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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Poetry and Education

Poetry and Education

Today I am talking about poetry and education. I will begin with the sad case of Matthew Arnold, who became a school inspector and ceased to be a poet. Matthew’s father, Thomas Arnold, was the man who turned Rugby into a high-minded school. Though he had a great personal love for the Gospel of St John, Thomas Arnold did not believe that the Christian dispensation extended to schoolboys. Their natures were too brutish, too inclined to evil. They had to be ruled by the rod and the Mosaic Law, like the old tribes of the Jews. All this is set down in the sermons of Dr Arnold. It must have been a source of grief to him when Matthew became a poet, losing en route his evangelical faith. Matthew remembered his father with tenderness and grief, mingled with deep admiration:

O strong soul, by what shore
Tarriest thou now? For that force
Surely has not been left vain . . .
Yes, in some far-shining sphere,
Conscious or not of the past,
Still thou performest the word
Of the Spirit in whom thou dost live –
Prompt, unwearied, as here!
Still thou upraisest with zeal
The humble good from the ground,
Sternly repressest the bad!
Still, like a trumpet, dost rouse
Those who with half-open eyes
Tread the borderland dim
’Twixt virtue and vice . . .

A curious picture of Dr Arnold giving stiff lectures to the blessed spirits. To keep his talents occupied, some of them would have to be capable of doubtfulpage 631 behaviour. These lines occur in the middle of that long, moralistic eulogy called ‘Rugby Chapel’. They represent the conscious daylight image which the poet had of the great pedagogue; and they creak like the wheels of a cart on a bumpy road. But I believe that the battle scene between Sohrab and Rustum in the poem by that name gives a more accurate symbolic picture of their relationship:

Then Rustum raised his head; his dreadful eyes
Glared, and he shook on high his menacing spear,
And shouted: ‘Rustum!’ – Sohrab heard that shout,
And shrank amazed; back he recoiled one step,
And scanned with blinking eyes the advancing form;
And then he stood bewildered, and he dropped
His covering shield, and the spear pierced his side.
He reeled, and staggering back, sank to the ground;
And then the gloom dispersed, and the wind fell,
And the bright sun broke forth, and melted all
The cloud; and the two armies saw the pair;
Saw Rustum standing, safe upon his feet,
And Sohrab, wounded, on the bloody sand . . .

It is an extraordinary picture of a father-son relationship. I suggest that the symbols of Matthew Arnold’s poetry indicate that his individuality was wounded by the authority, educational, parental and ecclesiastical, embodied in his formidable father. What happens when Sohrab, the inner self, the man capable of natural contemplation, the poet, dies? I think he becomes a ghost and writes long essays about literature and dogma, trying to prove that poetry has a moral task. The poems, however, reveal a much more fundamental conflict, between the energies which the Victorian moral order could not utilise or render fruitful, and that massive ordering authority itself. In ‘Empedocles on Etna’ the philosopher meditates endlessly, like a wound- up clock, on the absence of natural joy in the world, before plunging into the crater of the volcano – a dramatic symbolic return to the womb of the earth mother – and meanwhile Callicles the shepherd-boy sings below about the torture and imprisonment of Typho the rebel Titan:

The Lyre’s voice is lovely everywhere!
In the court of Gods, in the city of men,
And in the lonely rock-strewn mountain glen,
In the still mountain-air.

Only to Typho it sounds hatefully!
To Typho only, the rebel o’er thrown,
page 632 Through whose heart Etna drives her roots of stone
To imbed them in the sea . . .

The groans of the rebel Titan are heard on Mount Olympus and the reaction of Zeus is a most enlightening one:

But an awful pleasure bland
Spreading o’er the Thunderer’s face,
When the sound climbs near his seat,
The Olympian council sees!
As he lets his lax right hand
Which the lightnings doth embrace,
Sink upon his mighty knees.
And the eagle, at the back
Of the appeasing gracious harmony,
Droops all his sheeny, brown, deep-feathered neck,
Nestling nearer to Jove’s feet;
While o’er his sovereign eye
The curtain of the blue films slowly meet . . .

