How Did The Devil Come? Twentieth-Century Poets
Back in August 2019 when I uploaded my first post in this blog I mentioned, in the context of a number of very moving and emotive Peanuts Sunday strips from the 1970s, that nothing I had read as a boy came close to exploring the feelings they did with such intensity, except perhaps for the poems we were studying at school, although that was a topic for another time. Seven years and just fourteen posts later I feel that other time has come.
Readers of my blog will know that my propensity towards melancholy retrospection made its presence felt at a quite remarkably early age. The first entry in the various diaries I kept that mentions it is from June 18th 1982, on the occasion of the last of my ‘A’ levels; I remark upon a pensiveness I felt for the whole day, reflecting on the fact that I would never again venture onto the hallowed turf of Alsop Comprehensive School in Walton, Liverpool, to sit in a lesson or exam, and I realised at the time that this was a major milestone in my short life. But in fact, at least two years before that, I had absorbed and committed to memory the John Betjeman poem Norfolk, and especially its opening line – “How did the Devil come? When first attack?” When reading this poem for the first time I immediately recognised the emotion it so heartrendingly expresses as one that would be close to my heart forever.
For English Lit ‘O’ level we studied a number of poems from an old text book called Ten Twentieth-Century Poets edited by the teacher, editor and poetry anthologist Maurice Wollman (a man about whom, despite much digging and despite his undoubted impact upon the study of poetry in British schools in the twentieth century, I have been unable to unearth anything much in the way of biographical detail). The book had a sufficient impact on me that when a decade and a half later I saw it among the old schoolbooks (from Cheam County Secondary School) owned by the woman who would go on to be Mrs Carey I was absolutely delighted. It’s in a much dilapidated condition, the spine ready at any point to detach itself from the rest of the book, but it will always have a cherished place on my shelves.
The ten poets whose works were included were: W H Auden, John Betjeman, Walter de la Mare, T S Eliot, Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Edwin Muir, Edward Thomas, W B Yeats and Andrew Young. Half of them were still alive when my (and my wife’s) copy of the anthology was published in 1963, but of course they are all long dead now. Looking through the table of contents I can see that we must have studied in our lessons somewhere between 20 and 30 of the 92 poems in the book, and the only poets whose works we didn’t touch were, for some reason, Hardy and Young. I can’t even remember after all these years whether any of the poems we studied ever actually featured in the exams at the end or whether our learning about them was merely part of a more general study of poetic techniques. At the time the decision as to which of the poems we would study on a given day seemed a fairly arbitrary one and it didn’t appear to matter much if any of us were off school sick on the day a particular poem was studied.
Being affected so deeply by these poems I think was one of many indicators I had that I was not really like the other kids my age (along with those obsessions with buses, trams and toy soldiers). One of the earliest I remember studying was Eliot’s Journey of the Magi – I think it must have been some time in 1978/9 when I would have been around 15. I felt at the time that I could not remember ever reading anything quite so profound and I genuinely struggled to understand what the final verse was saying to us about life and death and change. Not so it seemed my classmate Phil Gedling, or Gedo as we knew him. After a full double period of our excellent English teacher ‘Skippy’ Johnson (we would go on to have a terrible relationship during my rebel phase a year or two later but he was in fact excellent) explaining and discussing the poem, he asked as the bell went if there were any questions. Up went Gedo’s hand and he cried out (imagine if you will the thickest scouse accent) “Yeah, sir, what’s a ‘maggy’?”
I quickly grew to love the poetry of all of the writers from the book that we studied, and it was curious to learn that, at such an early age, I could be wistfully nostalgic, and nostalgic for a past or a world that I had never experienced and knew little about. My reaction to John Betjeman in particular was and is perplexing. I aways feel that I should have hated him, and that the more I learned about him the more contempt I should have had for his works. Bourgeois to his core (and me a burgeoning Marxist), he was the champion of the middle class and the suburban, while in his private life he appeared to be a snob, a social climber and pals with the fascist likes of Oswald Mosley and Diana Mitford. But from the time I read those opening lines of the poem Norfolk, How did the Devil come, when first attack, I felt a strong sense of kinship that has never left me. The cri de coeur that ends the same poem could be my motto:
Time, bring back
The rapturous ignorance of long ago.
The peace, before the dreadful daylight starts,
Of unkept promises and broken hearts.
