Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of
‘The Soldier’
by Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blessed by the suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Never robust, Rupert Chawner Brooke – though from childhood a keen sportsman, swimmer and walker – was frequently laid low by the slightest ailment (perhaps as a result of a defective immune-system). Second son of a Rugby public school housemaster, Brooke, blessed with a classical profile and a striking mane of red/gold hair, was always destined to be the cynosure. His friends and acquaintances read like a Who’s Who of early twentieth century Georgian glitterati: H.G.Wells, E.M.Forster, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Francis Cornford, Augustus John, Lytton Strachey, (the Fabians) Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Edward Thomas, Walter de la Mare, John Maynard Keynes, George Mallory (the Everest mountaineer), Hugh Dalton, Winston Churchill, the Asquiths – Brooke knew them all.

After a prize-littered Rugby schooling (in his father’s house, ‘School Field’), Brooke won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, where his uncle, Alan, was Dean. He first drew the attention of his soon-to-be patron, the senior civil servant – and literary insider – Sir Edward Marsh, when ‘starring’ in a college play – as a herald with a non-speaking part. In 1910 he took a disappointing ‘Second’ in the Classical Tripos, and in the December of the following year privately published his first collection, Poems. He had his ‘digs’ during this period in The Old Vicarage, Grantchester.

Always something of a restless soul, Brooke embarked on a succession of travels after an ill-fated love-affair with a Miss ‘Ka’ Cox. His various peregrinations would embrace France, Germany, the United States, Canada, Fiji, New Zealand and Tahiti (where he is said to have fathered a daughter to a native girl). In 1914 he returned home to an ‘England’ (never ‘Britain’) about to be engulfed in war and, pulling strings, was commissioned as a Sub-Lieutenant in the Royal Naval Division (RNVR). His admirer, W.L.S. Churchill, was First Lord of the Admiralty. Involved in the five day defence of Antwerp (October 1914) as a platoon Commander, Brooke seems not to have seen action, though he would certainly have heard the sound of guns fired in anger: the chateau in which he’d slept the previous night was hit by shellfire and he lost some of his kit and papers. After their ignominious retreat from Belgium, Brooke’s unit returned to Dover, but the well-connected poet was soon to wangle a transfer to ‘Hood’ Battalion (commanded by Bernard Freyburg, Churchill’s ‘salamander’) based at Blandford Camp, Dorset. Here, in primitive conditions exacerbated by noxious fumes from the coke stoves, Brooke wrote most of his sequence of five sonnets, ‘1914’, of which ‘The Soldier’ is the last. On Christmas night, surrounded by the sounds of drunken revelry, he commenced the poem with which he is always most associated, using the working-title of ‘The Recruit’.

‘The Soldier’ was completed whilst Brooke was staying in Walmer Castle, Kent, (‘among all those Field Marshalls’) at the behest of Violet Asquith, the Prime Minister’s daughter, in early January 1915. Hilaire Belloc’s narration of a fictional journey across Sussex (The Four Men, which Brooke had read in 1912) was the inspiration behind the sonnet:

He does not die that can bequeath
Some influence to the land he knows
Or dares, persistent, interwreath
Love permanent with the wild hedgerows;
He does not die, but still remains
Substantiate with his darling plains.

A manuscript of Brooke’s poem still exists written in his neat hand on lined paper headed ‘Hood Battalion, 2nd Naval Brigade, Blandford, Dorset’. It was not its author’s personal favourite of the sequence: this remained ‘The Dead II’. It utilises an idiosyncratic rhyme-scheme comprised of a Shakepearean Octave (ababcdcd) and a ‘Petrachan’ Sestet (efgefg).

‘1914’ was first published in the month of its completion, January 1915, in New Numbers. On the 4th April, Dean Inge, of St. Paul’s, read ‘The Soldier’ as part of his Easter Sunday sermon: The Times printed it the next day. This same month (April 23rd, ‘St. George’s Day’) Rupert Brooke was to die of septicaemia on board the French hospital ship, Duguay-Trouin. Part of the allied expedition to The Dardinelles, he’d contracted first heat-stroke and then infection from an insect-bite on his lip. Though the sole recipient of the attentions of a team of twelve surgeons, he would breathe his last during the afternoon – two days before the Gallipoli landings – and be interred on the nearby island of Skyros, once the mythical playground of Achilles. His olive-grove burial-site (which is ‘for ever England’) is now neighboured by Greek naval emplacements.

Further reading:
Brooke, R., Poetical Works, Faber (1946).
Holt, T. & Holt, V., Poets of the Great War, Leo Cooper (1999).
Keyes, G., Letters of Rupert Brooke, Faber (1968).
Read, M., Forever England, the Life of Rupert Brooke, Mainstream (1997).

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of
‘Bright Star! would I were steadfast as thou art’
by John Keats (1795-1821)

Bright Star! would I were steadfast as thou art-
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors-
No -yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair loves’ ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, Still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever – or else swoon to death.

Eldest son of the manager of the stables/inn, The Swan and Hoop, in Moorgate, Keats went on to study at Guy’s Hospital before qualifying as an apothecary in 1816. His interest in writing poetry dates from just two years earlier. After having his work premiered in Leigh Hunt’s radical weekly, The Examiner, he published his first collection, Poems, in 1817, which was followed by Endymion in April of the succeeding year. These were mercilessly ridiculed in Blackwood’s Magazine as ‘drivelling idiocy’ and as products of the vulgar ‘Cockney Rhyming school’: young ‘Johnny Keats’ was advised to return to his pills and plasters!

There are two versions of this celebrated sonnet, once thought to have been Keats’ last poem, but now placed with some probability in the period between April and October 1819. Some of the imagery resembles that in his sychronous correspondence, and the ‘soft fallen mask/ of snow’ may refer to an unseasonably heavy snowstorm that struck London (Keats was living in Hampstead for much of this time) on the 22nd of October. In this same month – a little before Keats’ 24th birthday – Fanny Brawne, his secret fiancee, had transcribed ‘Bright star’ into her copy of Dante. The original, also copied out by the poet’s friend and fellow writer, Charles Armitage Brown, was first published in The Plymouth and Devonport Weekly Journal on 27th September 1838. In this first draft, whilst both versions retain the same Shakespearean rhyme-scheme, the Octave (first eight lines) reads similarly to the revision reproduced above -though ‘devout’ precedes ‘sleepless Eremite’. The Sestet (concluding six lines) differs considerably after the volta ‘No – yet still steadfast, still unchangeable…’

Cheek pillow’d on my love’s white ripening breast,
To touch, for ever, its warm sink and swell,
Awake, for ever, in a sweet unrest,
To hear, to feel her tender-taken breath,
Half passionless, and so swoon on to death.

‘Death’ to Keats – a keen student of Shakespeare – would have been punningly suggestive with its Elizabethan connotation of sexual climax. Brown’s MSS is preserved at Harvard University. The better-known revision – printed here – was first published in Monckton Milnes’ Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848). It was inscribed into Keats’ volume of Shakespeare’s Poems (in the blank page opposite ‘A Lover’s Complaint’) on the 29th September, 1820. Keats and his companion, the painter Joseph Severn – to whom this volume would later be gifted – were onboard the Maria Crowther en route to Italy, where he was travelling in the faint hope of finding improved health.

The tuberculosis which was affecting Keats had, in all probability, been contracted from his brother, Tom, whom the poet had nursed, back in late 1818. It seems to have taken hold of him in the autumn of the following year, whilst he’d experienced severe haemorrhaging in the February of 1820. His own medical training (coupled with the fact that his mother – as well as his younger brother – had died of the disease) would have left him in little doubt of its eventual outcome.

The ‘My fair love’ referred to in the text probably represents Fanny Brawne, whom Keats had met two years previously and to whom he’d become engaged in the October of 1819. Illness, financial problems and the failure of his literary ambitions were to thwart their immediate plans of marriage. Though he was in some doubt as to her constancy, Keats had written to her in regard to his proposed Italian venture ‘It’s certain I shall never recover if I am to be so long separate from you’. The ‘Bright Star’ of the poem is, presumably, the North Star, Polaris. Keats may have had in mind the lines from Julius Caesar: ‘But I am constant as the northern star,/ Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality/ There is no fellow in the firmament…’ (III, i, 60-62). An ‘Eremite’ is a hermit.

During the long, cramped and difficult voyage Keats’ condition was to deteriorate still further. He was to die, aged 25, on the 23rd February 1821 in Rome, and be buried in the Protestant cemetry there. Although Shelly wrote the elergy, Adonais, in his memory upon hearing of his fellow poet’s death, it was not until the Pre-Raphaelites championed his work, over a quarter of a century later, that Keats was to find a popular readership. This late fame might, perhaps, have agreeably surprised the young apothecary with literary pretentions who’d devised his own epitaph: ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’.

Further reading:
Garrod, H., Keats, Poetical Works, Oxford University Press (1956).
Keats, J., Letters of John Keats, (ed. Gittings, R.), Oxford (1975).
Motion, A., Keats, Faber (1997).
Roe, N., John Keats and the Culture of Dissent, Cambridge (1997).
Ward, A., John Keats, The Making of a Poet, Secker & Warburg (1963).

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of
‘Song’
by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor Shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dew drops wet
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not see the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember
And haply may forget.

Christina Rossetti had barely turned eighteen when she wrote ‘Song’ on 12th December,1848. The world outside her comfortable Charlotte Street home in central London was being shaken by rumours of foreign revolution and Chartist demonstrations and, domestically, her life was in some turmoil also. The poem was written as an engagement present for her new fiancee, James Collinson: a painter friend of her brother’s, Dantë Gabriel, and a fellow member of his fledgling Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It is doubtful whether she harboured any especially strong feelings for Collinson, and she was to end the engagement after two years when he returned to his previous Roman Catholic persuasion.

Christina’s high church Anglicanism was to be one of the defining aspects of her life. Her elderly father (Professor, minor poet and Neapolitan political-exile, Gabriele) had suffered a deterioration in both general health and eyesight and she herself appears to have undergone some form of nervous collapse around this time. A doctor, Hare (the family physician), who attended upon her when she was ‘about 16-18…[was reported to have been convinced]…that she was more or less out of her mind (suffering, in fact, from a form of insanity, I believe a kind of religious mania)’. Christina, in stark contrast to the demure paragon of Christian virtue she was to become, seems to have been quite wilful and to have engaged in self-harm as an adolescent (as she reveals in a later letter): ‘On one occasion, being rebuked by my dear mother for some fault, I seized upon a pair of scissors, and ripped up my arm to vent my wrath’. This type of behaviour has led at least one biographer to speculate about the possibility of an incestuous and/or abusive relationship between Christina and her ‘papa’.

There seems scant evidence of religiosity in ‘Song’, which may indeed even be read from a humanistic perspective. It does however deal, in a way which was to become typical of the poet, with the classically adolescent subject matter of Death and the possibility of survival of some form of personal identity.

Though Christina had been writing poetry from a very early age, her work would not reach a wider public until the 1862 publication of Goblin Market and other poems (which includes ‘Song’). The Literary Review perhaps best summed up the critical accolades heaped on this volume, when it enthused: ‘Simultaneously with the publication of Mrs Browning’s Last Poems, the legacy of one whose untimely death has robbed us of many a noble thought set to rich music, we receive from a poetess whose name is known to but few, a first work of singular merit’. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, although Christina never met her, remained a great insiration: she was later tempted to write the older woman’s biography – though Robert Browning effectively scotched the project.

Christina Rossetti’s later years were to be characterised by a determined self-effacement in the path of life’s vicissitudes. She would work for ten years as a volunteer at the St Mary Magdalene refuge for single mothers and former prostitutes, in Highgate. She would lose her equally celebrated elder brother (for whom she’d once acted as painter’s model) in 1882. Looking after her mother and aunts until late middle-age, she was to be denied a tranquil senescence of her own by the twin afflictions, stoically endured, of Graves’ Disease – a thyroid disorder – and terminal breast cancer. Her literary reputation, which had suffered neglect for many years, underwent a significant re-appraisal in the 1970s, with the advent of feminism.

Further reading:
Jones, K., Learning Not To Be First, Oxford University Press (1991).
Marsh, J., Christina Rossetti, A Literary Biography, Jonathan Cape (1994).
Rossetti, C., Selected Poems (ed., Roe, D.), Penguin Classics (2008).

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of
‘Stopping by woods on a snowy evening’
by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Often hailed as the unofficial poet laureate of the United States – prior to the concept being formalised in America – Robert Lee Frost espoused a kind of homely self-determinism which chimed perfectly with the perceived spirit of the Founding Fathers and emerging nationhood. Frost was 48 years old when he wrote ‘Stopping by woods…’ in the June of 1922, ensconced in his New England farmhouse, The Stonehouse in South Shaftesbury, Vermont. The Peleg Cole farm was a ninety acre holding with a granite cottage (circa 1779) and an orchard. Living there since November, 1920, he’d previously farmed (poultry) in Derry, Rockingham county (1900-1911) where, together with his wife, Elinor, he’d raised and schooled his five surviving children (they were both qualified teachers). Harvard educated, Frost was by no means an efficient farmer (he liked to sleep in late into the morning) but enjoyed the freedom it afforded him to write. The farm in Vermont represented an attempt to escape from the rigours of academia – he’d just resigned from a lectureship at Amherst college – although he still enjoyed a well-paid but less taxing visiting fellowship at the University of Michigan.

It had taken a move to England, just prior to the first world war, for Frost to gain an entree into literary society and to forge the beginnings of a reputation. Though he’d had few poems published up to this time, he managed to place his first book A Boy’s Will (1913) within two months of his arrival, and the successful North of Boston came out the next year. His friendship with Ezra Pound, and the Georgians Wilfred Gibson, Lascelles Abercrombie and – particularly – Edward Thomas, dates from this period, prior to his return to the States in 1915.

‘Stopping by woods…’ was first published in New Republic and was included in Frost’s fourth publication New Hampshire (1923) which was to win the first of his four Pulitzer prizes. Its author (in old age and about to embark, yet again, on a plane journey) said of it ‘If I’d known […] that when I wrote those few verses they would have led to this amount of travel I wouldn’t have written them’. But then, he’d also called the poem ‘his best bid for remembrance’ and stated that it contained ‘all I ever knew’. It is written (bar the last verse) in the Rubaiyat stanza, created by Edward Fitzgerald (aaba) and carries a rhyme over from one verse to the next (chain rhyme). It has been subjected to many interpretations, though Frost thought of it as a simple piece. If ‘the darkest evening of the year’ means the longest night of the year (21st/22nd December) then the ‘promises to keep’ would, presumably, be Christmas presents.

‘Stopping by woods…’ is claimed to have been written ‘in a few minutes without any strain’. According to one account, Frost had been sitting in his chair all night by the kitchen table, crickets calling outside ‘like a metronome’, finishing a poem called ‘New Hampshire’…’I went outdoors, got out sideways and didn’t disturb anybody in the house, and about nine or ten o’clock went back in and wrote the piece about the snowy evening and the little horse as if I’d had an hallucination – little hallucination – the one critics write about occasionally. You can’t trust these fellows who write what made a poet write what he wrote. We all of us read our pet theories into a poem’. In another interview Frost admits that the poem DID require fine-tuning: ‘I wrote the third line of the last stanza in such a way as to call for another stanza when I didn’t want another stanza and didn’t have another stanza in me, but with great presence of mind and a sense of what a good boy I was I instantly struck the line out and made my exit with a repeat end’. Typically forthright, this is the same, no-nonsense Robert Frost who felt that writing vers libre was akin to ‘playing tennis without a net’. There is, in fact, a rough draft of ‘Stopping by woods…’ which shows that the poet was being less than totally ingenuous: he’d had difficulty with the second stanza, leaving the first line of it incomplete after four attempts and completing the second line after one revision.

