imagine singing

What about the other poets in the Anthology?

The first time I read Bertram Stevens' choice I came away with a quick impression of softness and grandness or quietness and grandness, the language of grandness (“gold,” and “purple” objects, verbs happening “oft”) without royal aggression: here were people who would rather talk about roses than say anything satirical, here nostalgia was the fad, never comedy – and even on a second and third look it's not a funny book, Stevens not a man who cared about humour in poems (see his selection from Banjo Paterson -- nature things and Clancy of the Overflow), and Walter Murdoch in 1918 wasn't mad keen either, in The Oxford Book of Australasian Verse – still, the different level of attention in the second and third go-arounds penetrated that first impression and now I realise that a few poets like John Farrell (1851 – 1904) had the impatience that I smelt faintly, faintly when I was reading Bathgate's Sydney.

“The noisiest find quiet graves,” is the way he sums up the deaths of British adventurers abroad in Australia to England (1897), which may not look like much but when I saw him write in close phrases through the whole poem I thought that here was a poet whose ideas came to him so vividly that they came as song.

“I imagine singing I imagine | getting it right,” wrote Geoffrey Hill once, and Paul Muldoon, talking about T.S. Eliot in 2011, said, “He has a great ear, a rarer and rarer commodity these days, even among fairly highly regarded poets.” Ezra Pound is an advocate of song in The ABC of Reading. It's possible that Hill, who admires Pound, was echoing the ABC when he associates “singing” with “getting it right.” But Hill is hard on himself and uses absolutes. Not “getting it acceptable” but “getting it right.” “Either the thing moves, RAPMASTER, or it | does not,” is what he believes* in Speech! Speech!, the enjambment reminding me of the same before the word “mute” in Wordsworth's There was a Boy, which I would not have thought of if Himadri at The Argumentative Old Git hadn't written about it in July.

The moment of silence before the admission of incapacity, that's what I'm looking at, does not speak in one case, does not work in the other. “Hopefully, RAPMASTER, I can take stock | how best to oút-ráp you.” There's always something to live up to. (The Moldovan bots have overtaken the Russians in my stats.)

* He challenges the value of movement ("I disclaim spontaneity, | the appearance of which is power") but not the fact of it. "I wíll | mátch you fake pindaric for trite | violence, evil twin."

his richest notes

Rummaging through Far South Fancies I go searching for darkness set against other things. “Our woods are dark, our lakelets' waters clear” from Faerie, “Where the dawn the darkness breaks | Floats a lightsome fleecy cloud” from Lament for Te Heu Heu, “Naught the expanse of yellow breaks, | Save where a darker spot denotes | Some straggling bush” (Our Heritage), “The sky was quickly darkened, | Where erst all had been fair” (The Praetor Aelius Tubero), “The moko chimes his richest notes |'Mid dark green kaio trees” (A New Zealand Reverie), and meanwhile in Light he, the poet, imagines darkness, representing self-interest, “smitten” by God: “God is light.”

Full many an evil influence doth lurk ;
Some dark as night, and others seeming fair

Seeming fair but dark at heart. Seeming fair, but, examined rightfully, it is dark. “Passion's oft for Love mistaken” in Eric Iredale but they are different. “Passion dies but Love's eternal.” A love that has passed is an illegitimate love. “But pure love is never sating.” A rock is more virtuous than a puddle, a tree is closer to heaven than a worm. To endure is virtuous, per se. Ezra Pound put the same assumption into his ABC of Reading. It was not uncommon.

Darkness is a sign of strength in The Clematis and a kind hiding spot in other places (“They gain the whare's safe retreat,| And in its friendly darkness hide” (Hinemoa)); descriptive threat of depth elsewhere.

