Richard Adams and the Rabbit World of Literature

Richard Adams, the author of Watership Down and other novels for children and adults, died on 24 December. He was 96 years old.

In a year where celebrity deaths seemed nonstop, his passing was overshadowed moments after it was announced, by the death of actress Carrie Fisher, who sadly was only 60. But it was particularly hard to hear that Richard Adams was gone, given the importance of Watership Down in my life.

As a child I loved talking-animal books, a genre which seems to have gone thoroughly out of fashion (for anyone older than picture book age, at least). It was inevitable that I would read Watership Down. My first attempt was when I was seven or eight and I didn't get very far. I found the style a bit heavy and the action a little too frightening, and abandoned it. When I picked it up again I think I was ten or eleven, and I was hopelessly lost in the best possible way. I followed Hazel, Fiver and their friends out of the Sandleford warren and never looked back.

Many books have moved me, but I think there are only a few (another important one being The Lord of the Rings) which on repeated readings have proved so emotionally overwhelming that they leave me physically drained. I read and re-read Watership Down with cold shivers, with the complete disappearance of the world around me, in tears. Again and again I seemed to find myself physically in the midst of scenes - 'racing through the ochre light' of a thunderstorm ahead of a murderous gang of thugs, trying to save my friend from the deadly snare, staring awestruck at the enormous, silent movement of clouds over the downs. I have finished it and started it again immediately. I have read it several times in a year, although not for quite a few years, I admit. Despite that, its words and images are always within me. My visualisations of the book play through my head sometimes, or I hear the words, or read them behind my eyes.

Watership Down can be read as a really great adventure story blending the fantasy of anthropomorphic animals and their society with accurate details about the natural life of the rabbits and the English countryside they move through. It also has elements of allegory, particularly about the dangers of totalitarian rule. I have, however, read many beautifully written adventure stories, or allegories about fascism (I was even younger when I read Orwell's Animal Farm). What makes Watership Down unique is the way it subtly draws the reader into a literary world. It contains so many literary references that reading it is a remarkable education.

The book is famous for its epigraphs at the start of each chapter, which range from Xenophon to the Bible to Joseph Campbell to Jane Austen to Dostoevsky to WH Auden - and many others. In subsequent years, every time I have come across one of these quotations within the work of literature it was taken from, I feel a kind of time-shock and I am in Watership Down again. I discovered the World War II poet Sidney Keyes through one of these epigraphs, and he has become one of my favourites. Robinson Jeffers' poem 'Hurt Hawks' also came to me in this way. But the epigraphs are far from being the only references. Within the text itself, Richard Adams compares the adventures of the rabbits to those of Odysseus. The poem recited by Silverweed, the eerie rabbit-poet who appears in one of the book's most sinister passages, contains the phrase 'the heart of light, the silence', which is a quotation from TS Eliot's The Waste Land. (The blunt Bigwig refers to Silverweed as 'that lop-eared nitwit of a poet'.) There are glancing references to Sherlock Holmes and Robin Hood, to 'Everyone Sang' by Siegfried Sassoon, to the Psalms, and more.

Watership Down has thus been a kind of slow-release of literature into my bloodstream throughout my life. I have finally realised that this, more than anything else, has made it so important to me. It has created echoes everywhere and has accustomed me to walking through a world where I see and hear literature in everything. It seems that this is how Richard Adams saw the world, or at least how he wanted his readers to see it. I am used to carrying quotations and stories and references and poems with me wherever I go, seeing and hearing them everywhere. And because of this book, I know that it's ok to do so. Some of us see the world in this way, and it enriches us. It makes life a little easier and a little more beautiful. It helps us to understand the interconnectedness of things, to see cause and effect, and to act with compassion and understanding. It shows me that understanding my connections to literature is a way of understanding connections to the world around me.

I don't think Watership Down, which first appeared in 1972, would be published now. If it were, it would be in a massively butchered form. The style would not pass an editorial team today. It would be viewed as too dense and difficult, too prescriptive of the pantheon of literature, too paternalistic. Most books aimed at adults today don't have a tenth of the complexity and beauty of Watership Down. But despite that complexity, it is also far less didactic than many books published now, which tend to hit the reader over the head with a dumbed-down style and a painfully obvious worldview. Richard Adams wrote this book at a time when authors still allowed their convictions and principles to imbue their writing, but not to overwhelm it. This is rare today, but it's good to know that so many people still love his work.

