I turned 61 today - or yesterday. I live in the Far East, but my thoughts are somewhere in North America. A friend wished me a happy birthday and then said "come home". I will, I will. But first there's this rough patch to get through, this unnecessary detour. It's unavoidable, can't be helped. But for now, time to reflect on my progress.
Poets always put a patina on it, getting old, I mean. Like découpage. Two poets I have long admired talked about the common perceptions of age, without really feeling them in themselves. Thomas Hardy saw how his spirit, still willing, had to contend with his flesh, which had altered:
I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, ‘Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!’
For then I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.
But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.
Hardy felt betrayed, by the changes in others and the changes in his physical appearance. But the incongruity of his still youthful passion against the image in his mirror was too much for him, too absurd to accept. Only one can be true, but which one?
Philip Larkin, who was a great admirer of Hardy, felt deeply the difference between his life and the lives of others; a disconnect between what was expected of his life and what his life had amounted to. Not by regret, but by the refusal of others, people he once knew, to imagine their own lives otherwise.
‘Dockery was junior to you,
Wasn’t he?’ said the Dean. ‘His son’s here now.’
Death-suited, visitant, I nod. ‘And do
You keep in touch with—’ Or remember how
Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight
We used to stand before that desk, to give
‘Our version’ of ‘these incidents last night’?
I try the door of where I used to live:
Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.
A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.
Canal and clouds and colleges subside
Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord,
Anyone up today must have been born
In ’43, when I was twenty-one.
If he was younger, did he get this son
At nineteen, twenty? Was he that withdrawn
High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms
With Cartwright who was killed? Well, it just shows
How much ... How little ... Yawning, I suppose
I fell asleep, waking at the fumes
And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,
And ate an awful pie, and walked along
The platform to its end to see the ranged
Joining and parting lines reflect a strong
Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife,
No house or land still seemed quite natural.
Only a numbness registered the shock
Of finding out how much had gone of life,
How widely from the others. Dockery, now:
Only nineteen, he must have taken stock
Of what he wanted, and been capable
Of ... No, that’s not the difference: rather, how
Convinced he was he should be added to!
Why did he think adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution. Where do these
Innate assumptions come from? Not from what
We think truest, or most want to do:
Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They’re more a style
Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,
Suddenly they harden into all we’ve got
And how we got it; looked back on, they rear
Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying
For Dockery a son, for me nothing,
Nothing with all a son’s harsh patronage.
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.
Ah, but Larkin was afraid of dying - not so much death as the moment when he would die. He anticipated it, just as Shakespeare had in Sonnet 73:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.
And Shakespeare died at 52! "Death is but the shifting wind that fills the living sail." I wrote these words when I was 20. How did I know it at 20? "The idea is to die young as late as possible," wrote the anthropologist Ashley Montagu. And Oscar Wilde's lovely line, "The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young." And poor Oscar was dead at 46!
I feel myself to be exactly the same at 61 as I was at 20 - as I was at 10! One's age is unimportant.
I first heard of Alan Bennett when he was one of the quartet of wits (Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller) who made up Beyond the Fringe. Only later I learned of his renown as a playwright. In 2014, Faber & Faber published a book of his called Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin, An Anthology. Bennett's six poets are Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, John Betjeman, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and Philip Larkin. It was clearly a personal selection, rather idiosyncratic, and limited to Brits, and not trying to be scholarly or comprehensive or even prescriptive.
While it's tempting to quibble with Bennett's choices (Louis MacNeice?), if I were to compile such an anthology, I would keep two of his poets (Hardy and Larkin) and add four of my own choosing: Robert Frost, Robert Graves, Wallace Stevens, and Elizabeth Bishop. I will devote a piece to each of them in the coming weeks.
Randall Jarrell claimed that poets are people who run outdoors during thunderstorms hoping to get hit by lightning. If they are struck a few times in their lives they are genuine poets. If they are struck several times they are great. Everyone interested in poetry has his or her own way of telling the real thing from the fake. Housman told a friend that he couldn't think of a poem while he was shaving because it made his whiskers stand on end and he couldn't get a good shave. Some invoke the hairs on their forearms or on the back of their necks standing edgewise. It is always something like this - an uncanny feeling, like terror, comes over you. Robert Graves went so far as to identify it as the unmistakable presence of his White Goddess.
1. Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928)
Though he studied to be an architect, Thomas Hardy was a lifelong poet. He even dictated a poem to his second wife from his deathbed. He wrote novels to make a living, but he didn't publish his first book of poems, Wessex Poems and Other Verses, until 1898, after the outraged reception of his last two novels, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure made him decide to give up novel writing altogether. He was clearly in the habit of writing poetry, of finding occasions to put thoughts and feelings down in verse. That he maintained, over more than sixty years of writing poems, such a high degree of quality is amazing in itself.
But it is commonly believed that his work took on a higher quality and a greater sense urgency upon the death of his first wife, Emma. He then wrote, in Poems of 1912-13, a series of poems that are imbued with a powerful grief and regret. His marriage to Emma, which lasted thirty-eight years, was marked by an estrangement before her death, which caused Hardy greater pain when he looked back on the course of his love for her. Here is a poem from that period.
THE VOICE
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Can it be you that I hear?
Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.
December 1912.
Hardy isn't telling us a ghost story, as in Wuthering Heights. He is haunted by thoughts of his wife, that make him feel her presence, but he is writing about the dead. He feels that her death is a direct challenge to his continued existence. Emma's death was not Hardy's first encounter with death, but it made him think about his own death for the first time, which hers seemed to directly foretell. In several poems, Hardy is reminded, again and again, that his place is with her in the grave. In another poem from the period, "Something Tapped," Hardy hears a tapping at the window and thinks that he sees "my weary Belovèd's face," berating him that she has waited in vain for so long for him to join her in the grave. Some have mistaken this concentration on death as "gothic" - a term that Hardy knew from his studies in English architecture, not as a popular genre of horror fiction. Again, Hardy wrote of someone he knew who had died and with whose absence he was obsessed. But unlike Miss Kenton in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, we never have to guess whether someone is seeing ghosts or is merely hallucinating. Emma is unambiguously dead. The voice that Hardy hears, the visions he sees, the presence he feels, are all in his mind - and he cannot get them out.
There is a haiku by the 17th century poet Basho that captures the same tone:
The piercing chill I feel/ my dead wife’s comb, in our bedroom/ under my heel
There is the physical pain of the comb's "teeth" digging into his foot, and the existential pain of the sudden remembrance of his wife.
Hardy's plans to join Emma after his death were frustrated by well-meaning people who wanted to secure his legacy. He had left instructions that his body should be placed beside Emma in Stinsford churchyard where she was buried. However, his executor insisted that Hardy be buried in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. A compromise was reached whereby Hardy's heart was removed from his body prior to cremation. The heart was buried with Emma, and his ashes enshrined in Westminster. While somewhat poetic, I somehow doubt that Hardy would've been satisfied with his executor's solution.
