"The Yellow Spot"

Enough of this. The place has accumulated routines, touches on objects, their manipulation, sequences of movement done repeatedly with resultant noises, collisions, clunks, knacks. They are so specific when you remember them that the world seems impossibly full, a miracle of containment. Or does it leak? (p. 85).

Reviewed by Peter Hughes

Shearsman, Paperback, 456pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $29, ISBN 9781905700578



The publication of John Welch's 450-page Collected Poems provides the reader with a welcome opportunity to look back over the writing career of this significant London-based poet. It has been a long and productive career: the poems collected here cover a period of almost forty years; and a large number of earlier poems are left out. Shearsman are to be congratulated on imaginatively bringing out, at the same time as this substantial volume of poems, another important work by John Welch, his Dreaming Arrival. This is half the size of the Collected Poems and is a series of prose reflections on the motivations of his poetry, and the relationships between the poetry and the author's experience of psychotherapy.

Yet the simultaneous publication of these two books, valuable and fascinating as each certainly is, does pose something of a dilemma for the reader. If you read the prose book first, you are in danger thereafter of reading the poems as merely autobiographical, or worse – as a series of exercises in art therapy. Needless to say, the poems could be read that way. But such a reading would be damagingly reductive. So I would recommend reading the poems first, then the prose. The poems are thereby free to resonate in the more expansive contexts they deserve.


◊ ◊ ◊


Sometimes Welch can sound like Seferis:

IMAGINATION AND DREAM

1

The city sleeps. One by one
We waken into its dreams
Beginning to dream of ourselves, like children
Throwing stones at a statue.

The word is scrawled on a coffin
Or over a mirror: I saw.
The sleeping town
Is verbal tangles. Although not
Obsequious, not like us, these eat
And breathe and sleep and are without hope
Till going from us
One by one they waken into their dream.

In a sunlit corner of that city
Where I was and was not
I came upon someone fallen quiet
Who was myself and not myself.

Lifting his eyes he addressed me.
'I am beside you now
Riding the breath but not staying.
What you need is this distraction.

When you wake the mirror clouds
With bloom of my exile breath.
You trace your name
And smile into my absence.

(Imagination and Dream, p. 179)

There is a good deal of absence in the poetry of John Welch. And not just the absence of traditional formal devices such as rhyme and alliteration. A sense of absence can appear suddenly in the spaces between different pronouns, especially when those pronouns refer to the same thing – the voice articulating the poem. This is registered from the inside and from the outside. It is rotated between the fingertips of the poem to shift from 'I' to 'you' to 'he' to 'they' – sometimes to end up as 'us'. It is also scrutinised as a permeable membrane forged of language; sometimes this flexes as a deep innerness, but usually the speaker's sense of self slides off it back into a sunlit silence. The sound of footsteps walking away along a city street is usually one's own.

Again and again, these poems carefully trace the everyday details of London streets – and then the details dissolve into a pool of selflessness and dazzle off a mucky puddle:

Then it comes, that sense of being here and not being here, all things chiming at once in an epiphany of absence, and for a moment you are quite lost in it.

(Local Aspects, p. 165)

Lost, perhaps, in the sense of found.

Or:

Stand and on one foot turn

The way light falls into silence

(Taking Refuge, p. 251)

Or:

... 'I' is this epiphany of absence

(Exhibit, p. 338)

Again:

So we go on defined by our absences.

(At the Centre, p. 350)

I wonder if one aspect of this recurrent sense of absence is a good old godlessness. After all, Welch's father and grandfather were both clergymen whilst the voices here in the poems articulate an entirely secular vision of existing amidst the ordinary; of existing, indeed, mainly in terms of other people's expectations, criticisms and approbations. Another kind of absence in the poetry is that of the 'father' and 'mother' – figures who are remote, detached and vivid only in dreams. So instead there is walking, walking and writing. Walking towards and away from the sense of self; walking towards personal extinction through vistas of arterial roads, the odd beach or meadow, and pages inscribed with the sights and sounds of dream and waking.

Here is a resonant passage from the prose book Dreaming Arrival:

You have a notion of a model railway all set up in a beautifully crafted landscape, the marvellous self-containedness of this simulated world. But it never quite happens. Instead you end up with words. A poem: as if you need this mirror to make your silence in, the reader moving in behind you who hovers there like an afterthought. It was as if out of absence you had made a kind of home. And now it emerges with something in its beak.

