Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature 9780674985360

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H E A R I N G ­T H I N G S

HEARING ­T HINGS THE WORK OF SOUND IN LIT­ER­A­TURE

ANGELA LEIGHTON

THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts London, ­England  2018

Copyright © 2018 by Angela Leighton All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca First printing Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Leighton, Angela, 1954–­author. Title: Hearing ­t hings : the work of sound in lit­er­a­t ure / Angela Leighton. Description: Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017051393 | ISBN 9780674983496 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Senses and sensation in lit­er­a­t ure. | Hearing. | Spoken word poetry. Classification: LCC PN56.S47 L45 2018 | DDC 801/.9—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https:// ­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2017051393 Cover photograph: ONiONAstudio / Thinkstock / Getty Images Cover design: Jill Breitbarth

Contents

Sound’s Work: An Introduction ​1

1 Listening Thresholds ​19



2 Tennyson’s Hum ​49



3 Humming Tennyson: Christina Rossetti and ­Virginia Woolf ​70

4 Pennies and Horse­play: W. B. Yeats’s Recalls ​96

5 “Coo-­ee”: Calling Walter de la Mare, Edward Thomas, Robert Frost ​117

6 A Book, a Face, a Phantom: Walter de la Mare’s “The Green Room” ​145



7 Hearing Something: Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorie Graham ​158

8 “Wherever You Listen From”: W. S. Graham’s Art of the Letter ​181



9 Incarnations in the Ear: Hearing Presence in Les Murray ​203



10 Justifying Time in Ticks and Tocks ​226



11 Poetry’s Knowing: So What Do We Know? ​251

BIBLIOGRAPHY ​2 73 ACKNOWL­E DGMENTS ​ 287 INDEX ​ 2 91

Sound’s Work: An Introduction My own voice cheered me, and, far more, the mind’s Internal echo of the imperfect sound; To both I listened. . . . william words­worth Nicht mehr für Ohren . . . ​: Klang, der, wie ein tieferes Ohr, uns, scheinbar Hörende, hört. rainer maria rilke [No more for ears . . . ​: sound, which, like a deeper ear, hears us, the seemingly hearing ones.] In 1879, Gerard Manley Hopkins pondered the very nature of reading in answer to a criticism of his poem “The Loss of the Euridyce.” Looking at the poem again, he explained to Robert Bridges how I opened and read some lines, reading, as one commonly reads ­whether prose or verse, with the eyes, so to say, only, it struck me aghast with a kind of raw nakedness and unmitigated vio­ lence I was unprepared for: but take breath and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right. (1935, 1955: 79) The passage is a reminder that reading, even reading one’s own poem, might be a surprising and variable activity, violently challenging, on the one hand, or ­else “all right” on the other. For reading is never just one activity, a ­matter of simply recording the words on the page. As Hopkins points out, we might read very differently “with the ears”

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as opposed to “the eyes.” While all reading “commonly” requires eyes, and then a transmission of what is seen on the page into messages for the brain to understand, the idea that we might read “with the ears” then strikes with a sense of oddness, as well as subsequent rightness. Certainly at first, it might seem literally impossible, and the phrase rings with the surprise of the unfamiliar; but it also rings true, in that written words make noises as well as shapes, calling on the ear like an ­after effect of being seen and understood. And poetry, of course, is a form of language which notably heightens the noise, thus polarizing the effect of “unmitigated vio­lence,” on the one hand, and pleas­ur­able rightness on the other. Even as I read Hopkins’s own sentence ­here, I am aware of the eyes’ quick scan of the words and a nearly instant comprehension of their meaning. But if I try to read “with the ears,” struggling to adjust my senses accordingly, I find myself g ­ oing slower, no longer following the lines to the end in order to discover what is meant, but attending instead to any number of incidental rhythmic effects and sound combinations. And indeed, to do this I must change tack and “take breath”—­and then, as I read the sentence again, I won­der what taking breath might mean, since I do not need breath in order to use my ears, but only to speak, or perhaps to sing—or possibly to take a very large leap. “But take breath and read it with the ears,” Hopkins urges, with no pause for breath in his own phrase, while hinting at all ­those other breath-­taking activities which might, perhaps, also take courage and nerve. Reading “with the ears” instigates this slightly comic juggling of fact and figure, m ­ atter and meta­phor. For the poet’s injunction, though it seems to involve a s­ imple oppositional equivalence of “with the eyes” or “with the ears,” is in fact deeply dis-­equipollent. For the ear hovers somewhere between a literal and a meta­phorical faculty in the work of reading, between a sense perception, alert to real noises, and a figure for hearing which might pay attention to sounds on the page that are self-­evidently inaudible. To think about how the ear might read is to start, then, perhaps by taking breath—­with the sense of pause and re­orientation that that involves— in order to make sense of a phrase that rings with the surprise of a new thought . . . ​indeed in the ear.

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This book is a meditation on sound and on how we might listen to it, in lit­er­a­t ure. In it I want to explore the ways that writers themselves, mostly poets but also some novelists, describe the work of the ear as crucial to writing, as well as to reading. Such descriptions often consist of brief insights, passing comments, suddenly ringing phrases, like Hopkins’s own, that retain the creative difficulty and won­der of their subject while struggling to describe a form of attention which slips elusively between the perceptual and the imaginary. For hearing ­things when t­ here is nothing, yet also every­thing, to be heard involves an imaginative extension of hearing which, by its very nature, overrides the empirical workings of the ear. Moreover, the fact that so many writers, particularly from the nineteenth to the twenty-­first centuries, have stressed the importance of hearing, as the mainspring of both composition and interpretation, might be a reminder of something in the literary text which challenges our critical commonplaces, as well as perhaps our very styles of critical writing. This book hopes to push out the bound­aries of such writing, even if just by a ­little, in its juxtapositions of story and interpretation, historical broad sweep and local close reading, as it explores from several ­dif­fer­ent ­angles sound’s work in lit­er­a­t ure. Sound as a physical entity, of course, is already a complex object, and it is worth remembering a few facts about it. As Kruth and Stobart point out in the introduction to their book Sound, “­There is no perfect point of hearing; only interpretations” (2000: 4). Obviously, the eye sees what is literally before it, verifiably t­ here, but the ear must make assumptions about the origin of what it hears. For ­t here is no sound which is not already on its way, and way out, its existence dependent on the vari­ous densities of ­matter through which it travels and by which it is tuned. In the vacuum of outer space, t­ here is no sound at all, and no possibility of sound. In that anacoustic zone the ear meets its severest challenge of silence. For sound is always contingent on other ­t hings, being relative to this planet’s par­t ic­u ­lar conditions of air and atmosphere, substance and ­matter. Sonic booms, Doppler shifts, whispering galleries, wolf notes, and whistlers are all

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reminders that, far from being a fixed given, emitted from an object and correspondingly heard, sound depends on a carry­ing medium which can deflect and change it. Within the limited sphere of this planet, however, sound is also eerily unlimited. For as Don Ihde points out in his fine early book Listening and Voice, “Physically even molecules sound” (1976, 2007: 55). The tiniest moving particles must emit some noise, and it is only the ­human ear’s very narrow range of hearing which gives us the imaginary blessing of silence. Other­wise, the racket of this moving, living planet might, if we could hear it, be maddening and deafening. Both the ear’s limitation, and the unnerving reach and ubiquity of sound, are facts explored by lit­er­a­t ure’s own awareness of the written word’s mixed silence and audibility. As well as being an invisible, altering noise, sound is also a physical object which literally touches the ear when heard. At some frequencies, this might be unbearable. As Murray Schaffer points out in The Soundscape, “Hearing and touch meet where the lower frequencies of audible sound pass over to tactile vibrations (at about 20 hertz). Hearing is a way of touching at a distance” (1977: 11). Although he writes “at a distance,” for that is where the object seems to be, of course a­ ctual soundwaves touch the ear literally, at no distance, and thus set its mechanisms for hearing in motion. Jonathan Ashmore explains, “The role of the cochlea is to feed information about sound as a physical stimulus into the auditory nerve, which relays an encoded form of the sound on to the brain as a pattern of activity in its separate fibres” (2000: 65). Sound is always a touch, but is only registered as such when it hurts. To think about sound at all is thus to have to separate an invisible moving object from its source, to consider the ambience through which it travels—­differently, through air, ­water, or a double-­glazed win­dow—­while registering the near-­limits of our senses of both touch and hearing. It is not surprising, then, that sound lends itself to a vocabulary of the preternatural. While the sense of sight verifies without any need for interpretation, hearing, with its often surmised or memorized location of origins, slips easily into a more distant apprehension, memory, or sometimes even imagination of a sound. As David Toop suggests in Sinister Resonance, “Sound is a haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location in space is ambiguous and whose existence in

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time is transitory” (2010: xv). For the sound we hear is already in medias res, a passenger through time, cut off from its cause and quickly lost as it fades. To think about hearing is therefore to have to think without fixities and bound­aries, in the flux of time that also runs through our very sentences for thinking. Heard in time, and then lost in time, sound quickly traverses the spectrum from closely sensed object to mere faded after-­ring, remembered and interpreted in the struck quiet it leaves b ­ ehind. So if ­actual sound is itself a transient passenger, invisible and always to be interpreted by the ear, how much more acute is the strange interpretability of sound in the written word, the ghost effects of which are built into its workings. For all reading is a m ­ atter of hearing ­t hings, in both the literal and the ghostly sense of that phrase. As Walter J. Ong points out in Orality and Literacy, “ ‘Reading’ a text means converting it to sound, aloud or in the imagination[. . . . ​] Writing can never dispense with orality” (1982, 2012: 8). In ­silent reading, which is the subject of this book, we certainly hear something, but it remains fluid, alterable, uncertain. Moreover, ­t here is a difference between reading a nonliterary and a literary text. In the case of the first, so long as we understand the vocabulary, the passage is swift from eye to brain, the message quickly understood and the ear’s l­ abor reduced to a minimum. In the case of the second, the act of translating visual collocations of letters on the page into meaningful messages involves a delaying diversion through the ear, causing the reader to linger in a kind of aural distraction, which makes dif­fer­ent demands and might even hold us up forever in its reverberating halls. Garrett Stewart, in Reading Voices, catches the contradiction of this ­silent literary reading in a suggestive antithesis when he proposes near the start, “When we read to ourselves, our ears hear nothing. Where we read, however, we listen” (1990: 11). To what do we listen, then, if “our ears hear nothing”? As with Hopkins, the statement involves a slippage between the ear as passive ­perceiver of audible noise, and the ear as recaller, surmiser, or re­ imaginer of noise. The purpose of lit­er­a­t ure is somehow to turn up the volume of that listening when we hear “nothing,” to make it speak or sing. Stewart’s phrase “we listen” remains tantalizingly objectless, thus drawing into its radius, even for the reader who reads

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it, the action of memory, surmise, imagination. For as Susan Stewart points out, writing about composition as well as reading in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, “­Because we cannot reconstitute t­ hese auditory conditions of the poem’s production, our recalling ­w ill always have a dimension of imagination” (2002: 69). Although her object is the poetic lyric ­here, the sense that “we are always recalling sound with only some regard to an originating auditory experience” (68) applies to all reading of literary texts, with their constant calls on our ability to recall, not only the words we have just read but the sounds such words might make, read again, or read elsewhere, or heard somehow echoing from voices conjured from other remembered texts. Between the silence of the page which greets us, and the sounds we recall or imagine and for which we might still listen at the end, lit­er­a­t ure happens. It is this puzzle of hearing ­t hings in lit­er­a­t ure which lies at the heart of this book. It is a puzzle that I want to enter into, rather than dissect and solve, for this is a puzzle to which writers themselves constantly return, with a sense of its always unfinished mystery, as well as its infinitely resourceful possibilities. “Write with the ear to the speaking voice” (2006: 643), urges Robert Frost, for example, reversing the usual order to insist that the ear writes. The sentence is one of ­those surprising expressions which makes more sense for being a ­little resistant, like Hopkins’s “read it with the ears” (1935, 1955: 79). To write or read “with the ear” is to start to turn this traditionally passive faculty into an active worker. For as Frost also claims of sounds, the ear is “no more than their summoner—­t he imagination of the ear” (2006: 642). The ear writes or reads by summoning tones of voice from any word or phrase, and thus enacts a ghostly activity, a calling or conjuring up of speech literally unspoken, but heard in the infinite layerings of remembered usage, ­actual and literary. As he also points out, “We value poetry too much as it makes pictures. The imagination of the ear is more peculiarly poetical than the imaginative eye” (642). The “imagination of the ear” is a phrase that, with its implied clash of registers between image and sound, sight and hearing, also gives pause, asks us to take breath, while calling attention to a juxtaposition which ­w ill not naturalize instantly but jars with novelty and surprise. It reminds us not only that the ear must

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work to hear inaudible print, but also that it must imagine the intonations of what it reads, and thus be already interpreting its imagination of hearing. For example, Frost explains, although the written word “oh” looks identical to the eye, to the ear it has a wide spectrum of sounds and senses depending on the length and emphases of its voicing. “ ‘Oh’ may be as long as prolonged agony or short as slight surprise” (645), he writes, offering six differently voiced examples. To read “oh” silently on the page is, first to hear all t­ hose possibilities jostling for attention, then to work at determining the most likely. Such se­lection and interpretation takes time, and may moreover never finish since each reading raises the ghost of a dif­ fer­ent voice, a dif­fer­ent tone, rhythm, or stress, and therefore arrives at a dif­fer­ent destination of meaning. For look, and you ­w ill observe the same writing unchanged on the page; but listen, and all you ­w ill detect is a murmur of possibilities in ­every phrase, always still to be summoned into speaking life. Although he does not mention Frost in his book, and although not specifically on the ear, Eric Griffiths’s The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry advances the very Frostian argument that “writing is an act of supplication to an ­imagined voice” (1989: 13). He writes that “the absence of clearly indicated sound from the silence of the written word creates a double nature in printed poetry, making it both itself and something other—­a text of hints at voicing, whose centre in utterance lies outside itself, and also an achieved pattern on the page, sal­vaged from the evanescence of the voice in air” (60). ­These “hints at voicing,” like Frost’s tones and intonations of voice, may have no vis­i­ble sign, but they contextually demarcate one register of, for instance, “oh,” from another. In Griffiths, such “hints” must be inwardly voiced, while they also recall and save something of the original “voice in air.” His differentiation between “voicing” and “voice” h ­ ere might lie b ­ ehind Jonathan Culler’s similar separation of the two in his recent book, Theory of the Lyric. In it Culler writes, “Rather than imagine that lyr­ics embody voices, we do better to say that they create effects of voicing, of aurality. Certainly a theory of the lyric must consider ­whether effects of voicing rather than voice— as in the echoing of rhyme, assonance, or alliteration, and rhythmic patterning—­are not the more fundamental dimension of lyric”

