Wi’ a’ its agonies in the cosmos still
The Cheka’s horrors are in their degree;
And’ll end suner! What maitters ’t wha we kill
To lessen that foulest murder that deprives
Maist men o’ real lives?
Such a doctrinal extremism marred both the nationalist and internationalist strain in MacDiarmid’s thinking all through his life. His Anglophobia, for instance, can be both salubrious and strategic, a natural and allowable consequence of opposition to imperialism, and another consequence of his ambition to relocate the focus and idiom of Scottish literature. But unless it is exercised in the service of his more broadly transformative vision of world language and communist order, the Anglophobia only massages a kind of vindictive nativism, the very opposite of the liberated consciousness he intended to promote. And it can, of course, pass beyond the stage of mere prejudice to arrive at the lunacy of something like the following, taken from one of the late poems in English:
So every loveliness that Scotland has ever known
Or will know, flies into me now,
Out of the perilous night of English stupidity,
As I lie brooding on the fact
That perchance the best chance
Of reproducing the ancient Greek temperament
Would be to ‘cross’ the Scots with the Chinese.
This flawed poetry of the 1930s and 1940s, with all its technical vocabularies, its Joycean revel in the words and ways of other languages, its insistence on the possibility of harnessing a future-oriented dream of Scottish life to the Gaelic and medieval Scots heritages, its ache to produce a seismic poetry that might include every thing and every language and every discipline – this poetry wanted to go so far beyond the proprieties of English literature that it would come right out the other side of orthodox expression. Yet it is only occasionally that the eerily beautiful, deliberately arcane words with which he confronts the reader attain the kind of inevitability which I praised earlier in the Scots lyrics. Poems such as ‘On a Raised Beach’ and ‘In a Cornish Garden’ do surprise by a fine excess, and word by word they possess a unique multitudinous accuracy and psychedelic richness. Even they, however, totter close to self-parody and only get by through the huge appetite their author displays for matching the multiplicity of the phenomena with a correspondingly cornucopic vocabulary. More often, alas, neither MacDiarmid’s lavishness nor his originality can move the data across the frontier of writing. Skewed rhythms, egregious diction, encyclopaedic quotation, sheer monotony – MacDiarmid certainly gave his detractors plenty to work with.
Before I end, therefore, I want to suggest very briefly a way of both respecting and admitting the failure of MacDiarmid’s immense epic effort, in projects such as ‘Cornish Heroic Song’ and ‘In Memoriam James Joyce’. Historically, it’s worth thinking of these works as being all of a piece with the awesome and sometimes terrible projects of twentieth-century Soviet communism; they are like those gigantic dams and steelworks and tyrannically organized communal farms, every one of them the result of cruel effort, every one a breath-taking conception surviving in the world as something both spectacular and uncherished, evidence of actions at once heroic and doomed. If I exaggerate, it is partly to emphasize the huge amount of MacDiarmid’s poetry that remains unread and unassimilated. The journalist and the activist in him would not be quieted, and when there was no outlet for them in prose, they invaded the verse without compunction. Sooner or later, however, what happened to Wordsworth will happen to MacDiarmid: the second phase of his career will be rendered down to a series of self-contained, self-sustaining passages of genuine poetry, disentangled at last from the editorials and encyclicals he launched so indefatigably for more than forty years upon the unresponsive world.
Still, MacDiarmid was right to make the leap towards the impossible. With the publication of his short lyrics in the collections called Sangschaw and Fenny Wheep (in 1925 and 1926 respectively), then A Drunk Man in 1926, not to mention To Circumjack Cencrastus and Scots Unbound in the early 1930s – with the publication of all this work he not only had created a language, but within a decade had endowed it with enough literature to be going on with. But then, in poetry, enough is never enough. To find its true measure, creative talent must exert itself beyond the limit. If MacDiarmid were to continue with the exploration and experiment that had characterized his great decade, he had to get through the barrier of the very excellence he had created. He had to find an idiom that would not make a fetish of the local but would rather transpose the parochial into the planetary. He therefore strove for an all-inclusive mode of utterance, and wrote a loose-weave, discursive, digression-filled verse, prone to off-loading miscellaneous information and opinions, constantly punctuated by disconcerting and abrupt shifts of tone. Although his reasons for this were outlined with exhilarating force in ‘The Kind of Poetry I Want’ – ‘Poetry of such an integration as cannot be effected/ Until a new and conscious organization of society/ Generates a new view/ Of the world as a whole’ and so on, – it did not work.
These later poems in Synthetic English generally don’t have the intensity or oddity or uncanny inevitability of the early work in Scots, even if here and there they do manage to create that double sensation of sure-footed homecoming and light-headed expedition which only the highest poetry achieves. It is surely time, for example, that anthologies of twentieth-century verse – which almost invariably print W. H. Auden’s ‘In Praise of Limestone’ – should also carry something from the luminous, almost biblical reveries of ‘On a Raised Beach’. Philip Larkin’s Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse ignores it, and Larkin’s Selected Letters give us his candid assessment of MacDiarmid in one sentence, as follows: ‘I am so averse from his work I can hardly bring my eyes to the page.’ That comes in a letter to Dan Davin at the Oxford University Press, and a couple of weeks later Larkin is asking Anthony Thwaite: ‘Is there any bit of MacD that’s noticeably less morally repugnant and aesthetically null than the rest?’ Thwaite may have given him a few tips, but unfortunately he doesn’t seem to have directed his attention to lines like these:
Nothing has stirred
Since I lay down this morning an eternity ago
But one bird. The widest door is the least liable to intrusion,
Ubiquitous as the sunlight, unfrequented as the sun.
