The Forward Prizes 2012: Predictions

Tonight the results will be announced for the Forward Prizes (or Backward Prizes as they are now popularly called) for Best Collection, Best First Collection and Best Poem. I haven’t said anything about this up until now. The more I look at the poetry awards in the UK, the more I realise the whole thing is caught up in the poetry biz. Awards sometimes resemble ‘rewards’ or mutual back-slapping parties between judges and recipients. Maybe tonight will prove otherwise. ‘Outsider’ figures have won awards occasionally in the past and there is always that chance.

But predictions are always fun. The shortlists are here. I predict that John Burnside will win Best Collection. Sean O’Brien and David Harsent will both have a strong appeal for the judges, but I guess they may feel John Burnside’s time has come: he hasn’t won it before. Geoffrey Hill hasn’t won it before either, but he will no doubt divide the judges down the middle.

I predict that Rachael Boast will win Best First Collection, although I am particularly unsure of my guess in this category. Anything on the shortlist could win.

The Best Poem category contains two poems from Poetry Review (the editor is one of the judges, although there are five judges. Can't make the judging process easy, mind you), one from the London Review of Books, and one from Poetry London. I have only read Sharon Olds’s poem in the Best Poem category, but that won’t stop me having a guess. I predict Alan Jenkins will win.

I am not very good at guessing winners of anything, by the way, so don’t rush down to the bookies and place money on account of my tips.

*Edit: actually, my advice at the end was wrong. You should have gone to the bookies and invested your life-savings on my first two predictions - as John Burnside and Rachael Boast both won*

Poetry and Emotional Impact

Just spotted this curious review of Lavinia Greenlaw’s new collection, The Casual Perfect, in The Independent. Its curiosity isn’t altogether the reviewer’s fault. She’s obviously been given a maximum word count and 281 words is hardly sufficient to review a poetry collection with any real insight. It may even have been edited down by someone else to emphasise an attitude that might not have been prevalent in its original draft. Maybe. It’s impossible to tell. The attitude is represented by:

"There is some emotion to be gleaned from these cool, opaque poems."

So the reviewer is analysing the poems to glean emotion from them and largely isn’t succeeding. When she does glean some emotion from a poem, she writes:

"Nicely earthy, it contrasts with the cerebral tone of much of this collection."

Now, a poem’s emotional impact is one measure of a poem’s success. But it is hardly the only measure. We can enjoy poems because they turn our brains inside out, because they transform the way we’ve always looked at something, because their words sing in a way which isn’t merely clever but somehow invigorating, because they coolly hit the nail on the head, because they connect ideas and themes in ways we’d never before imagined, and so on and so on.

I have read some of The Casual Perfect and I think “cool” and “opaque” are both fair words to describe the poems I’ve read, but their payback doesn’t depend so much on a gleaning of emotion as a surrender to and engagement with mystery. Why demand emotional impact when a poem is offering something else entirely?

On Katharine Kilalea's 'Hennecker's Ditch'

One poem I didn’t write about in my review of The Best British Poetry 2011 was Hennecker’s Ditch by Katharine Kilalea, and perhaps that’s just as well, as Don Share has just posted a fascinating reading of it at the Carcanet New Poetries blog, a better way of reading it than I would have managed. The text of the poem is also at the link and, although it’s long, it’s well worth taking time to read it.

I read it a couple of times when going through the anthology and felt taken aback. I had read (indeed, had reviewed) her first collection, One Eye’d Leigh and had liked it a lot, but I didn’t remember it containing anything quite in this mould. It felt like a step forward rather than a repeat of what she’d already done. There was so much going on, so much that wasn’t obvious, that I mentally filed it under Go Back to Read Again Later. I now have done and am intrigued, as I often am, to reflect on why I can enjoy a poem when I don’t understand much of what’s actually happening in it. Each phrase is in itself entirely clear – nothing muggy or vague about them – and the syntax is relatively standard. But the poem doesn’t occupy a linear time-scheme and it took a few reads before details of the world it creates began to map themselves in my head. So what makes the poem so effective?

Partly it must be memorable lines and images (“the trees walk backwards into the dark”, “the washing machine shook so badly/ that a man asleep four floors down reached out to hold it”), partly the sound, rhythm and the music Don Share mentions. The language, with its shifting tones, is is never predictable – the first section alone contains the lyrical “pages of a book/whose words suddenly start to swim”, the informal “Wow. The rain”, the strange “Ickira trecketre stedenthal, said the train”, and the consciously poetic, “Dear Circus...the pain癡d months are coming for us”. Perhaps, also, it feels like I am being taken to a half-lit world and shown something beautiful, haunting, and intimate, and then I’m left there to build my associations at first hand – the dark, the many different kinds of light that emerge, the trees and coastline, the human relationship(s), the bath and water, the dog, the moon, the different winds, the bakery, the house and the surrounding houses and gardens, the curious addresses to the Circus. Some obscure poems send me to sleep. Nothing about them draws me in, but the world of Kilalea’s poem feels like a place I am happy to spend time in.

You can hear her read part of the poem here on YouTube (where it's called 'Dear Circus'). You can read the full poem online at the link above or on paper in New Poetries V or in The Best British Poetry 2011.

