Simon Turner - Close Encounters (3): Ted Hughes’ ‘Griefs for Dead Soldiers’

Ted Hughes, second from left, with Louis MacNeice, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, and Stephen Spender

Ted Hughes’ poetry is a body of work profoundly interested in language as a subject. If this sounds like something of a redundant statement – very few poets can be said to lack interest in their basic medium – what I mean to suggest is that Hughes’ work is as concerned with language as subject as it is with language as form or medium. A key passage from Poetry in the Making should help to illustrate this point. In this instance, Hughes is discussing the ways in which a writer might use language to bring to life an everyday image, such as “that crow flying across, beneath the aeroplane.” “[H]ow are we to say what we see in the crow’s flight?” Hughes enquires. “It is not enough to say the crow flies purposefully, or heavily, or rowingly, or whatever. There are no words to capture the infinite depth of crowiness in the crow’s flight. All we can do is use a word as an indicator, or a whole bunch of words as a general directive.”

Language, for Hughes, is very often incommensurate to the task of representing reality: even a relatively simple fragment of reality as a crow flying beneath an almost empty sky. Words, argues Hughes in the same piece, “tend to shut out the simplest things we wish to say.” Hughes’ method after, say, Lupercal, might be seen as an attempt to try to find an appropriate language with which to represent nature, remaking the language afresh with each line, like Adam in the Garden, improvising variations on phrases and conceits in order to get at the subject as closely as possible, rather than worrying overmuch about the finish of the poem. But what happens to language when confronted with the facts of historical trauma and atrocity? Quite a number of poems in Hughes’ earlier volumes – most notably in The Hawk in the Rain – deal with the matter of the First World War, and the question of language seems to me to be central here, too. For Hughes, the First World War was the defining trauma of 20th century British life, much more so than the Second. In a review of First World War poems in the Listener in 1965, Hughes called the war Britain’s “number one national ghost. It’s still everywhere, molesting everybody”, whilst in a letter to Nick Gammage dated March 15, 1991, he reiterates the same point, stating that “the whole country was traumatised” by the war, and that as a child the war had dominated adult conversations, and his own consciousness to a startling extent.

Hughes’ own approach to the war is entirely continuous with the discourse of language outlined above. In particular, Hughes’ critical writing suggests that the failure that he sees in much Georgian poetry of the conflict might be a failure of language itself. In the same Listener review previously cited, Hughes notes that:

“apart from Owen and Sassoon, the poets lost that war. Perhaps Georgian language wouldn’t look nearly so bad if it hadn’t been put to such a test. It was the worst equipment they could have had – the language of the very state of mind that belied and concealed the possibility of the nightmare that now had to be expressed.”

Tellingly, the only poets – other than Owen and Sassoon – that Hughes sees as surviving aesthetically are Ivor Gurney and Osbert Sitwell, both of which “used a plain unpoetic language, which makes an impressive lesson in preservation among the other tainted fruit.” A binary system is being erected here ,with the “plain unpoetic” diction of Sitwell and Gurney operating as foil to the allegedly high-falutin’ rhetoric of the Georgians. The first succeeds, the second fails, because in the latter case, the language is incommensurate to the task at hand. Where Own and Sassoon fit is unclear, as neither fell foul of the excesses of Georgian poetry, yet neither could be said to write in a “plain unpoetic” style. (This is particularly true of Owen, I feel.)

This same opposition can also be seen in an encounter Hughes recounts his discussion of Orghast, a play written in an invented language which he devised with Peter Brook and Geoffrey Reeves in 1971. Researching a poem about Gallipoli, Hughes “had an enlightening encounter talking to two of the survivors – one eloquent, one taciturn ...” The eloquent veteran, whilst full of anecdotes, ultimately communicates least to Hughes (“dramatic skill concealed everything”), whilst his monosyllabic comrade “released a world of shocking force and vividness” through his very inarticulateness.

