The Purpose and Power of Art and Poetry (4/4): R. S. Thomas at last

At last we’ve arrived at the point where I try and pretend I’m ready to tackle R. S. Thomas’s poetry.

He represents a particular challenge – he very often combines a modernist verse form with a quasi mystical content. The latter draws me strongly in, whereas the former pushes me back. The absence of music doesn’t help.

My reason for attempting to rise to this challenge is because Thomas combines spiritual themes to some degree sometimes with scientific and artistic ones, something which obviously appeals to me given my star of truth lightbulb moment.

Deus Absconditus and Theodicy

The Long Healing prayer of Bahá’u’lláh contains words that capture this challenge: ‘I call on Thee O Manifest yet Hidden, O Unseen yet Renowned, O Onlooker sought by all!’

Wynn Thomas strongly emphasises that:[1] ‘Thomas’s great quarry was ever the deus absconditus to whom the mystics of the ages had paid their awed tribute.’

Interestingly, at the same time as he searched for connection with God, he was scourged by the problem of theodicy:[2]

Thomas was ever helpless to deny his nagging, underlying recognition of the cruelty of the laws governing the world of God’s creation.

He never shook off the problem:[3]

The problem of accounting for the overwhelming evidence of suffering in the world supposedly created by a God of love: it tormented R. S. Thomas his entire life.

In the end he had to resort to the same solution as I do:[4]

His strategy [in the end] was to foreground that very transcendent otherness of God, and to emphasise that when thus coolly view sub specie aeternitatis the otherwise vivid world of human experience faded into ephemeral, illusory importance. . . . [Also] language could at best be but a darkling glass that inevitably muddled understanding.

My poem is the closest I can get to capturing what this feels like.

Before we move on to Thomas’ more intermittent preoccupation with science and art, we need to look at a few examples of his poems about his struggle to connect with God. These are the ones that have most attracted me.

His consistent focus on this theme in his poetry came relatively late:[5]

[in 1972] recently settled in Aberdaron, despairing of both culture and politics,… he began to send out his distinctive verse probes into inner space.

. . . [Seamus Heaney in Stepping Stones says] ‘What I loved then were those later poems about language, about God withdrawn and consciousness like a tilted satellite dish – full of potential to broadcast and receive, but still not quite operating.’

Even though the theme draws me in, I need at the same time to confront the problem created by the absence of music and the pared back quality of his verse. Why wasn’t this enough to repel me from continuing to read him, as was the case with almost every other modernist poet?

One of his poems to which I resonate most strongly is The New Mariner[6] which will hopefully go some way to giving a sense of where I’m coming from.

Scanned from Collected Poems — page 388

I suspect its resonance is partly because of the delightful self-mockery of the joking title and closing lines, and the memories they carry of Coleridge’s longer ballad, The Ancient Mariner. He speaks of returning from his ‘impossible journeys’ with ‘messages I cannot decipher’ and ‘worrying the ear/of the passer-by, hot on his way/to the marriage of plain fact with plain fact.’

The sarcastic metaphor describing the way he corners materialists who seek to sanctify their creed by marrying reductionist fact with reductionist fact exactly captures my own sense of naturalism’s defects which I try to convey on this blog and in conversation, ultimately based in my sense that matter is really not all there is. How could I not be drawn by the magnet of such poetry to keep revisiting it, in spite of the surface limitations that usually repel me?

The modernist manner is not cryptic or elitist. That helps. But there is more to the way he uses this style than that.

He has phrases that capture for me exactly the experience Thomas is seeking to convey. He describes ‘silence’ as God’s ‘chosen medium’ yet insists that he is ‘telling/others about it in words.’ The short and broken lines within which these phrases are embedded show us what a struggle it is for him. He doesn’t have to spell it out: he creates an experience that conveys it. The modernist style in fact helps him convey what he is seeking to express.

Even if I didn’t share that sense of his skill, the content would probably be enough to keep me engaged. Much of what I try to write in verse involves attempting to capture the inexpressible. The silence of the ground of being has always teased and tormented me.