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(2015: 35). Culler’s “effects of voicing” remain located in the formal properties of lyric, whereas in Griffiths, the “voicings” or intonations of the text are “hints,” which then ask to be summoned into sound and sense by a reader-­voicer, and may be summoned differently at each read. But it is Frost who makes the ear central to ­t hese transactions. As “summoner” (2006: 642), the ear calibrates the work of sound in the text in all its varied, changing, imaginable effects. By hearing nothing literally, it makes a summons, and creates a proliferation of ghosts. ­Those critics who have considered the faculties of hearing and listening in literary works have often had to think them anew, in a language not yet hardened into familiar conceptual categories. For example, in The Poetics of French Verse, Clive Scott proposes, at one point, that the “reading of verse” is “a dialogue between a reading self and a listening self, where the listener speaks” (1998: 93). This takes some slow and never quite conclusive decoding. It places “a listening self ” somehow outside the act of reading, as if ­there ­were another presence in “dialogue” with the reader, but a dialogue also overruled by how this “listener speaks.” Such speaking is as s­ ilent, yet as sounding as listening, though both happen at once within the same person. It suggests something like an echo on the rebound, created by that tiny displacement of “reading” into “listening.” Scott’s own ears may have been remembering a phrase from Paul Valéry, who writes of the poet in “A Poet’s Notebook” (1933),“His ear speaks to him” (1958, 1985: 174). So the reading ear, the writing ear, the summoning ear, and the speaking ear all figure among poets who are keen to keep the ear at work in their descriptions of how poetry is written or read. But Scott may also be recalling Roland Barthes’s ­little essay, “Ecoute,” or “Listening,” where Barthes explains, though in the context of psychoanalytic listening, that “the listener’s silence ­will be as active as the locutor’s speech,” and concludes with the resonant proposition: “listening speaks” (1982, 1986: 252). Like Valéry, he insists on that essential expressivity of the ear, which is as attentive as silence yet more speaking than speech. Reading might be a listening speech or a speaking listen, but at any rate it is an attention to words which also turns them into heard voicings. Just as speaking might listen, to itself and to the air which silently contains it, so any listening might speak, by being an attention that supplicates or summons

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speech out of the literally unspeaking text. The interplay between them is itself an imagination of incompatibles, summoned to life. To turn at this point to a tradition of philosophical and cultural commentary is to find a similar gravitation ­towards the language poets use in discussions of the ear. For instance, as long ago as 1958, Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, proposed that a single line of poetry might be “a point of departure for a phenomenology of the verb to listen” (182). Such a “phenomenology,” not yet in existence, might be derived from t­hose poets, like Loys Masson, who can play “the dream devices known to us as seeing and hearing, ultra-­seeing and ultra-­hearing, hearing oneself seeing” (181). So the ear of the poet guides ­t hose “dream devices” of sense perception, taking them beyond their normal workings into a dream of intensification and cross-­purpose, where “hearing oneself seeing” might come to be philosophically explicable. This Joycean phrase might perfectly capture the strange doubleness of the act of reading. Bachelard’s call for a “phenomenology of the verb to listen,” however, was answered neither by himself, nor by the book that, some twenty years ­later, only repeats the call. Don Ihde’s Listening and Voice (1976), which was revised and extended in 2007 u ­ nder the more capaciously plural subtitle: Phenomenologies of Sound, advises that “what is needed is a philosophy of listening,” adding with less certainty: “But is this a possibility?” (15). The uncertainty stems from the fact that “philosophy has its very roots intertwined with a secret vision of Being that has resulted in the pres­ent state of visualism” (15). The question “is this a possibility?” hints at something about “listening” which is anathema to the too visually invested traditions of philosophy. When, in his second edition, he starts to answer his own call, it is not in relation to lit­er­a­t ure but to m ­ usic. “I propose to investigate phenomenologically a dimension of ­human experience that may be called auditory imagination” (2007: 203), he begins, with no specific reference to T. S. Eliot, but with increasing reference to musical effects and acoustic technologies. Even this edition, however, ­w ill turn out to be, as he himself admits, only another unanswered “call for a full phenomenology of sound” (215). Since Ihde’s first book, o ­ thers have returned to the prob­lem of ­listening, but with a similar sense of unfinished business. In 1990, for instance, Gemma Corradi Fiumara published The Other Side of

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Language: A Philosophy of Listening, which does not mention Ihde’s work but might be starting to answer his challenge. Taking her bearings mainly from Heidegger and Gadamer, she attempts to answer the question “as to why the vast body of philosophical lit­er­a­ ture tends to neglect the prob­lem” of “listening” (29). This “blind spot” (8), she claims, derives from our culture’s attitude to listening as having “no remunerative value” (31), even though, she points out, “listening belongs to the very ‘essence’ of language” (30). Not only is listening, in her view, “one of the most unexplored and risky of all pro­ cesses” (166), but it is also “a highly demanding mode of ‘thinking’ ” (145). As the inverse side of all speech, she writes, now quoting Heidegger, “ ‘Speaking is itself a listening. Speaking is listening to the language we speak’ ” (118). This may, she proposes, be the forgotten female aspect of communication and one that signals the loss of an ethics of attention which lies at the heart of communication. Active listening, she concludes, might be like Socratic “won­der” (191), the beginning of a new kind of philosophical thinking, a creative opening for another language for knowing. She too thus sets herself to right a historical wrong, to point out a surprising absence, and to lay the ground for a ­future, perhaps gendered, phenomenology of the subject. The questions do not seem to go away, however. In 1999 Bruce Smith, in The Acoustic World of Early Modern ­E ngland, urges, “We need a cultural poetics of listening. [ . . . ​] We need a phenomenology of listening” (8). Such a “phenomenology,” he explains, might take account of the specificity of listening as opposed to hearing, for “you can listen in search of something you want to hear” (6). Being in search of something then characterizes Salomé Voegelin’s tentatively titled book, Listening to Noise and Silence: T ­ owards a Philosophy of Sound Art (2010), which returns to the prob­lem of how listening might be worthy of philosophical investigation. For “listening,” she argues, is “an aesthetic activity that challenges the philosophical tradition of the West” (13) in which the ear is subservient to the eye, and sound subservient to rationality and argument. The question of how to write about listening might, therefore, require a ­wholesale reordering of our language of argument and enquiry. The challenge of such reordering is one that philosophy, she suggests, by the very nature of

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its essentially discursive methods, might not yet be equipped to undertake. It may be, then, that the challenge belongs to lit­er­a­t ure and to literary-­critical discourse. This seems to be what Heidegger, the phi­ los­o­pher who is most attentive to the listening aspects of language, continually suggests. In a fascinating passage from his essay “ ‘. . . Poetically Man Dwells . . .’ ”—­t he title taken from the poet, Hölderlin—he proposes that man first speaks when, and only when, he responds to language by listening to its appeal. [ . . . ​] But the responding in which man authentically listens to the appeal of language is that which speaks in the ele­ment of poetry. The more poetic a poet is—­t he freer (that is, the more open and ready for the unforeseen) his saying—­t he greater is the purity with which he submits what he says to an ever more painstaking listening, and the further what he says is from the mere propositional statement that is dealt with solely in regard to its correctness or incorrectness. (1954, 1975: 216) This is a fine definition of poetry, as the art which speaks the act of listening, not only as a check on composition—­t he poet submitting his work to a ­later “painstaking listening” which might revise the original—­but also as a kind of writing which contains the space of listening within itself. In part, Heidegger is referring to the nonpropositional nature of poetry: that its argument cannot be detached from its linguistic means, but in part he is also struggling to hear the grammar of some instantaneous activity of speaking and listening together. In poetry “that which speaks” is “the responding in which man authentically listens.” Admittedly, he muddles the listening speaker and the listening writer in this passage, but that muddle, as we ­shall see, often lies at the heart of other poetic accounts of listening. As Martin Jay points out, Heidegger’s acoustical meta­phors depend on finding the kinship between “Hören, Horchen and Gehören: hearing, hearkening to and belonging” (1993: 272), as if belonging, or “dwelling in”—­t hose verbs that define a certain kind of knowing—­were intrinsically related to poetry’s listening power.

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As “the essence of all art,” ­whether “architecture, the visual arts” or “­music” (1935–1936, 2002: 45), poetry, according to Heidegger, is the art in which “truth’s setting-­itself-­into-­work” as “an open place [ . . . ​] a place in which every­thing is other than it was” (44), is most apparent. It follows from this that “listening” lies at the heart of all the arts, as works of somehow truth-­speaking attention. He does not offer an object for poetry’s speaking, but rather emphasizes that art communicates its truth as a listening, in a simultaneity that is hard to comprehend as a “propositional statement,” but makes a kind of other sense, perhaps approximating the sense of a poem. It is as if Heidegger in t­ hese passages takes philosophy almost as far as it might go t­ owards poetry while still exposing the difference between his own expository writing and that of, say, Hölderlin—­t he quotation from whom must be pointedly marked off from the beaten track of argument by t­ hose differentiating ellipses on e­ ither side of the title. In 2002, Jean-­Luc Nancy published a short book which picks up the old question once again. “Is listening something of which philosophy is capable?” (2002, 2007: 1) he asks at the start, adding as a question, “What secret is at stake when one truly listens, that is, when one tries to capture or surprise the sonority rather than the message?” (5). To “surprise the sonority” suggests an animal pouncing on its prey, but also leaves open the possibility that “sonority” itself might work in the way of a “surprise,” finding us, not necessarily as we look to hear it, but unawares, and as if by the sudden revelation of a “secret.” It is Nancy who reminds us that in French, “Entendre, ‘to hear,’ also means comprendre, ‘to understand’ ” (6), although the coincidence still leaves listening—­that activity of forever dissatisfied apprehension—­“on the edge of meaning” (7). Such an “edge” might be as near as listening comes to the “meaning” that philosophy aims to explicate or achieve. Between “sonority” and “message,” then, lies the difference that baffles thought and differentiates the two disciplines. In the end it is poetry, with its surprised and surprising sonorities, which offers the way forward for any philosophy of listening. Quoting Francis Ponge’s comment, “ ‘I never come to write the slightest phrase without my writing being ­accompanied by a ­mental speaking and listening,’ ” Nancy himself concludes,

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It is not, and in any case not only, what one can call in a superficial way the musicality of a text: it is more profoundly the ­music in it, or the arch-­music of that resonance where it listens to itself [s’écoute], by listening to itself finds itself [se trouve], and by finding itself deviates [s’écarte] from itself in order to resound further away. (35) From “musicality” he shifts to “­music,” then “arch-­music,” and fi­ nally to “resonance,” as if the presence of an ear which “listens to itself ” might create a kind of inwardly resonating ping, a vibration in a self-­echoing hall, in which the sound “deviates from itself ” and therefore draws attention to the very “further away” openness of space outside. For this effect of self-­involved listening, by which “the musicality of a text” is both found and found to be dif­fer­ent from itself, one must turn, as with Heidegger, once again to the poets. Alongside t­ hese calls for a philosophy of listening by phi­los­o­phers and cultural theorists, ­t here is of course a parallel tradition: that of literary critics pressing the philosophical or cognitive claims of lit­ er­a­t ure. Simon Jarvis’s book Words­worth’s Philosophic Song (2007), as well as his essays, “Prosody as Cognition” (1998) and “Musical Thinking: Hegel and the Phenomenology of Prosody” (2005), draw on philosophical theories of cognition to justify the differently thinking ways of lit­er­a­t ure or m ­ usic. Defining “philosophic Song,” he writes, for instance, “It might mean, not that philosophy gets fitted into a song—­where all the thinking is done by philosophy and only the handi­work by verse—­but that the song itself, as song, is philosophic. It might mean that a dif­fer­ent kind of thinking happens in verse—­t hat instead of being a sort of thoughtless ornament or reliquary for thinking, verse is itself a kind of cognition, with its own re­sis­tances and difficulties” (2007: 3–4). While Jarvis has spearheaded this recent interest in the thinking properties of poetry, in fact, looking back over the history of literary criticism, one might say that many critics have made similar points, if more sporadically and with less of a phenomenological bent. For instance, in Against Coercion: Games Poets Play, Eleanor Cook concludes with the assertion that “thinking-­in-­poetry is what poets do” (1998: 259), as if to suggest that “thinking-in” might not be quite the same as thinking about, which

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sets itself critically outside the act of composition. If this is what poets do, what is left for critics to do? Or is ­there a way for critics, similarly, to think-in rather than about their chosen works of lit­er­a­ture? Helen Vendler, in Poets Thinking, also recruits thinking to describe the poet’s work when she writes, “While retaining its fierce intelligence, poetic thinking must not unbalance the poem in the direction of ‘thought’ ” (2004: 9). The grammatical change from the substantive “ ‘thought’ ” to “thinking” is crucial h ­ ere, for the pres­ent participle offers a key to the unfinished purpose of literary meaning and the way that it might constantly circle back into sounds. So the question “what does the poet think?” is routed at the start; for the poet is merely “thinking,” without object or conclusion. In both Cook and Vendler, then, “thinking” dignifies the poet’s activity with a seriousness which also cannot be too much decoded. For as Vendler concludes of poets generally, “we must call what they do, in the pro­cess of conceiving and completing the finished poem, an intricate form of thinking, even if it means expanding our idea of what thinking is” (2004: 119). Once again, “thinking” both challenges the limits of philosophical thought and offers a key to the open-­ended business of literary work. How a poem is “finished” might draw on a “thinking” as concentrated as ce­re­bral thought, but also as unspecific and objectless as the drift of a dream. While all t­ hese works attribute “thinking” to what the poet does, more recently critics have explored the poem’s capacity to think, in a formalist move that brings its own nice challenge to the philosophical meaning of “thinking.” John Wilkinson, for instance, in The Lyric Touch, proposes that “the poem is thinking, and my recounting can only strive to follow its thought rather than set out its products” (2007: 201). Writing as poet rather than critic, he sheds responsibility for both the poem’s writing and its reading; all he can do is “strive to follow” a “thought,” which is already the poem’s own. Another critic, who is also significantly a poet, spells out what such thinking might mean in the a­ ctual extension of the sentence which describes it. James Longenbach, in his book The Re­sis­tance to Poetry, writes of the ­little word “or,” that it “is the sound of thinking in poetry—­not the sound of finished thought but the sound of a mind alive in the syntactical pro­cess of discovering what it might be thinking” (2004: 73–74). So the poet in him pushes out the bound­aries of “thinking”

