Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978 Part 5

Synge, in his preface to The Tinker's Wedding, used a phrase which is apposite to my concerns in this discussion. 'The drama is made serious,' he wrote, 'not by the degree in which it is taken up with problems that are serious in themselves, but by the degree in which it gives the nourishment, not very easy to define, on which our imaginations live.' That nourishment, it seems to me, became available more abundantly to us as a result of the achievements of the Irish Literary Revival, and much of its imaginative protein was extracted from the sense of place. There is, for example, this short but very revealing moment in a review which Yeats wrote in 1874, when he was twenty-nine. 'The final test of the value of any work of art to our particular needs, is when we place it in the hierarchy of those recollections which are our standards and our beacons. At the head of mine are a certain night scene long ago, when I heard the wind blowing in a bed of reeds by the border of a little lake, a j.a.panese picture of cranes flying through a blue sky, and a line or two out of Homer.' Yeats is here talking about what Matthew Arnold called 'touchstones', high points of imaginative experience, 'those recollections which are our standards and our beacons'. Arnold's touchstones were literary, drawn from the whole field of European poetry, but it is typical and significant, I think, that first in the hierarchy of Yeats's recollections is an experience that was obviously local and deeply involved with his apprehension of the spirit of a place. The wind among those night reeds stayed with him and was so pervasive in his mental weather that it formed the t.i.tle of a collection of poems that he published four years later, a book that brought the moods of the Irish weather into English poetry and changed the atmosphere of that poetry.

However, we have to understand also that this nourishment which springs from knowing and belonging to a certain place and a certain mode of life is not just an Irish obsession, nor is the relations.h.i.+p between a literature and a locale with its common language a particularly Irish phenomenon. It is true, indeed, that we have talked much more about it in this country because of the peculiar fractures in our history, north and south, and because of the way that possession of the land and possession of different languages have rendered the question particularly urgent. But I like to remember that Dante was very much a man of a particular place, that his great poem is full of intimate placings and place-names, and that as he moves round the murky circles of h.e.l.l, often heard rather than seen by his d.a.m.ned friends and enemies, he is recognized by his local speech or so recognizes them. And we could also talk about the sense of place in English poetry and find it rewarding with talents as diverse as Tennyson and Auden, Arnold and John Clare, Edward Thomas and Geoffrey Hill.

But I want to turn the plough back into the home ground again and see what can be turned up in Co. Monaghan. Patrick Kavanagh's place was to a large extent his subject. As I have said before (see here) his quarrel with himself was the quarrel between himself and it, between the illiterate self that was tied to the little hills and earthed in the stony grey soil, and the literate self that pined for 'the city of Kings/Where art, music and letters were the real things'. His sonnet 'Epic' is his comprehension of this about himself and his affirmation of the profound importance of the parochial. Where Yeats had a conscious cultural and, in the largest sense, political purpose in his hallowing of Irish regions, Kavanagh had no such intent. Yeats would have probably called him local rather that national, as he had called William Allingham; and Kavanagh would have called himself parochial. He abjured any national purpose, any belief in Ireland as 'a spiritual ent.i.ty'. And yet, ironically, Kavanagh's work probably touches the majority of Irish people more immediately and more intimately than most things in Yeats. I am not going to say that this makes Kavanagh a more important writer, but what I do say is that Kavanagh's fidelity to the unpromising, unspectacular countryside of Monaghan and his rendering of the authentic speech of those parts gave the majority of Irish people, for whom the experience of life on the land was perhaps the most formative, an image of themselves that nourished their sense of themselves in that serious way which Synge talked about in his preface. Kavanagh's grip on our imaginations stems from our having attended the intimate hedge-school that he attended. For thirty years and more he lived the life of a small farmer's son in the parish of Inniskeen, the life of fairs and football matches, of ma.s.s-going and dance-going. He shared his neighbours' fundamental piety, their flyness, their brusque manners and their vigorous speech. He gambled and rambled among them. He bought and sold land and cattle and corn. Yet all the time, as he st.i.tched himself into the outer patterns of his place, there was a sensitivity and a yearning that distinguished him. For this poet whom we recognize as being the voice of a communal life had a fiercely individual sense of himself. 'A poet is never one of the people', he declared in his Self Portrait. 'He is detached, remote, and the life of small-time dances and talk about football would not be for him. He might take part but he could not belong.' And that statement could stand as a gloss on the first important poem that Kavanagh wrote, a poem which is about his distance from what is closest to him, a poem too where the life of small-time dances which he affects to disdain is lovingly particularized (see here).

