Preoccupations

Englands of the Mind

One of the most precise and suggestive of T. S. Eliot’s critical formulations was his notion of what he called ‘the auditory imagination’, ‘the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back’, fusing ‘the most ancient and the most civilized mentality’. I presume Eliot was thinking here about the cultural depth-charges latent in certain words and rhythms, that binding secret between words in poetry that delights not just the ear but the whole backward and abysm of mind and body; thinking of the energies beating in and between words that the poet brings into half-deliberate play; thinking of the relationship between the word as pure vocable, as articulate noise, and the word as etymological occurrence, as symptom of human history, memory and attachments.

It is in the context of this auditory imagination that I wish to discuss the language of Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill and Philip Larkin. All of them return to an origin and bring something back, all three live off the hump of the English poetic achievement, all three, here and now, in England, imply a continuity with another England, there and then. All three are hoarders and shorers of what they take to be the real England. All three treat England as a region—or rather treat their region as England—in different and complementary ways. I believe they are afflicted with a sense of history that was once the peculiar affliction of the poets of other nations who were not themselves natives of England but who spoke the English language. The poets of the mother culture, I feel, are now possessed of that defensive love of their territory which was once shared only by those poets whom we might call colonial—Yeats, MacDiarmid, Carlos Williams. They are aware of their Englishness as deposits in the descending storeys of the literary and historical past. Their very terrain is becoming consciously precious. A desire to preserve indigenous traditions, to keep open the imagination’s supply lines to the past, to receive from the stations of Anglo-Saxon confirmations of ancestry, to perceive in the rituals of show Saturdays and race-meetings and seaside outings, of church-going and marriages at Whitsun, and in the necessities that crave expression after the ritual of church-going has passed away, to perceive in these a continuity of communal ways, and a confirmation of an identity which is threatened—all this is signified by their language.

When we examine that language, we find that their three separate voices are guaranteed by three separate foundations which, when combined, represent almost the total resources of the English language itself. Hughes relies on the northern deposits, the pagan Anglo-Saxon and Norse elements, and he draws energy also from a related constellation of primitive myths and world views. The life of his language is a persistence of the stark outline and vitality of Anglo-Saxon that became the Middle English alliterative tradition and then went underground to sustain the folk poetry, the ballads, and the ebullience of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. Hill is also sustained by the Anglo-Saxon base, but his proper guarantor is that language as modified and amplified by the vocabularies and values of the Mediterranean, by the early medieval Latin influence; his is to a certain extent a scholastic imagination founded on an England that we might describe as Anglo-Romanesque, touched by the polysyllabic light of Christianity but possessed by darker energies which might be acknowledged as barbaric. Larkin then completes the picture, because his proper hinterland is the English language Frenchified and turned humanist by the Norman conquest and the Renaissance, made nimble, melodious and plangent by Chaucer and Spenser, and besomed clean of its inkhornisms and its irrational magics by the eighteenth century.

And their Englands of the mind might be correspondingly characterized. Hughes’s is a primeval landscape where stones cry out and horizons endure, where the elements inhabit the mind with a religious force, where the pebble dreams ‘it is the foetus of God’, ‘where the staring angels go through’, ‘where all the stars bow down’, where, with appropriately pre-Socratic force, water lies ‘at the bottom of all things/utterly worn out utterly clear’. It is England as King Lear’s heath which now becomes a Yorkshire moor where sheep and foxes and hawks persuade ‘unaccommodated man’ that he is a poor bare forked thing, kinned not in a chain but on a plane of being with the animals themselves. There monoliths and lintels. The air is menaced by God’s voice in the wind, by demonic protean crow-shapes; and the poet is a wanderer among the ruins, cut off by catastrophe from consolation and philosophy. Hill’s England, on the other hand, is more hospitable to the human presence. The monoliths make way for the keeps and chantries if also for the beheading block. The heath’s loneliness is kept at bay by the natural magic of the grove and the intellectual force of the scholar’s cell. The poet is not a wanderer but a clerk or perhaps an illuminator or one of a guild of masters: he is in possession of a history rather than a mythology; he has a learned rather than an oral tradition. There are wars, but there are also dynasties, ideas of inheritance and order, possibilities for the ‘true governaunce of England’. His elegies are not laments for the irrevocable dispersal of the comitatus and the ring-giver in the hall, but solemn requiems for Plantagenet kings whose murderous wars are set in a great pattern, to be understood only when ‘the sea/Across daubed rocks evacuates its dead’. And Larkin’s England similarly reflects features from the period that his language is hived off. His trees and flowers and grasses are neither animistic, nor hallowed by half-remembered druidic lore; they are emblems of mutabilitie. Behind them lies the sensibility of troubadour and courtier. ‘Cut grass lies frail;/Brief is the breath/Mown stalks exhale’; his landscape is dominated neither by the untamed heath nor the totemistic architectures of spire and battlement but by the civic prospects, by roofs and gardens and prospects where urban and pastoral visions interact as ‘postal districts packed like squares of wheat’. The poet is no longer a bardic remnant nor an initiate in curious learning nor a jealous master of the secrets of a craft; he is a humane and civilized member of the customs service or the civil service or, indeed, the library service. The moon is no longer his white goddess but his poetic property, to be image rather than icon: ‘high and preposterous and separate’, she watches over unfenced existence, over fulfilment’s desolate attic, over an England of department stores, canals and floatings of industrial froth, explosions in mines, effigies in churches, secretaries in offices; and she hauls tides of life where only one ship is worth celebration, not a Golden Hind or a Victory, but ‘black-/Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back/A huge and birdless silence.’

