There is great irony in the fact that I am putting the finishing touches to this blog post the morning after the dreadful terrorist attack on Paris on Friday 13th November 2015. The great sense of outrage and helplessness described in this poem after the events of 17th May 1974 transcends time and place. All Irish thoughts and prayers are with the innocent victims of this barbaric premeditated attack on the people of France.
Child of our Time
For Aengus
Yesterday I knew no lullaby
But you have taught me overnight to order
This song, which takes from your final cry
Its tune, from your unreasoned end its reason;
Its rhythm from the discord of your murder
Its motive from the fact you cannot listen.
We who should have known how to instruct
With rhymes for your waking, rhythms for your sleep,
Names for the animals you took to bed,
Tales to distract, legends to protect
Later an idiom for you to keep
And living, learn, must learn from you dead,
To make our broken images, rebuild
Themselves around your limbs, your broken
Image, find for your sake whose life our idle
Talk has cost, a new language. Child
Of our time, our times have robbed your cradle.
Sleep in a world your final sleep has woken.
– Eavan Boland
BACKGROUND NOTE
‘The Troubles’ began in Northern Ireland in the Summer of 1969 and during the early Seventies the violence escalated. It was a time when, as Eavan Boland herself says, ‘the sounds of death from the television were heard almost daily’. Attitudes in the Irish Republic were at best ambivalent, with many remaining detached and turning a blind eye while others became involved and active.
On the 17th May, 1974 a coordinated series of four car bombs were detonated during rush hour traffic in Dublin and Monaghan, killing 34 civilians including two infants and a full term unborn child and its mother. In all, 27 died in Dublin as a result of the three car bombs detonated there and 7 died as a result of the Monaghan bomb. This poem, ‘Child of our Time’, from the collection The War Horse (1975), is Eavan Boland’s response to this barbaric event.
Eavan Boland herself describes the genesis of the poem:
I wrote it inspired – and I use the words with care – by a photograph I saw two days later on the front of a national newspaper whose most arresting feature was the expression on the face of the fireman who lifted that child, an expression of tenderness as if he were lifting his own child from its cradle to its mother’s breast.
Further on in this article entitled ‘The Weasel’s Tooth’ (Irish Times, 7th June, 1974), she writes of, ‘that greatest of obscenities, the murder of the innocents’ and refers to the poem as, ‘one among many other statements of outrage’.
The infant victims of the bombings include Anne Marie O’Brien (5 months) and her sister Jacqueline (17 months) along with their parents John (24) and Anna (22) – the entire family killed in the Parnell Street explosion. Baby Doherty, was the full term unborn child of Talbot Street bomb victim, Collette Doherty. Three months later in August, 1974, Baby Martha O’Neill, the stillborn daughter of Edward (39) and Martha O’Neill was delivered. Edward was killed, and his two sons seriously injured in the Parnell Street bombing.
So, it is obvious that there is heartbreak and unbearable loss at the centre of the poem and to further expand this notion of bereaved families, the poet dedicates this beautiful poem to Aengus, a friend’s child, the victim of a cot death. So, although the poem is rooted in the conflict in Northern Ireland and the overspill of that conflict south to Dublin and Monaghan, the poem is addressed to all families who suffer loss and it highlights the damage inflicted on children in all wars and all situations and obviously from a casual look at our local and international news stories today, it is as relevant now as it was then in 1974.
COMMENTARY
This is a beautifully constructed formal lament or elegy and because the victim is a child it is couched in the language of a lullaby, suitable for a young child. The words used eloquently pinpoint this: it is a ‘song’, ‘a lullaby’ which has a ‘rhythm’ and a ‘tune’. Bedtime is that sacred time which Boland refers to in many of her poems when parent and child are never closer. Here bedtime is conjured up with ‘rhymes’, and ‘tales’ and ‘legends’. Despite the focus on musical terms the poet wants to point out the horrible juxtaposition of the child’s ‘final cry’. The poet’s outrage at this meaningless terrorist act is stated unambiguously at the end of the fifth line with her use of the word ‘murder’ which jolts us into outrage as well. Death is final and the child cannot ‘listen’ anymore to our feeble justifications for political violence.
The second stanza evokes a stereotypical happy childhood lived in a secure home, safe in the natural ‘rhythms’ of life, waking and sleeping, playing with favoured soft toys. The child is protected by language, ‘tales to distract, legends to protect’ – indeed much of the poem is couched very cleverly in language terminology. Indeed it is normally the adults, the parents, who develop and teach the young a language they can use to explain the world that surrounds them. This natural cycle has been subverted here and it is now the child who instructs us:
And living, learn, must learn from you, dead.
The sound patterns and structure of the poem illustrate the chaos and confusion that reigns within the poet after such an atrocity and tries to mirror the immediate aftermath of a car bomb explosion in a busy rush hour street. The poet manages this by creating opposing tensions within the poem: waking/sleeping, adults/child, the ‘living’/’dead’, ‘song’/‘cry’, ‘tune’/’discord’. The poet struggles to impose some sort of order on the chaotic aftermath and so there are three stanzas with six lines in each. Each stanza seems to represent a phase, a stage in the process of coming to terms with the awful events which have occurred:
Stanza 1: This death is meaningless
Stanza 2: We are responsible
Stanza 3: There is an urgent lesson to be learnt
The poem can, and should, be read as a comment on the failure of communication. The only way forward from this conflict and violence is described as a ‘new language’. Our ‘idle talk’ about Nationalism and Unionism, North and South has given us this ‘broken image’ of a dead baby being carried from the carnage of a street bomb by a fireman and used the following morning in the newspapers to encapsulate the tragedy. The dead child becomes, for the poet, an emblem of hope as her eternal sleep is juxtaposed with the world waking up to the absurdity of indiscriminate violence. The poet ends with an exquisite metaphor of ‘robbing the cradle’, an image that sharply contrasts violence and the innocence of childhood. ‘Our times’ have done this, we are all responsible. Our ‘tales’ and ‘legends’ and our interpretations of history have created quarrels and division and the hopeful plea from the poet is that the child’s needless death will encourage us to ‘wake up’ and think differently.
As I said at the beginning this poem is an elegy and traditionally the functions of an elegy were to lament, to praise and to console. The tone of the poem oscillates between tenderness and outrage throughout. There is also another important dimension to this poem which is also in-keeping with an elegy and that is its political dimension. In hindsight, this powerful poem has become, like Longley’s “Ceasefire”, a clarion call for change. The poet’s anger is not directed at the bombers but at society in general who have allowed this situation to develop and fester and get out of control.
This is why we need poets like Boland to act as our trailblazers and as Mark Hederman has so eloquently put it, ‘to express what they perceive in a prophetic and irresistible rhythm, shape and form.’ Our poets and artists are forever busy, whether in their studios or their nurseries, ‘writing the icon of our future face, preparing the skins that can carry the new wine, digging the trenches into which the waters can flow…’ Boland wrote these game changing verses in her suburban home where she was busy raising her young family. However, it still took some time for her voice to be heard, for the critical mass to tip things in favour of peace; it took an Enniskillen, a Shankill and an Omagh atrocity for the penny to drop that we in Ireland needed ‘a new language’, a new way of communicating with one another that does not include violence and murder of innocent children and pregnant women. From her suburban vantage point, this woman has done the state and our republic some service.
Works Cited:
Hederman, Mark P., (2001), The Haunted Inkwell: Art and our Future, The Columba Press, Dublin.
The scene in Talbot Street shortly after the explosion.
The purpose of these notes is to guide you in your exploration of the poetry of Eavan Boland. The notes are structured as a series of ‘thinking points’ ranging over the main themes and issues evident in her work. They are not exhaustive and neither are they ‘carved in stone’. They should be altered, added to or deleted as you develop your own understanding of the poet’s work.
You are expected to study six poems by Eavan Boland from your Anthology. The poems we will concentrate on are:
‘Child of Our Time’,
‘This Moment’,
‘Famine Road’,
‘Outside History’,
‘The War Horse’,
‘The Black Laced Fan My Mother Gave Me’
Boland’s view of Irish history and her idea of nation
Boland deals with the reality of Irish history, the familiar story of oppression, defeat and death (‘The Famine Road’). The sense of national identity that comes across from ‘The Famine Road’ speaks of victimisation, being downtrodden and living out pointless lives; see also the suffering in ‘Outside History’.
Opposed to that view is the male-created myth, involving heroic struggle, battle, and glorious defeat: see the image of the dying patriot immortalised by art in ‘An Old Steel Engraving’. The woman poet feels excluded from that cultural tradition – ‘One of us who turns away.’
Boland resists the myths imposed on us by our history (and the way it was taught!!) and she insists on the necessity of confronting the reality, facing the unburied dead of history and laying them to rest (‘Outside History’).
She shows concern for the unrecorded history, for the significance of lives lived on the margins of history, away from the centre of power, far from the limelight of action. She mourns the forgotten lives in ‘That the Science of Cartography is Limited’.
In her prose writings Boland explores the idea of nation and the difficulties it produces for her as a woman poet. In Object Lessons she says:
So it was with me. For this very reason, early on as a poet, certainly in my twenties, I realised that the Irish nation as an existing construct in Irish poetry was not available to me. I would not have been able to articulate it at that point, but at some preliminary level I already knew that the anguish and power of that woman’s gesture on Achill, with its suggestive hinterland of pain, were not something I could predict or rely on in Irish poetry. There were glimpses here and there; sometimes more than that. But all too often, when I was searching for such an inclusion, what I found was a rhetoric of imagery which alienated me: a fusion of the national and the feminine which seemed to simplify both.
It was not a comfortable realisation. There was nothing clear-cut about my feelings. I had tribal ambivalences and doubts, and even then I had an uneasy sense of the conflict which awaited me. On the one hand, I knew that as a poet I could not easily do without the idea of a nation. Poetry in every time draws on that reserve. On the other, I could not as a woman accept the nation formulated for me by Irish poetry and its traditions. At one point it even looked to me as if the whole thing might be made up of irreconcilable differences. At the very least it seemed to me that I was likely to remain an outsider in my own national literature, cut off from its archive, at a distance from its energy. Unless, that is, I could repossess it. This proposal is about that conflict and that repossession and about the fact that repossession itself is not a static or single act. Indeed, the argument which describes it may itself be no more than a part of it.
Violence in society
‘The War Horse’ explores suburban, middle-class attitudes to political violence. It is really a psychological exploration of the theme ‘how we respond to violence’.
Race memory and the old antagonisms to English colonial rule still exist just beneath the surface (‘The War Horse’).
The real human consequences of political violence are portrayed in ‘Child of Our Time’. The poet here acts as the conscience of our society.
Violence is seen as the result of a failure of language, an inability to communicate (‘Child of Our Time’).
The significance of myth
While in much of her poetry myth is seen as a positive thing, Boland often challenges the image of woman in mythology (also in art in mythology), particularly when it shows woman as marginalised, silenced, subservient to her husband the hero, as in ‘Love’.
For her our history (indeed all history) is laced with myths. The unreality, the coldness and the distance of myth from real lives is symbolised in the stars of ‘Outside History’.
The experience of being a woman
Boland’s strong feminine perspective lends an extra dimension of insight to all her themes. But she also considers specific issues relating to the portrayal and the treatment of women.
The sufferings of women are equated with the oppression of the nation (‘The Famine Road’)
The traditional role of woman is validated in such poems as ‘This Moment’, which show woman as mother. That maternal gesture of catching the child in her arms is the key to the poem. The protectiveness of mothers features also in ‘The Pomegranate’. Also her wisdom is displayed in allowing the daughter freedom to learn for herself.
Woman as lover features in ‘The Black Laced Fan My Mother Gave Me’ and ‘Love’.
Suburban woman features in many of the poems: ‘The War Horse’ and ‘This Moment’.
The puzzling relationship between men and women features in ‘The Black Laced Fan My Mother Gave Me’: the mistimings, the tempests of love, the sensual allure. Love diminishes in time, like the importance of the fan. This makes an interesting alternative view to the blinkered one of idyllic romance.
Boland challenges the patriarchal tradition of Irish poetry. In Object Lessons she elaborated on her objections to the images of women in literature:
The majority of Irish male poets depended on women as motifs in their poetry. They moved easily, deftly, as if by right among images of women in which I did not believe and of which I could not approve. The women in their poems were often passive, decorative, raised to emblematic status. This was especially true where the woman and the idea of the nation were mixed: where the nation became a woman and the woman took on a national posture. (Note: This is very obvious in the poetry of Yeats where he refers almost obsessively to Maud Gonne).
The trouble was [that] these images did good service as ornaments. In fact, they had a wide acceptance as ornaments by readers of Irish poetry. Women in such poems were frequently referred to approvingly as mythic, emblematic. But to me these passive and simplified women seemed a corruption. For they were not decorations, they were not ornaments. However distorted these images, they had their roots in a suffered truth.
What had happened? How had the women of our past – the women of a long struggle and a terrible survival – undergone such a transformation? How had they suffered Irish history and rooted themselves in the speech and memory of the Achill woman, only to re-emerge in Irish poetry as fictive queens and national sibyls?
The more I thought about it, the more uneasy I became. The wrath and grief of Irish history seemed to me, as it did to many, one of our true possessions. Women were part of that wrath, had endured that grief. It seemed to me a species of human insult that at the end of all, in certain Irish poems, they should become elements of style rather than aspects of truth.
Poetry in the suburbs
A good deal of her poetry is set in the suburbs, a setting not associated traditionally with poetic inspiration.