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almost into the “sound” of it. Sentences like ­t hese begin to work like a “thinking-in” the modality of poetry, rather than in the modality of philosophy. One might be tempted to ask, what does “the sound of a mind” sound like, and how might a “sound” be “thinking,” or even “discovering . . . ​t hinking”? Such phrases seem to backtrack so far from the ce­re­bral activity of “thought” that one might question the very legitimacy of the term “thinking.” Yet notions of cognition continue to crop up, particularly in recent criticism about sound, as if the idea of “thinking” might justify an other­w ise unquestioningly pure aestheticism. Sam Halliday’s review of modernist art in Sonic Modernity, for instance, concludes that listening in art opens a “still wider field of cognitive and even spiritual comprehension” (2013: 178), though he himself does not develop the point. James Longenbach, in The Virtues of Poetry, devotes a chapter to “Poetry Thinking,” in which he argues that, without Shakespeare, “none of us would know what we imagine thinking to be” (2013: 140), while pointing out that “the sound of thinking in our poetry has always been disjunctive” (139). It is notable, however, that “thinking” h ­ ere does not stand alone, but comes already yoked to imagination or to “sound.” Elizabeth Helsinger’s Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-­Century Britain, acknowledging a large debt to Jarvis in its attribution of thought to the poem, continually returns to the point that “song poems [ . . . ​] ask readers to think like song: to listen to the sound of a poem thinking” (2015: 2). ­Here, both the reader and the poem think, but what would it mean “to think like song”? Would it be to sing thinkingly, or to think singingly, or both? Would it be to write criticism singingly, letting the singing sound of it think? And how, anyway, other than in a nice clash of terms, can this happen? Of course, such repeated invocations of “thinking” are always in danger of their own redundancy. Moreover, one might ask: are literary critics only riding on the intellectual self-­importance of “thinking” as opposed to, say, dreaming or imagining, singing or wondering, in order to dignify the work, w ­ hether poet’s or critic’s? And if thinking is what poets, readers, and poems all do, is the verb in danger of losing its meaning as a distinctively h ­ uman, ce­re­bral activity? Or are literary critics quite rightly joining the phi­los­o­phers in questioning what

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“thinking” means, and how it relates to the language we use? Certainly, to move from “thought” to “thinking” is already to loosen the verb’s connection with logical, deductive, argumentative l­abor, and to open it up to other ­mental pro­cesses more usually associated with writing or reading poetry. While this book ­will dance in and out of such questions, of knowledge and cognition, thought and thinking, its primary focus is on listening. This word, of course, also carries its weight of earlier analy­sis in literary criticism. John Hollander, for instance, writing about “Words­worth and the ­Music of Sound,” beautifully explains a line from “Nutting” as one of “the ­ g reat anatomized acts of listening”—­which also turns the reader into a would-be listener: “it is the listening itself we are on the brink of hearing” (1972: 59), he writes. This brinkmanship of the ear—­perhaps not very dif­fer­ent from Nancy’s “listening [ . . . ​] on the edge of meaning” (2007: 7)— is emphatically attributed to the poem itself, as the disclosure of something never quite audibly disclosed. The idea of a “listening”—­ that verb turned noun which thus becomes its own action, and which is brilliantly both something on “the brink” as well as a nothing that falls away beyond it—­keeps the sense of reach and unattainability, of the presence and absence of its ghostly object. Unlike “thinking,” which always implies a h ­ uman brain somewhere, one can imagine a listening, or indeed “the listening itself ” of a poem, almost as a sound that the poem gives back. To be hearing listening, then, as Hollander suggests ­here, is to be caught in a whirl­pool of resonance and attention which somehow leaves the subject writer or reader, as well as the ­actual listened-to object, a ­little out of account. It is as if an ear might be in Words­worth’s ­music itself, listening out for the listening that the reader brings to it—or at least brings to its “brink.” The formalist slip that the verb “listening” permits when applied to literary texts lies at the heart of many of ­t hese accounts, as well as my own. The subject who listens to read, and even the author who listens to write, become lost in a larger listening back, or as Nancy puts it in his essay about m ­ usic, “Ascoltando,” “The subject who is constituted in resonance, the listening-­subject, is nothing ­else, or is no one e­ lse, but the m ­ usic itself ” (2001, 2008: x). Who or what listens becomes less impor­tant than the pres­ent participle’s own action

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within sound’s work. It may be that this key word, which unravels such a complex of ideas within the art work, ­whether literary, musical, or paint­erly, w ­ ill never achieve a fully phenomenological explanation, in the philosophical sense, but only lend itself to snatches of elucidation and to a language of criticism which thinks-in, and alongside, the literary sounding of the text itself. In her introduction to The Sound of Poetry and Poetry of Sound, Marjorie Perloff laments that “however central the sound dimension is to any and all poetry, no other poetic feature is currently as neglected” (2009: 1). That cry remains both true, and untrue. In a sense, writing about “sound” still feels like casting in the dark, finding a language even while trying to describe the elusive, half-­imaginary properties of the sounded-­sounding text. But in another sense, almost all writers throughout history have had something to say about sound, even if only incidentally, in notebooks, letters, journals, or ­else in the critical tale that all literary works also contain. My own ­excuse for writing a book on the topic is that I am aware of a rich tradition of writings, by poets and novelists, on the mysterious dimension of sound in lit­er­a­ture—­w ritings which may not have received much attention and which provoke questions about the very function of criticism. Since “hearing t­ hings” in lit­er­a­t ure is as much a form of artfully performed invention as of ­simple aural attention, it may be that poets and novelists, more than any o ­ thers, have something impor­tant to say about it. The ways in which, in verse or prose, poets invite the ear to listen are, then, the subject of this book. To re­adjust our sensory attention in f­ avor of the ear, as I ­will try to do in the chapters that follow, is also to discover how much our traditional language of criticism depends on certain modes of discourse which the workings of the ear throw into disarray. To describe t­ hose workings means very often returning to the poets’ own accounts of writing—­accounts which often bypass the meaning-­making ways of grammar and argument. I do not try to offer a “phenomenology of listening,” since such a proj­ect would require a philosophical system of thought, abstracted from specific examples and then applicable to all. Instead, this is a meditation on, and exploration of, the many ways in which lending an ear to the literary text, finding its “hints at voicing” or “effects of voicing,” might

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r­ eshape the nature of what we mean by literary understanding. Hearing t­hings is not just a m ­ atter of noting incidental sonorities, chimes, or chants, as if they ­were the musical backing to some other intellectual purpose of words, but of actually redefining the purpose according to the sounds or, in Nancy’s term, the “resonance.” Inevitably, a g ­ reat deal of lit­er­a­t ure is left out of this se­lection of texts from the nineteenth to the twenty-­fi rst centuries. Not only drama and per­for­mance poetry, but also much of the heritage of black writing, from Langston Hughes to Patience Agbabi—­w riting which calls on the voice rather than on what Griffiths and Culler call “voicing,” and whose logical end is the live audience rather than the solitary reader—do not feature in this book. In Bob Dylan or Kate Tempest we do of course hear t­ hings, but we hear them through a memory of their power­f ul rendition in song or chant by the poets or performers themselves. My excuse, then, apart from the sheer impossibility of any sort of comprehensiveness, is that this book focuses on the sound that, in a sense, stays s­ ilent on the page while shaping the ­labor of the ear through which it might, nevertheless, be heard. Moreover, the form of this book emerges, not from a consecutive argument, drawn out chapter by chapter, but from an accretive interrelating of essays as they work through dif­fer­ent aspects of the topic. While ­there is an approximate chronological order, from Alfred Tennyson to Alice Oswald, with their two suggestively book-­ ending “Tithonus” poems, links between chapters happen, I hope, with a sense of surprise and happenstance, of connections noted by the way rather than being loudly hammered home to a prearranged end. In it, I want to listen in to some nineteenth-­, twentieth-­, and twenty-­first-­century lit­er­a­t ure, mostly poetry but sometimes prose, in order to explore how writers manage the extraordinary expressivity of sound in their ­silent writings, how readers might hear ­t hose sounds in their heads, and how each text might be said to listen to itself, as if to a hollow cave of echoes which opens up from within. At the same time, each chapter hopes to be a new opening into the subject of sound’s work—­t hat strange interactive complex of writer, reader, and text, through which the first inklings and rhythms that generate composition become a creation which then both expresses, and continually still asks for, listenings in the interpreting reader.

1 Listening Thresholds    And poor old Homer blind, blind, as a bat, Ear, ear for the sea-­surge, murmur of old men’s voices . . . ezra pound hollow unreal voices, reaching the ear unexpectedly, from ­behind or round the traverse bend, like the shouting at the immediate door comes on you from a far win­dow . . . david jones I am sitting on a terrace in Sicily, listening to the sound of the sea breaking on the rocks below. That statement, in the pres­ent, is not quite true of course, at least no longer quite true, ­because the time of sitting, and even the time of writing that “I am sitting,” have already slipped into some f­ uture anytime, anywhere, of the reader who reads it and who, in a kind of reverse action, then understands that “I am sitting,” but also with luck imagines that he or she might also be sitting “listening to the sound of the sea.” Grammar plays lovely tricks on our willing ears. But it reminds us, too, that in order to read with attention we must cross all sorts of time barriers and place barriers, journeying across va­r i­e­t ies of half-­t ruths, like “I am sitting,” which we have mostly learned to cross by convention, but which the literary text asks us to cross again in imagination. And much of this activity happens in the ear—­t hat subtle, often underrated organ, which is itself composed of a series of openings and obstacles that transmit sound waves to the brain. First of all, ­t here is not one ear but three: in medical terminology, the outer, ­middle, and inner ear. Within ­these three lies a complex architecture

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of parts, not only the drum-­like mechanism of the ear­drum, the striking workshop of hammer, anvil, and stirrup, or the shell-­shaped whorls of the cochlea, for instance, but also the threshold areas of the “oval win­dow,” the “round win­dow,” and the “two-­chambered vestibule.” As sound waves are passed through this complex organ, causing fine hairs, fluids, membranes, and small bones to vibrate or knock on the way, they send messages to the brain which sorts them into sense. That sound waves travel, not only outside us, through the sound-­creating densities of our atmosphere, but also in our ears, through the responsive filters and vibrators of their three chambers, suggests the extent to which movement, time, and alterability are basic to the act of hearing. But the h ­ uman ear itself only goes so far in the detection of sound. Beyond what is technically called “the threshold of audibility” lies the huge, unheard “sound shadow” of noises outside our range: ­t hose too high or too low for h ­ uman detection, or just too far away. Thresholds are a limit as well as an opening. When thinking about the complexities of listening to and in lit­er­a­t ure, the notion of thresholds as places of passage and blockage, corridors and doors, might become a suggestive working meta­phor for the kinds of attention demanded by the literary text. On that terrace in Sicily, I found myself listening continually to the sea. The sea, when it breaks on rocks, is an ever varying sound, rhythmic but never regular, repetitive but never the same, with a ­vocabulary of whisperings, hissings, sighings, knockings, which suggests a creature of diverse moods and vast potential. At night I could hear it through the open win­dow, amplified by quiet, clarified by space, a cradle of lulling sibilants to the ear. In storms, however, it would come rushing and crashing, breaking against the breakwater, its volume swelling as each wave heaved a massive shoulder, and retreated in sheet-­falls of whisper. And the lightning, that sudden tuning fork in the sky, a divining rod with prongs set earthwards, would crack, then pause—­a split second, maybe, or a long moment—­ before its thunderous growl traveled outwards in altering registers. It is a strange concert, that of sea and storm, thrilling in its mix of rage and restraint, percussion and pause, in its play of sound and after-­sound—­all of it a reminder of the strange physics of sound, and of the infinite variety of noises that make up the symphony of a

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world full of motion. Living on the edge of that sea was like turning an ear to something, not easily predictable or interpretable but, like lit­er­a­ture, enticing, versatile, on the move—­something constantly challenging the ear’s own variable thresholds of attention. a a a

It is now a commonplace to note that our main critical metaphors—­ vision, insight, image, and imagination—­are predominantly derived from the eye and that we lack the equivalents for what the ear can do. Certainly, t­ here are no single words for innerly hearing to match the inwardness of vision or insight. The advantage, however, is that ear-­based meta­phors retain the surprise of unfamiliarity; they have not yet set into conceptual categories or theoretical shorthand. They are therefore often dear to writers, who may be more aware of the work of listening than their critics and readers, and more willing to risk inventive or idiosyncratic descriptions of that work. So Hopkins, as I have shown, notes the difference between “reading, as one commonly reads ­whether prose or verse, with the eyes,” and the kind of reading that might make sense of his own poetry: “but take breath and read it with the ears” (1935, 1955: 79), he advised. To “take breath” suggests both a pause and a performative replay which reads, hears, and perhaps sings at the same time. Robert Frost in his many prose writings similarly rings the changes on what the ear might do. He refers at vari­ous points, for instance, to “the hearing ear” (1995: 682), “the imagining ear” (1995: 687), the “summoner” ear (2006: 642), “observing ears” (2006: 643), while Joyce relishes the ear which “seehears” (1922, 1998: 271), W. S. Graham “the mind’s ear” (1999: 162), Seamus Heaney the “deep ear” (1988: 109). For writers of all kinds, the ear has thresholds and depths, actions, movements, and capabilities which provoke a rethink of its functions: it can hear, imagine, observe, summon, even see or think. Such synesthetic possibilities are particularly appealing to writers who, a­ fter all, call on the reader to be all eyes and ears at once, seeing words on the page but also hearing what they sound like, and making sense of the sound. While seeing is comparatively straightforward and has a long history of signifying clarity, offering proof, and ascertaining truth, listening has