The Troubadour Poetry Prize 2011

I thought I’d bring the Troubadour Poetry Prize to your attention, if you don’t yet know about it. The deadline is 17 October, judges are Susan Wicks and David Harsent (who both read ALL the poems: no sifters). The first prize is £2500 and there are several other prizes. Full details and entry process is at the link. The entry fee is £5/€6/$8. Your fee, of course, (as well as paying the costs of holding the competition) supports future live poetry at the Troubadour – a good cause.

Review: The Best British Poetry 2011

I wasn’t sure whether I would like The Best British Poetry 2011. I know some of the poets in it and was fairly sure I would like their poems but I was more interested in what I’d think of the rest. I tended to avoid reading the British mainstream (until, of necessity, I had to engage with it through becoming Magma’s reviews editor) and much preferred to spend time with American and European poetry collections, along with a few Scottish favourites, and I had the fear that an anthology of British poems selected from magazines would contain too much bland and boring work.

I have to say that my eyes have been opened. I really enjoyed some poems in this anthology from writers I knew by name but had somehow bypassed. It’s certainly a positive introduction to contemporary writing in Britain – a far wider range of styles and schools (and both the famous and lesser known, both the established magazines and the new) than is customary in British publications. I will pay more attention in future. Poems that struck me (not counting those by my friends) included those by Emily Berry, Judy Brown, Fred D’Aguiar, Sasha Dugdale, Ian Duhig, Giles Goodland, Patrick McGuinness and Deryn Rees-Jones, and there were several others I much enjoyed. OK, there were also poems that struck me as pretty ordinary, but nowhere near as many as I had expected, and no one is ever going to like everything in such an anthology.

Fred D’Aguiar’s ‘The Rose of Toulouse’ got my attention with its opening section in which the streets are “not a scene for former slaves”:

Or their feisty descendants, wearing their life
Savings, nursing wounds from history, no track
Record in an ocean with bones for a library.

The poem is an evocation of French city life, into which is woven a subtext centring on the poet’s children and another one focusing on justice and domination in history. At the back of the anthology are 40 pages of short author biographies and a few paragraphs on the poets’ impetus for writing their poem. I noted from Fred D’Aguiar’s reflections that the poem seemed to me to be about more or less what he also thought it was about.

That wasn’t always the case. Sasha Dugdale’s ‘Shepherds’, according to its author, “is an elegy for the last dwellers on the [South] Downs, and a hymn of praise to the hills themselves.” Now that she mentions it, I do see how that makes sense. But I felt the poem centred on questions of religious faith. There’s an ambiguity at its heart – the Bible-carrying shepherds also read the earth’s Bible – the one written “in chalk, in rabbit droppings, and lady’s smock” which now has “no meaning for anyone, except the shepherds/ Who are gone.” The pastoral world of the Bible (both the literal one and the metaphorical Bible of the earth) is rendered unreadable in an urban age. That may be a statement of how the poet views the world, but the elegiac tone also suggests to me that something seems lost by this shift.

I found the variance between my own interpretations of poems and those proffered by the poets to be a source of considerable fascination. Both the writer’s and the reader’s ideas are admissible, of course, and a difference between them isn’t evidence of failure on either side. It may even point to a welcome complexity that the poem can’t be summed up in explanatory prose. Several poets expressed a discomfort about offering comment on their poem and I felt an initial scepticism at first glance, but I have been won over. It is simply interesting and doesn’t negate other readings. Now and again, I did realise that I hadn’t read the poem carefully enough and saw it with new eyes after reading the author’s thoughts. Sometimes, the comments were just a little pretentious..., but not as often as you might expect in an anthology of poets.

I am always happy when poets come across as unusual people and when Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch confessed (in her prose comment) that “lining objects up on tables has always fascinated me” and that she attended a “table etiquette course in Somerset three years ago,” I found new reason to trust her advice in her poem, ‘Table Manners’:

..........................Do not remove your shoes or
show any flesh. Tilt your soup’s light towards
her, like an invitation to swim. Sip
as though you’re working on it.

Perhaps not all of that will impress on a first date, but I hope someone puts it to the test. But remember the sting in the tail, that "cutlery is a code" and "ten to five means it's over." Don't say you haven't been warned. So, yes, there are more good things happening in British poetry than I had expected and The Best British Poetry 2011 will offer, to most readers, a number of welcome surprises and send them rounding up the back catalogue of at least a few of the featured poets.

The Best British Poetry 2011, ed Roddy Lumsden, is published by Salt, £7.99

Courtesy of Shiraz: Geoffrey Hill's Clavics - 1

It’s 10pm, my wife is out being an actress, my daughter is asleep. I have settled down with my laptop, a glass of Shiraz – an inordinately large glass – and a review copy of Geoffrey Hill’s Clavics, posted to me by Enitharmon Press. The collection is described in the dust jacket as “an elegiac sequence for William Lawes, the Royalist musician, killed at the Battle of Chester.” So we’re in the 17th century during the ill-fated reign of Charles I. It isn’t the first time I’ve picked up Clavics, which consists of 32 page-long poems, each in two fetchingly-shaped sections. I’ve read poems at random off and on for some time now. I recognise that certain names, phrases, and ideas slip from one poem to another and several long, coherent, note-taking reads are no doubt necessary to review it properly, but I am not going to review it properly. I am simply going to record a few impressions and I’m going to begin with the first poem. In future posts, I plan to say more. I am intrigued, for instance, by the relationship between the two sections of each poem which sometimes seems tenuous, and this is a question which (strangely?) no previous reviewers have addressed. How can they possibly not address that?! One good thing – in the course of writing this paragraph, the Shiraz, pretty rough at first, now tastes much smoother. This has ridiculous metaphorical possibilities when it comes to discussing a Hill collection, but I will refrain.

