Vita Sackville-West

by Vita Sackville-West

  Vita spent much of her time at Sissinghurst in her writing tower, coming down for meals, and that, not always. Even on her travels she was constantly writing poems. She wanted above all, says her son Nigel, to be known as a poet. Her poetry can only be evaluated as part of its time and place. This is definitely the part of her work that seems the least “modernist.” But her poems, including “The Land” and “The Garden,” depend on the whole and very English tradition of writing about the land and the seasons: James Thompson’s The Seasons forms the background for her epic poems of working the land, and of loving it. Also, her love of gardening informs her writing of these epic works, and if they seem to us at the present moment somewhat sentimental, we can scarcely fail to be aware of the richness of her natural perception, the high color of her love.

  If we can lay aside our preconceived notions of what twentieth-century poetry is meant to be, even in the early part of the century, we can enter the stateliness and interior order of these verses, provided we take the time. It is a privilege to do so.

  “WINTER AFTERNOON”

  Summer may boast her sweets, but sterner days

  Strip country bare and gild the nervous trees

  With an ancient light that summer never knew,

  Low and experienced sun, aslant, askew,

  Old man of seasons bent on crooked knees.

  (See, on the moat’s embankment, like a frieze,

  The slow procession leads the punctual hour

  Across the primrose of the evening’s flower:

  Two heifers treading the appointed ways,

  Followed by man with stick

  And waddling cygnet and a dozen ducks

  Strung out in ludicrous yet due design,

  In grave march, never quick,

  All homing in their usual evening line.)

  Here is no colour, here but gold and ash.

  Cold, cold the night will be; the dusk is chilled

  Already with the winter’s coiling lash;

  Earth to the moon will blanch.

  Yet, rare musician sumptuously skilled,

  The sunlight with a sinking finger plucks.

  Last notes from each bare branch.

  Goldsmith of fields already brownly tilled

  Gilder of ridges left behind the plough,

  Layer of gold-leaf where no leaf remains,

  The sunlight in an aged actor’s bow

  Takes rich and low farewell of summer’s strains.

  Ah, with what beauty did he touch the trees,

  Ah, with what beauty did he touch the fields.

  So delicate, so rich, so altering a touch

  It held the heart confuted in a clutch;

  An altering touch that magnified the heart

  And set it from the cannon apart.

  Such moments come and shatter prudent shields

  Our poor reminders of mortalities.

  (See, up the track come waggons strongly drawn,

  Passing the window with their outer life;

  Trusses of fodder, timber newly sawn

  Loads for a sturdy team.

  The ruts are frosted, and the horses steam with foot-fall effort up the lane;

  The carter’s boy alongside leaves the rein,

  And pares a hazel switch with sharpened knife.

  How calm, how strong, how permanent, how sane,

  The venerable necessary theme!)

  Is this the world’s last day so placid seen

  Earth and her beasts and men and women’s range?

  So, for a million years, has life worked on

  Varied from continent to continent

  From Asia to a patch of little Kent,

  A ploughshare carving through the centuries.

  Is this the world’s last day, that may exchange

  Traditions for catastrophes?

  All effort, patient or heroic, gone?

  The little knowledge perilously won

  Since men desire, enquire, and still aspire,

  Scrapped on a planet’s paltry pyre

  To perish half-way done?

  Reprieve and ruin, ruin and reprieve.

  Still the dread sentence rumbles like a far

  Delaying storm above the herded sheep,

  So long delaying that the soul takes leave

  In reassurance still to disbelieve,

  And still to live, and still to sow and reap.

  Still rises once again the evening star

  In ordered juncture as we, singly blest,

  Turn our brave planet to a further rest

  And let our hamlets fold themselves in sleep.

  “THE INTELLECTUAL TO HIS PUPPY”

  Golden lad, what art thou eating?

  Feathered slipper, silken sock?

  Filthy muck I call manure?

  Drop it, drop it, pretty sweeting.

  That’s a trick I can’t endure.

  Little one, what art thou doing?

  Puddles on my Persian rug?

  O poetry

  Out with you, you dirty varmint,

  Make them on the garden dug.

  That’s the place for all your messes,

  But you must not bury bones

  Where our precious plants are planted,

  Nor between our paving stones.

  “THE PUPPY TO HIS NEW OWNER”

  Naughty, naughty, always naughty.

  How can puppies hope to please?

  All you folk are far too haughty,

  Far too tidy, far too smart.

  What I want’s a loving heart.

  Oh this place is far too cold!

  And the place where I was wanted,

  Where I came from—that was home.

  Not this place where it is always

  “Brandy, no! hey nonny, NO!”

  “IN MEMORIAM: VIRGINIA WOOLF”

  [with Vita’s changes after publication in The Observer, April 1941]

  Many words crowd, and all and each unmeaning.