He recks not what result his action brings,
The dark and rushing waters o'er his head

(from Eric Iredale)

We have harnessed the binary properties of electrons, said the mathematician to me when he was discussing life; and look at computers for example, which work by asking for discrete packages of energy either spurted or withdrawn, every unit always on or off, but what about the other properties, the not-binary, not understood by us, and never used, because we can't – he said, and wished that physicists would work widely, towards uncertainty, and not inwardly, towards corralling and reportable successes, public profiles: that was how he saw them, with expectation guiding them into a disappointing temptation. “Bauerlein et al. (2010) claim that we are currently experiencing an ‘avalanche of low-quality research’, and academia has become an environment where ‘[a]spiring researchers are turned into publish-or-perish entrepreneurs, often becoming more or less cynical about the higher ideals of the pursuit of knowledge’,” is the opening line of a quote at flowerville.

ground where now we stand

If I had to choose a piece of Bathgate's scenery I would pick the contrast between the colours of the swans and the pelicans in The Sydney Exhibition, 1879, “The only fleet a flock of dusky swans, | Which, near some fearless white-plumed pelicans | Swam stately on the quiet water's breast” -- only I want the contrast jammed closer, eg: “For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 14, the line itself turning on the word “turn”), “fruitful strifes and rivalries of peace” (Tennyson, Idylls of the King), or in Hill's Funeral Music, “fastidious trumpets,” even “grim fatuous clown,” from First Dog On The Moon's cartoon about Joe Hockey, the closeness that is also part of jokes and jump cut edits, things close together seeming exciting by proximity, proximity being the arena in which events take place, change wrought, attacks carried out; the possibilities fly open; the poem should be shocked by the surprising contrast of white and black animals on the water.

Note that the colours haven't been mined any further by the author, who, in this narrative scene, is envisioning the First Fleet coming to Botany Bay, obvious, you'd think, obvious, the “poor native black” standing there a little way earlier in line six, looking at him, asking to be transposed into the swans, but does Bathgate think that way? Is that what “fearless” next to “white-plumed pelicans” is trying to do? The British have come and they are fearless, etc, to lead on from the earlier description of “the first daring English wand'rer” in line two?

A century complete has scarcely passed
Since the first daring English wand'rer stood
Upon this favoured ground where now we stand.

Bathgate is so gentle I can't tell. Question though: why does he give the pelicans credit for being fearless, on that quiet bay without the swans threatening them or the ships coming too close, or any other thing trying to attack? Does the act of water-riding seem terrifying in and of itself, to the mind of Alexander Bathgate, even if the water is quiet, and therefore is this act always performed either fearfully or fearlessly, in that same mind?

It is brave to be stately when your entire activity threatens you; and you are like an aristocrat getting into a tumbril.

Or else the absence of fear in these pelicans is so incredible to Bathgate that it doesn't need to be justified by any poem, even if he is the author of that poem. It is a royal majesty. Explanation is beyond the point. It should exist. It should have a lovely, pure existence. It should be possible to detect an incredible, impossible purity behind the word "fearless."

When John Donne discusses God in his Sermons he considers the rights of kings.

Donne was not a king any more than Bathgate was a pelican. So I see that the normal existences of alien beings can be a source, either of wonder or of speculation, since Bathgate is wonderstruck without speculating and Donne speculates without seeming wonderstruck.

There is no reason in the poem for the pelicans to be fearless and no reason either, for the wand'rers to be daring. Australia is not only "favoured," it is furthermore a “fairyland of flowers and bright-hued birds” where the “calistemon's flaming brush-like plume, | Meet and delight the adventurer's eye.” “Daring” becomes synonymous with “inexperienced.” When is it brave, entering fairyland? When you don't know that it's fairyland.

peaceful waves

Bathgate's reviewer never mentions rhymes. The poem as a poem -- as a mechanism of language -- is almost concealed from the person who reads the review, aside from the mention of “lines which are both wise and true.” What's a line like when it's wise and true? The meaning matters to him, not the form. A poem can do two things in this review: it can introduce you to characters and it can describe landscape. It would be indistinguishable from prose if it didn't have those “lines.” The reviewer quotes from Ivan Graeme.

The glossy kine browse lazily,
Or on the grass repose.
The grey-duck swims so warily
In pool where raupo grows:
While from the sea there swiftly comes
The black-capped, long-winged tern;
The drowsy blue-fly heavy hums
Among the russet fern.
The wide Pacific's peaceful waves
Are scarce heard from the shore,
Save where a dark cliff's feet it laves
With distant muffled roar.