The phrase ‘God-space’ into which he sends out his ‘probes’ implies exactly the kind of unresponsive infinity that resonates with my idea of an elusive universal mind with which it is virtually impossible to consciously connect.

He had hoped, as I did, that advancing age would probably correlate with increasing restorative quietness, ‘a time to draw/my horizons about me.’ No such luck. Rather than watching ‘memories ripening/in the sunlight of a walled garden’ such as my wife and I find at Berrington Hall, he suffers with ‘the void/over my head and the distance/within that the tireless signals/come from.’

A wall at Berrington Hall

Which contains another deeply resonant idea for me.

The Universe Within

Anjam Khursheed, in his book The Universe Within,[7] summarises our situation: ‘Humanity stands on the dividing line between two universes: the conscious universe within us and the external universe that surrounds us.’

Such attempts to capture what I have come to call the inscape, a term borrowed from Hopkins, have always fascinated me, not least because of the quotation from Ali, the successor of Muhammad in Bahá’u’lláh’s The Seven Valleys. In the earliest version I came across it reads:[8] ‘Dost thou reckon thyself only a puny form/When within thee the universe is folded?’ Anjam Khursheed in his book The Universe Within uses[9] almost identical wording from The Writings of Bahá’u’lláh[10] along with quotations from other religious traditions, to give warrant to the title of his book.

Khursheed raises an important point here:[11]

Our spirit of exploration and discovery in the external universe is not matched by a corresponding spirit for the inner universe. We are more comfortable conquering far away moons then exploring inner space.

Much as we might brag about[12] ‘the impressive gains in our knowledge of the external world, our knowledge of ourselves remains limited.’ We are essentially missing the point according to Laszlo:[13] ‘The critical but as yet generally unrecognised issue confronting mankind is that its truly decisive limits are inner, not outer.’

The initial trigger of my attraction to Thomas’ poetry came from his poem on this very theme – Groping [14]– where he writes ‘The best journey to make/is inward. It is the interior/that calls.’

Poetics

Wynn Thomas manages to explain in a partially convincing way how Thomas’ poetics work, but unfortunately does not deal with either The New Mariner or Groping.

One example he uses from the Collected Later Poems page 33[15] is The Echoes Return Slow.

The wrong prayers for the right

reason? The flesh craves

what the intelligence

renounces. Concede

the Amens. With the end

nowhere, the travelling

all, how better to get

there than on one’s knees?

He comments:

The poem … is written in the language and grammar of actual existential experience, and gives us the self agonistes, through lines that seem to be bent and buckled at the right-hand margins by the pressure of feeling to which they are almost palpably subject. The curt phrases, like those in Emily Dickinson’s poems, belong to an urgently compressed and curtailed style of mental notation, the poetic equivalent of the stammered morse code of a mind in the midst of spiritual emergency.

I definitely could not have put it better myself.

Another example he uses is What One Receives from Living Close to a Lake[16] a poem ‘that concludes with the following passage:

a clearing and made the entangled

forest of forms and voices,

anxious intentions, urgent

memories: a deep, clear

breath to fill

the soul, an internal

gesture, arms

flung wide to echo

that mute generous outstretching

we call lake.

He explains its power:

The layout maps the movement of mind, the line-breaks repeatedly suggesting the brief searching for the right noun to follow the qualifying adjective (‘entangled’/’forest’, ‘urgent’/’memories’, ‘clear’/’breath’, ‘internal’/’gesture’), for the precise verb for its purpose (‘arms’/’flung wide’) for the object that exactly complements the verb (‘to fill’/’the soul’). The result is the conveying not of thoughts but rather of the act of concentrated thinking – in other words, of ‘contemplation’ sufficiently sustained so as to become ‘meditation’.