Goodbye and thank you, Richard Adams.

Sidney Keyes: 'Death and the Maiden' (Four Postures of Death)

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, The Spanish Dancer, 1888



'Death and the Maiden', the first poem in Sidney Keyes' Four Postures of Death sequence, is the poem from which Richard Adams took the first few lines for one of his epigraphs in Watership Down. So this is the poem which introduced me to Keyes, and it is an important part of the wonderful interwoven, nature-celebrating and literature-loving texture of Watership Down. For years before I even felt strongly impelled to look up the whole poem and to find out more about Sidney Keyes, I wondered what kind of poet had written such singular, unforgettable lines.



FOUR POSTURES OF DEATH (Sidney Keyes)


I

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN


He said 'Dance for me,' and he said,
'You are too beautiful for the wind
To pick at, or the sun to burn.' He said
'I'm a poor tattered thing, but not unkind
To the sad dancer and the dancing dead.'

So I smiled and a slow measure
Mastered my feet and I was happy then.
He said, 'My people are gentle as lilies
And in my house there are no men
To wring your young heart with a foolish pleasure.'

Because my boy had crossed me in a strange bed
I danced for him and was not afraid.
He said, 'You are too beautiful for any man
To finger; you shall stay a maid
For ever in my kingdom and be comforted.'

He said, 'You shall be my daughter and your feet move
In finer dances, maiden; and the hollow
Halls of my house shall flourish with your singing.'
He beckoned and I knew that I must follow
Into the kingdom of no love.

Wallace Stevens's 'A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts': When Rabbits Freak You Out

Watchful Rabbit, Hackney Road. London. Photo by Ewan Munro. Used under Creative Commons license



Anyone who doubts that rabbits can be scary need only watch Donnie Darko or read parts of Watership Down. Then there's Michael Sowa's painting Happy Easter. And also, this poem:


A RABBIT AS KING OF THE GHOSTS (Wallace Stevens)


My faithful blog readers may not be entirely surprised to hear of my ongoing astonishment that there is no epigraph from 'A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts' in Richard Adams's Watership Down. It seems so perfect a fit, in so many ways, that I can't understand how Richard Adams overlooked it. I can only assume that he couldn't fit it in, or that he was not aware of the poem when he wrote his famous novel.

The two Watership Down characters which this poem immediately reminds me of are the sinister Black Rabbit of Inlé, who is a sort of grim reaper in the rabbit cosmos, and also the megalomaniac General Woundwort. (In one passage, Bigwig dreams about Woundwort: "And over all, as big as a horse in a field, aware of all that passed from one end of the world to the other, brooded the gigantic figure of General Woundwort.") This comparison may be a bit simplistic, though. The rabbit in the poem is not necessarily a scary rabbit, or at least not an evil rabbit. It is Rabbit: primal and animal.

The poem has an edge of surreal humour which is not unfamiliar from reading Stevens's other poems. Why does the rabbit see itself growing bigger and bigger, "humped higher and higher, black as stone"? Why the vision of the cat slipping away like an insect - "the little green cat is a bug in the grass"? The imagery of red and green seem to me to suggest a prism, the breaking of light into component colours. This could be a reference to the differences between animal sight and human sight; also, perhaps, the shifting mood of the rabbit picking up on the subtle natural shifts around it.

Mainly the impression I carry away from this poem is that of another dimension which wild animals inhabit. This is a human viewer trying to describe a state of mind which humans do not experience. Anyone who has been fortunate enough to observe wild animals will know that through their trancelike, indifferent gaze they inhabit a world very different from our own. Perhaps, in a rabbit's mind and through its senses, there are moments when it feels itself becoming "a self that fills the four corners of night". Once again, Wallace Stevens is playing with shifts in perception.

On this link, you can find a video of actor Bill Murray reading another Stevens poem, 'The Planet on the Table', and 'A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts': http://www.openculture.com/2012/08/bill_murray_reads_wallace_stevens_poems.html

The Poetry of Sidney Keyes: "We Shall Never Forget Nor Escape You..."

Takrouna - Two Miles West of Enfidaville, in Tunisia during World War II, by Alex J Ingram. Used under IWM Non Commercial Licence



He said 'Dance for me,' and he said,
'You are too beautiful for the wind
To pick at, or the sun to burn.' He said
'I'm a poor tattered thing, but not unkind
To the sad dancer and the dancing dead.'