Is this Dr Arnold dining at a high table with his prefects, while the rebel meditates on his sins elsewhere? I think it could be. It is certainly a vivid picture of power and complacency. The shepherd-boy – that is, Arnold’s intuitive faculty, which has not yet lost the key to the natural paradise – presents the situation clearly in images. But Empedocles – Arnold’s highly developed academic faculty of reason – misinterprets the evidence. He concludes that the images indicate only that cunning people triumph over the brave and impetuous ones, and locks the conflict out of sight with the remark that the noises of the mountain are only natural phenomena – a familiar trick of the abstract mind. So Empedocles is left in despair.

I have spoken at length about Matthew Arnold because his life and work illustrate exactly a certain kind of conflict between the creative powers in the depths of the human mind and the formal educative process by which the individual is conditioned to think and act socially. That’s what one would say in the problem-dodging language of the Department of Education. A statue of Matthew Arnold, with the sad eye and the air of a greyhound that has lost the scent, should stand in the central offices of every Department of Education. But let us consider broadly what this conflict implies for New Zealand poets.

From an abstract point of view, there seems to be no reason why New Zealand poets in the making should not benefit from their time in our schools, or why the work of established local poets should not be used as material – shades of the lumberyard! – in our classrooms. In practice bothpage 633 expectations are likely to be frustrated. I think the obstacles are inherent in the nature of the educative process itself.

A New Zealand child will generally come to school with its inner mind loaded with images purloined from the natural paradise in which it has begun to grow up – the first cigarette tasted in the top branches of a macrocarpa tree, the mud-eels hooked or gaffed from the creek below the house, the limestone cave where somebody reckons the Maoris used to bury their dead, the girls undressing in the bathing-sheds, seen through a crack in the wall – I am speaking of a country child, but even a town child will no doubt have something of the kind. These experiences, relatively unimportant from the point of view of the educator, are the seeds of what may later enable a person to write or appreciate a poem. When I speak of ‘the natural paradise’ I am not talking theologically. A sense of absolute value in what is happening; a sense of being in relation to other people and to things; a sense of endless possibilities of fruitfulness; and above all, the habit of natural contemplation, of letting the mind rest upon, draw nourishment from, the images of nature perceived as an organic whole – these things constitute, to my mind, a paradise, as far as such a condition is possible after the Fall of Man. Our poets continually return to this treasurehouse of images. Here, for example, is one poem by Pat Wilson – ‘The Anchorage’:

Fifteen or twenty feet below,
The little fish come creeping round the anchor chain.
I could not have it quieter now,
Not anywhere, nor could there be less movement
Anywhere at all than here.

The bay moves on into night.
The shadows come to watch and wait in every hollow
Till they have gathered-in all.
But moon comes over the rocks; she lights the little fall
And rise and fall at the beach.

Deep water, deep bay
So still and calm for one whole night in the south-east
That day has never come,
And I am still upon my knees out on the stern,
And you and I still watch
Down twenty, thirty feet below . . .

This lucid, charming poem would not conflict with the canons of taste that prevail in our classrooms. It could be ‘taken’ with a primary or secondary class quite easily. But the habit of contemplation, the view of the world itpage 634 implies – chiefly by what it leaves out – are in fact alien to our conditioned modes of thought. There are, I think, two main influences by which the minds of our children are rendered barren. The first is that principle of artificiality, by which each classroom situation or event is constructed in accordance with the demands of a syllabus or programme, however much the cleverer teachers may camouflage this; the second is the emphasis on intellectual disciplines, ways of looking at life, which hold up an allegedly scientific lens to what is going on, and in the process mummify it. This habit can easily become ingrained and last from kindergarten to the boneyard. And behind these influences lies the uneasy intention, on the part of the educator, to do the child some good by ordering its activities and moulding its mind. The battle may be no less brutal than that of Sohrab and Rustum. The process of de-education, by which one regains confidence in the value of one’s own experience, and a spasmodic revival of the power of natural contemplation, can be just as brutal; but at least one has something to show for it. I do not admire what our educators do; I only admire their courage and perseverance in situations often as trying as those of an Antarctic expedition. Well – I am not talking to a radio audience, with the Broadcasting Corporation groaning at my earhole. I will tell you the story, in verse, of an imaginary heroine in the field of education. I would prefer you to consider its accuracy rather than its propriety:

This is the tale of Matilda Glubb
Whose great-grandfather owned a pub,
But the stock got crossed with a Pig Island ram,
And her father was washed in the Blood of the Lamb
With a character nobody could smirch,
A grocer and a deacon of the Baptist Church,
And her mother often told her as the sky grew dark,
‘Matilda, don’t ever stay in the park,
Though the boys play there with tyres and balls
There’s an Ugly Old Troll who eats little girls.’
Second row from the front, with her glasses on,
Matilda kept her hanky clean,
Her hair was straight and her books were neat,
She learnt to spell and read and write,
And her teachers shook their heads and smiled,
‘Matilda Glubb is a careful child.’
She saw a blackbird dead at the gate
On the day she started to menstruate;
At the end of each month her face turned green
But she did quite well in the hockey team.
Her father dropped dead while he ate his porridge
page 635 And Matilda went to Training-College,
And the Warden said to the Principal,
‘Matilda Glubb is a well-meaning girl.’
She sat at the Method Lecturer’s feet,
She kept her blouse and bloomers neat,
She worshipped the gods of the Middle Class:
Propriety, Jargon and Tidiness.
With a Standard One in her P.A. year
She never blotted her register,
And the headmaster said to the First Assistant,
‘I think Miss Glubb will last the distance.’
When Matilda Glubb was twenty-eight
She thought she’d found her Mr Right,
His tie was straight and his hair was dark,
He had a job as a lawyer’s clerk,
But when he put his hand on her knee
Matilda said, ‘Don’t grab at me!’
And while she took her class to the pond
He was hooked and landed by a blousy blonde.
When Matilda Glubb was thirty-five
She said to herself, ‘It’s time to live’ –
With a new tight skirt and a glossy perm
She went to a dance for the Deaf and Dumb
And a Maori farmer asked her up –
When he offered her a drink she was scared of rape.
When Matilda Glubb was forty-two
She took her kids for a visit to the Zoo,
And the big baboon in its tight hutch had
A human face both funny and sad.
She slept and ate and banked her pay,
She spoke about spelling to the P.T.A.,
In a room with a tank and a daffodil
She took her kids for their Phonic Drill.
One Saturday morning she got out of bed
With a funny feeling in the crown of her head
And a little voice spoke clear and high,
‘Matilda Glubb, you are going to die.’
She boiled some water for a cup of tea,
She locked the door of the lavatory –
When Matilda Glubb in the mirror stared
Nobody cared, nobody cared,
And then in a flash Matilda knew
Precisely what she had to do.
page 636 When she asked for a cabin with a single bunk
The man at the Bureau thought she was drunk,
And he said while he washed his hands at the sink
‘That poor old cow was crackers, I think.’
The Director was rubbing a pimple on his chin
When the office door snickered and Miss Glubb came in –
He thought, ‘God help us, another old hag!’
And then she opened her travelling bag,
And while the Director ran for his life
Miss Glubb ran quicker with a butcher’s knife.
Her hair was lank, her eyes were wild:
‘Oh you are the father of my child,
The Ugly Old Troll who lives under my bed,
The man who stole my maidenhead!’
Oh it was a case of the biter bit,
The walls were spattered with gall and shit
And when they came with a gun to get her
They found her squatting in front of a heater.
Miss Glubb was roasting a bit of pork,
The Director’s penis on a toasting fork.
She said as the ambulance took her away,
‘Clay is shit and shit is clay,
Treat me kindly, treat me fair,
I never blotted my register!’ (Uncollected)

A bit grim, eh? And what has it got to do with poetry and education? The point is, I think, that there are quite a few Miss Glubbs in this country – God help them and us! – and if they are teaching poetry it will bear the impression of their personalities. I would prefer to have no poetry taught. Let the books be there in the schools – plenty of Negro blues and Australian ballads, and as little as possible of Wordsworth or T.S. Eliot – and if the kids want it, they can read it and even possibly recite it. Often they are inclined to pick up one or two things that suit them and leave the rest.

Poems that refer directly to the natural paradise can generally be set before children without worry to the teachers. No child – they think – could be bewildered or corrupted by a poem about trees. Yet certain difficulties remain.

