading his work, with evocative visual images to accompany the readings.

[i] The death toll is placed around 25,000.  https://www.theguardian.com/news/2011/jan/20/weatherwatch-grote-mandrenke

[ii] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/ravenser-odd-yorkshire-medieval-town-b2037441.html

[iii] ‘The Holderness coast, on which Spurn Point sits, is Europe’s most rapidly eroding coastline, with some areas disappearing by more than 30ft per year.’ https://www.express.co.uk/news/history/1593410/Yorkshire-Atlantis-Ravenser-Odd-Sir-Ernest-Shackleton-ship-Endurance  

Posted on by Maryann Corbett

Three ballades

MARYANN CORBETT is the author of five books, most recently In Code (Able Muse, 2020). Her work has appeared widely in journals on both sides of the Atlantic, including 32 Poems, Rattle, and the Los Angeles Review of Books in the US, and The Dark Horse and PN Review in the UK. Her poetry has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and the Poetry Foundation website, and was included in The Best American Poetry 2018. Her sixth book, The O in the Air, is forthcoming in 2024. New poems are forthcoming in Image and Beloit Poetry Journal

Christine de Pizan (1364—c. 1430) was the first woman in France, and possibly in Europe, known to have supported herself and her family by means of her writing. She took up the pen after the death of her husband and produced several collections of poems, although she is best known now for her prose works on the role of women, such as The City of Ladies. She was the initiator of the feminist side of two important literary discussions: the exchange known as the “debate (querelle) on the Romance of the Rose” and the four-hundred-year-long “debate on women (querelle des femmes).” She can be considered the West’s first protofeminist and the first woman humanist, in the Renaissance sense of that term.

Ballade I from Les Cent Ballades

from the Middle French of Christine de Pizan, translated by Maryann Corbett

Some ask me: Write a pretty verse or two

and send it. I’ve a gift for poetry,

or so they say. Begging their pardon, though,

I scarcely have the skill they claim for me

in pleasant lyrics or in probity.

Still, their good hearts have asked. At their behest,

I’ll try, no matter how unlearnedly,

to do the work they graciously request.

My feelings are not free to render true

lines fashioned out of pleasure or of joy.

My sadness passes what all others know,

wrenching my heart out of its well-worn way.

But from the great grief that has silenced me

I can speak words enough, abundant, blessed.

Therefore I have consented willingly

to do the work they graciously request.

And to whatever reader seeks to know

how sorrow blanched my happiness away:

Death did this, when it struck an unwarned blow

at him in whom all goodness lived for me.

Death seized and set me on despair’s highway.

I dare not hope for wholeness in my breast.

Out of that sorrow comes my poetry,

which is the work men graciously request.

Prince, I have not lived long with poetry.

Take it with grace if I should fail the test.

But others ask. For their sake, I agree

to do the work they graciously request.

Original:

Aucunes gens me prient que je face
Aucuns beaulz diz, et que je leur envoye,
Et de dittier dient que j’ay la grace;
Mais, sauve soit leur paix, je ne sçaroye
Faire beaulz diz ne bons; mès toutevoye,
Puis que prié m’en ont de leur bonté,
Peine y mettray, combien qu’ignorant soie,
Pour acomplir leur bonne voulenté.

Mais je n’ay pas sentement ne espace
De faire diz de soulas ne de joye ;
Car ma douleur, qui toutes autres passe,
Mon sentement joyeux du tout desvoye;

Mais du grant dueil qui me tient morne et coye
Puis bien parler assez et a plenté;
Si en diray : voulentiers plus feroye
Pour acomplir leur bonne voulenté.

Et qui vouldra savoir pour quoy efface
Dueil tout mon bien, de legier le diroye
Ce fist la mort qui fery sanz menace
Cellui de qui trestout mon bien avoye;
Laquelle mort m’a mis et met en voye
De desespoir; ne puis je n’oz santé;
De ce feray mes dis, puis qu’on m’en proie,
Pour accomplir leur bonne voulenté.

Princes, prenez en gré se je failloie ;
Car le ditter je n’ay mie henté,
Mais maint m’en ont prié, et je l’ottroye,
Pour accomplir leur bonne voulenté.

Ballade IX from Les Cent Ballades

from the Middle French of Christine de Pizan, translated by Maryann Corbett

Hard Death, you who have dispossessed me, you

who seize my earthly comforts, you who break

my cherished habits, who oppress me so

that my own home becomes the claim you stake—

What further damages can you exact?

I live too long because of this reprieve.

I want one thing, through all my spirit’s ache:

to have through you deliverance from my grief.

I have spent five whole years lamenting now—

often, often, with tears that scored my cheek.

Five years have run now, since the hour when woe

robbed me of joy and left me slavery’s mark.

That beautiful, good, wise one—when you took him,

you sentenced me: torment without relief,

so that my anger makes me sigh and shake

and long for your deliverance from my grief.

If at that moment I had been taken too,

it would have been a far more gentle act,

for since that hour I have been laid so low

by pain, received so many a scourge’s stroke—

and every day the torturer comes back—

that I want nothing. I want no more of life.

It’s forfeit to you, payment I will make

to buy a last deliverance from my grief.

Prince, in your pity hear the plea I make

to Death: Indict me in your fatal sheaf

of pages. Let me know the judgment quickly:

Say I will have deliverance from my grief.

Original:

O dure Mort, tu m’as desheritée,
Et tout osté mon doulz mondain usage ;
Tant m’as grevée et si au bas boutée,
Que mais prisier puis pou ton seignorage.
Plus ne me pues en riens porter domage,
Fors tant sanz plus de moy laissier trop vivre.
Car je desir de trestout mon corage
Que mes griefs maulx soyent par toy delivre.

Il a cinq ans que je t’ay regraittée
Souventes fois, a trés pleureux visage,
Depuis le jour que me fu joye ostée,
Et que je cheus de franchise en servage
Quant tu m’ostas le bel et bon et sage,
Laquelle mort a tel tourment me livre
Que moult souvent souhait, pleine de rage,
Que mes griefs maulx soyent par toy delivre.

Se trés adonc tu m’eusses emportée,
Trop m’eusses fait certes grant avantage,
Car depuis lors j’ay esté si hurtée
De grans anuis, et tant reçu d’oultrage,
Et tous les jours reçoy au feur l’emplage,
Que riens ne vueil, ne n’ay desir de suivre,
Fors seulement toy paier tel truage
Que mes griefs maulx soyent par toy delivre.

Princes, oyés en pitié mon language,
Et toy Mort, pri, escry moy en ton livre,
Et fay que tost je voye tel message,
Que mes griefs maulx soyent par toy delivre.

Upon the Problem of the Envoi in the Contemporary Ballade

            “The envoi of a ballade is typically addressed to a prince.”
                        —LitCharts web page, “Ballade”

Though slant and half will often squeak you by,
it’s tricky to persuade the thing to rhyme.
With three bare possibilities, you fry
your brains and end up scrambled half the time.
And then you face the silly pantomime
of long tradition: Who on earth will do?
The way the newsreels roll them all in slime,
what prince out there’s worth dedicating to?

The little European kings? Just try
admiring rigid stick figures who mime
in medalled chests and pricey pageantry
what’s lost now to equality’s long climb.
The Saudis, credibly accused of crime
too horrible for thought, a lurid brew
of evils? The idea’s too icky. I’m
perplexed: Whom could one dedicate this to?

