Charles Causley

Charles Causley, a defiantly unmodern poet, died on November 4th 2003, aged 86

THE purest poetry, it can be argued, springs not from urban angst or cloistered academies, nor even from the passionate contemplation of nature. It grows from the soil, and is best expressed in the simple songs of ordinary people. Just as a line of hills, or the edge of a wood, can move an English heart in inexplicable ways, so too can the plain, quiet words of “The Sally Gardens” or “Linden Lea”, even before a Benjamin Britten or a Ralph Vaughan Williams has added woodwinds to them.

Yet for centuries, from the decorous Augustans through the blazing Romantics to the solid Victorians, no one paid much attention to the ballads of England’s drinking houses or the rhymes of its playgrounds. The odd little snatches chanted in Shakespeare’s plays by Puck or Ariel had a certain haunting power, but no poetic virtue. These were primitive

things. Only poor half-mad William Blake, buffeting the wind on Hampstead Heath, gained some sort of audience for “songs” that deliberately confused the worlds of the adult and the child. And only Rudyard Kipling gave soldiers’ slangy ballads an honoured place in his work.

Charles Causley not only embraced this sort of poetry, but became its best modern practitioner. He called his poems ballads, carols, serenades, rondels and nursery rhymes, and wrote them as if they should be danced to. He delighted too, like Blake, in making poems that could be read by children and adults alike. He did not believe in the distinction, and in his work the observer always kept both perspectives. The world was disturbing as well as magical, and the eye that saw it both innocent and knowing. In “Timothy Winters”, he wrote of a wild schoolboy with the boy’s defiance and the teacher’s frustration:

When teacher talks he won’t hear a word

And he shoots down dead the arithmetic-bird

He licks the patterns off his plate

And he’s not even heard of the Welfare State.

while in “Recruiting Drive”, one of many poems born out of his naval experiences in the second world war, the “lily-white boy” is both a pitiable piece of cannon-fodder and a character from a fairy tale:

Under the willow the willow

I heard the butcher bird sing,

Come out you fine young fellow

From under your mother’s wing ...

You must take off your clothes for the doctor And stand as straight as a pin, His hand of stone on your white breastbone Where the bullets all go in.

Even his rare non-ballads could not leave childhood songs aside, as in “Convoy”, about a drowned sailor in the Arctic:

He is now a child in the land of Christmas:

Watching, amazed, the white tumbling bears

And the diving seal.

The iron wind clangs round the ice-caps,

The five-pointed Dog-star

Burns over the silent sea,

And the three ships

Come sailing in.

Because such writing looks easy, and because the common man understands and likes it, Mr Causley was often scorned as simplistic and old-fashioned. His insistent rhymes and metres got on the nerves of those who thought only free verse or broken rhythms could express the modern muse. Yet the best poets – Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes – knew how deep simplicity could go, and admired him.

His natural shyness did not help him. He was brought up poor, and remained keenly aware of his working-class roots. His mother took in washing, but also sawthat her son learned piano, where he encountered the bitter songs of the first world war. His own experiences in the next war, he always said, made him decide to be a poet. Before that he had worked as a clerk for a builder’s firm and an electrical company. Though he travelled widely, he kept returning to the slate-and-stone town of Launceston in Cornwall, where he was born. Like most good poets, he thought the voyages of his imagination more important than travels round the world.

In that sense, too, he was true to his balladeer’s calling. The old songs are rooted in local earth and feeling, and so, too, were his: not in England, properly speaking, but in Cornwall, that misty Celtic promontory running out into the Atlantic. Though he wrote of many other places, the core of his work was set in Marazion, Porth Veor, Lezant or Bodmin, on granite moors or under hawthorn hedges, and constantly within sight or hearing of the “long salt fingers” of the sea. Many Cornishmen wanted him for their official Poet Laureate, cocking a deliberate snub at their long-felt colonisation by Anglo-Saxons.

This is also a land peopled with giants, devils and saints, as Mr Causley saw them. Giant Winter lies over Wilsey Down, “the snow flossing his blue coat and his buckles/Drifting his lip and his eye.” A demon is shot down by St Michael, the “silver bowman”, over Helston, and Judas Iscariot returns as Jack O’Lent, running across the moors in search of redemption. All this, too, is in the style of ancient carols, which translated the Christian mysteries to local places and contemporary dress. But it is hard to think of any modern caroller who could pick up Mr Causley’s pen.