The fragile nature of the beauty and order created in the suburbs is brought out in ‘The War Horse’.
The toy-house neatness of suburbia is no match for the wild, elemental attractions of nature in ‘White Hawthorn in the West of Ireland’.
In the later poems we encounter a romantic evocation of a suburban twilight (‘This Moment’). Nature has colonised the suburbs (‘Stars rise / Moths flutter’, ‘one window is yellow as butter’).
But the real bleakness of the suburban street is not hidden: ‘The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured’ – ‘The Pomegranate’.
Portrait of Eavan Boland as a child by her mother, the painter Frances Kelly
Very little is known about Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886) other than that she had a normal rearing in a Calvinist, New-England background; that at school she formed some extravagant attachments, and, at the age of 23 she cut herself off from the outside world, except for some correspondence with a few friends. She spent years without putting her foot outside the grounds of her house and yet, like Hopkins, she made a huge contribution to the world of literature after her death. With her contemporary, Walt Whitman, she helped to usher in a new age of poetry. No one is sure why she resorted to live a life of seclusion; some say, without much proof, that she had an unhappy love affair; perhaps she did so from choice. Judgement of her work is often made in an atmosphere of wonder, similar to that of judges of Shakespeare’s work: ‘How could this country boy from Stratford have written such plays?’ However, having studied her work, I’m sure you’ll agree that she had a unique perspective on life, death, love, nature and friendship. She didn’t use titles for her poems, she didn’t need them because her lines spoke volumes and still speak volumes to us today.
She was a Calvinist, living in a narrow New England society, but she did not accept the Puritan idea of a frightening, punishing god: she was rather a mixture of Puritan and free-thinker, but she never doubts an after-life, although she is terrified of its nature. Indeed, the number of her poems about death is remarkable. She was terrified of its uncertainties. In spite of the Calvinism in her upbringing she could say, ‘That bare-headed life under grass worries me like a wasp.’ She had, despite her reclusive nature, a morbid passion (obsession?) for writing letters of condolence and was always probing into the morbid details as to how a person died. She was obsessed by death, ‘goings away’. At times she seems to be looking at her own death in anticipation. But all the time she writes as an observer. But this pre-occupation, with its horrible uncertainties and its doubts about immortality, gave us her best works.
THIS IS A PERSONAL REVIEW OF SOME THEMES AND ISSUES WHICH FEATURE IN DEREK WALCOTT’S POETRY. YOU SHOULD CONSIDER THESE IDEAS, THEN RE-EXAMINE THE POEMS MENTIONED FOR EVIDENCE TO SUBSTANTIATE OR CONTRADICT THESE INTERPRETATIONS. IN OTHER WORDS MAKE YOUR OWN OF THESE NOTES, ADD TO THEM OR DELETE FROM THEM AS YOU SEE FIT.
THE FOLLOWING SELECTION IS SUGGESTED BECAUSE THEY DEAL WITH THE MAJOR THEMES WHICH RECUR IN HIS POETRY:
Letter from Brooklyn,
Endings,
To Norline,
The Young Wife,
St. Lucia’s First Communion,
Pentecost.
W. B. YEATS ONCE SAID THAT HIS POETRY WAS ‘BUT THE CONSTANT STITCHING AND RESTITCHING OF OLD THEMES’. CHECK THIS OUT FOR YOURSELF IN RELATION TO WALCOTT AND ALL THE OTHER POETS ON YOUR COURSE!
YOUR AIM SHOULD BE TO PICK YOUR OWN FAVOURITES FROM THIS SELECTION AND GET TO KNOW THEM VERY WELL.
BIOGRAPHICAL TRIVIA
Derek Walcott is a Caribbean poet who was born in 1930 in Castries on the island of St. Lucia, one of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles.
Both his grandmothers were said to have been the descendants of slaves.
He was born into a Methodist, English-speaking family although the dominant tradition on the island was Catholic and French speaking.
His father, described in the poem “A Letter from Brooklyn”, was a civil servant and painter who died at the age of 34 when Derek was only one year old.
He began writing poems at the age of fourteen and plays at the age of sixteen.
After studying at St. Mary’s College, a school run by the Irish Presentation Brothers in St. Lucia and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica where he graduated with an Arts Degree in English, French and Latin, he moved in 1953 to Trinidad, where he worked as a theatre and art critic.
In 1954 he married Faye Moyston. They separated in 1956 and divorced the following year.
He founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959, which has produced his plays (and others) since that time, and he remains active with its Board of Directors.
At the age of 18, he made his debut with his first collection 25 Poems in 1948, but his breakthrough came with the collection of poems, In a Green Night, in 1962. That same year he married his second wife, Margaret Maillard.
In the 1960’s his Selected Poems was a publishing success and he was awarded a substantial grant by the Rockefeller Foundation.
In 1970 his best known play, Dream on Monkey Mountain, was published and later performed with great success in New York.
He has learned his poetic craft from the European tradition, but he remains mindful of West Indian landscapes and experiences.
In 1973 he published Another Life, a long narrative book-length poem, offering autobiographical details and opinions.
In 1976 he published a collection Sea Grapes (including the poem “Endings”) which dealt with changing phases – beginnings and endings – of his life.
After a break with the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1976, Walcott directed his attention increasingly to the United States, where he has held a number of teaching positions, including a long-standing appointment at Boston University.
In 1979 Saint Lucia achieved independence following the collapse of the West Indian Federation.
In 1979 he published The Star-Apple Kingdom, a very successful collection containing the long poem, “The Schooner Flight”.
He founded the Boston’s Playwright’s Theatre at Boston University in 1981 hoping to create a home for new plays in Boston. That same year he was granted an award by the American MacArthur Foundation worth over $250,000.
In 1982 he published a collection of poems called The Fortunate Traveller and, that same year, married Norlene Metivier, his third wife.
In 1986 his Collected Poems were published and sold remarkably well.
His 1988 collection of poems, The Arkansas Testament, written about his life in Saint Lucia, (dealt with in part one entitled “Here”) and his life in America (dealt with in part two entitled “Elsewhere”) contained the following poems: “To Norline”, “Saint Lucia’s First Communion”, “Pentecost”, “The Young Wife”, “For Adrian” and “Summer Elegies”.
In 1989 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, the first non-English writer to be granted the award.
Omeros (modern Greek for Homer) was published in 1990, just after his sixtieth birthday, and is Walcott’s most ambitious work to date, a book-length poem that places his beloved West Indies in the role of the ancient bard’s Cyclades. Gods and heroic warriors do not inhabit this retelling of the Odyssey, but simple Caribbean fishermen, whose Greek names register their hybrid identities.
In 1992 he became the first Caribbean writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
With his artistic and financial success he bought a house on Saint Lucia and spent more and more of his time on the island.
In 1997 he brought out a new collection, The Bounty, which dealt with themes such as old age and death.
In 1998 he co-wrote a Broadway musical, The Capeman, with the singer/songwriter Paul Simon. Unfortunately it proved to be the biggest flop in the history of Broadway musicals closing with losses of $11 million.
In 2000 he published the long poem Tiepolo’s Hound, a biographical study of the Impressionist painter Camille Pisarro.
That same year his twin brother, Roderick, died.
In 2004, at the age of 74, The Prodigal, his sixteenth book of poetry was published.
In 2009, Walcott began a three-year distinguished scholar-in-residence position at the University of Alberta.
He now divides his time between his home in the Caribbean and New York City.
A BRIEF THEMATIC GUIDE TO THE POETRY OF
DEREK WALCOTT
A Letter from Brooklyn
The poem deals with the influences that were important in Walcott’s life and career as an artist.
Religion, particularly the Methodist religion, was an important part of his father’s life and has also influenced his own poetry in both substance and style.
The artistic example of his father is celebrated in this poem.
The belief that poetry is a divine gift is exemplified in the story of his father’s life and death
Endings
This is a short one-sentence poem on the theme of transience.
The poem offers examples of things that fade and end.
Even love is seen as transient.
The idea of Beethoven’s hearing ending offers a deeper meaning and a deeper image.
See also For Adrian which deals with the same theme of transience
To Norline
This is a brief meditation on lost love and the power of memory.
The poem also considers the evocative and memorable power of poetry.
The theme of the sea and its fluctuating status is important in Derek Walcott’s poetry.
The Young Wife
This is a poem written to comfort a husband who has lost his wife.
The poem explores the complex processes of grief, including guilt, despair and comfort.
There is a contrast evident between how grief affects a husband and how grief affects their children.
The poem concludes by asserting the primacy of love over death.
Saint Lucia’s First Communion
The poem describes one of the most important religious festivals on the island of Saint Lucia.
At first the poem describes the communicants.
It sees the religious ceremony as akin to a form of slavery.
The poet wishes to liberate the children to find their own way to heaven.
Pentecost
This is primarily a poem about the nature of belonging.
The theme is the power of the Caribbean landscape to affect the poet’s very soul.
There is a strong contrast between the constrictions of city life in winter and the freedom of the sea in Saint Lucia.
MAJOR THEMES IN WALCOTT’S POETRY
Religion
Derek Walcott was brought up in the Methodist religion. His father’s religious faith and the influence that had on both his father’s life and on his own life is dealt with in the poem A Letter from Brooklyn. In that poem the simple faith of the old lady restores the poet’s faith in God.
He offers a critical perspective on the traditional religious practices of Catholicism in Saint Lucia’s First Communion where he sees the children as innocent victims of an institutionalised religion. But the poem does have a positive religious perspective as he imagines the children flying heavenward beyond prejudice and evil.
Pentecost has not only a religious title but also a religious conclusion as it celebrates the sense of a soul finding itself in a natural seaside environment away from the soulless city.
Love and the End of Love
Derek Walcott was married three times and many of his poems deal with themes of love.
That love has a powerful but temporal influence on human life is acknowledged in Endings where love’s “lightening flash” has no “thunderous end.”
The dissolution of his marriage to his third wife, Norline Metivier, is treated with metaphoric brilliance in To Norline, a poem that charts the end of a relationship.
Death can also end a relationship but in The Young Wife Walcott explores the manner in which love can overcome death and the ending of life.
Death/Bereavement
Derek Walcott’s father died when the poet was only one year old but his death had a profound effect on his poetry. This is explored in A Letter from Brooklyn.
That positive view is also expressed in another poem on death and grief, The Young Wife, where a sense of hope evolves out of the devastation of grief.
AN ANALYSIS OF WALCOTT’S STYLE
Style
Derek Walcott uses a variety of poetic forms in the poems on the course.
• There is a loose, relaxed narrative form, using dialogue and description, in the poem A Letter from Brooklyn.
There is a complex use of couplets in the poem Endings. In this brief poem the couplets are short, pithy and, like “the silence that surrounds Beethoven’s head”, imbued with a sense of power and mystery.
The most common form evident in these poems is the four-line quatrain, influenced to some extent in the Methodist hymns Walcott learned in his childhood. The themes, as well as the form, often reflect a religious content, perhaps not in To Norline, but certainly in Saint Lucia’s First Communion, Pentecost, and The Young Wife.
Language
Derek Walcott was born into an English speaking family in the predominantly French-speaking island of Saint Lucia. His use of English belongs to the English poetic tradition but it is also influenced by the religious language of his Methodist up-bringing and also by the traditional patois of Creole English.
He has a very fine ear for dialogue as is evident in the manner in which he captures the old-fashioned religious language of the elderly correspondent in A Letter from Brooklyn. There is an astute religious sensibility present in many of the poems. Pentecost uses religious terminology as does Saint Lucia’s First Communion.
The poetic sensibility of this modern poet is revealed in his constant and varied use of metaphor and simile (see below).
Metaphor and Simile
From the beginning Derek Walcott has used both metaphor and simile with great inventiveness and originality.
The metaphor of a spider’s web runs throughout A Letter from Brooklyn and helps to unify the different strands of this complex, sensitive treatment of old age, art and death.
In Endings the “silence that surrounds Beethoven’s head” becomes a metaphor for the mysterious of endings and beginnings while the poem is bolstered by the clever use of similes.
To Norline, although very brief, has a subtle mixture of metaphor (in the opening stanza where the wave’s surf is seen as a sponge erasing lines and love) and simile in the second stanza (where the poet’s memory of his sleeping beside his wife is compared to a coffee mug warming his palm) and in the third stanza (where the sight of a salt-sipping tern is compared to a memorable line of poetry.)
At other times the use of metaphor and simile reveals a wonderfully visual imagination as in Saint Lucia’s First Communion where a caterpillar is compared to an accordion and communion girl’s compared to candles.
The Sound of Poetry – Rhyme, Assonance and Alliteration
Although Derek Walcott uses a variety of poetic forms in the poems on the course, his use of rhyme is more subtle than regular, more attuned to the off-beat sounds of the Caribbean than to any formal pattern.
An early poem like A Letter from Brooklyn uses rhyme more regularly than is evident in the latter poems. There are many rhyming couplets in this narrative poem and it ends with a distinctive rhyme in the concluding couplet: believe/grieve.
Another poem using couplets, this time very short-lined couplets, is Endings. In this poem, although none of the couplets rhyme, there are subtle echoes throughout the poem involving off-rhymes ( flesh/flash, sand/end/sound) assonance (fail/fade) and alliteration (fades from the flesh, flowers fading like the flesh, sweating pumice stone, silence that surrounds).
Five of the poems are written in quatrains but none of these employ regular rhyme schemes. To Norline is the closest to an ABAB rhyme scheme with its half-rhymes and assonantal echoes. The rhymes are purposely faint: dawns/sponge, come/palm, house/yours, tern/turn. This poem also uses alliteration cleverly, particularly on the “s” sounds to convey the sound of the surf on the beach: slate, surf, sponge, someone, still-sleeping, salt-sipping and some.