Maybe a different sort of royalty
would solve this (yes, we’re turning on a dime).
Some country king of braid and gold lamé
like Elvis, fat and sequinned, past his prime?
Some prelate seated on the cherubim?
Some Koch or Musk or Bezos? Sacré bleu.
Some laureled poet with a Guggenheim?
Where is a prince to dedicate this to?

Forget it, sovereigns all-too-unsublime—
anointed, crowned, and human through and through.
I think I’m done with working overtime
to find a prince to dedicate this to.

Posted on by John Bingham

My Offer, and five readings

JOHN BINGHAM has been writing poetry for nearly 20 years, from his first limerick, ‘Barry the Snail’, to his first competition win with ‘I miss you’. John believes poetry is an amazing tool to help with expressing feeling or aiding with mental health issues and hopes his poems can one day help others.

My Offer

I offered you the world and more and to the moon and back,

and would gladly give my life for you to keep our love on track.

There’s an infinity of areas I may not prove my worth,

But I offer you my happiness whilst we remain on earth.

I offer you the breath I take the place my feet may stand,

I offer you my soul as well, my heart, my head, my hand.

I offer you the life I’ve lived and the life I’ve yet to take,

I offer every choice to you that I may ever make.

I ask with humble hope that the hand I gives enough,

And ask that you stick by me when the choices all seem tough,

I ask for understanding when I’m wrong in what I say,

I’m very far from perfect but I’m trying every day.

I can never give you everything and will never promise to,

but everything I am or own, I offer it to you.

I ask you please to keep it safe my soul and heart’s on show,

and in return I promise you I’ll never let yours go.

JOHN BINGHAM reads five of his poems:
My Offer, by John Bingham
I Miss You, by John Bingham
The Cobbler, by John Bingham
A Bard, by John Bingham

Closing Down, by John Bingham

Posted on by Colin James

Top View of a House

COLIN JAMES has a couple of chapbooks of poetry published – Dreams Of The Really Annoying, from Writing Knights Press and A Thoroughness Not Deprived of Absurdity, from Piski’s Porch Press – and a book of poems, Resisting Probability, from Sagging Meniscus Press

Top View of a House

The new subdivision,

“A Bomber’s Paradise”,

grew out of lush privations.

The walk from here to there

had changed unbeknownst

until Mrs Parker at condo 99

beckoned me for a natter.

Her porch was internalized

so we gabbed on fake grass

bordered by sincere

painted white stones.

She could not have smoked

her corncob pot pipe

this side of a mouth,

without more contradiction.

Posted on by Michael Yost

Faith and formalism

Ezekiel’s vision

The True Gods Attend You

Clarence Caddell, Bonfire Books, 2022, 71 pages, £11.80

MICHAEL YOST finds a collection of original religiously-inspired verse rather forced

There are two major traditions pertinent to verse literature that are seldom engaged in, but for all that are the more interesting when an artist does make use of them: the theological and imaginative Christian tradition of faith, and the much more practical tradition of formal verse craft.

In most people’s minds, the two probably go together; one thinks of the Anglican John Keble’s Christian Year, the Roman Catholic James Matthew Wilson, or the American Protestant Longfellow, all of whom reward the interest of their readers. However, the major religious tradition of the West is less often engaged today, and many Christian poets take the outward and visible signs of form as Luther and Zwingli took the outward and visible signs of the Eucharist: conventional, and unessential.

T.S. Eliot suggested in his essay Religion and Literature that what was needed was not religous literature in the obvious, propagandizing manner of a Keble or Chesterton, but rather the unconsciously religious literature of a Dante or a Joyce. As I have suggested in another essay, Eliot’s idea of the relation between religion and literature also is true of any set of first principles, or overarching metaphysics; the reason Eliot sought for an unconsciously religious literature was because he wished religion to inform the bones and marrow, the form and substance of literature, not merely decorate it with the furniture of, say early-mid-twentieth century Anglo-Catholicism. In brief, the law of craft is the law of belief, or philosophical conviction, or more often, the lack of those things.

This is not to say that formal verse is always the work of deists. But it is per se the work of people who have some stake in things as ordered, even if the order is conventional, or merely conservative in character. Here we come to Clarence Caddell’s The True Gods Attend You, a chapbook published by Bonfire Books, the Australian press. What makes Caddell interesting is that his poems do often address religious themes; but in each case they are pitched with a deep and seemingly impenetrable irony. In reading them, I cannot help but place them in the category of consciously religious.

This is largely because the primary concern of the poems is, as in a devotional poem, religion and religious experience. The difference is that the religious poems are counter-propaganda; they are devotional poems in reverse. Not much to their credit, the poems’ engagement with religion largely draws from the fragmentary and derivative gnostic texts of the Church’s early period, as well as two books that each propose a conspiracy-theorist’s account of the origins of Christianity. There are poems of some formal merit, such as Initiations, The Golem, Passover Feasts of the New Covenant, Elegy With an Omen, and A Mobius Wedding Band; as well as a long blank verse narrative poem, The Candidate. These I would single out among the collection as poems whose ideas are engaging, but more importantly, solidly executed. In many of the other poems, there is a distinct lack of metrical control. Cadell’s hand is often shaky as he tries to unpack complex situations, parallels, and resonances within a brief space. Trochees, eye rhymes, weak rhymes, (such as the anachronistically signaled elision “o’er” that exists in order to rhyme with “floor”) and awkward syntax abound, marring an energetic idea, crippling a final stanza, and perhaps most difficult, undermining the authority of Cadell, the poet and speaker. On one or two occasions the concrete situation of the poem is nearly impossible to discern.

There is also a distinct difference between the poems that rely on history, the re-formulated symbolism of the Gnostics, or the tendentious and ludicrous thesis that Christianity was a political invention of the Flavian dynasty, and the poems that seem to draw from Caddell’s own experiences of life, love, and loss. The aforementioned poems can be by turn, difficult, energetic, and reliant upon an imaginative world inherited by Caddell. When they succeed, they succeed because Caddell unlocks their complexity, which pours out in a torrential fashion reminiscent of the metaphysical poems of John Donne. This is the case in the Blakean Initiations. But where they fail, it is because that complexity has failed to materialize in an ordered way. Caddell’s more intimate poems, by contrast, work precisely because that same intricacy is in play, but in a context that is both familiar, tender, and surprising, such as A Mobius Wedding Band. But even here the shield of irony is raised. I wish to turn to that particular poem as a success: an English sonnet that treats of married love; a love that is painful and yet inseparable, desired and feared. It plays with the same themes of distance, suffering, betrayal and desire that another of his poems, Vicar of Christ, engages; but with a more perfect union between form and content, a clearer direction and drive moving through the entire poem, and a perfect complication of the symbolic ring of marriage. Here, the symbol seems to truly mean something, even in its reversal.
The Candidate, the longest poem in the collection, details the conversion and reversion of a family man to and from the Roman Catholic Church, or at least, a parodic vision of that church. Throughout the poem, the sincerity of his spiritual search is pushed back against, and ultimately revealed as an expression of his own narcissistic quest for “religious experience.” The heavy-handed moral is that the candidate should avaunt church-shopping and return from its distractions to his wife and family. It is singular insofar as it depicts an often undepicted subculture within Catholicism. But it does not ascend above the level of caricature.