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no such history, and has always involved some ele­ment of deduction or surmise in discovering its object. For sound is always a moving target, invisible in itself, caught in transit, its origins partly deduced or guessed from its effects. Lit­er­a­t ure, in its appeal to the ear, of course shares some similarities with that other art of sound and time: ­music. A long aestheticist tradition from the mid-­nineteenth ­century onwards has meant that writers have often taken their critical vocabulary from ­music and musicians. Meanwhile, the idea that listening might be a form of knowing, its attention sufficient to the meaning of the t­ hing heard, is one that musicians have no trou­ble repeating. Daniel Barenboim, for instance, keen to keep the thought-­content of the ear to the fore, defines listening to m ­ usic as “hearing with thought” (2008: 37) and ­music itself as “sound with thought” (2008: 16). It is not so much that sound is worth thinking about, as that hearing or sounding come “with thought.” He captures this compact of ­music and ce­re­ bral activity in one memorable and surprising phrase, when he describes ­music as “the wisdom that becomes audible to the thinking ear” (2008: 3). That “wisdom [ . . . ​] becomes audible” crucially does not explain what kind of wisdom this might be or how it might be known and achieved, only that it answers to “the thinking ear” in a kind of reciprocity which justifies both “wisdom” and “thinking,” not as ends to be gained but as activities still in pro­cess The phrase is shot through with a temporizing purpose which is also what Barenboim wishes to convey. Time is of the essence, while also being incalculable, for this “thinking ear” goes on “thinking,” without any end in view (or within hearing) except that of a wisdom always still becoming “audible.” It may be that the only way to describe “wisdom that becomes audible” in m ­ usic is to reach for sentences, like this one, which disclose their meaning as a continuing, effortful puzzle of audibility—­indeed like a hand still cupped to an ear. This is both the image and the effect of another, very dif­fer­ent art work which, in place of an answer, offers a question about sound. Lucian Freud’s self-­portrait, titled “Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening (Self-­Portrait)” (2012: 99), depicts a large fore-­grounded plant half-­h iding a diminutive, naked man who peers through its leaves. At first glance, this is a triffid nightmare, an outsize close-up

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of streaky green leaves dwarfing the ­human being. But the man ­behind, in spite of being disproportionately small, also holds the attention ­because he keeps one hand cupped to an ear. Speak up! he seems to signal, as if calling to someone or something on the far side of the plant, the room, even perhaps the frame of the painting itself. He looks out through that fecund leafage as if trying to catch a sound, ­either from the other side of it or e­ lse from beyond the canvas itself. Who is out ­t here? What sound does he detect? Or is it perhaps just the plant itself he is trying to hear? And what do you hear if you listen to a plant? The answer is, prob­ably nothing, ­unless you start to imagine how, as George Eliot once proposed in Middlemarch, “it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence” (1871–1872, 1965: 226). Or, as Walter de la Mare once pointed out, perhaps with Eliot’s “roar” in his own ears, “Had we ears delicate enough we should detect the roaring rilling flood of sap and chlorophyll” (“Super­natural in Fiction,” 3d). Both of them are turning an ear to the inaudible sound shadow beyond h ­ uman range, as well as, perhaps, remembering an even earlier example of this ubiquitous “roar” in a story by the ­brothers Grimm, called “The Six Servants.” One of ­these servants who has superhuman ears describes how “ ‘I am listening to what is just g ­ oing on in the world, for nothing escapes my ears; I even hear the grass growing’ ” (1944, 1975: 601). To hear so much is to enter a world without bound­aries or safeguards, without any protective barriers to audibility, but opening onto a chaos of noises where grass or leaves might deafen us with their “roar.” Of course this is only a story or, in Freud’s case, a painting, and the “hearing of sound in a painting can only be speculative and uncanny” (2010: 78), as David Toop points out. In “Interior with Plant” the sense of sound is doubly “uncanny,” since both canvas and its depicted still life produce no noise; the imaginary cry or call that the cupped hand catches is all the more mysteriously compelling for having no vis­i­ble origin. What does the man hear, and what do we then listen for, as we observe his concentrated pose? The title might offer some help, though it is oddly long-­w inded, as if the painter kept thinking of something more to add: “Interior

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with Plant, Reflection Listening (Self-­Portrait).” “Interior” points to a place within—­t hose brown blank walls in the background—­but it hints too at a sense of inwardness, a sound perhaps within the man’s head. Then ­there’s “Reflection Listening (Self-­Portrait).” ­Those parentheses frame the “Self-­Portrait” just as the large plant frames the man, a ­little comically, quizzically, as if he too w ­ ere cupped in an aside or afterthought. This is me, the painter seems to add, or rather (me), and therefore not quite me. The game of a parenthetical (me), which therefore asks “who, me?” as in Les Murray’s poem, “MeMeMe” (see Chapter 9), makes “(Self-­Portrait)” only questionably a portrait of the self. Similarly, “Reflection,” which suggests a mirror-­imaging self-­reflection, must in fact be a memory-­reflection, recalling a time before the painter took up his brush to paint. “Reflection,” then, in the purely visual sense, starts to slide into the other sense of ­mental reflection or memory, recalling a time-­lapsed self in the paint­er’s mind’s eye. But the word also thickens further, as “Reflection Listening” hints that it might be the very act of reflection that listens—­reflection as the subject of the pres­ent participle. Can reflection listen, or listening reflect? Perhaps only in “the reflecting ear”—­t he object to which that cupped hand ­d irects us. Something about this painting, the conundrum it sets up between what it depicts and its titular explanations, between the visual and the literary, eye and ear, draws the viewer into a nice tangle of sense perception. The painting seems to listen out for an object beyond the frame of what is depicted, but ultimately it only reflects on us, the viewers, looking to see-­hear something like a sound in the man’s ear. As Jean-­Luc Nancy writes of the musical marking, “ascoltando,” “It directs us to play while listening” (2001, 2008: ix). To play thus listeningly is to bring to the ­music a sense of the acoustical won­der of it, while also drawing us intransitively back into listening’s own sound-­longing. Peter Szendy, following Nancy, takes this intransitiveness (and indeed won­der) a step further when he asks, “I won­der. Can one make a listening listened to?” (2008: 5). That “a listening” might be the object of its own verb strains for attention beyond the limits of any object merely heard. In a sense, this is what is ­going on in Freud’s painting: a looked-at listener, hand cupped to ear, suggests a “Reflection” that might be both the reflected memory-­image of the

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painter, or a reflecting on noise just out of earshot, or a reflection on reflecting that we, listener-­v iewers, might be engaged in. So Freud also makes “a listening listened to,” in a painting which shows nothing to hear, since its very condition is the blank silence of the canvas, as well as the difficulty of hearing that it depicts. In lit­er­a­t ure, too, the printed page is a ­silent base, though one which continually asks to be voiced, silently or aloud, in order to be understood. If aloud, it sets, for that moment at least, into a single accent and rhythm; if silently, the alternatives remain audible, overlaying, even jostling with one another. As well as the sounds of words, ­t here are sounds signaled by words—­sounds which the speakers or characters seem to hear and which set up other listening expectations in the reader. And fi­nally, ­t here is the undercurrent murmur of other texts at work, ­whether in quotation or allusion, or just in the chance similarities of the language itself. For the literary text is a bottomless well of potential noises, an object, as Garrett Stewart puts it, “acoustically textured to the point of distraction” (1990: 37). ­These sounds may be brought to life by the reader according to a limiting plan of interpretable “hints at voicing” (Griffiths 1989: 60) or “effects of voicing” (Culler 2015: 35), or ­else may be maddeningly, distractingly infinite. The s­ ilent page may become a trove of riches or a Pandora’s Box, but e­ ither way, t­ here is such a complex orchestration of noises in it, such a “roar” within its silence, that to read without listening for ­those noises might be to miss much of what lit­ er­a­t ure is about. It is this imaginable audibility of the text, stemming from the way that writers plant clues to sounding in their work, that interests me in this book; in par­t ic­u­lar, ­t hose moments when the reader’s understanding is challenged, redirected, or distracted from the routine norms of making sense. Lit­er­a­ture is full of t­ hese. For example, h ­ ere is a passage from the “Giorgione” chapter of Walter Pater’s The ­Re­nais­sance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1893, 1980). It is a chapter which plays kinesthetically with the idea of m ­ usic as a figure, paradoxically, to be sounded, not only on the mute canvas of the painting in question but also on the equally mute page which describes it. Giorgione’s fascination with players and audiences, with ­those moments of ­reflection which internalize what might be heard, are unsurprisingly

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of par­t ic­u­lar interest to so sound-­conscious a writer as Pater. ­Here he summarizes: In ­these then, the favourite incidents of Giorgione’s school, ­music or the musical intervals in our existence, life itself is conceived as a sort of listening—­listening to ­music, to the reading of Bandello’s novels, to the sound of w ­ ater, to time as it flies. (1980: 119) The meaning, as happens so often in Pater, must be caught on the hoof, in the twists and turns of the syntax, in its calculated pauses, and especially in the work of the dash (see Leighton 2005: 74–77). ­Here, it is both an apparent join, continuing the point with pointed examples, as well as a demarcation that holds two parts of a sentence grammatically apart. So the phrase “life itself is conceived as a sort of listening—” marks an end, rounds up a statement, and turns “listening” into a self-­sufficient end. But it also signals one of ­t hose moments of hesitation and transition, a pause for thought and a change of tack. For “a sort of listening,” the gerund, then becomes on the other side of the dash a transitive pres­ent participle: “a sort of listening—­listening to ­music, to the reading of Bandello’s novels, to the sound of w ­ ater, to time as it flies.” It seems a list of randomly specific, even inconsequential examples, as if Pater ­were trying out this and that, casually reaching for what comes to hand. What, one might ask, does “time as it flies” sound like, if listened to? While “time flies” is an easy cliché, “time as it flies” is a more timed passing, so that “listening [ . . . ​] to time as it flies” seems to open inwardly into time heard minute by minute, even if beyond conceivable hearing. If this is a definition of “life,” it is of life permanently caught in the attention and silence of a listening—­fi rst to “­music,” then “novels” (the timed art forms), but then “to time” itself, as if to its minutely conceivable milli-seconds ever passing on their way. Such listening might indeed take a lifetime. While Pater plays on the difference between intransitive and transitive, pure and applied “listening,” other writers enjoy similar games of strange attention. Wallace Stevens, for instance, in his essay “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” asserts that the “deep-

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ening need for words to express our thoughts and feelings [ . . . ​] makes us listen to words when we hear them, loving them and feeling them, makes us search the sound of them” (1997: 662). Poetry, he proposes, “makes us listen [ . . . ​] when we hear.” To hear is quick and easy; to listen comes l­ater and involves a revision or intensification of hearing; it might also involve loving, feeling, searching. To “search the sound” of words thickens with allusive play, for not only does it express a l­abor, almost physical, of touching sound in order to find it, but also hints at that other sense of sound—to dive deep. To “listen to words when we hear them” is to make the ear work harder at hearing, with an extra attention that is both like a body search and a loving caress. When Gaston Bachelard briefly considers sounds in his book, The Poetics of Space, he declares of the poet René Daumal, “Another poet teaches us, if one may say this, to hear ourselves listen” (1958, 1969: 181). If Stevens makes us “listen [ . . . ​] when we hear,” then Bachelard makes us “hear ourselves listen.” Both are turning an ear on the act, as if to double its volume, while exploiting the ear’s potential to attend to a kind of phonic objectlessness. What the poet, or indeed any poet, offers is a space in which to pay attention to our own attention, to reflect on reflection, like putting an ear to a shell—or to a cupped hand. Roland Barthes’s l­ittle essay “Listening,” or more precisely “Listen”—­“Ecoute” in French—­moves from listening as an “alert” (une alerte) to listening as “deciphering” (un déchiffrement) (1982, 1986: 245), to a third kind, which is listening as “the endless interplay of transference” (246) between listening and being listened to—­“ ‘j’écoute’ veut dire aussi ‘écoute-­moi’ ” (1982: 217). L ­ ater in the essay, almost by the by, he adds an extra: “But, also, listening is taking soundings” (1982, 1986: 250)—(“Mais aussi, l’écoute [ . . . ​] c’est ce qui sonde”) (1982: 222). That verb, “qui sonde,” like Stevens’s to “search the sound of them,” takes us into the ­whole area of linguistic noise, of poetry’s deep-­sea undertow of aural effects. Such sounding must dive or trawl for noises, in an atmosphere thick with watery obstruction. As Susan Wolfson has shown with reference to Words­ worth, “to sound” is a word rich in the sense of the ear’s l­abor, its search for that sonic information, or “prescient deep knowing,” like sounding the “ ‘ears’ ” of “ ‘Esthwaite’s Lake’ ” (2011: 69) in The Prelude,

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for something which comes through the obstructive medium of air or ­water, and which often requires a concomitant blindness or deafness to more familiar channels of communication. To listen, or take soundings, is to focus on a faculty which is always over and above the passive nature of hearing. ­There is a sense in all ­t hese writers, then, that learning to listen is what lit­er­a­t ure might teach, by a kind of shared activity between author and reader, page and ear, sound and soundings, in a mutual or interactive work of apprehension. “The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader” (1995: 677), writes Robert Frost, as if the work required for both writing and reading ­were the same. ­Those moments when writers make special calls on our ears, by setting listening against listening to, hearing against listening, or by planting an oddly angled listener in the text, are moments when the verb becomes as much an object itself as the means of finding an object. In such moments, we listen to that space which opens up in the curiously self-­imagining ear of the text. To think of the text as having ears, as I ­w ill throughout this book, is to think also of laying an ear to an ear, in order to listen in to what might be said within its resonantly calling quiet. To take another example from the nineteenth ­century, Christina Rossetti’s poem “A Green Cornfield” seems to be in a familiar ­Romantic tradition: that of the singing bird as model for the poet and object of aspiration. But Rossetti in fact turns away from that tradition at the end, in a surprising, distinctly gendered move: The earth was green, the sky was blue:   I saw and heard one sunny morn A skylark hang between the two,   A singing speck above the corn; A stage below, in gay accord,   White butterflies danced on the wing, And still the singing skylark soared,   And ­silent sank and soared to sing. The cornfield stretched a tender green   To right and left beside my walks;

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I knew he had a nest unseen   Somewhere among the million stalks: And as I paused to hear his song   While swift the sunny moments slid, Perhaps his mate sat listening long,   And listened longer than I did. (1979–1990: I. 197) This finely orchestrated ­little verse turns on studied pauses: first, the pauses of the “singing skylark” who alternately falls ­silent and soars to sing; then the pause of the speaker-­poet who “paused to hear his song”; then the continuing pause of the bird’s “mate” who may be “listening long”; and fi­n ally the pause at the end, as something, “Perhaps his mate,” but also perhaps not, “listened longer.” Certainly, this poet stops paying attention to the skylark of the old poets, Shelley’s in par­t ic­u ­lar, and listens instead to the pauses in the intervals of song: “Perhaps his mate sat listening long, / And listened longer than I did.” The quietly gendered difference between “singing” and “listening” distracts this poet from the usual origin of poetry’s singing lessons. As she “paused to hear his song,” Rossetti starts to listen instead to another sound counterpointing the first lark’s stops and starts. Moreover, at the point where the poem should end, she keeps us hanging on in ­t here. How long is “long,” or its comparative, “longer?” The speaker does not even know if ­t here is a female mate on a nest, yet still listens for that listening which, she then imagines, is listening back. Rossetti, as I ­w ill show in Chapter 3, is one of the ­great poets of listening, of a stillness and attention which seem like h ­ umble secondariness but are in fact a space for her own speech. What “A Green Cornfield” fi­nally discloses is a vast space of attention—­t he poet’s, the speaker’s, the bird’s, and then the reader’s own, all somehow turned up to high volume, as if ­t here ­were some object beyond hearing that listening listens for. Such moments are everywhere in lit­er­a­t ure. ­Here, for instance, is a poem, the philosophical and visual power of which are a reminder of the close historical links between t­ hose two. Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man” is, on the face of it, a poem about looking, about the landscape’s wintry sparkle and the sheer blank dazzle of the snow.