Hughes’s sensibility is pagan in the original sense: he is a haunter of the pagus, a heath-dweller, a heathen; he moves by instinct in the thickets beyond the urbs; he is neither urban nor urbane. His poetry is as redolent of the lair as it is of the library. The very titles of his books are casts made into the outback of our animal recognitions. Lupercal, a word infested with wolfish stinks yet returning to an origin in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: ‘You all did see that on the Lupercal/I thrice presented him a kingly crown.’ Yet the word passes back through Shakespeare into the Lupercal, a cave below the western corner of the Palatine Hill in Rome; and the Lupercal was also the festival held on 15 February when, after the sacrifice of goats and a dog, youths dressed only in girdles made from the skins of these victims ran about the bounds of the Palatine city, striking those whom they met, especially women, with strips of goatskin. It was a fertility rite, and it was also a ritual beating of the bounds of the city, and in a way Hughes’s language is just this also. Its sensuous fetch, its redolence of blood and gland and grass and water, recalled English poetry in the fifties from a too suburban aversion of the attention from the elemental; and the poems beat the bounds of a hidden England in streams and trees, on moors and in byres. Hughes appeared like Poor Tom on the heath, a civilized man tasting and testing the primitive facts; he appeared as Wodwo, a nosing wild man of the woods. The volume Wodwo appeared in 1967 and carried as its epigraph a quotation from Gawain and the Green Knight, and that deliberate affiliation is instructive. Like the art of Gawain, Hughes’s art is one of clear outline and inner richness. His diction is consonantal, and it snicks through the air like an efficient blade, marking and carving out fast definite shapes; but within those shapes, mysteries and rituals are hinted at. They are circles within which he conjures up presences.

Hughes’s vigour has much to do with this matter of consonants that take the measure of his vowels like calipers, or stud the line like rivets. ‘Everything is inheriting everything,’ as he says in one of his poems, and what he has inherited through Shakespeare and John Webster and Hopkins and Lawrence is something of that primary life of stress which is the quick of the English poetic matter. His consonants are the Norsemen, the Normans, the Roundheads in the world of his vocables, hacking and hedging and hammering down the abundance and luxury and possible lasciviousness of the vowels. ‘I imagine this midnight moment’s forest’—the first line of the well-known ‘The Thought Fox’—is hushed, but it is a hush achieved by the quelling, battening-down action of the m’s and d’s and t’s: I iMagine this MiDnighT MoMenT’s foresT. Hughes’s aspiration in these early poems is to command all the elements, to bring them within the jurisdiction of his authoritarian voice. And in ‘The Thought Fox’ the thing at the beginning of the poem which lives beyond his jurisdiction is characteristically fluid and vowelling and sibilant: ‘Something else is alive’ whispers of a presence not yet accounted for, a presence that is granted its full vowel music as its epiphany—‘Something more near/Though deeper within darkness/Is entering the loneliness.’ It is granted this dilation of its mystery before it is conjured into the possession of the poet-warden, the vowel-keeper; and its final emergence in the fully sounded i’s and e’s of ‘an eye,/A widening deepening greenness,’ is gradually mastered by the braking action of ‘brilliantly, concentratedly’, and by the shooting of the monosyllabic consonantal bolts in the last stanza:

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox

It enters the dark hole of the head.