During the years which followed, when his reputation was being consolidated, Frost was to undergo a series of family tragedies. In 1934 his youngest and favourite child, Majorie, would succumb to Puerperal fever and in 1938 Elinor died suddenly of a heart attack. His son, Carol, would commit suicide in 1940, and another daughter, Irma, would go insane (as had his sister, Jeannie). His apotheosis as the homely sage of New England would continue – ‘Stopping by woods…’ would become a kind of key-note and coda to the John F Kennedy presidential election campaign – until the posthumous demolition of his good name by his one-time confidant Lawrence Thompson’s biographical trilogy (completed 1976) which characterises Frost, in great detail, as an egomaniacal, controlling ‘monster’ in his personal relationships. Be that as it may (and Thompson would seem to have had his own agenda), Frost’s poetic achievement appears likely to survive any criticisms of him as a human being.

Further reading:
Frost, R., Robert Frost: Selected Poems (ed., Hamilton, I.), Penguin (1973).
Lathem, E., Interviews with Robert Frost, Holt, Rinehart & Winston (1966).
Parini, J., Robert Frost, A Life, Heinemann (1998).
Thompson, L., Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874-1915, Holt, Rinehart & Winston (1966).
Thompson, L., Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915-1938, Holt, Rinehart & Winston (1970).
Thompson, L., Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938-1963, Holt, Rinehart & Winston (1976).

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Kevin Saving

Palaeosriptology of
‘Anthem For Doomed Youth’
by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

What passing bells for those who die as cattle?
–Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmer of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Wilfred Owen was probably experiencing more than his fair share of ‘anxiety clusters’ when in the September of 1917 he wrote the poem quoted above (the earliest of his truly mature works). Firstly, as a second lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment he was afforded only the status, in the charming terminology of the time, of a ‘temporary gentleman’ (although his mother, Susan, was very ‘class-conscious’, his family had for some generations been of solid yeoman stock). Secondly, as a repressed-homosexual, he would have been very aware of the societal stigma – not to say legal sanctions – implicit in any overt display of homoerotic affection. Lastly, as a Mental patient in Craiglockhart war hospital – required to wear a blue armband when visiting the nearby city of Edinburgh- he’d have known that a large question -mark was being placed against both his physical courage and his right to lead men.

24 years of age, with no conventional officer-class background of public school or university to bolster his self-confidence, Owen had already endured the experiences which were to fuel his later poems ‘Exposure’, ‘Futility’ and ‘The sentry’ (in January, around Serre in the valley of the river Ancre) and ‘Dulce et Decorum est pro Patria Mori’ (in a gas attack). Two more recent traumas had caused his referral to Craiglockhart: a mysterious fall into a cellar where he’d lain, possibly for upwards of a day, with concussion -and (a month later) a ‘near-miss’ shell which had blown him into the air and rendered him briefly unconscious. Following this latter incident, Owen seems to have cowered in a cutting for several days, surrounded both by corrugated iron and the newly-disinterred remains of a brother officer.

After Casualty Clearing Station Owen found himself classified as a ‘neurasthenic’ (suffering from what today might popularly be called ‘shell-shock’ or, clinically, ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’). His army file states that he was ‘observed to be shaky and tremulous, and his conduct and manner were peculiar and his memory was confused’.

Rather fortunate to be placed in the charge of Dr Arthur Brock (whose humane methods were very much at variance with some of the ‘treatments’ dished-out to the non-commissioned soldiery), Owen was encouraged to immerse himself in amateur dramatics and editorship of the hospital’s magazine, The Hydra. An even more propitious meeting occurred when captain Siegfried Sassoon, M.C., was finessed into Craiglockhart. An upper-class, previously published, well-connected, heroically decorated and handsome figure, Sassoon -who became the acme of everything Owen admired – was another ‘closet-gay’, who’d rebelled against the conduct of the war by dropping his Military Cross into the Mersey and writing an anti-war protest letter which was subsequently read out in the House of Commons. ‘Mad Jack’ (as his men named him) Sassoon was to be probably the most important influence of Wilfred Owen’s short life. Some of the amendments to the early draughts of ‘Anthem’ (there were seven in all) are written in his, Sassoon’s, hand -indeed, the word ‘Anthem’ was the latter’s suggestion.

It is seldom acknowledged just what a hotch-potch of imagery and influences ‘Anthem’ really is. To start with, Owen quarried his own (1916) draught-poem, ‘A New Heaven’. Keats (another enduring ‘hero’ for Owen) had written – in ‘To Autumn’ – the line ‘Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn’. ‘Monstrous’ guns borrows from Beatrix Brice’s once-influential, now forgotten, ‘To the Vanguard’ (1916) and Ian Hay’s (1915) novel The First Hundred Thousand (about a ‘Kitchener’ battalion earlier in the war) includes the sentence ‘a machine gun begins to patter out a stuttering malediction’. ‘Doomed’ youth was originally ‘Dead’ youth, and the monstrous anger of ‘the’ guns was previously ‘our’ guns (Sassoon urging that the perceived anti-German sentiment needed diluting). Finally, the last line of ‘Anthem’ echos and elaborates Laurence Binyon’s (1914) ‘For the Fallen’.

A variation of the ‘English’ or ‘Shakespearean’ sonnet, the poem utilises full end-rhymes instead of the new-fangled ‘para-rhymes’ (his acquaintance, Edmund Blunden’s 1931 coinage) with which he’d been tinkering around this time. His ‘Song of Songs’ – written the previous month – is the first known example of a poem whose rhyme-scheme is worked exclusively around ‘half-rhymes’ (as they’ve come to be known) – although ancient Welsh, and recent French experimental verse, had toyed haphazardly with the idea.

Wilfred Owen was to return to active service and win his own Military Cross, for gallantry, in October, 1918. One month later (and exactly one week before the Armistice) he would be killed, alongside many of his comrades, whilst attempting to cross the (militarily) ‘virtually impossible’ defences of the Oise-Sambre canal. In his own lifetime only five of his verses had been published (two of these in The Hydra). For many years accorded the status of a minor poet, it was only in the 1960s – especially after Benjamin Britten’s use of the poems in his celebrated War Requiem (1962) – that Owen’s work began to receive greater critical attention, and that the writer himself gained, retrospectively, what he’d always most desired: recognition as ‘one of the ones’.

Further reading:
Barker, P., The Regenration Trilogy, Penguin (1998) (three novels, but well-researched ones)
Egremont, M., Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography, Picador 2005)
Hibberd,D., Wilfred Owen, A New Biography, Weidenfeld and Nicholson (2002)
Stallworthy, J., The Poems of Wilfred Owen, Chatto and Windus (1990)

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Kevin Saving on
‘The Daffs’

Palaeoscriptology of
‘The Daffodils’
by William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils,
Besides the lake, beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretch’d in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:-
A poet could not be but gay
In such a jocund company!
I gazed -and gazed- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought.

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.

One of the most famous of all poetry’s opening lines started life as ‘I wandered like a lonely cloud’. Fortunately, Wordsworth – a notorious tinkerer with his own work – ammended the simile to the form we know today. The more widely recognised (revised 1815) version printed above was the poet’s second manifestation of his floral broodings: a three stanza poem with similar sentiments had been penned in 1804 and published (1807) in Poems in two volumes during the height of the Napoleonic wars.

An outstanding exemplar of the Wordsworthian credo of ’emotion recollected in tranquility’, ‘The Daffodils’ is thought to have been inspired by a stroll around Lake Ullswater on the 15th April, 1802 (Wordsworth was an enthusiastic walker) – although this would have been by no means the first time he’d have witnessed the locally renowned profusion of daffodils near Gowbarrow. On this occasion he was visiting his friend Charles Luff, a captain in the local militia, who was conducting exercises nearby. Providentially for literary historians, he was accompanied by his devoted sister, Dorothy, who recorded in her Grasmere Journal how they had happened upon a ‘long belt’ of the eponymous flowers…’I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones […] Some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever dancing ever changing’. These uncultivated blooms would have been rather paler, smaller and more delicate than modern variants.

Wordsworth was 34 when he wrote what is possibly the most famous of his poems. Married less than two years to Mary (nee Hutchinson) he formed the dominant and indulged quarter of a menage a quatre (which also comprised his sister and infant son, John). They inhabited the tiny, un-named cottage overlooking Grasmere lake, which until fairly recently had been an inn, The Dove and Olive Branch. William, typically, took the best room for his study and library – though (according to his self-appointed ‘Boswell’, Thomas de Quincey) he often composed his poetry on the hoof. If his friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge was becoming occasionally fraught – they had published their collaboration, the ground-breaking Lyrical Ballads some six years earlier – it was still very much alive, but Wordsworth was growing closer to another member of ‘the set’, Robert Southey. A productive time in a number of ways (Mary had become pregnant with the couple’s second child) the Wordsworths had finally been paid the money owed to William’s father by the Lowther family (earls of Lonsdale). Concurrently, he was engaged upon an ode, ‘Intimations of Immortality’, (his personal favourite) and what was to become ‘The Prelude’.

‘The Daffodils’ (also known solely by its first line) is written in iambic tetrametre (te-TUM, te-TUM, te-TUM, te-TUM) and quite deliberately moves away from poeticised diction into the language of ‘the common man’. The lines ‘They flash upon that inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude’ were contributed by Mary Wordsworth (not usually credited with a poetic sensibility). They were, William considered, the finest lines in the poem. It is not even certain that daffs were the author’s best-loved flower: he wrote three poems about the lowly celandine. Wordsworth would go on to become poet laureate in 1843 before dying at the age of eighty – staunch conservative where once he’d been convinced radical, pillar of an establishment he’d once affected to despise.

Further reading:
Barker, J., Wordsworth, A Life, Viking (2000).
Davies, H., A Walk Around The Lakes, Orion (2000).
Sisman, A., The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge, HarperPress (2006).
Wordsworth, W., William Wordsworth, Selected Poems, Penguin (2004).

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of
‘An Irish Airman Forsees His Death’
by W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

The Irish airman in question, for whom Yeats ventriloquises so brilliantly, was Major Robert Gregory (1881-1918), only son of the poet’s confidant and patron, Lady Augusta Gregory. As in any act of ventriloquism, the words are not necessarily an accurate reflection of their subject’s real feelings. Gregory and Yeats were not especially close: the former could become exasperated by the way ‘Willie’ Yeats used his mother’s house at Coole, near Sligo – drinking only the best wine, sleeping only in the best quarters, cosseted and pampered by all. Yeats in turn felt that the younger man failed to make the most of his talents and would only work if forced to for want of money. Politically, too, there were differences: Gregory was ‘Imperialistic’ – the poet, a self-proclaimed Irish patriot who would later serve as a senator in the newly independent Irish Free State.

William Robert Gregory was a substantial personality in his own right. Educated at Harrow, New college, Oxford and the Slade School of Art, he excelled at boxing, horse-riding and cricket. Having collaborated with Yeats in designing the sets of early Abbey Theatre productions, he’d exhibited in Chelsea just prior to the Great War. At the outbreak of hostilities he enlisted in the 4th Connaught Rangers before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps, gaining his ‘wings’, being awarded the Military Cross (and Chevalier de Legion d’Honneur) and leading his squadron in France and Italy. On January 23rd, 1918, he was shot down and killed, seemingly by an allied (Italian) pilot.

In a postscript to a letter dated 2nd February, Lady Gregory wrote to Yeats ‘if you feel like it some time – write something down that we may keep – you understand him better than many’. Soon after she added an appeal from Robert’s wife, Margaret, with whom Yeats had a sometimes difficult relationship, to the effect that ‘if you could send even a paragraph – just something of what I know you are feeling – to The Observer – or failing that The Nation – she would feel it a comfort’. The Observer duly printed Yeats’s ‘Note of Appreciation’ on 17th February; an encomium for a figure represented as something of a ‘renaissance man’.

Yeats was to elaborate on this theme in four separate poems in the months to come (‘An Irish Airman Forsees His Death’, written that year, was the third of these). Later, in a poem entitled ‘Reprisals’, he would antagonise Augusta by envisaging her son – Yeats was enormously ‘into’ spiritualism – as an avenging ghost returning to Ireland to take issue with the ‘Black and Tans’. The poem was not published until after her death as she found it to be less than ‘sincere’.

Something of a hybrid ‘Anglo-Irishman’, Yeats wrote just the one war poem, reproduced here. Though he’d witnessed (at a distance) a Zeppelin raid over London in 1915, the Great War left him cold as did its poetry, towards which he felt ‘distaste’. When editing The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) he deliberately under-represented the war poets as a group, and ignored Wilfred Owen entirely. The ‘Easter Uprising’ of 1916 and his newly wedded wife Georgie’s ‘automatic writing’, were the things that were really exercising him at this time. Nevertheless, his threnody to Robert Gregory is a remarkably crafted and controlled piece of work: the manuscript in Yeats’ own untidy hand reveals just one major revision, ‘angry crowds’ becoming ‘cheering crowds’. The would-be patrician in him could hardly apreciate the difference anyway. ‘Kiltartan’ lies close to the Gregory’s country seat at Coole Park (which was to inspire the title of the collection in which the poem would be published in 1919, The Wild Swans at Coole.

William Butler Yeats was to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, at the receipt of which news he is said to have enquired, ‘How much?’ He died in France in 1939 at the age of 73, eight months before the outbreak of another world war.

Further reading:
Coote, S. (1997) W.B. Yeats, A Life, Hodder and Stoughton.
Wade, A. (1954) The Letters of W.B. Yeats, Rupert Hart-Davis.
Yeats, W. (ed) (1936) The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935, Clarendon.
Yeats, W. (1994) W.B. Yeats – The Poems (ed. Albright, D.), J.M.Dent.

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Kevin Saving

Paleoscriptology of
‘The Darkling Thrush’
by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Has sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

31st December, 1900

For the Victorians the Twentieth Century only began on the 1st January, 1901 – and thus the end of two eras coincided when the aged Queen died on the 22nd of that month. Thomas Hardy at this time was in his sixty-first year, wealthy, famous but disenchanted by the critical effront taken to his penultimate novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), living in an ugly, self-designed house at Max Gate and embroiled in an increasingly desolate marriage. He’d even had a new, private entrance built so that he could come and go without contacting Emma Hardy in any way.

Withdrawing from the Novel form, he returned to his first literary love, poetry, and published Wessex Poems in 1898 (his debut collection at the age of fifty-eight). Afforded a respectful but lukewarm reception, this ‘early’ verse took a while to win the critics over. ‘Poetry is not his proper medium … he is not at home, he does not move easily in it’ sniped The Spectator in 1902.

The fictionist in Hardy remained active. Although now always dated 1.1.1900, the poem ‘The Darkling Thrush’ originally appeared in The Graphic on December 29th, 1900 under a different title, ‘The Century’s End, 1900’. A deleted ‘1899’ on the author’s manuscript indicates that it may have been written earlier still. Either way, ‘The Darkling Thrush’ appeared in Hardy’s second collection, Poems of the Past and the Present in November, 1901 (alongside such other notable – and historically pertinent – work as ‘Drummer Hodge’). This desire to tinker with his personal and literary history would continue, even posthumously, with the publication (1928 and 1930) of the writer’s two volume Life, ostensibly written by his second wife, Florence, but in fact self-penned.

A-typical in several respects, ‘The Darkling Thrush’ ends on an up-beat note. Famously pessimistic (a charge the author himself was uncomfortable with) Hardy felt that ‘if a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst’. The rhymes here are – with one exception – precise, even prissily so: this is again uncharacteristic. ‘Inexact rhymes now and then are far more pleasing than correct ones’ was a tenet which the younger Hardy had brought with him from his architectural studies, tending as they did to evoke ‘spontaneity’. Finally, the regular ababcdcd of the four stanzas is very unusual for a poet who prided himself on his ability to conjure up new, but never avant-garde, metrical forms.

