Collected Poems

by Peter Redgrove

  freed the water, the nectar.

  Now the pelvic cups tilt and kiss

  and are of the same pulse. We see

  the various flowers

  And flower-gardens we are made of

  inside – the carnation

  of the heart,

  The daffodil banks

  of the spleen,

  the jasmine kidney. We watch

  Free cities of flowing nectar;

  all the citizens in polished carapace

  feast at its banks:

  This is the start

  of Unbottle, or Autumn,

  when the pleasure

  Of smells

  is at its most

  perilous.

  THE HARPER

  Shiny waterbeetles

  scribe the pond, each one

  the centre of its circular signature,

  Each one the centre

  of its circular harp;

  these harps collide

  Sending out graven improvisations,

  sketches, line-drawings

  and scrawling signatures,

  All the same signature,

  never identical,

  now an ellipse,

  An egg drawn on water, a one system

  with two beetle-centres …

  the woman swimming

  At the heart of her harp,

  swimming in her evening clothes

  that make fresh signatures,

  Entering the music like Ophelia

  but a strong swimmer,

  in her presence

  The music bends,

  turning over and over

  in its helicals,

  Her orchestra skirt and blouse

  winding conches and sails;

  how the cloth clings

  In a lover’s chord …

  Her love is the fresh

  and talkative spring she

  Couples with,

  and in it layers herself,

  clothes scribing out

  The depths of the river …

  the woman swimming looks up

  and the whole woodland pond

  Is reflected in her eyes,

  her hair twining and searching

  in the signature:

  Woman harpist clothed in the forest brook.

  PIANISM

  Fluid pianism. It was as if

  he sat down at a waterfall, it flowed

  over his fingers and they wrestled

  With the disappearing water; the piano’s

  frame and strings reappeared

  from moment to moment in the busy

  water

  Then disappeared in a sudsy flux of brilliant

  current, or were marked across by some

  new breeze of tributary torrent but

  The sheerwhite style was creaselessly present:

  something in the speed; his hair flowed too

  down to his shoulders and was a part

  Of the music seen as well as heard,

  its sound matched the brilliance

  of his hair-gloss and the white foam

  Flowed over the piano’s terraced ledges

  down his legs and over the stage

  into the audience soaking them with

  Liszt.

  THEME-DREAM

  Touching my tongue

  to her hole, there was

  an electrical jolt

  Like the stud

  of a powerful torch battery,

  the kind that goes on

  For ever; then there was an electrical theme-park

  seen through the skin

  full of invisible but melodious

  Carousels; ferris wheels and booths of chance,

  and this was a dream clothed by

  the actual visit

  We had made that afternoon.

  The children ran ahead

  between the model buildings

  One-tenth the size, there was Pisa leaning

  and the munificent Swiss chalet

  full of accordion mirth

  On self-changing records ever-lasting

  to which the girls were dancing

  before the David

  Of Michelangelo

  like a golden calf;

  they danced with joy

  Because of his neat genitals

  like a draw-string shammy bag

  with a weasel peering from it:

  The two were only nine at that time,

  this the only wedding-muscle they’d seen,

  so sweet and neat they danced

  And then the voice above of splitting-open drowned

  the Switzer jollification, and the axe

  of thunder sang in the black

  Cloud towers, the snaking blue fire

  played about the shammy-bag

  of valiant David

  In the pouring rain.

  ORCHARD END II73

  In the rainshower

  under the green skirts,

  sheltering with my mother;

  Beneath the oak

  the sudden magistery

  of the oak smell,

  The oak coming forth

  with a hiss in the leaves,

  as the oak comes

  Into the rainfall

  the ground darkening

  and then puddling with mirrors,

  Stepping out into the world of the oak,

  into the world changed

  by the oak-elixir, charged,

  The rain lowers herself on the oak

  and the oak comes

  into the rain

  By the house called Orchard End,

  either because it was the end

  of the great orchard of Malden,

  Or the end of paradise

  that was expected to fade

  as one grew up,

  But it didn’t

  because of the oak coming forth

  under my mother’s shade

  Which has since

  become the oak-shade.

