Alun Lewis's 'Raider's Dawn' By Way of Hardy's 'In Time of "The Breaking of Nations"'

John Constable, A ploughing scene in Suffolk (A summerland), c 1824



When I lived in Canada, I was quite often asked if I was any relation to Dan Aykroyd, the Canadian actor. I am not - he belongs to the other branch of Canadian Aykroyds, who seem unrelated to my family (and furthermore, he pronounces it Ack-royd while we pronounce it Ayk-royd - which has caused no end of confusion over the years.) Living in England, I seldom get asked about Dan Aykroyd but I do get asked occasionally about author Peter Ackroyd (no relation) and very occasionally about artist Carry Akroyd (also no relation.)

A few days ago I went to the London launch for George Szirtes's Bad Machine (which is excellent) and chatted with a gentleman who I had met previously at one or two literary events, and also saw online occasionally on George's Facebook page (which is a bit like an online literary salon.) He asked me about my name and we chatted a bit about the people I wasn't related to. Later that evening, this gentleman messaged me through Facebook to say that at his local train station that evening, where people left books to trade, he had come across a copy of World War II poet Alun Lewis's letters to Freda Aykroyd and had wondered about the surname, given our conversation.

I was quite surprised by this coincidence, because I actually do have a family connection to Freda Aykroyd. She was the wife of my great-uncle W R Aykroyd, who was then the director of the Nutrition Research Laboratories in southern India. Freda Aykroyd and Alun Lewis met in 1943 and fell in love. Lewis's death in 1944 from a self-inflicted gunshot is thought to have been a likely suicide, and it is also thought that the affair had something to do with it. I have not read the letters, which were published as A Cypress Walk, but it seems that both were very aware that they were betraying spouses who they loved, and apparently Lewis's awareness was particularly acute. All the evidence suggests that he was also very much in love with his wife, Gweno.

The coincidence was made a bit stranger by the fact that this copy was signed by Juliet Aykroyd, who is Freda and Wallace's daughter and thus another of my distant-ish cousins, who also helped with the editing of the letters, I think. The people who were directly involved in the drama either died before I was born, or were sufficiently distant relatives that I would never have met them, and thus the story is on mostly an intellectual level for me. It is a strange, sad story to have in the family, though. I am quite unable to find such developments in people's lives romantic; just sad, mainly.

This rather long-winded anecdote did remind me that I have wanted to write about one of Lewis's poems, 'Raider's Dawn', and one of Thomas Hardy's, 'In Time of "The Breaking of Nations"', for some time. Here, first, is the Hardy poem, written during World War I, in 1916:


IN TIME OF "THE BREAKING OF NATIONS" (Thomas Hardy)


Only a man harrowing clods
  In a slow silent walk,
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
  Half asleep as they stalk.

Only thin smoke without flame
  From the heaps of couch grass:
Yet this will go onward the same
  Though Dynasties pass.

Yonder a maid and her wight
  Come whispering by;
War's annals will fade into night
  Ere their story die.


Alun Lewis's World War II poem can be found here:


RAIDER'S DAWN (Alun Lewis)


The title of the Hardy poem makes reference to Jeremiah 51:20 ("Thou art my battle axe and weapons of war: for with thee will I break in pieces the nations, and with thee will I destroy kingdoms.") The counterpoint to Lewis's reference to "Paper on paper,/Peter on Paul" - the falling of fragile pages from a Bible - is very interesting.

Essentially, I haven't come across anything to directly confirm it (if anyone has, please let me know) but I am absolutely convinced that these two poems are related. It seems to me almost impossible that Lewis wouldn't have come across Hardy's poem, and that 'In Time of "The Breaking of Nations"' wasn't either a conscious or a subconscious inspiration for 'Raider's Dawn'. The poems seem to reflect each other almost like mirror images.

The major difference is, of course, in the conclusions that the poets reach. Hardy saw that the war was changing the world around him, but he chose to focus on the eternal things that would outlive war; love, the basics of human survival, and so on. In Lewis's poem, ominously, the lovers are "Eternity's masters,/Slaves of Time", no longer lost in their own world, but observing the fall of bodies into mass graves. The concluding image of the "blue necklace" on the "charred chair" is especially haunting, and depressing. For me it seems to conjure up thoughts of the deserted house after the pogrom, or the aftermath of the atomic bomb. 'Raider's Dawn' seems to become the dark shadow of 'In Time of "The Breaking of Nations"', the final loss of innocence in World War II which began with World War I.