The ‘Darkling’ of the title represents a nod in the direction of John Keats (one of Hardy’s most enduring influences). The word occurs in the similarly avian ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. The opening line, ‘I leant upon a coppice gate…’ is very Hardyesque. Of the (almost) one thousand poems of the oeuvre, 152 begin with the pronoun ‘I’.

Thomas Hardy would go on writing lyrical poetry, very much in his own style, well into his eighties. In this he is probably unique: even Yeats’ muse was silenced (by death) a decade earlier. Hardy’s heart is buried – with his two wives – in Stinsford churchyard, Dorset, and the rest of his remains lie (next to Charles Dickens) in Westminster Abbey. Despite his usual, gloomy forebodings (‘Alas for that volume’ he’d written to his friend, Edmund Gosse) Poems of the Past and the Present was an instant commercial success. The first edition was quickly sold out and a second was being planned just weeks later. Thomas Hardy could still shift copy.

Further reading:
Gittings, R. (1975) Young Thomas Hardy, Penguin.
Gittings, R. (1978) The Older Hardy, Penguin.
Hardy, T. (1994) The Works of Thomas Hardy, Wordsworth.
Tomalin, C. (2006) Thomas Hardy – The Time-Torn Man, Penguin.

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of
‘Do not go gentle into that good night’
by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should rage and burn at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could shine like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on that sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ was written in the spring of 1951 when Thomas was thirty-six. It was composed in a draughty garden shed -a sort of adjunct to the poet’s residence, ‘The Boat House’, both of which still look out over the estuary of the river Taf at Laugharne, Carmarthenshire. Thomas, his wife Caitlin, and their three children had been living at the six-room, three-storey Boathouse since 1949, courtesy of a benefactress, Margaret Taylor (first wife of the historian and television presenter A.J.P. Taylor). The latter had put up with the Thomases for a long time: they’d lived in 1946 in a summerhouse at the bottom of his Oxford garden and made regular attempts to wheedle money from him. No admirer – unlike his wife – of the poetry, Taylor observed that Thomas would commence his poems using plain language before quite intentionally clouding them in successive layers of obscurity. Thomas did, indeed, habitually write using legions of worksheets (his shed at Laugharne was usually left littered with their crumpled remnants until he discovered that they could be saleable). Alongside obvious shopping-lists, certain enigmatic numberings in the margins of drafts initially perplexed literary scholars – until it was determined that they related to Roget’s Thesaurus listings.

By 1951 Thomas had already begun the series of four drink-fuelled American tours which so bolstered his legend. The first (from February 1950) established the template for self-indulgent, self-destructive, absent-minded and shirt-stealing boorishness. Though immensely popular with audiences (and seemingly lucrative) little of the money found its way into the Thomases’ two bank accounts: the final destination of his earnings and royalties has proved elusive for both biographers and the Inland Revenue. Almost half of Dylan’s collected correspondence consists of attempts to borrow money or apologise for not delivering work/ repaying debts.

A typical day at Laugharne would involve a late lie-in followed by a short stroll along a coast-hugging lane to Brown’s Hotel in the village. He would usually drop-in to his parent’s rented house, The Pelican in Mainstreet, where he and his father would do The Times crossword together. After lunch he would spend the afternoon trying to write in his little shed, where neither wife nor children were allowed. At seven o’clock sharp (pub opening time) he would retrace his steps back to ‘Brown’s’, accompanied this time by Caitlin. There were frequent, intoxicated bouts of violence between them, often with their mutual infidelities as a subtext.

Dylan Marlais Thomas had found literary recognition early. His first collection, Eighteen Poems, was published (as a prize-award) in 1934, a little after his twentieth birthday. The influential Edith Sitwell (after some dithering) became the first of a succession of older, female sponsors and patrons when – barely two years later – she praised his work as being ‘on a huge scale, both in theme and structurally …nothing short of magnificent’. Thomas’s pouty, cherubic looks, coupled with his artfully-constructed act of slightly bewildered enfant terrible could arouse some women’s protective, maternal feelings. After his apprenticeship on a local newspaper, and with the occasional interlude working on film scripts (which were seldom shot) or radio broadcasts (which were sometimes made), he would never really find conventional employment – and would always be short of money.

‘Do not go gentle’ is a villanelle (an Italian pastoral form originating in the sixteenth century and first popularised by the French poet, Jean Passerat [1534-1602]). It comprises five tercets followed by a quatrain and may be expressed as follows: A1, b, A2/ a, b, A1/ a, b, A2/ a, b, A1/ a, b, A2/ a, b, A1, A2 (numbered capitals being refrains). The poem is (for Thomas) written in a straight-forward style, and has been read at numerous funerals – particularly in the United States. It exhorts Thomas’s father – with whom he had a complicated relationship – to meet his end with defiance, not to fade quietly into the dark.

‘D.J.’ Thomas was an ex-schoolmaster, aloof, irascible and fastidious. An agnostic and a thwarted poet himself, D.J. had gained a first-class honours degree in English from the university college of Wales at Aberystwyth before descending into a career which he felt was ‘beneath’ him. Thomas senior, for whom Dylan never lost his respect, had inculcated into his son a love of poetry equal to his own. Before Dylan could read, D.J. would recite Shakespeare to him. He was to die, after a prolonged illness and resolutely dry-eyed, on 16th December, 1952, aged 76, from heart-failure. Contrary to Dylan’s repeated assertions, his father’s sight failed only at the very end; his final recorded utterance was ‘It’s come full circle now’. Dylan vomited during the cremation service.

Thomas sent ‘Do not go gentle’ to Marguerite Caetani (a wealthy American who’d also commissioned Under Milk Wood) for inclusion in her Roman magazine Botteghe Oscure. In a postscript to his covering letter of 28th May, 1951, he wrote ‘the only person I can’t show [the poem] to is, of course, my father who doesn’t know he’s dying’. Of this foreign debut one should not infer too much altruism: American publishers paid far more generously than their British counterparts. The villanelle was included (before D.J.’s demise) in Dylan’s Collected Poems, out that November. It is one of only six poems in that volume completed in the period between 1946 and the poet’s own death late in 1953.

Dylan’s own ‘close of day’ would occur in st. Vincent’s hospital, New York (where he’d been taken with suspected alcoholic poisoning). His mother thus lost her husband, her adored, spoilt son and her only other child, Nancy (from cancer) all within a year. There is strong evidence that Dylan’s death was caused by Iatrogenesis (that is, medical incompetence). An American doctor had injected him with half a grain of morphine (three times the recommended dosage) as a sedative and analgesic. This rather unjustifiable intervention would yet further have depressed the poet’s already compromised respiratory system. Always something of a hypochondriac, Thomas had often said that he would never reach the age of forty.

Further reading:

Brinnin, M., Dylan Thomas in America, Ace (1957)
Ferris, P. (Ed.), The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas, Dent (1985)
Ferris, P., Dylan Thomas, The Biography, Dent (1999)
Jones, D. (Ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Poems, Dent (1971)
Sinclair, A., Dylan The Bard, Constable (1999)

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of
‘I Am’
By John Clare (1793-1864)

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;
And yet I am, and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
And een the dearest -that I loved the best-
Are strange -nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smiled or wept;
There to abide with my creator, GOD,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below -above the vaulted sky.

There is no draft manuscript for these verses by the ‘peasant poet’ John Clare. What we do know is that they were written whilst he was in his early fifties and a patient in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. Transcribed by the ‘House Steward’, William knight, ‘I Am’ was first published in The Bedford Times on New Year’s day, 1848, after being sent to a mutual friend, the Bedfordshire watchmaker Thomas Inskip (in December 1846). There is some contextual evidence that the lines were penned even earlier in late ’44 or in 1845 – by which time the writer had been residing in Northampton for three years.

If John Clare was to exhibit symptoms of mental instability it is hardly to be wondered at. Born the son of an impoverished farm labourer in Helpstone, Northamptonshire, he found employment (after a rudimentary local education) as a flail-thresher, horse-boy, plough-boy, under-gardener and lime-kiln worker. Aged eleven, his family’s cottage was divided, by their new landlord, into four tenements – combined with an annual rent increase from two to three pounds! When he was sixteen an Act of Parliament enclosed the common land in Helpstone and – as he later wrote – ‘trampled on the grave/ Of labours rights and left the poor a slave’. His first surviving poem, ‘Helpstone’, is dated that same year (1809). From his early teens Clare had written verses on whatever scraps of paper were to hand: magazines, newspapers, even discarded sugar-bags. He was ‘taken up’ by the London publisher John Taylor (Keats’ publisher, among others) and their first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life, came out – to great acclaim – in 1820, the year of his marriage to Patty (nee Turner) with whom he would have eight children. Lionised by literary London society – where he was for a time the latest ‘fad’ – Clare seems to have been ‘marketed’ as much for his curiosity-value as for his poetry. Slowly the critical attention faded, and other productions – though possibly better-written – were commercial failures. This, coupled with a move from Helpstone (to Northborough, four miles away) affected Clare badly. Already victim of mood-swings, he began to have hallucinations and to complain of awful headaches. There are dark insinuations that he could be violent. Eventually, in 1837, when his wife could no longer cope, he was removed to High Beech, Essex, from where he escaped in 1841, walking all the way home to Northamptonshire. Once again certified as insane, he was admitted to Northampton’s New Asylum (opened only three years earlier).

Clare seems not to have been violent at Northampton. Patients were divided into five classes proportionate to the severity of their symptoms and the degree of care required. The poet was in the ‘fifth class’ of private patients (those who received least supervision and whose payments, accordingly, were remitted at the lowest rate). These payments were received in part from a charitable fund and, in part, from Earl Fitzwilliam, a local aristocrat and long-term benefactor to Clare. Northampton General Lunatic Asylum (now ‘St. Andrew’s’) was a state-of-the-art facility with hot water accessible in all parts of the building, galleries, day-rooms furnished to look as ordinary as possible, and a liberal regime under its first superintendents, doctors Prichard and Nesbitt. Clare was allowed to walk unaccompanied into town where he was often to be found sitting in the portico of All Saints church, usually with his notebook in his hand – always with his tobacco pouch. Occasionally, once in 1844 and again in ’46 and ’48, he would be confined to the asylum after over-partaking in the local ales. His services as a purveyor of verse seem to have been sought by the locals (especially around St. Valentine’s day) and paid for with bribes of tobacco.

Of Clare’s mental state at this time it is impossible to write with any exactitude. Less than two dozen letters survive from the period of his hospitalisation and, although these always show ‘insight’, there is also – as often as not – evidence of delusional ideation. Clare kept up an irregular correspondence with his family but appears never to have been visited by his wife, or to have seen any of his numerous grandchildren. Prolific in his output during the early years of his institutionalisation (Knight collected 800 of these ‘Asylum Poems’, of varying quality, over the five years prior to his own departure), Clare would lose the thread of his compositions if for any reason interrupted. His conversation, likewise, could be uneven. He’d developed a fixation with an old girl friend, Mary Joyce, whom he would describe as his ‘first love and first wife’ – and was unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge her death. Clare also suffered delusions that he was, at various times, (the prize-fighter) Jack Randall, Horatio Nelson, Shakespeare or Lord Byron, and would spend much time revising the latter’s work.

Modern diagnostic practices shine little light on the poet’s illness, which displays aspects of both schizophrenic, and bi-polar affective, disorders. Its aetiology is likewise confused (there is no evidence of any previous psychoses in his family) by all sorts of theories. Some experts have advocated the possibility of head trauma (Clare once fell from a tree), others advance the notion of vitamin-deficiency due to poor diet (he often lived with his family in considerable poverty), whilst others advocate the possibility of alcohol abuse or tertiary syphilis (again, there is some supporting evidence for these theses).

Clare’s oeuvre has also been fraught with questions of editorial tinkering. Knight notes at the beginning of his collection that the poems were ‘copied from the manuscripts as presented to me by Clare…the whole of them faithfully transcribed to the best of my knowledge from the pencil originals many of which were so obliterated that without referring to the Author I could not decipher’. The poems have never, completely, fallen into desuetude and have been espoused by such dissimilar commentators as Francis Palgrave, Arthur Symonds, Edward Thomas, Edmund Blunden and Geoffrey Grigson – all of whom sign-posted its virtues. More latterly Clare’s work has become highly fashionable once again, with the likes of John Ashbery and Seamus Heaney thumbing a lift on to his belated bandwagon.

As the years in Northampton passed Clare’s productivity lessened – although it never ceased entirely. His conversation was apt to become larded with obscenity and he became quite stout, often sitting in a favoured chair with views over the asylum’s well-tended gardens. He seems to have grown more taciturn and, towards the end, suffered from a series of transient ischemic attacks (or ‘mini-strokes’) until his death, at the age of seventy, after well-over 22 years of institutional life. He’d more than once likened his surrounds to ‘the Bastille’. He was to be buried in his beloved Helpstone via the good offices of the local church-warden, thereby narrowly avoiding the final indignity of a pauper’s grave.

Further reading:
Bate, J., John Clare, A Biography, Picador (2003)
Clare, J. (Ed. Summerfield, G.) John Clare: Selected Poetry, Penguin (1990)
Storey, M. (Ed.) The Letters of John Clare, Oxford University Press (1988)

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of
‘The Tyger’
by William Blake (1757-1827)

Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fires of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?

Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Probably written in 1792/93 – at the same time as the full ramifications of the French Revolution were beginning to reveal themselves – ‘The Tyger’ must, surely, be one of the most famous poems ever written. William Blake, son of a hosier and from a dissenting background, would have been in his mid-thirties when he composed it, residing with his wife, Catherine, at number 13, Hercules Buildings in Lambeth (the two of them were known to sunbathe naked in its garden) and practicing his trade as an engraver. He would almost certainly have seen a live tiger as there were two of them on view at the Tower of London and – in an earlier dwelling place at Green street – a tiger had been exhibited in a private menagerie just around the corner in Leicester House. Blake’s accompanying depiction, however, displays little of that beast of prey’s lissom and feral power, possessing as it does more the feline vigour of a rather sad domestic tabby.

‘The Tyger’ is one of the Songs of Experience upon which Blake was working as a companion piece to his ‘Songs of Innocence’ (some of which appear to have been begun as early as 1784). It is often cited in direct contrast to ‘The Lamb’ of the earlier sequence.

Blake’s manuscript containing drafts of ‘The Tyger’ has an interesting history. It originally belonged to his much-loved younger brother, Robert, who died from tuberculosis, aged only 19, in 1787. Blake himself had nursed him at the end, and would keep his brother’s notebook with him until the close of his own life – using the spare pages for thoughts, drawings and verses of his own (including many of the workings of ‘Songs of Experience’). Blake felt that he was ‘guided’ by his brother’s spirit for a number of years and, indeed, claimed to have seen Robert’s soul ascend to heaven (through the ceiling). William had already been seeing ‘visions’ since the age of eight, and there can be little doubt that in a later age the artist would, routinely, have been diagnosed as a schizophrenic, ‘sectioned’ under the Mental Health Act and (involuntarily) medicated. As it was he was left free to pursue his own inclinations which were, at this time, highly influenced by Swedenborgian philosophy.

‘The Tyger’ is written from a Gnostic perspective: for Blake ‘Jehovah’ meant merely the artificer of an imperfect creation, beyond which lies the ultimate divinity. In Blakean mythology the ‘Tyger’, symbol of wrath, is a product of ‘Urizen’ (a fallen titan driven by materialism and calculating rationality). ‘Los’ – who embodies artistic imagination – is engaged in an historical struggle with ‘Urizen’ and only their ultimate reconciliation can make ‘Jerusalem’ possible. The ‘Lamb’ is equated with Jesus and a gentler spirituality. The ‘forests of the night’ are often held to be the (French) church and state.