All this talk of Shiraz etc will no doubt have got rid of the Hill acolytes who swoon theatrically at every syllable he writes. Not serious enough, y’see. There are people who just can’t fathom why readers find Hill “difficult”. They know it all, are vastly more intelligent than ...well... anyone who suggests that there might be a few complexities to overcome when reading Hill. It is reassuring when they use Hill to assert their intellectual superiority without (of course) offering us the slightest proof of their unique understanding. I always enjoy that. Hill knows very well that he is difficult and thrives on the fact. Anyway, the Shiraz is going down nicely and I feel like raising a toast to Astraea, goddess of justice for whom this world was unendurable. Perhaps that owl with the mouse in its mouth, which adorns the cover of Clavics, was one reason why Zeus placed her within a constellation in the night sky. Cheers, Astraea, wherever in Virgo you are (according to that reliable source, Wikipedia, there is also a ‘La Vida es Sueno’ reference, as one of the characters in that play takes on the name ‘Astraea’ when in court. ‘La Vida Es Sueno’ features heavily in Hill’s ‘The Orchard of Syon’). We really need you down here, by the way, Astraea. And Hill also knows it:

Bring torch for Cabbalah brand new treatise
Numerology also makes much sense,
O Astraea!

Indeed. This is how poem 1 begins, so we’re in the realm of metaphysical digging. The Cabbalah is a way of understanding everything, more or less, although it has no agreed canon and can incorporate internal contradictions with aplomb, which is extremely handy for everyone. Hill adds to the mishmash and invokes the goddess who is watching from her starry haven. I read the invocation as angry, sarcastic. As such, I’m taking a rather different view of this poem to Lachlan Mackinnon in his now infamous “sheerest twaddle” review, where Astraea represents Elizabeth I. Hill is trying his best to get to the truth, to the centre of things, but he is locked into his tradition (as we all are, whether we recognise it or not), and moving things on from it is no easy task. He is unhappy with Astraea’s chilled distance and calls her a “bitch” in his typical politically-correct way. She may have been physically exalted but, in Hill’s eyes, she has returned “rich/ To the low threshold of contemplation”, which at least has given Hill the opportunity to prove himself, as ever, the undisputed master of spitting irony (even rhyming ‘bitch’, ‘ditch’ and ‘rich’ is supremely ironic). I should mention at this point that the poems all rhyme and are technically demanding, to put it mildly – plenty of lines with two (or sometimes one) accented beats. Try the form and see how far you get! Anyway, seeing as Astraea isn’t playing her full part, we’re left with the poet/artist/composer (I presume) as:

Her servile master subsisting on scraps
Keeping station
As one pursuing ethics perhaps.

Astraea seems to function as a pitiless form of Muse here, an object of devotion who nevertheless feeds the artist only on scraps. It is a particularly religious feeling, a severe Kierkegaardian sense of the utterly transcendent God who can barely be approached, yet must be obeyed humbly by e.g. the pursuit of ethics. Time to fill up my glass, although I note there is not enough left in the bottle to fill it up more than half.

The second section of the poem riffs on the writing process, partly through the metaphor of musical notation. It can be done with “care” (like prayer) or with “flair” (which I suspect is not so good). He makes reference to musical stress marks, also surely a mischievous allusion to the curious stress marks which adorn some of his poems in other books. If these are simply flair, mere affect:

Dump my clavic books in the mire
And yes bid me strut myself off a cliff.

No, don’t do that! I quite like Poem 1 and it’s obviously been written with a great deal of care (and flair too, I think, and just as well). Some readers will be saying, “But that’s quite an ‘easy’ poem, relatively speaking.” And I agree. It is highly compressed writing, a more radical compression than most poets would employ and this, combined with the tight rhyme and accentual scheme, necessitate a degree of odd phrasing and strange syntax, which make certain sections of the poem hard to make sense of – but not impossible. Later poems do present more formidable challenges.

A Few Odds And Ends

It’s been a strange few months. Not that anything obviously out of the ordinary has happened, but I’ve found myself busy at every turn. There are the usual things which make life busy, none of which are relevant to this blog, but on top of that several reviews had to be written and I found myself writing poems too. I thought I might have enough to draft a new manuscript. When I slotted them together, it turned out I had more than enough – to my considerable surprise. For some reason, I’d been feeling highly unproductive and every poem I tried to write was taking me ages to finish, but I suppose three years of writing adds up.

Then I got involved in writing a cento of a century of Scottish poetry, using 100 lines from Scottish poems, one from each of 100 poets, and fusing them together into something new. I probably don’t need to say that such an undertaking is liable to drive anyone mad. Looking back on it, it seems like I must have had a lot of fun, but I’m certain that wasn’t how I felt during the process of writing the thing.

I went to hardly anything at the Edinburgh Festival and have hardly been out anywhere since. I hardly read a blog post all summer. The poetic side of my life has been writing and revising poetry, along with a few reviews. I couldn’t think of anything to blog about, so I didn’t. Yesterday, I woke up buzzing with ideas for blog posts, so it seems a good time to start up again. Not that I have much more to say today.

