The Columbia History of British Poetry (138 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 546
Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me,
And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty.
Only in such fleeting moments in high, familiar places can Hardy join the Wordsworth of "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" in a close companionship within nature defined by a keen sense of place and a fleeting sense of serenity in knowledge of the self.
Under the same cultural pressures, D. H. Lawrence's poetic treatment of nature narrowed from Hardy's panoramic sense of landscape in a Darwinian universe to a focus on vital, living details. Inevitably, Lawrence's early model was Hardy, but, as the titles for later collections suggest
Birds, Beasts and Flowers
(1923) and
Pansies
(1929)his Romantic antecedents became the
Immortality Ode
(not "Tintern Abbey") of later Wordsworth and the odes of Keats and Shelley, lyrics in which natural details like a pansy (Wordsworth's "meanest flower that grows") or a nightingale (Keats's "light-winged Dryad of the trees") or a wind (Shelley's "Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere") inspire meditation and philosophy. For Lawrence after the First World Waras for the Wordsworth after the rise of Napoleonthe focus of poetry must be these intense, immediate experiences of nature, as he explains in his introduction to
New Poems
(1918): "There is another kind of poetry: the poetry of that which is at hand: the immediate present. In the immediate present there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished. . . . There is no static perfection, none of that finality which we find so satisfying because we are so frightened.''
In form, Lawrence affected a compromise with the English tradition using the style of the American Walt Whitman, discovering in "free verse" a clarity of diction combined with the expressive exuberance that allowed "the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The result is a poem like "Medlars and Sorb-Apples," in which sucking the decaying fruit evokes a sense of loss and loneliness of the fallen world, a literal tasting of "the flux of autumn," and, through references to the mythology of the Underworld of Dionysus and Orpheus, a senselike Keats'sof eternal leave-taking: "Orphic farewell, and farewell, and farewell." The apples falling in "The Ship of Death" trigger brooding on the need to prepare for death"A little ship, with oars and food / And little dishes, and all accoutrements / fitting and ready for the
 
Page 547
departed soul," for a journey that will lead to "no port, there is nowhere to go"yet the poem provides a kind of consolation by becoming the means to be "renewed with peace," even in contemplating that a "voyage of oblivion awaits you." Nevertheless, Lawrence's universe is one of frightening supernatural portents: bats replace swallows at nightfall to give an ''uneasy creeping in one's scalp," and a snake that the poet attacks out of fear is found to be, like the infamous "albatross" of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, an inviolable sign of the potential for nightmare in the world of nature: "For he seemed to me again like a king, / Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld, / Now due to be crowned again." Lawrence's sense of the world seems finally stiff as much postlapsarian as post-Darwinian as he poetically explores myth, both classical and literary, as a means to understand the ambiguous dark forces of his age.
For Robert Graves, another poet whose career began in the company of the Georgians, poetry was also to offer a healing vision in the face of the nightmare of modern history that he had personally experienced in the First World War. His stated goal was "to help the recovery of public health of mind as well as my own by writing of 'therapeutic poems"'; initially he worked within the English tradition to present his healing topic, eros and love. These love poems range in topic from the playful phallicism of "Down, wanton, down!,"
Will many-gifted Beauty come
Bowing to your bald rule of thumb
Or love swear loyalty to your crown?
to the frustration of courtship of "Not at Home,"
And yet I felt, when I turned slowly away,
Her eyes boring my back, as it might be posted
Behind a curtain slit, and still in love,
to the grizzled veteran's desire for the female ideal in "The Face in the Mirror,"
I pause with razor poised, scowling derision
At the mirrored man whose beard needs my attention,
And once more ask him why
He still stands ready, with a boy's presumption,
To court the queen in her high silk pavilion.
 
Page 548
Over time, Graves evolves a poet's mythology of hope and salvation centered around the celebration of an imagined female deity who rivals the terrible, dark "witches" of the neoclassical Modernists. His poem, "The White Goddess," begins by describing his search for this elusive and obscure female figure, whose erotic power threatens prevailing cultural values:
All saints revile her, and all sober men
Ruled by the God Apollo's golden mean
In scorn of which we sail to find her
In distant regions likeliest to hold her
Whom we desired above all things to know,
Sister of the mirage and echo.
Eventually, Graves's literary quest for renewing vision during the course of history in the first half of the twentieth century culminates not in poetry but in a grand prose work of mythology called
The White Goddess
.
The White Goddess
is a work like the "Preface" to
Lyrical Ballads
that Wordsworth wrote after the French Revolution and like the "Apology" that Hardy wrote after the First World War; Graves's narrative critiques the assumptions of modern culture and suggests a new understanding of the civilized for the era. His inspiration is the writer's compelling need under duress of the history of his times to explain what has brought the disaster represented by World War II to civilization and to express, spontaneously and haphazardly, a radical new view to replace the old, dishonored one. Graves's creation of what he subtitled "a historical grammar of poetic myth" was an outpouring of syncretic mythologizing (he wrote the first version in a frenzy in six weeks); as such, it was part of the neo-Romantic movement that arose in the arts of the 1940s in reaction against the legacy of Modernism. Graves modestly claims his intention is only to recover the mythology necessary to reinspire poetry in his time: "My task in writing
The White Goddess
was to provide a grammar of poetic myth of poets, not to plan witches' Sabbaths, compose litanies and design vestments for a new orgiastic set, nor yet to preach matriarchy over a radio network.'' Like Yeats in
A Vision
(1925), he is a poet merely needing to find and define metaphors for poetry, particularly his own, yet in the effort there is clearly higher aspiration.
While not proclaiming a new religion, Graves, like Lawrence in his fiction, is affirming the Romantic desire to reclaim for civilization

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