TE Hulme: Images at Play

I sometimes wonder why I don't come across more appreciation of and commentary on the Imagist poet TE Hulme (1883-1917). The answer is probably that he wrote only a small number of poems (around 25), and just a few were published during his lifetime. He is probably better known as a literary critic and a philosopher.

He established the Poets' Club and the School of Images (the latter including Ezra Pound), both of which explored new directions in English poetry. Hulme had a colourful life and was known as a strong (not always appreciated) personality. He died in World War I, in West Flanders, blown up by a shell he didn't see coming (those around him did, and threw themselves to the ground.) He was 34.

TE Hulme isn't exactly a household name. He has always seemed to me to occupy a particular niche. It is thought that if he had lived, he could have become one of the most influential literary figures of the century, but he didn't have a chance beyond what he accomplished before his death. I just love his poems.

Most of Hulme's poems were only a few lines long. I love short poetry (my own poems average about 10-14 lines - more than 20 lines is a long poem for me) and I don't think it gets enough credit. A poem leaving a lasting impression in six or twelve lines may stay with a reader forever. Hulme's poems are clear-eyed, balanced between warmth and dispassion, wistfully playful and very precise. I can't ask for much more in a poem.


AUTUMN (TE Hulme)


A touch of cold in the Autumn night - 
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.


'Autumn' reminds me a little of Tolkien, to the extent that I wonder if the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings might have been influenced by it. Perhaps because of that, it makes me think of much of the writing I enjoyed as a child: a mix of comfort, adventure and a slight eeriness.


THE EMBANKMENT (TE Hulme)

(The Fantasia of a Fallen Gentleman on a Cold, Bitter Night)


Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,
In a flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.
Now see I
That warmth's the very stuff of poesy.
Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.


'The Embankment' is especially evocative to me as it's a part of London I know well. The 'flash of gold heels' seems to spark, an irony considering the man's search for warmth. It's a whimsical, sad and (again) faintly eerie poem, and it always makes me think of how there are still so many homeless people looking for shelter around Waterloo and Embankment.

Hulme isn't really known as a "war poet", despite his dates and his death. But he left this poem on a return to England from the front. It was probably transcribed (edited?) by Ezra Pound, but there seems little doubt as to its authorship. The final lines leave me stunned. Indeed, the 'mind is a corridor' under trauma. He said it perfectly.


TRENCHES: ST ELOI (TE Hulme)

(Abbreviated from the Conversation of Mr TEH)


Over the flat slopes of St Eloi
A wide wall of sand bags.
Night, 
In the silence desultory men
Pottering over small fires, cleaning their mess-tins:
To and fro, from the lines,
Men walk as on Piccadilly,
Making paths in the dark,
Through scattered dead horses,
Over a dead Belgian's belly.

The Germans have rockets. The English have no rockets.
Behind the line, cannon, hidden, lying back miles.
Beyond the line, chaos:

My mind is a corridor. The minds about me are corridors.
Nothing suggests itself. There is nothing to do but keep on.

"This Is an Alien City": Amy Lowell's 'A London Thoroughfare. 2 A.M.'

This is another painting by John Atkinson Grimshaw, depicting Chelsea in London. I think that you can expect to see Grimshaw at least occasionally on this blog when I write about London.

I'm still browing and reading through London: A History in Verse, edited by Mark Ford. This anthology really does capture the spirit of London - its events, places and people - across centuries. It is the dark and the light; I wonder if any other city has so much of each. Unified and scattered, sinister and exhilarating - I think London's poetry may carry its essence even more so than its art or photography, for instance. (But then, I would think that...) What fascinates me is that certain themes seem to flow down the centuries and recur so frequently. These include the city as a brooding, dark personality made up of tiny fluttering voices; the underground nature of London, whether that's the actual London Underground or its hidden and lost rivers; and the use of names, its streets and squares and boroughs, with an almost totemic power.

2012 is by some reckoning the 100th anniversary of the Imagist movement in poetry. This enormously influential movement, which helped to launch modernist poetry, concentrated on "clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images." Its early proponents included Ezra Pound and T E Hulme.