The drafts of this poem show Blake refining and supplementing his own original vision of the first three stanzas (which are only slightly revised). The fourth stanza as projected might have run ‘Could fetch it from the furnace deep./ And in thy horrid ribs dare steep/ In what clay & in what mould/ Were the eyes of fury rolld’. The poet had likely witnessed the Perseid meteor showers of 1783 (which some observers felt resembled a spear being hurled across the heavens). This may be the inspiration behind ‘When the stars threw down their spears/ And water’d heaven with their tears’. The poem is probably unique in containing two climatics (the first being the unanswered question ‘Did he who made the lamb make thee?’, the second being the single word ‘Dare’ of the final line).

Blake would continue to go his own way. A political – as well as religious – radical, he was fortunate to be acquitted from the twin charges of sedition and assault at a court in Chichester in 1805. After some years of increasing neglect and debility he would die, still singing, a few months short of his seventieth birthday, and be buried (in a common grave) in the Dissenter’s burial ground at Bunhill Fields. Already a forgotten man, his engraved and hand-printed Songs of Innocence and of Experience had sold less than twenty copies in over thirty years.

In 1847 (twenty years after his death) the foolscap quarto sketchbook of 58 pages – once the property of Robert Blake – was bought, for just over ten shillings, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It was not until 1863 that Alexander and Anne Gilchrist’s monumental Life would begin the process of rehabilitation, rescuing the visionary from literary obscurity.

Further reading:
Ackroyd, P., Blake, Sinclair-Stevenson (1995)
Foster Damon, S., A Blake Dictionary, Brown University Press (1988)
Gilchrist, A. (Intro. Holmes, R.), Gilchrist on Blake, Harpur (2005)
Keyes, G. (Ed.) The Complete Writings of William Blake, Oxford (1966)
Keyes, G. (Ed.) The Letters of William Blake, Oxford (1980)

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of
Sonnet XVI: To the Lord General Cromwell
by John Milton (1608 – 1674)

Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud
Not only of war, but destractions rude,
Guided by faith and matchless fortitude
To peace and truth thy glorious way hast ploughed,
And on the neck of crowned fortune proud
Has reared God’s trophies and his work persued,
While Darwen stream with blood of Scots imbrued,
And Dunbar field resounds thy praises loud,
And Worcester’s laureate wreath; yet much remains
To conquer still; peace hath her victories
No less renowned than war, new foes arise
Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains:
Help us to save free conscience from the paw
Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw.

We are fortunate enough to be in possession of Milton’s working copy of his earlier poems (know as the ‘Trinity Manuscript’ by virtue of its residence at Trinity college, Cambridge). Via this source we know that the sonnet – the first in a series addressed to various prominent figures of his time – was composed in May 1652, in response to the heated deliberations of a committee for The Propagation of the Gospel. Some on the Committee advocated an established Church with ministers appointed (and paid for) by the state. Others favoured a greater freedom of conscience – and this latter view was shared, at least in the matter of organised worship, by Cromwell and Milton himself.

Milton at this time was very much a political insider. Forty-three years of age, he had only recently moved into a house in Petty France, Westminster, close to the seat of The Commonwealth’s Government and his job, Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council of State (an amalgam of senior civil servant, secretary/interpreter and propangandist) which paid him a relatively modest £288 per annum. The Government he worked so assiduously for was a republican one since the execution of the former king, Charles II, in January, 1649 (in favour of which Milton had, quite vehemently, written).

The verse quoted above represents a fairly blatent piece of political opportunism. John Bradshaw, formerly Milton’s lawyer and something of a patron, had stepped down from his position as chair of the Council in November 1651. Everyone by now knew that the real power in the land was wielded by Oliver Cromwell, all-conquering Lord-General and head of an ideologically energised New Model Army. The sonnet, condemning the Presbyterian drive for conformity, has Ciceronian undertones. Whilst bloodthirstily lauding Cromwellian victories (the Durwen was a tributary of the river Ribble, near Preston, where Cromwell decimated the Scots invaders in 1648) Milton presumes to remind Cromwell that there is much still to do. The allusion to a crown might be considered unfortunate! Traditionally, sonnets reach their volte (or turning point) around their eighth line, but here the poet over-runs into the ninth, driven by his need to sweeten the pill of what is about to come. There is little textual evidence here of the familiarity, indeed open admiration, of another sonnet – written only a little over a month after this one – to the Treasurer of the Navy, Henry Vane. Milton and Cromwell, it may be conjectured, were useful to each other, but not friends. Strangely, there is no mention of the poet’s name in any of Cromwell’s correspondence or speeches. Milton later wrote admiringly (in his Second Defence of the English People, 1654) of the Protectorate’s ‘well-regulated liberty’ and, elsewhere, of The Protector’s lack of personal arrogance coupled with ‘a trustful faith in God, and a native vastness of intellect’.

The later poems in the Trinity Manuscript are written in various, unknown hands. Though demonstrably copied under his close supervision, their author had cause to employ a number of amanuenses. Though this was a fairly common practice of the time, Milton had more need of it than most: at this stage he was almost totally blind. Suffering from what by modern diagnostic criteria was almost certainly glaucoma, he had – at a time when blindness was often, superstitiously, believed to be a sign of God’s displeasure – attempted to disguise the infirmity for a number of years. Personally vain, he believed both that the casual observer was unable to detect him in this deceit, and that he, still, appeared much younger than his age. In a letter to a friend (dated 1654) he chose to categorise the symptoms he’d experienced progressively over the previous ten years. These included a body ‘shaken with flatulence’, awful headaches in which colours ‘proportionately darker would burst forth with violence and a sort of crash from within’; by 1654 everything was ‘pure black, marked as if with extinguished or ashy light’.

Milton’s domestic circumstances in the May of 1652 were equally punishing. On the fifth of that month he lost, three days after giving birth to their fourth child, his first wife, Mary, with whom he’d had – we may comfortably surmise – a fraught relationship characterised by a three-year separation and infused by familial and political differences. Just six weeks after his mother, their only son (another John) died at the age of fifteen months, in circumstances which caused Milton’s nephew, Edward Phillips, to fulminate against ‘the ill usage or bad constitution of an ill-chosen nurse’.

Milton was to undergo a number of vicissitudes in the remainder of his life before dying quietly in his bed (of gout, in his sixty-sixth year). By then he’d been fortunate enough to survive The Restoration, jail, the Great Plague, the fire of London; to marry twice more, and to produce his long-planned masterpiece, Paradise Lost, in his late fifties. Though his politics have frequently been questioned, his literary survival never, seriously, has. Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England and his senior by nine years, would predecease him on September 3rd 1658 – the anniversary of the twin victories at Dunbar (1650) and Worcester (1651) which the poet had eulogised some six years earlier.

Further reading:
Beer, A. (2008) Milton, Bloomsbury.
Danielson, J. (ed) (1999) The Cambridge Companion To Milton, Cambridge university Press.
Fraser, A. (1973) Cromwell: Our Chief Of Men, Methuen.
Hill, C. (1988) Who’s Who in Stuart Britain (1603-1714), Shepheard-Walwyn.
Milton, J. (1997) The Complete Shorter Poems (ed. Carey, J.), Longman.

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of
‘In Flanders Fields’
by John McCrae (1872-1918)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place: and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch: be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Whenever something is published (especially something which subsequently acquires a certain fame) it is always entirely legitimate to enquire just how much its author actually knew about their subject. John McCrae (1872-1918) was well-acquainted with modern warfare. The ‘Kaiser’s War’ was actually his second as he’d served, with some distinction and as a junior officer, with the Royal Canadian Artillery in the Boer War. By no means a ‘name’ poet, McCrae wrote poetry for his own pleasure and had met one of his literary heroes, Rudyard Kipling, in South Africa around this time.

Second son of a second-generation Canadian, John David McCrae (who was destined to reach the high rank, for a ‘colonial’, of Lieutenant General) joined the Cadet Corps at the age of fourteen and, a year later, his father’s regiment as a bugler. Academically gifted, at 16 he was awarded a scholarship to the university of Toronto. After a break in his studies due to recurrent asthma, he qualified as a doctor at 26, subsequently becoming a respected lecturer on bacteriology and pathology.

Already onboard ship en route to England at the outbreak of world war one, he lost little time in offering his services to the Canadian government either as medical or artillery officer. At first rejected (due to his age) he saw service during the battle of Neuve Chapelle (March 1915) as Brigade Surgeon, although he found himself unable to resist acting in a combatant role, directing gunfire, when the opportunity arose. ‘In Flanders Fields’ was composed under conditions of extreme mental and physical stress.

In April 1915 McCrae’s unit – First Brigade, Canadian Field Artillery – moved onto the Ypres sector, just in time for the second battle of Ypres in which the Germans debuted their new secret weapon, chlorine gas. Completely unprecedented, defensive measures against this threat were rudimentary at best (soldiers were advised to cover their faces with urine-soaked hankerchiefs) and over 60 per cent of the Canadian troops engaged became casualties. Included among this number was lieutenant Alex Helmer, McCrae’s student and close friend, killed by shell-fire. On the night of 2nd May, in complete darkness and just behind the lines, Helmer’s remains (gathered up into two empty sandbags, their flaps held together with safety-pins) were buried in a makeshift grave -McCrae himself officiating in the absence of a chaplain. The following day and in a brief interlude from ministering to the wounded, McCrae sat in the back of an ambulance just north of Ypres, and wrote his famous poem (at first entitled ‘We Shall Not Sleep’). Around him, between the growing number of wooden crosses, the first wild poppies were coming into flower. The story goes that McCrae discarded the poem only for it to be retrieved by his commanding officer, Edward Morrison, who sent it first, unsuccessfully, to The Spectator before having it accepted by Punch. The latter printed it, anonymously, in December 1915, whereupon it quickly took on the status of a modern classic.

‘In Flanders Fields’ is a Rondeau (fifteen lines, two rhymes and a thrice-repeated refrain). This verse-form was originally a French invention, often used for humerous purposes -but it was McCrae’s peculiar inspiration to subvert the genre, to infuse it – quite literally – with a grave cadence, distilling both morbid and bucolic imagery to startling effect. Nowadays, the final bellicose stanza is often omitted -yet it is entirely consonant with its author’s outlook in which avocation as healer vies with inclination to perform as man of action.

Two days prior to the Armistice an American YMCA worker, Moine Michael, noticed the verses reprinted in a copy of her Ladies Home Journal. Enthused, she immediately bought 25 poppies and handed them out to colleagues in memory of the fallen. Post war, she campaigned for the poppy to be adopted as a symbol of remembrance. A French woman, Anne Guerrin, had the idea of selling artificial poppies in order, initially, to raise funds to aid children affected by the recent hostillities. In 1921 she visited the recently ennobled Earl Douglas Haig who agreed to use his influence in order to amalgamate a number of veterans’ associations and form the British Legion – who held their first official Poppy Day on November 11th of that year.

By then, John McCrae was long-dead. He’d been promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and become Chief of Medical Services at Number 3 Canadian General Hospital, near Boulogne. The debilitating effect of attending to so many wounded soldiers from the battles of Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele had eroded his own health and this – coupled with a recurrance of his old enemy, asthma – led to his death, at the age of forty-five, on January 28th 1918 from double pneumonia.

Further reading:
Fry, S. (2005) The Ode Less Travelled, Hutchinson.
Gardner, B. (1964) Up The Line To Death, Methuen.
Giddings, R. (1988) The War Poets, Bloomsbury.
Graves, D. (1997) A Crown of Life: the World of John McCrae, Spellmount.
Lawrence, W. (2005) Great War Literature Study On War Poets of the First World War, Great War Literature publishing.

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of
‘Tagus, farewell’
by (Sir) Thomas Wyatt (1503-42)

Tagus, farewell, that westward with thy streams
Turns up the grains of gold already tried,
With spur and sail for I go to seek the Thames
Gainward the sun that showeth her wealthy pride
And to the town which Brutus sought by dreams
Like bended moon doth lend her lusty side.
My kind, my country, alone for whom I live,
Of mighty love the wings for this me give.

Sir Thomas Wyatt was an example of that most endangered of species: courtier to, and confidant of, King Henry VIII. His father, Henry Wyatt, had allied himself with the Lancastrian faction during the Wars of the Roses and been rewarded by his namesake, Henry Tudor, with a knighthood and a place on the Privy Council upon his succession as Henry VII. Thomas was born at Allington castle in Kent and – probably – graduated with an MA from St. John’s, Cambridge, in 1520. He was married around this time to Elizabeth Brooke who was to provide him with two children before their separation, on the grounds of her adultery – which may account for the rueful tone of much of his love poetry. He also, according to legend, enjoyed a dalliance with the future queen, Anne Boleyn, and may even have warned his monarch against her.

As a young man, Wyatt was involved in diplomatic missions to Paris and to Italy (where he was captured and ransomed by Spanish troops who were occupying Rome). He seems to have escaped, and upon his return to England published a number of his translations from Plutarch in 1528 (the only examples of his work to be printed in his lifetime). After a two year assignment as High Marshal of Calais he was gaoled in the Fleet prison (for killing a member of the London Guard) in 1534 and, again, in the Tower from May, 1536 (for six weeks) most likely in connection with the fall and disgrace of Queen Anne.

Royal disfavour was brief. Wyatt profited from the confiscation of church lands at the Dissolution and, newly knighted, was sent to be English ambassador to the Spanish court of the Emperor Charles V – who had been antagonised by the English King’s divorce from his aunt, Katherine of Aragon. Sir Thomas’s mission seems to have been accorded a success and in the poem reproduced above we see him, in the June of 1539, allowing himself, perhaps, some wistful ambivalence at the news of his recall to England.

‘Tagus, farewell’ (untitled) survives in a leather-bound notebook which Wyatt kept between 1537 and 1542. This contains over a hundred of his poems in various hands (together with a number by the earl of Surrey), plus drafts of letters and mathematical computations. This particular poem was written by Wyatt himself, in a spidery script, and we can see several amendments – for instance the ‘which’ in line 5 and the ‘alone’ of line 7 are corrections (the original was ‘only alone’). The Iberian river Tagus was celebrated for the resemblance of its sandy bed to gold (by, amongst others, Chaucer and John Skelton). The ‘Brutus’ alluded to is not the Roman regicide but rather a Trojan descendent of Aeneas of Troy, who had dreamt that he would establish a kingdom in Albion and was said, by some, to have founded London. ‘Gainward the sun’ refers to the fact that the Thames, unlike the Tagus, flows eastwards. ‘Bended moon’ is a nod towards the crescent-like kink in the Thames.

The works of Sir Thomas Wyatt were not available to a general English readership until fifteen years after his death, when they appeared in Songs and Sonnettes, ‘written by the ryght honourable Lorde Henry Haward Late Earle of Surrey’, and other, (better known as Tottel’s Miscellany, published in 1557). This work introduced to the Tudors something of the flavour of the Italianate poets, alongside various ‘new’ forms such as the sonnet, the ottava rima, the terza rima and iambic pentameter. It would prove enormously influential to the Elizabethans, in particular writers such as Spenser, Marlowe and Shakespeare. Due to an error in their respective chronologies, it was long believed that Wyatt was merely a camp-follower of the earl of Surrey, but in the twentieth century the primacy of Wyatt’s poetic legacy became fully established. Tottel’s Miscellany fails to attribute the verse to its true author and entitles it ‘Of his returne from Spaine’.

Wyatt may have been wise to view his return with ambivalence. In 1540 the fall of his friend and patron, Thomas Cromwell, signalled a new period of danger, and early 1541 would see him, once more, languishing in the Tower – on trumped-up charges of treason. Again the mercurial king would release him and grant him new and profitable offices. In early October, 1542, an emissary from Charles V arrived at Falmouth and Wyatt was dispatched, post-haste, to meet him. The arduous journey in inclement weather led to the onset of a fever (probably pneumonia) from which the poet was to expire, at Sherbourne, Devon, on the eleventh of that month.