  LAST POEM74

  Buzz-saw cry of the gannet,

  a ghost of water,

  his outside child

  The next station is God

  Mind the doors!

  Alive in those shadow-streets

  NOTES

  1. ‘Phlebas the Phoenician’: the title is from Part IV of The Waste Land. This poem was incorporated into a six-part version of ‘Lazarus and the Sea’, which was never published. Published in Chequer 2, 1953.

  2. ‘Dr Immanuel Rath’: inspired by Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 film The Blue Angel, about a repressed teacher who becomes enslaved by a manipulative nightclub singer. Published in Delta 2, 1954.

  3. ‘Guardian’: published in Delta 3, 1954.

  4. The Collector: Redgrove’s first volume bears the date 1959, but publication was actually delayed till January 1960 in the hope of being the ‘Choice’ of the Poetry Book Society.

  5. ‘Lazarus and the Sea’: see John 11. When Redgrove was conscripted into the army at the age of eighteen he had a breakdown, was diagnosed as schizophrenic and subjected, as the standard treatment of the time, to fifty ‘insulin comas’ by withdrawal of blood-sugar. He has written that when he started to write poetry he wondered what authority he had, and realised that he had ‘died’ fifty times. This is the poem that resulted.

  6. ‘The Collector’: this poem is the subject of one of Redgrove’s most resonant and oft-repeated anecdotes: ‘The first time I slept with a woman … such a peace and silence came into my conflicting head! Then into that peace came of itself a measured statement, and this was my first poem.’ The earliest extant draft is only four lines:

  ‘Caught in a fold of the living hills he failed.

  Extending his amiable senses he found

  The mist that glittered like a skin

  The horny rocks and the alien soil.’

  7. ‘Memorial’: on Christmas Eve 1957 Redgrove’s younger brother David, just short of his twentieth birthday, was killed
in a fall, trying to climb into the hotel bedroom window of a friend who was locked out of her room.

  8. ‘Variation on Lorca’: adapted from ‘Alma Ausente’, Lorca’s elegy for the bullfighter and writer Ignacio Sanchez Mejias. Redgrove effectively elides the Mediterranean detail and references to Mejias’s maturity, to create an elegy for David, who was a soldier.

  9. ‘Being Beauteous’: adapted from Rimbaud’s prose poem of the same title.

  10. ‘Mr Waterman’: performed on BBC TV Monitor by Kenneth Griffith, 1962.

  11. ‘In Company Time’: written when Redgrove was working as a scientific copywriter for Glaxo Kline. The prose section is a sample of his actual copy. The poem celebrates the birth of his first son, Bill, in July 1958.

  12. ‘The Force’: in the summer of 1963 Redgrove and his family stayed at a B&B owned by Mrs Tyson in Borrowdale, Cumbria.

  13. ‘The House in the Acorn’: this poem was inspired by Dame Julian of Norwich: ‘he schewyd me a lyttille thynge the qwantyte of A haselle Nutte lyggande in the palme of my hande & to my vndyrstandynge that it was as rownde as any balle. I lokede theropoun and thought whate maye this be and I was aunswerde generaly thus it is alle that ys made.’ (Amherst Manuscript Folio 99)

  14. ‘The Ferns’: ‘Three things made this poem. It happened to be the dead of winter and the window glass was so cold that to breathe on it was to get instant frost-ferns. I had been reading about some Greek philosopher, I think, who said everything was water, and I had not understood this but wondered what it felt like to believe it. And the third thing was that I had been reading – fact or fiction, Conan Doyle or Dr Beebe, I don’t remember – about an astonishing dive five miles deep into the ocean. One of the characters at the bottom of the sea was having a bad time and could not help knowing how deep he was. He thought of the steamer as far above him as the highest clouds in the sky were above that steamer and still could be clouds – five miles. This seemed so astonishing to me that it all came together in this poem, The Ferns, a poem of transpiration, translocation and flow.’ [PR]