The window is starless still; the clock ticks,

The page is printed.

Next a poem whose subject might be expected to woo the tender pious vowels from a poet rather than the disciplining consonants. About a ‘Fern’:

Here is the fern’s frond, unfurling a gesture,

The first line is an Anglo-Saxon line, four stresses, three of them picked out by alliteration; and although the frosty grip of those f’s thaws out, the fern is still subsumed into images of control and discipline and regal authority:

And, among them, the fern

Dances gravely, like the plume

Of a warrior returning, under the low hills,

Into his own kingdom.

But of course we recognize that Hughes’s ‘Thistles’ are vegetation more kindred to his spirit than the pliant fern. And when he turns his attention to them, they become reincarnations of the Norsemen in a poem entitled ‘The Warriors of the North’:

Bringing their frozen swords, their salt-bleached eyes, their salt-bleached hair,

The snow’s stupefied anvils in rows,

Bringing their envy,

The slow ships feelered Southward, snails over the steep sheen of the water-globe

and he imagines them resurrected in all their arctic mail ‘into the iron arteries of Calvin’, and into ‘Thistles’. The thistles are emblems of the Hughes voice as I see it, born of an original vigour, fighting back over the same ground; and it is not insignificant that in this poem Hughes himself imagines the thistles as images of a fundamental speech, uttering itself in gutturals from behind the sloped arms of consonants:

Every one a revengeful burst

Of resurrection, a grasped fistful

Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up

From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.

They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.

Every one manages a plume of blood.

Then they grow grey, like men.

Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear,

Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.

The gutturals of dialects, which Hughes here connects with the Nordic stratum of English speech, he pronounces in another place to be the germinal secret of his own voice. In an interview published in the London Magazine in January 1971 he said:

I grew up in West Yorkshire. They have a very distinctive dialect there. Whatever other speech you grow into, presumably your dialect stays alive in a sort of inner freedom,… it’s your childhood self there inside the dialect and that is possibly your real self or the core of it.… Without it, I doubt if I would ever have written verse. And in the case of the West Yorkshire dialect, of course, it connects you directly and in your most intimate self to Middle English poetry.

In other words he finds that the original grain of his speech is a chip off the old block and that his work need not be a new planting but a new bud on an old bough. What other poet would have the boldness to entitle a collection Wodwo? Yet Gawain and the Green Knight, with its beautiful alliterating and illuminated form, its interlacing and trellising of natural life and mythic life, is probably closer in spirit to Hughes’s poetry than Hughes’s poetry is to that of his English contemporaries. Everything inherits everything—and Hughes is the rightful heir to this alliterative tradition, and to the cleaving simplicity of the Border ballad, which he elevates to the status of touchstone later in that same interview. He says that he started writing again in 1955:

The poems that set me off were odd pieces by Shapiro, Lowell, Merwin, Wilbur and Crowe Ransom. Crowe Ransom was the one who gave me a model I felt I could use. He helped me get my words into focus.… But this whole business of influences is mysterious.… And after all the campaigns to make it new you’re stuck with the fact that some of the Scots Border ballads still cut a deeper groove than anything written in the last forty years. Influences just seem to make it more and more unlikely that a poet will write what he alone could write.

What Hughes alone could write depended for its release on the discovery of a way to undam the energies of the dialect, to get a stomping ground for that inner freedom, to get that childhood self a disguise to roam at large in. Freedom and naturalness and homeliness are positives in Hughes’s critical vocabulary, and they are linked with both the authenticity of individual poets and the genius of the language itself. Speaking of Keith Douglas in 1964, Hughes could have been speaking of himself; of the way his language and his imagination alerted themselves when the hunt for the poem in the adult world became synonymous with the hunt for the animal in the world of childhood, the world of dialect:

The impression is of a sudden mobilizing of the poet’s will, a clearing of his vision, as if from sitting considering possibilities and impossibilities he stood up to act. Pictures of things no longer interest him much: he wants their substance, their nature and their consequences in life. At once, and quite suddenly, his mind is whole.… He is a renovator of language. It is not that he uses words in jolting combinations, or with titanic extravagance, or curious precision. His triumph is in the way he renews the simplicity of ordinary talk.… The music that goes along with this … is the natural path of such confident, candid thinking.… A utility general purpose style that combines a colloquial prose readiness with poetic breadth, a ritual intensity of music with clear direct feeling, and yet in the end is nothing but casual speech.

