The Columbia History of British Poetry (31 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 128
reminds her of the human mix of Kant, Hegel, dynamite, and cannon, in her heart she cries:
"I wish our brains were not so good,
  I wish our skulls were thicker,
I wish that Evolution could
  Have stopped a little quicker;
For oh, it was a happy plight,
  Of liberty and ease,
To be a simple Trilobite
  In the Silurian seas.
Lord Lytton had gone before her in cosmic interests but without her refinement and radiance of language and thought. Keen cerebration distinguishes her verse from the durable epitaph and other verses of her near contemporary, Robert Louis Stevenson: "Home is the sailor, home from the sea, / And the hunter home from the hill."
Edith Sitwell, in the next generation, employed a modernist aesthetic to ascribe seriousness to rhythmic language apart from meaning; even after darkening portions of
Façade
(1923) in keeping with darkened times, she described the poems of that entertainment (in the preface to her
Collected Poems
of 1968) as "
abstract
poemsthat is, they are patterns in sound." Erudition in her later poems could encompass ballad traits in ballad form, for example in a song written as if by Anne Boleyn, "At Cockcrow":
You'll hear my bone clack on your heart
  Your heart clack on my bone.
That sound once seemed the first sunrise:
  Now I must sleep alone.
Stevie Smith, beginning later and from a lower rung, managed to make religious and social uncertainty much more personal than the cosmic anxiety of Kendall. With what Seamus Heaney describes as Smith's "disenchanted gentility" her buoyancy absorbed Cavaliers, Metaphysicals, Blake, and Dickinson. With condensation akin to parody she practiced nursery rhythms on the venerable subjects of love, faith, death, and housebroken dogs. For contrast with Kendall as well as with, say, the imagination-hungry Kathleen Raine ("I am the world, the world is mine""if only the god will come"), take Smith's early "Egocentric":
 
Page 129
What care I if Skies are blue,
If God created Gnat and Gnu,
What care I if good God be,
If he be not good to me?
Balladry and
Christabel
meet in the haunted little poem beginning "He said no word of her to us / Nor we of her to him." Smith called subtly on the vernacular, as in rhyming "Whose best is only better" with "Forget him and forget her." She broke ballad rhythms for lines as prolonged as Ogden Nash's and for other considered reasons, as in her best-known poem, which ends, "I was much too far out all my life / Not waving but drowning."
Kendall, Sitwell, and Smith flirted with gravity. Elizabeth Jennings, the only woman represented in Robert Conquest's
New Lines
(1956), has spread gravity over a variety of tributes and a great range of subjects in (Margaret Willy's words) "lucid diction, use of traditional metres, and the keen and subtle intelligence in her exploration of ideas"in other words, paying only unconscious tribute to the balladic and comic traditions of British poetry and instead reaching toward posterity. The popular and much-anthologized Thomas Kinsella is yet often academically ignored, perhaps because, though Irish, he follows Eliot's strand of modernism rather than Yeats's. Popularity of any sort is academically suspect.
Balladry as in Aytoun and Kipling, occasionally grotesque as in Barham and Hood, the social world of Praed, lighter verse as in Frederick Locker Lampson and Austin Dobson, religious and social satire as in Chesterton, self-communion like Smith's, the edge of jingle and the air of parodyall came together in the poems of John Betjeman. On occasion, as in "Diary of a Church Mouse," he verges on happy nonsense. Philip Larkin, in his introduction to the
Collected Poems
of 1971, enlarges the common view of Betjeman's subjects as "Victorian Gothic and sports girls and being afraid of death" into "poetry that embraces architecture" with "topography, religion, satire, death, love and sex, people and childhood" as subjects.
Heir to William Morris in fighting the desecration known as church restoration, Betjeman could combine in a single stanza the peal of bells, gaslight, tennis, and sex. His weakling protagonists recall Calverley as they sigh for athletic girls:
So happy, and so deep he loves the world,
Could worship God and rocks and stones and trees,
 
Page 130
Be nicer to his mother, kill himself
If that would make him pure enough for her.
In Betjeman, though, the phrase "worship God" in a frivolous context has satiric depth. In "Christmas," as a believer in Sacrament, he protests the annual exchange of "inexpensive scent" and "hideous tie." An Anglo-Catholic, he rejects the Calvinistic "godly usher'' of every age: "The dog lay panting at his godly feet." In "Exeter" the "doctor's intellectual wife" turned from the Church to Aldous Huxley until the doctor's Morris car was hit by a tram.
The titles of two gatherings tell the story:
Old Lights for New Chancels
(1940) and
New Bats in Old Belfries.
But Betjeman reveled in the particular too much to leave reformist enemies bloodied, and also too much to sentimentalize his beloved parish churches, where "the organ set them singing and the sermon let them nod." Grudges clear enough in satiric titles soften in the curveting stanzas that follow. He has sympathy for all who realize they must die.
In Betjeman's overpopulated England, the landscape and village of Wordsworth and Crabbe crowd into one. He answers Crabbe as well as Goldsmith in "The Dear Old Village": "Farmers have wired the public rights-of-way / Should any wish to walk to church to pray," and woe to the lesser farmer who crosses rich Farmer Whistle: "You'd never think that in such honest beef / Lurk'd an adulterous braggart, liar and thief." In the autobiographical
Summoned by Bells
(1960), Betjeman flattened Wordsworth's blank verse into "slammed doors and waitings and a sense of dread."
Everywhere the concrete and particular. In "A Subaltern's Love song" his Joan Hunter Dunn drives in her Hillman through "mush-roomy, pine-woody, evergreen smells." Love of language colliding with daily life reduces satire to innocence; going north in Oxford, the poet passes "land-locked pools of jonquils by sunny garden fence" before "a constant sound of flushing runneth from windows where / The toothbrush too is airing in this new North Oxford air." "Love in a Valley," taking its eight-line stanza from George Meredith's "Love in the Valley," and making a challenge of concreteness even in the reversal of "the" to "a," challenged also a poet who thought in metaphors with the unmetaphoric detail characteristic of Betjeman. Yet the speaker who begins her appeal with "Take me, Lieutenant, to that Surrey homestead!" ends with a density of symbol: "So for us a

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