Bearing this in mind, I’ll turn now to an analysis of one of the ‘war’ poems in The Hawk in the Rain, and consider the ways in which it enacts the critical framework that Hughes erects in his prose writing on the subject of the war. ‘Griefs for Dead Soldiers’ is tripartite in structure, and revolves around three acts of memorialisation of the war dead. In the poem’s first section, a public memorial is erected; in the second, a war widow receives a telegram informing her of her husband’s death; in the third, soldiers in the field are observed burying their dead comrade. The language employed in each section suggests a kind of hierarchy of experience and suffering. In the first section, public memory – at the furthest remove from the atrocities of combat – is conceived of in highly wrought purple language. Heavy, Greco-Latinate abstractions – ‘mightiest’, ‘universal’, ‘monstrousness’, ‘cataclysm’ – combine to create a mock-Shakespearean rhetoric that, I would argue, seeks to satirise the way in which war is memorialised in public. The language Hughes deploys is the linguistic equivalent of the grandiloquent blood-and-thunder of most war memorials, the very same rhetoric that Mya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial sought to overturn:

“Make these dead magnificent, their souls

Scrolled and supporting the sky, and the national sorrow,

Over the crowds that know of no other wound,

Permanent stupendous victory.”

The section dealing with the war widow’s grief is less rhetorically overblown, deliberately so: there is a mundanity to Hughes’ portrait of her, which is all the more effective for being offset by the dramatic linguistic violence of the preceding section:

“To a world

Lonely as her skull and little as her heart

The doors and windows open like great gates to hell.

Still she will carry cups from table to sink.”

Yet it is the final section of the poem where the ‘truest’ grief resides. Where sections one and two re-enact violence and motion in linguistic terms, here the aftermath of violence is portrayed in the calmest, most motionless language possible. The language is reduced, for the most part, to monosyllables – inarticulate articulacy, once more – and where words which overstep those Anglo-Saxon bounds occur, they are of a far more colloquial quality than the abstractions occurring earlier in the poem. Hughes’ language here is by no means ‘unpoetic’ – it is unclear precisely what might be meant by that term, anyway – but it is plain, and as such, according to Hughes’ own critical terms, the closest language can come to an expression of genuine grief; whilst the dirt being shovelled upon the war dead by men who are “[w]eighing their grief by the ounce” becomes, in the poem, the one true honourable monument to the conflict.

=====

Bibliography:

Ted Hughes, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 2003)

---, Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, edited by William Scammell (London: Faber, 1994)

---, The Letters of Ted Hughes, selected and edited by Christopher Reid (London: Faber, 2007)

Recent News...

What with all the poetry we've been publishing here lately, we've had a slew of interesting submissions. What with all the real life we've been doing also, we've a bit of a backlog - but we've some rather good stuff lined up in December.

But meanwhile, a small interlude to offload some of the interesting poetry events scooting about the country...


- The winner of the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation is... Professor Randall Couch for his translation of Gabriela Mistral's Madwomen.

"Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) is one of the most important and enigmatic figures in Latin American literature of the last century. The Locas mujeres poems collected here are among her most complex and compelling, exploring facets of the self in extremis—poems marked by the wound of blazing catastrophe and its aftermath of mourning."


- We've been invited by the British Library Web Archiving Programme‏ to participate in their preservation project. I get the feeling, to do it right, we'd have to write to every contributor we've had and ask for permission to allow their work to be archived there, although we could quite easily add a T&C point in the submissions form to set a start date. It's quite a bit of work, so if you have any thoughts about this, we'd be grateful to hear it. I tihnk we'd end up sitting between Gillian Clarke and Give me a Break - Cyfle i Ddianc.

- bani haykal is blogging at a new location, with his misinterpret musings. Rather brilliantly voiced, in the editors' opinions (well, one editor, but the other is hermiting again - goad goad).

- John Tucker (two poems forthcoming on G&P) wrote recently to us announcing the Anon Project: "It’s a new artistic printing and distribution experiment centred on a website that has been seven years in the making. The idea is that people visit the website and are granted two things: currency and the vote. With currency one can submit work, which can be anything from concrete word-patterns, to newsflash, to flash fiction, to verse. With votes one votes for the work to be made available for nationwide (as yet) printing and distribution on snazzy, anonymous, A6 ‘throwaways’ which can come in seven colours." It's quite a weird sounding idea, with plans to circulate printed 'throwaways' in "public transport hives, bookstores, libraries, cafes". We like weird.

- Flarestack Poets, the new pamphlet imprint from Flarestack Presshave launched their first three pamphlets, the two winners of their Pamphlet Competition and an anthology of the best poems submitted: Selima Hill's Advice on Wearing Animal Prints, Cliff Forshaw's Wake, and Mr Barton isn't Paying edited by Editors & Judges, Meredith Andrea and Jacqui Rowe. The G&P Editors attending the launch event, so expect a little more on this soon.

