The Columbia History of British Poetry (148 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 581
Despite a strategic concession to the value of "seriousness" that religion reinforces, the poem is really an opportunistic deflation of sacral majesties. It differs from the more complex engagements of "Next, Please," whose character-in-voice is waiting in a ration queue. Speaking in lines politely filed, waiting for his proverbial ship to come in, he hears the call of the title, but notes drolly:
Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.
Unlike "Church Going," which opposes its blandly reasonable speaker to the mysteries, "Next, Please" allows its tide idiomthe whole order of civil normality that it invokesto tap into the dark backward and abysm of fate.
Such interactions between the vatic and prosaic were prepared for in a number of poems Larkin tried unsuccessfully to publish in the later 1940s (gathered in the book-length manuscript
In the Grip of Light
). In "Many Famous Feet Have Trod," for example, the gnomic, incantatory voice is moderated by a plonky pentameter, a homey decasyllabic that does not neutralize it, but rather grounds it in a kind of proverbial wisdom. Those "famous feet" have trod
Sublunary paths, and famous hands have weighed
The strength they have against the strength they need;
And famous lips interrogated God
Concerning franchise in eternity . . .
Behind this measure lies a force of critical intelligence articulated in Davie's 1957 poem, "Rejoinder to a Critic." just as the prophetic intensity of the apocalyptics partakes of the riot of recent history, emotional excess risks the catastrophes of the last war. "'Alas, alas, who's injured by my love?'" he quotes Donne to query, "And recent history answers: Half Japan!" At this moment of political and literary history, then, the one thing needful is a controlling of the time, a simple metrical regularity, and Davie offers this as the tonic measure: "Appear concerned only to make it scan!''
Davie's new metrical contract opens a middle way between social normality and imaginative intensity and so defines an area of common ground for poets normally regarded as antithetical talents. Geoffrey Hill, usually heard as a poet thriving in solitary defiance of his times,
 
Page 582
enters into the same compromises that characterized the work of Larkin and Davie. The fiction of "Holy Thursday" (1952), for example, leads the poet toward "the wolf's lair," emblematic of the dangerous precincts of apocalyptic poetry (Hill's title identifies a sacred location), while the taming of the beast in the final lines relies for its poetic credibility on the normalizing cadence, more interestingly varied but no less stabilizing than Larkin's or Davie's:
'I have been touched with that fire,
And have fronted the she-wolf's lair.
Lo, she lies gentle and innocent of desire
Who was my constant myth and terror.'
Similarly, in "The Bidden Guest" (1953), a regular iambic octosyllabic parcels out the blessings of the pentecostal inspiration, scanning and counterstressing the vatic inrush:
The starched unbending candles stir
As though a wind had caught their hair,
As though the surging of a host
Had charged the air of Pentecost.
With the movement poets Hill also shares a central, ramifying wariness about the morality of poetic engagement with the horrors of history. In "Eight Years After" Davie speaks for the conscience of his contemporarieswe might "have no stomach for atrocities," he concedes, but "we brook them better once they have been named." "To name,'' as Davie continues, "is to acknowledge," ultimately to make reasonable and acceptable, and so the one responsible strategy for engaging the unspeakable is to leave it unnamed, to evoke it in an art of extreme obliquity. These needs help to explain the broad appeal in the 1950s of the New Criticism, which allowed paradox and irony, those hallmarks of movement tone, to stand in place of the violent conflicts of history and nature.
If poetic appeasement is the one phobia of the decade, however, movement poets often avoid its dangers to a fault, settling for the most attenuated presentation of the world's torn body; more frequently, they choose not to engage at all, not to risk the accommodation. It is Hill who turns the anxiety of the age into the lasting art of the period, at once forcing the problem to critical mass and breaking through to unique solutions. In "Two Formal Elegies: For the Jews in Europe"
 
Page 583
(19551956) he echoes Davie, to begin with, noting how the "long death" of the last war, in being "documented," will be sanitized, made verbally "safe.'' In his radical definition, however, the problem goes to the roots of poetry, which "deceives with sweetness harshness," traducing the matter of sordid fact into the consonance of aesthetic form, thus making it not only acceptable but attractive.
The task is to find a music that replicates the brutality of history without abandoning a sense of the superior order of poetry, a tonic possibility that gives nothing away to the realist. These ambitions generate the distinctive textures of the poems he begins to write in 1955. Witness the studied ineloquence of the abrupt overture to "Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings":
For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores,
Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good,
To sound the constitution of just wars,
Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood.
A parallel extension of New Critical principles informs the early work of Ted Hughes, who is usually (and wrongly) seen as a poet wild and whirling as the moors of his native Yorkshire. The challenge and value of that critical sensibilityto densify the world's body in the physical body of language and thus subject it to the formal order of artinspires Hughes's imaginative vision as well as his technical practice in
The Hawk in the Rain
(1957). The title poem, for example, uses heavy alliteration to thicken the verbal texture and consolidate the material reality of words, while its fiction shows the poet straining toward the hawk's steady flighta point of supernal perfection, an overmastering formal control:
I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up
Hell after heel from the swallowing of the earth's mouth,
From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle
With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk
Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.
His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet . . .
The vantage of the hawk is associated more specifically with the advantage of art in other poems, as in "A Modest Proposal." Here two lovers, likened to two frenzied wolves in the wood, are recomposed and calmed at the sight of the great huntsman, depicted here in the lineaments of

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