The rhyming scheme in Saint Lucia’s First Communion varies from a loose ABAB in most stanzas to AABB in the third stanza and ABBA in the fourth stanza. There are assonantal patterns throughout the poem (cotton frock, cotton stockings, pink ribboned missals, caterpillars accordion).
Pentecost uses rhyme more regularly than in any of the other quatrain poems: concrete/street, show/snow, roof/proof, shoal/soul. As in many of the other poems, the use of alliteration, particularly on the “s” sounds, is very evocative: slow scriptures of sand/that sends, not quite a seraph.
Contrast: Many of the poems use a form of contrast to emphasise their thematic concerns.
Pentecost comes from a book, The Arkansas Testament, which is divided into two contrasting sections entitled “Here” and “Elsewhere”. The poem contrasts the soulless, winter, lost city where he works with “the slow scriptures of sand” he finds in his warm Caribbean home. There is a stark contrast between the dead and the living in the poem, The Young Wife. In this poem the contrast is overcome by the sense of love that accompanies the end of the poem.
Bucknell University. (Photos by Timothy D. and Nicole M Sofranko)
COMMENTS ON WALCOTT’S POETRY
Derek Walcott on Derek Walcott
“There is a continual sense of motion in the Caribbean – caused by the sea and a feeling that one is always travelling through water and not stationary.”
“My calling as a poet is votive, sacred… it was a cherished vow taken in my young dead father’s name, and my life is to honour that vow.”
“Throughout my whole youth, that was happening. It was the experience of a whole race renaming something that had been named by someone else and giving that object its own metaphoric power.”
“I had a sound colonial education
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
And either I am nobody, or I am a nation.”
“I come from a backward place: your duty is supplied by life around you. One guy plants bananas; another plants cocoa; I’m a writer, I plant lines. There’s the same clarity of occupation, and the sense of devotion.”
“I think of myself as a carpenter, as one making frames, simply and well. I’m working a lot in quatrains… and I feel there is something in that that is very ordinary… I find myself wanting to write very simply cut, very contracted, very speakable and very challenging quatrains in rhyme.”
“Well, when I write
this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt;
I go draw and knot every line as tight
as ropes in this rigging; in simple speech
my common language go be the wind…”
“History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History.”
“This island is heaven.”
“Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.”
“It takes a West Indian a long time to say who he is”
“People who praised classical Greek, if they were there then, would consider the Greek’s tastes vulgar, lurid….All the purple and gold – that’s what I’m saying is very Caribbean, that same vigour and elation of an earlier Greece.”
“The easiest thing to do about colonialism is to refer to history in terms of guilt or punishment or revenge, or whatever. Whereas the rare thing is the resolution of being where one is and doing something positive about that reality.”
“The romanticised, pastoral vision of Africa that many black people hold can be an escape from the reality around us. In the West Indies, where all the races live and work together, we have the beginnings of a great and unique society. The problem is to recognise our African origins but not to romanticise them.”
Critical Comments on Derek Walcott by the Critics
“What moves me in Walcott is his refusal of simplifications.” Paul Breslin
“It was the Metaphysicals technique of using metaphor as the prime vehicle of shape and meaning in their poetry that seems to have so greatly impressed Walcott, who has always …” moved in metaphor as in his natural element.” Stewart Brown
“Walcott is a model of ripened ambivalence that makes impossible demands of the heart, tears it to pieces by a contradiction of origins, and finally offers it to the dubious consolation of despair.” George Lamming
“Naming is central to Walcott’s claims for an ‘Adamic’ New World poetics. The act of naming takes the natural world into the cultural domain while grounding language in the domain of the natural. And the choice of a name reveals much about the consciousness of the namer, the degree to which it has become Adamic by exorcising ‘the pain of history words contain.’ ” Paul Breslin
“Omeros attempted to shrink the Iliad and the Odyssey into the tiny sins and squabbles of some Caribbean fishermen and bewildered colonials” William Logan
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Sample Answer: Write a personal response to the poetry of Derek Walcott.
Of all the poets on the Leaving Cert course, Derek Walcott, in my opinion, is the one who has most to say about the ‘big issues’, about life, the universe, and everything. I would recommend his poetry to anyone who has lost someone close to them, or to anyone who finds themselves wondering about man’s place in the universe.
There are three aspects of Walcott’s poetry in particular that appeal to me: his approach to the notion of ‘endings’, his poems about lost love, and his poems about bereavement. I’m not saying that Derek Walcott has the answers to all the questions that surround these issues; just that he asks them in a very beautiful and enlightened way.
One aspect of Walcott’s poetry that really hit home with me was his focus on the way everything in this world is moving slowly but surely toward its end. ‘Endings’, for example, depicts how things ‘do not explode, / they fail, they fade’. Everything, the poem maintains, is disappearing, but too quietly for us to notice. Things fade away as gently and subtly, ‘as the sunlight fades from the flesh / as the foam drains quick in the sand’. We no more notice most things disappearing than we do the water draining into the sand at the beach. Reading his poetry, we are constantly reminded, of the fragility and preciousness of all things. His work reminds us to enjoy what we have while it lasts.
For me, one of the finest aspects of Walcott’s work is his depiction of lost love. ‘To Norline’, is filled with a melancholy longing for a love that has been and will never be again. This poem paints a sad portrait of the poet walking along an empty beach remembering his lost love. He seems certain that ‘someone else’ instead of him will soon be enjoying Norline’s affections. His poetry is always keenly aware of the fact that love inevitably fades away. As he puts it in ‘Endings’, ‘love’s lightning flash / has no thunderous end’. Love, like everything else, fades away quietly, without us even noticing, ‘it dies with the sound / of flowers fading’. We can no more notice love fading away than we can hear a flower withering. All in all, then, I would recommend the poetry of Derek Walcott to anyone who has had their ‘heart broken’! His writing provides real solace and comfort for anyone whose relationship has just ended.
Bereavement is one of Walcott’s most recurring themes and he deals with it magnificently. He never shrinks from depicting the true horror of bereavement. ‘The Young Wife’, for example, is a moving depiction of great loss. This poem is about a man whose wife has just died from cancer. He must mourn her quietly so as not to upset their children, ‘the muffled sobbing / the children must not hear’. The house he lives in is haunted by memories of his departed partner. There are certain drawers in the house which he ‘dare not open’ because the objects they contain would remind him too painfully of her. Despite this obvious emotion and pain, however, his poems invariably contain an element of hope. In this case, the wife may have been claimed by cancer at a tragically young age but she somehow lives on in her children. When her husband sees their children laugh he is reminded so strongly of her that she may as well be in the room, ‘They startle you `when they laugh. / She sits there smiling’.
‘A Letter from Brooklyn’ is another poem that offers hope to the bereaved. Mabel Rawlins, a friend of the family, writes to the poet about his dead father. She is convinced that this man, who died twenty-eight years ago, is at God’s side in heaven, ‘he was called home, / And is, I’m sure, doing greater work’. Mabel’s unquestioning faith helps to overcome the poet’s own doubts about the existence of God and ‘restores’ his belief in the afterlife, ‘I believe. / I believe it all, and for no man’s death I grieve’.
Just as I would recommend Walcott’s poetry to anyone who has had his or her heart broken by the break-up of a relationship so too would I recommend it to anyone who has been bereaved. His poetry presents us with a full picture of the sorrow and pain of bereavement. Yet it also suggests that maybe, just maybe, there is hope.
Derek Walcott receives his Nobel Prize for Literature from the King of Sweden King Karl XVII Gustaff – in December 1992.
Larkin’s worth and relevance as a poet is constantly under review. The most recent biography by his friend and former colleague at Hull University, James Booth, was published in 2015 entitled, Philip Larkin: Life Art and Love. Booth sees himself as keeper of the Larkin flame and is at pains to debunk much of the negative publicity which has surrounded Larkin in the decades since his death. Booth’s main motto seems to be: judge the poems, not the poet.
All good biography should send us back to the poet’s work and in this Booth succeeds admirably. He also makes Larkin more likable – we are made to wonder how it was that this miserable, self-hunted man managed to produce such great, enduring work.
Larkin was born in Coventry in August 1922. He has described his childhood, with his domineering father and timid mother, as a “forgotten boredom”. Tall and shortsighted, he grew up self-conscious and shy, developing a stammer at an early age. He did well in school and went to study English at Oxford, where his interest in writing and his love of jazz were nurtured.
On leaving Oxford with flying colours, he took up a post as librarian in a small village in Shropshire, and it was here that he began to write more extensively. He went on to work as a librarian in various colleges and universities, including Queen’s University in Belfast and the University of Hull, and he won increasing recognition as a writer.
There were many significant women in his life, but despite a yearning for love and intimacy his relationships seem to have been blighted by fear and indecision, and he appears to have resigned himself to the idea that marriage was not for him. He remained alone and became something of a recluse in later years, growing increasingly melancholic.
In June 1985, he was diagnosed with cancer and he died that same year, on December 2nd. He left behind him a body of work that has won him the accolade of being one of England’s finest post-war poets.
(skoool.ie)
WHAT FOLLOWS IS A PERSONAL REVIEW OF SOME THEMES AND ISSUES WHICH FEATURE IN THE POETRY OF LARKIN. YOU SHOULD CONSIDER THESE IDEAS, THEN RE-EXAMINE THE POEMS MENTIONED FOR EVIDENCE TO SUBSTANTIATE OR CONTRADICT THESE INTERPRETATIONS. IN OTHER WORDS MAKE YOUR OWN OF THESE NOTES, ADD TO THEM OR DELETE FROM THEM AS YOU SEE FIT.
THE FOLLOWING SELECTION IS SUGGESTED BECAUSE THEY DEAL WITH THE MAJOR THEMES WHICH RECUR IN LARKIN’S POETRY:
At Grass,
Wedding Wind,
Church Going,
An Arundel Tomb,
Ambulances,
Cut Grass,
The Whitsun Weddings
YEATS ONCE SAID THAT HIS POETRY WAS ‘BUT THE CONSTANT STITCHING AND RESTITCHING OF OLD THEMES’. CHECK THIS OUT FOR YOURSELF IN RELATION TO LARKIN AND THE OTHER POETS ON YOUR COURSE!
YOUR AIM SHOULD BE TO PICK YOUR OWN FAVOURITES FROM THIS SELECTION AND GET TO KNOW THEM VERY WELL. MAKE NOTES FOR YOURSELF, TOGETHER WITH QUOTATIONS AND REFERENCES.
MAJOR THEMES AND PREOCCUPATIONS IN LARKIN’S POETRY
Larkin’s awareness of modern society: When asked if writers should be concerned with political and social issues, Larkin said: ‘The imagination is not the servant of the intellect and social conscience.’ But while his poetry may not be directly motivated by specific social themes, Larkin was always alert to social behaviour, and many important aspects of modern society are reflected in his poetry:
The bleakness of urban living is explored in ‘Ambulances’ with its references to traffic, accidents, frightened people.
The random nature of social bonds is also explored: ‘the random blend of families and fashions’ is mentioned in ‘Ambulances’.
The vanity and empty glitter of our fashionable functions is explored in ‘At Grass’:
Numbers and parasols: outside
Squadrons of empty cars, and heat,
And littered grass.
The society Larkin writes about is a post-religious one (see ‘Church Going’ which can be read as charting the stages in the breakdown of faith – from scepticism, to superstition, to disbelief).
The function of churches in an age of disbelief is considered: they supply ceremonies that provide unity in our lives and mark significant points, places where ‘all our compulsions meet, / Are recognised, and robed as destinies’ (‘Church Going’)
Love and Marriage
In general, Larkin yearns for the ideal of love as a solution to human isolation.
In ‘An Arundel Tomb’ he toys with the vain hope that love might transcend death:
to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love
He deals with the fragile nature of human happiness and love in ‘The Wedding Wind’ when he compares the fragility of the newly married woman’s joy to ‘a thread carrying beads’.
Also in ‘Wedding Wind’ he deals with sexual fulfilment, happiness and joy from the woman’s point of view: ‘Our kneeling as cattle by all-generous waters’.
Complete happiness is never achieved for Larkin: as far as he is concerned there is an untruth at the heart of the love statement in ‘An Arundel Tomb’; love is qualified, as the speaker is still sad that she cannot share her happiness, in ‘Wedding Wind’.
Death
Larkin is obsessed with the passage of time in many of his poems. He doesn’t make any heroic attempts to defeat Time as other poets like Shakespeare or Keats have done, rather he records the different faces of death and finds the odd crumb of comfort along the way!
In ‘At Grass’ death is seen as the culmination of life. Death is seen as natural and gentle, yet it is essentially lonely: ‘And not a fieldglass sees them home’.
In ‘Ambulances’ the bleaker side of death is introduced. Here death is seen as capricious (‘children strewn on steps or road’), it is impersonal, alarming, the final loosening of all bonds, utterly comfortless, ‘so permanent and blank and true’.
Larkin sees death as the meaning of life: ‘the solving emptiness / That lies just under all we do’. (‘Ambulances’)
In ‘Cut Grass’, death in nature is seen as something beautiful; death and beauty exist side by side:
It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers
Nature
Larkin is constantly aware of nature in his poetry. In our selection all but ‘Ambulances’ use nature as a backdrop.
For Larkin, nature is the one constant, the only survivor, outlasting many institutions, ideas, etc. In ‘Church Going’ he says, ‘And what remains when disbelief has gone? Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky’.