- Speaking of Jacqui Rowe, she runs the very entertaining bi-monthly 'Poetry Bites' series at the Kitchen Garden Café in King's Heath, Birmingham. Upcoming 2010 events:
* 26th January: Michael McKimm
* 23rd March: Nine Arches Press
* 25th May: George Ttoouli (yes, yes, OK, but...)
* 27th July: Jane Routh and Mike Barlow

- Speaking of Nine Arches and pamphlets, the Editors also attended the launch of David Morley's The Night of the Day, published by Nine Arches earlier this month. We picked up our limited edition, slightly-larger-than-life copies, with silver cover fonts and black flyleaf, which, I believe, are now sold out (less than three weeks after publication!), but there's a cheap version available.

- And we've heard, thro' our divers network of spyes, that Richard Price may soon be appearing on the Verb, talking about poetry pamphlet publishing. As one of the key luminaries at the British Library behind the Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets, it's something to look forward to.

- The last in Shearsman's 2009 Reading Series took place on Tuesday, 1 December at 7:30 pm, featuring Janet Sutherland & Alan Wearne. Click the names for details of the new collection that will be launched on the evening and for biographical details: Janet & Alan.

- And finally, also from the Poetry Society's press room, further details of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry have been released. You have to be a member to submit suggestions, it's UK only, and websites don't count, which seems a shame given how much new work is happening online in the UK.

Simon Turner - Writers' Journals and Plain Style: additional note

Further to my rather inconclusive comments earlier, I have managed to stumble upon a passage from Gerard Manley Hopkins' journals which illustrates my point about writers' journals: that they remain 'contemporary' in a manner which their poetry often fails to do. The passage is dated July 11th 1866:

"Oaks: the organisation of this tree is difficult. Speaking generally no doubt the determining planes are concentric, a system of brief contiguous and continuous tangents, whereas those of the cedar wd. roughly be called horizontals and those of the beech radiating but modified by droop and by a screw-set towards jutting points. But beyond this since the normal growth of the boughs is radiating and the leaves grow some way in there is of course a system of spoke-wise clubs of green - sleeve-pieces. And since the end shoots curl and carry young and scanty-leaf stars these clubs are tapered, and I have seen also the pieces in profile with chiselled outlines, the blocks thus made detached and lessening towards the end. However the star knot is the chief thing: it is whorled, whirled round, a little and this is what keeps up the illusion of the tree: the leaves are rounded inwards and figure out ball-knots."

The density of the writing here is familiar to anyone who has read and enjoyed Gerry's poetry, but what is remarkable in this passage is the degree to which it manages to evade the worst excesses of his verse. Yes, it is dense, but is dense in a manner which is more easily adaptable in a contemporary mode. This could well be a personal connection with little basis in any real textual evidence, but this reminds me of Peter Larkin's prose excursions into the woods: the density of description, the jostling of registers (Hopkins' writing in this passage is always moving towards scientific diction, but yet always holding back). Larkin is the more 'modern' of the two, obviously, but the journal places Hopkins far less obviously in his historical era than his poetry does.

The idea of the journal as a means of getting at poetic speed and vividness is by no means a new idea, either. Some of Ted Hughes' most valuable prose material relates to the composition of Moortown Diary, the poems in which were rescued from prose jottings the poet made on the spot as it were. They did not begin life as poems, and as such are released from the burden of finish and formal unity with which we often associate the poem, as opposed to prose. But the poems in Moortown Diary are by no means chopped up prose: they are poetry by virtue of the quickness of expression, the keenness and freshness of Hughes' eye and ear. They are poetry, that is, because of the energy underlying them, an energy more easily tapped because the poems were created before they were conceived of as poems. They might well prove to be his most important work, though I've no doubt I'll receive a barrage of complaints and counter-arguments for that one. If anyone's reading, of course...

Holland & Co.

Simon Turner reviews Boudicca & Co by Jane Holland (Salt Publishing), £9.99, ISBN 1-844712-89-3

What is most striking about this collection upon first delving into it is the sheer range of material on display. We have a number of poems detailing domestic everyday life; strong evocations of landscape; Anglo-Saxon translations; echoes of medieval songs; and, most impressively of all (but we can come on to that later) we have the long sequence to which this collection owes part of its name, an imaginative excursion into the life and career of the Queen of the Iceni. This range may well have something to do with the collection's vintage: nearly ten years in the making, the poems in this collection represent a great leap forward from Holland's enjoyable debut, The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman.