The inward gates of a bird are always open.
It does not know how to shut them.
That is the secret of its song,
But whether any man’s are ajar is doubtful.
I look at these stones and I know little about them,
But I know their gates are open too,
Always open, far longer open, than any bird’s can be,
That every one of them has had its gates wide open far longer
Than all birds put together, let alone humanity,
Though through them no man can see,
No man nor anything more recently born than themselves
And that is everything else on the Earth.
I too lying here have dismissed all else.
Bread from stones is my sole and desperate dearth,
From stones, which are to the Earth as to the sunlight
Is the naked sun which is for no man’s sight.
I would scorn to cry to any easier audience
Or, having cried, lack patience to await the response.
This scorning to cry to an easy audience is, of course, the secret of MacDiarmid’s best work. When he was at his artistic best, his appeal was made to an imagined authority, a court of higher spiritual attainment and more illuminated understanding than any he could find around him. And in this, he fulfilled a poetic demand which always precedes and survives the demands of technique and artistic skills. This is the demand that the artist sacrifice himself or herself to an envisaged standard, and what such a demand entails was expressed with great eloquence and persuasiveness by Richard Ellmann when he wrote of the good poetic example of W.
B. Yeats: according to Ellmann, in much of his work Yeats ‘wishes to show how brute fact may be transmogrified, how we can sacrifice ourselves … to our imagined selves which offer far higher standards than anything offered by social convention. If we must suffer, it is better to create the world in which we suffer, and this is what heroes do spontaneously, artists do consciously, and all [others] do in their own degree.’
For all his intellectual arrogance and poetic megalomania, MacDiarmid was an approachable and companionable man. The exorbitance and wilfulness of his poetic persona were partly self-inflationary, but they did arise from his conception of the large prophetic role which poetry had to fulfil in Scotland, and in the world of the future. He did not, however, confuse the greatness of the office with the dimensions of his own life as a citizen. When I met him in his later years, he and Valda lived modestly in their cottage in Biggar in Lanarkshire. Their hospitality was very moving, and they had attained a composure which seemed right after the buffeting they had both undergone forty years earlier, when their extreme poverty only intensified what was already an emotional and vocational ordeal. But then and always MacDiarmid was sustained by a faith older and simpler than the one he professed in Marxism. Lenin’s Utopian vision was undeniably inspirational for him, but deep down in the consciousness of this child of the Bible-reading Scottish Borders, Christ’s commandment to people to love one another was surely equally powerful.
Oxford Lectures, October 1992; R. 1. Best Memorial Lecture, National Library of Ireland, January 1993
from Dylan the Durable? On Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’ fulfils its promise because its craft has not lost touch with a suffered world. The villanelle form, turning upon itself, advancing and retiring to and from a resolution, is not just a line-by-line virtuoso performance. Through its repetitions, the father’s remoteness – and the remoteness of all fathers – is insistently proclaimed, yet we can also hear, in an almost sobbing counterpoint, the protest of the poet’s child-self against the separation:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
This poem was written at a late moment in Thomas’s life, when he was thirty-seven, almost twenty years after ‘Before I Knocked’. The year before, in 1950, he had worked on the too deliberate raptures of ‘In the White Giant’s Thigh’ and the never-to-be-completed ‘In Country Heaven’. And all the while, on and off, he was fiddling with the genial dreamscape of Under Milk Wood. But now, in 1951, at a time when his father was dying from cancer and his relationship with his wife Caitlin was in a kind of deep freeze because of his affair with the American woman whom biographers call ‘Sarah’, Thomas came through with a poem in a single, unfumbled movement, one with all the confidence of a necessary thing, one in which again the fantasy and extravagance of imagery and diction did not dissipate themselves or his theme. Words forking ‘lightning’, frail deeds dancing ‘in a green bay’, blind eyes blazing ‘like meteors’ – these defiant and lavishly affirmative images could conceivably have appeared in the windier ambience of a piece like ‘Lament’, but within the genuinely desperate rhetoric of the villanelle they are informed with an urgency which guarantees their immunity from the virus of rant and posturing.
‘Do Not Go Gentle’ is obviously a threshold poem about death, concerned with the reverse of the process which occupied Thomas in ‘Before I Knocked’. In that earlier poem, the body was about to begin what Thomas calls elsewhere its ‘sensual strut’, here the return journey out of mortality into ghosthood is about to be made, so in fact the recurrent rhymes of the villanelle could as well have been ‘breath’ and ‘death’ or ‘womb’ and ‘tomb’ – but what we have instead are ‘night’ and ‘light’. And the night is a ‘good night’. For once, however, a characteristic verbal tic has become an imaginative strength and not just an irritating cleverness. ‘Good night’ is a pun which risks breaking the decorum of the utterance but which turns out in the end to embody an essential complexity. The mixture of salutation and farewell in the phrase is a perfect equivalent for the balance between natural grief and the recognition of necessity which pervades the poem as a whole.