Nature imagery is used by Larkin to express human emotions: ‘perpetual morning shares my bed’, ‘all-generous waters’ (‘Wedding Wind’).
Death is acceptable, less threatening, natural in the context of the seasons (‘At Grass’, ‘Cut Grass’)
Larkin’s Philosophy of Life
Many critics find a deep sense of disillusionment and pessimism in Larkin’s poetry: Eric Homberger describes it as, ‘the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket’, while Charles Tomlinson says of Larkin’s writing that it shows, ‘a tenderly nursed sense of defeat’ (Charles Tomlinson)
The main areas of disillusionment for Larkin were:
the lack of religious faith, which means that he has not got the comfort of that absolute in his life (‘Church Going’)
his very bleak view of the end of life is given full expression in ‘Ambulances’ when he speaks of, ‘the solving emptiness that lies just under all we do’.
the pointlessness of the struggle and the irony of all the effort, ‘not a fieldglass sees them home’ (‘At Grass’)
We also find that his perpetual awareness of death colours all his attempts to celebrate life. For example, ‘At Grass’ celebrates the success of life, but it is a life that is over. Even the celebration of nature’s beauty and abundant growth is qualified by the presence of death (‘Cut Grass’).
Larkin himself denied that he was a completely pessimistic poet: ‘The impulse for producing a poem is never negative; the most negative poem in the world is a very positive thing to have done’. Would you agree?
SAMPLE ANSWERS ON LARKIN – FOR THE OPTIMISTS AND PESSIMISTS AMONGST US! TAKE YOUR PICK!
(1) Sample Answer Specially Written for Pessimists!: ‘The realities of his own society and life, explored through a variety of traditional techniques, is characteristic of the poetry of Philip Larkin.’
In many of Philip Larkin’s poems we are presented with situations in a society that is post-war, increasingly materialistic, decreasingly spiritual, often alienating and occasionally meaningless. In this society we see ordinary people struggling to realise their ideals, dreams and hopes, grasping at an illusive happiness, which for many will remain unattainable and remote. This contrast between the ideal and the ordinary is central to Larkin’s view of the life and society within which he worked.
In ‘At Grass’, the narrator recalls the brief moments of fame enjoyed by the horses and their trainers. The poem is carefully structured into five stanzas, each of six lines with a regular rhythm and the rhyme scheme abcabc. Most of the lines are of equal length and of eight syllables, which is suited to a poem that is ponderous and sad in tone. The horses are closely observed in the poem and their retirement in the ‘unmolesting meadows’ suggests how short-lived fame or notoriety is, and just as short, perhaps, for humans as for these horses. They enjoy a temporary freedom from the flash bulbs and public glare before being called to the stables, symbolic of the inevitable submission to death.
The idea of death disturbed Larkin. In ‘Church Going’ he confesses to being a non-believer in a church which has frequently left him ‘at a loss’. Through the argument of the poem, Larkin discovers his purpose in these frequent visits to churches. It is a desire to fulfil, ‘A hunger in himself to be more serious’, to be, perhaps, important, significant, or simply a desire to matter and to make a difference. This desire to be important underpins several poems by Larkin which deal with love. In ‘Wedding Wind’, the speaker, in this case a young bride, delights in her happiness, despite, or perhaps in spite of, being left by her husband to feel, ‘Stupid in candlelight’. Her joy is tempered only by her reflection on those less fortunate than herself who ‘lack the happiness’ she anticipates and perhaps expects to enjoy in her married life. However, Larkin is not so convinced and in the second stanza the newly-weds have once again been parted by the domestic rituals that will demand attention and disrupt the ideal of shared married life. It is notable that the rhyme patterns are less than regular in this poem. In the last four lines of stanza one, a pattern emerges as the bride speaks of her joy and contentment but this pattern is not continued into the second stanza, the tone of which is certainly more anxious and uncertain.
In ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ Larkin deals with several marriages that occur on the same Saturday in June in a landscape that is quintessentially English, ‘wide Farms’ are observed from the train and as the journey continues south the poet speaks of ‘Canals with floatings of industrial froth’ and of new towns which were ‘nondescript …. with acres of dismantled cars’. Gradually the poet’s curiosity draws his vision to the wedding parties where women wore ‘nylon gloves and jewellery substitutes, / The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres’ and ‘girls, gripping their handbags tighter’. The speaker’s increasing involvement with those married couples who have boarded the train is suggested when the personal pronoun ‘I’ is replaced by ‘we’ in the final stanza. The sense of ‘swelling’ of hope and of possibility in the future is with all of those who step from the train in London. The poem is meticulously crafted over eight stanzas each of ten lines and with a regular rhythm. The rhyming scheme mirrors the speed of the train – slow at first and then gradually picking up speed as it leaves each station.
Not all – in fact, very few – of Larkin’s poems show such optimism! While there are moments of joy and happiness, and surprise in Larkin’s poetry, the overriding sensation which remains with the reader, having read his poetry, is disillusionment. In ‘Ambulances’ the clamour of the sirens which ‘Brings closer what is left to come, / And dulls to distance all we are’, is a striking reminder of the inevitable fate we await in death.
Larkin’s poetry reflects the experiences and impulses that were common to many people living in England in the immediate post-war era. Some of these experiences he shares, if not physically, then emotionally. He may at first stand as an observer, but he often becomes less detached and removed from the scene he observes in order to identify himself with those who live and breathe and ‘grow old’ before him and with him.
(2) Sample Answer Specially Written for the Optimists among us – for those who see the bright side of everything!: Write an essay in which you outline your reasons for liking and/or not liking the poetry of Philip Larkin.
Of all the poets I studied as part of my Leaving Cert course it was Philip Larkin who really struck a chord with me. When I think now why I liked his poetry so much I think of his moving elegiac accounts of the passing of time in poems such as ‘At Grass’. Then there are the poems rich with philosophical ideas and considerations that give rise to many questions without pretending to know the answers. ‘Church Going’ and ‘An Arundel Tomb’ offer a fascinating perspective on how values and meanings change over time without resorting to unnecessary obfuscating language. Larkin’s poetry also gives us a view of life that is ‘permanent and blank and true’. However, whereas some readers may find the poetry of Larkin to be bleak, at the heart of many of these poems lies a beautiful sensitivity to the bonds and moments of love that come to define our lives. This is particularly the case with ‘Ambulances’, a poem that deals unflinchingly with mortality. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it is the language that Larkin uses. Every poem contains exquisite lines of poetry that are a joy to read.
‘At Grass’ is a perfect example of Larkin’s ability to evoke the past and the heart-aching melancholy that comes with the passing of time. The poem is an elegy to a lost world – the world of the summer races, Ascot, the Derby: ‘Silks at the start: against the sky / Numbers and parasols: outside / Squadrons of empty cars, and heat’. However, there is a very interesting and moving ending to this poem. Having described the exciting world of the races he brings us back to the scene of two horses alone in a field, their racing days now long over. Capturing perfectly the melancholic sadness of life drawing to its close, Larkin describes how now that the world of the races has vanished, ‘Only the groom, and the groom’s boy, / With bridles in the evening come’. This final detail achieves a powerfully poignant melancholy.
This awareness of the passage of time and its consequences also lies at the heart of ‘Church Going’ and ‘An Arundel Tomb’, two poems I found particularly stimulating. Each poem considers how an object, though it might physically remain the same, comes to have different value and significance over the course of time. In ‘An Arundel Tomb’, the poet considers the representation in stone of an ‘earl and countess’ upon their tomb. Using sharp observation the poem raises many fascinating questions about the changes that time effects. Those buried in the tomb could never have imagined how the world would change around their frozen image:
They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read.
In ‘Church Going’ the poet raises equally fascinating questions about the significance of the churches that lie at the centre of every town in the country.
What I particularly liked about ‘Church Going’ was the way Larkin draws the reader into the poem. Using the register of the ‘Bored, uninformed’ tourist, the poet charms the reader with his observations (‘From where I stand the roof looks almost new – / Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don’t’) and humour (Hatless I take off / My cycle-clips in awkward reverence’) before raising some very important questions about the gradual demise of the church in modern society. The church ultimately becomes a ‘serious place on serious earth’, a place, ‘In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, / Are recognised, and robed as destinies’. That the church does this seems an invaluable thing and Larkin rightly wonders what institution will take its place when it no longer exists.
Wherever Larkin’s poems start from, they most often end with the inescapability of death. ‘Church Going’ contemplates the importance of churches in our lives but cannot help but notice in the end that ‘so many dead lie around’ them. In ‘Cut Grass’, something as ordinary and everyday as mown grass becomes a powerful symbol for the great sadness and finality of death:
Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death
It is ‘Ambulances’, however, that provides us with the bluntest depiction of human mortality, with its vivid descriptions of illness and death. The poem exposes ‘the solving emptiness / That lies just under all we do’. However, even in this bleakest of poems Larkin remains keenly aware of the small things that come to define our lives and invest them with value and meaning – ‘the unique random blend / Of families and fashions’ and ‘the exchange of love’.
And that is what lies at the heart of Larkin’s poetry – his attention to the intimate details that define our everyday lives. He was not a poet who needed to travel to exotic places in order to find inspiration for his poetry. His truths are the simple truths of life and death and as a poet Larkin stuck with what he knew and like Frost’s, ‘The Road Not Taken’, that has made all the difference for me!
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This one is a bonus – however, it is not on the Leaving Cert course – maybe for obvious reasons!
The legend of Plath as a dark and driven and unstable young woman is a tremendous simplification of her work. Her work will endure where poetry endures.
The trouble for us who come to study her work in depth at Leaving Cert or A Level is that we already know the ending – a bit like watching a film of The Titanic! We know that Plath died by suicide in mid-sentence, so to speak, at the age of thirty one. Studying this arbitrary selection of her poems here should impress on us her vast and vital legacy. She is, in my view, a very essential poet.
There is unfortunately a widespread tendency to interpret Plath’s work as autobiographical, to read her poems as if they tell her life story. While it is quite obvious – and probably inevitable – that a writer’s life will influence what she writes, it is important to understand that poetry is art. Writing about this issue, Ted Hughes pointed out that the reader must learn, ‘to distinguish between a subjective work that was trying to reach an artistic form using a real event as its basis, and a documentary of some event that did happen.’
Some critics read her later poems exclusively in the light of her suicide. They argue that she signals her suicide (intentionally or otherwise) in a number of her last poems, through various references to despair, rage, loss, separation, or death. This is by no means as obvious as these critics claim and after all hindsight has always been the great tormentor of those left bereaved and bereft after a suicide. Many of these poems are the work of a woman who is coming into her own, recognising her own needs, using her own voice, finding her true self. Look, for example, at ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’. This is about facing and releasing the fears that are hidden beneath the surface – not about a woman who is contemplating death.
So therefore, it is important to read the poems as they stand. Looking for signs of what was to happen afterwards in her life is to predetermine how the poems should be read, not actually attending to the poems themselves.
Note:To help you prepare for your Leaving Cert you need to become very familiar with at least six of Sylvia Plath’s poems. I would recommend that you concentrate on her later poems (from 1960 to her death) because of their power and honesty. The following selection will be dealt with in some depth here:
‘Morning Song’ (19th February, 1961),
‘Finisterre’ (29th September, 1961),
‘Mirror’ (23rd October, 1961),
‘Pheasant’ (7th April, 1962),
‘Elm’ (19th April, 1962),
‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’, (4th October, 1962),
‘Child’ (28th January, 1963).
The points made here represent one interpretation of her work. It is important that you develop your own response to each poem; where this differs from the suggestions given here, trust your own judgement! Become familiar with the poems and with the major themes running through Plath’s poetry.
BACKGROUND
Plath wrote incessantly during her short life: poetry, short stories, articles, essays, and one semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. Her writings were first published in magazines on both sides of the Atlantic; later they appeared in book form.
She considered poems written before 1956 as ‘juvenilia’. Her first published book, The Colossus, includes only poems written after this date. Her remaining poems were published after her death in three collections: Ariel and Other Poems, Crossing the Water, and Winter Trees.
Her last poems are generally seen as Plath’s outstanding achievement and that is why we concentrate on them here in this review. Here she truly found her voice, expressing herself in a distinctive, unique style. She was aware of this herself: while writing them she informed her mother, ‘I am a writer…. I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name…. (Letters Home, 16th October 1962).
Her husband, Ted Hughes, describes these poems equally glowingly:
‘Her real self showed itself in her writing … When a real self finds language and manages to speak, it is surely a dazzling event’ (The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1982).
MAJOR THEMES IN PLATH’S POETRY
Motherhood: Plath wrote many poems dealing with all aspects of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, at a time when writers, especially poets, rarely touched on such topics. Her best-known work on the theme, ‘Poem for Three Voices’, evokes powerfully the variety of emotions experienced by women around pregnancy, miscarriage, motherhood, and adoption. Her poems on this theme are remarkable for their lyricism (their song-like quality), depth of feeling, and tenderness.
What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?
However, being a realist, she also reflected the other side of being a mother: the drudgery, the anxieties, and the level to which a mother is bound to her child:
I have never seen a thing so clear …
It is a terrible thing to be so open: it is as if my heart
Put on a face and walked into the world.
Both attitudes are seen in ‘Morning Song’. The mother’s life is shadowed by the child’s arrival, but is enriched by the joy of love. ‘Child’ also reflects the simple pleasure she derives from her child; his eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing that she longs to fill with the beauty of the world. But there is also an underlying threat to the child’s safety, which distresses her.