This combination of ritual intensity, prose readiness, direct feeling and casual speech can be discovered likewise in the best poems of Lupercal, because in Hawk in the Rain and indeed in much of Wodwo and Crow, we are often in the presence of that titanic extravagance Hughes mentions, speech not so much mobilizing and standing up to act as flexing and straining until it verges on the grotesque. But in poems like ‘Pike’, ‘Hawk Roosting’, ‘The Bull Moses’ and ‘An Otter’ we get this confident, speedy, hammer-and-tongs proficiency. And in this poem from Wodwo, called ‘Pibroch’, a poem uniquely Hughesian in its very title, fetching energy and ancestry from what is beyond the Pale and beneath the surface, we have the elements of the Scottish piper’s ceol mor, the high style, implicit in words like ‘dead’, ‘heaven’, ‘universe’, ‘aeon’, ‘angels’, and in phrases like ‘the foetus of God’, ‘the stars bow down’—a phrase which cunningly makes its cast and raises Blake in the pool of the ear. We have elements of this high style, ritual intensity, whatever you want to call it; and we have also the ‘prose readiness’, the ‘casual speech’ of ‘bored’, ‘hangs on’, ‘lets up’, ‘tryout’, and the workaday cadences of ‘Over the stone rushes the wind’, and ‘her mind’s gone completely’. The landscape of the poem is one that the Anglo-Saxon wanderer or seafarer would be completely at home in:

The sea cries with its meaningless voice

Treating alike its dead and its living,

Probably bored with the appearance of heaven

After so many millions of nights without sleep,

Without purpose, without self-deception.

Stone likewise. A pebble is imprisoned

Like nothing in the Universe.

Created for black sleep. Or growing

Conscious of the sun’s red spot occasionally,

Then dreaming it is the foetus of God.

Over the stone rushes the wind

Able to mingle with nothing,

Like the hearing of the blind stone itself.

Or turns, as if the stone’s mind came feeling

A fantasy of directions.

Drinking the sea and eating the rock

A tree struggles to make leaves—

An old woman fallen from space

Unprepared for these conditions.

She hangs on, because her mind’s gone completely.

Minute after minute, aeon after aeon,

Nothing lets up or develops.

And this is neither a bad variant nor a tryout.

This is where the staring angels go through.

This is where all the stars bow down.

Hughes attempts to make vocal the inner life, the simple being-thereness, ‘the substance, nature and consequences in life’ of sea, stone, wind and tree. Blake’s pebble and tiger are shadowy presences in the background, as are the landscapes of Anglo-Saxon poetry. And the whole thing is founded on rock, that rock which Hughes presented in his autobiographical essay as his birthstone, holding his emergence in place just as his headstone will hold his decease:

This was the memento mundi over my birth: my spiritual midwife at the time and my godfather ever since—or one of my godfathers. From my first day it watched. If it couldn’t see me direct, a towering gloom over my pram, it watched me through a species of periscope: that is, by infiltrating the very light of my room with its particular shadow. From my home near the bottom of the south-facing slope of the valley, the cliff was both the curtain and backdrop to existence.

I quote this piece because it links the childhood core with the adult opus, because that rock is the equivalent in his poetic landscape of dialect in his poetic speech. The rock persists, survives, sustains, endures and informs his imagination, just as it is the bedrock of the language upon which Hughes founds his version of survival and endurance.

* * *

Stone and rock figure prominently in the world of Geoffrey Hill’s poetry also, but Hill’s imagination is not content to grant the mineral world the absolute sway that Hughes allows it. He is not the suppliant chanting to the megalith, but rather the mason dressing it. Hill also beats the bounds of an England, his own native West Midlands, beheld as a medieval England facing into the Celtic mysteries of Wales and out towards the military and ecclesiastical splendours of Europe. His Mercian Hymns names his territory Mercia, and masks his imagination under the figure of King Offa, builder of Offa’s dyke between England and Wales, builder as well as beater of the boundaries. Hill’s celebration of Mercia has a double-focus: one a child’s-eye view, close to the common earth, the hoard of history, and the other the historian’s and scholar’s eye, inquisitive of meaning, bringing time past to bear on time present and vice versa. But the writing itself is by no means abstract and philosophical. Hill addresses the language, as I say, like a mason addressing a block, not unlike his own mason in Hymn XXIV:

Itinerant through numerous domains, of his lord’s retinue, to Compostela. Then home for a lifetime amid West Mercia this master-mason as I envisage him, intent to pester upon tympanum and chancel-arch his moody testament, confusing warrior with lion, dragon-coils, tendrils of the stony vine.

