Neglected Poets: Siegfried Sassoon

It may seem odd to identify Siegfried Sassoon as a "neglected poet."  His poems and memoirs of the First World War have certainly not been forgotten (particularly Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and several much-anthologized poems:  "Base Details," "The General," "Attack," "'Blighters'," "The Dug-Out," "To Any Dead Officer," "Suicide in the Trenches").  Further, his personality - the "fox-hunting man" who was known as "Mad Jack" in the trenches for his bravery and recklessness; the war protester who nevertheless wished to return to the front due to his love for the men he led - still holds interest:  three substantial biographies have been written about him within the past 10 years or so.

However, I believe that Sassoon is a "neglected poet" when it comes to the poetry that he wrote after the War.  Bear in mind that he was born in 1886 and died in 1967 - just short of 81.  During most of the 49 years of his life after the War he continued to write poetry, and, although he was certainly a well-known personage, his poetry was generally viewed by critics as out-of-fashion (or, more commonly, was simply ignored).

I readily admit that I, too, viewed him simply as a "War Poet" - until I read Siegfried Sassoon: A Poet's Pilgrimage by D. Felicitas Corrigan (published in 1973).  The book combines extracts of Sassoon's writing (some of it previously unpublished) with a biographical narrative that places the pieces in context.  I discovered that there was a great deal that I had missed in Sassoon.  Here is a small part of what I found.

                   Release

One winter's end I much bemused my head
In tasked attempts to drive it up to date
With what the undelighting moderns said
   Forecasting human fate.

And then, with nothing unforeseen to say
And no belief or unbelief to bring,
Came, in its old unintellectual way,
   The first real day of spring.

Sequences (1956).  This poem was originally published in 1950 in a volume titled Common Chords.

'When I'm alone' -- the words tripped off his tongue
As though to be alone were nothing strange.
'When I was young,' he said; 'when I was young . . .'

I thought of age, and loneliness, and change.
I thought how strange we grow when we're alone,
And how unlike the selves that meet, and talk,
And blow the candles out, and say good-night.
Alone . . . The word is life endured and known.
It is the stillness where our spirits walk
And all but inmost faith is overthrown.

Collected Poems (1961).  According to Sassoon, this poem was written in December of 1924.

"Man Is But A Bubble": Erasmus and Dodsley

"Man is but a bubble" is one of the adages collected by Erasmus in his Adagia.  He writes:

"Man is but a bubble.  The lesson of this proverb is that there is nothing so fragile, so fleeting and so empty as the life of man.  A bubble is that round swollen empty thing which we watch in water as it grows and vanishes in a moment of time.  Thus Marcus Terentius Varro in the preface to his book on agriculture:  'Bearing in mind', he says, 'that I must make haste; for if, as they say, man is but a bubble, much more is this true of an old man.  My eightieth year reminds me to pack my baggage, before I bid farewell to life.' . . . Nor could one think of anything, in fact, which would give a better picture of the utter nothingness of this life of ours."

The Adages of Erasmus (selected by William Barker), II.iii.48 (University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 171-172.

Long before encountering the comments by Erasmus, I came across this poem by Robert Dodsley (who is perhaps best known as one of Samuel Johnson's publishers):

Man's a poor deluded bubble, 

   Wand'ring in a mist of lies,

Seeing false, or seeing double,

   Who would trust to such weak eyes?

Yet presuming on his senses, 

   On he goes most wond'rous wise:

Doubts of truth, believes pretences;

   Lost in error, lives and dies. 

Robert Dodsley, Trifles (1745), page 241.  I particularly like the line: "on he goes most wond'rous wise."

Victorian Poetry: A Confession

A confession:  I am fond of Victorian poetry.  That being said (and in order to perhaps temper your dismay, delight, or indifference), let me make clear that this fondness excludes: (1) wide swathes of Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold; (2) lengthy dramatic poems set in mythic, Arthurian, exotic, or antique lands (alas! no Proserpinas, Pomonas, or Pans!); and (3) Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll.