Identity: Plath frequently returned to the issue of double identity in her writing. The subject of her undergraduate thesis in Smith College was: ‘The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Dostoevsky Novels’. Her interest in what appears on the surface and what is hidden is reflected in ‘Mirror’. Here, the depths hide something frightening and sinister; something the woman would prefer to avoid but cannot escape.
‘Elm’ also deals with doubleness: the apparent calm of the elm in the opening stanzas, and the hidden terrors that surface as she talks. A similar preoccupation is at the heart of ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’. The practical, square box is a simple container: apparently there are no mysteries here. However, it conceals something sinister, but also fascinating.
Nature: Plath’s abiding interest in the world around her, her interest in nature, is reflected in many poems. Her descriptions are remarkable for their concrete, precise detail.
‘Finisterre’ paints a graphic picture of the scene before her eyes, conveying the harshness of the sea, the bleakness of the rocks, the delicacy of the flowers on the cliff, and the effect of the mist.
Her painterly style creates graphic images in ‘Pheasant’: the bird itself, the flowers, the hill and elm in the background, the earlier scene where the snow was marked with the ‘crosshatch’ footprints of various birds. This poem also reflects her stance against the destruction of nature, a concern that features in many of her poems.
Psychic landscapes/Mindscapes: While her descriptions of landscapes and seascapes are very striking, the scene is at times simply the backdrop to the mood of the speaker. In ‘Finisterre’, the place is identified by the title. The landscape is captured in a series of wonderful images. Many of these are personified: cliffs are ‘admonitory’, rocks hide their grudges, the sea wages war, and mists are without hope. The place assumes an atmosphere that is oddly human.
Plath with husband Ted Hughes
PLATH’S TECHNIQUE
Style: Plath’s style changed considerably during her career – unlike, say, Hopkins. However, there are certain features that mark all her work:
Her remarkable use of language
Unusual and striking imagery
Language: Plath’s ‘crackling verbal energy’ is apparent in her poems’ biting precision of word and image. Her writing has been variously praised for its tactile quality, power, incisiveness, control, taut originality, and luminosity. Joyce Carol Oates observed that, ‘the final memorable poems (‘Elm’, and ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’ among others) … read as if they’ve been chiselled with a fine surgical implement out of arctic ice.’ In her Journals, Plath constantly urges herself to develop ‘diamond-edged’, ‘gem-bright’ style. This she certainly achieved. Part of her technique was to reuse certain words in many poems, which thus took on an almost symbolic meaning: smiles, hooks, element, dissatisfaction, vowels, shriek, horse, sea.
‘Pheasant’ is a good example of her skilled control of descriptive language. The form here is less dominant, and the poet’s feelings are reflected in the personal voice that speaks throughout. The words are simple, the descriptions are vivid, and the poem is crystal clear – a good example of Plath’s descriptive powers at their best.
‘Elm’ shows her powerful response to loss, pain and terror. The feeling of despair, for example, is conveyed through a number of highly charged nouns and verbs.
Imagery: Certain images recur in Plath’s poetry, taking on a symbolic meaning that gains added force through repeated use.
The moon symbolises barrenness, coldness, and the negation of life. in ‘Elm’ it is merciless, cruel, and barren, associated with pain and suffering.
The mirror often symbolises the hidden alter ego (the ‘other self’), as in ‘Mirror’.
The horse is a symbol of vitality. In ‘Elm’, love gallops off like a horse.
The sea is often associated with undefined menace or hidden threat, as is so graphically evident in ‘Finisterre’.
She uses many other images, however, that are not symbolic, images that add to the vividness and immediacy of what she is describing. One of the most distinctive features of her work is her use of metaphors, many of which are visual.
Examples abound:
Mists are ‘souls’, which ‘bruise the rocks out of existence’ (‘Finisterre’).
The pheasant is ‘brown as a leaf’, a ‘little cornucopia’ (‘Pheasant’).
The bee box is ‘square as a chair’, a ‘midget’s coffin’ (‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’).
Bees are like ‘African hands, / Minute and shrunk for export’ (‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’).
The baby’s mouth opens ‘clean as a cat’s’ (‘Morning Song’).
Her crying is ‘a handful of notes’, which rise ‘like balloons’ (‘Morning Song’).
Plath attached great importance to colours, often identifying them with specific attributes. The repeated use of colour to suggest certain qualities links her poems to one another, giving added force to her meaning.
Red signifies vitality, life force: the pheasant’s vitality is envisaged largely through its vivid colouring.
Green too signifies the positive, creativity, life force: the pheasant is red and green.
Black is associated with death, anger, depression, aggression, and destruction: the black headland that opens ‘Finisterre’ underlines the sinister mood.
Surprisingly, white too is sinister: the white faces of the dead, the white mists in ‘Finisterre’.
In Summary then…
Sylvia Plath was a lyric poet in the Romantic tradition. She wrote poems that drew on her own experience of life and explored a range of emotions from love and joy to terror and despair. Like the Romantics, she looked inwards rather than outwards; her experience is gauged by what she has lived through.
‘Elm’ is perhaps the most striking example of this. It is one of a number of poems she wrote around the same time, expressing agonising emotions. Some of these emotions were quite ‘acceptable’, provided they were not shown too openly: the grief and loneliness expressed in ‘Elm’, for example. However, less acceptable was the intensity with which she voiced these; it was considered ‘over the top’, too revealing.
The writer and critic Joyce Carol Oates sees in these poems the seeds of Plath’s eventual suicide.
Her poems have that heart-breaking quality about them that has made Sylvia Plath our acknowledged Queen of Sorrows, the spokeswoman for our most private, most helpless nightmares, her poetry is as deathly as it is impeccable; it enchants us almost as powerfully as it must have enchanted her.
Not everyone agrees with this estimate, however. Janice Markey sees Plath’s writings as life-affirming:
‘The enduring success and greatness of Plath’s work lies in its universal appeal and in an innovative, effective presentation. Plath was the first writer in modern times to write about women with a new aggressive confidence and clarity, and the first to integrate this confidence and clarity in a sane, honest and compassionate vision’.
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SYLVIA PLATH – AN AMAZING POET
One of the problems when reading poetry is how much do we need to know about the poet’s life and background. The poet Thom Gunn argues that the making of poems is not like turning out clay pots; poems are rooted in and tell directly or indirectly of a life. People who have never read a Sylvia Plath poem know that she killed herself at thirty one and therefore, her death has come to overshadow and dominate the life. In Plath’s case, probably more so than the other poets on our course, her life is so emotionally complicated and complex that a fuller understanding and appreciation of the poems are possible when they are read against the life. That life was in Sylvia Plath’s own words, ‘magically run by two electric currents’ and these she named ‘joyous positive and despairing negative’; her poetry reflects those charged polar opposites.
The seven poems that we have chosen here were written in the space of two years – the last one, ‘Child’ two weeks before she died. Her poems describe the natural world and the domestic world but, whether she is writing about a pheasant, an elm tree, bees, or her child, she is primarily writing about herself.
Her poetry is always very urgent and intense. That poetry has sometimes been described as hysterical and self-dramatising but such descriptions ignore the clear-sighted understanding she has of a situation. She very often courageously writes of troubled emotions, the darker side of life, her own experiences. Ted Hughes once told Eavan Boland that Sylvia Plath’s face changed in absolutely every single moment of expression. She did experience extremes and, if her work is more pessimistic than optimistic, more shaded than light, she herself defended it as follows:
Don’t talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen – physical or psychological – wants is nobody saying that the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like. It is much more help for me, for example, to know that people are divorced and go through hell, than to hear about happy marriages (Letter to her mother, 21st October, 1962).
‘Morning Song’, ‘Finisterre’, ‘Mirror’, ‘Pheasant’, ‘Elm’, and ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’, in Seamus Heaney’s words, reveal, ‘the terrible stresses of her own psychological and domestic reality’. If she writes about a dramatic landscape, as she does in ‘Finisterre’, we see that landscape as Plath sees it. She brings to it, just as every viewer would, her own preconceptions and concerns. Anne Stevenson, in her book Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, writes that Plath’s, ‘raw-edged response to personal sorrows and joys, her apprehensions of the world’s horrors and injustices, as well as its beauty, were excessive to an unusual degree.’
Asked once about the importance of poetry, Plath said:
‘I am not worried that poems reach relatively few people. As it is, they go surprisingly far – among strangers, around the world, even. Farther than the words of a classroom teacher or the prescriptions of a doctor; if they are very lucky, farther than a lifetime.’
She wanted her poetry to mirror the life lived, its ordinariness and its extraordinariness, so much so that Plath once famously said that she wanted to get a toothbrush into a poem and that she was interested in writing about, ‘The real world. Real situations, behind which the great gods play the drama of blood, lust and death’.
Her mother, Aurelia Plath, said that Sylvia Plath, ‘made use of everything and often transmitted gold into lead …… These emotions in another person would dissipate with time, but with Sylvia they were written at the moment of intensity to become ineradicable as an epitaph engraved in a tombstone’. But on the page the thoughts and feelings are shaped and crafted. Eavan Boland speaks of Plath’s, ‘great elan, her handling of the line, her very unusual take on language and image – all of those things have become coded into the poetry that we now have. Robert Lowell speaks of Plath’s, ‘perfect control, like the control of a skier who avoids every death-trap until reaching the final drop’ and Michael Schmidt says of her poetry that it ‘is hard to imagine a poetry more forcefully stamped with a personality and voice’.
Therefore, it is clear that the legend of Plath as a dark and driven and unstable young woman is a tremendous simplification of her work. Her work will endure where poetry endures.
SAMPLE ANSWER: Nature imagery in the poetry of Sylvia Plath.
Sylvia Plath was a very ambitious writer. In 1958, before the publication of her first volume of poetry, she wrote in her journal: ‘I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America ….. I am eager, chafing, sure of my gift.’ Plath dedicated much of her short life to writing and developed several features that became characteristic of her style. One of the most interesting and accomplished features is her depiction of nature in her work.
Plath shows a very keen eye for detail in her fine and striking portrayals of nature. It is easy to picture the ‘Black admonitory cliffs’ in ‘Finisterre’ and she can also recreate the beauty of nature’s creatures as we see in ‘Pheasant’ where she marvels at ‘the wonder of it, in that pallor / Through crosshatch of sparrows and starling’. She manages to capture the beauty and richness and ‘rareness’ of the pheasant in one remarkably apt image: ‘It’s a little cornucopia’. Imagery, of course, adds a new dimension to Plath’s descriptions of nature. She uses imagery in a way that sends echoes of suggestion, of splendour, of menace through a poem and invites interpretations from the reader.
Much of her imagery is of a visual kind, in itself emphasising the importance of ‘seeing’ and ‘reflecting’ in her work. One of her common images from nature, very like Heaney, is water. In ‘Finisterre’, for example, Plath recreates the sights and sounds of land’s end in a dramatic evocation of the sea as it explodes, ‘Whitened by the faces of the drowned’. The sea ‘cannons’ to the dead, suggesting that for Plath, it represents a destructive force that humans can only hope to oppose in their unheard prayers to ‘Our Lady of the Shipwrecked’. The scene at the sea cliffs is a grim one. Nature is unforgiving; it is a receptacle of death, ‘Leftover soldiers from old, messy wars’, and it holds potential for more evil where ‘rocks hide their grudges under the water’. Certainly, it is not a benevolent force, not a nostalgic, romantic or sentimental place. Plath’s vivid and perhaps unexpected images have created a disturbing ‘Bay of the Dead’.
However, a further development occurs in Plath’s imagery when she begins to use it, not merely to create a vivid picture of external reality, but as a device to suggest the inner reality of her own mind. In this way, Plath uses imagery as an expression of landscape but also as a reflection of her own inner mindscape. (Hopkins does this also in his Terrible Sonnets). In other words, Plath succeeds in fusing external events with her own inner feelings. In the poem ‘Elm’ the poet creates a dark, disturbing and surreal world where love is ‘a shadow’, sunset an ‘atrocity’, where winds are violent, the moon ‘merciless’, and the tree/woman is ‘terrified by this dark thing / That sleeps in me’. The poem concludes with death that seems, rather than being final, to be ongoing. The external landscape of the tree may indeed express the inner turmoil and disturbances of Plath’s mind, that has become ‘inhabited by a cry’ that ‘Nightly … flaps out / Looking with its hooks, for something to love’. The poet is ‘terrified by this dark thing’ that ‘petrifies the will’.
Imagery, therefore, captures various states of emotional distress. Often this unexpected power of her images originates in objects that at first appear commonplace, such as the elm tree or, in ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’, the bees. Nonetheless, the echoes that emanate from such commonplace objects are unexpected and startling. The bees in the bee box, for example, are variously described ‘a Roman mob’, ‘maniacs’, who speak ‘unintelligible syllables’. However, the poet has to ‘live with’ them overnight. Such imagery certainly animates the bees in the poem, but it could also evoke the inner turmoil and chaos within the poet’s mind. Her inner voices are like the bees: she can’t control them, can’t understand them, they remain ‘dark, dark’. She also sees them as ‘Black on black, angrily clambering’ and their shriek ‘appals’ her. In the poem she decides, hesitantly, to ‘set them free’ from her mind, which up to now has remained a ‘coffin’, a locked up box with ‘no exit’. The poet, dressed in her ‘moon suit and funeral veil’ both wishes for and fears their release. But the conclusion is more hopeful than that in ‘Elm’, for tomorrow she will ‘set them free’.