This is a son comforting a father; yet it is also, conceivably, the child poet in Thomas himself comforting the old ham he had become; the neophyte in him addressing the legend; the green fuse addressing the burnt-out case. The reflexiveness of the form is the right correlative for the reflexiveness of the feeling. As the poem proceeds, exhortation becomes self-lamentation; the son’s instruction to the disappointed father to curse and bless him collapses the distance between the sad height of age and physical decay in the parent and the equally sad eminence of poetic reputation and failing powers in the child. ‘Do Not Go Gentle’ is a lament for the maker in Thomas himself as well as an adieu to his proud and distant schoolteacher father. The shade of the young man who once expressed a fear that he was not a poet, just a freak user of words, pleads for help and reassurance from the older, sadder literary lion he has become, the one who apparently has the world at his feet.
Not that Thomas intended this meaning, of course. One of the poem’s strengths is its outwardly directed address, its escape from emotional claustrophobia through an engagement with the specifically technical challenges of the villanelle. Yet that form is so much a matter of crossing and substitutions, of back-tracks and double-takes, turns and returns, that it is a vivid figure for the union of opposites, for the father in the son, the son in the father, for life in death and death in life. The villanelle, in fact, both participates in the flux of natural existence and scans and abstracts existence in order to register its pattern. It is a living cross-section, a simultaneously open and closed form, one in which the cycles of youth and age, of rise and fall, growth and decay find their analogues in the fixed cycle of rhymes and repetitions.
Indeed there is something Rilkean in the tendency of ‘Do Not Go Gentle’, for we are here in the presence of knowledge transformed into poetic action, and the extreme claims that Rilke made for poetry are well enough matched by Thomas on this occasion. The following, which comes from a Rilke letter about his Duino Elegies, seems relevant and worth quoting:
Death is a side of life that is turned away from us … the true figure of life extends through both domains, the blood of the mightiest circulation drives through both: there is neither a here nor a beyond, but a great unity, in which those creatures that surpass us, the ‘angels’, are at home.
In its canvassing of the idea of a great unity and its employment of the bodily image of circulating blood, this statement by Rilke is reminiscent of the murkier, more biological statements of the young Thomas. Yet in ‘Do Not Go Gentle’, I would suggest that the old murkiness has been worked through … I would also suggest that the mighty vaunt of ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’ has now been made good, and its operatic, death-defying strains have modulated into something even more emotionally persuasive.
Oxford Lectures, November 1991; Ben Belitt Lecture, Bennington College, 1992
Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin
To begin with, I want to read a poem by the Czech poet Miroslav Holub. This describes two characters who are like allegorical representations of the different poetic postures adopted by W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin, not only towards last things, but towards nearly everything. It has all the clarity of a blackboard diagram and makes an excellent introduction to my concerns in this lecture:
The Dead
After the third operation, his heart
pierced like an old carnival target,
he woke in his bed and said,
‘Now I’ll be fine,
like a sunflower, and by the way
have you ever seen horses make love?’
He died that night.
And another one plodded on for eight
milk and water years
like a long-haired waterplant
in a sour creek,
as if he stuck his pale face out
on a skewer from behind the graveyard wall.
Finally his face disappeared.
In both cases the angel of death
stamped his hob-nailed boot
on their medulla oblongata.
I know they died the same death
but I don’t think they died
in the same way.
As Philip Larkin once said, readability is credibility: because of the truth-to-life in Holub’s presentation of the different ways the two men lived, there is great cogency in his claim that there was a difference in the way they died. Indeed, it’s because of this thoroughly persuasive quality that I want to set Holub’s poem beside one by Larkin which takes an opposing view and contains the line ‘Death is no different whined at than withstood’ (my italics). Larkin’s ‘Aubade’ is the poem where this dark observation appears and it constitutes a direct contradiction of Holub, in that it treats as mystification any imaginative or rhetorical ploy which might mask the facts of the body’s dissolution and the mind’s disappearance after death. Religion, courage, philosophy, drink, the routines of work and leisure – all these are regarded by Larkin as placebos. As he aged, his vision got arrested into a fixed stare at the inexorability of his own physical extinction. Human wisdom, therefore, seemed to him a matter of operating within the mortal limits, and of quelling any false hope of transcending or outfacing the inevitable. The poet in Larkin, in other words, was entirely sympathetic to living as a long-haired waterplant in a sour creek, and the persona he created for himself in the last two decades of his life bore a definite resemblance to that pale face on a skewer sticking out from behind the graveyard wall. So what I want to do in this lecture is to consider the implications for poetry of Larkin’s attitude, and to ask whether his famous rejection of Yeats’s more romantic stance has not been too long and too readily approved of.
Finders Keepers Page 36