(Dreaming Arrival, p. 204)

That slightly cheeky intrusion of the 'natural world' into the last line is characteristic of Welch. His work is full of birds carrying unreadable scripts and singing unintelligible song. Then there are the plants, usually resilient and unrequired – say a dusty buddleia, coming into leaf in the corner of some wasteland ripe for redevelopment. Yet indispensible, actually, because redolent of the unplanned, the gratuitous, the vital amidst the constructed and part-derelict present.

Another kind of unplanned vitality irrupting into the poetry is that of dream. An extraordinary amount of Welch's work is fed and energised by dream. He discusses the relationships between dream, memory, desire and poetry at length in Dreaming Arrival. As far as the Collected Poems volume is concerned, the greatest concentration of dream imagery is, not surprisingly, to be found in the section entitled 'Blood and Dreams', which was originally published by Reality Street Editions in 1991. Yet in spite of the chaotic freedoms of dream, familiar themes emerge. Embedded in the first poem of this section, 'The Fish God', is a children's story, quoted in full: "One day Gopal caught a fish. It said, Put me back, and he did so. The fish gave him silk saris for his wife, a house, servants. But Gopal's wife grew greedy. She wanted to be queen. The Fish God was angry and took all the presents back. She went to the riverbank and shouted, but the God never returned. Gopal didn't mind; he just went on fishing." (The Fish God, p. 132)

More absence then – this time burnished by a sense of guilt which is inexplicable, unfocused, and displaced.

Later in the 'Blood and Dreams' section comes the poem already quoted from at the start of this review, Imagination and Dream. It contains the following evocation of the poet as Orpheus:

'Literature' – like Orpheus as he returns from the Underworld. So long as he looks straight ahead, safe in the knowledge that he is leading someone, it is the Real that lives and breathes and walks behind him, and moves steadily towards the creation of some final meaning. But, should he look round, all he will find in his hands is this meaning clearly stated, which is to say, lifeless...

...The dreamer: site of an abandoned cult, come back to daylight. The mark of absence is a blaze on his forehead.

(Imagination and Dream, p. 183)

This sense of a richness hidden somewhere just out of sight is sustained by moving forwards. And this movement keeps at bay the stultifying oppressiveness of a stale and static present. Walking, walking and writing, with each step and syllable a postponement of some kind of paralysis.

In the end the poetry deals with perception, with the experience of being in the world, and reflecting upon it – and therefore of language:

Backing off into a smile I greet you
Standing silent in the doorway to language.

(Dreaming the Sign, p.145 )

We have returned to the classical theme of art enduring: dynamic models of thought and perception enshrining their occasions. Language as Tardis:

Typewriter

I can see it crouched there on the table, facing onto the blackness outside. The thing at the back to hold the paper upright sticks up in its V-shape, like antennae. The whole looks as if it is about to set off into the night.

(A Vigil, p188)

Writing is seen as a way of moving away from the self, into an enduring public realm.

The best lines I ever wrote flew out of the window and settled in the trees.

(A Vigil, p189)

The best that can happen, it seems, is that the margins of self and non-self melt or merge, masking isolation and the incapacitating tangles of self-consciousness. And that this is enacted within and facilitated by poetry.

...Journeys to the periphery - ...as I sat in my room at midnight such a sensation of power; a hot summer night and the surge of traffic below me, I was the city and I could do anything with it and I wrote it down as if it wrote me.

(A Vigil, p.195)

Before ending I should perhaps say that not all these poems concern the urban. Poems are set on the coast, or in the remote countryside, in Wales, Scotland, England and France. Nor do all the poems have a solitary feel – several deal with relationships between parents and children, or between partners. I should also mention the beautiful artwork that graces the covers of both the Collected Poems and Dreaming Arrival. (John Welch is married to an artist, the painter Amanda Welch). Yet the characteristic Welch poem is out walking through the north London streets, measuring the presence of the conscious self in its passing settings, and making more of this modest and unmistakeable music:

And I will walk slowly
Making the most of it
Absenting myself in the song

(Dragon Dreaming, p.138)

This book is full of integrity – again and again, the seriousness of address; writing as if poetry were a matter of life and death. Quiet lyrics following one another like cold waves onto an autumn shore. No flash effects, no random scramblings, no posturing, nothing sly or trivial. Writing as if your life depended on it.