So, what does that leave us with?  Consider this:

                  Memory

Is Memory most of miseries miserable,
Or the one flower of ease in bitterest hell?

Or this:

Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,
Of what we say we feel - below the stream,
As light, of what we think we feel - there flows
With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed.

And, finally, consider this:

The Metropolitan Underground Railway

Here were a goodly place wherein to die; --
   Grown latterly to sudden change averse,
All violent contrasts fain avoid would I
   On passing from this world into a worse.

"Memory" is by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), who is better known as a Pre-Raphaelite painter than as a poet.  "Below the surface-stream" is by Matthew Arnold.  (Although I said that my fondness excludes "wide swathes" of Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold - it does not exclude everything.)  "The Metropolitan Underground Railway" is by William Watson (1858-1935).  Despite a bit of slightly archaic diction in places, these poems seem to me to be, well, timeless - and not stereotypically "Victorian" as that term is commonly understood.  I was surprised when I first came across them.  They made me realize that there is more to "Victorian" England than meets the eye.

So, from time to time, I will treat you (or afflict you, as the case may be) with poems by the likes of William Allingham, Richard Watson Dixon, Edward Dowden, Coventry Patmore, William Renton, A. Mary F. Robinson, William Bell Scott, C. S. Calverley, John Leicester Warren, Arthur Hugh Clough, and Philip Bourke Marston. 

Before I go, I will cave in and permit one "Proserpina" (by Dante Gabriel Rossetti):

Edmund Blunden: 'Trench Nomenclature'

As I said in a recent post, reading Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War is heart-breaking.  But I am also always amazed at the humor that persisted under the horrific conditions:  you have to shake your head and smile sometimes.

For instance: the naming of trenches and other military locations.  Blunden mentions the following trenches: Jacob's Ladder; Kentish Caves; Half Moon Street; St. Martin's Lane; Haymarket; Piccadilly; Esperanto Terrace; Coney Street; The Great Wall of China.  In addition to the trenches, Blunden mentions Valley Cottages (a battalion headquarters); Oskar Copse and Wilde Wood (adjacent battlefield features); Ocean Villas (a play on the name of a village - Auchonvillers - near the trenches).

Blunden includes a poem entitled 'Trench Nomenclature' in the final section of  Undertones of War.  Here are the first two lines and the final two lines of the poem:

Genius named them, as I live!  What but genius could compress
In a title what man's humour said to man's supreme distress?
. . .
Ah, such names and apparitions! name on name! What's in a name?
From the fabled vase the genie in his cloud of horror came.

No Escape, Part Three: C. P. Cavafy

No visit to the land of "wherever you go, there you are" would be complete without considering one of C. P. Cavafy's best-known poems:

                       The City

You said:  "I'll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I've spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally."

You won't find a new country, won't find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You'll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You'll always end up in this city.  Don't hope for things elsewhere:
there's no ship for you, there's no road.
Now that you've wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere in the world.

C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard) (Princeton University Press, 1992).

You have to give Cavafy credit:  he doesn't mince words, does he? 

On the other hand, one could look at another of his poems - "Ithaka" - and find, if not a way of escape from "the black ruins of [your] life," at least a potential way of living that saves you from false hopes.  But I'll save "Ithaka" for another time.

                                     Cavafy's City: Alexandria

C. S. Lewis: "On a Vulgar Error"

I first encountered the following poem in Philip Larkin's The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse.  Larkin's selection of poems was published in 1973, and it was criticized by many as being too "old-fashioned."  Given Larkin's sense of humor, one gets the feeling that he likely set out to provoke exactly that type of response.  In any event, here is the poem - which stands on its own (but it is easy to understand why Larkin would like it):

        On a Vulgar Error

No. It's an impudent falsehood.  Men did not
Invariably think the newer way
Prosaic, mad, inelegant, or what not.