He likes the kind of poem that could be described as an “immersive experience,” smooth, jerkless, joltless, giving him the beautiful feeling of flying through the pages -- which is the style that Bathgate pursues; and so the reviewer doesn't describe it, he doesn't need to, it's the warm water in which he's lying; he looks up.

miming the appearance of characters to whom something happens

When I remember that line from the Alexander Bathgate review in the Literary World, “if the author had been blessed with a spark of humour, the verses would have gone straight into the fire,” I realise that I don't know where the reviewer laughed.

Why should I know where the reviewer laughed; why should that be open to me – because it's a review, I say.

The contempt is clear but the details indeterminate. I can see the general sentiment but I can't agree or argue with the specific thought; and I suspect this lacuna is irritating me simply because it is a lacuna, and not because I sincerely want to know the details of the reviewer's contemplation, mild frottage of the brain, and why feel it in the first place I ask, when there is the problem of vanishing electrons that I could be studying instead: what a waste of a human mind, what a dilettante, when I could be more like the mathematician I met on Thursday, who was working his way through quantum physics to find an equation that would put his schizophrenic visions into logical perspective – set theory, he said, and a woman who was eavesdropping interrupted us, saying, Well we've all been to college.

From my perspective (as she came sideways into the corner of my vision) she was acting out what Jacques Ranciere calls “the intoxication of art,” which is, “mining the act of appearing, instead of miming the appearance of characters to whom something happens, or who feel something,” (Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, translated by Zakir Paul) though from her perspective I can believe that she was coming at Ranciere from the opposite direction and that she was miming a character to whom something had happened, and who felt something.

"If they had been blessed with a spark of humour," she thought, " -- and by that I mean proportion -- this conversation would go straight into the fire."

In the rest of the review I see that Bathgate's reviewer is irritated by the footnotes (“they are a necessary evil, and should be reduced to the smallest compass”), that he is bored by the characters, and that he admires “excellent bits of landscape” in some of the poems. Iredale might be “singularly fatuous” but “a few lines” in the book “are both wise and true,” though he doesn't tell you what the lines are and here again is the lacuna (“Then kill it,” says Irma), for nothing in the other poems seems any smarter to me than Iredale, a long piece of blank verse which argues that we should reject sexual attraction in favour of platonic love between men and women because “higher love” can last forever, extending even into heaven, but “Passion lasts a fleeting day” -- the poet presenting his idea in a binary moral narrative about a man who stumbles into “passionate love” and has to be rescued posthumously from a supernatural giant named Lust, by the devotion of two pure women: “both are clear from stain.”

I snickered at an ungainly rhyme on page two, “Fair Alice Bain: Anon he knew the pain,” and that was as close as I came to an instinctive understanding of the reviewer's point about Bathgate's sense of humour.

pasteboard and filched laurel

When Richard Tuttle was a young man he heard that the famous artists of his time were making their art large because they wanted to represent the universe, which encouraged him to make his art small so that he could approach the same desire from a different angle. Is that a story of dissatisfaction or not, I wonder. The reviewer who wrote about Alexander Bathgate's Far South Fancies for the Literary World was more direct when he said, “if the author had been blessed with a spark of humour, the verses would have gone straight into the fire” -- criticising the writer for his lack of dissatisfaction; and saying that Bathgate was not talented at the essential skill of discontent which is also discernment: “the most zealous and earnest, therefore the most discontented,” as Ruskin refers to some “leading masters” of his day when he reviews Charles Eastlake's Materials for a History of Oil-Painting (1847).

As though these two critics believe that the artist has summoned a demon that deserves pain as a sacrificial recompense for its appearance, Ruskin even using that word, “pain,” in The Cestus of Aglaia.

I say triumphal home, for, indeed, triumphal arches which you pass under, are but foolish things, and may be nailed together any day, out of pasteboard and filched laurel; but triumphal doors, which you can enter in at, with living laurel crowning the Lares, are not so easy of access: and outside of them waits always this sad portress, Patience; that is to say, the submission to the eternal laws of Pain and Time, and acceptance of them as inevitable, smiling at the grief. So much pains you shall take—so much time you shall wait: that is the Law. Understand it, honor it; with peace of heart accept the pain, and attend the hours; and as the husbandman in his waiting, you shall see, first the blade, and then the ear, and then the laughing of the valleys. But refuse the Law, and seek to do your work in your own time, or by any serpentine way to evade the pain, and you shall have no harvest—nothing but apples of Sodom: dust shall be your meat, and dust in your throat—there is no singing in such harvest time.