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However, in the last two stanzas t­ here is a sound, which is the sound of the land, and of the “same wind / [ . . . ​] in the same bare place”: For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not ­there and the nothing that is. (1997: 8) The brilliant metaphysical riddle of that last line, which depends on seeing or beholding va­r i­e­t ies of “nothing,” has tended to obscure something ­else ­going on, not in the eye but the ear: “the sound of the land” and of “the same wind” in “the same bare place.” That they are all “the same” seems boring, beneath notice, and the snow-­dazzled eye skips them to reach the last line, as if for the solution. Yet “For the listener, who listens in the snow” t­ here is perhaps another object out ­t here which holds the attention. The ear of the poem seems at cross-­purpose with its eye—­t he eye which cancels every­t hing between the “nothing himself ” of the listener and the two nothings that follow. If nothing fi­nally “is,” it may contradict its own negated “­thing,” in a chop-­logic game which, by sheer repetition, makes what the reader “beholds” still residually t­ here. However, “the listener, who listens in the snow,” and whose tautologically intransitive a­ ctivity ranges beyond ­those “same” sounds of “land” and “wind,” keeps, as it ­were, an ear open for something e­ lse in the poem’s g ­ listening visualism. Oddly angled and easily missed, that “listener” offers a dif­fer­ent threshold from which to read, playing ear against eye, as if to remind us that the stereo-­work of reading might not ­settle for any one object or any one satisfying punch line. All this is related, of course, to something critics have always noted: that the sound effects of poems are part of what they are about. Garrett Stewart puts this nicely when he describes the “challenge of sound to sense” and “the continual churn of wording beneath and between the chain of words” (1990: 25). His attention to the phonotext in the text, to the “errancy” of signifying sound in “the errand of meaning” (27), reminds us to listen against the grain of ­r unning meaningful errands and to wander (or err) among noises that may seem no more than a distraction, but a distraction that could be the ­whole point. Stevens’s “listener” is a presence that figures the cross-­

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purposes of our senses as readers, while reminding us that poetry works to complicate rather than to resolve them. That understanding might therefore lie in the place of not understanding, in rerouting our routine expectations of seeing the point, is what the ear encourages. This other sense of understanding is stressed in Peter Kivy’s book ­Music, Language, and Cognition, which argues that ­t here might be “cognition without content” (2007: 223) in both ­music and lit­er­a­ ture. Such cognition, he goes on, would be like “hearing that certain musical ­things are ­going on, and, the while, thinking about ­these ­goings on and about your hearing them” (2007: 231). Understanding the arts of sound thus comes round to that old circularity: “hearing [ . . . ​] and, the while, thinking [ . . . ​] about your hearing.” It is an anti-­utilitarian form of “cognition” which turns the ear on the ear, “hearing” on “hearing,” in order to reach some notion of “thinking” as a dif­fer­ent grammatical form: as unfinished participle rather than object, as ­labor rather than achievement. In his brief excursus into a pos­si­ble “phenomenology of the verb to listen” (1958, 1969: 182) in The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard refers at one point to ­t hose “quiet readers” who “would not hear colors shudder if a poet had not known how to make us listen, not to say, super-­listen” (178). Like many o ­ thers, he too qualifies the verb “to listen,” as if always opening a scope beyond its range. To “super-­ listen” is to turn a kind of hearing aid onto sounds in the sound shadow of language. Meanwhile, his slip from spatial meta­phors of the text as ­house to aural meta­phors of the text as ear is a reminder that the two belong together: that any place of enclosure ­w ill be a place of reverberation and echo, as well as of blocking walls and doors. “The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices ­behind a door that cuts off the words” (1995: 664), writes Robert Frost, in a letter explaining the “sound of sense” that lies in poetry’s hinted voicings and intonations. This is another of t­ hose sentences which perform what they describe. It sets the reader listening round or through or beyond the obstacle of a “door,” to hear how such “voices” might sound without distinguishable words. Such doors, the blocking devices to easy meaning, are as impor­tant in lit­ er­a­t ure as the words and sounds that entice us to listen better, more deeply, or more soundingly. For it is the door which makes us pay

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attention, with that extra effort of never being quite sure we can catch the original. When Seamus Heaney proposes, in an essay called “Sounding Auden,” to “listen in to some passages of Auden’s work” (1988: 109), he lets us hear the door or wall which makes Auden sound, as opposed to just speak. For to “listen in” is to be an outsider, to know the text as a ­house or room to which we have no direct admittance but on whose threshold we might stand in the hope of hearing something. With its hint of overhearing or eavesdropping, of putting an ear to a wall or a door, the phrase “I s­hall listen in” tells us that listening to poetry might always have to l­abor to overcome a difficulty. Some one came knocking   At my wee, small door; Some one came knocking,   I’m sure—­sure—­sure; I listened, I opened,   I looked to left and right, But nought t­ here was a-­stirring   In the still dark night [ . . . ​] (1969: 140–141) This poem by Walter de la Mare is called “Some One,” as if that presence ­were a given, except that its spelling contains the tiniest pause, as if not quite “someone,” a person, a noun in the singular, but perhaps, adjectivally, just “some one” t­ hing among the many that are listed. “Some One” hesitates, as the w ­ hole poem does between the sound of knocking and the knowledge that quite simply no one is at the door. That “knocking” goes on and on in a continuous pres­ent, like an earworm that ­will not leave off its beat—as anyone knows who first read this poem in childhood and has never forgotten it. Even ­after the thumping insistence of “Sure—­sure—­sure” becomes, in the final line’s dotted rhythm, “At all, at all, at all” (141), not at all sure anymore, the sense of “Some One” t­here w ­ ill not go away. The ­poem’s point is to open and listen, not in order to discover what is out ­there, which is easily verified by the eye, but to keep us at the door, as if, in spite of the evidence, that w ­ ere the place for poetry readers. Frost’s own interest in “voices ­behind a door that cuts off the words” may well have been learned, as I w ­ ill show in Chapter 4, from

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de la Mare. In his own odd ­little poem “The Lockless Door” he enacts a similar child’s-­play of inside-­outside, as the speaker waits for a knock, expects it, and then, when “the knock came again,” bizarrely creeps out of a win­dow and “bade a ‘Come in’ / To what­ever the knock / At the door may have been” (1995: 222). In both poems, the door, the knock, and the wait raise expectations of a message or messenger, and then flout it. De la Mare’s “Some one” never appears; Frost’s speaker hoodwinks the ­whole notion of a messenger by spying from the outside, from where, like a child playing both parts of a game (or a poet listening in to his own poem), he conjures a knock in answer to a wish or a fear. Each poem plays a prank on the ear, knocking for no reason, answering to no purpose. The ­house of the poem, it seems, is a place of misplaced doors and walls, of calls which go unanswered and presences which may not be ­there. It is tempting, as with all texts about h ­ ouses, to detect in both poems a poetics of space which, capriciously and magically, yields a poetics of sound. For the h ­ ouse is an echoing hold, like a g ­ reat ear itself, a place that registers noises, calls, knockings, not necessarily attached to agents with ­human intentions. It is, by its very nature, a haunted place. Meanwhile, it is not the message that keeps us listening but sounds that run amok a­ fter the message, indeed the “errand,” logically fails. “My ear against the wall to hear” (1922, 1998: 270), Joyce writes in the “Sirens” chapter of Ulysses. No less than poetry, prose fiction also insists on an ear-­work that works against the eye, crossing the ear’s voicings over the appeal of the vis­i­ble. For Joyce, like de la Mare and Frost, is fascinated by ­those walls and doors which distort, block, or sometimes clarify the passage of sound. His ­brother Stanislaus once asked, “I won­der w ­ ill any scruffy old professor recognise Jim’s ability to write general noise on paper” (in White 2008: 153). As Matthew Bevis has pointed out in his “Coda” on Joyce in The Art of Eloquence (2007: 263–269), the word-­games on eye and ear in Finnegans Wake—­ perceiving with “an ear-­sighted view” (1939, 1964: 143), being “all seenheard” (61), catching “a listener’s eye” (174), becoming an “aural eyeness” (623)—­are like a theory of reading written into the deep-­set synesthesia of the printed word. Like all literary writers, Joyce trains us to listen, and to listen differently, not only setting ear against eye but also taking us far into the listening spaces of the text.

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His short story “The Dead,” for instance, is full of floors, doors, walls, and win­dows, through which the protagonist, Gabriel Conroy, must learn to listen. From the very beginning, opening doors is about letting in not only guests and gusts of wind, but also sounds, memories, ghosts. At first, seeing his wife Gretta “leaning on the banisters, listening to something” (1914, 2000: 165), Gabriel falls for the smug “kitsch” (xxxix), as Jeri Johnson puts it, of a Victorian painting. “Distant ­Music he would call the picture if he w ­ ere a painter” (165), Joyce writes. But distant ­music in this story, and ­t here are many kinds, played, sung, and i­ magined, must be heard, not seen. Gabriel must become a musician rather than a painter, or at least, true to the nature of the literary, both at once. So Gabriel learns to pay attention to voices and noises, from b ­ ehind doors and win­dows, from the hallway, from upstairs or outside. At one point Joyce writes how his “warm trembling fin­gers tapped the cold pane of the win­dow” (151). That tap, though barely noticed at this point, ­w ill have increasingly audible repercussions. Gabriel imagines, for instance, how ­people outside might be “gazing up at the lighted win­dows and listening to the waltz ­music” (159). Eventually, he himself must learn to listen to Gretta’s story about her young lover, how the d ­ ying boy outside once wanted to come in, and how she “heard gravel thrown up against the win­dow” (174). ­These tappings of fin­gers, eyes, gravel, against lit but excluding win­dows, all build up to that final paragraph which confirms Gabriel’s humiliation and enlightenment at learning about his wife’s girlhood ­passion. Joyce writes, “A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the win­dow. It had begun to snow again” (176). It is indeed only snow, which literally would make no noise, but by now ­these “light taps” have the touch and call of fin­gers—­a call that might, impossibly, cross all barriers between inside and out, the warm and the cold, the living and the dead. In this text too, like a sound the reader must learn to listen for, “Some one came knocking.” “The Dead,” then, becomes an education in listening, Gabriel’s as well as the reader’s. The busy realism of the story is a screen, a kind of door b ­ ehind which something ­else is ­going on. At the end, ­G abriel might himself be listening as if from within the boy’s grave, hearing how snow might sound from underground, across

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that impassable last barrier of all: “falling faintly through the universe [ . . . ​] upon all the living and the dead” (176). This last lyrical paragraph, with its hint of poetic parody, is language playing to the ear, repeating a tuneful chiasma of open-­ended participles: “falling softly” and “softly falling,” “falling faintly” and “faintly falling,” which might go on forever. The pres­ent participle, that oddly detached, inclusive, impersonal grammatical form, which seems to get ­f ree of time and place, subject and story, thus carries “The Dead” into the lyrical no-­t ime of snowfalls everywhere. Snow, with its apparent soundlessness and light touch, its blank visibility and muted hush, is a figure that often tests the limits of what can be seen or heard in the comparable whiteness of the printed page. Joyce’s power­f ul last paragraph might lie b ­ ehind Richard Wilbur’s war poem “First Snow in Alsace” (1943), with its extension of weather to ­t hose dead soldiers lying outside the town: You think: beyond the town a mile Or two, this snowfall fills the eyes Of soldiers dead a l­ ittle while. Persons and persons in disguise, Walking the new air white and fine, Trade glances quick with shared surprise.   (2004, 2005: 444) Wilbur beautifully and terribly equivocates between the snow that fills the eyes of “persons” with a lovely “quick [ . . . ​] surprise” and snow that literally fills the wide-­open eyes of soldiers, “dead a ­little while.” How long is “a l­ittle while?” The idiomatic lightness of the phrase tells both of some unlucky recentness and a ­f uture forever. Only “a l­ittle while” before, their living or “quick” eyes might have been differently filled with the look of snow; now, wide open, the snow falls and literally “fills” them, with the same casual undifferentiation of Joyce’s snow that falls on “all the living and the dead.” “You think:” writes Wilbur, and then takes us across the difficult divide of that colon, to let us hear how the light pun of “fills the eyes” might in fact make the reader wince to “think:” it.