Art & Science

One poem I’ll focus on in a bit of detail, of the many in his Collected Poems: 1945-1990 which focus on works of art, is Two Children Menaced by a Nightingale.[17] Max Ernst is not the only surrealist Thomas addresses in his poetry – there are at least two poems triggered by the work of Magritte (see link for an example of a trigger painting). This one particularly attracted my attention because of its reference to Keats and obviously his Ode to a Nightingale.

According to the MOMA website Ernst described this work, made in 1924 – the year of Surrealism’s founding, as

“the last consequence of his [sic] early collages—and a kind of farewell to a technique…” He later gave two possible autobiographical references for the nightingale: the death of his sister in 1897, and a fevered hallucination he recalled in which the wood grain of a panel near his bed took on “successively the aspect of an eye, a nose, a bird’s head, a menacing nightingale, a spinning top, and so on.”

Without the picture I doubt whether I would have been able to even begin to make sense of the poem and vice versa. I’m still frankly puzzled by both the poem and the picture: that was probably the intention of both painter and poet!

What Thomas’ poem seems to be doing, which is worth drawing attention to, is using free association to shape his response to the painting, as though trying to beat Surrealism at its own game. He clearly draws in Keats given the strong association between Keats and nightingales, though Keats is clearly listening to the song in the dead of night rather than at dawn as the painting depicts, and also because the Ode addressing the nightingale flags up the power of poetry, albeit coloured by a longing for death in this context: ‘I will fly to thee . . . on the viewless wings of Poesy.’ It reminded me of the words of Bob Dylan – ‘Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain’. Thomas fails to flag up the possibility that the gate does not only represent a possible escape for the children but is also perhaps inviting us to enter the picture and share the experience more closely.

He expands on the associations he has with nightingales beyond that to include migration and insects, implying, as a result, that the children’s flight could be some kind of migration from a hostile to a kinder climate, and suggesting that the children need to be shielded from the less pleasant habits of the nightingale than its song. His last association is to a sinister fairy tale, where the eventually dead children are covered in leaves by a robin not a nightingale.

He may be also drawing associations into other poems such as Guernica[18] where the lines ‘The painter/has been down at the root/of the scream’ may be making a back reference to Munch’s painting The Scream, though there is also a scream clearly depicted in Picasso’s masterpiece. When I saw that painting full size in our visit to Barcelona I was blown away.

Interestingly, immediately preceding Guernica in the Collected Poems we find a reference to the possible close relationship for him of poetry and science. He writes[19] ‘Baudelaire’s grave/not too far/from the tree of science./Mine, too,/since I sought and failed/to steal from it…’

The New Mariner at the end makes clear his contempt for reductionist materialism but he is not blind to comparable defects in religion as practiced. He speaks[20] of the ‘human,/that alienating shadow/with the Bible under the one/arm and under the other/the bomb.’ He is also aware of our more mundane but none the less lethal destructiveness when technology shackles itself to capitalism:[21] ‘They cut down trees/to have room to make money.’ He describes the call of whales as ‘regret/for a world that has men/in it,’ of which I had no memory when I wrote my wordy poem, Orcastration, on the same theme.

Even though these occasionally recurring themes around art and science do resonate to some degree with me, what really keeps drawing me back to his poems is his constant quest for a connection with an elusive God which is far more resonant. It’s the first time for me I have found poems whose bleak modernism perfectly expresses and conveys the poet’s experience in a way that is not dispiriting but rather inspiring, and for that I am truly grateful.

For me, it seems, the purpose of poetry is largely to capture deeply important but elusive experiences in words that will lift the understanding of every careful reader to a higher level. I have come to think that Thomas succeeds in doing so more often than most poets though not in every poem he wrote — but then no poet has ever succeeded in rising successfully to that impossible challenge, as a quotation I used in an earlier post makes clear:

Perhaps a fitting way to close this sequence is with the words of Wynn Thomas[22] which describe R. S. Thomas as ‘writing the modern history of a soul’ and goes on to say ‘This is the Thomas who seems to have fully discovered the natural idiom of his soul only late in his career, in his haunting religious poetry.’