It is a rainy Sunday afternoon and the forecast is for rain on each of the next five days. It is the 50th anniversary of my church and I am off to an event there tonight. I am looking forward to finding out how Kona Macphee and Sophie Cooke got on in their week in Lvov and I read a few Zbigniew Herbert poems last night in anticipation. I am listening to the Waterboys playing Yeats. I have just finished The Best British Poetry 2011 edited by Roddy Lumsden and enjoyed it – will say more later. I read the September issue of Poetry and enjoyed that too. I just wish we had a magazine of similar quality and range on this side of the Atlantic. I was pleased with the list of people elected to the Poetry Society board, and I hope they can make a difference. And I have perused a mountain of books sent for review in Magma – still trying in vain to narrow it down to 12. I could tell you what I had for breakfast but that would be pushing at the far margins of what this blog can contain.

Things That Happened When I Was In Turkey

Firstly, the death of Sam Hoare, the journalist who blew the whistle on the News of the World phone hacking scandal. It appears that his death was self-inflicted, according to police reports, but I believe investigations are still going on.

Secondly, the Poetry Society EGM. I had arranged my proxy vote before I left for Turkey. Since my return, I’ve been catching up with what happened. My jaw has dropped on several occasions. In a previous post, I asked whether the lack of transparency had been caused because either:

1. The Poetry Society had something to hide
2. The Poetry Society was beyond useless at public relations
3. The situation was much worse even than it seemed, so bad that things couldn’t possibly be made public [without severe embarrassment]

It now looks as though all three of these possibilities were accurate! What has happened has been much worse that I could have believed and several questions remain unanswered. The best (and most chilling) summary I have read has been that by George Szirtes. There is a petition to reinstate Judith Palmer as Director, which I have signed. Clearly, the PS needs to get back in line with what the Arts Council expected of it. Whether it can do this with the current board over the next couple of months is open to serious doubt. Also, the question of Poetry Review and of the Editor’s line management both clearly have to be resolved without delay, but I have no confidence in the current board to deal with these matters properly.

Thirdly, the death of Amy Winehouse. I feel sadder about this than some of my friends might expect. It is, of course, the death of a young person in circumstances common to many families and every one of those is a private grief and torment. But, in a more public sense, I feel sad because I don’t think Amy had reached her peak, in contrast, say, to Kurt Cobain – I doubt Kurt could have improved on the final two Nirvana albums if he’d lived to 100. Amy’s Back to Black, on the other hand, contained a few brilliant songs, showing immense talent, but also several fillers. She might have fulfilled her potential if she hadn’t fallen into bad company, bad drugs etc. We’ll never know now.

Fourthly, Norway was all over the Turkish TV channels, as elsewhere. Watching the reports in Turkish, not understanding a word but understanding the images all too well, was a sad and sobering experience.

Meltdown (2011): Poetry Society

Very funny satire on the Poetry Society's current woes. Not exactly the first attempt to do something with this film(!), but really well done.

Poetry Society: Wheelbarrow and Plums

I have been taking my customary July break from blogging (is it customary? Well, if not, it should be). I guess anyone wanting to keep up with the Poetry Society story can do so elsewhere, at Baroque in Hackney and Raw Light etc. A General Meeting has been called by the Poetry Society on 22nd July at 2pm, but it’s unclear whether the agenda will address members’ concerns expressed in the requisition (which did achieve far more than the required 10% of signatories to call for an EGM). The red wheelbarrow delivering the signatures was met with a gift of plums. But any attempt to get clarification results in a reply which says more or less nothing except that an agenda for the GM will be produced next week – typical of the way the Poetry Society board have managed this situation from the beginning. They act like politicians, full of evasions and anodyne language, unwilling to provide a direct answer to anything. But, like politicians, they are dependent on an electorate...

Quick Word on Moderator Controls

I’ve installed moderator controls, more as a precaution than anything else, as I’m out a lot at the moment. But I’ll continue to publish anything that isn’t nasty or libellous. Apologies to all readers for the inconvenience of comments not appearing instantly, but it’s only a temporary measure. Promise.

The Poetry Society Chaos Update

Since I first posted about the Chaos at the Poetry Society three weeks ago, quite a lot has happened. Or, rather, nothing has happened. Or, I’m not really sure. Katy’s article at Baroque in Hackney sums up pretty much all anyone knows about what’s going on. Three weeks ago, I made a low level plea to the Poetry Society, which now must seem humorous in an uncomfortable kind of way:

“...it becomes important to make some kind of statement. Not a bland statement which says nothing, but a statement which accurately and as fairly as possible tells the story...”