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Joyce’s own exploration of ­t hose blocking walls and doors continues in Ulysses, especially in the “Sirens” episode, which both Jean-­M ichel Rabaté and Brad Bucknell have read in terms of a nothing becoming something. As Rabaté puts it, the passage with the seashell “reflects only emptiness, the emptiness which nevertheless allows for the exchange of imaginary products” (1986: 87). Bucknell elaborates on this with his own seashell echo of Stevens at this point, when he concludes, “Bloom sees them hearing the nothing that is not t­ here, and hears the nothing that is” (2001: 147). The passage in question has Lydia putting the seashell to the ear of George Lidwell: To the end of the bar to him she bore lightly the spiked and winding seahorn that he, George Lidwell, solicitor, might hear. —­Listen! she bade him. . . . Ah, now he heard, she holding it to his ear. Hear! He heard. Wonderful. She held it to her own and through the sifted light pale gold in contrast glided. To hear. Tap. Bloom through the bardoor saw a shell held at their ears. He heard more faintly that that they heard, each for herself alone, then each for other, hearing the plash of waves, loudly, a ­silent roar. Bronze by a weary gold, anear, afar, they listened. (1922, 1998: 269) So Joyce plays his own variations on a theme, setting ear-­rhymes against eye-­rhymes, and constantly repeating the verb “to hear” as if the reader, like every­one in the story, w ­ ere trying to hear better: “that he [ . . . ​] might hear [ . . . ​] Ah, now he heard [ . . . ​] his ear. Hear! He heard [ . . . ​] To hear. [ . . . ​] their ears. He heard [ . . . ​] they heard [ . . . ​] hearing [ . . . ​] anear, afar.” The luck of En­glish is that the ear rhymes with what it does and so makes a sound from the activity that seeks it. Joyce is also echoing himself from an earlier passage in the novel, where the ding-­dong opposites of “anear . . . ​afar” refer to another sound: “hoofs ring from afar, and heard steelhoofs ringhoof ringsteel” (248), as if the sound of h ­ orses’ hoofs with their

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steel clatter ­were recalling, from “afar,” another story of poetic origins (see Chapter 4). Meanwhile the “anear, afar” sound that the shell gives out is also a half-­rhyming “roar,” which might be the sea, or just the blood ­going round, or the sound of listening in its seashell hold. Joyce then adds to the fun by first asking us, with George Lidwell, to “Listen!” then, with Bloom, to hear “through the bardoor” which blocks the way. Bloom in fact does not hear anything at all, at least not literally. Yet perhaps precisely b ­ ecause of t­hose obstacles, the seashell and the bar door, he succeeds in “hearing [ . . . ​] loudly, a ­silent roar.” Is Joyce perhaps also recalling George Eliot’s “roar [ . . . ​] on the other side of silence”? Certainly, that it is “loudly, a ­silent roar” makes Bloom’s a wild contradiction of hearing, like the imagination of a sound both too s­ ilent and too deafening simply to hear. It is telling, too, that the mysteries of hearing or listening in this passage are repeatedly expressed by intransitive verbs: “Bronze by a weary gold, anear, afar, they listened” (269), he writes. A c­ ouple of pages ­later, he is still harping on the verb: “Listen. Bloom listened. Richie Goulding listened. And by the door deaf Pat, bald Pat, tipped Pat, listened” (272). The presence of Pat, who is “hard of hear by the door” (262), then sets the w ­ hole of this chapter in context. Ulysses’s men may have blocked their ears with wax to avoid hearing the sirens, but in Joyce’s version, it is the deaf and door-­blocked who listen hardest and best. Pat, who stands “by the door” in his own doubly blocked enclosure, being both deaf and shut out, is the one who listens most strenuously: “deaf Pat, bald Pat, tipped Pat, listened.” As Pat listens, intransitively, to nothing he can hear, so the act, as in many of ­t hese texts, opens a wide radius. What does it mean to listen without hearing, and therefore with a kind of unfinished wish? Perhaps this is the radius that reading itself seeks—­a reading that ­listens “­behind a door,” through the difficulties and obstructions of literary language itself, to the shell that gives back, like “a ­silent roar,” all and nothing. Pres­ent participles, intransitive verbs, forms of attention without immediate object, all take us to the edge of what the senses can deliver. Beyond that edge lie the sights and sounds of another kind of cognition: perhaps lit­er­a­t ure’s own. In this section Joyce then redirects sound through the deafness of his waiting waiter. For instance, the phrase “tipped Pat” taps out

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another sound and signals something e­ lse on Bloom’s mind. It is as if “tipped Pat” condenses to a kind of portmanteau, which is then isolated like a line of poetry: “Tap.” This is the sound of the blind piano tuner, whose “tap” interrupts the w ­ hole episode, whose cane taps along the pavement at the end, and whose tapped tuning fork soon sets every­one listening again: From the saloon a call came, long in ­dying. That was a tuningfork the tuner had that he forgot that he now struck. A call again. That he now poised that it now throbbed. You hear? It throbbed, pure, purer, softly and softlier, its buzzing prongs. Longer in ­dying call. (1922, 1998: 253) Attention in this chapter is set by the deaf and pitched by the blind. That “a call came, long in ­dying” becomes the tuning fork’s “Longer in d ­ ying call,” as Joyce works all the puns on “long in” and “longing,” on “­dying call,” with its Tennysonian fall, as well as making the urgent joke that in “­dying” we might still “call.” T ­ hose “buzzing prongs” of the fork are a “Longer in ­dying call” which might go on “­dying” beyond h ­ uman hearing, forever. Certainly, the tap of the tuning fork and the tap of the cane, combined in “tipped Pat,” is one way of keeping at the back of our ears a sound that strikes the key pitch of this extraordinary verbal m ­ usic. If Joyce keeps us listening, “anear, afar,” to all the virtuosic ear-­ work of his words, this is only one extreme example of what all writers do at some level. Literary writing offers a threshold rather than a destination, and makes us pause ­t here, to hear all the summoned sounds that words can make or bring to the ear. It stops us ­going straight over into sense and comprehension. Like “tipped Pat” or Bloom, in reading we stand at a door, which may be a place of blockage or an outlook of extra wide attention, or, indeed, both at once. From that place we strain to hear both the sounded-­ness and the soundlessness of the written words on the page—­a contradiction as close and arresting as Joyce’s “plash of waves, a s­ ilent roar.” Was Elizabeth Bishop recalling ­these listening games in the opening paragraph of her short story “In the Village?” It begins:

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A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over that Nova Scotian village. No one hears it. [ . . . ​] The scream hangs like that, unheard, in memory—in the past, in the pres­ent, and t­ hose years between. It was not even loud to begin with, perhaps. It just came t­ here to live, forever—­not loud, just alive forever. Its pitch would be the pitch of my village. Flick the lightning rod on top of the church steeple with your fingernail and you w ­ ill hear it. (1984: 251) This tale plays round the harrowing memory of the mad m ­ other’s scream, which can be touched into life again at a “Flick.” All the paradoxes of that sound, which is both dominant and unheard, are contained in this opening paragraph. First, it is both a “scream” and only “the echo of a scream,” as if a Doppler effect ­were at work in the first few words, an “anear, afar” of noise quickly distancing into a merely remembered repeat. Second, it is “unheard, in memory,” where the comma crucially changes the sense, dividing the “unheard” from what is still remembered, so that each remains intact in its contradictory truth. Third, although it was “not even loud to begin with,” the scream seems to get louder with each repetition. Fourth, it has a pitch, “the pitch of my village,” which is both visual and aural together, both a setting and a sound. Fi­nally, even though “No one hears it,” something can set off the scream, like that “Flick” of a fingernail which releases, by implication, a flicker of lightning to be conducted down the “lightning rod” (of memory or writing), and earthed. When Bishop as a young ­woman once developed a serious infection of the ear, she spent weeks in hospital and became fascinated by what she called “All the physics of sound and balance, such fancy bones, and tuning forks” (in Millier 1993: 94). Such “fancy bones” might well take the fancy of this writer, who knows so well how to tune words by listening to how they might “pitch” t­ hose early autobiographical memories in words that both release and hold them. For in this story the scream of maternal insanity—­a noise which must be appeased and gentled, as well as saved “in memory”—­lies ­behind the many other sounds that increase or allay the child’s terror at hearing. For instance, t­ here is the sound the child herself makes

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playing hairpin m ­ usic in her grand­mother’s hair; ­t here is the sound of her aunt playing the piano while—­another scream, but unmentioned—­the pig is butchered; ­there is her grand­father’s talk when she is not “listening to what he is saying” but “listening for sounds from upstairs” (1984: 271); and fi­nally, most importantly, t­here is the “Clang. / Clang” (252) of Nate the blacksmith, who somehow holds and shapes the blocked-­out scream on his anvil. All ­t hese divert and reroute the horror of the sound: even, for instance, into the “ears” of the shoeing ­horse, which are, the child notes, “secret entrances to the underworld” (257). Everywhere, in this story, sound is more direction than object, more passage than fact, as if Bishop w ­ ere mapping the ear’s own thresholds and “entrances,” its ways into an “underworld” of consciousness, however much blocked out. Moreover, it is a nice piece of wit that the blacksmith’s workplace, with its anvil, hammer, and stirrup, takes Bishop’s imagination into the “ears” of the ­horse, where the small “fancy bones” of anvil, hammer, and stirrup are also at work. Certainly, her own ear-­minded aesthetic depends on that witty connection, between the outside narrative of Nate the blacksmith, making something useful and ordinary from the “beautiful pure sound” (274) on the ringing anvil, and its punning double in the ­horse’s (and reader’s) ears. Bishop, like Joyce, overlays sound on sound, in order to sound out the depths of what the text can know, hidden sometimes in its puns and word slippages. In  this story, all her roundabout, repressed, discrepant messages are tuned, somehow, by the (tuning) fork of that fingernail’s lightning, into something the ear might always listen for—as at the beginning: “A scream, the echo of a scream. . . .” While not exactly a random sampling, my choice of texts in this chapter is not meant to signal an exclusive or unique tradition. In a sense, all literary texts do what ­these do: they speak between the eye and the ear, creating that disjunction which the writer exploits and through which the reader must navigate. ­These are merely some that emphasize the hesitation as part of the story. What they tell is that a tale of the ear runs through all lit­er­a­t ure, like a reminder that reading also means hearing t­hings, but hearing that might be hard work. ­Those t­ hings ­will be infinitely varied and, as the phrase suggests, are not necessarily ­things e­ ither; but their mysterious presence in the text

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is part of the writer’s signposting to us, to listen in to the words on the page and, by implication, to attend to a world full of roars in the silence. My specific examples, then, are just a l­ittle more consciously representative of patterns that are everywhere in lit­er­a­ture. I ­will end with three last examples, the first rather less known than the other two. Somewhat underrated ­today, H. E. Bates published his extraordinary novel about unconsummated marriage, The Sleepless Moon, in 1956. In the first chapter, the heroine is left alone in bed on her first night of marriage, listening hour ­after hour to the sound of the sea. “She felt she would go on listening to it for the rest of her life” (1956, 2007: 19), he writes. That “listening” contains all the unspoken ­matter of her sexual loneliness which ­w ill lead, eventually, to her suicide in the last chapter, when she throws herself from a church tower. This is how Bates begins to describe that fall: “From the square no one saw her fall and presently, on the grass[. . . . ]” At this point, cued by “no one saw her fall,” the reader looks to see something on the grass. But this is what the novelist in fact writes: “From the square no one saw her fall and presently, on the grass, t­ here was no sound except the sound of bees in crocus flowers, hardly enough to break the calm and peaceful air” (381). It is one of t­ hose switches from sight to sound which seems to evade the facts but actually brings us almost too near to them, as the ear, it seems, touches ground. Between the two negatives, “no one saw” and “­t here was no sound,” Bates makes us listen all the more acutely to the awful, pausing sense of “presently.” He writes neither what this death looks like, nor what it sounds like, but lets “presently, on the grass,” take the full weight of it. Like Rossetti’s “longer” or Wilbur’s “a ­little while,” that “presently,” with its almost inconsequential time lag—­how long is “presently,” or “presently,” with a comma?—­gives us the fall as an a­ ppalling delay, long or short enough, and then as a sound which is “hardly enough to break[. . . . ]” Hardly enough, or perhaps just enough? since “break” also refers beyond its own object, “the calm and peaceful air,” to something ­else that has broken up, unheard, on the grass. That breathtaking comma a­ fter “presently,” as if itself trying to “break” the fall or save breath, makes a sounded silence of its own in this other­wise unquiet scene of humming “bees.” That the bees still hum then prolongs the sudden, unnerving close-up to what ­ else lies

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nearby, unhearing. This brilliant sentence, with all its punctuated notations of tempo, shuts out the sound of falling—­“­t here was no sound except”—­but therefore makes us listen all the more keenly, not just to it but through it, as if into another of the ear’s ­secret entrances to the underworld. And underworlds are the subject of another fine novel, published in 1981: Marilynne Robinson’s House­keeping. This too is a work which turns on listening: to the sounds of the lake, the leaves, the wind, imaginary c­ hildren on the lakeshore, and, of course, the ubiquitous dead who are pres­ent everywhere in the town of Fingerbone. As that name suggests, fingering bone is an act which might magic the dead to life, or touch them in their watery underworlds. Fin­gers, in this novel, have a habit of breaking bounds, being live when they should be dead, or feeling most when they are blind. “­Every spirit passing through the world fin­gers the tangible and mars the mutable, and fi­nally has come to look and not to buy” (1981: 67), Robinson writes at one point. Against the use-­value of buying and owning, ­t here is the dream-­value of merely looking and fingering. Meanwhile, the sentence itself ambiguously slips both ways “through the world,” keeping the doors in or out ambiguously open. Is the “spirit” that passes alive or dead? Do we even know which is which? For instance, the ­children’s dead ­mother is often glimpsed in the attitudes of Sylvie, their minder, in her shoulder “blades” and “bones” (115), till it seems to the orphaned girls as if that m ­ other’s “nerves guide the blind fin­gers that touch into place all the falling strands of Sylvie’s hair” (116). Dead fin­gers can guide and nerve the living, or blind fin­gers find the unseen place they seek. Owner­ship, even of “nerves” and “fin­gers,” is not certain in this story where spirits, alive or dead, drift in and out, catching the reader unawares. That “fin­gers” might see or hear, recognize or know—­like Sylvie’s own fin­gers trailing in the lake which “ ‘must be full of ­people’ ” (146)—is a crossing of bound­aries between world and underworld which never ceases. The joke of the name, “Fingerbone,” gives license to fin­gers everywhere in this novel to feel to the bone. “I tell my students, language is ­music. Written words are musical notation,” Robinson writes in her essay “Wondrous Love.” She continues, “The m ­ usic of a piece of fiction establishes the way in which

