The Columbia History of British Poetry (149 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 584
aesthetic concord. As "His embroidered / Cloak floats" by, the lovers may follow the model of "the two great-eyed greyhounds," who "leap like one, making delighted sounds."
Like Hill and, before him, Allen Tate, Hughes utters "the 'formal pledge of art against aimless power.'" These principles are pushed to visionary extreme in "The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar," which includes the (reputed) last words of the title figure in the epigraph: "'If I flinch from the pain of the burning, believe not the doctrine that I have preached.'" Like this witness's body, Hughes's own artifice attests to the powers of a transcendent art by containing the pain of history, subduing its primary violence to the higher order of arta poetry lined by the silence of its own constraint.
The skill and nerve needed to hold this New Critical balance are too often lost in
Hawk in the Rain
, which lapses frequently into sheer verbal sensationalism. The textured tensility of its best poems proves the norm rather than the exception in Hughes's second book,
Lupercal
(1960). His achievement finds precept and example in "To Paint a Water Lily," which develops a contrast between the exquisite flowerprecious as the verbal surfaces of his best verseand the submarine horrors, the elemental forces that Hughes both replicates and contains in the well-behaved body of his poetic language. Here the trim couplets convey a sense of immanent forceas a barrel of water charged with a million volts might show only the faintest rippling on the surface:
Now paint the long-necked lily-flower
Which, deep in both worlds, can be still
As a painting, trembling hardly at all
Though the dragonfly alight,
Whatever horror nudge her root.
The successes of
Lupercal
turn on acts of verbal restraint that suggest a psychological complex and interest of their own. The first two poems frame it. "Things Present" develops a comparison between a tramp's shelter, fabricated out of materials at hand, and the make-shift constructions of the poet, whose "hands" use words to "embody a now, erect a here"a homey version of the New Critic's verbal icon. But the lowly circumstances of the tramp's abode generate a compensatory fantasy''My sires had towers and great names, / . . . dreams / The tramp in the
 
Page 585
sodden ditch"and a similar fiction informs the second poem, "Everyman's Odyssey." Here Telemachus awaits his own noble forebear, who "arrives out of the bottom of the world" to avenge himself on "the beggars that brawl on my porch''; they will be "flung through the doors," the poet's diction promises exultantly, "with their bellies full of arrows." The parallel situations of the two poems suggest that the energies being repressed in Hughes's best art may well return to be revenged. The New Critical compact is being observed in
Lupercal
in a fashion equally charged and precarious.
No such doubts attend the technical masteries of Charles Tomlinson, who returns the New Critical emphasis on craft to its formative energies in Anglo-American modernism. If the movement poets shared at least partially in the spirit of early modernism, echoing the anti-Romantic exertions of T. E. Hulme, these affinities were realized only in the face of similar enemies. Despite Davie's (rejected) suggestion that Tomlinson be included in
New Lines
, this poet was alone from the start. On his own he discovered and drew upon the eclectic verve of radical modernism; painter as well as poet, he projected the possibility of a synthetic art, like the vorticists'. Its debts are acknowledged and its dividends promised already in "Poem" (1951):
Wakening with the window over fields
To the coin-clear harness-jingle as a float
Clips by, and each succeeding hoof fall, now remote,
Breaks clean and frost-sharp on the unstopped ear.
The allusion to Odysseus' stopping of his mariners' ears against the Sirens' song recalls Pound's evocation of the same myth in
Hugb Selwyn Mauberley
. That dangerous music is made safe here, for its sensuous acoustic has been rinsed and wrung clean by a visual stringency:
The hooves describe an arabesque on space,
A dotted line in sound that falls and rises
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And space vibrates, enlarges with the sound;
Though space is soundless, yet creates
From very soundlessness a ground
To counterstress the lilting hoof fall as it breaks.
Tomlinson directs his attentions to the dynamics and subtleties of sense perception. For him, the aesthetic object offers the sacramental occa-

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