Further reading:
Baldi, S., Sir Thomas Wyatt, Longmans (1961)
Scott, H. (ed), Selected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Carcanet (1996)
Thomson, P., Sir Thomas Wyatt and His Background, Routledge (1964)

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of
Sonnet XLIII from ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breath and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s Faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, -I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! -and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Something of a spoilt prodigy, Elizabeth Barrett could, apparently, read Homer in the original, aged eight. When she was only 14 her wealthy father published her work The Battle of Marathon (of which she would speak disparagingly in later life). At 15, however, an incident occurred in which, saddling her pony, she fell and sustained injuries which may -at least in part- have been psychosomatic. Thereafter she assumed more and more the role of invalid and seldom left her room, tended by her numerous close family, notably her stern, controlling father, Moulton Barrett, whose inherited fortune was based originally upon ownership of Jamaican sugar plantations -and slaves. Elizabeth continued to take a lively interest in literary matters from her sick-room (next door to Moulton’s room, joined by an interconnecting door) whilst her contributions to the Athenaeum and other periodicals, coupled with further publications (such as the two-volume Poems in 1844) cemented a growing reputation.

Her relationship with Robert Browning, six years her junior, the recipient of her later love poetry, began on the 10th January, 1845, with the arrival of his first, admiring letter. Abandoning Victorian notions of propriety he expressed himself as follows -and to a total stranger- ‘I do, as I say, love these [her] verses with all my heart -and I love you too’. Thus began a correspondence which would last twenty months, span 574 letters and culminate in a secret engagement and marriage, their elopement together to Italy and Elizabeth’s estrangement/disinheritance from her father whom she would never see again.

The sonnet reproduced above (the penultimate of a forty four sonnet sequence) observes a classically Petrachan octave. The end-word of line ten, ‘Faith’ seems to stand alone -highlighting the noun- although it is flagged by half-rhymes which both precede it (lines 1,4,5 & 8) and trail after it (‘breath’ and ‘death’). A MSS of the poem (in the possession of the British Library Board) written in the poet’s shaky hand, appears at times to be almost illegible, though it can be seen that the word ‘childhood’s’ (preceding ‘Faith’) is a correction. The ‘my lost saints’ of line twelve does not allude to a wavering piety -Elizabeth was a life-long Anglican- but rather to her mother, Mary, (deceased 1828) and her much-loved eldest brother, Edward (‘Bro’) who’d drowned whilst sailing with friends in Tor Bay in 1840.

The sequence of sonnets was begun in August, 1845, and completed two days before the Brownings’ marriage of 19th September the following year. Much of their non-literary courtship occurred whilst Moulton was away on business, and in the Barrett’s spacious London home, number 50 Wimpole street, where Elizabeth lived with her remaining siblings, her adored spaniel, ‘Flush’ and their attendant domestic retinue. Despite Robert’s concern, Elizabeth was a confirmed and long-standing Morphine user -she, and her doctors, felt it helped calm her nerves. In the fortnight before the secret wedding, Flush was kidnapped by a notorious gang who seem to have made their living at this profession (it was Flush’s third such adventure). He was eventually ransomed for six guineas -though Browning was of no assistance in the matter, claiming one of his notorious ‘headaches’ (fortunately, Elizabeth was independently wealthy through an earlier inheritance). The dog had bitten her suitor on their first acquaintance and had thereafter to be bribed by biscuits.

‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ is a play on words. Though there seems to have been some semi-serious pretence that the poems were translations, ‘The Portuguese’ was Browning’s pet-name for Elizabeth (or ‘Ba’ as she was known to the rest of her family). The nickname was occasioned by her dark complexion -though she may have felt some ambivalence about it, believing as she did that there was African blood in her family via a paternal ancestor’s liaison with a slave-girl. The forty-year-old bride took some time to show her sonnets to her new husband, finally placing them in his pocket for him to find. As Browning later wrote (to Leigh Hunt) ‘I never suspected [their existence] till three years after they were written. They were shown to me in consequence of some word of mine, just as they had been suppressed through some mistaken word; I could not bear that sacrifice and thought of the subterfuge of a name’. The sequence was first published in the final portion of the Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1850. Browning himself thought them the finest examples of their form since Shakespeare.

The Brownings were to enjoy fifteen years of happy marriage and the birth, after a series of miscarriages, of their son, ‘Pen’. Elizabeth was to die of congestion of the lungs (and in Robert’s arms) in Florence in 1861, at which time her literary reputation was considerably greater than her husband’s -though this ascendency has subsequently been reversed. A successful stage play by Rudolph Besier, The Barretts of Wimpole street was premiered in 1930 and later made into a film, telling the story of the two writer’s early romance.

Further reading:
Forster, M., Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Chatto & Windus (1988)
Hicks, M., [ed.] Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Selected Poems, Carcanet (1988)
Kintner, E., [ed.] The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1845-1846, Harvard University Press (1969)
Markus, J., Dared and Done: the Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, Bloomsbury (1995).

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Kevin Saving

Palaeopscriptology of 
‘If’
by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

If you can keep your head while all about you
Are losing theirs, and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream -and not make dreams your master;
If you can think -and not make thought your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make a heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
And walk with kings -nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty second’s worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And -which is more- you’ll be a Man, my son!

Joseph Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ must be one of the most famous -and certainly one of the longest- sentences ever written (with eighteen main sub-clauses). All things to all men, the poem has been cherished by an assortment of diverse personalities. The Kaiser kept a copy of it on his desk during the First World War, whilst his opposite number, president Woodrow Wilson ‘derived constant inspiration…and often tried to live up to its standards’. The Spanish fascist Primo de Rivera hung it on a wall in his office; Antonio Gramsci (leader of the Italian communist party) rendered it into his native tongue and even the King of Siam attempted to translate it into Thai.

Born in Bombay (Mumbai) but schooled in Devon, Kipling’s literary career was well-established by the early part of the twentieth century, with classics such as Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), Barrack Room Ballads (1892), The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901) and the Just So Stories (1902) already to his name. ‘If’ was first published in the ‘Brother Square Toes’ chapter of Rewards and Fairies (1910) -which itself had been recently serialised in the magazine The Delineator (July of that year). Rewards and Fairies was the sequel to Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and consists of interlinked short stories and poems themed around the imaginary exploits of two, time-travelling children.

‘If’ soon took on a life outside of its immediate context and was rapidly ‘pirated’ in numerous, unauthorised editions. Kipling’s (U.S.) publishers, Doubleday, were highly exercised by the fact that Americans, in particular, seemed to believe that (a) the poem was in the public domain and (b) written about George Washington. This latter misapprehension is understandable as ‘Brother Square Toes’ does mention Washington’s statesmanlike qualities en passant. In 1920 Kipling won a court case against Genatosan Ltd. (manufacturers of ‘Sanatogen’) for their illegal use of some of its lines. No feminist, he would refuse Marie Stopes, the controversial pioneer of ‘Family Planning’, permission to alter the text. It seems she’d suggested that if only men could keep their heads and ‘fill the unforgiving minute with sixty second’s worth of due distance run’, they’d be more entitled to be called men (‘my son’).

The author wrote (in his autobiography Something of Myself [1937]) that ‘If’ had been ‘anthologised to weariness’ and ‘contained counsels of perfection most easy to give’. He felt that it was disliked by many younger people (who had been compelled to copy it out). He also mentions -in the same book- that the poem was ‘drawn from’ the character of his Scottish friend, Dr Leander Starr Jameson (1853-1917). This gentleman, whilst an administrator in the British South Africa company, had led a force of 470 mounted men in a raid that has come to be indelibly linked with his name. Their intention -backed by Cecil Rhodes and, almost certainly, the British colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain- was to advance the 180 miles from Bechuanaland into Johannesburg, Transvaal, and unite with ‘Uitlanders’ (non-Boer European workers) to topple the government of Paul Kruger. The ‘Jameson Raid’ ended ignominiously on 2nd January, 1896, four days after the would-be insurgents crossed the border into Transvaal. The Uitlanders did not revolt, the rebel force was captured and Dr Jameson was led, in tears, into captivity. Kipling’s was not the only poem written in praise of the ill-fated and ill-thought-out expedition. Alfred Austin, the poet laureate, also contributed some verses, which -although embarrassing to his Conservative backers- were of lesser quality and more readily forgotten.

‘If’ seems to have been composed in 1909 (two years after Kipling had become the first English writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature). It was probably written at ‘Batemans’ in Burwash (his family’s Sussex home since 1902) and soon after a visit from Jameson -the sort of ‘strong man’/desperado who so appealed to to the diminutive writer. By now in his mid-forties, Kipling cohabited with his older, American wife, the protective and possessive ‘Carrie’ -and their daughter, Elsie- in their own comfortable Jacobean Manor house, furnished with oak beams and large fireplaces. The ill-fated John (short-sighted like his father) had been packed-off to ‘st. Aubyn’s’ boarding school two years previously. With his own, almost boy-ish enthusiasm for new technology, ‘Rud’ had prevailed upon an eminent Civil Engineer of his acquaintance to install an electrical generator, powered by the river at the bottom of their garden. Another enthusiasm of these years was centred on the various prototypes of the automobile. Though he never drove himself, the author soon acquired an early edition Rolls-Royce with its attendant chauffeur.

This same year (1909) Batemans was visited by George Clemenceau -until very recently the French prime minister (as he would be again during the coming war). Kipling established friendly relations with many contemporary, imperialistically-minded politicians (including Rhodes, Teddy Roosevelt, Andrew Bonar law and Lord Beaverbrook). His own cousin, appropriately enough, was Stanley Baldwin -whom he felt to be ‘nearly a socialist’. The writer’s conversation, always inclined to be ‘salty’, cannot have been improved by his recent abstinence, on doctor’s orders, from smoking. Always something of an insomniac (who felt that he worked best just before dawn) Kipling was ambivalent about his own verse, feeling that it lacked real poetry. According to one of his friends, he felt that it was ‘a useful means of expressing ideas where they could not be expressed in prose’. His method was almost invariably to get a tune into his head -and then fit words to it.
After serving his fairly nominal 15 month’s imprisonment (somewhat oddly, in Britain) L.S. Jameson had been paroled -doubtless through his influential friends’ backing- and had served as premier of Cape Colony immediately after the Boer war. He would be granted a Baronetcy in 1911. Kipling was never the same man after the 1915 death-in-action of his only son, the myopic John (for whom he’d ‘pulled strings’ to obtain a commission in the Irish Guards). He would decline the offer of a knighthood on several occasions, as he’d declined the Order of Merit (twice) and -reputedly- the post of poet laureate. He would die, aged seventy, of complications arising from a perforated duodenum, and on his forty-fourth wedding anniversary. In 1996 ‘If’ was voted the ‘Nation’s Favourite Poem’, according to a BBC poll (with twice as many votes as the runner-up). Unfailingly ‘dug out’ for sporting occasions, its injunction on the correct approach towards those ‘two imposters’ still greets tennis stars about to enter Wimbledon’s ‘Centre Court’.

Further reading:
Adams, J., Kipling, Haus Books (2005)
Kipling, R., Rudyard Kipling, the Complete Verse, Kyle Cathie (2002)
Kipling, R., Something of Myself, An Autobiography, Hesperous (2007)

Establishing a substantive provenance for this poem has proved a tortuous business. Two possible avenues for research, which might have been expected to provide assistance, were singularly uncommunicative. The curatorship at Batemans and the staff of the Kipling Archive, University of Sussex, both failed to reply to correspondence (with return-addressed, pre-stamped envelopes provided). These joint failures of scholarship and of courtesy reflect poorly on the institutions concerned.

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Kevin Saving

Paleoscriptology of
‘This be the verse’
by Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

They fuck you up, your mum and dad,
They may not mean, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can
And don’t have any kids yourself.

The type-script of this poem makes its first appearance in April, 1971, when Larkin sent it to his long-term girlfriend, the English-Lecturer, Monica Jones. He claimed that he could ‘never remember [his] parents making a single spontaneous gesture of affection towards each other’. The lines are prefaced as ‘A little Easter poem’. The same verses were also sent (on 14th April) to Anthony Thwaite, asking -ironically- if Thwaite’s wife, Ann, (who was editing Allsorts, a children’s annual), might care for them.

‘This be the verse’ is a reference to Robert Louis Stephenson’s Requiem: ‘This be the verse you grave for me:/ Here he lies where he longed to be;/ Home is the hunter, home from the sea/ And the hunter, home from the hill’. The piece was first published in the New Humanist (August ’71) and included in Larkin’s last collection, High Windows (1974).

Philip Larkin would have been 48 when he completed these contentious, though memorable, verses. They’d have found instant recognition and support from miss Jones, one of his two concurrent inamoratas. She, too, would have regarded herself as a holder of ‘Advanced’ views: one of their favourite holiday pastimes was to deface novels adding prurient variations to originally innocuous passages. The poet might also have found sustenance in Book Ten of Paradise Lost: Eve’s protestation ‘Childless thou art; Childless remain’. John Milton (though he sired children himself) would certainly have found a kindred spirit in the notoriously misanthropic Larkin.

The parents -who conspired to ‘fuck’ Larkin ‘up’- were, indeed, a disparate couple. Eva (nee Day, 1886-1977) was an ex-teacher, mousy, perpetually ‘boasting and complaining’ -according to her son- in a kind of ‘rambling natter’. In the same (1967) letter to Jones, Larkin confided his belief that ‘people ought to get away from home as chickens get out of eggs, wholly, utterly, immediately, cleanly […] I suppose I shall become free at sixty, three years before cancer starts’. In this last assertion he was almost uncannily prescient. Yet Larkin, despite his whingeing, retained a curious attachment towards his mother. He continued to visit regularly when she was admitted to a nursing home with an Alzheimer’s-type dementia, and some observers have felt that she was, paradoxically, a kind of Muse. He’d dedicated his first collection, The North Ship, to her. Eva had married the seemingly charmless Sydney Larkin (1884-1947) in October, 1911. The latter made his career in what is now called local government, and reached the dizzying heights of Treasurer to Coventry corporation. He has been portrayed as something of a crypto-fascist; Larkin fils styled him ‘the sort of man democracy doesn’t suit’. A frequent pre-war visitor to Nazi Germany, attending several Nuremberg rallies, Sydney kept a figurine of Adolf Hitler on his mantelpiece. Both parents seem to have indulged the young Philip (named after sir Philip Sydney).

Larkin began ‘This be the verse’ on the same mid-June, 1967 evening that he completed ‘Annus Mirabilis’ (‘Sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty three’). The two poems share much of the same tone. Their author would not finalise the twelve lines for another four years.

He’d ‘got out’ fairly early himself when, after an Oxford education under the tutelage of luminaries such as J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Neville Coghill, he embarked on a career as librarian which culminated in his appointment as overlord of Hull’s Brynmor Jones university library in 1955. He’d occupy this post until the end of his life. Literary recognition came that same year with the publication of The Less Deceived. From 1956 to 1974 Larkin lodged, alone, at number 32, Pearson Park -an upper-storey, one-bedroom flat where he could write, be alone, listen to his beloved jazz records and complain about the noise from his neighbours.

Larkin’s last years make for rather a sad catalogue. Artistic inspiration deserted him and his drinking-habit accordingly increased. He wrote to a friend in 1982 that ‘there was rather too much of the four-letter Larkin for [his] liking. “They fuck you up” will clearly be my Lake Isle of Inisfree (sic). I fully expect to hear it recited by a thousand Girl guides before I die’. A life-long agnostic, Larkin’s last words (uttered to a nurse in his private hospital) were ‘I am going to the inevitable’.