The Poetry Society has released two statements since, one of which said “business as usual”, and another which said, “moving forward”. Three possibilities suggest themselves to me from these statements:

1. The Poetry Society has something to hide
2. The Poetry Society is beyond useless at public relations
3. The situation is much worse even than it seems, so bad that things can’t possibly be made public

It’s hard to know which to go for. Of course, all or none could be true. I am impressed with Fiona Moore’s assessment of the situation from a public relations perspective. It won’t make happy reading for the Poetry Society, who ought to start listening before it’s too late. Into the vacuum has come a great deal of speculation, culminating yesterday with an article in the Daily Telegraph, which suggested the dispute was mainly about money. This explanation may have some truth, but it doesn’t add up. The Poetry Society received an increase in its grant from the Arts Council of England. The application must have been for specific purposes and must have been in accordance with its own stated aims and objectives. If people on the board, after receiving the grant, want to spend money on something different to what they’ve just received it for, they simply can’t do it. Unless they are “reinterpreting” what the application means, when it will still have to be generally in line with what ACE understood it to mean. This all smacks of politicking behind the scenes, people with opposing visions seeking dominance. The Telegraph suggests that ACE is becoming uneasy. If so (it is a big “if”), that’s not exactly great for staff morale, given that their jobs depend on this money, but I doubt ACE would want to pull out. I imagine the silence must be due to current sensitive negotiations between ACE and the Poetry Society and between different schools of thought within the society. Apparently there is a July deadline for a report on precisely how some of the funding will be used. That document should make interesting reading!

Lemn Sissay stepped in with a blog article a few days ago. I'm sure it's written with integrity and the best of intentions, but I also think it’s fair to say that he doesn’t really present a coherent argument. The main thrust of the article is to defend Fiona Sampson, editor of Poetry Review, the magazine of the Poetry Society. He feels that FS is being stitched up by people with a vested interest in her being removed. I guess there are a number of people who would like to see her booted out. I have no view on this, as I'm not a subcriber and haven't submitted anything for years. I think Fiona Sampson has offered the magazine strengths (translated work) and weaknesses (lack of range). But the extent of Fiona Sampson’s involvement in the current disputes is impossible to determine. Lemn Sissay says she has nothing to do with it. Other people say she is central to the arguments. People argue about these things on Facebook, on blogs, on newspaper comment sections, on the basis of facts which may not be facts. An entire discourse develops around happenings which may not have happened, figures which may not tell any story let alone a whole story, personalities which may be phantoms.

Charles Boyle summed it up well when he wrote:

I have no inside info; I don’t even have gossip. But what to me is a little bit interesting is that in the absence of hard fact, the speculation that fills the vacuum can become what a thing is about and start to influence what happens next.

Very true. But speculation requires a vacuum and the Poetry Society, in my opinion, is largely to blame for creating one. Its public statements have been evasive and cagey and the resulting speculation has led to a vast number of people joining the society simply to sign a petition calling for an EGM to get full answers. Some of the questions I have seen mooted for a potential EGM don’t seem quite adequate in that they can be answered ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and a few monosyllabic answers won’t tell us any more than the Poetry Society’s press releases. I reckon questions need to be open enough to require a thorough explanation.

I know Kate Clanchy initiated a call for names to call an EGM (around 340 are required, I believe), but I’m unsure whether that has now been derailed or not. (Actually, it's still on track. Katy EB writes in the comments, "Kate C is definitely still collecting names; anyone who wants to be on the list should email her at kateclanchy at gmail dot com. She has a barrister advising as to process and content of a possible EGM; email her for more information"). If anyone else is leading the call with an agenda set up and specific questions on the table (as required), I don’t know who it is. But I'm sure we'll find out sooner or later...

(incidentally, I don't mind comments on this, but please keep them from being abusive to individuals. I will delete comments which contain either abuse or libellous material)

Tennyson; In Memoriam - 10

Poem number 10 from In Memoriam continues the theme of the previous poem that the ship carrying Arthur Hallam’s body will make it back safely to England. Tennyson knows he would feel better if his friend were buried than if he should be lost at sea.

X

I hear the noise about thy keel;
I hear the bell struck in the night:
I see the cabin-window bright;
I see the sailor at the wheel.

Thou bring'st the sailor to his wife,
And travell'd men from foreign lands;
And letters unto trembling hands;
And, thy dark freight, a vanish'd life.

So bring him; we have idle dreams:
This look of quiet flatters thus
Our home-bred fancies. O to us,
The fools of habit, sweeter seems

To rest beneath the clover sod,
That takes the sunshine and the rains,
Or where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God;

Than if with thee the roaring wells
Should gulf him fathom-deep in brine;
And hands so often clasp'd in mine,
Should toss with tangle and with shells.

I don’t find this one of the stronger portions of In Memoriam, but it has its moments. The opening stanza with its repeated “I hear” and “I see” and end-stopped lines has rhetorical power and brings the scene right before the reader’s eyes and ears. The positive list in the second stanza closes with the idea that the ship is also carrying a “vanish’d life”, which is a great phrase – very moving.

I really like the third stanza. It’s not quite what I was expecting – idle dreams, home-bred fancies – a detour into the hearts and minds of those waiting for the ship, which continues in the ideas expressed in the closing stanzas. He wants Hallam to have a proper burial: the earth is fed with sunshine and rain, and the prayerful people are depicted as the hamlet where the chalice of God’s grapes is drained. There is nurture and peace compared to the “roaring wells” and “toss with tangle” of the final stanza’s sea. It may be possible to read this as a depiction of Tennyson's own emotional state. At the beginning, he's beset by anxiety, noise and turbulence, and his hope for a resting place for Hallam's body may reflect his own hope that a burial might bring about some comparable inner peace.

Tennyson; In Memoriam - 9

Tennyson imagines Arthur Hallam’s remains being carried home by ship from Italy. Poem 9 of In Memoriam is a ‘prayer’ (invoking the ship) that the remains will be carried safely. The poem shifts along fairly well itself, without mishap, until the final two stanzas in which it really takes off.