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it is to be read, and, in the largest sense, what it means” (2012: 130). To read House­keeping as a score, or “musical notation,” is to read, ascoltando, as if “what it means” ­were to be found in ­t hose listenings that ask to be listened to. The novel is full of them. For example, sitting in an abandoned homestead by the lake one day, the child Ruth recalls not only the “small, bone feet” (1981: 137) of the other lost ­children but also her own drowned m ­ other who killed herself, driving her car into that selfsame lake: It was so very long since the dark had swum her hair, and t­ here was nothing more to dream of, but often she almost slipped through any door I saw from the side of my eye, and it was she, and not changed, and not perished. She was a m ­ usic I no longer heard, that rang in my mind, itself and nothing ­else, lost to all sense, but not perished, not perished. (138–139) ­ ere is another of ­those aural thresholds that the novel slips through, H taking the reader “through any door” between this and that, heard and unheard, the known and the unknown. Listening for ­music meets the contradiction of a sound “no longer heard, that rang in my mind, itself and nothing.” Like the dream of a m ­ other when t­ here is “nothing more to dream of,” Ruth senses what is “lost to all sense”: that is, a sounding presence, caught in the contradictions of cancelled positives as if in the movement of opening and shutting doors. As Ruth herself puts it elsewhere, “We had spent our lives watching and listening with the constant sharp attention of c­ hildren lost in the dark” (114–115). Only t­ hose who are “lost” and “in the dark” might be able to hear something, like ­music, on that threshold of “sharp attention” which the ear, of all the senses, most easily crosses—­a threshold between h ­ ouse and lake, living and drowned, fin­ger and bone, which the w ­ hole novel searches and listens for. The story then slides to a brilliantly uncanny dénouement, as listening takes over from the other senses and Ruth’s words run on like nothing more than sounds in the ear. At this point, in terms of the narrative, she appears to be dead. Nevertheless, as she imagines coming back alive to her living ­sister, she repeats a strain which has run throughout, like a threat to the novel’s deeply ironic title. Keeping

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­ ouse, or keeping in the ­house, cannot keep out ­t hose sounds that h come knocking, from outside, on all the doors that represent safety, security, and sense. H ­ ere the dead Ruth imagines what her living ­sister, Lucille, might hear of her voice when, in the pres­ent tense, she returns home once more: She thinks she hears someone on the walk, and hurries to open the door, too ­eager to wait for the bell. It is the mailman, it is the wind, it is nothing at all. Sometimes she dreams that we come walking up the road in our billowing raincoats, hunched against the cold, talking together in words she cannot quite understand. And when we look up and speak to her the words are smothered, and their intervals swelled, and their cadences distended, like sounds in ­water. (186) It is the old trick, of listening through an obstruction, ­whether death or a door, in order to hear the sense of words when words make no sense. Ruth, like so much ­else in this novel, might only be the sound of a dream, or of “the wind” outside, or of “nothing at all.” Yet listening at a door is also where something might be heard, like knocks or bells—­those rhythmic pulses which turn the language to lyric. The reversal of voices only adds to the strangeness: Ruth imagines her living ­sister thinking she hears words from Ruth’s own dead self—­words like m ­ usic, or like drowning: “their intervals swelled, and their cadences distended, like sounds in ­water.” T ­ here is a latent corpse in this sentence, “swelled” and “distended” as well it might be in ­water, as if the dead Ruth now embodied her own ­mother’s death and ­were returning, like all the other dead in this novel, in an estranged ­music played to the living. “I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming” (184), she admits ­towards the end. That a sentence about sound might intimate a drowned body suggests how thin a line this novel treads between “thinking and dreaming,” between narrative and lyrical modes. Quite who dreams, and who is the object of dreaming, and quite how a dream of return might think itself true, are questions that Robinson’s language, like any poet’s, constantly asks. In this, the novel’s ambiguous, disturbing, oddly matter-­of-­fact ending, our

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dream-­reading ears are taken on a journey across all ­t hose imaginable thresholds, between inside and out, air and w ­ ater, the dead and the living, and urged to hear a nearly impossible, utterly seductive “­music” ­t here. Six years a­ fter the publication of House­keeping, another novelist wrote a work which also keeps h ­ ouse for the dead—­not only a dead child but also a ­whole dead population: the “Sixty Million and more” that she represents. Toni Morrison’s epic Beloved has the same thin borders as House­keeping, as it tracks between a re-­memoried past, and the pres­ent which incarnates that past as the ghost of a dead d ­ aughter. “A fully dressed ­woman walked out of the ­water” (1987: 50), she writes of Beloved herself, with a nonchalance that carries its intimations of the grave, of ­water ­u nder a bridge, of the ­M iddle Passage, as well as the breaking ­waters of birth or rebirth, with such literal lightness that the reader is barely aware of the anomaly. If Robinson’s dead are also watery ones, discovered outside the house—­that “inherited burden” of white Amer­i­ca, as Marilyn Chandler puts it—­Morrison makes the ­house “a refuge, an achievement” (1991: 294), a place justified by its very haunting. In both, however, the ghost presence is signaled by ­t hings heard rather than seen. For instance, in a sentence that eerily recalls Ruth’s dream of herself returning, dead-­alive, in House­keeping, Morrison writes of Beloved’s effect on her m ­ other and s­ ister: “­A fter four weeks they still had not got used to the gravelly voice and the song that seemed to lie in it. Just outside ­music it lay, with a cadence not like theirs” (1987: 60). What lit­er­a­t ure can do, of course, is make audible the cadenced voicings within the mere voice, or the sound of “song” in a character’s par­t ic­u ­lar “gravelly voice.” Beloved speaks like any churlish, difficult teenager, but the beloved memory she evokes and is, speaks through, and round, and across her voice, like “the song [ . . . ​] in it,” which is also “outside” the ­music of song. It is when the grammar of a sentence ­w ill not quite add up that the reader listens, as ­here, to what must be known differently, by some roundabout route of attention, some pause in the pro­cess of sifting sense, which is what ­poetry offers. Beloved, as a character and a ghost, a fact and a memory, a girl and a p ­ eople, a proper noun and a biblical adjective, is both a voice and a rich hold of “voicings,” to be known only

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in the cadences of what is not exactly the sound of any real ­human speech, but only of a lyrical poem that holds up the story. It is this “song” in Beloved’s voice which emerges ­later in the novel, just ­after the skating episode, to confront her ­mother, Sethe, with knowledge that is then only remembered like a heard after-effect: When the click came Sethe ­didn’t know what it was. Afterward it was clear as daylight that the click came at the very beginning—­a beat, almost, before it started; before she heard three notes; before the melody was even clear. Leaning forward a l­ittle, Beloved was humming softly. It was then, when Beloved finished humming, that Sethe recalled the click—­t he settling of pieces into places designed and made especially for them. (1987: 175) ­ ere, the “click” only clicks into place when the “humming” has H stopped, and we learn some paragraphs l­ater that, as Sethe puts it, “Nobody knows that song but me and my ­children” (176). This, of course, is the time-­lagged structure of the w ­ hole novel, which delays disclosure in an almost psychoanalytic pro­cess of overcoming reluctance and re­sis­tance, by which time the ­t hing disclosed has already slipped back into memory, surmise, ghost or song. ­Here the “click,” like an up-­“beat” or rhythm before the tune even starts, the sound that makes it all fall into place, is already in the past when Sethe makes sense of it. Beloved’s voice was always made strange by the “song” in it, and song is what she w ­ ill become again t­ owards the end, in her own Song of Songs: “I am Beloved and she is mine” (214). So the sense of lyric in the novel asserts its power of song over and above the power of character, person, even history and story. Beloved is an inscription on a grave come to life, not only as a girl but also as a song, even if it is only as an old quotation from another Song. It is the genius of Morrison to have combined the two, as if lyric voicings might distract us from narrative, assert another score for reading, and open up a space in which the ear might hear, re-­memory, and then forget, the sounds of a song that is much larger than any one singer. It is as if in all t­ hese novels and stories, lyric cuts across novelistic conventions like a haunting from poetry. Far from being a separate

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genre or form, lyric, or at least the lyrical, might be the acoustic texture of any literary text, ­whether prose or poetry—­a texture which distracts the ear with all its hums, melodies and songs, with tunes that tune us to “the wisdom that becomes audible” (Barenboim 2008: 3). Just as lyric might be “overheard” in the dramatic monologue, as Herbert Tucker (1985) has shown, so one might argue that lyric is no more than an ­angle of reading—­one which turns an ear to the text, and pauses to listen in to its acoustic distractions, as if t­hose ­were the very sense of it. Lyric may be no more than “the lyre at work in the words” (Leighton 2012: 171), tweaking our attention away from the eye and its fast track to the brain at any moment. And so, in listening to Beloved’s “humming,” Sethe hears in retrospect the “click” of a recognition scene much stranger than that between ­mother and ­daughter, as if Beloved’s voice had thus become the multiple indistinguishable hum of ­t hose “Sixty Million and more.” It is a scene of loss, as well as gain, but it is also the scene of reading (itself loss and gain)—­one in which the ear starts to listen to a song, and loses the sense of a girl in the pro­cess. ­A fter this recognition, Beloved starts to retreat into being forgotten. By the final paragraph, her “footprints” have been erased, till “By and by all trace is gone” (Morrison 1987: 275), both footprint and print on the page lost to the “weather,” as if in preparation for the forgetting that reading becomes when the text is something more than a story. “Just weather,” Morrison writes, except that she then gives us a last word, not yet forgotten, or only forgotten in the way that a poem must be forgotten in order to be read again, itself the “trace” of a song in a voice that was almost a person but was also always more than that, and full of other voicings: “Beloved” (275). Lyric, as song, or as a Song of Songs, is the catalyst at work in this novel, turning it from mere narrative, or even mere history, into a love poem, richly sounded. In all ­t hese examples, then, it is not just that lit­er­a­t ure takes us by the ear, making us hear its rhythms, pauses, allusions, and it is not just that the act of listening may be written in as part of the story; it is also that the text works by becoming a listening space itself, a hold which holds us attentive to words, especially words that have suffered the queer deflection, estrangement, and difficulty of what we call the

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literary. “The ear,” writes Frost, “is the only true writer and the only true reader” (1995: 677). It is not just that the writer consciously hears something, writes it down, and then invites a hearing from the reader to match. In fact the match is never exact and cannot be pre-planned. For it is part of the fascination of hearing t­ hings in lit­er­a­t ure that words shift, change, and deepen, loaded as they are with the half-­ conscious counterweave of other texts and usages, and renewed in their ­silent voicings at each new reading. It is as if the ­silent page might release to the summoning, imagining, thinking ear some version of that “­silent roar,” which always lies beyond the sound threshold of what we think we can merely hear.

2 Tennyson’s Hum a thousand twangling instruments ­ ill hum about mine ears . . . W william shakespeare “Pom,” said Pooh. “I put that in to make it more hummy . . . ​” a. a. milne Nay—­t he hum of men Or other ­t hings talking in unknown tongues, And notes of busy Life in distant worlds, Beat, like a far wave, on my anxious ear. (1969, 1987: I. 73–85, Pt. 2, ll. 36–39) ­ hese lines from Tennyson’s early poem “Armageddon,” prob­ably T composed when he was about fifteen, already point to a lifetime’s obsessions: not only with the sea, that “far wave” which trou­bles the ear, but also with noises generally: the “hum,” the “unknown tongues,” the “notes” which resonate outside articulate speech. That “hum of men / Or other t­ hings talking in unknown tongues” is an odd expression, which partly echoes Milton’s “Towered cities please us then, / And the busy hum of men” (1968: 138, ll. 117–118), and partly disavows him by setting “other ­t hings talking” against men’s merely social communication. It is typical of Tennyson to be more pleased by neutral, inanimate “­t hings talking in unknown tongues” than by Milton’s urbane “busy hum of men,” even if ­t hose two lines are in his ears at this point. Hearing “­t hings” that are indecipherable or otherworldly, w ­ hether from foreign lands or natu­ral landscapes, is much more likely to appeal to this post-­Romantic poet, even if what he is also often hearing is the echo of previous poems, layered

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one over the other. Thus the Miltonic “hum of men” slips into a Wordsworthian alternative: “Or other t­hings talking,” and fi­nally into the “Beat” of “a far wave” which gathers them all into a distant rumor and rhythm. It is as if Tennyson w ­ ere already, at this early stage, tracking the course of his own creativity, through the voices of pre­de­ces­sors, to the word which w ­ ill represent the rhythmic pulse of verse that suddenly sounds like his own, in that emphatically placed and isolated verb: “Beat.” Yet the phrase “Beat, like a far wave, on my anxious ear” is also a reminder that the “ear,” for all its ability to track sounds into the distance, is troubled by listening. For why should it be “anxious”? In case it cannot hear, or ­because it would hear more, or less, more closely, or more distantly? That “anxious ear” has a restlessness about it not quite in proportion to the apparently innocuous noises it might detect. It is as if, in that one line, Tennyson ­were sketching out a poetics of listening, trialing an attention to sounds which, in all their unspecific and incommunicable distance, their poetic allusions and resolution into a faraway beat, in fact command a difficult kind of attention. His “anxious ear” is still straining to hear at the end, as if ­t hose alternatives: “the hum,” the “talking,” the “notes,” do not quite allay its anxiety. However much the “far wave” beats, like the sound of a knock or a heart—­t hose favorite beating subjects in his poems— it may not necessarily assuage or answer his wish to hear. The poet’s ear turns anxiously t­owards the object not only b ­ ecause it may not be able to hear it, but also perhaps b ­ ecause it may not want to. It was Arthur Hallam, the poet’s first g ­ reat critic, who pointed out that Tennyson was among the poets who “ ‘produce two-­t hirds of their effect by sound’” (1831, 1967: 45). But Hallam was not alone among early reviewers in noting Tennyson’s sheer sonorousness. “ ‘You are sure of a sweet sound, though nothing be in it’ ” (in Hunt 1970: 111), wrote another, possibly Gerard Manley Hopkins. A third declared, “ ‘He ­w ill write you a poem with nothing in it except ­music’ ” (in Jump 1967: 155). What should be “in it,” it seems, is not “nothing” but something. That phrase, “nothing in it,” runs through the history of Tennyson’s reputation like a motif of too easy lyricism and equivalently baffled meaning. ­Music or sweet sound always sound like “nothing” beside a more impor­tant something which has been