Further reading:
Bradford, R., First Boredom, Then Fear, Peter Owen (2005)
Larkin, P., Required writing: Miscellaneous Pieces, Fabers (1983)
Larkin, P., Collected Poems, Fabers and The Marvell Press (1988)
Motion, P., Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, Fabers (1993)
Thwaite, A. [Ed.] Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1940-1985), Fabers (1992)

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of
‘Adlestrop’
by Edward Thomas (1878-1917)

Yes. I remember Adlestrop-
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop -only the name

And willows, willow-herbs, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that moment a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Confusion exists over exactly which train Edward and Helen Thomas took on that Midsummer Day (24th June, 1914). If the poem is to be taken literally, there was only one express on the Paddington/Worcester line that day, which may have stopped ‘unwontedly’ at Adlestrop (in the heart of the Cotswolds) -perhaps due to snapped signal wires- circa 3.18 p.m. Another possibility exists- namely that a stopping train (scheduled to arrive earlier at Adlestrop at 12.46p.m.) may have carried the poet. This version is given credence by Thomas’s own Field Note Book which records: ‘Then we stopped at Adlestrop, thro the willows could be heard a chain of blackbirds songs at 12.45 & one thrush & no man seen, only a hiss of engine letting off steam’. Either way, the Thomases were en route to stay for a few days with Robert Frost at Leadington, after going to the ballet in London. The day, emphatically was hot: the local stationmaster’s records list it as 80 degrees Fahrenheit -this, last, pre-war summer was long and dry.

Edward Thomas was catapulted into poetry late in his thirties. Although he’d had the benefit of an Oxford university education, his time-consuming work -as a free-lance reviewer and travel-writer- was often insufficient to provide adequately for his wife and their three children. Thomas was drawn to poetry, respected for his reviews on the subject and acquainted with many of ‘The Georgians’, but he himself felt that he lacked the affinity for that medium. It was largely through the influence of his new friend Robert Frost (whose own work he’d helped to introduce to a wider readership) that he began to find his own poetic ‘voice’: this, and the fact that as a serving soldier he could at last find the time and financial security to write verse. His whole poetic oeuvre of 144 poems dates from the last two years of his life.

Fairly typically, Thomas went through agonies of indecision before enlisting in the ‘Artist’s Rifles’ in July, 1915. His duties (as a corporal) were initially as a map-reading instructor in Essex and it is probable that, due to his age, he could have remained in this non-combatant role. However, he would (in November, 1916) finally be commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery. Frost later admitted that his own, much-anthologised poem, ‘The Road Not Taken’, was ‘a mild satire on the chronic vacillating habits of Edward Thomas’.

‘Adlestrop’ was composed on 8th January, 1915, when the writer was ‘laid up quite immovable’ with an ankle badly sprained from a trip on New Year’s Day. He was living at this time at Steep in Hampshire. The first stanza went through four versions in two MSS drafts, but otherwise the poem was little altered. ‘Express-train’ was originally ‘steam train’, ‘unwontedly’ was previously ‘unexpectedly’ and ‘cloudlets’ were ‘cloud tiers’. The poet equivocated with a comma before settling on a full-stop after the first word, ‘Yes’. Sadly, Thomas never saw the proofs for the volume in which ‘Adlestrop’ was to be published. Poems came out under the sobriquet ‘Edward Eastaway’ and six months posthumously.

On the 30th January, 1917, Thomas sailed for France, serving with number 244 Siege battery. He died ten weeks later (at the age of 39) when, on the first day of the battle of Arras (April 9th), a German shell exploded close by. His body was unmarked, but the shockwave from the blast stopped his heart and he would have been killed instantly.

Adlestrop station no longer exists. Though the line -part of the old Great Western Railway system- still runs through this same (Gloucestershire) area, the station itself was closed to passengers, in accordance with the ‘Beeching cuts’, on 3rd January, 1966.

Further reading:
Cooke, W., Edward Thomas: A Critical Biography, Fabers (1970)
Farjeon, E., Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years, Sutton (1997)
Harvey, A., Adlestrop Revisited, Sutton (1999)
Thomas, E., Collected Poems, Fabers (1979)

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of
‘Fare Thee Well’
by George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

Fare thee well! and if for ever,
Still for ever, fare thee well:
Even though unforgiving, never
‘Gainst thee shall my heart rebel.

Would that breast were bared before thee
Where thy head so oft hath lain,
While that placid sleep came o’er thee
Which thou never canst know again:

Would that breast, by thee glanced over,
Every inmost thought could show!
Then thou woulds’t at last discover
‘Twas not well to spurn it so.

Though the world for this commend thee-
Though it smile upon the blow,
Even its praise must offend thee,
Founded on another’s woe:

Though my many faults deface me,
Could no other arm be found,
Than the one which once embraced me,
To inflict a cureless wound?

[….]

All my faults perchance thou knowest,
All my madness none can know;
All my hopes, where’er thou goest,
Whither, yet with thee they go.

Every feeling hath been shaken;
Pride, which not a world could bow,
Bows to thee -by thee forsaken,
Even my soul forsakes me now:

But ’tis done -all words are idle-
Words from me are vainer still;
But the thoughts we cannot bridle
Force their way without the will.

Fare thee well! thus disunited,
Torn from every nearer tie,
Seared in heart, and lone, and blighted,
More than this I scarse can die.

There are, in all, fifteen stanzas of this maudlin and disingenuous claptrap.

Legends of the ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, club-footed sixth Lord Byron abound. In point of fact, Byron’s disability is more likely to have been due to poliomyelitis (though there has been some scholarly debate as to which leg actually was the game one). Either way, it seems not to have greatly inconvenienced him as he passed muster (whilst at Harrow) as a serviceable cricketer, practiced later as an amateur -in the fashion of the times- pugilist and, famously, swam the Hellespont. His sexual initiation came early, at the age of nine and at the hands of a May Gray, his nurse. Perhaps this experience fostered an abivalence in him, for the poet would take many lovers -of both sexes.

Byron became the equalvalent of a modern-day pop superstar in 1812 when, after the publication of Childe Harold, he (in his own words) ‘awoke one morning and found [him]self famous’. He first met his future wife, Anne Isabella (‘Annabella’ or -his pet-name- ‘Pippin’) Milbanke, in the March of that same year, at a party given by Lady Caroline Lamb. She was the only child of the sixth baronet, Sir Ralph Milbanke. He first proposed marriage, through the offices of his close confidant, Lady Melbourne, in October -but was rebuffed. Their correspondence continued, however, despite Annabella’s comment that she ‘would not enter into a family where there is a strong tendency to insanity’. Byron’s father had been universally known as ‘Mad Jack’. Annabella would not be the first, nor the last, young lady lured into marriage believing that she could ‘reform’ her husband; furthermore the poet was famed for his good looks! Simultaneously with his pursuit of Annabella, Byron was entering into a liason with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. In April 1814 the latter gave birth to a daughter widely believed to be his. To end the rumours circulating about them Augusta urged her lover/half-brother to marry and, in September, he re-proposed to miss Milbanke who, surprizingly, accepted him. Their marriage of just over one year commenced on January 2nd, 1815.

Soon after their honeymoon the young couple were invited to stay with Augusta. According to Annabella’s later account (to Harriet Beecher Stowe) her new husband ‘treated his sister with a liberty which both shocked and surprized her. Seeing her amazement and alarm, he came up to her and said, in a sneering tone, “I suppose you perceive that you are not wanted here. Go to your own room, and leave us alone. We can amuse overselves better without you” ‘. Byron soon confided that he wanted an ‘open’ marriage, with both partners free to take lovers. Additionally, Annabella had to cope with her husband’s heavy drinking and the black moods occasioned by his debts. She clearly thought he was going insane. When she began to wonder aloud about leaving him, Byron’s riposte -again, according to lady Byron- was that ‘The world will believe me, and it will not believe you’. He was conducting an affair at this time with a London chorus girl, Susan Boyce.

The Byrons made their marital home at 13, Piccadilly Terrace, London (where they were periodically visited by Augusta). Annabella gave birth to the couple’s only child, Augusta Ada, on December 10th and -a month later- visited her parents (who had never cared for the marriage) in Leicestershire. On hearing her story they forbade their daughter to see Byron again. Legal action to obtain a separation were initiated. On the 18th March, 1816, Byron composed the verses featured above and mailed them to his estranged wife two days later.

Either as an attempt at reconciliation, or as one of self-justification, ‘Fare thee well’ was, almost magnificently, ill-judged. Byron had fifty copies printed for private circulation in early April, and one of these -together with a copy of ‘A Sketch’, in which Byron attacks Annabella’s childhood nurse, Mrs Clermont, for allegedly raising her in a cold manner- fell into the hands of the lawyer, Henry Brougham. Although Brougham -who’d previously criticised the peer’s literary style in print- was supposed to be an impartial mediator in the separation, he had the two poems published (together with a devastating personal commentary) in The Champion (April 14th). The effect of the two poems was to throw public opinion -for the most part- behind Annabella, though ‘Fare thee well’ caused Byron’s royal fan, the princess Caroline, to claim it made her ‘cry like a fool’.

Opprobrium failed to dissuade their originator from reprinting the verses in his Poems later that year. By that time he’d been forced to sign separation papers (on April 21st). The version printed in Poems had some small revisions and is prefaced by a quote from Coleridge’s Christabel.

A draft manuscript of ‘Fare thee well’ survives, showing numerous crossings-out and ammendments -characteristic of the poet’s usual compositional style. Until fairly recently it was believed that ink blots on the verso were tear stains. Byron also habitually wrote with the aid of a rhyming dictionary.

Perhaps the nearest to an objective view of the marital breakdown -and subsequent scandal- comes from John Hobhouse (a long-term friend of Byron’s whom we might expect to have been biased against Annabella). Hobhouse came to believe that the poet had ‘been guilty of a very great tyranny -menaces- furies- neglect, and even real injuries…in fact turning her out of the house’. To this charge-sheet was added: ‘locking doors, showing pistols, pouring reproaches on her in bed…’ Annabella’s maid, Ann Rood Fletcher, testified to several instances of what appear to have been attempted marrital rape. There are strong grounds to believe that Byron attempted to sodomise his, highly religious, wife.

Post-separation, and in the eight years that remained to him, Byron became extremely embittered towards his erstwhile spouse, describing her as a ‘moral Clytemnestra’. He sailed from England on 25th April for a self-imposed exile (after being ‘dropped’ by much of fashionable society). The occasion was commemorated by a scurrilous George Cruikshank caricature. After various wanderings around Europe the poet embraced the cause of Greek independence and would die in that country of a fever, his sufferings exacerbated by the over-enthusiastic application of ‘bleedings’ from his physicians. He was destined never to see his country, his sister, his daughter or Annabella again.

Annabella would survive until the age of 67, devoting herself to philanthropic causes but plagued by ill-health. She’d clung to the illusion that Byron would return to her, imploring forgiveness. She even penned a retort to ‘Fare thee well’, ‘By thee forsaken’: But it must come -thine hour of tears,/ When self-adoring pride shall bow-/ And thou shalt own my ‘blighted years’,/ The fate that thou inflictest -Thou!/ Thy virtue- but from ruin still/ Shall rise a wan and drooping peace,/ With pardon for unmeasured ill,/ And Pity’s tears -if love must cease!’

Further reading:
Eisler, B., Byron, Child of Passion, Fool of Fame, Hamish Hamilton (1999)
MacCarthy, F., Byron, Life and Legend, John Murray (2002)
McGann, J. [Ed.], Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, Clarendon (1993)
Nicholson,A., The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics, vol. 12, Garland (1998)
Stowe, H., Lady Byron Vindicated, Fields Osgood (1870)

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of
‘Kubla Khan’
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
[….]
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight would win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

No one can be sure exactly when ‘Kublai Khan’ was composed (there is evidence for several contradictory dates). Coleridge referred to it as ‘a vision in a dream’ and as a ‘fragment’. In a note to the printed poem he described how ‘In the summer of the year 1797 the Author, then in ill-health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton’. In another note to the MSS copy Coleridge stated that it had been written ‘a quarter of a mile from Culbourne Church, in the fall of the year 1797’ -though this would still be the geographical region around Exmoor. The author was notoriously vague regarding dates. Evidence from his correspondence seems to indicate early October, when he was away from home trying to complete his tragedy, Osorio. Coleridge later claimed that the poem had its genesis ‘in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of opium taken to check a dysentry’. ‘The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than two to three hundred lines; if that can be called composition in which the images rose up before him […] without any sensation of consciousness of effort’. Upon waking the writer began transcribing his vision before -in one of the most infamous interruptions in literary history- being disturbed by ‘a person on business from Porlock’ who detained him for upwards of an hour. Once rid of this distraction he found to his chagrin that though the ‘vague and dim memory of the general purport’ of the composition remained, coupled with ‘some eight or ten scattered lines or images’, the rest had vanished, leaving him only 54 completed lines and -one may surmise- the resolution never more to purposelessly procrastinate in propinquity to persons from Porlock!

‘Kublai Khan’ was first published in Biographica Literaria in 1817. Coleridge published it (he said) ‘at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity…[Byron]…and as far as the author’s own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the grounds of any supposed poetic virtue’. The book, printed by Byron’s publisher John Murray, was not well-received. The Edinburgh Review commented ‘Forth steps Mr Coleridge, like a giant refreshed from sleep…[it had been nearly twenty years since he’d aired a collection of his poetry. The giant had produced, however]…one of the most notable pieces of impertinence of which the press has lately been guilty’.

Coleridge would have been in his mid-twenties when he wrote ‘Kublai Khan’. The youngest of ten children born to a Devonian vicar and his wife, Samuel attended Jesus College, Cambridge, between 1791 and 1794. There was an intermission in his studies of a few months when, due to a thwarted love affair, he enlisted in the Royal Dragoons: his brothers had to arrange his discharge due to ‘Insanity’. In 1795 he married Sarah Fricker, sister-in-law to his friend, Robert Southey, with whom he’d planned to establish a utopian and egalitarian community in Pennsylvania. The marriage was to prove an unhappy one and ended in divorce. Between 1797/98 he lived in Nether Stowey, Somerset (Wordsworth rented ‘Alfroxton Park’, three miles away). His Laudanum-dependence, which had commenced around a year earlier, can be ascribed, initially, to self-medication for both facial-neuralgia and persistent toothache.

The draft MSS of ‘Kubla Khan’ displays well-configured writing with few deletions. ‘Alph’ is probably named after the river Alpheus (in Western Greece) which flows close to the historic site of Olympia. ‘Rills’ are meandering streams. ‘Mount Abora’ may refer to Asmara in Eritrea. Kublai Khan (1215-1294) of the Yuan Dynasty, was grandson to Genghis Khan and had his summer-palace at Shangdu (otherwise known as Xanadu). Marco Polo had returned to Europe with stories of his extravagance. Only the Emperor (or persons designated by him) had the right to drink milk from the imperial herd of horses -he owned around ten thousand. The concluding line of the poem ‘drunk the milk of Paradise’ is a reference to this. A quotation from the American, William Bartram (1739-1823) has been identified as a possible source for ‘Kubla Khan’: imagery from that author’s Travels (1792) detailing his exploration of the North American continent, appears to present parallels. The words ‘In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace’ occur in Purchas’ Pilgrimage (1613).

The late seventeen nineties were a period in which Coleridge and his gifted, egotistical friend, William Wordsworth, worked in close collaboration. ‘Kubla Khan’ is anomalous both in that it was written without reference to Wordsworth and that it was not selected for their joint-production, Lyrical Ballads of 1798. By the time of the poem’s belated publication, twenty years later, the two had become estranged and Wordsworth was noticeably reticent -in public- about Biographia Literaria as a whole: he had found little to enjoy there. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was to die in Highgate aged 61 -probably as a consequence of his addiction- his later life something of an anti-climax after his meteoric youth.