Another poet deeply involved in the Imagist movement was Amy Lowell (1874-1925). She was a highly prolific American poet (and businesswoman) who moved between the US and the UK, working to promote the Imagist movement in American poetry. She is now perhaps best known as a critic and anthologist, and as someone associated with more famous figures, but her poetry is wonderful in its own right and is recognised for its variety and sensuality.

This poem, 'A London Throughfare. 2 A.M.', is a bleak portrayal of the city, very closely observed. This is the city as state of mind, reflecting isolation and radiating hostility. It is easy to imagine that under similar circumstances, another poet (or even the same poet in a different frame of mind) might see the scene as beautiful. The fact that Lowell sees the distant moon as a friend, and the city as alien, is very telling.



A LONDON THROUGHFARE. 2 A.M. (Amy Lowell)


They have watered the street,
It shines in the glare of lamps,
Cold, white lamps,
And lies
Like a slow-moving river,
Barred with silver and black.
Cabs go down it,
One,
And then another,
Between them I hear the shuffling of feet.
Tramps doze on the window-ledges,
Night-walkers pass along the sidewalks.
The city is squalid and sinister,
With the silver-barred street in the midst,
Slow-moving,
A river leading nowhere.

Opposite my window,
The moon cuts,
Clear and round,
Through the plum-coloured night.
She cannot light the city:
It is too bright.
It has white lamps,
And glitters coldly.

I stand in the window and watch the moon.
She is thin and lustreless,
But I love her.
I know the moon,
And this is an alien city.

Seven Years In London: Smoke, Mirrors and the Sweet Smell of Road-Tar

This painting is by John Atkinson Grimshaw, a Victorian painter whose works have elements of the Pre-Raphaelites and JMW Turner. He is well known for his cityscapes, including London, Leeds, Liverpool and Glasgow, and he is set to become one of my favourite artists, I think. This particular work shows a street in Borough, south London.

On 27 July 2012, as far as I've been able to ascertain (from looking up my old BMI flight reservations), it was seven years since I moved to London - which means that I am only about a month late with this entry. It was an odd day; hardly what I would have expected. Two days earlier I had suffered a mishap at home when a sharp-edged object fell over and left me with a nasty cut on my face. The NHS, bless them, offered me a plastic surgeon, so 27 July found me at St Thomas's Hospital to get stitched up. It was also the day of the Opening Ceremonies of the London 2012 Olympics (perhaps worth an entry in itself, especially if I can find an appropriate poem.) I later watched some of it at home, feeling a bit miserable, but I found the British history section spectacular and moving.

Too many posts about London already, you might be thinking, but it's a well that never runs dry for me. There can never be an end to writing, thinking and dreaming about a great city, as well as just getting out into its streets and experiencing it. When I moved, I thought it likely that I would stay longer than my time in Dublin - three years - but I surpassed that long ago, and I don't have plans to leave. I'm one of those misfits of the world who is more at home in London than anywhere else, it seems.

I recently read Craig Taylor's Londoners, subtitled The Days and Nights of London Now - As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It and Long for It. Craig Taylor is a Vancouver Islander who has adopted London, just like me (although I hasten to add that he is from Nanaimo, and I am from Victoria. I met him briefly at a publishing networking event a few years ago and we chatted a little, mainly about the ex-pat thing and the Island. He had dared to say something about the class-ridden nature of the publishing industry, which mostly met with embarrassed looks and nervous giggles. I nearly cheered.) Not surprisingly, I found the book totally beguiling - even the commentaries by people who hate the place. There was so much that was familiar in it, but seen through a variety of different lenses. The City boy, the airline pilot, the dominatrix - it was rather odd to find echoes of my own feelings and my London moments in these lives. There were passages which I found incredibly resonant, almost as though they'd been taken straight out of my brain:


Places make the best lovers. You can trust a place more than you can trust a person as a lover. A place is more dependable and it has so much depth and stimulation and provides you with the opportunity to realize yourself. The place reflects you, provides you with stimulation, the ability to realize potential. If it's a good place it makes you feel stronger, makes you cleverer and more powerful. I did a walk with someone from the centre of the City to Soho, just taking a beeline, and on that walk ended up going into the Temple Church in the middle of the Temples so I was back in the twelfth century after already having gone into the Black Friar pub, an Arts and Crafts pub, and walking through the centre of Covent Garden and ending up in a Chinese restaurant having dim sum. Now there are not many people who can give you that much stimulation, but being with a person and having the ability to have that friend, London, as a companion throughout gives you a wonderful extra dimension to anything you do. I think of London as a partner. I'm in love with London and always have been. (Peter Rees, City Planning Officer, City of London)


The trouble with this sort of thing - which I find almost entirely true - is that it can feel as though the city is becoming your primary relationship: basically, not good. But very seductive. If there's such a thing as taking a drug in moderation, that would have to be the way to approach London. (I am told by someone who knows, from past experience, that London is like heroin.) When I went back to Canada for a visit a few months ago, I told an old family friend that London pulls you into its patterns and rhythms and tides so that you find yourself breathing in tune with it. Which is both exciting, and sinister.

There was also a passage in Craig Taylor's introduction, where he describes his own London experience, which was extremely familiar:


I hadn't yet become an urban otter - one of those sleek Londoners who moves through the city with ease. They're the ones who seem slow and graceful but are always covering ground, who cross streets without looking back and forth; who know how to fold a newspaper crisply in the middle of a packed Tube train. (Craig Taylor)


Maybe I flatter myself, but I'm pretty sure I've become an urban otter. The best way to move through London is like breathing, like water is your element. I tread more lightly than I used to and I've found ways to flow through a crowd on an Underground platform without hardly touching anyone (these sometimes involve dislocating your hips from your torso - but it's strangely like a dance.) Passing the six-month point in London is pivotal. At that moment, I started to feel like I had a few friends; I also noticed that I was scanning my environment in a different way, and building a sort of transparent/semi-permeable wall around myself, something which allowed me to be more detached and more involved than ever before. Certainly, after years in London you react quite differently to the news of violent crime just down the street than you do during the first six months.

Another recent acquisition is the poetry anthology London, compiled by Mark Ford. It traces London's history and people and life in poetry, from ancient times to the present. I've only dipped into it so far and look forward to further exploration. London is drenched in poetry and this is how I see it, increasingly. It is both a way to shelter myself from harsh realities, and a way to get further and further in, closer to the heart (or hearts) of the city. This summer, during the Olympic and Paralympic Games, there has been a soundscape installation on the Millenium Bridge called Tales from the Bridge. It samples contemporary and historic literature and poetry to give glimpses of the city - mainly the Thames - through the spoken word. I stopped by to experience it recently, and found it quite intriguing.

I've picked out a few London poems which add to the richness of the city's tapestry, and which have a few familiar echoes, as well.

Tamar Yoseloff's 'London Particular' seems very much to be from the city-as-state-of-mind tradition. Sometimes you can see someone's face wherever you look, and all else fades. This poem captures a good deal of London's bleaker aspects, I think. Strangely, it also made me think of my Finnish grandfather, who I never knew because he died before I was born. He was briefly in London in the 1950s when London experienced one of its last pea-souper fogs (or "London particular"). I could very much see him as the gentleman in this poem.

'London Pastoral' by Tobias Hill, another contemporary London poet, is gentler but still gritty. I recognise its smell: "hallways sweet/with the residue of road-tar." London is such a juxtaposition of the ugly and dirty, and the beautiful; this poem is a good example.

Finally, this strange, sad poem by T E Hulme really touches me. The darkness and the bright glancing sparks of it are very London. Hulme was mainly a critic and sometimes a poet, and died on the front in Belgium in 1917.


THE EMBANKMENT (T E Hulme)

(The Fantasia of a Fallen Gentleman on a Cold, Bitter Night)


Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,
In a flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.
Now see I
That warmth's the very stuff of poesy.
Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.