Where best to stand? Easter sunrays catch the oblique face of Adam scrumping through leaves; pale spree of evangelists and, there, a cross Christ mumming child Adam out of Hell

(‘Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum’ dust in the eyes, on clawing wings, and lips)

Not only must English be kept up here, with its ‘spree’ and ‘scrumping’ and ‘mumming’, but Latin and learning must be kept up too. The mannered rhetoric of these pieces is a kind of verbal architecture, a grave and sturdy English Romanesque. The native undergrowth, both vegetative and verbal, that barbaric scrollwork of fern and ivy, is set against the tympanum and chancel-arch, against the weighty elegance of imperial Latin. The overall pattern of his language is an extension and a deliberate exploitation of the linguistic effect in Shakespeare’s famous lines, ‘It would the multitudinous seas incarnadine,/Making the green one red,’ where the polysyllabic flourish of ‘multitudinous’ and ‘incarnadine’ is both set off and undercut by the monosyllabic plainness of ‘making the green one red’, where the Latinate and the local also go hand in glove. There is in Hill something of Stephen Dedalus’s hyperconsciousness of words as physical sensations, as sounds to be plumbed, as weights on the tongue. Words in his poetry fall slowly and singly, like molten solder, and accumulate to a dull glowing nub. I imagine Hill as indulging in a morose linguistic delectation, dwelling on the potential of each word with much the same slow relish as Leopold Bloom dwells on the thought of his kidney. And in Mercian Hymns, in fact, Hill’s procedure resembles Joyce’s not only in this linguistic deliberation and self-consciousness. For all his references to the ‘precedent provided by the Latin prose-hymns or canticles of the early Christian Church’, what these hymns celebrate is the ‘ineluctable modality of the audible’, as well as the visible, and the form that celebration takes reminds one of the Joycean epiphany, which is a prose poem in effect. But not only in the form of the individual pieces, but in the overall structuring of the pieces, he follows the Joycean precedent set in Ulysses of confounding modern autobiographical material with literary and historic matter drawn from the past. Offa’s story makes contemporary landscape and experience live in the rich shadows of a tradition.

To go back to Hymn XXIV, the occasion, the engendering moment, seems to involve the contemplation of a carved pediment—a tympanum is the carved area between the lintel of a door and the arch above it—which exhibits a set of scenes: one of Eden, one of some kind of harrowing of hell; and the scenes are supervised by images of the evangelists. And this cryptic, compressed mode of presentation in which a few figures on stone can call upon the whole body of Christian doctrines and mythology resembles the compression of the piece itself. The carving reminds him of the carver, a master-mason—and the relevant note reads: ‘for the association of Compostela with West Midlands sculpture of the twelfth century I am indebted to G. Zarnecki, Later English Romanesque Sculpture, London (1953).’ This mason is ‘itinerant’—a word used in its precise Latin sense, yet when applied to a travelling craftsman, that pristine sense seems to foreshadow its present narrowed meaning of tinker, a travelling tinsmith, a white-smith. In the first phrases the Latinate predominates, for this is a ritual progress, an itinerary ‘through numerous domains, of his lord’s retinue’, to Compostela. Even the proper name flaps out its music like some banner there. But when he gets home, he is momentarily cut down from his grand tour importance to his homely size, in the simple ‘Then home for a lifetime amid West Mercia’; but now the poet/observer of the carving has caught something of the sense of occasion and borrowed something of the mason’s excitement. Yet he does not ‘see in the mind’s eye’, like Hamlet, but ‘envisages’ him, the verb being properly liturgical, ‘intent to pester upon tympanum and chancel-arch his moody testament, confusing warrior with lion, dragon-coils…’ Tympanum, of course, is also a drum, and the verb ‘pester’ manages a rich synaesthetic effect; the stone is made to cackle like a kettle drum as the chisel hits it. But ‘pester’ is more interesting still. Its primary meaning, from the original Latin root, pastorium, means to hobble a horse, and it was used in 1685 to mean ‘crowding persons in or into’. So the mason hobbles and herds and crowds in warrior and lion, dragon coils, tendrils of the stony vine; and this interlacing and entanglement of motifs is also the method of the poem.