I said there that 'Inniskeen Road, July Evening' is a love poem to a place and I noted the way that that adjective 'blooming' pulls in two directions at once, faithful to the local and dialect meaning in 'blooming' as a word expressing impatience, and faithful also to the literary charge in it as a word that celebrates growth and flourish. And the same vigour comes out in another little word that is like a capillary root leading down into the whole sensibility of Kavanagh's place. In the first line, 'the bicycles go by in twos and threes'. They do not 'pa.s.s by' or 'go past', as they would in a more standard English voice or place, and in that little touch Kavanagh touches what I am circling. He is letting the very life blood of the place in that one minute incision. The words 'go by' and 'blooming', moreover, are natural and spoken; they are not used as a deliberate mark of folksiness or as a separate language, in the way that Irish speech is ritualized by Synge. Inniskeen English is not used as a picturesque idiom but as the writer's own natural speech and again this points to Kavanagh's essential difference from the Revival writers. There is nothing programmed about his diction, or about his world. 'Who owns them hungry hills?' says the ungrammatical cattle-jobber in the poem 'Shancoduff' but as he speaks we know that the poet is neither savouring nor disdaining 'them hills' as opposed to 'those hills'. The poet meets his people at eye-level, he hears them shouting through the hedge and not through the c.h.i.n.ks in a loft floor, the way Synge heard his literary speech in Co. Wicklow.

'I heard the Duffy's shouting "d.a.m.n your soul"', Kavanagh tells us in 'Epic' and the very ordinariness of the quarrel between the Duffys and McCabes makes him again impatient of the whole blooming crowd of them: That was the year of the Munich bother. Which Was more important? I inclined To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.

He said: I made the Iliad from such A local row. G.o.ds make their own importance.

In this case, the local idiom extends beyond the locale itself. Munich, the European theatre, is translated into the local speech to become bother, and at once it is bother, it has become knowable, and no more splendid than the bother at home. Language, as well as G.o.ds, makes its own importance: the sense of place issues in a point of view, a phrase that Kavanagh set great store by and used always as a positive. He cherished the ordinary, the actual, the known, the unimportant.

Parochialism is universal; it deals with the fundamentals. It is not by the so-called national dailies that people who emigrate keep in touch with their roots. In London, outside the Catholic churches, the big run is on the local Irish papers. Lonely on Highgate Hill outside St. Joseph's Church I rushed to buy my Dundalk Democrat and reading it I was back in my native fields. Now that I a.n.a.lyse myself I realize that throughout everything I write, there is this constantly recurring motif of the need to go back.... So it is for these reasons that I return to the local newspapers. Who has died? Who has sold his farm?

Perhaps I can clarify something more of Kavanagh's relation to his place if I compare that relations.h.i.+p with another poet's relations.h.i.+p to his region. North of Monaghan lies Tyrone, and it is very much as a Tyrone poet that John Montague locates himself in a large section of his work. In an essay contributed to the Irish Times some years ago, Montague wrote about his relation to his place and also ended up with a feminine image of it, but it is a very different image from Kavanagh's. Since the piece bears so closely to the whole of what I have been saying so far about the sense of place, I want to quote from it at some length: A month ago, I was lying on the side of a hill, looking at one of the loveliest landscapes in Ireland. I was just back from a short reading tour in America, where I had earned more in a month than a term's teaching at home would bring. But at no point in my journey, even crossing a sunlit campus after my morning's stint was done, or relaxing in some heated pool, was I as happy as that May day, on the slopes of Sliabh Gullion.

Everything seemed to share that prehistoric timelessness; the stream that ran down the edge of the mountain path, the sheep that scattered as one climbed to the dark glitter of the Hag's Lake ...

Take the name Knockmany. One could explain it as 'Cnoc Maine', the hill of the Manaig or Menapii, a tribe of the Belgae who travelled as far as Lough Erne; after all, they gave their name to the adjoining county of Fermanagh. But the local translation of the name is Ania's Cove, and Ania or Aine or Ano is the Danaan Mother G.o.ddess, whose name is also found in the River Boyne, the Boan or Good Mother. Even Pope pays oblique reverence to her: 'And thou, great Anna...'