by Michael Peverett

One of the things about reading poetry off the page instead of hearing it is that the reading eye soon learns to be aware of words that swim into its early-warning system, whose power of forecast extends two or three lines ahead of the one that the reader is presently reading. This trick is on the whole an annoying one and not conducive to the reader's happiness; you don't really want to know anything about what's upcoming on line 166 while you are still silently reciting line 164 - it means you never get any of your poetry really fresh, the impact is always muffled because you've half-seen it coming - but nevertheless you still catch yourself doing it. The reason for this spoiling habit is obvious if you remember being forced to take part in sight-readings in class - you were appointed to be some obscure personage in Marlowe or Shakespeare and because you didn't know the play or what your character was doing in it, you were afraid of saying the words in the wrong way... just so, when you read poetry to yourself instead of listening to it you are still a performer of a sort (that is, you put on a performance for yourself) and you scan anxiously ahead, you use the early-warning system to make sure you're keeping roughly on track. But since this is normally how poetry is now imbibed, many poets exploit the early-warning system - so that, for example, in Peter Riley's Excavations when you turn over the page and catch sight of some words in bold type, though they still lie far off from you in the block of text, you read your way towards them with a jauntier gait, refreshed by the promise of imminent song.

This is all a laborious way of leading up to saying (what is nearly the only fact in this essay) that when I'm reading some old poem I get dispirited when I see the word "athwart" come over my horizon. It isn't just that the word is obsolete in British (written) English, or even that it had a confusing variety of senses, but something else too: when it became a poeticism in the nineteenth century, the poets start to use it in a confusing way. As much as it means especially little to me, the signs are there to show it meant something important to them; something more important than precision.

Take Coleridge in Kubla Khan:

     But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
     Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

I can make myself see something clearly here. We have, say, the slope of a hill in our vision. Imagine it blanketed in trees, perhaps of a coniferous sort - "cedarn cover" might do as a way of referring to the forest canopy; though not a particularly good way,since it has misled some readers into thinking of coffin-lids. And then, as is not unusual on such hills, imagine the deep cut of a beck slanting diagonally down the hill-slope, clearly visible as a rift in the forest - I think I'm clear about this, it's like Burrington Combe or Cheddar Gorge on the slopes of the Mendips, and it's quite an erotic image. But now "athwart" is annoying me, because apart from its ropey, fibrous sort of sound, inapropriate to a rocky chasm, it seems to assert that the slanting line is laid across, i.e. on top of, the cedarn cover, not embedded into it - as it were, chalked rather than scored. I am obviously being too logical here, but it seems like the word "athwart" is muffling my image, not clarifying it. Of course, this only means that I'm missing something. Can I guess what it is?

*

History of the word

"Athwart" is made of solid old material (a+thwart), but the evidence for its distinct existence in Middle English is rather hazy. It becomes prominent in written, or printed, English in the 16th century, and you do half-wonder if there's an element of pseudo-medievalism being enjoyed already. On the other hand, when it arrives clearly before us it already possesses its distinct range of meanings, most of which can be illustrated from the poets of the time.

     Athwart his brest a bauldrick braue he ware

(Spenser, Faerie Queene I, 7, xxix) - lying across something, especially slantingly - a baldric = ornamental leather belt worn over one shoulder, therefore diagonally across the breast.

     With wanton yvie twyne entrayld athwart

(Spenser, Faerie Queene III, 6, xliv) - this also means lying diagonally, in this case referring to the ivy winding up a branch. This is from the description of the Garden of Adonis, specifically the sexy forest on the mount of Venus which was the primary influence on those Coleridge lines - but Spenser's use of the word is precise and graphic (though the winding habit is more characteristic of woodbine or wild clematis), Coleridge's by comparison implies some other motive.

     hauing whiskt His taile athwart his backe

(a lion in Marlowe's Lucan) - moving across something so as to impede its view.

     All athwart there came / A post from Wales loaden with heavy news.

(Shakespeare, Henry IV Pt 1) - to cross a path, impede someone's progress, stop someone in their tracks, often with connotation of thwarting, perplexing and unhap.

     The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart / Goes all decorum

(Shakespeare, Measure for Measure) - figurative; morally off-track, awry, perversely.

I have no unpleasant frisson when I read "athwart" in these older writers, I understand what they want to say and the word seems to say it. It is in later poetry that I'm out of my depth.

But let's finish with the history first. What isn't represented here is two other things.

First, the very oldest uses of "athwart" are Scottish (though still not much earlier than 1500) - and in Scots "athwart" carries an extra meaning (possibly still current in some local speech, but Google is useless as testimony to spoken English) - the extra meaning is hither and thither, in all directions, all over the place. So far as I know this local meaning has no influence on literary usage, and perhaps it will live on tenaciously when all our canonical English literature is steaming in the dustbin of history, and actually this idea makes me feel happy, for some reason.

Secondly, at some point around 1700 "athwart" emerges as an active ingredient in nautical jargon - perhaps originally because boats are always moving athwart each other's course and courses themselves move athwart the tides, and then "athwart" begins to be used to imply an imaginary line from bow to bow of a boat (as opposed to an imaginary line from fore to aft), and gets into aggregate combinations like "athwartships" and "athwart-hawse". Possibly some of these uses too are still current.