-Sidney Keyes, from Four Postures of Death


It is 70 years today since the death of Sidney Keyes, on 29 April 1943. He is considered one of Britain's most important World War II poets along with Keith Douglas and Alun Lewis. Aged only twenty, he died during his first battle of the war, in Tunisia.

It may not be a great surprise to readers of this blog that I discovered Sidney Keyes through Watership Down. The quotation above, from a poem sequence called Four Postures of Death, appears as the epigraph at the start of one of the book's chapters. What I find somewhat more mysterious is how I came to start reading his poetry, beyond those few lines. From the age of about ten, I read Watership Down so many times that the literary epigraphs, and the words of the book itself, are buried very deep inside me. However, even after I started using the internet (in 1995, I think) and after I started my university studies (in 1996, which gave me access to a whole new library) I don't recall looking for more information on Keyes, though I'm sure I could have.

I moved to Dublin in 2002, and from there to London in July 2005. My final 2004-2005 year in Dublin was largely spent trying to decide where I wanted to go next - it was only by April or May of 2005 that I was certain I wanted to go to London. In March, I visited London for a few days, partly to meet up with friends from Canada who were passing through. I was ill with flu for most of those few days, but fortunately I managed to see my friends, visit the amazing Caravaggio exhibition at the National Gallery, and see Derek Jacobi perform in the extraordinary revival of Schiller's Don Carlos.

I also went to Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road and bought Carcanet's edition of Sidney Keyes's Collected Poems. The mysteriousness of this is due to a "why then?" question in my mind which I can't resolve. I remember going to Foyles, and I remember that I specifically wanted to look for poetry by Sidney Keyes. But I had already been reading and buying poetry for years, and I had certainly visited Foyles before - so I don't know why I only went looking for Keyes in 2005. I can only assume that something told me that the time was now right.

I don't think I had previously been aware that Keyes was only twenty when he died, or even that he was a "war poet". It certainly put everything in context - the tragedy of his death, like the tragedy of other war deaths; and also the extent to which he was already a "finished" poet versus showing potential. I don't see Keyes as a "finished" poet in the way that Keith Douglas was, but they were plainly two very different people with very different styles, and this probably also has something to do with the difference between twenty-four (Douglas's age when he died) and twenty. Keyes really didn't have time to fully move beyond his influences, and their presence is a weighty one in his work: Yeats, Rilke, Eliot, Hölderlin and others. The translator Michael Meyer, a friend of Keyes who edited his work, wrote of Keyes not long after his death:


He had either inherited or been infected with a sense of guilt and evil destiny. The subject of pain and death fascinated him, and his duality had sharpened since his childhood. That inner chamber of his mind, where he held converse with the heroes of his imagination, had become unapproachable to human beings. It was inhabited only by ghosts and phantoms. Keyes had developed an acute historic sense which enabled him to recreate the very spirits of those who stirred his imagination; and the poet within him dwelt only among the mighty dead. Blake, Schiller, Wordsworth and, above all, Yeats and Rilke, were more intimate to him than the contemporary world. He was in the closest and most constant contact with their minds through their writing, and he preferred their company to that of the living. (from Memoir by Michael Meyer, reproduced in Carcanet's Collected Poems of Sidney Keyes)


There is certainly an inescapable morbidity to much of Keyes's work - I think I guessed as much as a child from those short lines from Four Postures of Death. One of his first significant poems, written when he was only sixteen, commemorates the death of his grandfather. His own death in April makes it that much more poignant:


April again, and it is a year again
Since you walked out and slammed the door
Leaving us tangled in your words. [...]

(from 'Elegy (In memoriam S.K.K.)')


He also wrote poems with titles such as 'Shall the Dead Return?', 'Schiller Dying' and 'An Early Death'. His most reproduced poem (though not his best, I think) is 'War Poet', which you can find under Excerpt on Carcanet's Sidney Keyes page. He was also very interested in themes of nature and visual art ('Pheasant', 'The Kestrels', 'Paul Klee'). His love poetry tends to be sadly lacking in optimism, either for himself or for his beloved. He wrote this poem for Milein Cosman, a young German artist who only saw him as a friend:


NOT CHOSEN (Sidney Keyes)

(For Milein)


Not chosen, but unsure protagonist
Of my father's folly and his father's greed,
I rake the acres that I should have sown
And burn the corn to save next season's seed.