When the Literary World reviewer writes “the verses” he is referring to Eric Iredale, the “most ambitious” poem in the book but “singularly fatuous,” he decides very confidently; though that confidence does not impose itself on the world firmly enough to stop The New Place: The Poetry of Settlement in New Zealand, 1852-1914 (1993, ed. Harvey McQueen) from associating Iredale with the word “fascinating.” It is “a fascinating blend of Victorian values and concerns worked into a recasting of the Ranolf and Amohia legend.” From that angle it can be fascinating and I have heard someone explain the urban fantasy book he was reading by saying that it had “an interesting concept.“ These two pieces of language go together.

garlands ye have

Bathgate wants to be understood as well, but he is not like them – in what way? he expects comprehension as well as wanting it -- he is not like the artist that Ruskin describes when he writes about Lord Lindsay's Christian Art in 1847: “we are critically aware of all our deficiencies, too cognizant of of all that is greatest to pass willingly and humbly through the stages that rise to it, and oppressed in every honest effort by the bitter sense of inferiority.” Hill, after quoting Shakespeare at the podium in 2012 or 2013, stops and wishes, out loud, that he had a modicum of talent. On another afternoon he imagines dead writers judging him whenever he gets sloppy. “We are now aroused suddenly in the light of an intolerable day,” says Ruskin, “our limbs fall under the sunstroke – we are walled in by the great buildings of elder times, and their fierce reverberations fall upon us without pause.”

Bathgate feels the dead benevolently in The Clematis, he accepts the poetic language that they have passed to him, “garlands ye have,” “methinks thou dost,” “thee to show thy;” and he believes in the concord that concludes so many poems and books (until the history of writing in the English language could be described as a row of open clasps being spied and fastened – or the struggle for an ultimate representation of Leopardi's translated word, appropriate), the passage of summing-up and unity that Samuel Richardson's books will carry on for pages and pages, the dramatic climax of Pamela occurring just over half way through the story, the rest of the book dedicated to the rapprochement of the characters and the establishment of rules, followed by more issue in which lessons from the narrative are explained efficiently, so that the reader knows what they were expected to have deduced; everything has been concluded now, even their deductions, a state that Hill's later poems avoid, the last line of The Triumph of Love suggesting that nothing has changed except the vital and tiny presence of a solitary comma, which could be understood in different ways.

Richardson's own books have been understood in different ways, in spite of him, with the critics ignoring his notes whenever they feel like it and trekking implacably to their own conclusions. “Clarissa is read as a novel about violability and violation, about the rights of the self to self-determination. I will be approaching Clarissa from a different angle ...” (J.M. Coetzee, Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, from Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1986 – 1999, referring to a specific area of critical consensus that was current during the 1980s ...)

the 'world' in general understanding

I was going to write something about Bertram Stevens and singing next but Miguel of St Orberose brings up a point in the comments – I reword it into a question like this -- Is it wrong-headed to compare old poets, who are adhering to the aesthetics of their times, to new poets? I was wondering similarly while I was writing the last post but the word I used when I was talking to myself was fair. Was it fair? Strange fairness when one party had died and the other one would never know; this was fairness being acted out for the living and the present people, who would maybe feel it transmitted into themselves through the medium of correct and balanced feelings or emotional sniffer dogs implanted early and reinforced.

Incoherence, though; I was approaching Bathgate through the word incoherence, which had come into my head when I was re-reading that old interview with Geoffrey Hill.