If the collection is 'about' anything in particular, it is 'about' notions of Britishness, and notions of womanhood. I'll start with womanhood, as it is the less controversial, and less problematic, of the two central themes. Specifically, Holland seems concerned with opening up, and dismantling, traditional notions of femininity. From the book cover (reminiscent, at least to my eye, of the famous jacket photo for Germaine Greer's feminist classic The Female Eunuch) through to the Boudicca poems, Boudicca & Co. is packed to the brim with unconventional representations of women, not all of them positive - the 'Dragon Woman' in the poem of the same name is a particularly unsettling presence - but all of them transcending the preconceived boundaries of what it means to be a woman. Early on in the collection, this attempt to go beyond the patrolled borders of 'correct' female behaviour is enacted in 'Hot Days in the Eighties', where the speaker - employing a familiar syntactic trick of talking about herself in the second person (it's all 'you you you') - remembers how

You chopped your locks in the back
of the car one day, dyke-short.
Kept dental dams in the glove box,
grew the hair under your arms
to a mousy fuzz. Purchased
a map of the highways, went native.

The car - as any reader of Kerouac or fan of the Boss's seemingly endless series of songs about the open road could tell you - is a good old fashioned symbol of masculine freedom and self-reliance, and Holland's re-appropriation of it here is charged with significance. I was reminded a little of Lavinia Greenlaw's own tales of Thatcher-era delinquency in Minsk, but Holland's take on similar material seems to have a lot more punch and muscle.

Arguably the most remarkable component of Holland's poetry, however, is actually stylistic rather than thematic, for she is among a very small number of female poets (Alice Oswald being another) for whom Ted Hughes is a vital influence upon their poetry. Oswald, of course, has written about her love of Hughes' work elsewhere ; in the case of Holland, I'm just extrapolating what I see in the work - in short, it's guesswork. That said, if we take a poem of Holland's like 'The Song of the Hare' ('She sang the song of the hare / and the hanged man hung // as the god in the tree / put forth branches of sorrow // and the lark climbed high / in an ecstasy of cloud'), replace the word 'hare' with 'crow', throw in a little more blood and guts and atomic annhilation, and presto! We have a Ted Hughes poem circa-1974.

Okay, granted that's a parody of Hughes, and wilfully unfair to Holland's poem (which is beautiful), but the bigger point I'm making is that for a woman writer - especially - the presence of even a ghost of a Hughes influence is, I would argue, a pretty big deal, considering that for most of the 80s and 90s, Hughes was a byword in some circles for poetic / political conservatism and spousal abuse. If the rehabilitation (or, more correctly, rediscovery) of Hughes began with the publication of Birthday Letters in 1998, then it has arguably reached something of an apotheosis in the ardent championing he now recieves from writers like Oswald. The Hughes influence on Holland's work is perhaps quieter than it is in Oswald's poetry - Holland, for example, has not inherited Hughes' occasional tendency towards adopting a strident rhetoric of cumulative imagery and over-abundant sonic effects - and is perhaps most noticeable at the level of the telling image, of the perfect phrase. Take, for example, these lines from 'West Kennett Long Barrow':

Rain condenses its euphoric mass
to a single blessing

filtering through
the intestinal silence of rock.

Though compelling in their own terms, there is a distinct ghost of earlier Hughes poems like 'Pibroch' here, and much of the collection is shot through not only with Hughes' gift for image and phrase, but also with his concerns with landscape, and with landscape's relationship with a sense of identity, both personal and collective.

Such identity - in Holland as in Hughes - is most often bound up with a sense of the ancient forces underlying the recent (and implicitly inauthentic) accretions of national boundaries and political institutions. 'Elementals', the sequence of which 'West Kennett Long Barrow' forms a part, re-imagines components of the ancient landscape of the British Isles (going futher afield in 'Almost Iceland') in terms steeped in myth and folklore, bringing the land to life with a startling admixture of personification and physical descriptions, even enactments, of its components. Writing of an isolated house in the middle of a wind-swept landscape in 'Almost Iceland', Holland writes:

Its single chimney grinned up at the sky
like a maniac.