Finally, I claimed that "athwart" is obsolete in British written English, but (and here Google is a help) it isn't obsolete in US written English; evidently there is a group of educated Americans who still use the word, on occasion:

Marlowe meaningfully cuts athwart the expected pattern (Charles R. Forker, 1995)

He has placed his pontificate firmly athwart this conflict (of Pope John Paul II, re Iraq - National Catholic Reporter, 2003)

Indeed, the Sadrist insurrection which has followed Maliki's assault now controls many towns athwart the main route of supply for US forces, up from Saudi Arabia - and insurgent troops can take potshots at supply trucks all day every day if needed. (Newshoggers blog, 2008)

Its most-quoted use in recent-ish times was by William J. Buckley, Jr., when announcing his new conservative weekly on Nov 19, 1955:

if NATIONAL REVIEW is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.

Buckley chiefly meant "standing in the path of, impeding the progress of" - as per the Sadrist towns - but he also cunningly drew on the heritage of Romantic ambiguity; he cloaked the idea of the conservative as a mere reactionary blocker by managing to imply, rather, that the conservative stood at an oblique angle to history, not so much stopping it in its tracks - which readers of the National Review patently had no hope of doing though they probably would have liked to - as responsibly controlling it, standing a little to one side like a sober guardian or like a gardener correcting the injudicious vigour of modern tendencies with a pruning-knife.

*

Two other things about those sixteenth-century usages and why I feel comfortable with them; first, I talked about a ropey, fibrous connotation and I was probably taking a flyer when I said this but it so happens that lion's tails and ivy stems satisfactorily confirm my connotation. The other thing is that "athwart" in these usages is held down to a human scale. The possibility, however, of a gigantic extension was always there. If one of the things that "athwart" talks about is lying or moving across a backcloth then some of nature's backcloths are very large, and principally in this part of the world I'm talking about the sky and the sea. Bacon in his Essays takes "athwart" into this larger dimension:

     To break his bridge athwart the Hellespont

(We'll see more of this narrow strip of sea between Europe and Asia when we get to Browning.)

As for the sky - well, that leads me to these two quotations, in which the new poetic use of "athwart" that begins at the end of the eighteenth century is, I like to think, neatly encapsulated.

First, here we have Pope in an influential passage from The Rape of the Lock:

     Some guide the course of wand'ring orbs on high,
     Or roll the planets thro' the boundless sky:
     Some, less refin'd, beneath the moon's pale light
     Pursue the stars that shoot athwart the night,
     Or suck the mists in grosser air below,
     Or dip their pinions in the painted bow,

And, in contrast, this is Wordsworth in his early poem Salisbury Plain [note 1]:

     'Twas dark and waste as ocean's shipless flood
     Roaring with storms beneath night's starless gloom.
     [                              ]
     Where the wet gypsey in her straw-built home
     Warmed her wet limbs by fire of fern and broom.
     No transient meteor burst upon his sight
     Nor taper glimmered dim from sick man's room.
     Along the moor no line of mournful light
     From lamp of lonely toll-gate streamed athwart the night.

Pope's fantasy of the sylphs takes place under the large hemispherical dome of the night sky. At first he is looking overhead at the immensities of the ecliptic where the planets roll (they are really the same thing as the wandering orbs), but then the gaze lowers to near the horizon ("beneath the moon's pale light"); here the sky stands upright, and against it he shows us the stubby traces of shooting stars, like lion's tails or chalk-marks on a blackboard. What is described by the word "athwart" is a planar, two-dimensional effect, like a baldric across the chest. Though the night sky is immense, Pope makes the shooting stars seem small, the proper preserve of the delicate, miniaturized sylphs.

Wordsworth's poem specifically remembers Pope's in denying the presence of "transient meteors", his night, overcast and dense with rain, obscures all distance; and the petty light-source of the toll-gate (if only it were not also absent) is imagined as projecting an elongated beam visible in the reflections of a thousand raindrops. We've lost the planar effect still present in Pope's poem and "athwart" (combining the earlier meanings of "impeding the view of something" and of "diagonally slanting") now suggests the indefinably slanting angle of a beam that is not directly parallel to either an imagined backcloth nor to the viewer's line of sight; it suggests three-dimensionality and the experience of perception in a three-dimensional world, which is full of angles that are not precisely 90 degrees or 45 degrees but are seen at one kind of irregular slant and instantly understood as being really at some other kind of angle, could we but see them straight-on. (My friend who works in adaptive optics suggested I use the word "non-meridional" round about here.)

