That drain this valley. Those doors
Might well be the entrance to some mine:
How would you lift its liquid gold,
How would you hold time that is travelling, too,
In every gleam the light is wakening
Over the waters’ face, asleep and flowing
With its dream of flight towards what end
The winter’s night awaits it with? Those strips
Of flame, vibrant with the current bearing them,
Inscribe our sign and presence here
Who watch these waters jostling to their fate
In the far-off, sharp sea air –
Air of origin and end: on the gathered spate
Rides a signature of fire holding its own.
Skywriting (2003)
Skywriting
Three jets are streaking west:
Trails are beginning to fray already:
The third, the last set out,
Climbs parallel a March sky
Paying out a ruled white line:
Skywriting like an incision,
Such surgical precision defines
The mile between it and the others
Who have disappeared leaving behind
Only their now ghostly tracks
That still hold to the height and map
Their direction with a failing clarity:
The sky is higher for their passing
Where the third plane scans its breadth.
The mere bare blue would never have shown
That vaultlike curvature overhead,
Already evading the mathematics of the spot,
As it blooms back, a cool canopy,
A celestial meadow, needing no measure
But a reconnaissant eye, an ear
Aware suddenly that as they passed
No sound accompanied arrival or vanishing
So high were their flight paths on a sky
That has gone on expunging them since,
Leaving a clean page there for chance
To spread wide its unravelling hieroglyphs.
Death of a Poet
i.m. Ted Hughes
It was a death that brought us south,
Along a roadway that did not exist
When the friendship was beginning death has ended.
How lightly, now, death leans
Above the counties and the goings-on
Of loud arterial England. I see
A man emerge out of a tent,
Pitched at a field’s edge, his back
Towards the traffic, taking in
The flat expanse of Sedgemoor, as if history
Had not occurred, the drumming tyres
Creating one wide silence.
Oaks stand beside their early shadows.
Sun makes of a man’s two shadow-legs
Long blades for scissoring the way
Across yet one more meadow, shortening it.
Hardy’s rivers – Parrett, Yeo, Tone –
Flash flood waters at us. Then,
As the flatlands cede to patchwork Devon,
Again you cannot quite foretell the way
Dartmoor will rise up behind its mists,
As solid as they are shifting. Sun,
Without warning, sets alight the fields,
In anticipation of that other unison
As fire enters body, body fire,
And every lineament gone, dissolves
The seal and simplification of human limits.
Mourners drift out of the church,
Stand watching the slow cortège
Of car and hearse wind through the street
To that last unmaking. The net of lanes
Entangles our departure, hedges
Zapped spruce against the expectation
Of another spring. Scarcely time
To recall the lanes we walked in or the coast
That heard our midland and his northern voice
Against a wind that snatched their sounds.
The small hawks caught the light
Below us, crossing the Hartland bays
Over endless metamorphoses of water.
Voice-prints, like foot-prints, disappear
But sooner; though more lingeringly
They go on fading in the ear.
We join the highway that is England now.
The moon, a thin bronze mirror
Reflecting nothing, a rush of cloud
Suddenly effaces. The line of oaks
That at morning stood beside their shadows
Are shades themselves on our return.
Cotswold Journey
2001
A day before the war and driving east,
We catch the rasp of ignited engines –
Planes practising combat above this shire
Of Norman masonry, limestone walls.
In their quiet, they seemed so permanent
Under the changing light. But the tower
We stand beneath is hacked by sound
Out of the centuries it has inhabited
With such certainty. After the flash
We stand once more on stable ground
Under chevroned arches, climb the stair
Up to the dovecot where the priest
Once fetched the victims down that he would eat.
The form remains, the victims have all gone
From nesting places squared in stone,
Boxes of empty darkness now. The planes streak on
Returning out of the unsteady brightness,
The blue that rain could smear away
But does not. Sun turns into silhouettes
The gargoyles clinging to sheer surfaces
That rise above us. Sun travels beside us
As we penetrate deeper in, lose track
Of the plane-ways that leave no vapour trails
To decorate their passage through
In abstract fury. Courteous walls
Rise out of stone-crowned summits,
Prelude and then surround a dwelling space
With church and inn – for us the solace
Of a now twilit afternoon. We explore
Before we eat, the inn-yard and the street beyond,
Where Saxon masons, raising arch and jamb,
Cut leaves of acanthus whose weathered surfaces
Hold onto fragile form. The night
Slowly extinguishes their edges but bequeaths
To the mind the lasting glimmer still
Of stone come to life. The inn
Recalls us through the village street
And I remember how a friend once said,
Speaking with a Yorkshireman’s conciseness,
‘A native gift for townscape, a parochialism
But of a Tuscan kind.’ Our return
Is silent although we travel by
Lanes tracing the outlines of the airbase
And, there, all we manage to decipher
Is the gleam of wired restriction, barbs
That bar us out from sterile acres
Awaiting the future in a moonless quiet.