I remember something that happened when I was about thirteen. At that time I was a pupil at a North Island boarding school. The headmaster was a vigorous red-headed man, given to fits of violent temper, and in his own way deeply religious. I am indebted to him for an early knowledge of Robert Louis Stevenson’s story about the devil in the bottle – he used to read it aloud to us in the evenings. So if what I tell you shows him up in an unfortunate light – well, he was a man who happened to have wandered intopage 637 the world’s most dangerous profession, schoolteaching. He is dead now, and I hope the good man has a not too warm, safe place in Purgatory, where the schoolteachers have to shove loads of bricks uphill, while memorising the exports of Venezuela.

It happened one night that the headmaster’s son suggested to myself and another boy that we should get out of bed and go down the road in our dressing-gowns to a place where a bulldozer had been working. It was a clear, moonlit night. The two of us crept out of the school grounds and went to this place, where there were great mounds and gullies of sand. We played in the sandhills, climbing up them and sliding down again. I remember a sense of mystery and exhilaration – the unfamiliar lights and shadows that the moon created – a sense of unlimited space in the blowing of the night wind – something quite different from the daily life of the school, where it seemed often that you had your head inside an old paper bag.

When we came up the road again, we were met by a procession of all the school staff with torches. It was quite an unnerving sight. There were long interviews and questions galore. There were threats of expulsion. The point was that the headmaster thought I had been practising sodomy – whereas in fact I had been renewing my acquaintance with the natural paradise. Eventually a verdict of Not Proven was reached, and I was placed under probation till I left school at the end of that year.

The headmaster’s mistake was a natural one. After all, he was a pedagogue – an agent of the community whose job it was to see that children became socially adjusted – and from a pedagogue’s point of view, sodomy and natural contemplation are very much alike – subversive activities with a strong flavour of personal enjoyment. It is generally impossible to explain the difference to somebody who doesn’t already know it.

The headmaster’s religious background was no help to him. Matthew Arnold has some interesting comments to offer on this point:

For rigorous teachers seized my youth,
And purged its faith, and trimmed its fire,
Showed me the high white star of Truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.
Even now their whispers pierce the gloom –
What dost thou in this living tomb? . . .

When Arnold wrote these lines, he was convalescing from a bad fit of the blues – brought on no doubt by his labours in the field of education – as a guest in a Carthusian monastery. A very good place to find some peace and quiet, among those who practise supernatural contemplation – but the conscience of a pedagogue, implanted by his early training, told Arnold that any such retreat was vaguely immoral and smelt of the tomb.

page 638

I must confess to grave doubts about the high white star of Truth. What kind of truth was it? It did not get rid of the whipping-block at Rugby School. It could hardly have been Christian, because Dr Arnold did not believe a boy’s mind could grasp the niceties of the Christian revelation. Anybody who is engaged in staring at a high white star is less likely to notice that somebody else is stealing his purse or putting his personality in a strait-jacket. I suspect that the star was the hypnotic silver ball of Honour – or else, the Team Spirit – that English pedagogues have been accustomed to dangle before their charges. One does not question what is being honoured, or whether the Spirit may not be a shabby poltergeist. It is certainly a Spirit prone to generalities and boredom. I would prefer not to be haunted by it. I think my unfortunate headmaster was in its grip.

There is a Hindu story which may help to clarify some of the problems of personal freedom and social authority which I’ve been discussing. There was once a female tiger who gave birth to her cub while she was chasing a flock of sheep. Frightened away by the shepherds, she left the cub behind her, and it was adopted by an old ewe and raised as a lamb. The Tiger-Sheep thought he really was a sheep. He learnt to baa and eat grass, to obey the laws of the flock, and to run to shelter if any tiger was seen in the neighbourhood.

Now there was an old tiger who lived in the jungle near the village. And he got to hear about the Tiger-Sheep, and it upset him terribly. He chose a time when the Tiger-Sheep was grazing near the jungle, and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and dragged him to a waterhole. The Tiger-Sheep was naturally terrified. He expected to be devoured any minute. But the old tiger said, ‘Look! Look into the water and tell me what you see there.’

The Tiger-Sheep gazed into the pool, and saw a fierce young tiger looking back at him. ‘It’s bad magic,’ he baa-ed.

‘It’s not magic at all,’ said the old tiger. ‘It’s your own face. Look now’ – and he brought his head alongside that of the Tiger-Sheep, and the Tiger- Sheep saw two tigers looking at him from the pool.

