Indian Summer Notebook

by Henry Williamson

  It is true that he shared the fate of nearly all the great poets contemporary with him, in being unappreciated. Like them, he suffered from critics who were forever shearing the wild tresses of poetry between rusty rules, who could never see a literary bough project beyond the trim level of its day but they must lop it with a crooked criticism, who kept indomitably planting in the defile of fame the ‘established canons’ that had been spiked by poet after poet. But we decline to believe that a singer of Shelley’s calibre could be seriously grieved by want of vogue. Not that we suppose him to have found consolation in that senseless superstition, ‘the applause of posterity’. Posterity, posterity! posterity which goes to Rome, weeps large-sized tears, carves beautiful inscriptions, over the tomb of Keats; and the worm must wriggle her curtsey to it all, since the dead boy, wherever he be, has quite other gear to attend. Never a bone less dry for all the tears!

  I have made long quotations from the famous Shelley essay, much of it written on used envelopes and other scraps of paper – or the notes for it – while the poet stood at night on the Embankment, in broken boots, under the arch of Waterloo Bridge, where later, in the early years after the Armistice of 1918, I saw workless old soldiers lying on newspapers spread on the paving stones, trying to sleep – no hardship this, after the dreadful crater-zones, filled with water and afloat with corpses in khaki and feldgrau, in the morasses below the Passchendaele ridge. Indeed, by comparison of those nights, to sleep on firm stone, out of the rain, was a matter of hugging oneself with secret joy, that one was free, that one was dry, that the long nightmare was over. I have made these quotations (meaning at first to transcribe but a few lines after the poem copied from Sister Songs) because of the revelation of how a true poet, sometimes called a major poet, has within his being . . . what today is known as super-sensory perception. He also possesses unusual intuitions. He knows. Most people see; but the true poet sees. How does he see? What links his inner sight with the outward and visible world?

  We are all animals, according to modern science – science which, soon after the Passchendaele morasses, was declaring that the ‘lower animals’ operated solely from instinctive reflex actions. So do, and did we all before and after Pavlov made his discoveries of how animals imprisoned in laboratories behave. But, as Francis of Assisi knew, the birds were blithe spirits of the Creator. In service to one another, two paired birds can do no wrong. They are innocent and loyal, their instincts of loyalty and service to one another are an example to us all. They have not shared the Fall, by which, paradoxically, Man can attain to higher forms of the spirit by way of the Imagination. Are not all forms of life on our planet Creations of the Imagination, hence love, beauty, truth?

  The Church, [wrote Thompson at the beginning of his Shelley essay] which was once the mother of poets no less than of saints, during the last two centuries has relinquished to aliens the chief glories of poetry, if the chief glories of holiness she has preserved for her own. The palm and the laurel, Dominic and Dante, sanctity and song, grew together in her soil: she has retained the palm, but foregone the laurel. Poetry in its widest sense (that is to say, taken as the general animating spirit of Fine Arts) and when not professedly irreligious, has been too much and too long either misprised or distrusted; too much and too generally the feeling has been that it is at best superfluous, at worst pernicious, most often dangerous. Once poetry was, as she should be, the lesser sister and helpmate of the Church; the minister to the mind, as the Church to the soul. But poetry sinned, poetry fell; and, in place of lovingly reclaiming her, Catholicism cast her from the door to follow the feet of her pagan seducer. The separation has been ill for poetry; it has not been well for religion.

  Fathers of the Church (we would say), pastors of the Church, pious laics of the Church: you are taking from its walls the panoply of Aquinas; take also from its walls the psaltery of Alighieri. Unroll the precedents of the Church’s past; recall to your minds that Francis of Assisi was among the precursors of Dante; that sworn to Poverty he foreswore not Beauty, but discerned through the lamp Beauty the Light God; that he was even more a poet in his miracles than in his melody; that poetry clung round the cowls of his Order. Follow his footsteps; you who have blessings for men, have you no blessing for the birds? Recall to your memory that, in their minor kind, the love poems of Dante shed no less honour on Catholicism than did the great religious poem which is itself pivoted on love; that in singing of Heaven he sang of Beatrice – this supporting angel was still carven on his harp even when he stirred its strings in Paradise. What you theoretically know, vividly realise: that with many the religion of beauty must always be a passion and a power, that it is only evil when divorced from the worship of the Primal Beauty. Poetry is the preacher to men of the earthly as you of the Heavenly Fairness; of that earthy fairness which God has fashioned to his own image and likeness . . .

  Eye her not askance if she seldom sing directly of religion: the bird gives glory to God though it sings only of its innocent loves. Suspicion creates its own cause; distrust begets reason for distrust. This beautiful, wild, feline poetry, wild because left to range the wilds, restore to the hearth of your charity, shelter under the rafter of your Faith; discipline her to the sweet restraints of your household, feed her with the meat from your table, soften her with amity of your children; tame her, fondle her, cherish her – you will no longer then need to flee her. Suffer her to wanton, suffer her to play, so she play round the foot of the Cross!