IX

Fair ship, that from the Italian shore
Sailest the placid ocean-plains
With my lost Arthur's loved remains,
Spread thy full wings, and waft him o'er.

So draw him home to those that mourn
In vain; a favourable speed
Ruffle thy mirror'd mast, and lead
Thro' prosperous floods his holy urn.

All night no ruder air perplex
Thy sliding keel, till Phosphor, bright
As our pure love, thro' early light
Shall glimmer on the dewy decks.

Sphere all your lights around, above;
Sleep, gentle heavens, before the prow;
Sleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now,
My friend, the brother of my love;

My Arthur, whom I shall not see
Till all my widow'd race be run;
Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me.

The penultimate stanza pleads the weather to be calm and still and then Tennyson uses some extraordinary language to describe loss in the context of two men whose friendship was platonic:

My friend, the brother of my love;

My Arthur, whom I shall not see
Till all my widow'd race be run;
Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me.

“The brother of my love”, “My Arthur”, “my widow’d race”, and then those final comparisons to his mother and brothers: Tennyson views himself as a wife who has lost her husband, the repetition of “my” from line to line building the intensity. It still seems extraordinary 200 years later and I guess it must have seemed extraordinary at the time. I wonder, when he first wrote “till all my widow’d race be run” or "more than my brothers are to me", if he ever thought, ‘I can’t write that!’ because that’s often the moment that lifts a poem out of the ordinary and soon-to-be-forgotten. As long as the poet doesn’t score it out which I suspect often happens.

Tennyson; In Memoriam - 8

Tennyson really took me by surprise in poem 8 of In Memoriam. I suspect most poets would have stopped after the third stanza feeling they’d done a decent job, but Tennyson wants more than just decent.

VIII

A happy lover who has come
To look on her that loves him well,
Who 'lights and rings the gateway bell,
And learns her gone and far from home;

He saddens, all the magic light
Dies off at once from bower and hall,
And all the place is dark, and all
The chambers emptied of delight:

So find I every pleasant spot
In which we two were wont to meet,
The field, the chamber, and the street,
For all is dark where thou art not.

Yet as that other, wandering there
In those deserted walks, may find
A flower beat with rain and wind,
Which once she foster'd up with care;

So seems it in my deep regret,
O my forsaken heart, with thee
And this poor flower of poesy
Which little cared for fades not yet.

But since it pleased a vanish'd eye,
I go to plant it on his tomb,
That if it can it there may bloom,
Or, dying, there at least may die.

The poem starts with him imagining a man visiting his lover and finding her absent. He’s very sad about this, as if all his expectations have been dashed. Her entire house, it seems, has been “emptied of delight”. Then comes the first terrific line at S3 L1:

So find I every pleasant spot

What’s good about that? Well, there’s the dramatic contrast between the lover’s temporary loss and Tennyson’s all-encompassing one, enacted in a single, simple line. And look at the rhythm! You could scan it as purely iambic, but each of the first four syllables has a heaviness about them, even the technically unstressed first and third syllables – “SO FIND/ I EVery... “ That’s the sound and rhythm of anguish.

That could have been the end of the poem at the end of that stanza: a strong expression of personal sorrow – “all is dark where thou art not.” But Tennyson isn’t content with a decent poem and he goes for broke. The action switches back to the absent woman from the first two stanzas. She is out walking and finds a flower “beat with rain and wind” she’d once taken care of. Tennyson finds in this a metaphor for how he feels about Arthur Hallam, his late friend, particularly in poetry. And the great lines mount up poem by poem:

...this poor flower of poesy
Which little cared for fades not yet.

We could stick that on our fridges or Facebook statuses and wear it as a badge of hope. But Tennyson still isn’t finished, but has saved the best lines for last. He will plant his poem-flower at Hallam’s tomb:

That if it can it there may bloom,
Or, dying, there at least may die.

Morrissey may have said that he was more Wilde than Keats or Yeats (in 'Cemetery Gates'), but he may not have been accurate in saying that and his famous lyrics from ‘There is a Light that Never Goes Out’ have at least one prototype here in Tennyson’s poem. The flower may die at his friend’s grave, which would at least be something. But, carefully placed only on the penultimate line, it also may bloom.

Tennyson; In Memoriam - 7

In poem 7 from Tennyson’s In Memoriam, I’m struck as much by the skilful manipulation of rhythm and metre as of anything else. The poem has Tennyson visit his late friend Arthur’s house by night, but of course he comes away feeling only his absence, made all the more acute by the busy, unaffected universe trundling along as usual.

VII

Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasp'd no more—
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

In the first stanza, Tennyson doesn’t reveal the precise nature of his syntax, which only becomes clear by line 2 of stanza 2. Each line in S1 begins with a heavy stress – a trochaic or spondaic foot – a rhetorical device we often use unconsciously when making an address. The first line of S2 then echoes the final words of S1, “a hand”, emphasising acutely that it can no longer be clasped. Then in S2 L2, we realise for certain that he is addressing the house, asking it to “behold me”.

Just imagine if Tennyson had been writing bad free verse (hard, I know)! He might have begun:

I stand by the dark house
in the long unlovely street
at doors where my heart used to beat
quickly, waiting for a hand

that can be clasped no more.
I cannot sleep...