The John Constable painting above, incidentally, was chosen simply because Hardy's poem makes me think of Constable's paintings.

Peter Porter's 'Thomas Hardy at Westbourne Park Villas': A London Journey Into Darkness

Portrait of Thomas Hardy by William Strang, 1893.


I have this week come across a couple of poems inspired by Thomas Hardy, or invoking him in some way. One of the poems was 'Thomas Hardy Considers the Newly-Published Special Theory of Relativity' by the science fiction writer Brian Aldiss. The other was this poem by Australian poet Peter Porter, who made London his home for much of his life. I came across it while looking for London poems of light or of darkness, knowing that I'd overwhelmingly find the latter.


THOMAS HARDY AT WESTBOURNE PARK VILLAS (Peter Porter)


I used to live in West London not very far from Westbourne Park Villas, and near other streets and areas associated with Hardy. I sometimes walked down Westbourne Park Villas. There is an awareness that comes to me when I know that a writer or someone personally significant lived in a place. It is perhaps related to the feeling I get when I look at a manuscript in the writer's own hand. I feel as though they are still there.

Hardy's poetry has both a luminous clarity and an emotional gloom. In Porter's beautiful poem, as so often in London poetry, the dark and the light work off each other, but the overall effect gives way to the darkness. The final lines seem to fall with a clang like an iron portcullis.


    The watchful conspirator against the gods
Come to the capital of light on his own grim
Journey into darkness; the dazzle would tell
    Him these were the worst of possible odds -
ordinary gestures of time working on faces the watermark of hell.

Birdsong in the Trenches: Isaac Rosenberg and Humbert Wolfe

There are plans afoot in London to erect a statue to Isaac Rosenberg, one of England's great World War I poets. He grew up in the East End and studied in Bloomsbury, and the statue is planned for Torrington Square. Rosenberg studied at nearby Birkbeck College and the Slade School of Fine Art (he was also an artist).

I'm quite fond of what I've read of Rosenberg's work. It is rather modern in outlook, and poignant but not too innocent. Tonight I wanted to post a poem by Rosenberg, and another by Humbert Wolfe. They are both about the brief glimmer of hope and beauty brought to men in the trenches by the sound of birdsong. Rosenberg fought and died in the trenches, and I think Wolfe's participation in the war was at a greater distance, but these poems seem to spring from a similar source.

This photograph is French, and the soldier is sleeping, not dead. How difficult it must have been to sleep under such circumstances I can hardly imagine. Whenever I have seen trench warfare depicted in films and so on, I always think of how extremely far it must have been from the reality. I probably haven't seen any films sufficiently violent and explicit enough to depict anything really close to the reality; and even then, how close could they come?

Here are the poems: 'Returning, We Hear the Larks' by Isaac Rosenberg, and 'A Thrush in the Trenches' by Humbert Wolfe. (The Wolfe poem made me think of Thomas Hardy's 'The Darkling Thrush', too.)



RETURNING, WE HEAR THE LARKS (Isaac Rosenberg)

Sombre the night is.
And though we have our lives, we know
What sinister threat lurks there.

Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know
This poison-blasted track opens on our camp -
On a little safe sleep.

But hark! joy - joy - strange joy.
Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks.
Music showering on our upturned list'ning faces.

Death could drop from the dark
As easily as song -
But song only dropped,
Like a blind man's dreams on the sand
By dangerous tides,
Like a girl's dark hair for she dreams no ruin lies there,
Or her kisses where a serpent hides.



A THRUSH IN THE TRENCHES (Humbert Wolfe)

Suddenly he sang across the trenches,
vivid in the fleeting hush
as a star-shell through the smashed black branches,
a more than English thrush.

Suddenly he sang, and those who listened
nor moved nor wondered, but
heard, all bewitched, the sweet unhastened
crystal Magnificat.

One crouched, a muddied rifle clasping,
and one filled a grenade,
but little cared they, while he went lisping
the one clear tune he had.

Paused horror, hate and Hell a moment,
(you could almost hear the sigh)
and still he sang to them, and so went
(suddenly) singing by.