This was about the first Wordsworth poem that Coleridge encountered; happily for him, he had it read to him (by its author). It was 1795 - Wordsworth was 25, Coleridge a couple of years younger. Twenty years later, Coleridge remembered a "union of deep feeling with profound thought; [a] fine balance of truth in observing with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed; and above all [an] original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew drops."

I don't know how much of this description I understand, but it was true that Wordsworth was using language to express the depth and height and forms of the real world. "Athwart", like his much-admired use of "along" (as seen in the previous line of the quotation), was one of his tools for conveying the inflected spaces of landscape. And I think this is brilliant. But language being so poor at (among many other things) expressing three-dimensionality, the stretching of the word is done at the cost of introducing a significant vagueness; the possibility existed (perhaps it is already glimpsed in Coleridge's praise) of beginning not so much to choose the word for a pregnant suggestibility as to purchase with it a general suggestibility. Take this pot-pourri from Keats -

     Lo! I must tell a tale of chivalry;
     For while I muse, the lance points slantingly
     Athwart the morning air: (Specimen of an Induction)

     Where the dark-leav’d laburnum’s drooping clusters
     Reflect athwart the stream their yellow lustres,
      (To George Felton Mathew)

     some, clear in youthful bloom,
     Go glad and smilingly athwart the gloom; (Chaucer)

     Those two on winged steeds, with all the stress
     Of vision search’d for him, as one would look
     Athwart the sallows of a river nook
     To catch a glance at silver throated eels,—
      (Endymion Bk IV)

                    Silent sails
     This shadowy queen athwart, and faints away
     In another gloomy arch. (Endymion Bk IV)

I'm not going to trace "athwart" through its crowded nineteenth-century history, if such a thing were possible. In one sentence: from Keats it inevitably carries through to the early Tennyson -

           She drew her casement-curtain by,
     And glanced athwart the glooming flats.

     ---

     but most she loathed the hour
           When the thick-moted sunbeam lay
           Athwart the chambers, and the day
     Was sloping toward his western bower. (Mariana)

- and after that it's no surprise that almost every pre-Modernist poet uses it as a general marker of elevated language. It happens that while thinking about this I've been reading a volume from 1929, A Selection of Modern Swedish Poetry trans. C.D. Locock, so let's give Locock an outing:

     Ended the long November night, and like a sick man waking
     From slumber the drear Dawn unclosed her melancholy eyes,
     And low athwart the piny brow again came breaking
     In grey-blue silent harmonies the music of the skies. (F. Vetterlund)

               Heaven's air is breathless: there is cast
     A spell on us, who view the sight amazing
     Of the great windmill, ceasing its dull sound,
     A moveless cross athwart the sunset splendour. (Anders Österling)

*

So why do I experience a feeling of depression, of effort, when I glimpse the word "athwart"? Have I sufficiently accounted for it when I speak of a mannerism, a lazy poeticism? - no, it isn't enough. Casting about, I developed grand (yet somewhat obvious) theories about e.g. our loss of belief in realistic description and non-anthropic points of view, an analogy with the disappearance of photographic perspective from modern painting, the walled-in experience of urban horizons, dislike of elevated diction, etc. But if I am honest it comes down to something simpler than that; the word "athwart" becomes like a grey blot on the page because, mimicking one of its meanings, the word itself impedes the view - it bulks too large, it behaves more like a noun than an adverb. Take that last quote from Locock's Österling - I want in my mind's eye only the sunset and the black sails of the windmill, and I have to push "athwart" over to one side to see it clearly. For after all the sails are slim and bony, you wouldn't notice them against the sunset if they were a kind of obscuring mass that allowed no idea of what lay behind them.

It isn't that British poetry's interest in the inflections of three-dimensionality is over, far from it; J. H. Prynne, Peter Larkin, Frances Presley, Allen Fisher, Richard Makin, to name only a few obvious names... Riley's Excavations is a massive investigation of three-dimensional (and four-dimensional) space, but it dispenses entirely with the direct description of landscape - with the directness of description but also, as the word "athwart" epitomizes in miniature, the cluttered obfuscation of description. Instead, it is a realization of landscape. Riley seeds his vision with Victorian descriptions of grave remains where all the dimensions spring from an unperceiving body: "head to East, upper torso lying on its back but crouched at a right-angle and knees turned sharply to left, and the head also turned to face South.." Reading this, our own bodies feel the posture, we are sensitized to dimensionality. Around these quotations, the bending and torquing of Riley's own sentences, full of anything but grassy knolls, continuously assert the immanence of landform but without even naming it. The landscape is there but there's no need to move anything out of the way. At least, that's how it works for me.