Earlier in the review, I suggested that “the law of craft is the law of belief, or philosophical conviction, or more often, the lack of those things.” How does this apply in Caddell’s case? The True Gods Attend You stands half within the world of traditional religious expression (if ironically so), and half out of it. Likewise, Caddell has difficulty fully achieving coherence and rigor of poetic expression. His poems are indeed “formalist” as the blurb of the chapbook declares. But often the poems are (it seems unintentionally) rumpled. In both cases, it is hard for a Christian reader not to suggest that both constitute a falling away – an imperfect or misunderstood discipline. In sum, there is something to commend the originality and force, as well as the wit behind The True Gods Attend You. Caddell has skill, and an idiosyncratic vision. What remains to be seen is whether both, in time, develop.

Posted on by Peter Lillios · 3 Comments

Our Republic by the Sea, and two translations from German

PETER LILLIOS is an auditor and poet based in Sound Beach, New York. He writes: ‘I believe that poetry — and particularly formal verse — shows its strengths most readily when presented as an auditory experience. When spoken or sung expertly, the inherent musicality of well-crafted verse comes to the fore, creating a powerfully synergistic effect: delivery of meaning at an intellectual level is paired with a much more primal experience of truth as revealed through the rhythm and flow of speech itself. To this end, I’ve enlisted professional voice actors and singers to vocalise my poetry — both original works and English interpretations of existing works.’

Our Republic by the Sea

I know a little plot of land

That’s one part grass and one part sand;

Though twice a day it’s one-third sea,

There’s room enough for you and me.

No one’s staked as yet a claim;

None have stayed, though many came.

It hasn’t lustre or acclaim,

But let us take it, all the same.

We’ll build ourselves a cabin there

With driftwood bound and stacked four-square,

In order that we fell no tree

To craft our lodging by the sea.

We’ll pay no tithes, demand no tolls

From passersby who simply stroll

Through our surf, along our shore,

And leave things as they were before.

We’ll have no children of our own—

None to reap what we have sown;

And when our time has come and gone,

No monuments to gaze upon.

Yet if a child should someday sift

Through our ruins near the cliffs,

She’ll find our charter there below,

Untouched by water’s ebb and flow.

It shall not state our reasons why,

Nor seek to boast or codify.

Its form shall be a simple list

Of lessons learnt and lessons missed;

The ways we lived, the stands we took,

The rules we did and did not brook;

The things we gave and we forgave

Six metres from the lapping waves.

Our ode to life and love austere

Will linger well beyond our years.

Its title, set in bold, shall be,

‘Our Republic by the Sea.’

Music, vocals and instrumentals by Joseph DeNatale

Two Translations

The Midnight Watch

The Argonnerwaldlied (‘Song of the Argonne Forest’) was composed by Hermann Albert Gordon in 1914/1915.

The Western Front, six hours ’fore dawn.

A watchman gazes over yon:

Above the trench, beyond the wire,

At one small star, to which his thoughts aspire.

His love, he knows, beholds it too.

She’d sworn an oath, her word was true:

At midnight, till their eyes could meet,

She’d send the little star her beau to greet.

And with his gaze still fixed on high,

A flash of red illumes the sky.

The cannons’ thunder shakes the ground;

Shells burst and shrapnel splinters all around.

His comrades rally to his side:

A dozen left, the rest have died.

They fell by fate or happenstance—

Just twelve remain to halt the foe’s advance.

The watchman bids them hold the line.

Above the fray, his star still shines.

The guns resound, the rifles crack—

Until the foe is turned and beaten back.

He asks not ‘why?’ nor ‘what’s the sense?’

Seeks neither fame nor recompense;

Knows precious little of grand plans,

Yet at the fore the watchman firmly stands.

Argonnerwaldlied

Argonnerwald, um Mitternacht,

Ein Pionier steht auf der Wacht.

Ein Sternlein hoch am Himmel stand;

Bringt ihm ’nen Gruß aus fernem Heimatland.

Und mit dem Spaten in der Hand

Er vorne in der Sappe stand.

Mit Sehnsucht denkt er an sein Lieb:

Ob er sie wohl noch einmal wiedersieht?

Und donnernd dröhnt die Artill’rie.

Wir stehen vor der Infantrie.

Granaten schlagen bei uns ein,

Der Franzmann will in unsere Stellung ’rein.

Der Sturm bricht los, die Mine kracht,

Der Pionier gleich vorwärts macht.

Bis an den Feind macht er sich ran

Und zündet dann die Handgranate an.

Die Infantrie steht auf der Wacht,

Bis daß die Handgranate kracht,

Geht dann mit Sturm bis an den Feind,

Mit Hurra nimmt sie dann die Stellung ein.

Er frug nicht warum und nicht wie,

Tat seine Pflicht wie alle sie.

In keinem Liede ward’s gehört,

Ob er geblieben oder heimgekehrt.

Vocals: Chloe Edgecombe. Producer: Luks Rivera

Thoughts Unrestrained

Die Gedanken sind frei (‘Thoughts are Free’) is an ode to freedom of thought whose original lyricist and composer are unknown. The most well-known version was composed by Hoffmann von Fallersleben in 1842.

Unrestrained are our thoughts, no man can divine them;

They cannot be caught, nor jailer confine them.

No seer can know them, oppression won’t slow them,

So let it be taught: unrestrained are our thoughts!

I think as I will and as brings me gladness,

And do so until it drives away sadness.

This joy and contentment spurns censor’s resentment;

It remains as it ought: unrestrained are our thoughts!

And should I be thrown into a dark prison,

My captors shall bemoan my thoughts having risen—

Because my own thinking will set the bars clinking

And bring them to naught: unrestrained are our thoughts!

So I shall have ever this simplest of pleasure,

And bandits shall never steal from me this treasure.

No mob can demolish, no law can abolish

What Nature hath wrought: unrestrained are our thoughts!

Die Gedanken sind frei

Die Gedanken sind frei, wer kann sie erraten,
sie fliehen vorbei wie nächtliche Schatten.
Kein Mensch kann sie wissen, kein Jäger sie schießen
es bleibet dabei: Die Gedanken sind frei!

Ich denke was ich will und was mich beglücket,
doch alles in der Still’, und wie es sich schicket.
Mein Wunsch und Begehren kann niemand verwehren,
es bleibet dabei: Die Gedanken sind frei!

Und sperrt man mich ein im finsteren Kerker,
das alles sind rein vergebliche Werke;
denn meine Gedanken zerreißen die Schranken
und Mauern entzwei: die Gedanken sind frei.

Drum will ich auf immer den Sorgen entsagen
und will mich auch nimmer mit Grillen mehr plagen.
Man kann ja im Herzen stets lachen und scherzen
und denken dabei: die Gedanken sind frei.

Vocals and production: Caroline and Darren Clarke
Posted on by Stoddard Martin

Last flowers of Bloom

Harold Bloom
STODDARD MARTIN remembers a dedicated litterateur’s late works

One can hardly think but with affection of Harold Bloom, addict of the Word, historic lover of literature, and coiner of the phrase “anxiety of influence” among other more recondite tags.

It would be invidious not to feel that affection when considering his final books, compendious and repetitive though they may be, composed or compiled as they were during bouts of convalescence between the illnesses that led to his corporeal silence in 2019, aged eighty-nine. It is likely that more words from the indefatigable commentator may be stored up yet to come, editing angels and publishing deities willing. The prospect is daunting, to some perhaps dismaying, for after seven decades of pronouncements, more Bloom may seem less.