Betjeman became in later life a one-man army fighting a rearguard action to stave off the agents of change and decay, particularly in the area of architecture, and while we would surely disagree on what those agents are and what changes count as good, the melancholy nostalgia driving his actions is one with which I can obviously sympathise. As, perhaps, can anyone who has ever sighed at the sight of a green and pleasant vista disfigured by a row of enormous pylons or a sterile grey strip of concrete:
And over all the land, instead of trees,
Clean poles and wire will whisper in the breeze.
We’ll keep one ancient village just to show
What England once was when the times were slow
Betjeman of course never let his aversion to change interfere with his growing presence on newfangled media such as TV, and he cannily played on the old fogey image he presented in order to create a loved and recognisable TV persona. That is not to say that I think there is anything in the least cynical about the love he expresses for the country he saw vanishing before his eyes; and I think that when I am walking I connect to my inner Betjeman; seeking to cast off contemporary England and pursue his ghost down the wintry lanes, through the quiet woods and inside the old parish churches that carry the smell of the centuries past.
While I took much pleasure in Betjeman’s warming biscuit-tin-lid images of old England (“Mirrored in ponds and seen through gates, sweet uneventful countryside”, a line I often think of when I am out walking) I probably had a greater liking for the more whimsical elements of Robert Frost, the long-lived (1874-1963) Voice of New England who has given us, among other things, the hauntingly beautiful Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening (“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”. Inspired repetition!). Betjeman can be playful but Frost to me opened up deeper and more haunting possibilities:
It is under the small, dim, summer star
I know not who these mute folk are
Who share the unlit place with me-
Those stones out under the low-limbed tree
Doubtless bear names that the mosses mar.
Or:
I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly from the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
Apart from Betjeman and Frost my other favourite from the book is Edward Thomas, often regarded as a war poet even though most of his poems were written before he joined the British Army during the First World War. A friend of Frost’s, they would go walking together, and Thomas’s frequent indecision about which way to follow prompted one of Frost’s more famous poems, The Road Not Taken:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.
The first verse of which is another that I find popping into my head whenever I do a walk. The poem was a gentle dig at Thomas’s indecisiveness but its effects were disastrous. Thomas thought seriously about the indecisiveness that his friend had highlighted and the poem is regarded as a major factor in his decision to enlist, quite voluntarily as at 37 he was above the maximum age for conscription at the time. Sadly Thomas was killed in action at Arras in 1917 and Frost often subsequently commented on the painful irony of the poem’s conclusion:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Most of Thomas’s poems, even many of the ones that mention the war, are about nature or contain vignettes of country life. I came to love them very much and in particular the poem Roads, lines of which have always run through my mind whenever I find myself walking alone on a country road. The poem concludes:
Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance:
Whatever the road bring
To me or take from me,
They keep me company
With their pattering,
Crowding the solitude
Of the loops over the downs,
Hushing the roar of towns
and their brief multitude.
Apart from the use of ‘multitude’ as an abstract noun, the opposite of ‘solitude’, which I have always thought was a brilliantly distinctive deployment of a familiar word, I love the idea of being kept company during a solitary walk on a country road by silent but contented ghosts – and the thought that the roar of towns, something that often feels all-encompassing in our modern world, may be regarded as ‘brief’ and easily hushed by comparison.
The poetry we studied at school and the different ways it made me feel was just one of the things for which I became grateful and which could provide comfort during days of sadness or anxiety – Like the protagonist in the Paul Simon song I Am A Rock Betjeman and Frost and Thomas were up there with Peanuts, Tintin and Asterix the Gaul in my armoury of protective distractions. It’s no accident that the title of my blog is just one from a long list of possibilities all informed by the love of poetry picked up from Maurice Wollman’s selection. I hope those old poems are still taught in our schools and there are some fortunate kids like me who are still able to get as much from them.
It must be noted with some regret, however, that reading and admiring these poems in no way gave me the slightest ability to write any of my own. Between the ages of 15 and about 25 I wrote about a hundred poems and each and every one of them makes my toes curl to read them now. My brother at Oxford managed to win the David Duff Poetry Prize, and confident that I could do the same when I was there I sent off one one of mine; I didn’t even bother writing a new one for the occasion, I just sent one of my old ones off. Not only did I not win the prize, I never heard from them, no acknowledgement that they had received my submission, nothing. I could only conclude that they regarded my submission as a joke, which was hurtful and chastening – I felt like Snoopy receiving his abusive rejection slip from his publisher – but perhaps salutary. If, as Robert Louis Stevenson said, wine is bottled poetry, mine is the stuff in the plastic bottle that’s still unopened at the end of a student party.
Comments