*

I couldn't pass through the nineteenth-century territory of this essay without bringing in Browning. The opening of the second book of Paracelsus goes like this:

     Over the waters in the vaporous west
     The sun goes down as in a sphere of gold,
     Behind the outstretched city, which between,
     With all that length of domes and minarets,
     Athwart the splendour, black and crooked runs
     Like a Turk verse along a scimetar.

If you look at pictures of the famous view of Istanbul from the Galata tower, the City laid out like a line with the Golden Horn before it and the Sea of Marmara behind, you would swear the person who wrote this must have been there; in fact, the closest he had been to sixteenth-century Constantinople was the Greenwich shoreline. "Athwart" works here because what we are talking about isn't slim and bony but, then as now, one of the world's most populous cities; compared to a whole verse of writing, this vision easily accommodates the bulky "athwart"; indeed the word is perfect because it impresses the mind with the real breadth of the city as well as its perceived narrowness.

More trivia: if you want to hear what the word "athwart" sounds like when it's in a pop song, you need to get hold of This is Charing Cross (Idyllic Records, 2006) by Bristol duo The Wraiths, who take all their lyrics from mostly Victorian or Georgian verse anthologies. In a different mood I might say something catty about the recurrent Laura Ashley strand in British indie music, but instead I'll admit that I'm constantly fascinated by the radical disengagement between the meaning of the source-poem (Tennyson's In Memoriam XV, in this case) and the meaning of the song that's made from it ("The Rooks") - a disengagement symbolized by each song having a different title from it source-poem. You can sort of tell that Mog Fry isn't too sure what "all thy motions gently pass / athwart a pane of molten glass" means - and nor am I - but the song is absolutely and eloquently her song.

There is also a rather scary thrash-metal band called A T H W A R T (from Friuli). Some of their own lyrics, oddly, are taken from Walt Whitman, though not the line about "How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over upon me". (The incubus of neo-Conservative prog-rockers Rush and their rendering of Kubla Khan squats athwart this essay...)

I wish I had read: Rachel Blau Duplessis, Draft 27: Athwart.



NOTE

1. Salisbury Plain - Begun 1791-92, completed 1793-94; Wordsworth made various versions and extracts; it's most commonly seen (though quite substantially revised) in the version published by Wordsworth in 1842 titled "Guilt and Sorrow"; most of the stanza I've quoted is re-rendered, except for the "transient meteor" and the last two lines.

Nicholas Johnson


The cover of Sean Rafferty's 16 Poems was by Murray Grimsdale, showing a heavily armoured horse soldier, musket over his shoulder. After Durer's 'Knight, Death and the Devil’, the black and white gravure effect attracted me, a boy who loved mediaeval armour but was less keen when the knights carried muskets. Halberds and maces yes. This knight looked plague ridden but carried a mace.

The booklet was near the window on the floor in our Devonshire sitting room, surrounded by vandalised cushions, spent gunshells gleaned from the black woods behind the Eggesford hunt kennels, lint smelling art books that had lost their jackets, sometimes their bindings, and we four children. I knew the poems were written by the man who ran the pub I sometimes got taken into for a meal : I was nine or ten and the days of the pub were drawing to a close for Sean and Peggy Rafferty. The Raffertys had run the pub leased from Watneys since 1948, run on a generator and fine clarets bought at Wickhams, Bideford.

16 Poems, Rafferty's first collection, came out in 1973. Sean was 64. The pub The Duke of York at Iddesleigh overlooking the north side of Dartmoor was seven miles from home. Last Friday my son Reuben and I were taken to the pub for supper by friends. The montages of photographs taken by diverse photographers, including a 1911 Club Day parade restored and enlarged by James Ravilious, are still there : the caramel and woodbine ceiling the Grays Inn Road clock and large fireplace are unchanged. There are photographs of Sean and Peggy by Houston Rogers from 1958, published in The Daily Sketch, a later photo of Sean's daughter Christian, and of people who populated some of his poems, like Fred Hockings who lived on pasties biscuits and tea - who thatched our house in 1977. At about 9 o'clock Tom Simmons came in. He is over 90, and has lived all his life in the village. We talked a little of Sean and Peggy, of his only child Christian who made a rare visit two years ago. He remembered the Raffertys taking the pub over from the previous owners 60 years ago.

Nearly 15 years after Sean died there is a continuum: now I live four miles from him. Walking along the Okement I can reach the fields that lead up to his final home, Burrow.