Of the supreme enunciator of literary rankings in recent times – “probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world” of his day – posterity might require for a tidy canon. But tidy Bloom is not. In his 2019 book Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism, the idealiser of Falstaff and his perceived form of “heroic vitalism”[1] tacitly put faith in excess. Bloom’s object, insofar as it ever went beyond an exuberant autodidact’s self-revelations, was to provoke more than to instruct (Possessed, p12 – all subsequent page numbers refer to this book). “I am a Nietzschean,” he declares in the last of his provisional last words (p79) after a lifetime of enthusiasm for the philosopher’s kindred spirits, such as W. B. Yeats. Thus at the end, like the author of Ecce Homo when approaching fatal dispersion into madness, Bloom eerily claims: “Something in me speaks for multitudes around the globe.” (p11)

“Oh my brothers!” is Zarathustra’s refrain, and Bloom never tired of projecting that he was carrying on a dialogue with colleagues and students, whether at Cornell, Yale or Cambridge where a boy from a Yiddish-speaking immigrant family earned degrees, or at the same or similarly distinguished institutions where a publicity-loving adult would ultimately profess. First person plural is the mode. Bloom’s method as critic was conversational, sometimes ingratiating, especially in books where he might indulge in a lifetime’s penchant for having the last word. Why argue with him? Listen. Admire. Reflect. Then, perhaps, carry on a silent conversation of one’s own in the watches of night – those insomniac hours in which, as he tells us, Bloom had his most fertile ideas and, when not idealizing, lay awake reciting favourite works to the shades – incanting, as if a religious at prayer.

This is the milieu. And it determines content. Bloom’s canon finally includes, from the beginning, what he considers to be the great literary passages of “the Hebrew Bible” (Old Testament), for as he says, beyond having become Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale, Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard, recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, etc., he is “a literary and religious critic” (emphasis mine), whose “tradition is dying” and whose dying wish is “to rally a saving remnant”(p11). Again, a note of Nietzschean messianism, if perhaps with a hint of the disingenuous tendency of that other heroic vitalist (“the Fat Knight”) to humour and guff, “nimble believing and disbelieving”.

The lifelong lover of Shakespeare ascribes these qualities to Hamlet, whom he sees as “his own Falstaff… a consciousness so enormous that it contains all of human self-otherseeing” (p112). It might be a description of what Bloom aspired to be himself; it is also what he finds lacking in the Hebrew God – Yahweh, a dislikable presence for him at almost every turn, despite his Jewish roots. Here the old Bloom, whose early literary critical self started with Shelley, returns to youthful insurgency. Something is wrong in the heavens, as it was for the renegade Romantic: Prometheus punished by Jupiter is dealing with a false God or at least a faulty one – there is better beyond, in the pleroma. Gnosticism is in the air, and Bloom inhales it, lauding the work of his late “mentor” Gershom Scholem and concentrating passing attention on Scholem’s special study, the Kabbalah. “I have spent part of a lifetime,” Bloom states, “trying to work out a pragmatic relationship between Kabbalah and literary criticism” (p20). The provisionality implied here is matched by an achievement that is opaque and fragmentary. Bloom links Kabbalah and poetry both to “heretical subversions of orthodoxy”, “salvation by transgression”, “the frontier between the sacred and the profane” and no requirement to complete the Great Work but no freedom to desist in the attempt (pps23-5).

A Christian attempt to unravel Kabbalism, by the 16th/17th century thinker Heinrich Khunrath

From here it is small distance to Blake, Whitman and others of Bloom’s un-Leavisite “great tradition”, grounded in English literature fundamentally not only on Shakespeare but more portentously on Milton’s Satan. However – and here is an essential, perhaps under-recognised element in Bloom – heresy is only a pretext for a new/old orthodoxy and God. For Bloom’s ultimate standard is breadth and depth of vision, a vastness of sensibility and inclusion, reminding one perhaps of what a critic once complained of in the French symboliste Mallarmé: a sense that anything less than the all-embracing might be presumptuous[2].

Bloom, in short, disliking the Yahweh of tradition, sets out in effect to descry a truer God – humane, non-vindictive, invisible but glimpsed beyond Demogorgon up in starrier heavens. Like Shelley’s Prometheus being liberated from his bonds, the tireless yet mortally ill individual must rely on a bevy of maidens to help him complete the job – seven female assistants are named at the start of Possessed by Memory. This could be interpreted as Kabbalistic in the sense of Bloom’s contention that the proper mystical Yahweh can only function with aid from the Moon Queen or female spirit that resides in Malkuth, foundational pod of the Sefiroth [EDITOR’S NOTE: The Sefiroth are ten attributes of emotion, intellect or will in Kabbalistic esotericism]; it might also bring to mind accusations of “inappropriate” attention to female students that marked the professor’s later years.

Be that as it may, the inclusions in his excursion towards a summatory roundup of values betray composition by many hands: sketches, bits of lectures, notes from seminars are the basis, even in one case a funeral address. The authorial scholar gives way to the genial teacher, whose mission is foremost to enthuse. Possessed is designed to tell us why a dying man has recalled this passage or that poem and what is outstanding about it. It is a trawl, a last judgement on the canonical, as per a decent God’s instincts. And why not? Many an ailing scholar would love to engage in such a pastime, and Bloom’s range is such that he is almost always engaging at it – almost being the lively interlocutor’s operative word. In difference lies interest, in qualifications glided over or simply not made, in enthusiasms too grandly stated.

The Fat Knight Falstaff, for Bloom an exemplar of ‘heroic vitalism’

Falstaff, for instance, is not for this reader the exemplar that he is for Bloom, nor do the plays in which he appears seem the Bard’s best. Bloom has little time for the Marlovian in Shakespeare, speaks dismissively of Hotspur, and ignores the coruscating soliloquies of that supreme Machiavel, Richard. He is intriguing about the bastard Faulconbridge in the oft-neglected King John, but says little of comedies which now may strike the ear as warm-ups for Blackadder. As to Milton, he admits with Dr Johnson that few read him with pleasure (p176); re Johnson himself, he forgives eccentric pomposities. Bloom is of a generation of American Jewish scholars who began in awe of English literary tradition. He does not rate the deviations of Pound and Eliot towards Europe, attention to Dante excepted. The superior art of Baudelaire earns from him no more than an aside in a discussion of Swinburne (p301).

Walt Whitman, whom Bloom considered the greatest American poet

Much else is missing. Where for instance is Wilde, save in apt citation of a quote from ‘The Critic as Artist’ as the book’s epigraph? As for Wilde’s countryman Yeats: is he quite understood? In these summatory pages, how much space does old Bloom accord to a signal figure of his youth? His trajectory now, whatever it was in journeyman days and however much he may remain haunted by Shakespeare and Shelley, is towards fellow Americans – those who, unlike Eliot and Pound, did not “beat out [their] exile” but stayed home to “make [their] pact”, to borrow from the latter, Whitman-as-internationalist, as Bloom resolutely won’t. The god who stands at the head of American poetic tradition is for Bloom the seminal incantor – psalmic “transumptor” – of Leaves of Grass. Whitman the untidy, the vastly inclusive proto-Zarathustran – in him the professor finds a lodestone more congenial than in an Irishman whose attention to craft moved George Moore to depict him coming down to lunch at Coole Park to report to Lady Gregory that his morning’s work had consisted of removing a comma which he later restored[3]. Whitman’s incontinence, like Falstaff’s, if wilder, exposes another facet of “heroic vitalist” genius chez dying Bloom. Might we conclude that, in the light of his disintegration, a coherence strained for in youth seems no longer essential – analogous to how for the late Turner a glimmer of sun through vague clouds became preferable as subject to the detail of ship and sail? One suspects it to be partly the case. Bloom alludes en passant to Yeats’ “Byzantium poems”, but the exactitude of “hammered gold and gold enamelling” is hardly seen as a destiny. Bloom may live on as critic or at least enthuser: penning fifty-odd books suggests aspiration to transcendence beyond mere bodily existence. But if he lives on, Bloom is liable to do so as the critic permissive rather than the critic precise.