I am beginning to sound like Robert Graves's White G.o.ddess, but there is an extraordinary ident.i.ty between the linguistic and archaeological evidence concerning Knockmany. The curious cup marks and circles have been described as the eyes and b.r.e.a.s.t.s of a mother G.o.ddess, whose cult spread from Syria. I doubt if the late O. G. S. Crawford knew early Irish, but his eye G.o.ddess theory bears out the derivations I have suggested, since the same shapes are found at Newgrange, on the Boyne. So the least Irish place name can net a world with its a.s.sociations.

Now it is obvious that although both Montague and Kavanagh look and listen with intensity inside their parishes, their eyes and ears seek and pick up different things. Kavanagh's eye has been used to bending over the ground before it ever bent over a book but we feel with Montague that the case is vice versa. If Montague, for example, had been born in Kavanagh's country, Ardee and the Black Pig's d.y.k.e would have figured significantly in his literary topography. But Kavanagh never mentions them. Kavanagh's place names are there to stake out a personal landscape, they declare one man's experience, they are denuded of tribal or etymological implications. Mucker, Dundalk, Inniskeen, provide no frisson beyond the starkness of their own dunting, consonantal noises. They are names for what is known and loved, and inhabit the universe of the actual with other words like 'b.u.t.ter', 'collar and reins', 'bull-wire' and 'winkers' as we hear in that risky but successful poem called 'Kerr's a.s.s': We borrowed the loan of Kerr's big a.s.s To go to Dundalk with b.u.t.ter, Brought him home the evening before the market An exile that night in Mucker.

We heeled up the cart before the door, We took the harness inside- The straw-stuffed straddle, the broken breeching With bits of bull-wire tied; The winkers that had no choke-bank, The collar and the reins ...

In Ealing Broadway, London Town I name their several names Until a world comes to life- Morning, the silent bog, And the G.o.d of imagination waking In a Mucker fog.

Kavanagh's place names are used here as posts to fence out a personal landscape. But Montague's are rather sounding lines, rods to plumb the depths of a shared and diminished culture. They are redolent not just of his personal life but of the history of his people, disinherited and dispossessed. What are most resonant and most cherished in the names of Montague's places are their tribal etymological implications.

Both Kavanagh and Montague explore a hidden Ulster, to alter Daniel Corkery's suggestive phrase, and Montague's exploration follows Corkery's tracks in a way that Kavanagh's does not. There is an element of cultural and political resistance and retrieval in Montague's work that is absent from Kavanagh's. What is hidden at the bottom of Montague's region is first of all a pagan civilization centred on the dolmen; then a Gaelic civilization centred on the O'Neill inauguration stone at Tullyhogue. The ancient feminine religion of Northern Europe is the lens through which he looks and the landscape becomes a memory, a piety, a loved mother. The present is suffused with the past. When he walks the mountains and farms of his neighbours, he can think of himself as a survivor, a repository, a bearer and keeper of what had almost been lost. On the other hand, when Kavanagh walks through others' farms, he will think of himself as a trespa.s.ser rather than a survivor. His sensibility is acutely of its own time and place, and his region is as deep not as its history but as his own life in it. At the bottom of Kavanagh's imagination there is no pagan queen, no mystique of the national, the mythic or the tribal: instead, there is the childhood piety of the Morning Offering prayer, a prayer which offers to Jesus 'through the most pure hands of Mary all the prayers, works and sufferings of this day for all the intentions of Thy Divine Heart'. I believe that the spirit of this prayer, the child's open-eyed attention to the small and the familiar, is fundamental to Kavanagh's vision, as is the child's religious belief that if each action, however small, is offered up for love, then in the eyes of G.o.d it is as momentous in its negligible, casual silence as the great noisy cataclysmic and famous acts that make up history. Compare these two poems and all that I have said becomes, I am sure, simpler and clearer. First, Kavanagh's 'On Reading a Book of Common Wild Flowers': O the greater fleabane that grew at the back of the potato pit: I often trampled through it looking for rabbit burrows!

The burnet saxifrage was there in profusion And the autumn gentian- I knew them all by eyesight long before I knew their names.

We were in love before we were introduced.

Let me not moralize or have remorse, for these names Purify a corner of my mind; I jump over them and rub them with my hands, And a free moment appears brand new and s.p.a.cious Where I may live beyond the reach of desire.