Forgive my heavy hands their new precision
Learnt otherwise than we had wished or hoped;
Look not too closely as I move beside you -
My feet are shackled and my neck is roped.

I am the watcher in the narrow lane -
My tongue is schooled in every word of fear.
O take me back, but as you take remember
My love will bring you nothing but trouble, my dear.


He was partly a Romantic (he wrote a very beautiful elegy for William Wordsworth, another influence) and partly a Symbolist; in his fascinating poem 'The Anti-Symbolist', he comments wryly:


[...] The tall old woman
Eating her sandwiches on a pompous vault
And her dog who loves to play tag with tombstones,
Need never recur, yet link me with the drowned ones
Of earth, quite unforgettably.

(from 'The Anti-Symbolist')


I have to admit that the sensitive, death-preoccupied Keyes reminds me somewhat of Joy Division's Ian Curtis. It's hard not to see the deaths of these young men as inevitable, though the war poets such as Keyes and Douglas were really just caught up in very difficult, deathly times and influenced by the profoundly dark atmosphere of the world at that time.

For myself, I prefer Keith Douglas's work at this point in my life, but Keyes has had a long influence on me just through those few lines reproduced in Watership Down, and through several years of reading his work on and off since 2005. I go back to his poetry when I want something dark, thoughtful and highly symbolic, to admire his developing voice and to wonder how he might have gone on to transcend his influences if he hadn't died when he was just a boy. The words "We shall never forget nor escape you," from the 'Elegy' for his grandfather, are very appropriate.

I really recommend that anyone with an interest in Keyes look up the Carcanet Collected Poems, as it not only reproduces all the poems available to us, but also includes interesting commentaries by those who have studied his work closely or knew him personally. This review by Robert Richman of the Collected Poems is also excellent, and challenges both the ideas that he was a "war poet" and that he was obsessed with death: http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Ruined-squire-5645

I am happy to be able to conclude this entry with a long excerpt from 'The Foreign Gate'. Although considered a war poet, Keyes's own participation in the war was obviously short-lived, and I think he was influenced much more by the darkness of his times than by war as a literal theme. 'The Foreign Gate' is certainly about war, though, and the bringing together of the voices of those affected by and participating in war across the ages. There are lines in it which have echoed through me ever since I first read it.


from THE FOREIGN GATE (Sidney Keyes)


IV


The moon is a poor woman.
The moon returns to weep with us. The crosses
Burn raw and white upon the night's stiff banners.
The wooden crosses and the marble trees
Shrink from the foreign moon.
The iron gate glitters. Here the soldiers lie.
Fold up the flags, muffle the soldier's drum;
Silence the calling fife. O drape
The soldier's drum with heavy crêpe;
With mourning weeds muffle the soldier's girl.
It's a long way and a long march
To the returning moon and to the soil
No time at all.
                       O call
The soldier's glory by another name:
Shroud up the soldier's common shame
And drape the soldier's drum, but spare
The steel-caged brain, the feet that walk to war.

Once striding under a horsehair plume
Once beating the taut drums for war
The sunlight rang from brass and iron;
History was an angry play -
The boy grew tall and rode away;
The door hung slack; the pale girl wept
And cursed the company he kept.
And dumb men spoke
Through the glib mouths of smoke;
The servile learned to strike
The proud to shriek;
And strangled in their lovers' lips
The young fell short of glory in the sand
Raking for graves among the scattered sand;
The tattered flags strained at the wind
Scaring the thrifty kite, mocking the dead.
But muffle the soldier's drum, hide his pale head,
His face a spider's web of blood. O fold
The hands that grip a splintered gun.
                 The glittering gate
Baffles him still, his starvecrow soul. O drape
The soldier's drum and cry, who never dare
Defy the ironbound brain, the feet that walk to war.

The cold hand clenches. The stupid mouth
Writhes like a ripple. Now the field is full
Of noises and dead voices ...
                                          'My rags flap
Though the great flags are trampled ...'
                                                           'My mouth speaks
Terror and truth, instead of hard command.'
'Remember the torn lace, the fine coats slashed
With steel instead of velvet. Künersdorf
Fought in the shallow sand was my relief.'
'I rode to Naseby' ... 'And the barren land
Of Tannenberg drank me. Remember now
The grey and jointed corpses in the snow,
The struggle in the drift, the numb hands freezing
Into the bitter iron ...'
                                      'At Dunkirk I
Rolled in the shallows, and the living trod
Across me for a bridge ...'
                                            'Let me speak out
Against this sham of policy, for pain
Alone is true. I was a general
Who fought the cunning Africans, returned
Crowned with harsh laurel, frantically cheered
Through Roman streets. I spoke of fame and glory.
Women grabbed at my robe. Great poets praised me.
I died of cancer, screaming, in a year.'
'I fell on a black Spanish hillside
Under the thorn-hedge, fighting for a dream
That troubled me in Paris; vomited
My faith and courage out among the stones ...'
'I was a barb of light, a burning cross
Of wood and canvas, falling through the night.'
'I was shot down at morning, in a yard.'