  15. ‘The Sermon’: performed on radio by Donald Wolfit and on BBC TV Monitor by Michael Hordern in 1963. ‘This figure of the Dispossessed Parson works with me more and more. He implies so much social organization, so much of schooling, so many elaborate churches to which people no longer return. And for the individual me, he’s the sign of an active religious sensibility (I believe) that can’t stand churches. As Jung say somewhere, the Western Church, despite its admirable exfoliation of externals, has quite failed to show the image of the inner God to the inner man. God should haunt the pages of “The Sermon” in glimpses and brushes, if it works at all as I thought.’ [PR]

  16. ‘The Case’: this poem was published separately as a pamphlet with the title ‘The God-Trap’ and the following Introduction:

  ‘“The God-Trap” started with my hearing Verdi’s Requiem. I don’t know whether my view of this marvellous music is an orthodox one, it had a very violent effect on me. I seemed to hear a plea for the eternal rest or punishment of all sinners and it was, naturally, sung in the confident words of orthodox religion. The singers on the other hand were not the high calm voices of much church music, but rather the full-blooded singers of opera, seemingly fully aware both of their sensuality and their mortality – and they were scared stiff by what they were singing, although they put a bold face on it. Such people could not help making love as they sang, I felt, whatever words they were singing.

  ‘And I too was very disturbed by this, because I saw for the first time how you could believe in a God separate from his creation, frowning down upon it. Loving both God and the creation, one’s being would be split in two.

  ‘Later I came across Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf and when I encountered the following passage, I felt again as if I were living in the two worlds simultaneously: “Man is not by any means of fixed and enduring form … He is much more an experiment and a transition. He is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and spirit. His innermost destiny drives him on to spirit and to God. His innermost being draws him back to nature, the mother. Between the two forces his life hangs tremulous and irresolute… bourgeois ‘man’ is a transient agreement… a compromise… an experiment with the aim of cheating both the angry primal Mother Nature and the troublesome Father Spirit of their pressing claims, and of living in a temperate zone between the two of them.”

  ‘I happened too to be reading a little about Manichaeism, which as I understood it meant exactly this dualistic split between the glory of created things, which were evil, and the glory of God the Creator, who was good, and during my reading I was surprised to learn that Mani, the founder of this “heresy”, was often known as “The Son of the Widow”. I was surprised because I had already begun to write “The God-Trap”, and my cast was settled. It comprised a Widow and her son, and the Son was searching for a Father.

  ‘The clinching thing, though, as far as this poem was concerned, was an actual happening. We were visiting one of the great national trust houses near Harrogate. It has a wonderful walled garden. It was in this garden that I saw an elderly woman – she was about sixty – wearing a cotton dress with a floral pattern that spread great flower-blooms over her motherly figure. She was standing by a great bank of flowers, her eyes half-closed, leaning back slightly, and saying, quite softly: “Oh, this is life… what a shame we have to die …”

  ‘The figure of this woman haunted me and I had to work it out. She seemed so in love with the gardened earth I wondered what God she could have and whether he were apart from it, and if he were God in heaven, up there, how she could possess both him and the flowering earth. What could there be in the death of this woman, for others or herself, but terror and absence, the spirit and the flowering body taken apart, the white from the yolk.

  ‘And I thought of the son of such a woman, she perhaps pious and widowed, he sent almost by hints, misunderstanding of her piety on a mythic quest for God, the missing father, and how his inherited senses and his inherited piety would be as great as hers, and how he might court his destruction in his search, and where he would find his equilibrium, his compromise, Hesse’s “temperate zone”, and the poem seemed to give its answer; that his fate would be a modern fate, a Faustian fate, in his striving to command absolute experience, but the outcome would be the same as that of King Oedipus in the old story.