  The simplest words in sorrow are the best.

  So let us say, she loved the water-meadows,

  The Downs; her friends; her books; her memories;

  The room which was her own.

  London by twilight; shops and Mrs. Brown;

  Donne’s church; the Strand; the buses, and the large

  Smell of humanity that passed her by.

  I remember she told me once that she, a child,

  Trapped evening moths with honey round a tree-trunk,

  And with a lantern watched their antic flight.

  So she, a poet, caught her special prey

  With words of honey and lamp of wit.

  Frugal, austere, fine, proud,

  Rich in her contradictions, rich in love,

  So did she capture all her moth-like self:

  Her fluttered spirit, delicate and soft,

  Bumping against the lamp of life, too hard, too glassy,

  Yet kept a sting beneath the brushing wing,

  Her blame astringent and her praise supreme.

  How small, how petty seemed the little men

  Measured against her scornful quality.

  Some say, she lived in an unreal world,

  Cloud-cuckoo-land. Maybe. She now has gone

  Into the prouder world of immortality.

  POEMS OF HOUSE, LAND, AND SEASONS

  Vita’s love of her homes and her land often finds its expression in her poetry. The Land and The Garden, as well as “Sissinghurst” and “Winter Afternoon,” speak abundantly of that feeling.

  On Sissinghurst

  Vita’s intense and enduring attachment to Sissinghurst appears frequently in the many forms of her writing. In a letter to Alvilde Lees-Milne of December 11, 1954, she exclaims: “I can’t tell you how much it touches me that you should have this appreciation of my odd inconvenient Sissinghurst. You seem to understand it; and it takes a great deal of understanding. I wish you had seen it in the full moonlight two nights ago. It was a dream of unreality.”
Everything about Sissinghurst was of great appeal to Vita, even the times when the garden was barren of flowers, and all of it typified her beloved Kent. In another letter to Alvilde Lees-Milne of September 2, 1955, she exclaims how “The whole of Sissinghurst reeks of hops, which I find an agreeably Kentish smell.”

  Vita began this long poem in 1930, immediately after acquiring Sissinghurst. It is dedicated to Virginia Woolf, whose Hogarth Press published it in 1931.

  “SISSINGHURST”

  A tired swimmer in the waves of time

  I throw my hands up: let the surface close:

  Sink down through centuries to another clime,

  And buried find the castle and the rose.

  Buried in time and sleep,

  So drowsy, overgrown,

  That here the moss is green upon the stone,

  And lichen stains the keep.

  I’ve sunk into an image, water-drowned,

  Where stirs no wind and penetrates no sound,

  Illusive, fragile to a touch, remote,

  Foundered within the well of years as deep

  As in the waters of a stagnant moat.

  Yet in and out of these decaying halls

  I move, and not a ripple, not a quiver,

  Shakes the reflection though the waters shiver—

  My tread is to the same illusion bound.

  Here, tall and damask as a summer flower,

  Rise the brick gable and the spring tower;

  Invading Nature crawls

  With ivied fingers over rosy walls,

  Searching the crevices,

  Clasping the mullion, riveting the crack,

  Binding the fabric crumbling to attack,

  And questing feelers of the wandering fronds

  Grope for interstices,

  Holding this myth together under-seas,

  Anachronistic vagabonds!

  And here, by birthright far from present fashion,

  As no disturber of the mirrored trance

  I move, and to the world above the waters

  Wave my incognisance.

  For here, where days and years have lost their number,

  I let a plummet down in lieu of date,

  And lose myself within a slumber

  Submerged, elate.

  This husbandry, this castle, and this I

  Moving within the deeps,

  Shall be content within our timeless spell,

  Assembled fragments of an age gone by,

  While still the sower sows, the reaper reaps,

  Beneath the snowy mountains of the sky,

  And meadows dimple to the village bell.

  So plods the stallion up my evening lane

  And fills me with a mindless deep repose,

  Wherein I find in chain

  The castle, and the pasture, and the rose.

  Beauty, and use, and beauty once again

  Link up my scattered heart, and shape a scheme

  Commensurate with a frustrated dream.

  The autumn bonfire smokes across the woods

  And reddens in the water of the moat;

  As red within the water burns the scythe,

  And the moon dwindled to her gibbous tithe

  Follows the sunken sun afloat.

  Green is the eastern sky and red the west;

  The hop-kilns huddle under pallid hoods;

  The waggon stupid stands with upright shaft,

  As daily life accepts the night’s arrest.

  Night like a deeper sea engulfs the land,

  The castle, and the meadows, and the farm;

  Only the baying watch-dog looks for harm,

  And shakes his chain towards the lunar brand.

  In the high room where tall the shadows tilt

  For now the apple ripens, now the hop,

  And now the clover, now the barley-crop;

  Spokes bound upon a wheel forever turning,

  Wherewith I turn, no present manner learning;

  Cry neither “Speed your processes!” nor “Stop!”