In the summer of 1984 I spent a couple of summer afternoons with Ross, the daughter in the family who gave the Raffertys their home at Burrow. She was a teenager and liked Sean. We talked about him. But I can't remember what she said, except that he told her he liked Yeats' poetry. (Years later I had a letter from a book dealer who'd bought two beer-ringed volumes of Yeats' letters from Sean in the pub who later received a photostat of his poems from him, a plea to find a publisher for his poems.)

In 1987 my first book of poems, The Telling of the Drowning, was privately published. I selected 17 poems, which I chose as a safe bet between Sean's 16 and Dylan Thomas' debut 18. My book's dark Bodoni font and space each side of the : evoked the typography of the Grosseteste edition. That September I sent Sean the book. I'd not had the confidence to write to him before. He wrote back. It was, he said, the last vanity of the old, to be acceptable to the young. One poem 'Forges / High Tide' evoked the lyric of his poem 'You grow like a beanstalk'.

I was going to be home in Devon for Christmas; and I wrote again asking if we could meet. He replied declining but said if I wanted to, write to him from the country I was going to stay in : New Caledonia.

Twenty years ago. And throughout that year; from the aeroplane to San Francisco, from Tahiti, New Caledonia, my father's house in Armidale New South Wales, from the Annandale Road in Sydney which intrigued the Scottish remembrancer, New York and finally from the address he loved copying out, Holy Cross Abbey, Berryville Virginia, c/o Brother Benedict. He replied to each letter by aerogramme. To Holy Cross he sent his Codex, an A4 buff envelope, two photographs, an annotated P.N. Review that contained a wider selection of his poems [1982] and old stapled foolscap typescripts of 'The First Fabliau' and '1945', '1959'. The poems published in PNR were annotated for the odd Scottish word and phrase, and for reference occasionally to other writers' poems, 'Felix Randall' by Hopkins was one instance.

The aerogramme suited Rafferty's temperament. His letters could build up along the page and accentuate the mood on the flap overleaf and he could say a man had no time to stay because the page was running out. His letters were similar to his poems. His letters contained the language and form of address he used in the poems. Words began upper cased, accentuated and emphasised; like a prose poem. Later he told me that he sometimes copied out the letter before committing it to the aerogramme.

That July 1988 we met, not at his house but in his potting shed : and that is where I saw him in the courtyard of The Farm pushing a wheelbarrow. We took to the shed and drank a bottle of Burgundy he'd placed there, and talked. He didn't want to come to my wedding the following month, but he was pleased to meet Kate my bride and her parents fleetingly when they dropped me off at the farm. We'd spend another 90 minutes and then he'd leave, down trodden heading home, or sit in a grimy mackintosh on a bench in the autumn listening to the rooks, watching the great beeches sway. The Fall he called it. Melancholically he'd curse his poetry as an upturned waste paper basket, poetry unwritten poetry uncompleted tangled deteriorated lost forgotten. He wrote us a belated marriage poem, that really became a poem for our first son Louis, with its valedictory lines :

Before you are fully awake
I must be off : shuffling westward
over dead leaves : but content :
this last and loving message
has lightened the load

What do I wish to evoke for myself, or portray for the Rafferty enthusiast : the unfurling in 12 months of correspondence of a friendship with a man three times my age, who gave me books he'd loved and the O.E.D. in a barrow? Is it enough to acknowledge love and a guiding presence? I quickly learned that you learn more from a poet by not intruding; by not cataloguing a mooted chronology of literary persona. He told me of the Muirs, Empson, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Quentin Crisp, Sorley MacLean and Hugh MacDiarmid, they were funny stories, affectionate but not as interesting to me as he was. Chiefly he told me the trajectory of his own life, with its emphasis on solitary but not lonely childhood, the fire service and music hall in the Second World War, the death of his first wife Betty on V.E. Day, and of their friends and their daughter.

Slowly, from March 1989, when Peggy died I gained some knowledge of Sean's earlier poems. He never showed his sorrow at her death, only weariness : I was too young to detect the sorrow, but sensitive enough to his reticence. Many of his poems committed to print seemed infused with grief. The poems and music hall songs he kept stuffed in various drawers in his home, lines and phrases on the back of seed catalogues and stout orders. He let me type them up one-fingered on his Smith Corona which I now use. He signed and dated these scripts from 1991 and 1992. A renaissance befell his life. He began to write again, at regular intervals a poem of two to three pages of paper. His friends Clare and Michael Morpurgo wisely suggested workers on the Farm lived awhile in the cottage to keep him company. Adam Fowler was first, a Scot, who became dear to him, and who is evoked to me at least in the poem 'I would be Adam', written during this renaissance. Next was Clare Shenstone, who painted horses. My family of four stayed at various times, Easter or in the summer. We seemed to live outdoors, eating asparagus, stewed rhubarb, quiche and drinking claret and Talisker. I spent a couple of New Year's Eves with Sean by the fire. Although he was not keen on being depicted, his presence is obvious and intentional in my work Haul Song, and in part of Show. I wished to evoke some of the tales he told me of life in Fitzrovia, how he met his first wife, and his bearing as a playful elder, alone with a thin box room as bedroom, a chair by the bed a tie on the floor and shelves of battered books, Latin, Greek and French, like a Left Bank book stall. Alone but not alone.