Rain, with the clink of the lifted latch
On our arrival, bursts from the darkness where
East and west, preparing to unseam
The sleeping world below that height,
Downpour drops its curtain on the past
And the cry of the muezzin infiltrates first light.
If Bach Had Been a Beekeeper
for Arvo Pärt
If Bach had been a beekeeper
he would have heard
all those notes
suspended above one another
in the air of his ear
as the differentiated swarm returning
to the exact hive
and place in the hive,
topping up the cells
with the honey of C major,
food for the listening generations,
key to their comfort<
br />
and solace of their distress
as they return and return
to those counterpointed levels
of hovering wings where
movement is dance
and the air itself
a scented garden
Cracks in the Universe (2006)
Above the City
It would be good
to pass the afternoon
under this lucid sky,
strolling at rooftop level
this city above the city,
all the tubular protruberances,
chimneys, triangular skylights,
sheds that have lost their gardens
spread before one. The details
are not delicate up here
among the pipes and stacks,
the solid immovables, and yet
each outcrop affords
a fresh vista
to the promeneur solitaire –
though only the pigeons
are properly equipped
to go on undeterred
by changes of level where
one of their flat-footed
number suddenly launches itself
off the cornice sideways
taking its shadow with it
and bursts into dowdy flower,
blossoms in feathery mid-air to become
all that we shall never be,
condemned to sit
watching from windows
the life of those airy acres
we shall never inherit.
New York
Bread and Stone
The fragment of a loaf, rejected, stale:
As beautiful as any stone, it bears
Seams, scars, a dust of flour and like a stone
If it could unfold its history,
Would speak of its time in darkness and of light
Drawing it towards the thing it is,
Hard to the hand, an obstacle to sight,
Out of an untold matrix. If a son
Ask bread of you, would stone be your reply?
Let the differentiating eye
Rest on this, and for the moment read
The seed of nourishment in it as the sun
Reveals this broken bread as textured stone,
Served out as a double feast for us
On the cloth of the commonplace miraculous.
A Rose from Fronteira
Head of a rose:
above the vase
a gaze widening –
hardly a face, and yet
the warmth has brought it forth
out of itself,
with all its folds, flakes, layers
gathered towards the world
beyond the window,
as bright as features,
as directed as a look:
rose, reader
of the book
of light.
The Holy Man
In at the gate
A tramp comes sidling up:
‘I called before,’ – it’s now eight –
‘But you were still sleeping.’ He smiles
Like an actor who is perfectly sure
His audience will approve of him, offers
To tell us his story in exchange
For provision (the word is his) and lists
Tea, milk, candles and ointment:
‘I have been bitten by mosquitoes –
I bless them. They give only a love bite.
Did you see the moon last night? –
I blessed that too. Did you see its halo?’
I see the love bites on his wrists.
Beard, missing teeth, chapped hands.
‘The Lord told me four years ago
To take up a wandering life. I made a vow
Of celibacy then, and I have broken it
Only once. That was in Limerick.
Now I am headed from Devon to the Hebrides.
The voice of the Lord is a strange sound
Both inside and out. I shall only know
When I arrive where it is he wishes me to go.’
He pauses, provision slung across one shoulder:
‘I’ve blessed the stream that crosses your garden’ –
With this elate sidelong affirmation,
Departing he leaves behind him an unshut gate.
Eden
There was no Eden
in the beginning:
the great beasts
taller than trees
stalked their prey through glades
where the pathos of distance
had no share in the life of vegetation:
there was no eye
to catch the rain-hung grass,
the elation of sky
or earth’s incalculable invitation:
and when it came, that garden,
who was it raised the wall
enclosing it in the promise
of a place not to be lost,
guarded by winged sentries
taller than trees,
of an apple not to be eaten
and the cost if it were?
It was man
made Eden.
Epilogue
The Door
Too little
has been said
of the door, its one
face turned to the night’s
downpour and its other
to the shift and glisten of firelight.
Air, clasped
by this cover
into the room’s book,
is filled by the turning
pages of dark and fire
as the wind shoulders the panels, or unsteadies that burning.