References:

[1]. R. S. Thomas to Rowan Williams – page 205.
[2]. Op. cit – page 208.
[3]. Op. cit – page 210)
[4]. Op. cit – page 210)
[5]. Op. cit – page 212.
[6]. Collected Poems 1945-1990 – page 388.
[7]. The Universe Within – page 7.
[8]. The Seven Valleys (1945 edition) – page 34.
[9]. The Universe Within – page 23.
[10]. The Writings of Bahá’u’lláh – page 40.
[11]. The Universe Within – page 157.
[12]. Op. cit. – page 10.
[13]. Op. cit – page 133.
[14]. Collected Poems: 1945-1990 – page 328.
[15]. R. S. Thomas: The Serial Obsessive – page 207.
[16]. Op. cit – pages 259-60.
[17]. Collected Poems: 1945-1990 – page 445.
[18]. Op. cit. – page 437.
[19]. Op. cit. – page 436.
[20]. No Truce with the Furies – page 51.
[21]. Op. cit. – page 43.
[22]. R. S. Thomas: The Serial Obsessive – page 10.

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Exploring ‘The Waste Land’ (1/4): The April problem

In my earlier encounter with The Waste Land, before watching the recent BBC documentary, due to the absence of essential autobiographical information I had found it almost impossible to achieve a satisfactory understanding of its first line: ‘April is the cruellest month.’

The documentary blurb on iPlayer reads:

2022 marks the centenary of one of the defining poems of the 20th century, The Waste Land. TS Eliot’s groundbreaking work first exploded into the world on 15 October 1922 and has continued to resonate with successive generations.

For decades, Eliot actively discouraged biographical interpretations of his work, developing an ‘impersonal theory’ of poetry in which the private life of a poet was deemed irrelevant. Instead, numerous scholars have been guided by Eliot’s own seven pages of footnotes to the poem.

But in 2020, there were dramatic new revelations that demonstrated how, behind Eliot’s mask, there was a much more personal story to be found within The Waste Land – which can now at last be explored.

I went back to the poem in the hope that it would make more sense, but it was still rather opaque, to say the least. I was prompted to do some more digging later, as I explained in an earlier post, because of the debt I owed to Eliot’s footnotes which pointed me towards The Golden Bough, whose library reference connected me with the Bahá’í Faith. That’s not my focus right now, but it triggered me to make a public commitment on this blog to explore more, a commitment it has remained hard to follow through with.

The footnotes were either a deliberate misdirection to disguise the personal nature of the poem or simply padding required by the publisher to make the text a bit longer (more on that later). Ironic that a possible deception should have led me to important truths!

What this project has forced me to do, as I knew it would, is confront the challenges of modernist poetry yet again. Whether it has helped me resonate more to the poem or even understand it a bit better remains to be seen as this sequence progresses.

The Cruelty of April

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

So let’s start with my first challenge. Why on earth did Eliot condemn April as ‘the cruellest month’?

From my late teenage years studying English literature the lines from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales have echoed round my brain whenever I heard the word April, whether I wanted them to or not:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licóur

Of which vertú engendred is the flour;

(Not that there’s been such a drought in the UK this year – it’s been the wettest March for most of us since 1981!)

The notes to the Poetry Foundation copy of The Waste Land text gave me the beginnings of a clue:

The Waste Land begins with a subversion of the first lines of the prologue to the Canterbury tales by Chaucer. He paints April as a month of restorative power, when spring rain brings nature back to life… It’s an image repeated to the point of cliché in subsequent centuries. But in the wasteland of Eliot’s modern world, in the ruins of the World War I, the Chaucerian image of a fertile, resurrected April become suffused with cruelty. It is, ironically, winter that ‘kept us warm’.

My father fought in First World War as did all my uncles. Though he never spoke of it, my mother did, and from my earliest years I picked up a sense of the horror it had held for them both. I was born before the end of Second World War and watched my dad walk in though the kitchen door some mornings towards the war’s end after working in the Civil Defence overnight. Only one specific memory survives which is where he let me wear his cap and the dust got in my eyes. I’m sure though that the fear of air raids, the siren sound and the blackout blinds will remain embedded in my visceral memory for ever.