(As an interesting exercise, you might examine the poem ‘Mirror’ with some of these ideas in mind. Stanza two of that poem should reward you with some thoughtful insights! Another worthwhile study would be Plath’s use of colour and what it might symbolise in her poetry.)
It is clear, therefore, that Plath’s striking metaphors and startling similes are usually central to a poem’s development. Her images can evoke vivid descriptions of the external world, the poet’s feelings for that world, and at times she has the ability to fuse these feelings to the emotional insecurities of her inner world.
The main purpose of these notes is to assist you in forming an overview of Bishop’s work. For this reason the material is structured as a series of ‘thinking points’, grouped under general headings. These cover the poet’s main preoccupations and methods, but they are not exhaustive. Neither are they ‘carved in stone’, to be memorised: ideally they should be altered, added to or deleted as you develop your own set of notes. This priceless pearl of wisdom can be applied to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop but it equally applies to all the other poets on your course as well!
The poems that we will analyse are: The Fish, Filling Station, The Prodigal. (These are also on the Ordinary Level Course.) and also First Death in Nova Scotia, In the Waiting Room, At the Fishhouses and Questions of Travel.
Major Themes in Bishop’s Poetry
Childhood
Many of her poems have their roots in childhood memories, indeed are based on her own childhood (‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, ‘In the Waiting Room’).
The perspective is mostly that of adult reminiscence (‘In the Waiting Room’), but occasionally the child’s viewpoint is used (‘First Death in Nova Scotia’).
The lessons of childhood are chiefly about pain and loss (‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, ‘In the Waiting Room’).
There is a strong tension between the need to return to childhood and the need to escape from that childhood (‘In the Waiting Room’, ‘At the Fishhouses); she even returns in dreams in a poem called ‘The Moose’.
Perhaps this is based on the notion of childhood as the completion of the self, and the poems are a search for the self? (Don’t mind me I’m just showing off!)
We know she attended counselling to find the origins of her alcoholism and depression. Yet her reconstructions of childhood do not seem to function as Freudian therapy. She doesn’t seem to alter her direction or attitudes as a result of drawing her past into the conscious, though she does seem to find a deal of comfort and a greater acceptance in the later poem, ‘The Moose’. She is not trying to apportion blame, neither is she trying to be forgiving or sympathetic. In general she seems neutral and detached (‘First Death in Nova Scotia’).
She also deals with the end of childhood and the awakening to adulthood (‘In the Waiting Room’).
Her life was her subject matter
Bishop was ‘a poet of deep subjectivity’, as Harold Bloom said. She wrote out of her own experience, dealing with such topics as
Her incompleteness (‘In the Waiting Room’)
Alcoholism (‘The Prodigal’)
Achieving adulthood and the confusion of that (‘In the Waiting Room’)
Travel, her wanderlust (‘Questions of Travel’), her favourite places (‘At the Fishhouses’)
Even her hobbies, such as fishing (‘The Fish’).
The poet and travel
As her own wanderings show, she was a restless spirit, constantly on the move: Nova Scotia, Florida, Brazil, Europe, New York, San Francisco, Harvard.
Many of the places she visited (Nova Scotia, the Straits of Magellan, the Amazon Estuary, Key West, Florida) stand at the boundary between land and sea. There is a tension between land and sea in the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop (‘At the Fishhouses’, ‘Questions of Travel’), with the sea viewed as a strange, indifferent, encircling power (‘At the Fishhouses’). Perhaps this is a metaphor for the conflict between the artist and life? Quite a few of her poems are set at this juncture between land and sea (‘At the Fishhouses’, ‘The Fish’).
She seemed to be fascinated by geographical extremities: straits, peninsulas, wharves; mountains, jungle, outback (‘Questions of Travel’). Perhaps she was attracted to the near-isolation of these places. They are almost isolated in her poems. One critic viewed these as the sensual organs of a living earth, ‘fingers of water or land that are the sensory receptors of a large mass.’ The poet is seen as making sensuous contact with the living earth.
Bishop has an eye for the exotic and the unusual (‘Questions of Travel’) but also for the ordinary (‘Filling Station’).
She dwells on the difficulty of ever really knowing another culture (‘Questions of Travel’), but this did not prevent her trying!
Travel and journeying can be seen as a metaphor for discovery of truth in some poems (‘Questions of Travel’).
Bishop and the natural world
Nature is central to her poetry, either as an active element central to the experience of the poem or by making an intrusion into the domestic scene (in a minority of poems such as ‘Filling Station’, ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, and ‘In the Waiting Room’).
The experience of really looking at and encountering the natural is central to her poetic process (‘The Fish’, ‘Questions of Travel’).
Our ability to understand the natural is sometimes limited, yet there are great moments of awe and insight in our encounters with the otherworldly spirit of nature (‘The Fish’).
Bishop is always aware of the sheer beauty of nature (‘Questions of Travel’) and this is obviously tied in with her fascination with travel and her already mentioned interest in the exotic.
She tends to domesticate the strangeness of nature through language and description (see ‘The Prodigal’).
You should also consider again some of the points already made, such as how geographical extremes fascinated her, her beloved places, and the significance of journeys for her.
The domestic and the strange
The importance of the domestic is also a central ground in her poetry. Domesticity is one of the unifying principles of life. It gives meaning to our existence (‘Filling Station’).
The comfort of people, of domestic affections, is important (‘Filling Station’).
Yet the heart of the domestic scene can sometimes be enigmatic. This strangeness, even at the centre of the domestic, is a powerful element in human life (‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, ‘In the Waiting Room’). One can be ambushed by the strange at any time, even in the security of the domestic scene (‘In the Waiting Room’)
Bishop’s philosophy as revealed in the poems
Bishop’s is a secular (non-religious) world view: there is no sense of ultimate purpose, and in this she relates to modernist American poets like Frost and Stevens.
Hers is very much a here-and-now, existential philosophy: the experience is everything. There is some sense of tradition or linear movement in her life view, but tradition is just an accumulation of experience. The transience of knowledge (‘At the Fishhouses’) and the limits to our knowing (‘Questions of Travel’) contribute to this outlook.
Her ecological outlook is at the basis of her philosophy, as we have seen: humans communing with nature, discovering, encountering, not domineering (‘The Fish’).
She demonstrates the importance of the domestic (‘Filling Station’).
Her view of the human being is as fractured and incomplete (‘Chemin de Fer’). This duality has been described by Anne Newman (in Elizabeth Bishop: Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom) as follows: ‘She sees the ideal and the real, permanence and decay, affirmation and denial in both man and nature’; a sort of ’fractured but balanced’ view of humanity’. Examine ‘Filling Station’ and ‘In the Waiting Room’ for signs of this.
A person may not always be entirely free to choose her location (‘Questions of Travel’), yet she can make a choice about how her life is spent. Life is not totally determined (‘The Prodigal’).
The bleaker side of life is often stressed, the pain, loss and trauma (‘The Prodigal’, ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, ‘In the Waiting Room’), yet she is not without humour (‘At the Fishhouses’, ‘Filling Station’).
She believes we need to experience our dreams (‘Questions of Travel’).
Is her overall view of humankind that of the eternal traveller, journeying? And is the journey all?
She expresses the unknowable strangeness of death (‘First Death in Nova Scotia’).
Yet there is a sort of heroism evident in her poems. Many of the poems feature a crisis or conflict of some sort, with which the narrator deals courageously, often learning in the process (‘The Fish’, ‘In the Waiting Room’).
Bishop and Women’s Writing
Are you conscious of the femininity of the speaker in Bishop’s poems? Some critics have argued that the importance of the domestic principle in her philosophy (‘Filling Station’) and the attitudes of care and sympathy in the poems (for the fish, the prodigal, the animals and birds) and even the occupational metaphors, for example of housekeeping (‘Filling Station’) and dressmaking and map colouring in other poems, all indicate a strong feminine point of view in her poetry.
Other critics have argued that her rhetoric is completely asexual, that the poet’s persona is neutral, the Bishop ‘I’ is the eye of the traveller or the child recapturing an innocence that avoids sex roles altogether, an asexual self that frees her from any sex-determined role. Examine ‘Questions of Travel’ and ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’ in this regard.
We have already encountered something of her treatment of her own sexuality and her attitude as a child to female sexuality (‘In the Waiting Room’ and other poems).
Style and Technique
Variety of verse forms
Though she was not often attracted to formal patterns, there are a variety of verse forms found in Bishop’s poetry: sonnet, sestina, villanelle, etc. (‘The Prodigal’, ‘Sestina’).
She used a variety of metres but often-favoured trimeter lines (resulting in those long thin poems!).
She was happiest using free verse (‘Questions of Travel’. ‘At the Fishhouses’).
Her descriptions
The surface of a Bishop poem is often deceptively simple.
A favourite technique is ‘making the familiar strange’ (‘Questions of Travel’).
Her detailed descriptions function as repossession or domestication of the object by the artist. This is how she gradually apprehends her subject, through the accumulation of detail (‘The Fish’).
Bishop often insisted on the truth of her descriptions, but the reality is more complex than that. Her descriptions are both recreation and creation, creating veracity but also using poetic licence (‘In the Waiting Room’).
Her similes and metaphors are often surprising, like conceits. They can be both exciting and exact.
Control and feeling
Many of her poems deal with emotive subjects (‘In the Waiting Room’).
There is an element of spontaneity and naturalness in the tone. Consider the opening of ‘In the Waiting Room’ and ‘Filling Station’. ‘The sense of the mind actively encountering reality, giving off the impression of involved immediate discovery, is one of Bishop’s links to the Romantics,’ as the critic Penelope Laurans put it.
The matter-of-fact tone avoids sentimentality. The use of understatement controls feeling (‘In the Waiting Room’).
The absence of moralising
Her dislike of didacticism is well documented. She disliked ‘modern religiosity and moral superiority’, and so she avoids overt moralising in her poems. The scenes offer up their wisdom gradually, ass the descriptions help us to understand the object or place (‘At the Fishhouses’, ‘Questions of Travel’).
Bishop as a dramatic poet
Consider:
Scenes of conflict or anger
Moments of dramatic encounter
Dramatic monologue structure in many of the poems.
MAKING THE STRANGE FAMILIAR: FORGING A PERSONAL UNDERSTANDING OF BISHOP’S POETRY
Think about the following points, and make notes for yourself.
Which of her poems made the deepest impression on you?
Which passages would you wish to read and reread?
What are her principal issues or concerns?
Did you find that reading Bishop gave you any insights into human beings or the world? What did you discover?
Think about the landscapes and places that attracted her. What do they suggest about the poet and poetry?
What do you notice about the people featured in her poetry?
Do you find her poetry different in any way from other poetry you have read?
Why should we read Bishop?
What questions would you like to ask her about her poetry?
BISHOP’S LINKS TO THE ROMANTICS
The Romantic Movement held sway at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was at its height between 1800 – 1830 and the main architects of this movement were Wordsworth, Keats and Coleridge.
There follows a list of some of the main distinguishing features of Romanticism. Consider Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry in the light of some or all of these statements.
Romanticism stressed the importance of the solitary individual voice, often in rebellion against tradition and social conventions.
In place of orthodox religious values the individual looks for value and guidance in intense private experience.
Nature often provides this intense experience, hence the notion of nature as the great teacher and moral guide as in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ (or even ‘The Daffodils’!).
Romanticism can show a divided view of the individual. The individual is often pulled in opposite directions – for example solitariness versus sociability, lonely pursuit of an ideal versus community fellowship.
It is anti-rational. Feelings, instinctive responses, unconscious wisdom and passionate living are valued more than rational; thought.
Dreams and drug-enhanced experiences are especially valued. Children, primitive people, outcasts, even the odd eccentric figure are regarded as having special insight and wisdom.
‘Bishop explored typical Romantic themes, such as problems of isolation, loss, and the desire for union beyond the self.’ Explore the poetry in the light of this statement.
It has been said that Bishop’s practice of poetry follows Wordsworth’s advice that poetry should embody controlled passion. For Wordsworth, (and for Bishop also), poetry was ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ and many of his great poems embody the notion of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ Would you agree with this assessment of her poetry?
Finally, as a little test of your new-found expertise, examine ‘At the Fishhouses’ as an example of a great Romantic poem.
ELIZABETH BISHOP – AN OVERVIEW
The poems by Elizabeth Bishop on our course reveal many of the most striking characteristics of her work: her eye for detail, her interest in travel and different places, her apparently conversational tone, her command of internal rhyme, her use of repetition, her interest in strict poetic forms (the sonnet and the sestina), childhood memories, identity, loss.
The world, which Bishop describes in her poetry, is vivid and particular. She is so intent on accurate description that often the detail is qualified and clarified within the poem. In Michael Schmidt’s words, ‘the voice affirms, hesitates, corrects itself; the image comes clear to us as it came clear to her, a process of adjusting perception until the thing is seen. Or the feeling is released.’ For example, in ‘The Fish’ she tells us:
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
– the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly –
Another example would be where she describes the eyes of the fish. She says that they ‘shifted a little’ and then she clarifies this further with the more precise observation that, ‘it was more like the tipping / of an object towards the light’.
Bishop is a sympathetic observer and it has been said of her that she asks us ‘to focus not on her but with her’. She looks at the fish, imagines its insides – ‘the coarse white flesh / packed in like feathers, / the big bones and the little bones … ; she sings hymns to the seal in ‘At the Fishhouses’; she finds love is present in the unlikely setting of a dirty filling station. When Bishop uses ‘I’ in her poetry it is never alienating or distancing. Somehow she makes the reader feel at ease. The poems as we read them are working something out.