Gradually he became convinced that what the old tiger had told him was true. He ceased to baa and he began to eat meat instead of grass, though out of respect for the flock that had reared him, he did his hunting on the other side of the mountain. Among the flock, he was remembered as the Sheep Who Went Wrong, and held up to the young lambs as an example of what not to do. He was not particularly happy, but at least he knew who he was. Often, before, his claws and teeth and whiskers had alarmed him, and made him think he was a monster. Later on, he severely mauled the old tiger in a fight, and took over his section of the jungle.

Sheep ruminate. Tigers contemplate. Don’t get me wrong. I think every man is a tiger dressed up as a sheep. Man is made for self-knowledge, for spiritual deserts, for wrestling with the problems of the inner life, as the tiger is born to eat meat. But the pedagogues are accustomed to treat those whompage 639 they instruct as creatures of a less terrible kind. For this reason poets and educators are commonly at loggerheads. If it had been sodomy, and not an innocent adventure, which my old headmaster hauled me over the coals for, it would have been something further for me to understand – the tiger’s face in the forest pool – and education would still have been no help.

The crux of the matter is not any given experience, but the understanding of it. It is an error not only of Bohemians, but of young people everywhere, to suppose that a lot of things have to happen to you before you can write. Generally more than enough has happened already – it is the understanding which lags behind. I think our schools hinder the development of that understanding. They could hardly assist it to grow; but they need not hinder it as much as they do. There is a touch of arrogance in the pedagogue’s assumption that he or she knows what is good for another creature. Perhaps some teachers are not pedagogues – the farmers and fishermen and rouseabouts who have lost their way and stumbled into the profession by accident, and wonder why they don’t like it, and are a cause of great joy to many children who are looking for a kindly father. I remember one old man, a headmaster, whose wife had died. He used to sit in his office and let the children climb over his knees which resembled the roots of a tree. He paid no attention to his staff, who were quite able to keep up their feuds without his intervention. And I remember a Maori lad, a heavy drinker – I shared a bottle of gin with him once under a park bench – who used to take his entire sole-charge school on to the reef on fine days and spend the time fishing with them. But these were exceptional men, jewels in the mud; and women who do the same are even more exceptional.

My quarrel with our schools, and equally our universities, is not simply because they exterminate poets. That would be a narrow reason, though understandable, like that of the craftsmen who objected when machines were brought in to do the work faster. But there is an older battle, which has been going on a long time, between people with a deeply-rooted, regional, primitive cast of mind – peasants and tribesmen, for example – and the rootless, abstract, cosmopolitan way of thinking belonging to the politicians and pedagogues and businessmen who govern the modern world. The battle is always lost at the political or military level. It was lost at Parihaka when the Maori elders were arrested and carted off to jail; it was lost at Culloden when Cumberland piled up the bodies of the wounded clansmen and used them as targets for his cannon; it was lost in America when the Indians were fenced in on their reservations, or when the Northern troops burned the plantations and brought another kind of slavery to the Negroes. Allen Tate expresses the feeling of it in his poem, ‘To the Lacedemonians’, where an old Confederate soldier meditates at a reunion of veterans:

‘Soldiers, march! We shall not fight again
The Yankees with our guns well-aimed and rammed –
page 640 All are born Yankees of the race of men
And this, too, now the country of the damned:

‘Poor bodies crowding round us! The white face
Eyeless with eyesight only, the modern power . . .’

I do not think Tate is suggesting, through the mouth of the Confederate veteran, that the Yankees are bad men and the Confederates good – only that the sense of some sacred tribal identity has been destroyed, and with it the sight that is more than eyesight, the natural contemplate power.

Yevtushenko, the best of the modern Russian poets, has also described this death-in-life as it shows itself in Soviet society; not because the society is Marxist, but because the pedagogues and bureaucrats are in control:

I can recall that distant valley,
the years-old rotting bridge,
the woman on the bay mare flying over
in a dark cloud of dust, pale-cheeked and graceless,
‘Murder!’
She screamed it out.
I cannot lose this memory anywhere,
how people ran behind her
dropping their sickles down into the grass.
And sad and strange he was lying
over the far side of a small hill,
with an imperceptible wound under the rib,
being innocently murdered for money . . .
I recollect the darkness of the mud,
hear the hooves,
I dream the woman in her cloud of dust.
‘Murder!’
tearing my heart open.