So, yes, I get why the trauma of the recent war would’ve have left its mark on Eliot but why was April the flag for him?

A book I’d read more than twenty years ago provided the answer I had forgotten:[1] ‘His dear friend, the Frenchman, Jean Verdenal, who had become a medical officer in November 1914, had been killed on 2 May in the Dardanelles.’ This quote is from a biography of Vivienne Eliot, his first wife, by Carolyn Seymour-Jones. It’s called Painted Shadow. I had revisited it when I began to feel that Matthew Hollis’s The Waste Land: a biography of a poem wasn’t providing me with the answers I needed if the poem was ever going to make any kind of real sense to me.

To be fair, Hollis does refer to Verdenal:[2]

Eliot would dedicate his first book, Prufrock and Other Observations, ‘To Jean Verdenal, 1889 to 1915’, adding in time ‘mort aux Dardanelles’. And he would carry a grief that he was hesitant to unburden, one that would cast a shade across the initial years of his life in London. Only later, would he admit to what he called a ‘sentimental’ sunset: ‘the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later (so far as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli.’

Seymour-Jones uses the very same quotation but goes on to make the intensity of Eliot’s reaction more accessible:

Lilacs became Eliot’s symbol of loss: ‘April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire.’ Eliot would have heard of Verdenal’s death in May or June, and the shock and sorrow of this news may well have precipitated his proposal to Vivienne. The poet’s anguish was immense. It seems that Verdenal was later transfigured in his imagination into Phlebas, the drowned Phoenician in ‘Death by Water’ in The Waste Land. . . . This is a cry of grief which has given rise to the suggestion that The Waste Land is in essence an elegy for Jean. The medical officer, like Phlebas, was ‘a fortnight dead’, when Eliot, on the rebound, proposed to the young English woman he scarcely knew.

What has initially seemed at least partly inexplicable was beginning to make more sense.

It is possible though that she takes the matter too far, partly because she did not have access to the later correspondence that was released to scholars in 2020.

Her perspective is that The Waste Land is an elegy:[3]

A later critic, James E. Miller, has compared The Waste Land to Tennyson’s mourning for the dead of Arthur Hallam in In Memoriam. . . . He identified Phlebas the Phoenician as Jean Verdenal…

. . . The current image in The Waste Land, to which Eliot returns obsessively, is of Verdenal walking towards him in the Luxembourg Gardens, his arms full of lilacs.

This is something I would like to believe as my A level in English Literature involved a year-long study of In Memoriam. It affected me powerfully, perhaps in part because of the subliminal grief I ingested from my parents whose grief for the daughter who died before I was born was never assuaged.

The depth, darkness and power of Tennyson’s poem are illustrated by such verses as these from Number 50. They express a darkness beyond the purely personal and extending into the existential, as seems also to be the case with The Waste Land. So much so in the latter case that for many years it was taken to be just a commentary on the times rather than also in equal measure an expression of grief.

Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.

Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is racked with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
And weave their petty cells and die.

Perhaps the intensity of the opening lines of The Waste Land are best explained by grief. Seymour-Jones clearly thinks so:[4]

In the first section of The Waste Land, ‘the burial of the dead’, Eliot again makes it clear that his remembrance is not of a ‘hyacinth girl’ with whom he is in love, but of a male partner, who may indeed be symbolised by the God Hyacinth, killed by Apollo when the two are playing at discus.

She feels that what she concludes is Eliot’s ambivalent sexuality explains both the grief and the poem:[5]

Eliot’s remark that Tiresias, in whom the two sexes meet, is the ‘most important person in the poem, uniting all the rest’, stresses the androgynous impulse which is central to the poem.