Again, why not? The third of four parts of Possessed by Memory begins to judder and creak as it extends Anglo tradition to snippets from the canonical Browning and Meredith; but the fourth part, commencing with its long devotion to Whitman, moves to some eye-opening appreciations, not only of the predictable Stevens, Williams and Crane, but more appealingly of the less obvious Edward Arlington Robinson and Conrad Aiken among others. With Aiken, comparison to his Harvard classmate Eliot leads to a fuller understanding of why Bloom felt antipathy for the most celebrated Anglo-American voice of the past century. That said, Bloom’s account of Aiken’s work falls short of full praise, and his explanation for why Aikens failed to reach “the eminence” of “Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, Thomas Stearns Eliot and Hart Crane” seems partly to tell against itself – “Associative rhetoric was both Aiken’s mode and, sadly, his weakness. He did not try to make it new but to augment the foundations by relying upon the major poets of the Romantic tradition.” (p393)

Might this not be a description of Bloom’s own approach as critic? Might one even go so far as to see it as either a veil drawn over a latent, counter-canonical preference for poets of Aikens’ pitch or a subconscious admission of Bloom’s own less than supreme rank as critic? These are not idle questions. Somerset Maugham once famously quipped that his status as writer was in the first rank of the second rate. The false modesty hardly strained to disguise a popular novelist’s healthy antipathy for experimental modernists whom a cognoscenti lionized, but the common reader found unreadable: Woolf, Joyce and so on. Bloom, when set alongside the Derrida-ists, Deconstructionists, Structuralists and such fashionable ‘critics’ of his epoch, might strike one analogously as among the first rank of the middle-brow.

John Ashbery, by David Shankbone. Wikimedia Commons

Like Maugham in The Summing Up, Bloom laces his learned observations with recollection. His remarks on one of two women included in a 500-page book, May Swenson, pivot on their meetings at a café in Greenwich Village in the 1960s. His discussion of the original and vitalist ex-soldier Richard Eberhardt stems from a lecture tour at the University of Florida, where Eberhardt frightened him with the campus alligator. Bloom’s account of the master of negation, Weldon Kees, begins with an encounter at a jazz club in Harlem. Longer pieces on lesser-knowns such as Archie Randolph Ammons or Alvin Feinman are founded on yet closer association, as is the inclusion on John Ashbery, with whom Bloom’s “friendship has been continuous these sixty years… I have just phoned him at the Whittier Rehabilitation Center where he is recovering rather slowly from double pneumonia” (p431). Illness and age are constant companions in these last works, not notably cheerful ones, rather ones with whom Bloom struggles manfully to come to terms, never quite achieving reconciliation with, let alone joy in, observation of their processes – intrinsic to life, after all, thus a subset of the “heroic vital”. Bloom resists falling back into angry, non-accepting “rage, rage against the dying of the light”; rather he strives to win from these ultimate confrontations a revitalised urgency and heightened appreciation. He can still read, or be read to, and hear. He can still idealize and recite in the watches of night. Most of all he can remember. Which brings us to the ‘coda’ of the book, Proustianly entitled “In Search of Lost Time”.

Before one arrives there, one must be reconciled with Bloom’s subjectivity. One has to accept that his judgments have often to do with where he could most comfortably locate himself; that his “we” posits a community both transitory and presumptuous; that his lordly opinions, such as that Hart Crane is the great American poet after Whitman and Dickinson, may pass as gospel without being convincingly preached; that he gives himself grace to make errors and to speculate beyond what accords with known facts; that he settles scores on occasion – against Saul Bellow,  for instance (p416) – and will not always refrain from resorting to guff.

What, say, is the sense of a sentence such as “His consciousness was a plenum that could have created a heterocosm, where space and sun might have made another world” (p430)? From here it is not far to complain of Bloom’s cherished inventions such as “self-othering” or “transumptive”. But let it pass. Bloom is a character in his literary universe. He is too Shakespearean not to put a high, perhaps excessive, value on personality. That he has a big one has been part of his “body of fate”, to use a Yeats term; Bloom has embraced and cultivated it, and created a space for it to exist in and flourish and suffer. Irritating this may be, but one can also be glad for it. Bloom himself becomes a standard, not just what he says: a brand, an embodiment of forces to reckon with, if not revere – something of a god. Apotheosis may not be a fate he has worked for entirely nakedly, but he has certainly flirted with it often, notwithstanding the trademark baggy garb of being “human, all-too-human”.

God incarnate in Bloom? Will He live on as Holy Ghost? Close to his physical end, Bloom muses: “When we die, our own survival will be the extent to which we have changed the lives of those who come after us… I have to consider how little I know of time to come. Doubtless it is better that way. Foretelling can be destructive.” (p507) His coda to Possessed begins in this way to evince a becoming humility. Before sojourning with Proust, he recalls Saint Augustine’s conversations with his mother about God’s eternal light. The aptness is to what Bloom characterises as Proust’s “sublime lucidity”, which transcends Jewish and Christian roots to be “closer to Hindu philosophy”. While admitting that Proust probably never read the Bhagavad-Gita, Bloom invokes it.

Marcel Proust, for Bloom a kind of Gnostic seeker

Shortly afterwards, he qualifies a roving meditation by confessing, “I have the realisation or fantasy that simultaneously I know everything and nothing” (p481). This precedes recollection of moments of “sudden radiance” in early childhood, which “seem now to be heretical intimations of a lost gnosis” (p487). Proust’s similar epiphanies, Bloom muses, may stem from “worship of an unknown God who is yet knowable” (p492); in any case, the novelist’s truth “is compounded of perception, involuntary memory, impressionism, a search for spiritual meaning, and a kind of aesthetic mysticism” (p497). Is this not Bloom’s “truth” in a mirror? The presiding return of “childlike vision” is for him, as for Proust, “allied to phantasmagoria and to the world of dreams… modified delirium” (p501). Here one might end, or with association of “the survival of the inner self with a world founded upon benignity” (p503), or with a largeness that “could be at once atheist and mystic” (p505). But Bloom actually concludes by reverting to Dr Johnson, whose wisdom allows for ebb as well as a flow that chez Proust is continuous. Bloom has indeed already undercut his paean to In Search of Lost Time by stating that he would choose Richardson’s Clarissa in preference to it. Why? Because the heroine and her rapist lover are “more vital”.

One trusts this no more than one might accept Mozart’s sympathy to be with the survivors rather than with the deposed libertine at the end of Don Giovanni. Bloom’s coda, brave as it is in conveying what remains at the approach of his earthly dissolution, conveys one back towards his penultimate book, which occupies a more preliminary stage in the process and thus may constitute a more reliable summing-up of a career of concentrated literary contemplation.