The moon regards them without shame. The wind
Rises and twitters through the wreck of bone ...
                                            'It is so hard to be alone
Continually, watching the great stars march
Their circular unending route; sharp sand
Straying about the eyes, blinding the quick-eyed spirit.'
A soldier's death is hard;
There's no prescribed or easy word
For dissolution in the Army books.
The uniform of pain with pain put on is straiter
Than any lover's garment; yet the death
Of these is different, and their glory greater.
Once men, then moving figures on a map,
Patiently giving time and strength and vision
Even identity
Into the future's keeping;
Nourished on wounds and weeping
Faces and laughing flags and pointed laurels,
Their pain cries down the noise of poetry.

So muffle the soldier's drum, forget the battles;
Remember only fame's a way of living:
The writing may be greater than the speaking
And every death for something different
From time's compulsion, is a written word.
Whatever gift, it is the giving
Remains significant: whatever death
It is the dying matters.
                                              Emblematic
Bronze eagle or bright banner or carved name
Of fighting ancestor; these never pardon
The pain and sorrow. It is the dying pardons,
For something different from man or emblem.
Then drape the soldier's drum
And carry him down
Beyond the moon's inspection, and the noise
Of bands and banners and the striking sun.
Scatter the soldier's emblems and his fame:
Shroud up the shattered face, the empty name;
Speak out the word and drape the drum and spare
The captive brain, the feet that walk to war
The ironbound brain, the hand unskilled in war
The shrinking brain, sick of an inner war.



Permission to reproduce the poems was kindly given by David Higham Associates. Poems © Sidney Keyes and the Estate of Sidney Keyes, taken from Collected Poems of Sidney Keyes, published by Carcanet Press Limited.

Kim Moore's 'The Rabbit and the Moon': Revisiting Watership Down Yet Again

A couple of weeks ago, Inpress sponsored a Poetry Garden at London's Southbank, to celebrate their 10th anniversary. This included readings from various of their poets, but I totally failed to get out of bed in time (ie. I got up really, really, really late) and missed the readings. It was still pleasant to drop by, though, and see the tables of poetry books and the Poetry Bouquets, featuring real flowers adorned with quotations from Rilke (appropriately) and others.

I ended up buying Kim Moore's pamphlet If We Could Speak Like Wolves. It was quite prominently displayed as she'd been reading earlier, but the title drew my eye, and when I had a peek inside I realised that I was likely to enjoy it. I later got in touch with Moore and asked if I could reproduce one of the poems on my blog, which she kindly gave me permission to do.

Moore is from Barrow-in-Furness in Lancashire, and the imagery of many of the poems is distinctly northern. When I read 'Sometimes You Think of Bowness', I remembered my visit to Windermere and Bowness in the Lake District, some years ago. Most of that weekend the weather was good, and I was quite taken with the Lake District's beauty; a bit like north Wales, but softer. It rained when we went to Windermere and Bowness and a picture of that afternoon came back to me through these lines:


[...] but mostly you think of the people, drawn to water,

and how it looks in the rain, as if the very shops
are made of water, of ducking into a doorway
and carrying the smell of rain inside.


The title poem, 'If We Could Speak Like Wolves', has the muscular power of the creatures it describes:


[...] if a mistake could be followed
by instant retribution and end with you
rolling over to expose the stubble and grace
of your throat [...]


It builds and builds to the payoff at the end; this is not just a stunning portrait of wild animals, but a picture of a relationship "more simple than marriage." The poem works as a kind of slanted nature poem, but the final lines make the reader see it all in a new light.

I loved 'The Wolf' as well, which populates the reader's mind with dark, archetypal images from what seems to be a particularly sinister lost fairytale. 'The Ferryman' goes back to the figure of Charon, who has been much written about, but I found the fusion of modern and mythological imagery especially strong; the dead "sit on chair-shaped rocks,/as if they can still feel the shunt/of the tube", and some carry mobile phones. Again, the ending skilfully calls everything which has led up into it into question, and makes the revisiting of this ancient theme more than worthwhile.