Incoherence (I considered) is eternally available to everyone and the year 1889, which was the publication of The Clematis* would not have forbidden incoherence, the 1800s being so hectic in the Anglosphere and Ruskin breaking down, even at the end of Praeterita when he is pointing out the quiet and peacefulness; still he is not quiet and peaceful but must worry back over what he has written: “… totally above men of the 'world' in general understanding, courtesy, and moral sense. Men of the outer world, I mean, of course ...” -- joking a little but still craving in general to be understood both at the atomic level of a single word and in the overarching meaning, which he complained nobody got, and instead they pulled quotes out of his books and showed them around, saying they were beautiful. I do not want to be beautiful, he wrote. I want to be meaningful. But Oscar Wilde defended him after his death by writing

Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin’s views on Turner are sound or not? What does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so fiery coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best in subtle choice of word and epithet, is at least as great a work of art as any of those sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England’s gallery ...

The dirt world would not understand him either and his ditch did not work.

This is Hill's habit too, in lectures and poems, this way of picking back over a word he has used, this restless irritation, stung by words as if they are insects he has sat on, he goes, he has to scratch, but he has to sit down in the grass again too, he sits, he gets bitten, he quotes the OED, he sits down again and has to get up again. He will never be able to settle comfortably on a word and rest there like a man on a soft cushion. The dead are misunderstood as well, he worries. They are ignored. Very much like words in that respect. People assume their compliance without asking.

Somebody should make a list of writers whose clarifying nitpicks are also a style, eg

Hill
Ruskin
Stein
Robert Burton?


* I've just ("just" is at ten forty-five, the morning after I made this post) read a review of Bathgate's Clematis book, Far South Fancies, in an edition of The Literary World (July 19, 1890). The reviewer's opinion in a nutshell: "So far as the human element in them [the poems] is concerned, they are of little value [...] But Mr Bathgate has an eye for scenery."

this by others is descried

The first line of Hill's first published book (unless I've got this wrong) was, “Against the burly air I strode,” Genesis (1959), going on into more combat: “tough pig-headed salmon,” “triggered claw,” “fierce and unregenerate clay” “to ravage and redeem the world,” an atmosphere of struggle that almost does not exist in this Anthology of Australian Verse edited by Bertram Stevens, where the tone is usually the one in Michael's Personality, the authors easily acquiescing to their own ideas and language easily acquiescing to the authors.

Fair crown of stars of purest ray,
 Hung aloft on Mapau tree,
What floral beauties ye display,
 Stars of snowy purity.

(from The Clematis, by Alexander Bathgate)

Bathgate was a New Zealander. Stevens has decided to include poets from New Zealand for reasons that he doesn't explain. Proximity and small population seems to have connected them in his mind. “Australia was first settled by the British a little more than a century ago, so that we are still a young community. The present population, including that of New Zealand, is a little under five millions.” The Clematis exists in opposition to the spirit of Hill, who says, “I do feel that everything that I write is a kind of battle won—or lost—against silence and incoherence. And I think there is something naturally incoherent in me, just as I think there is probably something, at some level, anarchic, because the kind of obsessive concern I have with order in the early work is one that somebody has who feels all the time how endangered order is, and what a potential threat to order he is” (from an interview with the Paris Review.)

But Bathgate feels close to his opinion of the clematis flower, not incoherent or battling, he uses words for beauty, “fair,” “purest,” “snowy purity,” “stars,” without contradicting himself; the only opposition in the poem comes from the darkness of the mapau tree versus the brightness of the petals, “'mid sombre leaves.” Then he tells you that the deep colour of the tree is an asset for the little flower because it describes strength.

His strength, thy beauty, both unite
And form a picture to delight.

Next Bathgate reveals that he has been thinking of another union all along, and the perceptible union of the flower and the tree was a visible sign indicating the existence of other compatibilities, ones that can only be intuited; the minor troubles the clematis has faced (“weak stem“) were all temporary and solvable; each indicator of disunity was a false flag.

Fair flower, methinks thou dost afford
 Emblem of a perfect wife,
Whose work is hidden from the world,
 Till, perchance, her husband's life
Is by her influence beautified,
And this by others is descried.

What Bathgate sees is ultimately coherence and the poem moves into that coherence, it is coherent in its language, it does not contradict its own author, there is not “something naturally incoherent in me,” and order is not endangered – order exists in nature. It is there in the trees. “'It is not nature's way to be distraught.” (Hill, Expostulations on the Volcano (2012)) On the other hand “Words | Render us callous the fuller they ring” (ditto). Bathgate assumes that his words are full.