Hollis doesn’t quite see it that way. After quoting the lines in German which translated mean[6] Fresh blows the winds for home, my Irish girl, where do you roam?, he flags up ‘the hyacinth girl, who, after a decade’s silence, Eliot would tell Emily Hale was for her – his last romantic connection to America… In 1930, Eliot would ask her to reread these lines as a measure of his love for her. ‘I shall always write primarily for you.’

After he committed Vivienne to an asylum in 1938:[7] ‘I was never quite a whole man,’ Eliot told Emily Hale. ‘The agony forced some genuine poetry out of me, certainly, which would never have been written if I had been happy: in that respect, perhaps I may be said to have had the life I needed.’ . . . he embarked on a romantic correspondence with her that he would sustain until his wife’s death in 1947.’

Given that a significant focus of the first part of The Waste Land is elegy in the aftermath of war, and given the importance of those themes in my own background, why don’t I resonate strongly to it?

If he’d written ‘April was the cruellest month” it might’ve helped, but there still would’ve been a degree of misdirection there. Verdenal died in May (though only just), not April.

A more detailed answer to that will be the focus of the next posts, as I take a look at various forms of concealment. We are definitely not in the realms of confessional poetry here, not that this was always a winner in my book. Robert Lowell’s Complete Poems lurked almost unread for years on my shelves before I took it to Oxfam for someone else to enjoy.

More on that later.

And the Rest of the Opening

As for the rest of the opening section, Madame Sosotris baffles me completely, but I will be coming back to ‘the drowned Phoenician Sailor’ later in the context of Verdenal.

Also the Poetry Foundation footnote on the phrase ‘unreal city’ leaves me dissatisfied.

Eliot wrote:

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

They write:

The “Unreal City” is borrowed from Baudelaire’s “The Seven Old Men”: “Unreal city, city full of dreams,/Where ghosts in broad daylight cling to passers-by.” Eliot’s “Unreal City” is modern London. The urban scene that makes up the final piece of the first section of The Waste Land is set in the city is financial district where Eliot worked at Lloyds bank. Eliot’s London, Baudelaire’s Paris, and Dante’s Inferno merge into a hellish tableau. The phrase “Unreal City” returns in the third section of the poem.

The word Baudelaire uses is ‘fourmillant’ which means ‘swarming’ so they have mistranslated it. That word fits Eliot’s subsequent lines far better, so why did he not use it? ‘Unreal’ perhaps disguises the borrowing but he plays on the idea of ‘ghosts’ in his description, throngs ‘undone’ by so much ‘death.’ They cross the bridge like the living dead. Perhaps ‘unreal’ captures the sense of incredulity within him implied by ‘I had not thought.’

Louis Sass picks up on the high regard Eliot held Baudelaire:[8]

Although Baudelaire (1821–67) lived before the era of modernism, this poet and critic – whom T. S. Eliot described as ‘the first counter-romantic in poetry’ and considered far in advance of his time – was perhaps the first great harbinger of the modernist spirit.

The Baudelaire sonnet, Obsession, that I attempted to render in English has a darkness akin to what we find in The Waste Land and the fact that Eliot initially chose to place a quote from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness at the beginning of his poem speaks to the relevance of this to an understanding of the poem:

Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:

‘The horror! The horror!’

Hollis[9] feels it ‘might have lent so much to the poem had Eliot allowed it.’ Instead he gave in to Ezra Pound’s insistence that it should be deleted. Thanks, Ezra, for making this journey so much more difficult!

There is another example of Baudelaire in translation at the end of this post to enrich the possible connections.

Enough for now.

References

[1]. Painted Shadow – pages 79-80.

[2]. The Waste Land: a biography of a poem – pages 4-6.

[3]. Painted Shadow – page 294.

[4]. Op. cit – page 300.

[5]. Op. cit. – pages 300-01.

[6]. The Waste Land: a biography of a poem – page 234.

[7]. Op. cit. – page 380.

[8]. Madness and Modernism – pages 61-62.

[9]. The Waste Land: a biography of a poem – page 356.

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