Was the first pointed arch esteemed a blot
Upon the church?  Did anybody say
How modern and how ugly?  They did not.

Plate-armour, or windows glazed, or verse fire-hot
With rhymes from France, or spices from Cathay,
Were these at first a horror?  They were not.

If, then, our present arts, laws, houses, food
All set us hankering after yesterday,
Need this be only an archaising mood?

Why, any man whose purse has been let blood
By sharpers, when he finds all drained away
Must compare how he stands with how he stood.

If a quack doctor's breezy ineptitude
Has cost me a leg, must I forget straightaway
All that I can't do now, all that I could?

So, when our guides unanimously decry
The backward glance, I think we can guess why.

C. S. Lewis, Poems (1964), page 60.

Edmund Blunden: Undertones of War

Edmund Blunden's memoir of life in the trenches - Undertones of War - is, as one might expect, horrific and heart-breaking.  The style of Undertones is interesting: there is no invective or savage satire.  Rather, Blunden's tone is matter-of-fact, and even a bit wry.  And certainly elegiac. But the steady accumulation of exactly-rendered detail and incident is ultimately devastating.  First, a bit of background.

After attending Oxford, Blunden volunteered for the army in 1915.  He was on the front lines with the Royal Sussex Regiment by May of 1916 - at the age of nineteen.  He spent two years on the front.  His nickname in the trenches was "Rabbit."  He was awarded the Military Cross for bravery.

Blunden's method in Undertones is revealed in the following passage:

"Do I loiter too long among little things?  It may be so, but those whom I foresee as my readers will pardon the propensity.  Each circumstance of the British experience that is still with me has ceased for me to be big or little . . . Kenward the corporal and I saw a sentry crouching and peering one way and another like a birdboy in an October storm.  He spoke, grinned and shivered; we passed; and duly the sentry was hit by a shell.  So that in this vicinity a peculiar difficulty would exist for the artist to select the sights, faces, words, incidents, which characterized the time.  The art is rather to collect them, in their original form of incoherence."

Here are two of the "little things" that Blunden remembers:

"Darkness clammy and complete, save for the flames of shells, masked that movement, but one stunted willow tree at which the track changed direction must haunt the memories of some of us.  Trees in the battlefield are already described by Dante."

"Climbing the dirty little road over the steep bank, one immediately entered the land of despair.  Bodies, bodies and their useless gear heaped the gross waste ground; the slimy road was soon only a mud track which passed a whitish tumulus of ruin with lurking entrances, some spikes that had been pine-trees, a bricked cellar or two, and died out. . . . The shell-holes were mostly small lakes of what was no doubt merely rusty water, but had a red and foul semblance of blood.  Paths glistened weakly from tenable point to point.  Of the dead, one was conspicuous.  He was a Scottish soldier, and was kneeling, facing east, so that one could scarcely credit death in him; he was seen at some little distance from the usual tracks, and no one had much time in Thiepval just then for sight-seeing, or burying.  Death could not kneel so, I thought, and approaching I ascertained with a sudden shrivelling of spirit that Death could and did."

Undertones of War (1928), pages 157, 97-98.

Having witnessed these landscapes, it is small wonder that Blunden the poet (and he was primarily a poet throughout his life) would later write these lines in his poem "The Sunlit Vale":

I saw the sunlit vale, and the pastoral fairy-tale;
The sweet and bitter scent of the may drifted by;
And never have I seen such a bright bewildering green,
   But it looked like a lie,
   Like a kindly meant lie.

No Escape, Part Two: Samuel Johnson

When it comes to obtaining wise, no-nonsense, eloquent, and entertaining counsel on Life and/or How to Live, I am more than willing to rely solely upon Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.  As far as the quiddities of human nature and human behavior are concerned, one can be fairly certain that the two of them have been there before we have.