For miles around, whole islands lay down
and withered. Stones

stunted themselves in its shadow.
And always the wind

hammering for the house
to be absent.

Elsewhere, the capacity for the landscape to signify notions of belonging and identity is rendered explicit in poems such as 'Warwickshire' ('England // my beleaguered sunken island') and 'Benediction', where Holland describes what can only be described as a visionary experience brought on by the landscape itself:

[...] something
vast and intricate
charging the space in my head
with moths dancing - dust in the beam
and the smudge of a spire
glimpsed above sycamores -
the spirit of the tribe.

This emphasis upon landscape as a marker of belonging is potentially liberating when set against the political (and implicitly exclusionary) abstractions of nationhood or 'cultural identity': anyone can belong to a landscape; it is simply a question of being there, of living on it, and in it. Conversely, however, Boudicca & Co.'s employment of ancient (British and Anglo-Saxon) history, mythology and literature as a guiding principle in its representations of place might equally be read as problematic: a reader of a liberal cast of mind, for example, might well balk at the use of the word 'tribe' (which recurs more than once in the collection), with its connotations of the narrative of national 'belonging' associated with, and propagated by, the far right.

Of course, I do not wish to suggest that Holland's poetry is in any way right wing or regressive in its national politics, and Boudicca & Co., in totality, cannot be easily co-opted by the racist rhetoric of the far right in the way in which, say, Tolkein's Lord of the Rings trilogy can. What is apparent, though, is that words such as 'tribe' are loaded with significance, and cannot be used lightly, particularly when the paratextual material for the collection frames Holland's poetry within the ongoing contemporary debate on the meaning and value of 'Britishness'. Holland succeeds in her articulation of 'Britishness', I would argue, because of her willingness to challenge and critque the founding myths and narratives upon which the political idea of Britain is based, and not simply fall back upon the meaningless pieties and generalisations (all too easily capable of spilling over into the jingoistic racial nationalism of the BNP), which most often characterise the political classes' attempts to tackle the very same subject.

This effort to engage with British mythology and history from all angles - positive and negative - is most persuasively articulated in 'Boudicca', the sequence of poems dealing with the legendary Queen of the Iceni which concludes this collection. Where a lesser poet may have simply recapitulated the old myth of Boudicca as a heroic warrior queen routing the invading armies of Romans, and in the process cementing a romantic notion of Britain as a unified coalition of disparate tribes, Holland is brave enough to show the horror and violence enacted by both sides of the conflict. Certainly, the Romans are not portrayed as exemplars of civilised behaviour, but neither is Boudicca an entirely innocent player in the theatre of war:

Once, I slipped on a brain
in the road: decapitated owner
half-lying, half-sitting
against the ruins of her house.

I couldn't help laughing;
she looked so comical,
feet dragged in the dirt,
spare head grinning.

('Headless Woman')

Equally, and futher complicating the portrayal of Boudicca presented in the sequence, Holland is not afraid to show us a tender side to the warrior queen, as in the beautiful poem 'Boudicca's Son':

[...] I had a son once.
For three days.

The pale bluebell of his eyes
closed after sunset

and his whining breath
rattled into silence.

The sequence is littered with anachronistic references (hand-grenades and rifle butts play a part in the skirmishes with the Romans), which lends a further depth to the poems, and rescues 'Boudicca' from being simply an effort to flesh out a myth, pointing us towards more contemporary paralells (I don't need to point out the resonances of a poetic narrative detailing a violent response to an invading imperial army whose methods have a tendency to contravene the basic tenets of human rights legislation, so I won't).

In the process of dismantling the Boudicca myth, then, Holland has opened up new avenues for the possiblity of an engaged and visceral war poetry written by non-combatants, which evades the pitfalls of much protest poetry - we need only compare Holland's work with the anti-war 'poetry' of Harold Pinter to gain some indication of how rich and rewarding her response to modern conflict is - by shifting methods towards the imaginative and narrative elements of poetry, rather than the rhetorical and political. In this sense, the 'Boudicca' sequence has a great deal in common with David Harsent's Legion, which represents a similar attempt by a non-combatant poet to engage intelligently with the realities of war. This is, frankly, an outstanding collection, and Holland, as a result, can now count herself amongst the front rank of contemporary British poets.