In fact, we can see the method more clearly if we put the poem in its proper context, which is in the middle of a group of three entitled Opus Anglicanum. Once again the note is helpful:

‘Opus Anglicanum’: the term is properly applicable to English embroidery of the period AD 1250–1350, though the craft was already famous some centuries earlier.… I have, with considerable impropriety, extended the term to apply to English Romanesque sculpture and to utilitarian metal-work of the nineteenth century.

The entanglement, the interlacing, is now that of embroidery, and this first poem, I suggest, brings together womanly figures from Hill’s childhood memory with the ghostly procession of needleworkers from the medieval castles and convents:

XXIII

In tapestries, in dreams, they gathered, as it was enacted, the return, the re-entry of transcendence into this sublunary world. Opus Anglicanum, their stringent mystery riddled by needles: the silver veining, the gold leaf, voluted grape-vine, masterworks of treacherous thread.

They trudged out of the dark, scraping their boots free from lime-splodges and phlegm. They munched cold bacon. The lamps grew plump with oily reliable light.

Again, the liturgical and Latinate of the first paragraph is abraded and rebutted by the literal and local weight of ‘scraping their boots free from lime-splodges and phlegm’—the boots being, I take it, the boots of labourers involved in this never-ending Opus Anglicanum, from agricultural origins to industrial developments. And in order just to clinch the thing, consider the third piece, where the ‘utilitarian iron work’ in which his grandmother was involved is contemplated in a perspective that includes medieval embroidress and mason, and a certain ‘transcendence’ enters the making of wire nails:

XXV

Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer’s darg.

The nailshop stood back of the cottage, by the fold. It reeked stale mineral sweat. Sparks had furred its low roof. In dawn-light the troughed water floated a damson-bloom of dust—

not to be shaken by posthumous clamour. It is one thing to celebrate the ‘quick forge’, another to cradle a face hare-lipped by the searing wire.

Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer’s darg.

Ruskin’s eightieth letter reflects eloquently and plangently on the injustice of the master and servant situation, on the exploitation of labour, on the demeaning work in a nail forge. The Mayor of Birmingham took him to a house where two women were at work, labouring, as he says, with ancient Vulcanian skill:

So wrought they,—the English matron and maid;—so it was their darg to labour from morning to evening—seven to seven—by the furnace side—the winds of summer fanning the blast of it.

He goes on to compute that the woman and the husband earn altogether £55 a year with which to feed and clothe themselves and their six children, to reproach the luxury of the mill-owning class, and to compare the wives of industrialists contemplating Burne Jones’s picture of Venus’s mirror ‘with these, their sisters, who had only, for Venus’s mirror, a heap of ashes; compassed about with no forget-me-nots, but with all the forgetfulness in the world’.

It seems to me here that Hill is celebrating his own indomitable Englishry, casting his mind on other days, singing a clan beaten into the clay and ashes, and linking their patience, their sustaining energy, with the glory of England. The ‘quick forge’, after all, may be what its origin in Shakespeare’s Henry V declares it to be, ‘the quick forge and working house of thought’, but it is surely also the ‘random grim forge’ of Felix Randal, the farrier. The image shifts between various points and embroiders a new opus anglicanum in this intended and allusive poem. And the point of the embroidering needle, of course, is darg, that chip off the Anglo-Saxon block, meaning ‘a day’s work, or the task of a day’.

The Mercian Hymns show Hill in full command of his voice. Much as the stiff and corbelled rhetoric of earlier work like Funeral Music and ‘Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings’ stands up and will stand up, it is only when this rhetoric becomes a press tightening on and squeezing out of the language the vigour of common speech, the essential Anglo-Saxon juices, it is only then that the poetry attains this final refreshed and refreshing quality: then he has, in the words of another piece, accrued a ‘golden and stinking blaze’.

