The Voyage of the Hurunui

Cresswell is a true poet: his heart is in his job. In the jungles of Bohemia, in the half-world of the cultured tramp, he has kept that elusive quality, artistic integrity. All very well for me, with a wife and two children, a bought house, a new job in the civil service, to say – ‘Ah Cresswell, yes, if only he had become socially adjusted’. The Pythian Muse would haul down her skirts and boot me justly, from the door. Of several possible ways of coping with the dilemma of a vocation to poetry, he has chosen the way most often discussed and most rarely taken – to live by one’s wits and serve only the Muse. So if I do not praise greatly The Voyage of the Hurunui let no one suppose that I lack admiration for the author of A Poet’s Progress and Present Without Leave, those lively, brilliant and original journals of a dedicated life. I would like to hear a great deal more of the comment we deserve from a nomad living unwillingly among our cultural morgues and money-breeding hovels. My basic disagreement with Cresswell is not on social grounds, nor even ideological (though I do not believe that a mystique of homosexual love, however loyally held, however justly conceived, can adequately answer our demand for human brotherhood) – but on grounds of poetic method. No verse technique can supply a lack of inspiration; but a false direction to the development of idiom can gravely injure a poet’s best passages and completely wreck his tradesman’s job-work. The occasional italicised stanza in the Voyage,page 296 introduced for relief and written in the casual speech of sailors, shows quite plainly that Cresswell can handle speech idiom:

‘We’re off Gravesend, Jock, did you say?
Mud-pilot’s come aboard?
No thanks, old chap, I won’t need a strap,
I’ll carry it by the cord.’

His use, then, of archaic idiom (‘And ’twill grieve him sore to turn from shore’) – of hortative language in place of metaphor drawn from the senses (‘He rules Mankind through the abstract mind, / Through an abstract false ideal’) – of exclamation marks scattered like pylons through the text – these uses, leading quite often to bathos, spring not from a lack of poetic ability in Cresswell, but from his ingrained view of poetry as a ‘special’ language. No one who reads this ballad with the care it deserves can avoid the conclusion that a very good poet indeed is cutting his own throat:

There the sea-god dwells and weaves his spells
On the bottom of the deep,
And all who in his mirror look
There see the selves they have forsook:
As clear as in a crystal brook
Where leaning willows weep
Deep down each sees in his own brain
Further than plumb or anchor-chain
Can reach, or shipwreck e’er hath lain
Or things that swim or creep . . .

Such verse is not in fashion, but it has power and full validity. Cresswell does not fail by writing at times like Coleridge or Wordsworth; he fails by writing more often in the style of the ’prentice Byron or Shelley when didactic. He is, one feels, pig-headed. A powerful ballad allegory spoiled by muddy method is a sight to make the angels, or Cresswell’s own nature spirits, weep.

1956 (141)