Here, the book learning disappears and the mind is purified by naming the actual. The imagination slips free of the reading and refreshes itself in the common and humble sights Kavanagh has known in common places. But in this poem by John Montague which also celebrates the flora of his fields, the common and humble vegetation of the hedgerows and headlands a.s.sumes all kinds of learning into it. The poem does not elude the learned intelligence but calls upon it. There is first of all the echo of the Marian litany and through that an appeal to the whole gorgeous liturgy of the Catholic Church; then behind that there is, I feel, an appeal to our sense of early Irish nature poetry, that glorified fern and branch and waterfall; and behind that again there is the notion that the curve of the hill is the curve of a loved one's beauty, its contour the contour of a woman with child.

Hinge of silence creak for us Rose of darkness unfold for us Wood anemone sway for us Blue harebell bend for us Moist fern unfurl for us Springy moss uphold us Branch of pleasure lean on us Leaves of delight murmur for us Odorous wood breathe on us Evening dews pearl for us Freshet of ease flow for us Secret waterfall pour for us Hidden cleft speak to us Portal of delight inflame us Hill of motherhood wait for us Gate of Birth open for us Kavanagh's sense of his place involves detachment, Montague's attachment. When Montague asks who he is, he is forced to seek a connection with a history and a heritage; before he affirms a personal ident.i.ty, he posits a national ident.i.ty, and his region and his community provide a lifeline to it. Whereas Kavanagh flees the abstractions of nationalism, political or cultural. To find himself, he detaches rather than attaches himself to the communal. I rather than we is his preferred first person. 'A poet is never one of the people. The life of small-time dances would not be for him...' It is just possible that John Montague, if he heard a fiddle played at one of those small-time dances, would be inclined to see in them the last twitch of his ideal culture, and thus envisage such a life as an enabling rather than a disabling phenomenon for the poet.

But however different the focus of Kavanagh and Montague, what they have in common is a feeling for their place that steadies them and gives them a point of view. And just how vital this matter of feeling is we will see if we listen to an account of the Tyrone countryside by Robert Lloyd Praeger in his book, The Way that I Went. His sense of the place is, on the whole, that it is no place: Now that I wish to write about it, I find it is a curiously negative tract, with a paucity of outstanding features when its size and variety of surface are considered, for it stretches from Lough Neagh to within ten miles of the western sea at Donegal Bay. On its north-eastern frontier stand the Sperrin Mountains, raising broad peat-covered domes of schist and quartzite to over 2000 feet (Sawell, 2240 feet). These hills have been referred to already (p68): they are among the least inspiring of Irish mountains, though on the Derry side some fine glens are found. The only lake to be mentioned in connection with Tyrone is Lough Neagh, also dealt with previously (p95): for fifteen miles it forms the eastern boundary. Here the broad flat sh.o.r.e characteristic of this great lake prevails, and there are bays, and low dunes of sharp silicious sand, much prized for building in Belfast. A minor excitement is provided by the occurrence in this neighbourhood of a small coal-field; the coal is of good quality, but the strata have been so much disturbed by earth-movements that the seams are broken up by faulting, tending to make mining difficult and expensive.

This is also a subjective reaction, of course: who is to say objectively that Tyrone is a 'curiously negative tract' and that the Sperrins are 'the least inspiring of the Irish mountains'? Who (except someone with an incurable taste for punning) will agree that a small coal-field const.i.tutes 'a minor excitement'? The clue to Praeger's sense of place comes a couple of paragraphs later when he moves into Fermanagh and declares it 'more picturesque and from many points of view more interesting'. His point of view is visual, geological, not like Kavanagh's, emotional and definitive. The Tyrone landscape, for him, is not hallowed by a.s.sociations that come from growing up and thinking oneself in and back into the place. His eye is regulated by laws of aesthetics, by the disciplines of physical geography, and not, to borrow a phrase from Wordsworth, by the primary laws of our nature, the laws of feeling. In fact, Wordsworth was perhaps the first man to articulate the nurture that becomes available to the feelings through dwelling in one dear perpetual place. In his narrative poem, 'Michael', he talks at one point about the way the Westmorland mountains were so much more than a picturesque backdrop for his shepherd's existence, how they were rather companionable and influential in the strict sense of the word 'influential'-things flowed in from them to Michael's psychic life. This Lake District was not inanimate stone but active nature, humanized and humanizing: And grossly that man errs, who should suppose That the green valleys, and the streams and rocks, Were things indifferent to the Shepherd's thoughts.