Further reading:
Holmes, R., Coleridge: Early Visions, HarperCollins (1990)
Holmes, R. (Ed.), Selected Poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Penguin (1996)
Holmes, R., Coleridge: Darker Reflections, HarperCollins (1997)
Sisman, A. Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Friendship, Harper (2006)

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of
‘Not Waving but Drowning’
by Stevie Smith (1902-1971)

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

Commencing in Hull, Florence Margaret Smith’s -the ‘Stevie’ came later- is not a life in which much seems to have happened. She moved to number 1, Avondale Road, Palmers Green, North London, at the age of three and was to reside there for the rest of her life -supported and ‘managed’ by the formidable Madge Spear (her ‘Lion Aunt’) in a relationship which some have felt almost resembled a kind of marriage.

After completing her education at the North London Collegiate School (for girls) ‘Stevie’ -now nick-named after Steve Donaghue, a well-known jockey of the twenties- became secretary/PA to Sir Neville Pearson, a director of the magazine publishing firm George Newnes Ltd.. ‘Frozen out’ in an office power-struggle, Sir Neville’s responsibilities were less than onerous (in consequence, neither were Stevie’s). This could make her feel disengaged, but afforded her plenty of time for her writing. She would remain with this employer for upwards of thirty years (her employment records have subsequently gone missing).

‘Not Waving but Drowning’ was first published in a collection bearing the same title (Andre Deutch, 1957). Its author claimed that the original idea came from a newspaper story -though a similar (fortunately non-lethal) experience had occurred to her Newnes Ltd acquaintance, the Times journalist George Buchanan (1904-1989). The anecdote is recounted in his (1959) autobiography, Green Sea Coast.

Smith wrote in April, 1953, to her friend, the editor Kay Dick: ‘I felt too low for words (eh??) last weekend but worked it all off for all that in a poem…called ‘Not Waving but Drowning’. Her optimistic forecast proved inaccurate. Increasingly isolative, by turns apathetic and tetchy, Stevie slashed one of her wrists with a pair of office scissors after a trivial argument with her boss (July 1st). After a period of three weeks spent almost entirely in bed, she confided to Dick ‘I am a nervous wreck, it appears also anaemic’. A short holiday in Haversfordwest was followed by a communication from Newnes Ltd to the effect that as from December she was ‘retired’ from the company. It all appears to have been settled quite amicably and she soon found work as a reviewer. Her natural tendency towards depression may have been exacerbated by her steady failure to place her poetry in anything other than Punch. Although by this time she’d had four collections (and three novels) published, new rejection-slips from the TLS, New Statesman, Spectator and the Listener may have made her feel that her writing career was ‘flat-lining’.

In point of fact, the last ten years of Stevie’s life were, in critical terms, her most successful -the ‘Beat’ generation lending a belated, sympathetic ear to her ‘off-beat’ voice. She would survive her 96 year old aunt by only three years, dying of a brain tumour, the complications from which -most cruelly for her- caused progressive aphasia (complete linguistic ‘melt-down’).

Further reading:
Barbera, J. & McBrien, W. [Eds.], Me Again: Uncollected Writing of Stevie Smith, Virago (1981)
Smith, S., The Collected Poems of Stevie Smith, Allen Lane (1975)
Spalding, F., Stevie Smith, A Critical Biography, Fabers (1988)

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of
‘Gare du Midi’
by W.H. Auden (1907-1973)

A nondescript express in from the south,
Crowds round the ticket barrier, a face
To welcome which the mayor has not contrived
Bugles or braid: something about the mouth
Distracts the stray look with alarm and pity.
Snow is falling. Clutching a little case,
He walks out briskly to infect a city
Whose terrible future may just have arrived.

Christened ‘Wystan’ (after a ninth century Saint) by his affectionate, upper-middle-class parents, Auden’s childhood, public-schooling and progression to Christ Church, Oxford were all unexceptional enough. It was during his time at university that he would make the contacts, flaunt the politics, generally strike the pose that would so distinguish him from his contemporaries.

‘Coming down’ with a poor, Third Class degree (or, ‘a poet’s Third’), Auden would decamp to the louche counter-kultur of Weimar Germany where he could more easily indulge his homosexual inclinations in pick-up bars like ‘The Cosy Corner’ in Berlin.

Embarking (upon his return for financial reasons) on a less than whole-hearted career in teaching, he managed to attract the attention of T.S. Eliot at Fabers and placed his first book, Poems, with them in 1930. Thereafter, Auden’s prolific output of poetry, verse-plays (co-authored with his sometime lover, long-term friend, Christopher Isherwood) and travel books would establish him as a leading voice of the Left in Thirties Britain – alongside his ‘MacSpauday’ ‘Gang’ of Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis. In 1935, a marriage of convenience to Erika Mann (daughter of the novelist, Thomas), which allowed her to sidestep Nazi persecution, was closely followed by employment with the GPO film unit – his most celebrated collaboration, Night Mail, featured a score by another friend, Benjamin Britten.

Auden’s two, most practical, attempts to advance the cause of anti-fascism appear, on closer examination, to have been shambolic at best. Volunteering his services to the Republicans as an ambulance driver during the Spanish Civil War, the poet – whose vehicle-handling skills are reported to have been atrocious – ended up driving nothing more dangerous than a mule (which promptly kicked him) miles behind the front-line. His second venture, chronicling the Sino-Japanese conflict in company with Isherwood, resulted in the joint-production Journey to a War. Although this time the two writers did manage to briefly inspect the front – such as it was – the most perilous of their pursuits probably involved sampling their hosts’ eccentric cuisine. After their homecoming from China in 1938 the two intrepid and indefatigable travellers (with Isherwood’s latest boyfriend in tow) were off to Belgium for the festive season. Here they joined up with Gerald Hamilton (the prototype of ‘Mr Norris’ in Isherwood’s Mr. Norris Changes Trains) whom both had known in Berlin. During this fortnight in Brussels (December 1938) Auden wrote a stream of about a dozen poems, including the famous ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ and his ‘Gare du Medi’, reproduced above.

Something of this poem’s sinister tone might be explained by the coincidence that Auden had just finished reading Graham Greene’s novel, Brighton Rock. He was also, of course, much exercised by the prospect of germ warfare and the immanence of a second world war. Auden had, since that July, been experimenting with Benzedrine, an amphetamine (and at that time a non-prescription drug) at breakfast, which he counter-acted with Seconal at night. This self-medication would continue until the former drug’s reclassification in the 1960s.

‘Gare du Midi’ (or ‘South Terminus’) retains a curious relevance and, with the advent of dirty bombs (nuclear devices small enough to be contained in a suitcase) may even be considered prescient. It was first published in the spring, 1939 edition of New Writing and was included in Auden’s February, 1940 collection Another Time (the first of his books to be debuted in the United States) under the auspices of Random House.

Together with the two poems mentioned previously, this volume also incorporates other verse written in the late Thirties including ‘Tell me the truth about love’, ‘Stop all the clocks’, ‘Miss Gee’, ‘Lullaby’ (Lay your sleeping head, my love…), ‘Roman Wall Blues’, ‘Law like Love’, ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’, ‘The Unknown Citizen’, ‘Spain’, ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ and ‘September 1, 1939’. The quality of this work makes Another Time easily its author’s best, most sustained collection (though it received, for the most part, a frosty reception in Britain).

The reasons behind this lack of critical acclaim are not hard to fathom: Auden and Isherwood, turning their backs on their homeland, had taken passage for New York on board the liner, SS Champlain, which left Southampton on 18th January, 1939. This flight from a country which was soon to declare war upon a totalitarian regime – the likes of which Auden had for so long, and which such eloquence, opposed – was never, quite, forgiven him. Questions were even asked at the time in Parliament.

W.H. Auden would find love in America with a much younger Brooklyn Jew, Chester Kallman (to whom Another Time would be dedicated). He would, eventually, apply for American citizenship and return to Germany (after VE Day) as an Honorary Major with the US Strategic Bombing Survey. He would die of a heart attack, after one of his poetry readings, alone, in his Viennese hotel room, at the age of sixty six.

Further reading:
Auden, W., W.H. Auden, A Selection by the Author, Penguin (1958)
Bennett, A., Poetry in Motion, BBC (1990)
Davenport-Hines, R., Auden, Heinemann (1996)
Fuller,J., W.H. Auden: A Commentary, Faber (1998)
Osbourne, C., W.H. Auden, The Life of a Poet, Michael O’Mara Books (1979)

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of
‘Invictus’
by W.E. Henley (1849-1903)

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

When this great booming Broadside of a poem was written (during the early part of 1875) its author, William Ernest Henley, was twenty five years of age and languishing in a small ward of the old Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh.

The eldest son of an unsuccessful Gloucester bookseller, Henley was never to experience good health after the age of twelve, when he developed tuberculosis of the bone (which required the amputation of his left leg, below the knee, four years later). Thereafter, he was to walk using crutches and with the aid of a ‘wooden leg’. His right ankle was also affected and required support bandages. A resilient character, the young Henley determined upon a literary career and had just begun to submit work to Cornhill Magazine when he was admitted first to Margate Infirmary (where doctors wanted to remove his other leg) and then -after he’d discharged himself- to the teaching hospital in Edinburgh.

The twenty months or so which he spent there under the auspices of the eminent, pioneering surgeon, Professor Joseph Lister, were to be the defining period of his life. Lister -to whom he would profess an abiding gratitude- performed a succession of painful operations on the affected limb, utilising his own (currently radical) antiseptic practices, and recommending a succession of splints. Though not entirely cured, Henley kept his foot. Whilst ‘laid up’ he taught himself French and Italian and wrote the majority of his ‘In Hospital’ verse-sequence. This, consisting in the main of un-rhymed sketches of hospital life, was to be published thirteen years later in the poet’s A Book of Verse (1888) which was something of a literary sensation -reviewed in around forty publications by (amongst others) the likes of Oscar Wilde, G.B. Shaw and J.M. Barrie.

Burley and rumbustious, Henley left a strong impression on many of his acquaintances during his hospitalisation. One, Leslie Stephen (editor of Cornhill, and in Edinburgh on a lecture tour) visited his erstwhile correspondent in January, 1875, bringing along another young writer who was based in the city and had submitted work to the magazine. This was the beginning of an important friendship for both Henley and Robert Louis Stevenson: they would co-author several plays (Deacon Brodie being, perhaps, the most successful). Henley, who throughout his adult life affected a thick, piratical beard, became the prototype for Treasure Island‘s ‘Long John Silver’. Another new acquaintance, Anna Boyle, who was visiting her brother in the infirmary, was to begin a relationship with the irascible but kindly writer culminating in their 1878 marriage (which endured until Henley’s death).

No saint, Henley -a devotee of self-reliance and affirming high-Tory, imperialistic principles- was a determinedly disputatious individual who quarrelled frequently, even with his friends. He would become estranged from Stevenson in 1888 to their deep, mutual loss.

After leaving Edinburgh’s infirmary Henley would take on a peripatetic and often impecunious career as a freelance, initially working on the research staff of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and continuing his association with Cornhill under Stephen. Later, as editor of journals such as the Magazine of Art, The New Review and, particularly, The Scots (later The National), The Observer, he would publish some of the early work of the -at the time uncelebrated- writers, Joseph Conrad, W.B. Yeats and Rudyard Kipling. In 1894 the loss of his only child, Margaret, to cerebral meningitis (aged five), would finally knock much of the spirit out of him and he would die, soon after his and Anna’s silver wedding anniversary, less than ten years later.

Sometimes also known as ‘Out of the night’, Henley’s best-known poem was much-anthologised even in his lifetime -though he, and it, have since fallen rather out-of-fashion. His own preferred title was the unrevealing ‘i.m. R.T. Hamilton Bruce (1846-1899)’. The latter was a wealthy financial-backer of The Scots Observer and a steadfast friend, known to Henley (who bestowed nick-names on just about everybody) as ‘The Infallible’. The most common title for the verses, ‘Invictus’, is latin for ‘unconquered’.

Further reading:
Atkinson,D. [Ed], The Selected Letters of W.E. Henley, Ashgate (2000)
Connell,J., W.E. Henley, Constable (1949)
Harman, C., Robert Louis Stevenson, Harper Collins (2004)

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of
‘Cargoes’
by John Masefield (1878–1967)

Quinquireme of Nineveh from sunny Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Batting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware and cheap tin trays.

The year 1902 (in which above poem was composed) represented something of a turning-point for John Masefield: it was the same year that his first book, Salt-Water Ballads -which would make his name- was published.

Born in Ledbury, the second son of a Hertfordshire solicitor, Masefield was orphaned in 1891 and sent (at the age of thirteen) to join HMS Conway, a training-ship moored on the Mersey, as a sea-cadet. Here he was to serve his maritime-apprenticeship for a career in the Merchant navy, an idea which had come originally from his new guardian, his aunt Kate. Unfortunately, as he discovered after embarkation on the four-masted barque Gilcruix for the ‘Nitrate-run’ into Chile, he was to prove an irremediable victim to violent sea-sickness, a condition exacerbated by a four-week passage around the notorious Cape Horn. Under pressure from his aunt, Masefield signed-up for a second voyage, this time for the Far East, but after crossing the Atlantic to New York he abandoned the venture altogether and found work first in a bar and then in a carpet factory. These early experiences were to instil within him a fellow-feeling for the underdog. It is, perhaps, surprizing that a writer who so loved the sea -and has come to be so closely associated with it- should have spent so little time upon it as an active sailor.

Passing to years 1898 to 1901 (after his return to England) in the employ of the Capital and Counties Bank, as a clerk in the Kings Street, Covent Garden branch, ‘Jack’ Masefield would get his ‘lucky break’ through being invited to an evening meal at W.B.Yeats’ Bloomsbury rooms in the November of 1900. A great admirer of the Irishman’s work, the younger man was adopted into The Master’s circle, making useful literary contact with the likes of lady Augusta Gregory and the scholar-poet of the British Museum, Laurence Binyon. It was the latter who ‘pulled strings’ to find Masefield more congenial work, firstly in helping to prepare the footnotes to a new edition of John Keats’ works and secondly as Exhibition Secretary (throughout 1902) to Wolverhampton’s new Art Gallery. It was also at one of Binyon’s dinner parties that he would meet his future wife (of 57 years) Constance Crommelin, one of the dedicatees of Salt-Water Ballads. During this same period Masefield continued to rent lodgings at number 15, Coram street (an easy walk from Yeats’ house). His poetry had begun to appear in publications such as The Outlook, The Tatler and The Speaker (which also printed two of his book reviews and a series of semi-autobiographical articles, ‘A Measure of Shifting Sand’).

‘Cargoes’ was not included in Salt-Water Ballads -a title suggested by Kipling’s (1892) Barrack Room Ballads – which brought its author a measure of financial security, selling-out its first edition of 500 within six months. The verses would wait eight years before their inclusion in Masefield’s third book of poetry, Ballads and Poems (1910). The poet’s grasp of geography has been questioned many times: Nineveh (the ancient capital of Assyria on the east bank of the Tigris) was situated 200 miles inland. To an enquirer, a Mr. Fawkes, the writer suggested (in 1930) that ‘It has often puzzled myself that a quinquireme owned in Nineveh should be rowing to Palestine, but perhaps before the Flood fully subsided such things were possible’. A ‘Quinquireme’ was a large galley dating from around the fourth century B.C. ‘Ophir’ was a mythical land of gold referred to in the book of Genesis and that of Kings. ‘Moidores’ were Portuguese golden coins dating from the mid-seventeenth century.