P K Page's 'Stories of Snow': "Where Silent, Unrefractive Whiteness Lies"

A non-definitive list of the ten poems which have been particularly significant in inviting me into the world of modern, almost-modern, post-modern and contemporary poetry would likely include the following:

Byzantium (W B Yeats)
The Waste Land (T S Eliot)
Foal (Vernon Watkins)
The Convergence of the Twain (Thomas Hardy)
Homecoming (Paul Celan)
At the Quinte Hotel (Al Purdy)
The Tollund Man (Seamus Heaney)
Bagpipe Music (Louis MacNeice)
The Shadow of Cain (Edith Sitwell)
Stories of Snow (P K Page)

I've written about some of these before, and they could probably all be an essay in themselves. To use one of my favourite over-used words, it is a pretty random list. Poems discovered by chance, poems studied in high school or university, poems which I wasn't sure I liked at the time but which ultimately took on greater meaning, poems I heard read by the poet themself (T S Eliot, I wish! In this case, Al Purdy), poems which led me on to poems I preferred by the same poet...and so on.

I've written before about the modern Canadian poetry class which I took in university and which turned out to be very pivotal in my literary life. Among other significant moments, I discovered P K Page in this class, and that was hugely important for me. 'Stories of Snow' can lay claim to being one of the greatest Canadian poems of all time, and simply a great poem, and you can read it here. (Due to the way the poem is reproduced, be prepared to page over a couple of times - it's a long-ish poem.)


STORIES OF SNOW (P K Page)


The Canadian landscape, the landscape of the West Coast rainforest I grew up in, the tropics, Northern Europe - all of these are invoked. More than this, these are emotional and metaphoric landscapes, snowy and blossoming worlds of poetry.

In that forwards/backwards/memory/premonition way which I've come to recognise, it seems as though this poem ties in with my Antarctic fascination (although that came a little later than my first reading of this poem). In the end, the reader is invited to "unlock/the colour with its complement and go/through to the area behind the eyes/where silent, unrefractive whiteness lies." P K Page was also a talented artist, and her poems are often powerfully visual, so there is an element of artistic curiosity and exploration here.

I feel, though, that these are mainly emotional landscapes and that this has something to do with my metaphoric/semi-realistic desire to escape the twittering and the human difficulty of the modern world and to go to Antarctica - somewhere more peaceful, where access to what is truly important becomes more direct and less encumbered. "Souvenir of some never nether land": this could be ancestral memory, too, or something that I'd pass on if I ever had descendants; again, forwards/backwards/memory/premonition. I'm just waiting to find out that I had an ancestor who went to Antarctica, though I would likely have heard about it by now.

The painting is by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, the magnificent Finnish artist.

Titanic and Thomas Hardy's 'The Convergence of the Twain'

THE CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN (Thomas Hardy)

(Lines on the loss of the "Titanic")

I

           In a solitude of the sea

           Deep from human vanity,

And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

II

           Steel chambers, late the pyres

           Of her salamandrine fires,

Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

III

           Over the mirrors meant

           To glass the opulent

The sea-worm crawls — grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

IV

           Jewels in joy designed

           To ravish the sensuous mind

Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

V

           Dim moon-eyed fishes near

           Gaze at the gilded gear

And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?" ...

VI

           Well: while was fashioning

           This creature of cleaving wing,

The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

VII

           Prepared a sinister mate

           For her — so gaily great —

A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

VIII

           And as the smart ship grew

           In stature, grace, and hue,

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX

           Alien they seemed to be;

           No mortal eye could see

The intimate welding of their later history,

X

           Or sign that they were bent

           By paths coincident

On being anon twin halves of one august event,

XI

           Till the Spinner of the Years

           Said "Now!" And each one hears,

And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.


The Titanic sank on the night of 14-15 April 1912, one hundred years ago. The rush has already started this weekend, it appears, so I thought I would make my stunningly unoriginal blog post on the subject now.

It seems that Titanic will never die, although she has been gone for a century and she took more than 1500 lives with her. I suppose it was such a dramatic and instructive event that it was fated to become one of the bywords of a century which was soon to hold tragedies considerably more massive in scale. Fallen beauty and power; man against nature; human loss; hubris...all of these hold our attention.

I will admit straight out that I loved the film with Leonardo diCaprio and Kate Winslet. Yes, there was an unlikely romance and some pretty cheesy dialogue, but the ship's magnificence and the terror of its sinking were so convincingly portrayed that I couldn't help being moved. It did give a glimpse of the individual stories as well as the magnitude of the overall disaster.

