At Dead Low Water and Sonnets

This new book of verse by Mr Curnow contains sonnets selected from previous volumes, as well as some new. The result well justifies his selection; for Mr Curnow has habitually expressed himself with greatest clarity and intensity in the sonnet form; and hence these sonnets, though not a series, have in some degree a common theme, that of his deepest fears, regrets and self-probing. Those mannerisms springing from uncertainty which have led to obscurity in much of his other work are here at a minimum, and the total effect is one of chastened rhetoric, an amalgam of poetic diction and direct speech.

In the title poem ‘At Dead Low Water’ (first published in the Arts Year Book 1945), of which only the third and last section is in sonnet form, Mr Curnow achieves a superb synthesis of three separate levels of experience – personal, symbolic and metaphysical. In its first section he develops an image which he has frequently skirted elsewhere – that of the amphibious no-man’s- land, neither sea nor land, with ‘smell of harbour bottom’ and innumerable associations of decay and rebirth:

The boat was not deliberately abandoned
But tied here and forgotten, left afloat
Freakishly, bobbing where the summers foundered . . .

Surely this, like Rimbaud’s boat, is a symbol of spiritual exploration. But this time the voyage has not been made, the sailor has stayed on shore watching the mudflats uncovered by a receding tide. The sea recalls earth’s beginning when the Holy Spirit moved upon the face of the waters; also human birth – this section of the poem ends with a brilliant anatomical comparison so vivid as to be shocking.

The second and third sections of the poem are at the summit of Mr Curnow’s achievement. In firm precise stanzas, comparable in maturity with Eliot’s description in the Four Quartets of his imagined encounter with thepage 58 ghost of Dante, he introduces the dramatic theme of father and child walking hand in hand on the seashore. Against these apparitions from an idyllic past is set the horror of present decay and sterility:

. . . But carefully
Morning by morning, incorruption
Puts on corruption; nervously
Wave creeps in and lingers over

Tideswept heaps where the fly breeds:
Memory flows where all is tainted,
Death with life and life with death.

The poem ends with the finest sonnet in the volume, which could indeed bear comparison with any sonnet in the English language.

After the sustained intensity of ‘At Dead Low Water’ the sonnets which form the bulk of the book must seem less significant and compelling. In general they have the traditional shape of the Shakespearian sonnet, three quatrains and a couplet, but Mr Curnow has introduced half-rhyme and varied considerably the length of the lines. Where the impulse behind the poem is sufficiently strong, these devices are highly successful; but his more desultory poems, lacking the vertebraic column of a formal structure, tend to disintegrate to a series of ill-related clauses. One can detect the influence of Dylan Thomas in certain of the later poems; and more destructively, that of William Empson. Mr Curnow’s capacity for elaborate metaphor leads him at times to perverse extravagance. Yet in ‘With How Mad Steps’ he preserves full evocative power, though the sonnet is itself one metaphor:

. . . and even
While dawn destroys me her young foliage stirs;
Neither is mathematical space forgiven

My dear earth’s distance, though her heart descry
With how mad steps, her moon, I climb the sky.

A curious compound of sexual and religious symbolism, in which perhaps lies the mainspring of Mr Curnow’s poetic energy, links much of his poetry with that of Yeats’s later years. In ‘Genesis’ the weakness for purposes of art of a purely irrational view of sexual experience is apparent. Without the binding factor of a sense of relationship the poem dissolves into a cloud of Dionysiac images. One may compare this sonnet with some of Spender’s recent love poetry; the same lack of grip in both cases weakens the verbal structure andpage 59 makes the feeling sentimental; but with Spender the ailment is more chronic. Mr Curnow through an understanding of suffering has maintained a foothold on the greasy slide. And by some extraordinary toughness of intellectual fibre he is able at times to stand at the terminus of the romantic introspective journey, and make despair intelligible –

A glitter that might be pride, an ashy glow
That could be pity, if the shapes would show.

Certain poems previously published have in this volume been emended, some for the better but some less happily. For example in that sanguine early sonnet ‘Music for Words’, the cacophonous ‘As if blood could be got out of the dry bones’ is a melancholy substitute for ‘Than a blooding of dry bones with violence’. Perhaps the growth of a more conservative political attitude may account for the change of meaning; but it is bad policy to rewrite a poem in the light of a changed philosophy; the truth of a poem is not philosophical truth but the variable truth of anything intensely experienced. Mr Curnow is inclined to elaborate a simple statement into an unnecessary paradox, in fact offending against that economy of phrase which is the mark of good metaphysical poetry. One is reminded of the purely verbal difficulty and strained epigrams of Emily Dickinson’s lesser poems. Yet this fault may serve to preserve him from the greater faults of imprecision and lushness shown in his first book of poems Valley of Decision.

In his search for precision and solidity Mr Curnow has often turned to occasional themes. At least nine of the twenty-nine sonnets fall into this category; and many of those remaining are occasional in mood. It is significant that his best long poem after ‘At Dead Low Water’, that written for the Abel Tasman centenary, was strictly occasional. An unkindly analysis would be that Mr Curnow has hoped to be a New Zealand laureate; but the main cause lies probably in the fact that like Wordsworth he requires the reassurance of tangible material to balance that state (the occupational disease of artists) which psychologists term negativistic withdrawal.

Mr Curnow remains the most fascinating and enigmatic poet in this country. The total impression of this, his latest volume, is one of vigour and coherence, supported throughout by a keen sense of poetic tradition. (For example, in ‘A Sonata of Schubert’ the associations are amplified by a skilful echoing of Blake and Thomas Nashe.) The influence of Baudelaire, Dylan Thomas, and possibly Hopkins, on his later verse has led to a new fertilisation and increase in strength and subtlety. By this volume Mr Curnow retains and consolidates his highly individual position in New Zealand literature and among the best poets of this century.

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