W B Years in 1908

The book is less given to reminiscence and enthusiasm, though some is ever present. There are no chapters devoted to lesser talents such as John Wheelwright, James Merrill, Jay Macpherson or Amy Clampit, with whom Bloom ends his pre-coda trawl in Possessed. Among those, notably Merrill, Bloom remains ready to deviate back to consideration of his traditional greats: he cites phone calls “in which we explored W. B. Yeats’s A Vision, the Gnostic religion, and the relation of Yeats to Shelley and to Blake” (p449). Reader, take note. Bloom subsumes the Irish poet here to two English Romantics whom he has consistently ranked as the foremost. He glides from A Vision to Scholem’s topic as if Yeats’s mystico-historic text were self-evidently Gnostic. He considers the matter no further except to say “I suspect that Yeats would not have taken to James Merrill’s poetry” (p453), then somewhat conversely he postulates that in Merrrill’s poetry “the Byzantium of William Butler Yeats hovers and is deftly evaded” (p456). Deftly seems a loaded adverb, not least in a context where the Irish poet’s full name is iterated, as it is in most other scattered allusions to him throughout this book. Why? Shelley almost never requires “Percy Bysshe”. Is there some other Yeats that Bloom fears we may think of, or is there some more telling nuance at play??

Looking at this penultimate work, so boldly entitled Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: the Power of the Reader’s Mind over a Universe of Death, and among chapters Bloom devotes to the usual titans – Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Browning, Tennyson, Whitman, Frost, Stevens, Crane, Freud (eccentrically) and Dante (again, lone continental) – we find “William Butler Yeats and D. H. Lawrence: Start with the Shadow”. The title seems tricksy – it matters little: tags chez Bloom and others of his generation of academics often do. What does matter is the shadow of doubt that pervades. Bloom invokes an American favourite to contrast “three modes of mastery. In Lawrence it is chthonic. In Yeats it is occult. In Stevens it is massive acceptance of things as they are.” (p474) Proceeding to quote from one of the American’s poems, Bloom wonders if it is not “a critique by Stevens of the endless series of questing wanderers in Yeats” (p476). Endless series? “William Butler Yeats,” we are told (entire name again) “had the good fortune and the vital temperament to refuse any despair of his own quest” (p479). Are we to infer that a less “occult” sensibility should have despaired? Later, in parsing “All Souls” Night”, Bloom informs us that “the magnificence of gesture, metric, diction overcomes what could be judged sheer silliness” (p483); later still, in relation to Yeats’s alleged “pagan purpose”, we are told that “The force of his diction and metric brushes argument aside” (p485). “Devoted readers of Yeats learn that for him God and Death are one,” Bloom states, “a Gnostic formulation” (p486). This is of course arguable and reflects what Bloom is finally obliged to confess: “More than ever I have a mixed response.” (p490). He lauds “Adam’s Curse” in part to question the quality of what comes after; and when he reaches “Under Ben Bulben”, he decries a “farrago… much of it of a badness not to believed” (p497).

Old Bloom clearly had a problem with old Yeats. From a concluding phrase one might take it that he continued to rate or anyway grapple with the Irish master mainly out of an older loyalty: “The daemon in Yeats, as he acknowledged, was Shelley” (p499). This is arguable too and, at best, partial. But then, as I have indicated, partiality is characteristic of critic Bloom, in age as in youth. He is, to repeat his claim, a Nietzschean, as he fancies it: a “provoker”. A windbag like his beloved “Fat Knight”, he is more than a touch averse to fine concision. He is also no dedicated traveller in realms of magic and dream, however insomniac his nights may have been. Baudelaire comments somewhere that it would be impossible for a poet not to contain a critic but it would be prodigious for a critic to contain a poet. Harold Bloom adored poetry: of that there is no doubt. What may be lacking in him – one leaves it to weigh up – is a thoroughgoing sense of the poetic.

Harold Bloom bibliography (partial)

  • Shelley’s Mythmaking, 1959
  • The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, 1961
  • Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument, 1963
  • Yeats, 1970
  • The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition, 1971
  • The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry 1997
  • A Map of Misreading, 1975
  • Kabbalah and Criticism. 1975
  • Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens, 1976
  • Figures of Capable Imagination, 1976
  • Wallace Stevens: The Poems of our Climate, 1977
  • Deconstruction and Criticism, 1980
  • The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy, 1980
  • Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism, 1982
  • The Breaking of the Vessels, 1982
  • The Poetics of Influence: New and Selected Criticism, 1988
  • Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present, 1989
  • The Book of J: Translated from the Hebrew by David Rosenberg; Interpreted by Harold Bloom, 1990
  • The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation, 1992
  • The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, 1994
  • Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996.
  • Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 1998
  • How to Read and Why, 2000
  • Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages, 2001
  • El futur de la imaginació (The Future of the Imagination), 2002
  • Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, 2003
  • Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, 2003
  • The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost, 2004
  • Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, 2004
  • Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, 2005
  • American Religious Poems: An Anthology By Harold Bloom, 2006
  • Fallen Angels, 2007
  • Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems, 2010
  • The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life, 2011
  • The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of The King James Bible, 2011
  • The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015
  • Falstaff: Give Me Life, 2017
  • Cleopatra: I Am Fire and Air, 2017
  • Lear: The Great Image of Authority, 2018
  • Iago: The Strategies of Evil, 2018
  • Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind, 2019
  • Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism, 2019 
  • Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader’s Mind Over a Universe of Death, 2020
  • The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Re-read, 2020

[1] Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism (Vintage, 2019), p. 101. Further references by page number.

[2] See my Wagner to the Waste Land (Macmillan, 1982), 122.

[3] Moore notoriously settled a number of old scores in his memoir, Hail and Farewell.

Posted on by William G Carpenter

Dispatches from 1643

The following is an extract from Book II of William G Carpenter’s epic poem about the English Civil Wars.

The poet is Philip Meadowe, assistant to John Milton in his role as Foreign Language Secretary for the Council of State under the Protectorate.  Meadowe reads his lines to Milton at Milton’s house in Petty France, Westminster. 

1643: a tough year for the Parliamentarian armies, with defeats in every quarter of England, and ever and always short of money and provisions.  Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (herein “Dev-Ex”), Captain-General of the Parliamentary Army, is Meadowe’s protagonist in the early sections; this excerpt presents the successful conclusion of Dev-Ex’ siege of Reading in April 1643.

An excerpt from Book I, The Sword of Gideon, may be found at Expansive Poetry Online Spring 2022 (www.expansivepoetryonline.com/CarpenterPoem.html). 

WILLIAM G. CARPENTER is the author of Eþandun (Beavers Pond Press,2020), which depicts King Alfred’s struggle with the pagan Danes in 878 AD.  Available from Amazon, Itasca Books Distribution and www.williamgcarpenter.com

The Loss of the West

Dev-Ex’ men were dying by the score: 

“to death, by troops, the soldiers went,” says Chapman,

men spotted, burning, writhing, raving, bruised,

the life of men ebbing in stinking rills,

yet Dev-Ex knew no crime against Apollo,

no priest’s daughter seized, no ritual stinted,

that merited infernal punishment

of his half-frozen, always hungry men –

unless, as seemed unlikely, He preferred

east-facing altars and communion rails

and a Book of Common Prayer for the godly Scots –

unless He favored base servility

towards every courtier that caught Charles’ ear,

including Laud, Charles’ encroacher-in-chief. 

Or was it our indifference to His Word,

maiming and murdering maugre Majesty? 

Rupert had stormed Birmingham on Good Friday,

then, on the very feast of the Resurrection,

Sir William Waller occupied Welsh Chepstow –

perhaps no insult to the Prince of Peace

unless pursued without humility,

which was, Dev-Ex conjectured, Waller’s way. 

Our guns knocked down the tower of St. Giles,

but only when the Rs set a cannon on it. 

As to maimed rites, Parliament starved his army,

though willing enough to grant him compensation

for R despoilment of his lands in Staffs

out of the lands of Arthur Capel, Charles’s

lord-lieutenant of Salop, Chesh, and North Wales –

who loyally had bought a barony

when Charles, hungry for money, slashed the fee. 