Not only
the storm’s
breakwater, but the sudden
frontier to our concurrences, appearances,
and as full of the offer of space
as the view through a cromlech is.
For doors
are both frame and monument
to our spent time,
and too little
has been said
of our coming through and leaving by them.
from American Scenes and Other Poems (1966)
Afterword
David Morley
Charles Tomlinson was born on 8 January 1927 at his family home 34 Penkhull New Road, Stoke-on-Trent, the only child of Alfred and May Tomlinson. In 1930 the family moved to Gladstone Street in Etruria Vale, at the heart of The Potteries. It was for the young poet: ‘a land / Too handled to be primary – all the same, / The first in feeling’. He found it full of unsuspected possibilities: the shining surfaces of flooded marl pits, furnace-light reflected on canals, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in a dentist’s waiting room.
Stoke itself was heavily polluted. The house had for its view ‘the biggest gasometer in England’. Tomlinson’s mother and father took their son to a farm in Great Haywood where they would fish. Walking and fishing opened his eyes to the natural world, and to the notion that patience, contemplation, and ‘wishing the fish into the net’ had much in common with writing poems, an image for “capturing” he shared with his later great friend Ted Hughes.
Tomlinson’s health suffered as a child. Aged ten, pleurisy and rheumatic fever kept him off school for two years and in bed for nine months. During his illness, he wrote some early poems after seeing squirrels from his window. His doctor diagnosed he would have a ‘tired heart’ for the rest of what he expected would be a shortened life. But Tomlinson recovered and, during the war years, attended Longton High School, Staffordshire, [motto: Renascor ‘I am born again’]. Education opened up a fresh world beyond the Midlands town. As Tomlinson commented to The Paris Review in 1998, ‘You need two good teachers in any school, which is what we had, to get through the message of civilization—the role schools are there to fulfil’. Gerhardt Kuttner, a German Jew and a refugee from Hitler, taught him German; and a Scot, Cecil Scrimgeour, taught him French. As a teenager, Tomlinson’s mind was op
ened to Racine, Corneille, Molière, Hugo, Baudelaire, Gautier and Verlaine; and to Schiller, Heine, Kleist, Carossa, Kant, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Thomas Mann. It was a challenging but invigorating curriculum that led Tomlinson to comment later in life, ‘It was that sense of belonging to Europe, which took root early in my imagination’. His fluency in German, French, Spanish, and Italian would later lead to him becoming the foremost champion of translated poetry in Britain, and an outstanding translator of poems by, among others, Attilio Bertolucci, Octavio Paz, Cesar Vallejo and Antonio Machado. The excellence of his schoolteachers informed his own virtuosity and generosity as a university teacher later at Bristol.
While a teenager, Tomlinson met the head girl from the neighbouring school at an SPCK meeting and, later, at a dance on VE night. Brenda Raybould (b. 1928) went on to read history at Bedford College, London, followed by graduate work in art history at the Warburg and Courtauld institutes where her teachers included Ernst Gombrich, and the notorious spy, Anthony Blunt. Tomlinson himself won an exhibition in 1945 to Queens’ College, Cambridge, to read English and arrived ‘with Rilke in his pocket’. However, compared to the rich curriculum of school, Cambridge was an intellectual disappointment and his tutor disparaged Tomlinson’s passion for pan-European literature.
Disheartened, he considered leaving to pursue a freelance career writing film scripts. Brenda, with whom he was in daily written communication, persuaded him to stay until he got his degree. The poet and critic Donald Davie returned from war service in the navy and became his tutor in his final year. Davie introduced him to a range of modernist American poets, including Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens (his ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ became talismanic to the young poet), unleashing Tomlinson’s lifelong sense for the possibilities of a transatlantic poetry. Davie and Tomlinson formed a lifelong friendship (Tomlinson called Davie DAD, after the initials of his full name). Sharing their respective interests in modernist and foreign work and becoming allies in their advocacy for a more ambitious, international poetry, they taught each other.
But what Davie chiefly taught Tomlinson was how to articulate the energy of English syntax: to develop and unfold ideas over sinuous and keenly-designed verse sentences: ‘to think via syntax’. In a later interview Tomlinson reflects that the power of the sustained sentence that he derived from his reading of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Cowper, came from ‘playing tunes on the verbal piano, variations on grammatic possibilities’. Tomlinson never forgot his debt to Davie, dedicating the poem ‘Instead of an Essay’:
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