* * *

Finally, to come to Larkin, where what accrues in the language is not ‘a golden and stinking blaze’, not the rank and fermenting composts of philology and history, but the bright senses of words worn clean in literate conversation. In Larkin’s language as in his vision of water, ‘any angled light … congregate[s] endlessly.’ There is a gap in Larkin between the perceiver and the thing perceived, a refusal to melt through long perspectives, an obstinate insistence that the poet is neither a race memory nor a myth-kitty nor a mason, but a real man in a real place. The cadences and vocabulary of his poems are tuned to a rational music. It would seem that he has deliberately curtailed his gift for evocation, for resonance, for symbolist frissons. He turned from Yeats to Hardy as his master. He never followed the Laurentian success of his early poem ‘Wedding Wind’ which ends with a kind of biblical swoon, an image of fulfilled lovers ‘kneeling like cattle by all generous waters’. He rebukes romantic aspiration and afflatus with a scrupulous meanness. If he sees the moon, he sees it while groping back to bed after a piss. If he is forced to cry out ‘O wolves of memory, immensements’, he is also forced to recognize that he is past all that swaddling of sentiment, even if it is ‘for others, undiminished, somewhere’. ‘Undiminished’—the word, with its hovering balance between attenuated possibilities and the possibility of amplitude, is typical. And Christopher Ricks has pointed out how often negatives operate in Larkin’s best lines. Lovers talking in bed, for example, discover it ever more difficult

to find

Words at once true and kind,

Or not untrue and not unkind.

His tongue moves hesitantly, precisely, honestly, among ironies and negatives. He is the poet of rational light, a light that has its own luminous beauty but which has also the effect of exposing clearly the truths which it touches. Larkin speaks neither a dialect nor a pulpit language; there are no ‘hectoring large scale verses’ in his three books, nor is there the stubbly intimacy of ‘oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke’ which he nostalgically annotates among the miners. His language would have pleased those Tudor and Augustan guardians who wanted to polish and beautify their speech, to smooth it for art. What we hear is a stripped standard English voice, a voice indeed with a unique break and remorseful tone, but a voice that leads back neither to the thumping beat of Anglo-Saxon nor to the Gregorian chant of the Middle Ages. Its ancestry begins, in fact, when the Middle Ages are turning secular, and plays begin to take their place beside the Mass as a form of communal telling and knowing. In the first few lines of Larkin’s poem ‘Money’, for example, I think I hear the cadences of Everyman, the querulous tones of Riches reproaching the hero:

Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:

‘Why do you let me lie here wastefully?

I am all you never had of goods and sex.

You could get them still just by writing a few cheques.’

Those endstopped lines, sliding down to rhymed conclusions, suggest the beginning of that period out of which Larkin’s style arises. After Everyman, there is Skelton, a common-sensical wobble of rhyme, a humorous wisdom, a practical lyricism:

Oh, no one can deny

That Arnold is less selfish than I.

He married a wife to stop her getting away

Now she’s there all day,…

There is as well the Cavalier Larkin, the maker of songs, where the conversational note and the dainty disciplines of a metrical form are in beautiful equilibrium:

Yet still the unresting castles thresh

In fullgrown thickness every May.

Last year is dead, they seem to say.

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Even in that short space, by the way, one can see the peculiar Larkin fusion of parsimony and abundance—the gorgeousness of ‘unresting castles’, the poignant sweetness of ‘afresh, afresh’ are held in check by the quotidian ‘last year is dead’. Yet it is by refusing to pull out the full stops, or by almost refusing, that Larkin gains his own brand of negative capability.

As well as the Cavalier Larkin, there is a late Augustan Larkin, the poet of decorous melancholy moods, of twilit propriety and shadowy melody. His poem about superannuated racehorses, for example, entitled ‘At Grass’, could well be subtitled, ‘An Elegy in a Country Paddock’. Behind the trees where the horses shelter there could well rise the spire of Stoke Poges church; and behind the smooth numbers of wind distressing the tails and manes, there is the donnish exactitude of tresses being distressed:

The eye can hardly pick them out

From the cold shade they shelter in

Till wind distresses tail and mane …

And when, at the conclusion of the poem, ‘the groom and the groom’s boy/With bridles in the evening come,’ their footsteps surely echo the ploughman homeward plodding his weary way.

There is, moreover, a Tennysonian Larkin and a Hardyesque Larkin. There is even, powerfully, an Imagist Larkin:

There is an evening coming in

Across the fields, one never seen before,

That lights no lamps.