I find it hard to live in the world,
hearing that scream, hard:
I am not yet used to human death.
I have sometimes seen, deplore it as you wish,
a spirit’s imperceptible destruction.
Watching a senior comrade at his business
it terrifies me to divine his death
hardening over his face and features.
I am not strong enough,
clench my teeth, stay silent.
page 641 ‘Murder!’
I all but scream it out . . .

Yet one can find men who have avoided this kind of death. I remember a trip I made on board a fishing-trawler, in connection with some work I was doing for the Department of Education. The first day at sea, after a night of violent sea-sickness, I entered the wheelhouse – and pointing to an instrument on the wall, I said to the captain – ‘What is that for?’

‘It’s for measuring the depth of a woman’s private parts,’ he said. Not in those exact words. Decoded, I think the captain’s message would run like this:

I am a piece of red earth from Stornoway in the Isle of Lewis, whom the Lord God put breath into for His own purposes. I could speak no English when I came to school, and my schoolteacher thrashed me if I spoke a word of Gaelic, because he was a Sassenach, an intellectual monkey made out of wood and wire. My schooling left me with a stammer, but my subconscious mind still speaks the dialect of the tribe. Never try to treat me or my boat as if we were an It. You won’t find out how I know where the fish are when no other captain can find them; I don’t know myself how I know, and that’s why I am the best captain on the coast. With this boat, which is part of my own body, I go into the private parts of the sea, the death goddess, whom I am in love with. In the end she will kill me. That is what it is to be a man. If you don’t understand me, go back to your books.

I think I got the captain’s message. As a result, I was able to write a poem to my wife, in which I compared myself to a fishing-boat and her to the sea:

Woman, wife, sailor’s rib,
I think no surgeon could divide us,
So high you rule, so deep you flail,
So wide you make my rudderless horizon.
All the sea barns are banging empty
From Castle Rock to Turnagain,
And you possess the years below my keel
Where the net slides, while star and captain sleep.

In that grim gulf no twanging echo sounder
Can tell me how the contours flow.
False bellies, chafing gear,
Help the net to wear,
And the strung warps are trembling now . . .
(Version of ‘Trawling Poem’, CP 218)

If the captain had been a man whom education had taken hold of he could not have spoken to me as he did. He would have said – ‘This is an echopage 642 sounder, made by such and such a firm’ – the contemplative insight concealed in the package of a coarse joke would not have been passed on to me.

The educated sense of decorum may prevent a reader from understanding a poem. Here, for example, is one by an Australian woman poet. It is called ‘Prayer to Hekate’:

Goddess of childbirth
Forgive the death
Of the silent child
Severed from birth
Before the crescent moon
Became an eye
In night’s sad womb.

The shell on the sand
Corrodes the sun
With its solid light
But the wave-wind hand
Hollows and chips
Until the heart is revealed
And the shape is death.

Heart of a lover
That was once my heart
Spray on the cliff
In that moon-locked bay
Bets endlessly
For the mirror is dark
And bedded in rock.

Forgive the child
Whose unheard cry
Arrows the night
And peals the silver
From the glass –
O clear image
Of what is past.

I knelt on the sand
In a holy place,
Bent to the water
Where the half-known face
Had faded in foam;
page 643 The wind was sunless,
Cold the dunes . . .

I can imagine a secondary-school teacher, or even a university lecturer, discussing this poem with a class, and missing the bus completely through not realising that it celebrates an abortion. Not that abortions are remarkable. They are the standard modern solution to late marriage and the housing problem. But this poet is aware than an apology is required to some sacred power of fertility which has been violated. The aborted child and the love relationship itself are closely associated. The crescent moon (the child curved in the foetal position) had not yet become an eye – an eye that could see things, or the capital ‘I’ of identity. It is a sad poem and a very good one. The clues are plain enough; but an educated sense of decorum might blind the reader. And then one would have the complaint that modern poetry is too obscure. It would be less obscure to a Maori or an ancient Greek. One has to get de-educated to understand any poem well.

The fires of tribulation through which the modern world is passing have stripped away a great deal of the rational optimism and the belief in inevitable progress which our fathers possessed. Technological development may be as much a spiritual burden as a material asset. The exploration of space hurls one’s mind against the void.