In 1911 Masefield’s long, narrative poem The Everlasting Mercy (about the religious conversion of a blaspheming poacher) secured him a wider reputation which, together with his war-work during the first world war, culminated in his recommendation for the post of poet laureate in April, 1930. Boars Hill (near Oxford), where the Masefields had been living since 1919, thus rather monopolised the laureateship -as the previous incumbent, Robert Bridges, had also made his home there. When he heard of the news, the Cambridge poet, scholar -and another potential candidate- A.E. Houseman wrote, good-humouredly, to Masefield ‘In sporting circles here they are asking the question: if Boars Hill get it three times, do they keep it?’ The new laureate would continue to publish prolifically (if unevenly) into his eighties. He would die, full of honours, in his ninetieth year -the second-longest serving laureate (after Tennyson).

Further reading:
Errington, P. [Ed.], Sea-Fever: Selected Poems of John Masefield, Carcanet (2005)
Russel, N., Poets by Appointment: Britain’s Laureates, Blandford Press (1981)
Babington Smith, C., John Masefield, A Life, Hamish Hamilton (1978)

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of
‘Epitaph On a Hare’
by William Cowper (1731-1800)

Here lies, whom hound did ne’er pursue,
Nor swifter greyhound follow,
Whose footprints ne’er tainted morning dew,
Nor ear heard huntsman’s ‘Hallo,’

Old Tiney, surliest of his kind,
Who, nurs’d with tender care,
And to domestic bounds confin’d
Was still a wild jack-hare.

Though duly from my hand he took
His pittance ev’ry night,
He did it with a jealous look,
And, when he could, would bite.

His diet was of wheaten bread,
And milk, and oats, and straw,
Thistles, or lettuces instead,
With sand to scour his maw.

On twigs of hawthorn he regal’d,
On pippins’ russet peel;
And, when his juicy salads fail’d,
Slic’d carrot pleas’d him well.

A Turkey carpet was his lawn,
Whereon he lov’d to bound,
To skip and gambol like a fawn,
And swing his rump around.

His frisking was at evening hours,
For then he lost his fear;
But most before approaching showers
Or when a storm drew near.

Eight years and five round-rolling moons
He thus saw steal away,
Dozing out his idle noons,
And every night at play.

I kept him for his humor’s sake
For he would oft beguile
My heart of thoughts that made it ache,
And force me to a smile.

But now, beneath his walnut-shade
He finds his long, last home,
And waits in snug concealment laid,
Till gentler Puss shall come.

He, still more aged, feels the shocks
From which no care can save,
And, partner once of Tiney’s box,
Must soon partake his grave.

William Cowper (he choose to pronounce his name ‘Cooper’) was born with many advantages but also with a constitution disposed towards depression -possibly an inheritance from his father, John, chaplain to George II. His mother (nee Donne) was a descendent of the poet and divine, John Donne, and her death -when William was six- was a shattering experience for him. Bullying at school, and a rather fraught relationship with his cousin and sweetheart, Theadora, afflicted an abnormally sensitive nature which was ill-suited to the legal career for which he’d seemed predestined (there were previous Lord Chancellors from both sides of his family), After studying at the Middle Temple and being called to the bar (1754) he lost -in quick succession- his father, his best friend sir William Russell (in a swimming accident on the Thames) and concluded his courtship of Theadora (‘Delia’) -though they would both remain unmarried and devoted to each other. In 1763, through family influence, he was offered a choice of three near-sinecures in the offices of the House of Lords but, under the stress of a forthcoming public examination, made several attempts at suicide (involving self-poisoning, stabbing and hanging) and was admitted to Dr. Cotton’s Collegium Insanoram, St. Albans. During the mid-sixties Cowper’s recovery was aided by two new friends of great importance in his later life. The first, Mary Unwin, became -after her husband’s death- his house-keeper and a kind of surrogate mother. The second, Rev. John (‘Amazing Grace’) Newton, vicar at Olney (Bucks), and the reformed ex-captain of a slave-ship, chimed perfectly with Cowper’s already well-formed sense of religious zeal. The two would publish their joint-work Olney Hymns in 1779. It was in order to be closer to Newton that Cowper moved to Olney (with the remainder of Mrs Unwin’s family in tow), eventually settling at ‘Orchard side’ where he would live between February, 1768 and November, 1786.

Situated close to the town’s market place, ‘Orchard side’ consisted of two semi-detached houses dating from around 1700. Surrounded by Public Houses and labourer’s cottages, the residence could become enveloped by mist off the nearby river Ouse. The quarter’s occupied by Cowper’s long-serving manservant, Sam Roberts, were damp and rat-infested; however, the dwellings came with a large-ish garden and a summer-house (where the poet could sit, entertain friends or write). Cowper enjoyed assisting his new friend, Newton, with his parochial duties but local gossip, revolving around his -almost certainly platonic- relationship with Mrs Unwin, seems to have precipitated another period of nervous and spiritual crisis during which he experienced delusions both that God was abandoning him and that he was being poisoned.

‘Epitaph on a Hare’ dates from circa 1782. The poet, who’d always loved animals, was recuperating from this second breakdown when he was offered (in the spring of 1774) the gift of a leveret by some local children, who had been unsure how to look after it. Word soon spread of his affinity with wild animals and he was soon inundated with enough young hares (as he later wrote) ‘to stock a paddock’. Three hares became particular favourites, ‘Puss’, ‘Tiney’ and ‘Bess’ (all male despite their names). They had their hutches in orchard side’s hall and a small doorway was made in the wall, allowing them access to his parlour of an evening. Cowper described the arrangements he’d made for his new pets in a letter: ‘Immediately commencing carpentry, I built them houses to sleep in; each had a separate apartment so contrived that their ordure would pass through the bottom of it; an earthenware pan placed under each received whatsoever fell, which duly emptied and washed, thus kept sweet and clean. In the daytime they had the range of the hall, and at night retired into his own bed, never intruding into that of another’. There was to be a great commotion in August 1780 when Puss escaped by gnawing through ‘the springs of a lattice work’. The hare almost drowned but was rescued by a workman lifting him by his ears and returning him, with only minor injuries, for a reward of four shillings.

The tamest hare, Bess, died after only a year but the other two lived on. Tiney, the wildest, died at the age of eight and was buried under a walnut tree -with a carrot for company. Puss, despite the writer’s gloomy prognostications, died (aged almost twelve) four years after Tiney, on March 9th, 1786, ‘between twelve and one, at noon, of old age, and apparently without pain’. The latter had been Cowper’s special favourite.

An early opponent of fox-hunting and other blood-sports, Cowper kept at various times -and additionally to his hares- an assorted menagerie of rabbits, guinea pigs, two dogs, a squirrel, a number of cats, pigeons, a jay, two goldfinches, two canaries, a starling, several robins, several linnets and a magpie plus -more conventionally- hens, geese and ducks. He established a reputation for being so adept with hares that The Gentleman’s Magazine published an essay by him on their upkeep. The diet he describes in the poem would have been very sustaining. Cowper’s diligent animal husbandry undoubtedly had a therapeutic effect -helping, perhaps, to counterbalance his continuing habit of laudanum misuse.

This same year, 1782, Cowper published his debut collection of verse, Poems, and wrote what was to become one of his best-known narratives, The Diverting History of John Gilpin. He would go on to translate Homer and to receive a royal pension of £300, a tribute to his status as probably the best-known English poet of the late Eighteenth century. He would change houses several more times before settling, finally, in East Dereham, Norfolk, where he expired (according to his doctor) of a ‘worn-out constitution’.

Further reading:
Cooper, W., William Cowper: Selected Poems, Routledge (2003)
Ella, G., William Cowper – Poet of Paradise, Evangelical press (1993)
Mason, J. & Mason, D., The Hare, Merlin Unwin (2005) (about the animal, rather than the poem)

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of
‘Tichborne’s Elegy’ (1586)
by Chidiock Tichborne (c. 1562-1586)

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain;
The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

My tale was heard and yet it was not told,
My fruit is fall’n, and yet my leaves are green,
My youth is spent and yet I am not old,
I saw the world and yet I was not seen;
My thread is cut and yet it is not spun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

I sought my death and found it in my womb,
I looked for life and saw it was a shade,
I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb,
And now I die, and now I was but made;
My glass is full, and now my glass is run,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

Dr. Johnson famously remarked that if you have been told that you are to die in the morning ‘it concentrates the mind wonderfully’. This seems to have been the case here as this poem’s date of composition has been traditionally ascribed to 19th September, 1586 -the night before its author’s execution.

The Tichborne family had owned land at Tichborne, near Winchester, since the twelfth century. Chidiock’s father, Peter, who had a history of imprisonment for recusancy, came from a lesser branch and had married in August, 1562, making it likely that Chidiock was in his early twenties at the time of his death. He had been named in honour of his father’s patron, Lord Chidiock Paulet (a distant kinsman).

Often people fail to grasp just how much the reign of ‘Good Queen Bess’ was one riven by religious intolerance -‘liberal’ only in its use of agents provocateurs, fines, imprisonment and torture as a means of dealing with those of ‘popish tendencies’. To be a member of an ardent catholic family -as the Tichbornes undoubtedly were- was to be subjected to many forms of discrimination, harassment and bigotry.

In the June of 1586 the younger Tichborne was inducted into the so-called ‘Babington plot’ (whose aim was to assassinate Elizabeth I and replace her with her catholic cousin, Mary queen of Scots). This attempt at a coup d’etat was foiled by Elizabeth’s spymaster, Francis Walshingham, and most of the conspirators fled -though Tichborne, who had somehow injured his leg, was obliged to remain in London, and soon captured.

The elegy was included in a letter to his wife, Agnes, written during his detention in the tower of London. It was first published in Verses of Praise and Joye (1586) by John Wolfe in a volume intended to celebrate the queen’s survival. It is unusual in that it is comprised almost entirely of monosyllabic words. The elegy can be readily understand apart from the antiquated ‘Tares’ (a type of weed).

Tichborne’s fate was to be hanged, drawn and quartered (along with his co-conspirators Anthony Babington, John Ballard and four others) in St. Giles Field. He addressed the crowd prior to this -the customary punishment for Treason- being performed upon him. When told that this grusome spectacle had merely increased sympathy towards the remaining seven plotters held in custody, Elizabeth ‘commuted’ their execution to simple hanging. The Babington plot would lead directly to Mary Queen of Scots’ implication and her own execution (by beheading) some five months later.

FURTHER READING:
McLean, T. (1982) The Recusant Legend: Chidiock Tichborne, History Today, Vol 32, Issue 5;
Nichol, C. (1992) The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, Cape (very good background reading on Elizabethan dissent);
Williams, P. (2004) ‘Babington, Anthony (1561-1586)’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press.

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Kevin Saving

Palaeoscriptology of
‘The Sunlight on the Garden’ (1936)
by Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.

This poem, one of its author’s finest, is notably generous, tender and reconciliatory. It was written, for the poet’s erstwhile wife, in late 1936 -some weeks after their Decree Absolute came through. They’d married, to the consternation of both families, six years earlier. Mary MacNeice (nee Ezra, 1908-1991) was the daughter -from her first marriage- of the formidable and eccentric society hostess Marie Beazley. MacNeice describes Mary (in his posthumously published autobiography The Strings Are False) as being ‘like a little volcano that is never off the boil’. In this same work (in which she is called ‘Mariette’) her conversation is characterized as ‘like a barber’s scissors when he is giving his last touches to the back of your head, clicking away very fast, very deftly, but apparently not making contact’. She had, however, been ‘the best dancer in Oxford’.

Obviously, any marriage is a story with (at least) two narrators. By October 1935 the couple were renting ‘Highfield cottage’, previously a coachman’s quarters, in Selly Park, south Birmingham. MacNeice was working at that time as Assistant Lecturer in Classics at the local university. Staying with them was their mutual friend the former American Football star Charles Katzman (‘Tsalic’ in The Strings Are False) who, it was said, looked a bit like Clark Gable. Louis and Katzman (his passenger) were involved in a car accident on the 11th which left the latter unconscious and in hospital. The next month (subsequent to their American friend’s recovery after convalescing at Highfield) was a shattering one for MacNeice. He was prosecuted for dangerous driving by the police, received a compensation demand from the driver of the vehicle with which he’d collided -and then (on the 18th November) a spark from the sitting room fire set their cottage’s floor alight. The poet borrowed an axe and smashed the cement hearth while his wife threw bucket after bucket of water onto the burning beams below. The following day she left him, their eighteen month old son, Daniel, and their massive borzoi dog, ‘Betsy’, to be with Katzman in London.

‘The Sunlight in the Garden’ was written almost exactly a year after the events described above. By this time MacNeice had re-established himself as a lecturer in Latin at London university’s Bedford college for women and was living in an ‘attractive garden flat’ in Keats Grove, Hampstead (fifty yards from John Keats’ old residence, Wentworth Place), sublet from an old Oxfordian contemporary, the editor and critic Geoffrey Grigson. Whereas ‘Highfield’ cottage had not had its own garden, this flat boasted a lawn with two large sycamores and rose bushes. It may well have reminded its tenant of an earlier, prelapsarian garden -that of his father’s Carrickfergus rectory, which had looked out over Belfast lough.

The poem utilizes an idiosyncratic variant of an envelope rhyme scheme (abcbba) and was originally entitled ‘Song’. Its first appearance was in The Listener (January, 1937) before it was collected in The Earth Compels (1938). ‘We are dying, Egypt, dying’ is a Shakespearean quotation: the mortally wounded Mark Anthony to his lover, Cleopatra. The phrase ‘sonnets and birds descend’ sounds rather Audenesque. Wystan Auden (with whom MacNeice had recently toured Iceland) was at this time gradually replacing Anthony Blunt (1907-1983, aesthete, closet communist and spy/’traitor’ -known to MacNeice since his Marlborough public schooldays) as the poet’s most influential ‘sounding board’.

The immediate aftermath of his marriage breakup was, for MacNeice, a ‘year of intrigue, spiritual squalor and anxiety’. He’d swiftly instituted divorce proceedings and been granted custody of Daniel but found, to his chagrin, that his capricious mother-in-law had hired a private detective to ‘shadow’ him (presumably in the hope of unearthing an ‘indiscretion’). Of these there were to be a number -the next eighteen months seeing the ‘irredeemably heterosexual’ writer (Blunt’s description) embroiled in affaires d’armour with two very different women, Leonora Corbett and Nancy Coldstream. On 30th November, 1936, Mary married Charles Katzman. She’d become pregnant very early in their relationship but had had an abortion -which she would later come to regret. Louis, who’d offered to take her back, wrote congratulating her on the marriage ‘I do with all my heart wish you both everything you want and send you all my love as ever’. She, in turn, wrote ‘that the only person who has ever shown me what I feel is real love, in an all round sense -i.e. husband, mother, father, everything is YOU’. She’d left him because she felt ‘lonely in her mind’. What Louis’ own father, by now an Anglican bishop, thought about it all has not been fully recorded. MacNeice would later visit the Katzmans in the United Stated but (in 1953) would do everything in his power to prevent Daniel from emigrating in order to be with his natural mother (who’d parted from Katzman three years earlier). The poet would himself later remarry but -prone by now both to a ‘roving eye’ and to alcoholic excess- this, his second marriage, would also fail.

MacNeice would die, aged fifty five, of pneumonia contracted after a day spent recording sound effects in the Settle caves for his B.B.C. employers. He’d been caught by a heavy storm on the Yorkshire moors and had failed to change his heavily-soaked clothing. Anthony Blunt would be publicly unmasked as a soviet spy in 1979. It is an interesting conjecture whether the atheistic, left-leaning poet ever ‘saw through’ his friend’s suave, pro-establishment facade (they’d visited Spain together just before its civil war in March/April. 1936). Then again, this was the nineteen thirties and infidelity -of one kind or another- was somehow always in the air.

FURTHER READING:
Allison, J. (2010) Selected Letters of Louis Macneice, Faber and Faber;
MacNeice, L. (1965) (Ed. Dodds, E.) The Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography, Faber and Faber;
MacNeice, L. (2007) Collected Poems, Faber and Faber;
Stallworthy, J. (1995) Louis MacNeice, Faber and Faber.

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