  I am content to leave the world awry

  (Busy with politic perplexity,)

  If still the cart-horse at the fall of day

  Clumps up the lane to stable and to hay,

  And tired men go home from the immense

  Labour and life’s expense

  That force the harsh recalcitrant waste to yield

  Corn and not nettles in the harvest-field;

  As candle-flames blow crooked in the draught,

  The reddened sunset on the panes was spilt,

  But now as black as any nomad’s tent

  The night-time and the night of time have blent

  Their darkness, and the waters doubly sleep.

  Over my head the years and centuries sweep,

  The years of childhood flown,

  The centuries unknown;

  I dream; I do not weep.

  —1930

  FROM THE GARDEN (1946)

  Presented here is a large portion of the last part of The Garden, entitled “Autumn,” which won the Heinemann prize for poetry. Although Vita began The Garden in 1926 as a companion to the prizewinning The Land, she set it aside and didn’t resume writing it until 1939. She worked on the poem intermittently over the war years; it was published in 1946 by Michael Joseph in London. The Land and The Garden were republished together in 1989 by Webb and Bower in London.

  AUTUMN

  Autumn in felted slipper shuffles on,

  Muted yet fiery—Autumn’s character.

  Brown as a monk yet flaring as a whore,

  And in the distance blue as Raphael’s robe

  Tender around the Virgin.

  Blue the smoke

  Drifting across brown woods; but in the garden

  Maples are garish, and surprising leaves

  Make sudden fires with sudden crests of flame

  Where the sun hits them; in the deep-cut leaf

  Of peony, like a mediaeval axe

  Of rusty iron; fervour of azalea

  Whose dying days repeat her June of flower;

  In Sargent’s cherry, upright as a torch

  Till ravelled sideways by the wind to stream

  Disorderly, and strew the mint of sparks

  In coins of pointed metal, cooling down;

  And that true child of Fall, whose morbid fruit

  Ripens, with walnuts, only in November,

  The Medlar lying brown across the thatch;

  Rough elbows of rough branches, russet fruit

  So blet it’s worth no more than sleepy pear,

  But in its motley pink and yellow leaf

  A harlequin that some may overlook

  Nor ever think to break and set within

  A vase of bronze against a wall of oak,

  With Red-hot Poker, Autumn’s final torch.

  The medlar and the quince’s globe of gold.

  How rich and fat those yellow fruits do hang!

  They were light blossom once, a light-foot girl,

  All cream and muslin once, now turned to age

  Mellow with fine experience. The sun

  Burnt in one season what the years must need

  For a girl’s ripening. He was the lover

  In dilatory half-awakened Spring;

  He was the husband of the fruitful Summer,

  Father of pregnancy that brings those fruits

  Ready to drop at the first touch of hand

  Carefully lifting at the parting stalk,

  Or at the first wild breath of wind, so soft

  You think it harmless, till it blows the vanes

  Crooked this way and that, a treacherous wind

  Bringing the apples down before their date.

  All’s brown and red: the robin and the clods,

  And umber half-light of the potting-shed,

  The terra-cotta of the pots, the brown

  Sacking with its peculiar autumn smell,

  Musty in corners, where the cobwe
b panes

  Filter the sun, to bronze the patient heaps

  Of leaf-mould, loam, and tan of wholesome peat;

  And sieves that orderly against the wall

  Dangle from nail, with all the panoply

  (Brightened by oily rag) of shining tools,

  The gardener’s armour, pewter as a lake,

  And good brown wood in handles and in shafts;

  Plump onion and thin bassen raffia

  Slung from the rafters where the ladders prop.

  And in the gloom, with his slow gesture, moves

  The leathern demiurge of this domain,

  Like an old minor god in corduroy

  Setting and picking up the things he needs,

  Deliberate as though all Time were his.

  Honour the gardener! that patient man

  Who from his schooldays follows up his calling,

  Starting so modestly, a little boy

  Red-nosed, red-fingered, doing what he’s told,

  Not knowing what he does or why he does it,

  Having no concept of the larger plan.

  But gradually (if the love be there,

  Irrational as any passion, strong),

  Enlarging vision slowly turns the key

  And swings the door wide open on the long

  Vistas of true significance. No more

  Is toil a vacant drudgery, when purport

  Attends each small and conscientious task

  —As the stone-mason setting yard by yard

  Each stone in place, exalting not his gaze

  To measure growth of structure or assess

  That slow accomplishment, but in the end

  Tops the last finial and, stepping back

  To wipe the grit for the last time from eyes,

  Sees that he built a temple—so the true

  Born gardener toils with love that is not toil

  In detailed time of minutes, hours, and days,

  Months, years, a life of doing each thing well;

  The Life-line in his hand not rubbed away