  . . . An age that is ceasing to produce child-like children cannot produce a Shelley. For both as poet and man he was essentially a child . . . We, of this self-conscious, incredulous generation, sentimentalise our children, analyse our children, think we are endowed with a special capacity to sympathise and identify ourselves with children; we play at being children. And the result is that we are not more child-like, but our children are less child-like. It is so tiring to stoop to the child, so much easier to lift the child up to you. Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of today. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul; it is to live in a nutshell and to count yourself the king of infinite space; it is

  To see a world in a grain of sand,

  And a heaven in a wild flower,

  Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

  And eternity in an hour;

  it is to know not as yet that you are under sentence of life, nor petition that it be commuted into death. When we become conscious in dreaming that we dream, the dream is on the point of breaking; when we become conscious in living that we live, the ill dream is but just beginning.

  Coming to Shelley’s poetry, we peep over the wild mask of revolutionary metaphysics, and we see the winsome face of the child. Perhaps none of his poems is more purely and typically Shelleian than The Cloud, and it is interesting to note how essentially it springs from the faculty of make-believe. The same thing is conspicuous, though less purely conspicuous, throughout his singing; it is the child’s faculty of make-believe raised to the nth power. He is still at play, save only that his play is such that manhood stops to watch, and his playthings are those which the gods give their children. The universe is his box of toys. He dabbles his fingers in the day-fall. He is gold-dusty with tumbling amidst the stars. He makes bright mischief with the moon. The meteors nuzzle their noses in his hand. He teases into growling the kennelled thunder, and laughs at the shaking of its fiery chain. He dances in and out of the gates of heaven: its floor is littered with his broken fancies. He runs wild over the fields of ether. He chases the rolling world. He gets between the feet of the horses of the sun. He stands in the lap of patient Nature, and twines her loosened tresses after a thou
sand wilful fashions, to see how she will look nicest in his song . . .

  I read this marvellous essay during the late summer of 1917 in Flanders – the wettest summer for forty years – while the field-gun barrages advanced in lines of rolling fire and smoke before the struggling movements of the infantry. Tremendous bubbling thunder filled the very air and made the morass to tremble. Far behind, salvoes from the heavy batteries lining the Menin road east of Ypres droned and grumbled over the watery crater-zones to burst in black villains of smoke upon the concrete German pill-boxes, or massive forts, upon the Frezenberg ridge; beyond which, scarcely perceptible, upon the skyline rose the stump of Passchendaele church, standing nearly five miles east of Ypres and yet barely sixty metres above sea level.

  Up there the poor bloody infantry was once again going through it. Rockets of red and green arose above the sultry-speckled bursts of the creeping barrage, ‘lifting’ twenty-five yards every five minutes to allow the floundering infantry to catch up. Pale golden streaks of fire, as of rain going up instead of down, burst among all the red and green rocket-showers – S.O.S. calls for help from the German eingreif divisionen to their batteries on the Gheluvelt plateau on the flank of the advance.

  At night we led our pack-mules and horses into the storms of steel and fire descending from the German batteries ‘taping’ the timber-tracks lying like the sloughed skins of serpents upon the morass glittering with watery shell-holes reflecting the white calcium flares which at twilight began to rise, lilies of the dead, upon the expended effort of the attack.

  The salient, a vast negation of darkness, in hopeless travail with the dead weight of human and animal misery, was scored by those white streaks arising in a semi-circle around us: burdened men, charred tree-trunks, sunken tanks were wavery with shadows homeless in the diffused pallor of the night-long flares. To avoid the timber-track, broken and congested by a battalion transport which had just received several direct hits – for these ‘corduroy’ tracks were under fire from dusk to dawn – I led my string of pack-mules and light draught-horses across the morass, where one fell into a shell-hole nine feet in diameter and seven feet deep at its point of explosion. The driver was killed, the foundering beast snorted and groaned, while water glimmered behind its ears. High explosive shells began to burst all around us, with ruddy glares and rending metallic crashes; bullets, arising in ricochet from the outpost-lines nearer the flares, moaned and piped away overhead with their strange, bird-like pipings. I could hardly move, I stood hot and sweating with half a hundredweight of mud. Somewhere near the voice of a young colonel was cursing in high overwrought screams, for one of the mules had been hurled by a shell amongst his men. They were coming out of the line after relief. As more shells droned down, with their coarse base buzzing descending in scale – the copper driving-band at the base, scored by the gun-barrel rifling made that ominous sound – and screams of wounded horses arose with the cries of men, yellow-forked flames rose to a great height in front, to cast a glare upon the battlefield. They rose up high and narrow, as though the poplars once lining the road were recreated in fire. Some of the tanks going up for tomorrow’s attack had been hit by petrol shells. Within a few moments the enemy harassing fire was concentrated on the road where we were to turn off to our dump, and more flaming poplars rose, one beyond the other, into the rainy night. Then a soft downward slurring sound, followed by another and another and another. Plup-plup-plup – gently. Gas shells! My box-respirator, at the alert position across the chest, was a mass of mud. I could hardly discover my face, so heavy and monstrous were my arms. While I was struggling to fit the mask over my nose and lower face, the brutal whine of five-nines swooped down.