Inevitably, I really loved 'The Rabbit and the Moon'. Kim Moore said she was very pleased I had picked up on the fact that the imagery was drawn from Watership Down; my old obsession, how could I not spot it immediately? She'd been drawn to the cartoon especially, as a child, as I was to the book. This poem weaves in the book's themes beautifully, almost as a travelogue with perspective shifting from humans to animals.

(The painting featured on this entry is, of course, Dürer's famous image. I know that it is actually a hare, but I had it in my mind to go along with this post and it wouldn't go away.)

You can purchase the pamphlet on this link, from The Poetry Business: http://www.poetrybusiness.co.uk/shop/792/583/If-We-Could-Speak-Like-Wolves-Kim-Moore



THE RABBIT AND THE MOON (Kim Moore)


Let me tell you the story of a high, lonely place
where sight and sound carry with the pylon
that gives its shadow to the hill, and the farm
many fields away, and the long straight road.

A bird calls kehaar, kehaar to the moon
and trains are falling, falling into the night.
The black rabbit waits outside the caravan
and come morning, the booted feet of gulls

will be telling us to leave, but if we stay,
the dogs will lie like rugs at our feet.
Somewhere, there are other rabbits, and a river
to sail away on. Somewhere, there's a boat.


Poem © Kim Moore, 2012. Used by permission.

'Hurt Hawks': Robinson Jeffers By Way of Watership Down

Hawk eye photo by Jurvetson (flickr)



Over the years, and especially from about ages 7 to 20, there have been certain authors, works and characters which have been especially formative in my life. One of these was Watership Down, which I have already mentioned here and there in this blog. I think I was ten or eleven when I first read it, though I remember an abortive attempt a few years earlier, when I was really a bit too young and I think my mother had brought it home from the library for my older brother to read.

Watership Down was significant for me in a good many ways. It reinforced my love for nature, animals and talking animal books (a genre which seems to have gone significantly out of fashion - but for some years it was almost the only kind of book I wanted to read). It is one of the most English of books - if I remember correctly, Richard Adams based the characters partly on his friends during his time in the military - and it increased my fascination with all things English. It was also just an exciting, moving, funny, passionately written book which inevitably appealed to a sensitive child with a vivid imagination.

The book also features an epigraph at the start of every chapter, taken from world literature, and giving just a hint of what is to come in that chapter. These vary widely - from Shakespeare, the Bible, Jane Austen, Greek and Roman classics, Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces, The Wind In the Willows, and so on. It is in no way an exaggeration to say that I discovered a few writers that I really admire from these epigraphs. Sidney Keyes, one of the great World War II poets, is quoted at the start of one chapter, from his 'Four Postures of Death', and in recent years he has become a very significant poet for me. These phrases, like passages from the novel itself, have become a part of me and echo through me at many and various times in my life.

One of the epigraphs featured a quotation from 'Hurt Hawks' by American poet Robinson Jeffers:


HURT HAWKS (Robinson Jeffers)


It was in the chapter where Kehaar, the crazy gull, is found wounded and adopted by the Watership Down rabbits. (I'm honestly not sure if his accent was supposed to be Jamaican, or Polish, or what, but it wasn't all that politically correct.) The few lines of the poem made a deep impression on me. I don't even like birds that much, but I could just see everything in this poem. I could see the fearsome, pained glare of the wounded bird, the sense that death is encroaching.


He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,
The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.


I've now also read some of Robinson Jeffers' other poems. I think he is a bit out of fashion these days and in all honesty I do not see him becoming one of my favourite poets. He became most notorious for writing a long poem about incest, 'Tamar', and for a mode of thought called inhumanism. As far as I can tell, this posited that human beings are too indifferent to the beauty of the natural world and that their disappearance wouldn't be a great loss. (I admit that I may not have this quite right, but that's more or less how I understood it.) The great Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, who was a believer, wrote a very interesting poem, 'To Robinson Jeffers', in which he rejected Jeffers' inhumanism and deplored the "nakedness of elements" in a godless world, or at least a world in which God and humans could not have anything to do with each other.


Thin-lipped, blue-eyed, without grace or hope,
before God the Terrible, body of the world.
Prayers are not heard. Basalt and granite.
Above them, a bird of prey. The only beauty.