(A bargain at three hundred fifty pounds;

Sir Richard Newport later paid six thousand.) 

The “generals” in the Houses, knowing famine

and filthiness would breed disease in soldiers

who could afford nor daily bread nor clothing

whenever their promised daily eight pence failed,

nevertheless dared not incur the blame

of taxing men enough to fund the war –

pretending to themselves that Charles’s false

and dilatory treaty for a peace

would obviate the need to pay the army. 

Wherefore the Houses tottered along on loans,

first voluntary, then by threat of law,

and now sought to shift the hugeous cost

of war onto the Rs by sequestrations,

a measure certain to inflame their hatred. 

Only Pym, the true, the brave, foresaw

the Ps must needs dig deeper for the Cause

and dared to introduce an excise bill,

which naturally would kindle popular ire. 

As Dev-Ex lay in Daniel Blagrave’s bed,

his mind floating up through depths of sleep,

Sir John Meyrick breathing next to him

in darkness, with Sir John’s siege-guns rumbling

all day, all night, now going on nine days,

from west, north, east, and south of the worn town,

the birds a-chattering in the intervals,

he knew the siege of Reading verged on failure. 

Most of his regiments were undermanned,

primarily from this devilish camp fever

that wantoned through his army’s camps and billets. 

Provisions, powder, shot grew ever scarcer. 

And today, Charles’ host would arrive in force. 

At least the dead and dying could be shipped

down the Thames, which the Ps controlled downstream. 

An army is a perishable thing: 

maybe he ought to have rolled the dice at Oxford,

leaving Aston’s garrison in his rear. 

War was martyrdom, whoever triumphed. 

Pudsley dressed him.  Dev-Ex breakfasted

with Carey-Rochford, Robartes, Grey, and Hampden,

Constable, Goodwin, Skippon, and Du Boys. 

Meyrick, of course.  Cold capon, bread, and wine. 

They then progressed from Blagrave’s house in Southcote

to Caversham, where they met with Colonels Holborne,

Barclay, Meldrum, and Middleton, who’d slept

close to their regiments across the Thames. 

Dev-Ex had brought his secretary, Baldwin. 

Dawn lightened the rainy air.  No sun shone,

though fresh buds glowed on the tips of branches. 

“This Council of War shall now come to order.” 

Thus President Meyrick.  A dim chill tavern. 

“To recapitulate,” Dev-Ex began,

“why we’re here instead of Charles’s capital: 

leaving Aston’s regiments in our rear,

seven of foot and several troops of horse,

whilst charging Charles’s ring of garrisons –

not wise.  Whilst our more greener regiments

further dissuaded us from undertaking

the more hazardous task.  For which cause, too,

we thus far have elected not to storm

the governor’s forbidding palisadoes. 

Also our bargemen crave this reach of Thames. 

To boot, this matter weighed as much as any,

the welfare of the godly Reading people

groaning under Sir Arthur’s popish cruelty,

beaten, robbed, enslaved – their homes their prison. 

Rupert’s troopers roar like a sudden squall,

but Aston’s swarming plunderers have settled

like locusts on the folk, consuming them. 

“We’ve held off from mortaring their houses

and burning the unhappy town to the ground. 

Our guns play on their works, not on their churches. 

And so we find ourselves:  the walls unbreached,

their garrison intact, and our men scourged

by fever – with Charles and Rupert and young Maurice

and ten or twelve regiments, horse and foot,

arriving from Wallingford at any hour. 

In which light, the sole course, best to preserve

what yet survives of our afflicted force –

you know not how it gnaws at me to say it –

the only certain means to preserve our army,

is penitently to march back to Windsor,

relinquishing this siege for better days.” 

They sat in silence, stunned.  Constable bridled: 

“My lord, you mock our faith and fortitude. 

Think of the vast mercy shown at Kineton

and other fields too numerous to name. 

Crawling back to Windsor, where our men

had starved, but for killing of Charles’s deer –

with Charles and Rupert snapping at our flanks –

it behooves us, rather, to quick-march to Oxford

and storm it, having lured the popish wolf,

the wolf and the wolf’s cubs, from their popish den.” 

Du Boys added, not to be thought timid,

in his tongue-tied Netherlandish accent,

“When we have Oxford, they must sue for peace.” 

Meyrick had replaced him on the ordnance. 

The president studied faces, but said nothing –

betraying no dismay or disagreement,

unclear whether he was for or against retreat,

as Dev-Ex’ oldest, closest comrade present. 

Anticipating, Skippon answered thus: 

“Respected sirs, our horse may reach the town,

but our lame foot would quickly be devoured

by Cavaliers raging along Thames-side. 

And it will take some days to ship our sick

downriver, lest Sir Arthur murder them.” 

The small coal fire began to warm the room,

“divine tobacco” (Spenser) scenting the air. 

Said Hampden with a smile:  “My lord but tempts us. 

Not so, Lord General?  You would try our courage? 

The mercies Colonel Constable refers to,

they follow us today.  My Lord Grey (nodding)

has swelled our host.  Our trenches indefeasibly

advance on Aston’s works.  This man Flower –

we’ve now cut off Charles’ traffic with his people.” 

“A malignant messenger,” commented Meyrick. 

“A drummer of ours fished him out of the river.” 

Goodwin spoke up eagerly, “And look

at the feats of our fierce Caledonian friends,

Barclay and Holborne foiling the Earl of Forth;

Meldrum and Middleton, at Dorchester,

routing Charles’ life guard and snatching a cornet.” 

Dev-Ex exhaled a puff of smoke, content

to hear his councillors debate the motion. 

An old Parliament man, the General knew

that deference must be pricked to foster counsel. 

Grey added that the Eastern Association,

having assumed the risk and the expense

of sending several regiments abroad

(minus the Norfolk troop that mutinied

rather than fight for foreign counties’ safety)

with Cavendishes criss-crossing their northern borders,

if the Houses’ host rearward marched to Windsor

never again would join in such campaigns. 

The Parliament itself might reconsider

commissions should this mountain sire a mouse. 

The colonels knew that Lord Grey’s eastern levies

were the worst-equipped, -disciplined, and -paid

of any mustered for the present siege. 

They studiously refrained from knowing glances. 

Dev-Ex nodded.  Grey could contribute nothing. 

“I see that none here favors our withdrawal,”

said Dev-Ex, releasing peaceable smoke,

“which therefore, for lack of a second, dies. 

Yet such would not impair our army’s principal

purpose, which of course is guarding London. 

Nor do all favor a sudden lunge at Oxford. 

And so, a bear at stake, we abide Charles’ dogs. 

War is martyrdom, whoever triumphs.” 

They sat a moment, till Dev-Ex suggested

the Council briefly adjourn to Caversham Hill,

whence they might gain celestial instruction

as to their dispositions for the day. 

With Meyrick leading, following the thunder

that broke at intervals from the thick cloud

and smoke that hid the battery up the hill,

recalling Sinai to those godly captains,

they left behind the houses of the village

and left their horses at the barricade

that guarded Aston’s knowledgeable works. 

They found themselves exposed to wind and rain,

and earthquake when the greater pieces roared,

then huddled in the lee of a makeshift shed

erected on the south perimeter

to guard the match and powder from foul weather. 

Stepping into the wind, the General peered

across the river towards the battered town,

once prosperous, once occupied by Danes

as hostile as Sir Arthur Aston’s Rs. 

He scarcely could discern its walls and ditches

through the slanting rain and low blowing clouds. 