Hence, we should not be astonished that Samuel Johnson has visited the "wherever you go, there you are" territory and has reached the same conclusions as Montaigne (but in his own delightful fashion, of course):

     The general remedy of those, who are uneasy without knowing the cause, is change of place; they are willing to imagine that their pain is the consequence of some local inconvenience, and endeavour to fly from it, as children from their shadows; always hoping for more satisfactory delight from every new scene, and always returning home with disappointments and complaints. 

     [Johnson then describes Abraham Cowley's plan - as expressed by Cowley in the preface to his poems - to abandon England for America in order to gain peace of mind.]  Surely no stronger instance can be given of a persuasion that content was the inhabitant of particular regions, and that a man might set sail with a fair wind, and leave behind him all his cares, incumbrances, and calamities. . . .

     [Cowley] never suspected that the cause of his unhappiness was within, that his own passions were not sufficiently regulated, and that he was harrassed by his own impatience, which could never be without something to awaken it, would accompany him over the sea, and find its way to his American elysium.  He would, upon the trial, have been soon convinced, that the fountain of content must spring up in the mind; and that he, who has so little knowledge of human nature, as to seek happiness by changing any thing, but his own dispositions, will waste his life in fruitless efforts, and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove.

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, Number 6 (April 7, 1750).   
 

      Claude Lorrain, "Imaginary View of Delphi, with a Procession"

No Escape, Part One: Montaigne

An old saw:  "Wherever you go, there you are."  (Have no fear!  I am not venturing into "pop psychology," nor am I about to offer "self-help" advice.  Montaigne will arrive in a moment.)  Put differently:  There is no escaping yourself. 

Not surprisingly, Montaigne (and, it turns out, Socrates) covered this ground long before we moderns arrived on the scene:

Ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and lust do not leave us when we change our country.  "Behind the horseman sits black care."  [Horace]  They often follow us even into the cloisters and the schools of philosophy.  Neither deserts, nor rocky caves, nor hair shirts, nor fastings will free us of them. . . . Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better by his travels.  " I should think not," he said; "he took himself along with him."  

     Why should we move to find

     Countries and climates of another kind?

     What exile leaves himself behind?  [Horace] 

If a man does not first unburden his soul of the load that weighs upon it, movement will cause it to be crushed still more, as in a ship the cargo is less cumbersome when it is settled.  You do a sick man more harm than good by moving him.  You imbed the malady by disturbing it, as stakes penetrate deeper and grow firmer when you budge them and shake them.

Michel de Montaigne, "Of Solitude," from Essays (translated by Donald Frame).

On the rafters of his library, Montaigne engraved quotes of which he wished to be reminded.

The rafter below contains part of a quote from Terence: "homo sum humani a me nihil alienum puto."  Alas, I have no Latin, but here is one way of translating the line: "I am human; so nothing human is strange to me."

"Repose"

I am fond of the word "repose."  I trace this fondness back to the following poem by R. S. Thomas:

        Period

It was a time when wise men
Were not silent, but stifled
By vast noise.  They took refuge
In books that were not read.

Two counsellors had the ear
Of the public.  One cried 'Buy'
Day and night, and the other,
More plausibly, 'Sell your repose.'

R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems: 1945-1990 (1993).

"Sell your repose" has been rattling around inside me for years (together with the entire poem - it is one of those poems you automatically have by heart the second or third time that you read it.)

Then, recently, I read this poem by James Reeves (one of my "neglected poets"):

        Repose

Repose is in simplicities.
Perhaps the mind has leaves like trees,
Luxuriant in the sensual sun
And tossed by wind's intricacies,
And finds repose is more than grief
When failing light and falling leaf
Denote that winter has begun.

James Reeves, Collected Poems (1974).

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "repose" as "the state of being quietly inactive or relaxed, or of being free from care, anxiety, or other disturbances; ease, serenity."  (Sense 2.a.)  But perhaps I prefer Sense 2.b, which the OED designates as "obsolete":  "peace of mind."