Her poetry is not always strictly autobiographical but Bishop, an outsider for much of her life, writes indirectly in ‘The Prodigal’ of the outsider and later, in the explicitly autobiographical ‘In the Waiting Room’, she names herself (‘you are an Elizabeth’) and charts the sense of her child’s mind realising her uniqueness and identity. ‘Sestina’ is also autobiographical, in that it tells of a home without a mother and father. She only wrote of her childhood experiences late in life: ‘Sestina’, ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’ and ‘In the Waiting Room’ all date from when she was in her fifties. In these poems she captures the confusion and complexities of childhood, its terror, panic and alienation. In ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, she pieces together, as a child’s mind would, the details in order to understand them: ‘Arthur’s coffin was / a little frosted cake, / and the red-eyed loon eyed it / from his white, frozen lake.’
It has been said that Bishop preferred geography to history and it is significant that she remembers reading National Geographic in ‘In the Waiting Room’. The title of her first book, North and South, contains the idea of opposites but opposites that co-exist. Yet her descriptions of place are never just descriptions of place. Morality, history and politics are also evident in Bishop’s landscapes. In ‘Questions of Travel’, Brazil and its otherness prompt Bishop to ask if it’s right to watch strangers in another country. She dwells on the country’s traditions (‘In another country the clogs would all be tested’), religious influences (‘a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque’), history (‘the weak calligraphy of songbirds’ cages’).
In her poetry there is self-discovery, a sense of difference, moments of heightened awareness (epiphanies), a strong sense of here and now, an absence of any religious belief but a belief in the mystery of knowledge ‘flowing and flown’. In ‘At the Fishhouses’ what begins as accurate and gradual description of landscape gives way to a downward movement towards the dark cold centre of meaning, here imagined as deep beneath the ocean surface and something that we can never know or understand fully.
In Bishop the act of writing and the art of writing bring shape and order to experience. In ‘Questions of Travel’ she describes the traveller taking a notebook and writing. The use of ‘we’ in the poem and the way in which every traveller is contained in ‘the traveller’ allows everyone to enter into the experience. This record of thought and feeling is what Bishop herself does in her poems. She was interested in form: the sonnet and the sestina are very formal, but in other poems where the structure and rhythm may not be obvious at first there is often a very fine command and control.
***
In one of her finest poems, ‘Crusoe in England’, she imagines Robinson Crusoe lonely for his island and his friend Friday; and remembering his time there, she writes:
The sun set in the sea; the same odd sun
rose from the sea,
and there was one of it and one of me.
Here we have the voice of Robinson Crusoe, and the voice of Elizabeth Bishop, and the voice of all other lonely, observing, travellers. It is significant that Bishop was attracted to the figure of Robinson Crusoe, an isolated figure, someone ill at ease having returned to society. Her sexuality and her struggle with alcohol were part of her own sense of isolation. In a letter written in 1948 to Robert Lowell she said, ‘When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.’ Her later work suggests a happier Elizabeth Bishop, but her life was never uncomplicatedly happy.
Bishop’s The Complete Poems 1927 – 1972 contains just over 140 poems and some thirty of these are translations from French, Spanish, and Portuguese. She wrote very slowly, very carefully, sometimes pinning bits of paper on her walls, leaving blank spaces (‘with gaps / and empties for the unimagined phrases’ is how Robert Lowell described it in a poem for her), waiting for the right word. Some of her poems were several years in the making. She worked on ‘The Moose’ for over twenty-five years, yet it seems effortless as all good poetry does. She writes a poetry that echoes the rhythms of natural speech and her rhymes are not always easy to detect. End rhymes and cross rhymes or slant rhymes create a special and effective music. And what Yeats says of all true poetry is true of Bishop:
‘A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.’
Sample Answer:
‘Bishop’s poems are constructed around movement and reflection. She is a meticulous writer who effectively combines precise observations with striking imagery’.
In the words of famous American poet, Robert Lowell, ‘I don’t think anyone alive has a better eye than she has’ – there is ample evidence in her poems on the course of the truth of this statement.
Each of her poems, from ‘The Fish’ to ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, throbs with movement and reflection. Bishop is a poet who seems preoccupied with the passion of movement, yet never strains in her ability to capture its beauty, strangeness or intricacies in imagery which can be dramatic, and at times almost outrageous, in its originality. In ‘The Fish’, she describes how the fish hung ‘a grunting weight’ while his eyes ‘shifted a little’. Through the poem, Bishop reflects on its suffering movements before she finally ‘let the fish go’. Further activity is observed in ‘At the Fishhouses’ including the motion of wheelbarrows, the sea that considers ‘spilling over’, the standing seals and ‘forever flowing water’, all elements within a sea of change.
‘Filling Station’ has dirty monkey suits, wickerwork baskets and dogs, bringing to vivid life the ordinary, mundane scenes of a petrol station. The observations here are precise, honest and real, ‘a dirty dog’, ‘a big dim doily’ … (‘Embroidered in daisy stitch / with marguerites, I think, / and heavy with grey crochet’.); the comic books which provide ‘the only note of colour’. Much description, little movement it seems, until the observer moves outside where ‘high-strung automobiles’ fill up with gas as they impatiently prepare to depart the scene.
Movement is never described for its own sake or in isolation. It expands on a theme, a tone, a mood that the poem is trying to reflect on. The repentant wastrel in ‘The Prodigal’ mentions ‘pigs’ eyes’ following him, while the farmer comes at dark to inspect his labourer. These images are used to emphasise to us the misery and remorse of the prodigal, a lonely emigrant worker in a foreign land at the soul-destroying job of pig-herding.
In her later poems, Bishop’s reflection on what she observes becomes a theme in itself. In ‘Questions of Travel’, for example, there are ‘too many waterfalls … and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops / makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion’. Bishop feels a pang of guilt as the scene unfolds and asks, ‘Is it right to be watching strangers in a play / in this strangest of theatres?’ It is noteworthy too, that in describing the skies of Brazil she imports her imagery from Nova Scotia in saying, ‘the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships, / slime-hung and barnacled’. However, some things she observes will always be ‘inexplicable and impenetrable’ and can only be pondered on ‘blurr’dly and inconclusively’.
In all her poems, Bishop describes and defines movement, reflecting on landscape, animals and on people who work in and traverse that landscape. No detail seems too trivial for her to note in her observations. She paints striking pictures with imagery which is surprising, unusual and captivating – all the more so because many images depict ordinary, everyday scenes. Bishop was a meticulous worker, whose attention to detail shows she had a reflective mind and was a keen observer. Her craft, like her knowledge, is ‘flowing and flown’.
Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J. can perhaps be best described using Winston Churchill’s barbed attack on Russia, made in a radio broadcast in October 1939. He famously depicted Russia as, ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. Studying Hopkins’s poetry can leave us in much the same frame of mind as Churchill! Hopefully what follows will provide you with a key to help unlock the enigma!
He was born in Stratford, Essex in 1844 and educated at Highgate School and at Oxford, where he became a friend of the poet, Robert Bridges. He was very influenced by the Oxford Movement and he was drawn towards Newman and eventually, like Newman, he converted and became a Roman Catholic. Hopkins didn’t do things by halves and he went on to join the priesthood, not just the ‘ordinary priesthood’ either but he joined the Jesuits and was ordained in 1877.
Shortly after joining the Jesuits he resolved not to write any poetry unless asked to do so by his Superiors. This is in fact what eventually happened: his Rector suggested that he should write a poem to commemorate five Franciscan nuns who had been drowned in a boating accident on the Thames. The result was his great poem, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, which he completed in 1875.
He wrote steadily for the rest of his life, but made no effort to publish, being content with the opinions of Robert Bridges and a few intimate friends. Following ordination he worked as a priest in the slums of London, Liverpool and Glasgow, eventually coming to Dublin Catholic University (now UCD) where he was professor of Greek.
He died of typhoid fever in 1889 and he is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin. His work was first collected and published by Robert Bridges in a selected edition in 1918 and he became an overnight success 29 years after his death! His poetry was swiftly recognised for its great freshness and energy. So, even though he lived and died in the nineteenth century, Hopkins has become one of the great poets of the twentieth century!
Hopkins was a very original poet. He abandoned the traditional metres and substituted his own innovative ‘sprung rhythm’, where the stresses responded to the meaning rather than to any mechanical pattern. He used words in new and startling combinations and frequently dispensed with definite articles, conjunctions and even verbs. As with all great poets this language was not invented for its own sake, but to get across a deeply personal and passionate response to the world and its Creator. Since 1918 his reputation has risen steadily, and he is now rightly regarded by many as the greatest of the Victorian poets.
He once said that we should read his poetry with our ears, which seems like an impossibility, but is not, since many of the sounds we hear create images in our mind. He also said, ‘Perfection is dangerous because it deceives us – because there is no perfection on this earth’.
In Roddy Doyle’s novel The Van, Darren, studying Hopkins’s poetry for the Leaving Cert., reads one of the poems and wonders when Tippex had been invented and concludes, ‘Gerrah Manley Hopkins had definitely been sniffing something.’
MAJOR THEMES IN HOPKINS’S POETRY
NATURE
The world of nature pulses with energy because it is charged with the grandeur of God.
Spring is a glimpse of what the Garden of Eden must have been like.
Everything in existence has its own unique identity and inscape. It is possible to recognise God’s design in every natural object.
Contrast (dappled things) and variety set off the beauty of things.
Unspoilt nature (the weeds and the wilderness) is a precious resource.
Humankind’s sinfulness and the Industrial Revolution have made us insensitive to the beauty and preciousness of the natural world.
Despite the destructive activities of humankind, the Holy Ghost protects and renews the natural world.
SUFFERING AND ALIENATION
Humankind’s sinfulness brings it suffering and toil.
Acceptance of God’s will brings comfort and relief from pain.
Spiritual desolation is a bottomless pit of suffering.
The worst form of suffering, outside of Hell, is the desolation caused by self-disgust.
Suffering is a mystery understood fully by God alone.
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PEOPLE AND GOD
God makes himself known to us through the world of nature and in the faces of people.
He is the ‘dearest freshness’ that permeates the natural world.
Only through the submission of our will to the will of God can we truly reveal our inner beauty.
God has made us the gift of natural beauty, with all its variety.
Humans are insignificant beings who have been rescued from death and oblivion by the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.
God’s will is a mystery to us.
MAIN FEATURES OF HOPKINS’S STYLE?
What about some of the following? Energetic, intense, concentrated in meaning, obscure, tortuous, original, musical, dramatic, oratorical, erudite, demanding………
SOME IDEAS ON THE CONCEPTS OF INSCAPE AND INSTRESS AND SPRUNG RHYTHM
(It is not essential to have an understanding of these concepts to appreciate the poetry of Hopkins. If your reading of these notes enhances your understanding of the poet’s work, then they are worth reading; otherwise, they are a hindrance.)
In our modern world we are familiar with the idea of each human being having a unique genetic code or DNA. Hopkins’s theory was that everything in God’s creation had its own unique characteristics. If you look closely at an object and if you have the sensitivity to recognise its unique character, the object will reveal its ‘inscape’ or, if you like, its inner landscape. Finding the object’s form and shape, both external and internal, is the same as finding its inscape. One of the reasons Hopkins abandoned the idea of being an artist was that he found that he could not ‘capture’ the inscape of things in his drawings.
‘Instress’, according to Hopkins, is the energy of God pulsating through all created things (‘The world is charged with the Grandeur of God’). It is a coherent force, coherent because it comes from a single source. He sees the inscape and feels the instress. ‘All things are upheld by instress and are meaningless without it.’
Essentially, what Hopkins was attempting to do with the words ‘instress’ and ‘inscape’ was to provide a theory on the way in which objects, natural or human, create a reaction in the person who is looking at them. He believed that what he saw was contained in the object rather than a result of his imaginative interpretation of that object. He believed that the impact of that object on him was due to the object rather than to his subjective response to it. ‘I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people (like Leaving Cert. Students!) and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it.’
‘The Windhover’ provides an excellent example of these two concepts. The effort to describe the bird goes beyond mere description of its physical form or appearance (‘wimpling wing’): there is almost a scientific attempt to ‘capture’ its movements (‘Of the rolling level underneath him steady air’). This, however, is only part of the process. The inner form of the bird, its virtues or strengths, are identified (‘Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume’). There is more. The hidden ‘meaning’ or symbolic significance of the falcon is uncovered in a moment of mystical recognition that Joyce would call an ‘epiphany’. T. S. Eliot called it ‘the intersection of the timeless with time.’ It is the moment when the observer recognises God’s plan for mankind in the action of a bird in flight.
SPRUNG RHYTHM
By the time Hopkins’s poetry was published in 1918, many poets had already begun to dispense with regularity and rules regarding rhythm; nevertheless Hopkins’s revolutionary experiments with rhythm inspired many modern poets to be more daring and unconventional in their approach to composition. Of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ Hopkins wrote: ‘I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realised on paper.’ He called this new rhythm ‘sprung rhythm’, because it springs naturally. It has the following characteristics:
There is a fixed number of feet (rhythmic units) per line.
Each foot has one stressed syllable.
The stressed syllable may stand on its own, or may be accompanied by any number of unstressed syllables. Hopkins summed this up very well when he wrote: ‘One stress makes one foot, no matter how many or how few the syllables.’
He developed sprung rhythm because he believed that ‘it is the nearest to the rhythm of prose, that is the native and natural rhythm of speech.’ He added that ‘my verse is less to be read than heard….It is oratorical, that is, the rhythm is so.’