Many contemporary poems, even some which are published in magazines, aren’t far away from that – dull prose, and that’s only with a few changes. Am I exaggerating? I don’t think so. The basic sense and narrative is all still there, but Tennyson’s rhetorical and emotional intensity has been ripped clean away. I write mainly free verse myself, of course, and it’s not free verse that’s the problem. I’m no formalist dinosaur. It’s all about recognising how poetry works and how important style, rhythm, music, manipulation of syntax, and...well... imagination are in making a memorable poem.

Tennyson imagines he is under the house’s gaze, a poor wretch creeping to the door of absence. The first line of S3 is terrific – “He is not here; but far away”, which sounds roughly what we might expect, but the following line removes even that far-off consolation:

He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again

The noise of life is far away, not Arthur Hallam. Tennyson did of course believe in an afterlife, but “far away” wasn’t far enough for that idea.

I’d probably feel the same about the ending as I did with the previous poem. How do modern readers feel about those adjectives being used to create emotional mood – “ghastly”, “bald”, “blank”? Put it this way, contemporary poetic sensibility would ask anyone producing a poem like this not to rely on them – show, don’t tell; avoid possible sentimentality. And yet, the final line is beautifully crafted. The rhythm is broken up by the two unstressed syllables at the beginning, then three stressed, one unstressed and then two stressed to finish. But yes, it can all scan as iambic tetrameter. The interrupted rhythm, the strong –b alliteration, combined with the different vowel sounds slows the pace of the line right down. It’s as heavy as the day is about to become. Form mirrors sense.

Tennyson; In Memoriam - 6

In poem number 6 from In Memoriam, Tennyson’s target is the clich矇d words of comfort offered by friends –“other friends remain” and “Loss is common to the race”. His rebuttal is that death being commonplace makes his loss harder, not easier. He illustrates this by various people waiting for a loved one to arrive home, who dies even as they wait. The weight of loss keeps increasing and gives the poet no sense of ease at all. In fact, the point is that his specific loss is not common – it is specific. His friend, Arthur Hallam, has died and that particular person is irreplaceable.

VI

One writes, that `Other friends remain,'
That `Loss is common to the race'—
And common is the commonplace,
And vacant chaff well meant for grain.

That loss is common would not make
My own less bitter, rather more:
Too common! Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break.

O father, wheresoe'er thou be,
Who pledgest now thy gallant son;
A shot, ere half thy draught be done,
Hath still'd the life that beat from thee.

O mother, praying God will save
Thy sailor,—while thy head is bow'd,
His heavy-shotted hammock-shroud
Drops in his vast and wandering grave.

Ye know no more than I who wrought
At that last hour to please him well;
Who mused on all I had to tell,
And something written, something thought;

Expecting still his advent home;
And ever met him on his way
With wishes, thinking, `here to-day,'
Or `here to-morrow will he come.'

O somewhere, meek, unconscious dove,
That sittest ranging golden hair;
And glad to find thyself so fair,
Poor child, that waitest for thy love!

For now her father's chimney glows
In expectation of a guest;
And thinking `this will please him best,'
She takes a riband or a rose;

For he will see them on to-night;
And with the thought her colour burns;
And, having left the glass, she turns
Once more to set a ringlet right;

And, even when she turn'd, the curse
Had fallen, and her future Lord
Was drown'd in passing thro' the ford,
Or kill'd in falling from his horse.

O what to her shall be the end?
And what to me remains of good?
To her, perpetual maidenhood,
And unto me no second friend.

The biggest success of this poem is to situate death right in the middle of life. It overshadows everything in Tennyson’s world. A young woman at the mirror turns “to set a ringlet right,” to look at her best for the man she loves, a small gesture that seems insignificant, but this is the very moment in which her lover dies. This cycle is repeated constantly – the lover may have died by drowning or falling from his horse, or whatever, Tennyson satirises the idea that the specifics are irrelevant – it’s all very common, the same kind of thing happening all the time. Except that to the woman, it is anything but common.

The ending is intriguing. Tennyson asks what remains for the young woman and for the poet in his loss:

To her, perpetual maidenhood,
And unto me no second friend.

This refers back to the first line in the poem. Tennyson denies the clich矇. I find it interesting to consider that it would be impossible to finish a poem in that way today. Most contemporary readers would view this as melodramatic, over-the-top, an example of exaggerated emotion – why should the maidenhood be “perpetual”? And, of course, he will make new friends! But perhaps this attitude denies the very real fears and feelings people have, feelings we’d rather dress up in more sophisticated garb. Apparently Tennyson could hardly bear to read this poem to others, as it made him too upset. I wonder if 19th century readers would have found the poem melodramatic or if they would have regarded it as nailing the emotion with complete accuracy?

Tennyson; In Memoriam - 5

Well, if I was slightly underwhelmed with section 4 of In Memoriam yesterday, it’s all made up for today in section 5. In twelve lines, Tennyson gets more into a single poem than some manage in an entire collection. For anyone who thinks that 20th century theorists invented a distrust in words and their ability to convey information, this 19th century poem is for you:

V

I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.

In the first stanza, the rhyme between “reveal” and “conceal” on either side of a line-break emphasises the limitations of words and, in this case, poems. At the same time, the poem virtually disproves its own thesis! Which is, perhaps, what Tennyson most hoped for.