Fields, where with cheerful spirits he had breathed The common air; hills, which with vigorous step He had so often climbed; which had impressed So many incidents upon his mind Of hards.h.i.+p, skill or courage, joy or fear; Which, like a book, preserved the memory Of the dumb animals, whom he had saved, Had fed or sheltered, linking to such acts The certainty of honourable gain; Those fields, those hills-what could they less-had laid Strong hold on his affections, were to him A pleasurable feeling of blind love, The pleasure which there is in life itself.

And that temperate understanding of the relations.h.i.+p between a person and his place, of the way the surface of the earth can be accepted into and be a steadying influence upon the quiet depths of the mind, leads me to another poet of our places. John Hewitt's poems take their inspiration now from the literate historical reading of his place and its culture, now from the illiterate messages beat out in his pulses as he walks our countryside. He looks at the world now with the a.n.a.lytical and profane eye of a man of the left, now with the affectionate and feeling eye of 'an Ulsterman of Planter stock'. In an entirely pertinent pa.s.sage of his long poem 'Conacre', written in 1943, he questions himself about his need to repose in the customary and ancestral world of the countryside, in spite of his urban childhood and his politicized intelligence: Why not then seize the virtue in my luck, and make my theme the riveters who struck the other day for solidarity, or take a derrick simply as a tree and praise a puddle that contains the sky for the boots and wheels that clatter by?

He then goes on to acc.u.mulate a catalogue of images of city life, images that domesticate him to his native streets, and declares These by sound and sight Make up the world my heel and nostril know, but not the world my pulses take for true.

... somehow these close images engage the prompt responses only, pity, humour, rage, and leave the quiet depths unmeasured still; whereas the heathered shoulder of a hill, a quick cloud on the meadow, wind-lashed corn, black wrinkled haws, grey tufted wool on thorn, the high lark singing, the retreating sea- these stab the heart with sharp humility and p.r.i.c.k like water on the thirsty wrist in hill spring thrust, when hot sun splits the mist among dark peatstacks on long boggy plains, such as lie high and black between the Glens, or on the crown of Garron struck by sun to emerald or rain wrapped. I have won, by grace or by intention, to delight that seems to match the colours mystics write only in places far from kerb or street.

Yet as well as granting that these stirrings of the depths may be 'graces' inhabiting the same element as mystical apprehensions, Hewitt is also in possession of another vocabulary and another mode of understanding. His attachment to his actual countryside involves an attachment to an idea of country: his cheris.h.i.+ng of the habitat is symptomatic of his history, and that history is the history of the colonist, who, much like Wordsworth's Michael, has grown to be native to his fields through the accretions of human memory and human a.s.sociations. There is a pride of a.s.sertion at the end of his dramatic monologue, 'The Colony', that does not give the lie to John Montague's proclamation and reclamation of the Ulster territory as Gaelic; but it does give the obstinate colonist's answer: We have rights drawn from the soil and sky; the use, the pace, the patient years of labour, the rain against the lips, the changing light, the heavy clay-sucked stride, have altered us; we would be strangers in the Capitol; this is our country also, no-where else; and we shall not be outcast on the world.

It has been said that John Hewitt expresses the crisis of ident.i.ty experienced by the Planter stock but the ident.i.ty spoken for and through in these lines seems to me more composed than critical. In the Glens of Antrim this poet senses himself, as his fictional colonist also does, as co-inhabitant but not as kin with the natives. He loves their sacral understanding of their place but cannot share fully what he calls 'the enchantments of the old tree magic'. Hewitt is bound to his region not through the figure of a mythological queen in her aspect as spirit of the place but through the charter given by an historical king. His vision is bifocal, not, as in Montague's case, monocular. When Montague's vision founds itself on the archaeological, it is on Knockmany Dolmen, on the insular tradition. When Hewitt searches for his primeval symbol, it is also megalithic; 'a broken circle of stones on a rough hillside, somewhere,' is the destination of his search for a 'somewhere', and his note tells us that that somewhere is a refraction of two places. '"Circle of stones": for me the archetype of this is the Rollright Stones on the border of Oxfords.h.i.+re, mingled with the recollection of "Ossian's Grave", Glenaan, Co. Antrim.' Oxfords.h.i.+re and Antrim, two fidelities, two spirits that, in John Donne's original and active verb, interinanimate each other. John Hewitt knows where he stands and he can also watch himself taking his stand. His civilized mind takes its temper from a political, literary and religious tradition that is English, but his instincts, his eye and ear, are tutored by the Ulster landscape, and it is in the rag-and-bone shop of the instincts that a poetry begins and ends, though it can raise itself by the ladders of intelligence towards a platform and a politics.