One of the natural consequences of allowing any number of unstressed syllables in a line is that it generates energy. Unstressed syllables must be uttered quickly. The more there are in a line, the more energetic the line will be. This has a clear value for a poet who sees the world of nature as charged with the energy of God.
Sprung rhythm is used most blatantly in ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’ and ‘The Windhover’, both of which vibrate with the energy of the natural world. ‘Felix Randal’ also employs sprung rhythm extensively; other poems contain elements of it.
SUMMARY
To simplify matters, remember this: Hopkins believed in the idea of incarnation. Christ was both man and God; so, too, the world is a combination of the material and the divine. Seeing the divine in the world is the same as seeing its inscape. Feeling the divine presence is the same as feeling its instress. Sprung rhythm is a poetic device used to reveal the energy of God that pulses through the world.
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS – A GENERAL OVERVIEW
(As a member of the Jesuit order – the same order, it must be remembered, who were responsible for Joyce’s education at Clongowes and later at University – Hopkins was devoted to God and his poetry is a unique record of that devotion. In the twentieth-century several critics praised his efforts to restore ‘freshness in words’ and others came to recognise in Hopkins one of the most powerful religious poets writing in the English language.)
Though he lived and died in the nineteenth century, Hopkins is frequently considered a twentieth-century poet, not because his poems were not published until 1918 but because of their startling and unique style. It has been said that Hopkins was a Victorian in that he was serious, scrupulous, hard-working and set himself exacting ideals, but in his remarkable poetic innovations he was ahead of his time. His poetry was misunderstood, unappreciated, unknown during his lifetime and, even though he had a strong sense of duty and believed in self-sacrifice, he also had an independence of spirit that is evident in his work. He did not write for an audience nor did he follow the contemporary literary fashion. Hopkins, says Robert Bernard Martin, ‘is constantly more concerned with putting across his perceptions than with fulfilling customary expectations of grammar … Most persistent readers of his poems learn to abandon their usual demands of convention in language, in order to enjoy a fuller poetic process than would otherwise be possible.’ Coventry Patmore, however, found that Hopkins’s poetry had the effect of ‘veins of pure gold imbedded in masses of unpredictable quartz’. As mentioned earlier Roddy Doyle in his novel The Van, has Darren, studying Hopkins’s poetry for the Leaving Cert and when he reads one of the poems, wonders when Tippex had been invented and concludes, ‘Gerrah Manley Hopkins had definitely been sniffing something.’
And his poetry, though written in the nineteenth century, had an extraordinarily important influence on twentieth-century poetry. It was not so much that other poets imitated Hopkins; rather they were empowered to develop and explore their own individuality. His style was fresh and free and dazzlingly different. (!) Robert Bridges, Britain’s Poet Laureate, was Hopkins’s contemporary (both were born in 1844) and friend. It was Bridges who first published Hopkins’s poetry in book form in 1918 and an early reviewer of the poetry said that, ‘You fight your way through the verses yet they draw you on’, that the language, at times, created ‘an effect almost of idiocy, of speech without sense and prolonged merely by echoes’. But that same reviewer, in 1919, claimed that Hopkins’s poetry contained ‘authentic fragments that we trust even when they bewilder us’.
He always claimed that things are more beautiful in movement, as in the flight of the kingfisher, shooting weeds, the windhover, Felix Randal beating iron out, or the mountain stream ‘His rollrock highroad roaring down’. And he loved the distinctness in all things; each must be the individual that it is, as in ‘As Kingfishers catch fire’. He loved the uniqueness of things, the ‘individually distinctive.’ He called this quality INSCAPE. Another principle, that of INSTRESS was used by him to convey his understanding of the energy which made possible this uniqueness (‘It is the virtue of design, design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive’ wrote Hopkins in a letter to Bridges). Michael Schmidt, in his Lives of the Poets, sums it up as follows: ‘Inscape is manifest, instress divine, the immanent presence of the divine in the object.’
Hopkins, says Seamus Heaney, is a poet who brings you to your senses. The reader sees and hears the ‘hereness-and-nowness’ of the moment but the sounds also match the poem’s tone and mood. Hopkins believed that ‘my verse is less to be read than heard….it is oratorical, that is the rhythm is so’.
When he looks at nature, his involvement with what he sees is total but it is never a celebration of nature for its own sake; Hopkins saw nature as an expression of God’s grandeur. His poetry is inspired by his love of God and God’s creation. He is a poet of extraordinary highs. The imagination soars in a poem like ‘The Windhover’ but he is also a poet who is capable of writing the bleakest poetry about the depths of despair in The Terrible Sonnets.
SAMPLE ANSWER
‘Hopkins’s imagery impresses us with its originality and its range.’ Discuss this view using a selection of poems by Hopkins on your course.
Hopkins is regarded as an innovator. He innovated in many ways in his poetry and one primary instance of this innovation occurred in his use of language. The world surrounded Hopkins with visions of God’s glory and the poet responded by capturing those moments in imagery that is ostensibly original and quite remarkable in its range. Hopkins’s imagery serves one of two main purposes: to record and communicate the beauty of nature and its Creator or to reveal the anguish of a desolate soul that feels isolated from God. In the early poetry, Hopkins employs imagery to expose God’s glory in nature’s elements while the later poetry gives us dramatic images of desolation and despair.
He opened an early poem of celebration, ‘God’s Grandeur’, with the line: ’The world is charged with the grandeur of God’ and it seemed it was not too difficult for this sensitive poet to confirm this in the world around him. In ‘Pied Beauty’ he also praises God for his creation when he says, ‘Glory be to God for dappled things’. Hopkins, therefore, did not accept nature’s glories in any bland or pedestrian way. Rather, he responded to them with imagination and freshness to create images that are strikingly original and at times quite inventive.
In ‘The Windhover’, Hopkins uses recurring images of royalty. The high-flying solitary falcon is a monarch of the sky, surging with the poet’s spirit through the steady air. The poet uses chivalric terms such as ‘dauphin’, and ‘minion’ to capture the elegant and dignified ‘striding’ falcon, the prince of the daylight. God, too, is visualised as a ‘chevalier’. These images carry connotations of medieval romance and chivalry, and perhaps the virtuous struggle of the falcon in the air is symbolic of the Christian knight, Christ the chevalier, overcoming the pervasive threat of evil. This conflict in the poem is dramatised through imagery that suggests the supremacy of the falcon in flight, and his control and mastery that ‘rebuffed the big wind’. Another feature of Hopkins’s images here is the way in which they are loaded with possibilities. It is as if Hopkins intended to create multiple ideas in some of his images, each interesting and valid in its own way. For example, the image of the falcon on a ‘rein’ may represent the motion of as horse at the end of a trainer’s long rein. However, the term, being ambiguous, could also suggest the spiral climb of the bird. Perhaps, Hopkins is encouraging us to ‘Buckle’ several ideas in our engagement with the poem. What is not in doubt, at any rate, is the powerful and original representation, through the falcon, of Christ’s beauty and nobility.
Hopkins uses a very different image in describing the precision of the falcon’s flight, where he says, ‘As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend’. This image also conveys the speed of the bird’s flight. Other original images include that of ‘blue-bleak embers’ representing self-sacrifice and the ‘plough down sillion’ that evokes the hardship and perhaps tedium of daily labour. In ‘The Windhover’, therefore, Hopkins employs images of flight, of majesty, of sacrifice and of glory ranging from a ‘dauphin’ to a ‘skate’s heel’, from a ‘fire’ to ‘blue-bleak embers’. Such remarkable and wide ranging imagery reflects the vivid and precise response of the poet’s imagination to the sight of the falcon at dawn. More importantly, perhaps, the imagery reveals that the moment created a response of deep spiritual insight. There is nothing particularly novel in taking a falcon as subject matter. However, what is original is the way Hopkins engages with the falcon, observes it and concentrates on it in a deeper way and articulates what it revealed to him through an interesting range of original imagery.
However, particularly in his Terrible Sonnets, there is another, more disturbing effect created by Hopkins’s wide ranging use of imagery. We know that he wrestled with doubt, particularly during his final years which he spent teaching in Dublin. God exists, he is always certain of that, but why does he appear to be so far away, apparently unresponsive and uncaring to a man whose letters are ‘dead’? Hopkins’s increasingly sinister images explore the bounds of human suffering and despair. In the sonnet ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark’, for example, the conspicuous absence of daylight reminds us how far the poet has come from the glorious sunshine and colour in ‘Spring’, ‘God’s Grandeur’ or ‘The Windhover’. There is little evidence of ‘couple-colour’ in ‘the black hours’ Hopkins has spent with his torment, suffering ‘yet longer light’s delay’. The delay of light represents of course the delay of hope – all is now ‘gall’ and ‘heartburn’. Quite remarkably, taste is evoked as a description of the poet’s state. He becomes bitterness itself, borne out of his despair. Yet, perhaps this is God’s will that he suffer the ‘curse’ with which his ‘bones’ and ‘flesh’ must contend. But the poet’s tormented spirit is souring dough, which needs to be infused with spiritual ecstasy.
In his sonnet ‘No worst, there is none’, Hopkins outlines the intensity of his pain in the opening quatrain and then proceeds to seek significant comfort, but in vain. This sonnet is particularly interesting in that many of its images echo through earlier poems where the mood was less despondent. The poet’s sense of despair is emphasised in quatrain two in an unusual but particularly poignant image of his cries heaving ‘herds-long’, gathering at the gate of heaven perhaps but not being admitted or even acknowledged. Where is the comfort that Hopkins himself had administered to Felix Randal? The poet then refers to an ‘age-old anvil’, a sounding board which winces and rings out his pain. This very original image of the anvil reminds us again of Felix and his work in the forge, except on this occasion the poet is the raw material that Christ is beating into shape. In the sestet, the poet refers to a natural landscape, the mountains. In earlier poems, ‘wilderness’ filled him with joy. Here, however, the steep cliffs, a nightmarish metaphor, represent the spiritual torment and physical suffering that the poet has had to endure, day in, day out. The only comfort is the relief of sleep. But in ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark’ the poet awakens to the oppressive darkness of night and yearns for the respite of daylight. The dark night is itself symbolic of dark periods in the poet’s life when hope of spiritual ecstasy may have seemed very distant.
In Hopkins’s poetry, therefore, the range of imagery is certainly quite extensive, his originality unquestioned. Imagery ignites the poet’s celebration and it ignites his desolation. In the darkness, there is no flash of colour, of light, no ’dapple-dawn-drawn’ inspiration to lift his thoughts, no sparks, no flashes, no gold. In 1889, only weeks before his death, Hopkins wrote ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord’. In the poem images of fertility in nature abound: building, breeding, waking, growing. The poet, however, is depicted in the sterile image of a ‘eunuch’. Nonetheless, the concluding appeal, expressed again through a vivid and most appropriate image, is that as Spring renews nature, so God may send his ‘roots rain’. Where there is prayer, there is hope!
DEVELOP YOUR OWN PERSONAL RESPONSE TO FR. HOPKINS!
What impression of Hopkins the man do you get from his poetry?
Is it necessary to admire the author to admire his work?
Does the poet’s profound faith make it easier or more difficult for you to relate to his work?
If you had the opportunity to interview Hopkins, what questions would you ask him?
What do you like or dislike about the way Hopkins writes poetry?
Do you think that the themes of his poetry have relevance in the modern world?
Put forward an argument why Hopkins’s poetry should be retained on, or removed from, the Leaving Certificate course?
GENERAL QUESTIONS!!!!
WHAT ARE THE CENTRAL THEMES OF HOPKINS’S POETRY?
HOPKINS HAS BEEN CALLED ‘THE POET OF ENERGY’. HOW DOES HE CREATE THIS ENERGY IN HIS POEMS?
‘NO DOUBT MY POETRY ERRS ON THE SIDE OF ODDNESS’. IS HOPKINS’S POETRY TOO ‘ODD’ TO BE ENJOYABLE?
‘HOPKINS’S POETRY PRESENTS US WITH A DEEPLY PERSONAL AND PASSIONATE RESPONSE TO THE WORLD AND ITS CREATOR.’
Donal Ryan has hit the big time with his inclusion in the Leaving Cert syllabus list of texts for the Leaving Cert in 2017. This recognition is obviously well deserved and students will enjoy his quirky depiction of Celtic Tiger Ireland. It is amazing, and a source of great pride, how modern and with-it the ‘new’ Leaving Cert Syllabus really is, unlike the ancient ‘dead poet’s society’ attitude of years gone by. Today, any young aspiring Irish writer who gets shortlisted (or even long-listed) for the Booker guarantees him/her inclusion in the new course in a very short space of time.
Michael Longley, one of Ireland’s leading poets, died on Wednesday, January 22nd 2025 in Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital following a short illness.
His 13 collections have received many awards, including the Whitbread Prize, the TS Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize and the Griffin International Prize. Ash Keys: New Selected Poems was published last July to mark his 85th birthday, bringing together more than 50 years of poetry, from his first collection, No Continuing City (1969), to The Slain Birds (2022).
In 2015 he was awarded the Griffin International Poetry Prize for his collection The Stairwell (Jonathan Cape). In his acceptance speech in Toronto (June 4th, 2015), Longley said he had been writing since he was 15 years old. “It’s my life. It’s my religion. It’s the way I make sense of the world,” he said. The jury described Longley’s The Stairwell as ‘a book by a major poet writing at the height of his powers’. What follows here is a selective and subjective analysis and review of the major themes and issues which frequently recur in Longley’s poetry.
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