He sees a therapeutic use for poetry (“the sad mechanic exercise”). It numbs the pain of grief. Perhaps Tennyson wrote far more than he published at this time – I’m not sure – because this poem is as far from a “mechanic exercise” as it’s possible to get. The third stanza is surprising and astonishing. He carries on the exercise, so wrapping himself in words, which are like clothes (“weeds”, not of the garden variety!) keeping cold out. And then the fantastic close:

But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.

The “large” grief is himself, the one wrapped around with words. His entire being is depicted as grief-shaped (what an amazing image), although it is “given in outline and no more.” But the emotional impact of these lines is so great that we do indeed get more than an outline, more than could be humanly expressed if we could indeed see the real Tennyson going about his life before our eyes. His own doubts over the efficacy of poems to convey accurately an emotional state has become a catalyst for doing so.

True, his “measured words” conceal that real, physical sense of his being and consciousness that only he can know. But they reveal, across the centuries, something more than we could have known otherwise. Such is (great) poetry.

Tennyson; In Memoriam - 4

Poem 4 of In Memoriam. Well, it’s OK, but I’m not quite as impressed with it as with the first three and, consequently, I have less to say about it. Tomorrow’s poem, however, is a cracker, so don’t give up just yet.

IV

To Sleep I give my powers away;
My will is bondsman to the dark;
I sit within a helmless bark,
And with my heart I muse and say:

O heart, how fares it with thee now,
That thou should'st fail from thy desire,
Who scarcely darest to inquire,
'What is it makes me beat so low?'

Something it is which thou hast lost,
Some pleasure from thine early years.
Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears,
That grief hath shaken into frost!

Such clouds of nameless trouble cross
All night below the darken'd eyes;
With morning wakes the will, and cries,
'Thou shalt not be the fool of loss.'

Tennyson’s theme is sleep. The first two stanzas seem to connect with poem 2 about the yew tree which ends, “I seem to fail from out my blood/ And grow incorporate into thee.” In poem 4, he is sitting “within a helmless bark” and asks his heart how it feels that it “should'st fail from thy desire”. But while in poem 2 there was almost a longing for a constant raw grief, as opposed to real life’s uncertain moods, here, sleep mutes his sorrow. He can’t even quite be certain of what’s making him feel so sad. I suppose the counterpoint is that sleep offers no escape. The grief finds him even there, albeit in muted form, and he has no control over it. Morning brings full-blown sorrow, but at least it “wakes the will”. The poem suggests that sheer force of will could be what gets him through all this.

I love the line, “My will is bondsman to the dark.” And the idea that clouds are continually passing all night, somewhere between his eyes and brain, is a fantastic conception. But I found the poem less interesting than the others so far, both at the level of meaning and ideas and at the level of diction and great lines. I’m also puzzled by lines 3 and 4 of the third stanza – the grief that shakes “chilling tears” into frost (?), although I can see why breaking the vase might relieve the tension.

Tennyson; In Memoriam - 3

Tennyson has just said it might be preferable to live with constant sorrow than life’s more typical unpredictability. In the third poem from In Memoriam, he more or less says the opposite which, in itself, shows how unpredictable living with grief can be.

Sorrow is personified in this poem, each line in the opening stanza is an invocation from the poet to ‘her’, and begins with a heavy rhetorical spondee:

III

O Sorrow, cruel fellowship,
O Priestess in the vaults of Death,
O sweet and bitter in a breath,
What whispers from thy lying lip?

'The stars,' she whispers, `blindly run;
A web is wov'n across the sky;
From out waste places comes a cry,
And murmurs from the dying sun:

'And all the phantom, Nature, stands—
With all the music in her tone,
A hollow echo of my own,—
A hollow form with empty hands.'

And shall I take a thing so blind,
Embrace her as my natural good;
Or crush her, like a vice of blood,
Upon the threshold of the mind?

Sorrow is ambiguous to the core – “cruel fellowship”, “Priestess...Death”, “sweet and bitter”. He has already said in the first poem that, without feeling this sorrow, his love could not have been real and passionate. But its ambiguity makes it difficult to trust and Tennyson’s mood swings against it.

Sorrow herself invokes a purposeless, blind, decaying universe, a mere “phantom” whose music is a hollow echo of Sorrow’s own and, just to rub the point home, she repeats the word “hollow” in S3 L4. The world is infused with sadness, but even it is just a ghost evidencing Sorrow’s substantive reality. I really like the third stanza here: the parallelism of the repeated “all the...” in the first two lines – encompassing everything in the universe – with “hollow” in the next two, the real state of things whatever their appearance, according to Sorrow.

Tennyson can’t embrace sorrow as a good thing in the grief process. Rather he feels he ought to crush her. Grief counsellors would screw up their faces in dismay at this poem, as those who bottle up their grief in this way are only storing up further problems for themselves, but Tennyson isn’t afraid to say the incorrect thing. Nor is he the least bit worried about contradicting himself. He describes a feeling. 'In Memoriam' isn’t a step-by-step therapy session but a poem which opens its doors even to thoughts even the poet may have preferred not to have.

The phrase “vice of blood” from the fourth stanza is striking, as if he regards sorrow as a kind of poison or infection. He won’t allow it entry but kills it off at the mind’s threshold. It does seem a curious, but interesting, way to describe his attitude. People who lament that modern poems don’t always say things straightforwardly ought to read Tennyson to see that good poetry has never stuck to the straightforward path.