  ‘And lastly I wondered if I had ever met an actual person such as this, and where he would be found if I had not. For I saw that I was trying to write an elegy for him, a requiem, and one for a split in Man’s consciousness, and then I found that I had noted, as if by chance, this paragraph from some journal:

  ‘“‘Clinic Director: This is schizophrenia. The boy was close to his mother: a widow after a very unsatisfactory marriage. His illness, which must always have been latent, accelerated when she died… He suffers also from hysterical blindness, and cannot open his eyes. They have remained closed for the ten years of his illness… He likes to spend his time in the garden and likes also to be called “Father”. He never replies when he is so called, but only smiles a little, and turns away… I have noticed that such cases, which are nowadays very widespread, often seem unwilling to be cured.’”’

  On the evidence of Redgrove’s drafts, this ‘clinical report’ is his own fiction. ‘Then-shall-ye-see-and-your-heart-shall-rejoice-/And-your-bones-shall-sprout-as-the-blade …’: Isaiah 66.14 as quoted in John F. Potts’s translation of Swedenborg’s Arcana Coelestia. I have been unable to identify any of the other quotations.

  17. Work in Progress: this volume was published by a small press, ‘Poet and Printer’. Although it bears the date 1968 it actually appeared in the spring of 1969. It contains many of the poems subsequently published in the Routledge collection Dr Faust’s Sea-Spiral Spirit; the three poems reproduced here are not in that volume.

  18. ‘The Old White Man’: adapted from ‘The White Monkey’ in The Dragon King’s Daughter: Ten T
’ang Dynasty Stories, Longman Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1954.

  19. ‘Quasimodo’s Many Beds’: Redgrove wrote about this poem to his analyst, John Layard: ‘I’d take its meaning two ways. The truth is somewhere in between. Either Quasimodo is revealing something important to the girl, that she should love more widely, and if she does indeed love, his quirks are no deformities; or the girl is waiting for Quasimodo to stop playing about and make love to her properly. It doesn’t really matter to the poem which. The situation is there, and it’s the reader’s own business to decide which of the two persons in the poem he thinks is right, if either is. Also it may behove me as recipient of this poem (or “active imagination”) to consider my own psychological situation as reflected in the poem. Nevertheless the poem tries to be a discrete entity, a little machine that tells a tale. All it wants to do is to tell the tale. The moral is up to the reader. As a writer, I am still reflecting on the moral. It is a voyage of discoveries.’ The poem reflects the crisis in his first marriage.

  20. ‘Christiana’: see John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part 2, Chapter 3. The poem is dedicated to Redgrove’s first wife, Barbara, and was written shortly after their separation in 1969.

  21. ‘The Moon Disposes’: ‘Barbara and I mending our broken ring on Cornish sands, our world displayed and observed under the just dominion of the Moon.’ [PR to Dilly Creffield] Written in 1966, when Peter and Barbara moved to Falmouth from Leeds.

  22. ‘Young Women with the Hair of Witches and No Modesty’: ‘Dilly Creffield at her most glamorous and provoking, in the company of her children.’ [PR to Dilly Creffield]

  23. ‘The Youthful Scientist Remembers’: ‘A poem about the blessed lascivious humour of women. A poem of innocent surprise on the young man’s part.’ [PR to Dilly Creffield] In draft this poem is dedicated to Barbara.

  24. ‘The Idea of Entropy on Maenporth Beach’: the title echoes Wallace Stevens’s ‘Idea of Order at Key West’. The epigraph is from Baudelaire’s ‘La Géante’: ‘It is she, black but shining.’ The poem is dedicated to John Layard, and the first draft was written during a sleepless night on an overnight train, after hearing Layard lecture. Subsequently Redgrove had analysis with Layard for about eighteen months. This is the first poem in which he openly explores his ‘alternative’ sexuality, and he regarded it as a turning-point in his work.