When Sean Rafferty died on December the 4th 1993 I learned he had written me down as editor in his contract at Carcanet. If that was his secret it was equally his dignity. He was proud gentle and generous on the one hand, competitive and scatalogically disdainful on the other. He had no need to be competitive with someone so young in practice. The timing of his wit was fine tuned. He left me an unspoken and ritualistic task; to edit and convey his poetry.

After his death his poetry led me quietly into friendships with Sorley and Renee MacLean, the poet Gael Turnbull, his daughter Christian, vital to the clear editing of his poems, the film maker Timothy Neat, his wife Caroline and a man he would have grudgingly delighted in : Hamish Henderson. The comedian and writer Rich Hall let me visit his flat in Fitzroy Square and climb the stairs to see where Sean would once have lived. He asked me to send a photograph of Sean from the 1940s as his girlfriend was being pestered by a ghost sitting on the end of their bed.

His papers, scant as they so far are, are housed at Edinburgh University, thanks to the labours of Gael Turnbull who orchestrated this. Although Turnbull could select a Rafferty poem as desert island disc in Poet's Poems and MacLean recite eight verses of Rafferty from memory not one editor has anthologised his poetry in any account of the last century.

Posthumously I heard from two people who visited his pub once and never forgot him, in his back cupboard behind the bar a man who staked the territory of his locale : the Milk Water, the waters of Leith, Fitzrovia, Clerkenwell, Iddesleigh. Apart from visits to his elder sister Helen in Powfoot Scotland he does not appear to have visited anywhere else. Somebody kindly sent me proof that he'd had a poem published in a Scottish magazine in 1968, and Heather wife of the poet Tom Scott gave me a biography by Gordon Wright on MacDiarmid, which contains a photograph of a mischievous Rafferty beside MacDiarmid at a party for Helen B. Cruickshank. The role Sean played for the young is well evoked in Michael Morpurgo's novel Farm Boy.

How could I then describe a presence, virtually a ghost? Could I again evoke somebody as clearly as his handwriting does and will again? The A3 art pads where he wrote in pen and pencil, copying out the phrases over and again, and the letters written where a few words had already, previously, been written : phrases clear, unique and wry : like this one : I PECK ENCYCLOPAEDIAS.

The mower late in graveyard grass
sharpened his scythe to cut for me
green roads my barefoot summers pass
like Israel's children through the sea

a meadow's hay; where mowers lie
in hawthorn shade, to brim and bring
their pitcher from the conduit, I
the barefoot servant haycock king.

What is this road that I retrace
why should this water that I spill
rechristen me? He set my face
for home does home lie further still.
Some sabbath sung predestined place
Sharon Siloam under Sion's hill.

transmigrant
each with a journey before him
whereto neither can know.

                                          What can I
what can I give to a child
in farewell? Softly, speak softly.
In farewell to a child who is sleeping
give?

What can I give but a dream?

nothing is that is not made
made to stand, transparent, fine,
like the glass that holds the wine. ('Poets you may read it in')

O lady, lady
there are only two ways about it:
either you cook a fabulous omelet
or you've laid yourself in for
an epic load of trouble. ('Leda Poem')

The streets are full of noises
hallalis halleluias sackbuts psalteries tim
brels trumpets artillery: He has chastened the righteous
and utterly flattened the wicked. Praise Him.

 

‘Peacocks was really great.’

 
 
 
 
I would be Adam
leafless in the garden
with all my ribs about me
one day more.
For one more day
the Voice be off the air
a Heavenly silence
in which I find my feet
and flex my fingers
to grasp the Situation.

I doan like it.

To be creation's clown
a six day wonder
a ten toed bi-ped
with this bag of pebbles
that wobble when I walk.

He should have held his breath.
Five days was plenty.
Earth, sea, beasts, fowl, then feet up.

Make feathers fly and finish.

Peacocks.
Full stop.

Peacocks was really great.









A poem by Seán Rafferty, reprinted from Poems (Etruscan) with permission.