I'm not sure about Jeffers' beliefs - I have seen it suggested that he was a pantheist, but in any case, it seems pretty certain that he did not believe in a personal God. His vision of nature is indifferent to humanity, beautiful, stark and annihilating. In 'Hurt Hawks', the man does give release to the wounded hawk by killing him, but the bird's incandescent life force is still greater even as he dies:


[...] I gave him the lead gift in the twilight. What fell was relaxed,
Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

"O City city": T S Eliot's The Waste Land

T S Eliot and THE WASTE LAND at The Poetry Archive


This link will take you to an excellent T S Eliot page at The Poetry Archive, featuring biographical information, the entire text of The Waste Land (broken down into its various sections) and other poems including 'Journey of the Magi' and extracts from Four Quartets.

There is also an entire recording of Eliot reading The Waste Land. I have to admit, though, that I'd probably rather listen to Viggo Mortensen reading it on Faber's Waste Land app for iPad - if I had an iPad, and I'm probably not going to buy one just for that.

If you are reading this entry and have not yet read The Waste Land, I can't urge you too strongly to read it. Complex, yes, long, yes, intensely referential and rather confusing, yes. It is also a profound, beautiful, organic and skilfully integrated poem with some of the most resonant lines in all of English literature. The reader who sits with it and returns to it over the years will find that reading it is like swimming in the collective poetic unconscious.

I took the above picture near City Hall some months ago. Tonight, as I was thinking about writing this entry, it occurred to me that it would be a good illustration for Eliot's fragmented and layered vision of London in The Waste Land. A little later, I noticed that one of the London pages that I've "liked" on Facebook was featuring an almost identical photograph. It was one of those odd London moments that happen so constantly that they're almost a commonplace.

It's hard to walk around London, particularly the more historic areas, without having Waste Land moments. London is Unreal City, after all:


Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

(from 'Part I: The Burial of the Dead')


Of course, this is also Dante, one of the guardian spirits and governing principles of the poem. Dante saw the Inferno; Eliot saw London Bridge; I tend to see the outside of Victoria Station (and just possibly the inside). A couple of days ago I posted the following quotation from The Waste Land on my Facebook status - just because:


'This music crept by me upon the waters'
And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
O City city [...]

(from 'Part III: The Fire Sermon')


Last night I was on my way to the Globe Theatre to meet a friend for a Shakespeare/Globe event, decided that the easiest station to get out at was Mansion House on the District Line, stepped out of the station and found myself on Queen Victoria Street. I've been in the City many times, and nearby, but on Queen Victoria Street perhaps only once or twice before. It was another strange London moment, and a Waste Land moment.

I was reading The Waste Land today and came across these lines:


[...] I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

(from 'Part I: The Burial of the Dead')


I had a sudden flashback to Watership Down, for a great many years one of my favourite books, if not my favourite. I'd probably still count it as such, though I haven't read it for several years. I read it so many times particularly between the ages of about 12 and 18 that I have a lot of it very nearly memorized. I was fairly sure that "the heart of light, the silence" was echoed in one of the poems contained in the book. Sure enough:


O take me with you, dropping behind the woods,
Far away, to the heart of light, the silence.
For I am ready to give you my breath, my life,
The shining circle of the sun, the sun and the rabbit.

(from Watership Down)


I realised over the years that there are so many literary references - some of them only faint and glancing - in Watership Down that the pleasure of reading it is only increased by having a wide literary frame of reference. Reading The Waste Land is very similar. It both references - the Bible, Dante, the Grail Quest, Shakespeare, Verlaine, The Golden Bough, and many other sources and incidents - and is referred to. I have heard echoes of The Waste Land in so many of my favourite authors. As well as Richard Adams, I can think of Ursula Le Guin, Michael Ende, and Susan Cooper, among others. It is such an extraordinary and pervasive work that it seems to have seeped consciously or unconsciously into the works of countless writers. I am not sure that there is another modern poetic work to equal it in this respect or in its sheer catastrophic, fragmented, disorienting power. Although published in 1922, it is surely a suitable epitaph for the entire 20th century:


What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

(from 'Part I: The Burial of the Dead')

"A Size Larger Than Seeing": P K Page and West Coast Memories

AFTER RAIN (P K Page)

The above link will take you to P K Page's 'After Rain', a few of her other poems and some biographical information, from the University of Toronto Libraries website's section on Canadian poetry (http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/index.htm).