I think I can detect in the work of many younger poets the return of a mediaeval conception of human nature. Here are the first and last [stanzas] of a poem by Louis Johnson, entitled ‘Bread and a Pension’:

It was not our duty to question but to guard,
maintaining order; see that none escaped
who may be required for questioning by the State.
The price was bread and a pension and not a hard
life on the whole. There were some scraped
enough on the side to build up a fairish estate

for the day of retirement . . .
If they cared
much it was for the quiet life. You cannot hold
that against them, since it’s roundly human
and any decent man would want it the same:
and these were decent; did as they were told,
fed prisoners, buried the dead, and, on occasion
loaded the deathcart with those who were sent to the flames . . .

Johnson is no doubt describing the view of an ordinary Belsen guard; but the implication is that a great number of men would act and think thepage 644 same. He implies also that the execution yard is a permanent feature of any civilisation. The poem charts accurately the modern monotony, in which death is just another event. And though the word ‘sin’ is out of coinage, the sense that all is not well within the human soul is often explored with the precision of a surgeon probing an abscess. Here is ‘The Inflammable Man’, by Gordon Challis. He has to be careful whenever he is close to a petrol dump:

Such are the hazards which I well might fear
if I could be ignited from outside.
The masks which I must chronically don
are not to shield me, though they may appear
the same as my asbestos friend’s –

(Challis has another poem called ‘The Asbestos-Suited Man in Hell’)

. . . he tried
to keep all evil out but I have long

forsaken such a sham of hell and pain;
my masks are worn to stifle what’s within –
the rabid flames whose fingers never tire,
which force apart the fissures till again
a new mask must be laid, when one burns thin,
to feed and hide the anarchy of fire . . .

This is the language of the modern age, gaunt, precise, conversational. The experience of the void that remains when the earth is no longer sacred, and each man stands on his own two feet, at the heart of a sterile intellectual universe, is perhaps the one genuine benefit that education gives a poet. If the weight of this experience can be carried, without idealist subterfuge, it has its own religious quality. The void can be the place where man dies or the place where he waits to be born. I think that something like this is expressed in a poem by Peter Bland, with which I will conclude this rambling and prejudiced talk:

The Nightwatchman

I am the nightwatchman, left to face
The darkness you’re afraid of
And which, long ago, I also dreaded
Hiding my head beneath the blankets
For fear of faces reddened by hell’s flames

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As mine is now – but by the torch I carry
As warrant of my lonely trade,
While you are sleeping, I am seeing
The darker side of the gross machinery
That waits to claim you when my warrant fades.

I see it white-sheeted, cold, and idle,
Beneath black ribs of echoing steel.
I like to pretend it’s a church I’m guarding –
Loose wires are moss beneath my feet
And lathes leap up like spires or vaulting.

Sometimes, alone in my cold cathedral,
I ask myself if I am ghost or priest
Or simply sole remnant of a congregation
That has long deserted – or lies asleep
Beneath these coils of shining weeds.

Perhaps I’m all of these – ghost, priest,
And congregation wrapped in one.
I have to believe there’s some advantage
Left in facing what you’re sleeping off.
Maybe I’ve been alone too long.

For I cannot imagine ever changing
My nightly passage for your kingdom come.
Nor could I face the thought of staying
With those ghosts that gather when I have gone
To lie beneath the blazing sun.

These are the songs of experience; it may not be possible for many of us to write songs of innocence. Unconsciously, poets both here and overseas, try to enter and write from the situation of destitution, where one is not taken in by the slogans, the money, or the intellectual maps that leave out precisely this point at which creation becomes possible. This is not mere primitivism, a retreat from a world which does not understand the poet. It is an attempt to understand a world which does not understand itself.

And here is a small poem of my own as an epilogue:

It would be simple if I were indifferent
To you and you and you, not faces but

People – which of my selves do you want to eat?
page 646 I have forgotten what the poems meant.

Schoolteachers, chiropractors, farmers’ wives,
Ten years ago I would lie down

Drunk in the doorways of your town,
Write poems and throw poker dice.

Beyond the books, those boulders like great gourds
Where the sea washes, taught me words.
(‘To an Adult Education Audience’, CP 274)

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