Nor could he find his other batteries,

whose smoke the rain and gale bore away. 

Beckoning, he led the shivering colonels

across the hill’s crown to its northmost fence. 

From there they could make out their furthest outworks,

but beyond those, nothing.  Where was Charles? 

He scanned the plain with his perspective trunk,

then absently passed the device to Meyrick. 

He eyed the dripping faces of his fellows. 

“Here we are,” said Dev-Ex.  “At the stake. 

Four good if weary regiments we have

facing Charles’ most probable approach. 

Can four withstand his ten?  And what if Rupert

swoops in from west or south, and Aston sallies,

an anvil to the German prince’s hammer? 

The Houses’ army could be smashed to bits,

the London road left practically unguarded,

and us to face whatever punishments

befall men who squander the Lord God’s host.” 

A wet gust licked Dev-Ex’s fringe from his brow. 

Meyrick ushered the Council back to the shed,

where Dev-Ex dabbed his eyes.  Continuing: 

“Yet I concur, I must, with your advice,

Lord Grey, that to scurry back to Windsor

would be at least as costly to our Cause,

worse than defeat, in weakening the spirit

of those who do, and those who might, support us.” 

Unwilling to infect them with his dread,

and wishing, further, to lift up their hearts

despite the wind and rain, despite their prospects,

Dev-Ex glanced from face to face.  How he missed

Greville – his faith, his quiet joy in those he loved,

his portion of Our Savior’s kindliness,

his lucency in speech, his unrestrained

audacity in countering the foe. 

At least he still had Meyrick, Hampden, Robartes –

unlike Achilles, who went mad with grief

when his Patroclus fell to Hector’s spear. 

He caught the expectant glint in Hampden’s eye,

Hampden’s lips as if prompting his next words: 

“Let us rejoice, dear friends,” concluded Dev-Ex,

“in how Our Lord has favored this our leaguer. 

His mercies you know well, and his afflictions. 

It is our privilege to fight His battles.” 

Still Hampden looked at him expectantly. 

“Meyrick,” Dev-Ex said.  “Turn these great guns

to north-northwest.  Charles will be here soon.” 

Hampden, yet again, now Goodwin too. 

His two MPs, with Constable a third. 

Meyrick was a fourth, but “grappled to him

with hoops of steel and worn at his heart’s core.” 

“Robartes,” Dev-Ex added, to the baron,

“your foot, men know, stood firm at Kineton. 

Go quickly, now, and march them over the bridge. 

Meldrum will dispose them in his lines. 

We’ll meet Charles with five regiments at Caversham.” 

Robartes paled, pursed his lips, and nodded,

the slow action more a submissive bow. 

“Questions?  Meyrick, you may adjourn the Council.” 

They silently recrossed the battery,

the south wind spitting rudely in their faces. 

Dev-Ex felt as though his mask had cracked,

allowing chill tears for the coming slaughter

to drench his shaven cheeks in rivulets. 

The slender works he’d raised against his dread

gave way, and fear suddenly swarmed his trenches. 

“Dear Lord.  Dear Lord,” he muttered to himself. 

“Only you.  Only you, my Lord.  My God.” 

And the Lord God of Hosts heard his appeal. 

He stopped and looked across the river, where

the drifting cloud concealed and revealed Reading. 

A whitish thing appeared and disappeared,

wavering on the corner of the wall,

the northwest corner, facing Caversham Bridge. 

He looked, and the others followed his gaze,

as the white cloud opened and closed the vision. 

He took back his perspective-trunk from Meyrick. 

It was.  Yes.  A white flag of parley. 

“Praise God,” said Dev-Ex.  “Aston wants to talk.” 

But Aston did not want to talk.  Bedridden,

speechless from an injury to the head

inflicted by a falling chimney tile,

thanks to Meyrick’s diligent cannoneering,

Sir Arthur had laid down his tyranny. 

Command devolved on Colonel Richard Feilding,

a kinsman of William Feilding, Earl of Denbigh,

an R, and of P Colonel Basil Feilding. 

Dev-Ex hurried back across the river

and sent a trumpeter with Carey-Rochford,

whose father, Dover, served in Charles’s horse guards,

to make a truce, if offered, and give terms,

God willing, for surrender of the town. 

The Rs sent Colonel Bolle and LC Thelwell

and Sergeant-Major Gilby out to treat,

while Carey-Rochford stayed behind, a hostage,

joined by LC Russell and SM King. 

Meyrick’s guns fell silent, as did Feilding’s. 

When Dev-Ex summoned Aston, he’d refused

to let him march away with all his men. 

“I came not,” Dev-Ex said, “for the town only,

but for the men” – the whole three thousand of them,

a formidable access of strength for Oxford. 

But now, with Charles and Rupert on his doorstep,

his regiments consuming with the fever,

Dev-Ex willingly approved that trade

(excepting renegadoes from his army),

but capped removal of R guns and plunder. 

“Do we lack faith?” asked Hampden, privately,

once the trumpeter was on his way. 

They stood a few steps off from Dev-Ex’ tent,

where the R envoys sat.  The rain had paused. 

“Where is the sword of Gideon and the Lord?” 

Hampden continued.  “We outnumber Charles. 

Relief from Oxford was expected, which

is why we came with such a populous host.” 

“I’ll bear whatever blame accrues,” said Dev-Ex,

“without undue concern for martial glory. 

We cannot risk leaving London naked. 

Better a living dog, than a dead lion. 

Their ‘full honors of war’ will cost us nothing.” 

A distant cannon fired, well beyond Caversham. 

Charles was coming.  They went inside the tent,

Dev-Ex quietly ordering the guards

to keep the Rs from running back to Reading. 

“We’re under a truce,” he said to Colonel Bolle. 

The rain resumed.  Cannon- and musket-fire. 

The Rs were agitated, caught between

their truce and their obedience to Charles. 

A messenger from Colonel Meldrum came: 

Barclay’s and Robartes’ men were holding firm

against the whole brunt of Charles’ attack. 

Hampden left the tent to order dinner

and fetch a few more guards to watch the Rs. 

Colonel Bolle hailed from Louth in Lincolnshire,

but his foot regiment was raised in Staffs. 

Dev-Ex, the latter county’s lord-lieutenant,

knew Bolle’s officers and knew their families. 

Gilby, a papist, served under papist Belasyse. 

They dined.  There was no sally out of Reading,

which, Dev-Ex said, was good news for their treaty. 

Good news, he meant, for the R negotiators,

now Dev-Ex’ hostages in all but name. 

He ordered Hampden to the nearest battery,

with orders to let fly with one great gun

to mind Colonel Feilding of his position. 

The cannonfire dwindled and fell silent. 

Feilding asked for leave to seek Charles’ blessing

on the terms he and Dev-Ex had agreed. 

A messenger was sent and Charles was found

encamped amid his host near Wallingford. 

He seemed to give assent to Dev-Ex’ terms,

whereupon Colonel John Belasyse MP,

Lieutenant Colonel Edward Villiers, Bolle,

Gilby, Thelwell, and George Bond joined Feilding

and cosigned the articles of surrender. 

The following morning, Aston’s garrison

(including Henry Mordaunt in disguise,

soon to inherit his poor father’s earldom)

marched from Reading out Grey Friar’s gate,

led by Sir Arthur on his horse-drawn litter,

drums rattling, colors hanging, trumpets bleating,

the foot with ball in mouth and smoking match,

with four pieces of ordnance in their train

and fifty wagonloads of bag and baggage.