Victoria, on Vancouver Island, was a beautiful place to grow up. I didn't fully realise it until I left, and probably not even for a few years then. I regularly get people telling me that I'm crazy because I left British Columbia, and especially the Island, to live in London. Well - Londoners tell me I'm crazy; Islanders, when I go back home, remind me incessantly that it's the most beautiful place on earth and tell me how much I must miss it. I do miss it, of course; I miss fresh air, the ever-present ocean, the parks and flowers, some of the most striking scenery in the world (the Olympic Mountains painted across the horizon on the Strait of Juan de Fuca) - the list goes on. Also "of course", I had to leave eventually, and I am not sorry that I ended up in London. But I wish that I could go back more often, most importantly to see my family and friends. I took the above picture on a visit home this summer (June 2011).

Reading P K Page's poems brings back a flood of memories from Canada. I discovered her in a summer Canadian poetry class at university, and simultaneously discovered that contemporary poetry was quite a wonderful world. I remember doing a presentation on 'Cook's Mountains', a brilliant description of how language and names alter our perception: "instantly they altered to become/the sum of shape and name." I somewhat irrelevantly raised the point that images in the poem reminded me very much of a scene in Watership Down, but Doug Beardsley, the instructor and a poet in his own right, seemed to like it. And I remember being captivated by 'Stories of Snow', one of the greatest Canadian poems. Page was born in England but moved to Canada as a small child and lived there for most of her life, so she was certainly Canadian. However, she also lived with her diplomat husband in other countries including Australia and Brazil. 'Stories of Snow' beautifully describes how people with one set of experiences, or in one environment - in this case, the tropics - fill in their emotional landscape by dreaming of places that are very different. Although I'm not sure where Page lived when she wrote that poem, a friend pointed out to me that there was something very West Coast about these lines:


And stories of this kind are often told
in countries where great flowers bar the roads
with reds and blues which seal the route to snow...


Smug West Coasters do love it when the cherry blossoms, tulips and daffodils flower magnificently in the spring, and they can call their relatives out East, who are still snowbound.

I believe it was in 2000 when I went one evening to Victoria's James Bay Inn to hear P K Page read. My mother, also a fan, came with me. Page was a beautiful and stately lady - she would then have been about 85. I was one of a queue of people who politely lined up to ask her if she could read a particular poem. I told her how much my Canadian poetry class had loved 'Stories of Snow' and asked if she could read it, but sadly she didn't have a copy with her. I had also loved 'After Rain', so asked her if she could read that instead. When she got up to read her poems, she graciously but laughingly told us that she'd had to significantly rearrange her program because she'd had so many requests. I remember that she read 'Poor Bird', and the relish with which she delivered the line "Poor bird, he is obsessed!". And she did read 'After Rain'. I remember so vividly the turn of her head and the brightness of her eyes as she read: "O choir him, birds, and let him come to rest/within this beauty as one rests in love". Page died last year at the age of 93. I wish that she had made it to 100, as so many senior citizens living in Victoria do.

'After Rain' also reminds me of the West Coast simply on its own: a garden drowned in chlorophyll, and Page delighting in the lacy creations of the snails all over her cabbages. It is a wet climate, and the outdoors can drip seemingly for days after a day or six of heavy downpours. The poem's sharp but delicate imagery, its ornate but pure tone, are typical of Page's best work. The lines "Keep my heart a size/larger than seeing" have echoed in my mind for many years now.

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I realised that I didn't quite say what I wanted to say about Celan in my last entry, but I will probably have to return to him. It occurred to me that his abstract but extraordinarily precise images are somehow like electrodes placed on the reader's emotional centres, to stimulate wonder and fear and grief. Then, when I was tracing some more information about Celan, I found out that he underwent electroshock therapy for his severe depression. That was quite unsettling.

I also learned that Celan and P K Page were both born on November 23; Page in 1916, and Celan in 1920. It is strange to think that had he lived, I could potentially have met Celan, as I did Page. I am not sure if Celan influenced Page (more likely than the other way around, given his much greater fame), but I have thought that if his life had been less ravaged by tragedy, there might have been some more similarities between their work. There is something that seems to link them for me, as well as the coincidence of their birthdays; something in the images that they choose. They were certainly both in love with flowers, and birds, and images of minerals, and broken glass, and the changing perspective of the eye.