'The Convergence of the Twain', published a few years after the disaster, was one of the poems that brought me into the presence of Thomas Hardy as a great poet. The whole poem has a surreal, grotesque, almost gleeful quality which is very unnerving, particularly the idea that the iceberg was formed as the ship's "sinister mate". Hardy questioned the idea of a traditional God, but as can be seen from this poem, he certainly believed in some kind of "Immanent Will", whatever its exact nature. 'The Convergence of the Twain' suggests a belief in a divine force within nature - but not a particularly benign one.

Thomas Hardy's 'During Wind and Rain': Another Cheerful Hardy Moment

DURING WIND AND RAIN (Thomas Hardy)

They sing their dearest songs—

He, she, all of them—yea,
Treble and tenor and bass,
And one to play;
With the candles mooning each face. . . .
Ah, no; the years O!
How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!

They clear the creeping moss—
Elders and juniors—aye,
Making the pathways neat
And the garden gay;
And they build a shady seat. . . .
Ah, no; the years, the years,
See, the white storm-birds wing across.

They are blithely breakfasting all—
Men and maidens—yea,
Under the summer tree,
With a glimpse of the bay,
While pet fowl come to the knee. . . .
Ah, no; the years O!
And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.

They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them—aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs. . . .
Ah, no; the years, the years
Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.


This is my last night in my current flat. As I've said to a few people, I kind of checked out mentally at least a month ago, if not more (annoying new management, etc etc.) But there is always a wrench when I move, and I need to say "goodbye" (even aloud) when I finally close the door on the empty flat. And I will miss the view over all of London very, very much - I am unlikely to ever live in a place with such a view again. I am looking forward to the new place, though. Fresh starts can be good.

The above poem is partly about moving house, which is why it occurred to me. It is also a memento mori poem; typical Hardy. Not exactly cheerful... But still, it was another of the poems that convinced me that I could love Hardy as a poet, at least, even if warming up to his prose took a lot longer (and still hasn't quite happened.)

'The Darkling Thrush': Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Thomas Hardy

THE DARKLING THRUSH (Thomas Hardy)


I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
    The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
    Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
    Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
    The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
    The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
    Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
    Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
    The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
    Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,
    In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
    Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
    Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
    Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
    His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
    And I was unaware.


It is snowing in London again, and no doubt even more in other counties and countries. I had thought of posting some snowy poem to go along with the cold weather. Although this is not quite a snowy poem, it is at least wintry and beautiful. It was first published at the turn of the nineteenth century, and so it is usually reprinted as a New Year (or Old Year) poem - I noticed that several poetry blogs reproduced it around the end of the year.

I have a sad Thomas Hardy tale to tell. When I was no more than about twelve years old, my brother cruelly handed me Jude the Obscure and told me to read it. He wasn't normally a cruel brother, so I think that he may actually have wanted to share a book with me that he had enjoyed (or at least, there were definitely some passages in it that he had found funny.) Somehow I read it from cover to cover. And I hated it. I hated it so much that there were no words for my hatred. I found it boring, depressing, stupid, and...stupid. I cited it as my most hated book for many years. I was thoroughly Hardy-complexed and didn't want to look at another word he had written.

I think that I read 'The Darkling Thrush' when I was 16 or 17. I may even have studied it in grade 12, though I am not sure about that. It was certainly the poem that opened Hardy up to me again. I still didn't want to look at his prose, despite tentative suggestions that the likes of Far From the Madding Crowd might be just the thing to cure my malaise. I didn't want to know. But the poem was wonderful. Pessimistic, yes - but amazingly evocative and beautiful. I can see the bleak grey-brown landscape, hear the thrush's brave and glorious song, and feel the poet trying so hard to find some optimism against all his inclinations.

I encountered more of Hardy's poems in university - 'The Convergence of the Twain', 'During Wind and Rain', 'The Sunshade' - and either loved or liked all of them. I filed Hardy strictly under "awesome poetry, dire prose" for many, many years. Only about two years ago, I finally made myself read Tess of the d'Urbervilles. I had to acknowledge that it was engrossing and brilliantly written, but it was also highly melodramatic, and I loathed every single character, for different reasons. So my feelings about Hardy's prose are still mixed. But I love the poetry, and this poem in particular.