Silken it seems at a distance, yet

When it is drawn up over the knees and breast

It brings no comfort.

Where has the tree gone, that locked

Earth to the sky? What is under my hands,

That I cannot feel?

What loads my hands down?

Then there is Larkin, the coiner of compounds—which we may choose to call Hopkinsian or even perhaps, briefly, Shakespearean—who writes of ‘some lonely rain-ceased midsummer evening’, of ‘light unanswerable and tall and wide’, of ‘the million-petalled flower of being here’, of ‘thin continuous dreaming’ and ‘wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers’.

And to go from the sublime to the ridiculous, there is the seaside-postcard Larkin, as true to the streak of vulgarity in the civilization as he is sensitive to its most delicious refinements:

‘Get stewed:/Books are a load of crap.’ Or get this disfigurement of a poster of a bathing beauty:

Huge tits and a fissured crotch

Were scored well in, and the space

Between her legs held scrawls

That set her fairly astride

A tuberous cock and balls.

And then, elsewhere,

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

And again, in ‘Sad Steps’:

Groping back to bed after a piss

I part thick curtains, and am startled by

The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.

But despite the piss, and the snigger of the demotic in all of these places, that title, ‘Sad Steps’, reminds us that Larkin is solicitous for his Sidney also. He too returns to origins and brings something back, although he does not return to ‘roots’. He puts inverted commas round his ‘roots’, in fact. His childhood, he says, was a forgotten boredom. He sees England from train windows, fleeting past and away. He is urban modern man, the insular Englishman, responding to the tones of his own clan, ill at ease when out of his environment. He is a poet, indeed, of composed and tempered English nationalism, and his voice is the not untrue, not unkind voice of post-war England, where the cloth cap and the royal crown have both lost some of their potent symbolism, and the categorical, socially defining functions of the working-class accent and the aristocratic drawl have almost been eroded. Larkin’s tones are mannerly but not exquisite, well-bred but not mealy-mouthed. If his England and his English are not as deep as Hughes’s or as solemn as Hill’s, they are nevertheless dearly beloved, and during his sojourn in Belfast in the late fifties, he gave thanks, by implication, for the nurture that he receives by living among his own. The speech, the customs, the institutions of England are, in the words of another English poet, domiciled in Ireland, ‘wife to his creating thought’. That was Hopkins in Dublin in the 1880s, sensing that his individual talent was being divorced from his tradition. Here is Larkin remembering the domicile in Belfast in the 1950s:

Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home,

Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech,

Insisting so on difference, made me welcome:

Once that was recognised, we were in touch.

Their draughty streets, end-on to hills, the faint

Archaic smell of dockland, like a stable,

The herring-hawker’s cry, dwindling, went

To prove me separate, not unworkable.

Living in England has no such excuse:

These are my customs and establishments

It would be much more serious to refuse.

Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.

Larkin’s England of the mind is in many ways continuous with the England of Rupert Brooke’s ‘Grantchester’ and Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’, an England of customs and institutions, industrial and domestic, but also an England whose pastoral hinterland is threatened by the very success of those institutions. Houses and roads and factories mean that a certain England is ‘Going, Going’:

It seems, just now,

To be happening so very fast;

Despite all the land left free

For the first time I feel somehow

That it isn’t going to last,

That before I snuff it, the whole

Boiling will be bricked in

Except for the tourist parts—

First slum of Europe: a role

It won’t be so hard to win,

With a cast of crooks and tarts.

And that will be England gone,

The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,

The guildhalls, the carved choirs.

There’ll be books; it will linger on

In galleries; but all that remains

For us will be concrete and tyres.

I think that sense of an ending has driven all three of these writers into a kind of piety towards their local origins, has made them look in, rather than up, to England. The loss of imperial power, the failure of economic nerve, the diminished influence of Britain inside Europe, all this has led to a new sense of the shires, a new valuing of the native English experience. Donald Davie, for example, has published a book of poems, with that very title, The Shires, which attempts to annex to his imagination by personal memory or historical meditation or literary connections, each shire of England. It is a book at once intimate and exclusive, a topography of love and impatience, and it is yet another symptom that English poets are being forced to explore not just the matter of England, but what is the matter with England. I have simply presumed to share in that exploration through the medium which England has, for better or worse, impressed upon us all, the English language itself.

The Beckman Lecture, given at the University of California, Berkeley, May 1976