It could be said of the poets I have considered that their sense of place is a physical one but I want to turn finally and briefly to three younger writers for whom the sense of place might be termed metaphysical. In the work of Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon place symbolizes a personal drama before it epitomizes a communal situation. Mahon's bleak Glengormley and bleaker still North Antrim, Longley's botanically abundant west of Ireland and his nostalgically apprehended bleaching greens, Muldoon's rivery and apple-dappled Armagh, are all places that do not have to be proved or vindicated in the way Kavanagh's Monaghan or Montague's Tyrone or John Hewitt's braes and glens have to be. They exist to serve the poet and not vice versa. None of these poets surrenders himself to the mythology of his place but instead each subdues the place to become an element in his own private mythology. They may be preyed upon in life by the consequences of living on this island now, but their art is a mode of play to outface the predatory circ.u.mstances. Muldoon's wry and lyrical wit, Longley's amorous vocabularies, Mahon's visionary desolation are personal poetic gifts, but as the young Yeats once 'sought to weave an always personal emotion into a general pattern of myth and symbol' so these poets weave their individual feelings round places they and we know, in a speech that they and we share; and in a world where the sacral vision of place is almost completely eradicated they offer in their art what Michael Longley has called 'the sacraments we invent for ourselves'.

We are no longer innocent, we are no longer just paris.h.i.+oners of the local. We go to Paris at Easter instead of rolling eggs on the hill at the gable. 'Chicken Marengo! It's a far cry from the Moy', Paul Muldoon says in a line depth-charged with architectural history. Yet those primary laws of our nature are still operative. We are dwellers, we are namers, we are lovers, we make homes and search for our histories. And when we look for the history of our sensibilities I am convinced, as Professor J. C. Beckett was convinced about the history of Ireland generally, that it is to what he called the stable element, the land itself, that we must look for continuity.

Lecture given in the Ulster Museum, January 1977

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 relations.h.i.+p 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 h.o.a.rders and sh.o.r.ers 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 Sat.u.r.days 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 pa.s.sed away, to perceive in these a continuity of communal ways, and a confirmation of an ident.i.ty 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 G.o.d', '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 Yorks.h.i.+re 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 G.o.d'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 gra.s.ses 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 gra.s.s 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 G.o.ddess 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, ca.n.a.ls and floatings of industrial froth, explosions in mines, effigies in churches, secretaries in offices; and she hauls tides of life where only one s.h.i.+p 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 t.i.tles 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 pa.s.ses 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 gra.s.s 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 Nors.e.m.e.n, 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 Nors.e.m.e.n in a poem ent.i.tled '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 s.h.i.+ps 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 p.r.o.nounces 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 Yorks.h.i.+re. 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 Yorks.h.i.+re 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 ent.i.tle 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 t.i.tanic 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 t.i.tanic 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 t.i.tle, 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 G.o.d', '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 G.o.d.

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 s.p.a.ce 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 G.o.dfather ever since-or one of my G.o.dfathers. 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 d.y.k.e 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 h.o.a.rd 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 h.e.l.l ('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 st.u.r.dy 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 mult.i.tudinous seas incarnadine,/Making the green one red,' where the polysyllabic flourish of 'mult.i.tudinous' 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 acc.u.mulate 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 h.e.l.l; 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 a.s.sociation 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 ent.i.tled Opus Anglicanum. Once again the note is helpful: 'Opus Anglicanum': the term is properly applicable to English embroidery of the period AD 12501350, 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, sc.r.a.ping 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 reb.u.t.ted by the literal and local weight of 'sc.r.a.ping 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 cla.s.s, 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; compa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+fts 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 refres.h.i.+ng 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 p.i.s.s. If he is forced to cry out 'O wolves of memory, immens.e.m.e.nts', 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 Ma.s.s 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 s.e.x.

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 s.p.a.ce, 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, ent.i.tled 'At Gra.s.s', could well be subt.i.tled, '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 exact.i.tude 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 han