  Ten hours later about one-third of our mules, their ears drooping – sign of imminent collapse and lying down to die – were standing, mud to fetlocks, along the picket line with its gnawn wooden posts. Some were trying to eat the blankets strapped upon their neighbours. The louring sky – it was, as I have written, the wettest ‘summer’ in Flanders for forty years – quivered with gun-fire. The infantry were going over again – those who had managed to reach the tape-lines. A minor attack,one of a dozen scarcely mentioned in the official reports during the four and a half months to reach the Passchendaele crest, whence was a view over country held by the enemy for many miles.

  After deep sleep within my tent, reading Francis Thompson’s ‘Peace’, while with a pencil I altered, together with few other words, ‘Peace’ to ‘War’, thus: (the words in italics my changes) –

  War:- and a dawn that flares

  Within the brazier of the barrèd East,

  Kindling the ruinous walls of storm surceased

  To rent and roughened glares,

  After such night when lateral wind and rain

  Torment the to-and-fro perplexed men

  With thwart encounter: which of fixture strong,

  Take only strength from the endurèd pain:

  And throat by throat begin

  The guns to make adventure of harsh din,

  Till all the mud doth leap in horrid song:—

  One of the poet’s night stances – he as it were a sentry posted there – was in the vegetable market of Covent Garden, among the waggons which brought loads of vegetables along the Old Kent Road, and the broad sett-stoned highway of Whitechapel from the Essex flats. There, some years later, one of the poems of Sister Songs recalls his vigil.

  Spring, goddess, is it thou, desirèd long?

  And art thou girded round with this young train? –

  If ever I did do thee ease in song,

  Now of thy grace let me one meed obtain,

  And list thou to one plain.

  Oh, keep still in thy train,

  After the years when others therefrom fade,

  This tiny, well-belovèd maid!

  To whom the gate of my heart’s fortalice,

  With all which in it is,

  And the shy self who doth therein immew him

  ’Gainst what loud leaguerers battailously woo him,

  I, bribed traitor to him,

  Set open for one kiss.

  Then suffer, Spring, thy children, that lauds they should upraise

  To Sylvia, this Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways;

  Their lovely labours lay away,

  And trick them out in holiday,

  For syllabling to Sylvia;

  And that all birds on branches lave their mouths with May,

  To bear with me this burthen,

  For singing to Sylvia.

  A kiss? for a child’s kiss?

  Aye, goddess, even for this.

  Once, bright Sylviola, in days not far,

  Once – in that nightmare-time which still doth haunt

  My dreams, a grim unbidden visitant –

  Forlorn, and faint, and stark,

  I had endured through watches of the dark

  The abashless inquisition of each star,

  Yea, was the outcast mark

  Of all those heavenly passers’ scrutiny;

  Stood bound and helplessly

  For Time to shoot his barbèd minutes at me;

  Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour

  In night’s slow-wheelèd car;

  Until the tardy dawn dragged me at length

  From under those dread wheels; and, bled of strength,

  I waited the inevitable last.

  Then there came past

  A child; like thee, a spring-flower; but a flower

  Fallen from the budded coronal of Spring,

  And through the city-streets blown withering.

  She passed, – O brave, sad, lovingest, tender thing!

  And of her own scant pittance did she give,

  That I might eat and live:

  Then fled, a swift and trackless fugitive.

  Therefore I kissed in thee

  The heart of Childhood, so divine for me;

  And her, through what sore ways,

  And what unchildish days, />
  Borne from me now, as then, a trackless fugitive.

  Therefore I kissed in thee

  Her, child! and innocency,

  And spring, and all things that have gone from me,

  And that shall never be;

  All vanished hopes, and all most hopeless bliss,

  Came with thee to my kiss.

  And ah! so long myself had strayed afar

  From child, and woman, and the boon earth’s green,

  And all wherewith life’s face is fair beseen;

  Journeying its journey bare

  Five suns, except of the all-kissing sun

  Unkissed of one;

  Almost I had forgot

  The healing harms,

  And whitest witchery, a-lurk in that

  Authentic cestus of two girdling arms;

  And I remembered not

  The subtle sanctities which dart

  From childish lips’ unvalued precious brush

  Nor how it makes the sudden lilies push

  Between the loosening fibres of the heart . . .

  Eve no gentlier lays her cooling cheek

  On the burning brow of the sick earth,

  Sick with death, and sick with birth,

  Aeon to aeon, in secular fever twirled,

  Than thy shadow soothes this weak