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lost. To concede that t­ here might be something in the nothing then requires an inversion of our sense of significance. For if, as Eric Griffiths has pointed out, “Tennyson thought in melody” (1989: 107), then indeed perhaps we must recognize that ­t here is something “in” it, even a kind of “thought,” but thought that forces us to rethink what thought might be. “He had the finest ear of any En­glish poet since Milton” (1975: 239), declared T. S. Eliot. Auden repeats this, offering an even wider field of comparison, but meanwhile also hedges his bets: “he had the finest ear, perhaps, of any En­glish poet.” His famous and much-­ repeated corollary that “he was also undoubtedly the stupidest” (1973, 1979: 222) is a reminder that the ear is not traditionally ­intelligent. Yet it is that ear, nothing e­ lse, which haunts Tennyson’s readers and has haunted generations of l­ater writers. Stevie Smith, for example, who complained in Novel on Yellow Paper of “the sad sweet over-­sweet Alfred, so haughty, so proud and so disagreeable” (1936, 1980: 14), also filled her novel with nostalgic echoes of his work. “How richly compostly loamishly sad ­were ­those Victorian days[. . . . ​] How I love ­t hose damp Victorian trou­bles. The woods decay, the woods decay and fall” (13), she wrote, slipping the first four lines of Tennyson’s “Tithonus” into her mock-­ melancholy prose. “The waste remains, the waste remains and kills” (2000: 79), wrote William Empson in his villanelle “Missing Dates,” an echo first pointed out by I.  A. Richards, and elaborated by John Hollander (1981: 95–96) as well as by Christopher Ricks (2002: 202). Empson’s repeated cadence, “remains and kills,” recalls the original’s ­dying fall while perpetuating Tithonus’s mythical undying in the very structure of the villanelle, which asserts something constantly coming round again, even if, like life itself, killing. Tennyson’s “decay and fall” is scored on the ear of the l­ater poem, as it w ­ ill be on Alice Oswald’s own “Tithonus” (see Chapter 10), as if poetry’s infinitely allusive returns of rhythm and assonance—­ “decay,” “remain”—­were a Tithonus story of repeats in its very form. In a poem published in 1992, Paul Muldoon recalls hearing Tennyson’s voice on wax cylinder. Although poking a bit of fun—­Tennyson sounds like “a parakeet / crying out in a hurricane”—­even Muldoon cannot resist the addiction of that same line, and ends by quoting

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one who “quavered into the Ansaphone, / ‘The woods decay, the woods decay and fall . . .’ ” (1992: 9)—­ellipses marking where the fall (of woods and voice) goes on and on. So many of “Tennyson’s cadences are interested in falls” (2009: 16), as Peter McDonald notes, that they come to seem a m ­ atter of continuous intransitive action, rather than dead drops. Like the wax cylinder, Muldoon’s modern ansaphone also registers Tennyson’s funny noises, his way of repeating and drawing out the sound of “fall,” so that it holds up the narrative as if for an indefinite autumn of falling. As Penelope Fitzgerald summarizes more generally, Tennyson’s is “the sound of the language talking to itself ” (1992: 15). This nicely suggests, on the one hand, that literary language listens, lending an ear to its own voice, and on the other that it is a kind of madness, a “talking to itself ” which might end up ignoring the needs of ­human communication altogether. But ­t here are other hums in Tennyson, and it is in­ter­est­ing how this word, which figures so early in his writing, ­w ill continue throughout his life to evoke sounds over and above ­t hose of articulacy and communication. John Hollander touches in passing on one aspect of such a hum when he won­ders if echoes might “constitute a kind of underground cipher-­message for the attentive poetic ear, or perhaps a private melody or undersong hummed during composition by the poet” (1981: ix). Sound, he proposes, may be both the “undersong” of composition, an originating sound in the poet’s ears, as well as one of the main conduits of literary influence—as if that hum, heard by another at a distance, could set the tempo of a new composition: “The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.” Lit­er­a­t ure is full of ­these hummed undersongs, conscious or unconscious. Sylvia Plath’s “Love set you g ­ oing like a fat gold watch” (1960, 1981: 156), for instance, might be taking the meter and sound-­shape, though not the pace, of George Herbert’s “Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back” (2007: 661). Did the first word, “Love,” draw on some rhythmic memory in her brain, so that the composing ear, catching the hum of an old poem, set it to new words but replaced the drag of Herbert’s reluctance with the speeded-up tick-­tock of a “fat gold watch”? How much of Swinburne went into Yeats a­ fter the occasion when, according to John Masefield, “ ‘Yeats opened the door, and

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heard, as it ­were, the murmur of many bees on a hot summer day?’ ” This, he explained, “ ‘was Mr. Swinburne trying over his mea­sures in a musical chant’ ” (in Schuchard 2008: 14). Masefield’s very description carries its own allusive “murmur” of lit­ er­ a­ t ure’s bees, Tennyson’s among o ­ thers, as if he w ­ ere hearing that transference of sound from one poet to another. As Ronald Schuchard has shown, Yeats’s own composing voice chanted and hummed in a similar way: “ ‘I became aware of a queer monotonous murmur somewhere in the ­house’ ” (273), a visitor reported on hearing the poet composing out loud. Hums, murmurs, and whispers, t­ hose sounds which are “expressive, but impersonal” (Connor 2014: 92), inward and almost animal (for the sound of a bee is never far from a hum), as well as distracting and unlocatable, seem to carry the rhythms of sound into the ear without impositions of meaning. Hums and murmurs also carry from poet to poet, writer to writer, like a sound-­memory freed for re-use ­precisely by being without the burdens of meaning. Hollander’s “hummed” undersongs run rife in the ears of poets whose task is to listen both attentively, yet partially, to the noises of the literary past, and then to persuade the reader to hear the old within the new, echoes of familiar voices within each poem’s new voicings. Certainly, what the writer knows is that, in composition, the ear opens its radar wide, unconsciously perhaps, to catch the many competing undercurrents of sound and song within the language. a a a

To turn at this point to an early work by Tennyson—­a work which has often puzzled its readers and been quickly passed over, but like “Armageddon” is rich in promise of what’s to come—is to find a range of strange listenings, forms of inward attention, working almost like a secondary narrative in the text. “The Lover’s Tale” is an odd poem. The first parts ­were prepared for publication in 1832 but then withdrawn at the last minute, much to the astonishment of Hallam and the other Apostles. Certainly this deeply Shelleyan work is, in its narrative at least, bewilderingly, even comically solipsistic. The ­suicidal subplot, the three cypresses, the gloomy cavern, the name of Lionel, and the sibling incest theme all seem, despite Tennyson’s

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disclaimers, to derive from Shelley’s “Rosalind and Helen.” Tenny­ son’s rival lovers, Julian and Lionel, are both, it would appear, named ­after Shelleyan models, Julian being the poet’s own namesake in “Julian and Maddalo” and Lionel featuring, for instance, in “The Boat on the Serchio” as well as in “Rosalind and Helen.” Marion Shaw has also noted the influence of Byron’s “The Dream” and reads the poem as a refutation of romantic love—­that “auto-­eroticism which paradoxically renders [the hero] [ . . . ​] unloving and unlovable” (1988: 28). Meanwhile, as Seamus Perry points out, “The Lover’s Tale” contains such “thick mists of fantastic verbalism” that “it is often hard to know quite what is ­going on” (2005: 94). It is as if the narrative and dramatic drive of the story is constantly blocked by a language that circles in on itself, in whirl­pools of introspection. Moreover, it is perhaps not accidental that this poem is also a workbox of phrases which Tennyson w ­ ill pillage for the rest of his life. To forget its narrative momentum, and to read with a listening rather than deciphering ear, is to find a work which draws the attention constantly inwards, as if exploring a place, far away and full of noises, that often asks to be heard to be believed. The opening lines, suggesting a familiar Romantic scene, already draw the reader’s attention away from the near view ­towards the distant sounds of the sea: ­ ere far away, seen from the topmost cliff, H Filling with purple gloom the vacancies Between the tufted hills, the sloping seas Hung in mid-­heaven, and half-­way down rare sails, White as white clouds, floated from sky to sky. Oh! pleasant breast of w ­ aters, quiet bay, Like to a quiet mind in the loud world, Where the chafed breakers of the outer sea Sank powerless [ . . . ​] (I. 325–381, Pt. 1, ll. 1–9) ­ hese lines, with their Wordsworthian effects of mirroring calm— T the “quiet bay, / Like to a quiet mind”—­seem to describe a state of isolated composure. This is the Romantic poet in his “far away” lookout, self-­reflecting, dreamy, and apparently un­perturbed. Yet

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already at the start t­here is a Tennysonian trick of perspective: “­Here far away . . .” he begins. The poet’s favorite boyhood phrase, “far away,” plays a game of ­here and ­t here, now and then, against the opening word: “­Here.” Is “far away” a perspective beyond or within “­Here?” Is “­Here” “far away” from elsewhere, or is the speaker “far away,” in spite of being “­Here”? Moreover, the calm and quiet ­distance of the scene is no sooner established than it raises the prospect of something not quite so calm, which frets at the poet’s perception: “the chafed breakers of the outer sea.” He may not be so “far away,” then, as not to hear, or remember hearing, the breaking of “breakers”—­t hat “Break, break, break,” which ­w ill make Tennyson the g ­ reat poet of the broken heart and broken verbal repeats. Already the landscape is less a context for action than a figure, specifically a figure for what is “outer” and inner, the “outer sea” being a breaking force which might, at any time, break in. It is effectively the same situation as that conjured by the line from “Armageddon”: “Beat, like a far wave, on my anxious ear.” T ­ here is the same anxiety about hearing and the same sense of being “far away,” though not far enough to quite shut out another “outer sea.” ­Those two perspectives w ­ ill keep returning in this poem, in a play of ins and outs which has something to do with the allure and fear of sound, as well as with the need to sound sound’s further reaches. ­A fter this first “outer sea,” it is in­ter­est­ing how often the language keeps returning to ­t hings within and without: “the inner ­house” (Pt. 1, l. 108), “My inward sap [ . . . ​] My outward circling air” (ll. 161– 162), “the inmost blue” (l. 303), “my inmost heart [ . . . ​] my outward hearing” (ll. 418–419), “far on within its inmost halls” (l. 513), “her inmost heart” (l. 577), “my inmost frame” (l. 584), “More to the ­inward than the outward ear” (l. 709), “my heart seemed far within me” (Pt. 2, l. 53), “Flashed through my eyes into my innermost brain” ­(l. 94). In, inner, inmost, innermost—­this is a direction to which the poet keeps turning, as if in retreat from outer facts and places as well as the dramatic exigencies of the narrative. “­Here far away” turns out to be, less a place far away, elsewhere, and more a place of far-­ness deep within. It is not surprising, then, that the spot where Camilla, Julian’s beloved other half, his childhood foster-­sister and double, makes her

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traumatic disclosure of love for Lionel, his friend and rival, turns out to be a place almost too inward to know: by “a cavern and a mountain hall, / Which none have fathomed” (Pt. 1, ll. 507–508), Tennyson writes. This place, below which a bridge is thrown across a chasm, is a Romantic setting full of dizzying distances, below and within. Yet its unfathomableness is an invitation rather than a block, for in the very same line the poet starts to fathom it: “If you go far in” (l. 508), he proposes. Into this hall or cavern, so country rumor has it, a desperate husband once threw his wife and child, then killed ­h imself. On the narrative level, this is ­either a piece of interpolated melodrama intended to jazz up the love story, or ­else it is a pointed prophecy of Lionel’s l­ater, carelessly premature burial of his wife and child. But as so often in Tennyson, the monitory, ethical sense of the passage is quickly lost in the seduction of its noises. ­Going down from that same bridge, the last platform of the murdered ­family, Julian and Camilla seem to be recklessly heading in the same direction:        On the other side Is scooped a cavern and a mountain hall, Which none have fathomed. If you go far in (The country p ­ eople rumour) you may hear The moaning of the ­woman and the child, Shut in the secret chambers of the rock. I too have heard a sound—­perchance of streams ­Running far on within its inmost halls [ . . . ​]   (Pt. 1, ll. 506–513) The narrating “I” starts to listen to a place that speaks in rumors, moanings—noises which draw him characteristically “far in” or “far on within.” Such distances, mea­sured by the favorite adjective “far,” open up a prospect which is not only peculiarly aural but also out of phase with the tragic story line. For it seems that the sounds emitted by this eerie rock cavity are not t­ hose of the “moaning” ­woman and child who w ­ ere killed, but belong to another, almost Wordsworthian idyll: “I too have heard a sound—­perchance of streams / ­Running far on within its inmost halls.” So the inner

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distance—­“far in,” “far on within,” “inmost”—is a direction which leads, in spite of ­human calamities, to the sound of “streams / ­Running [ . . . ​] on.” Tennyson’s ear, it seems, is a wayward faculty, easily distracted from the emotional drama, seduced by other noises, and all too prone to hear a ­music of its own—or in this case an enviably Wordsworthian m ­ usic: “I too have heard[. . . . ]” The hum of a language from the past, streaming from Words­worth’s largely benign sense of streams, leads to that creatively e­ ager: “I too.” It becomes clear, then, that ­t here is some reason, other than dark rumors of murder and suicide, which draws the speaker, Julian, to this place. Though full of premonitions of strange losses to come, ­these “inmost halls” are also oddly songful, full of poetic voices from the past. For this passage first traces the sound of streams back through “the cavern-­mouth” (l. 514) and then ends in another surprising place which only seems to justify the ­music of the stream. It is a place where the “brawling brook” (l. 516) suddenly seems to pause:                unseen, But taken with the sweetness of the place, It makes a constant bubbling melody That drowns the nearer echoes. (ll. 520–523) In spite of graves, then, this place is sweet. Rumors and moaning have given way to a “constant bubbling melody,” in a puzzlingly cheerful substitution of further for “nearer echoes.” But which are the “nearer echoes”? The only other sounds in the vicinity are the rumored cries of the drowned w ­ oman and child. Are t­ hose erased by this “constant bubbling melody,” which, in a word that surprises with its own ironic sleight of hand, “drowns” them? It is an extraordinary use, or misuse, of the verb. Exactly who or what is drowned ­here? A ­family, literally? Julian’s hopes of marriage to Camilla, figuratively? A happy childhood, about to be dashed by sexual desires? Or just “echoes,” which are drowned out by echoes further off? ­Tennyson, it seems, is already sounding out the sound of something that “drowns” the tragic drama of betrayed families or disappointed love, and asserting instead “a constant bubbling melody.” R ­ unning on, as well as in, are tempting directions for this poet’s ear, as if mere

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events might be overwhelmed and substituted by an aural alternative: a listening far away, or far in, as if for the sound that listening makes in its “inmost halls.” The unfathomable “cavern” and “mountain hall” might thus cease to be places of narrative calamity and become the ear’s own inward space. What seems, then, like “fantastic verbalism” and emotional muddle begins to have some purpose. The cavern where three p ­ eople once drowned and which warns of three more figurative drownings—­ Camilla’s, her child’s, and Julian’s—is also the place where one wave of sound simply drowns out another, one echo another, leaving nothing but “a constant bubbling melody.” To go so far inwards is, for Tennyson, to start to fathom his own ear, to listen or to hear himself listening, as if no longer paying attention to an object, event, or story, but only to a kind of sweetly continuous, ultra-­linguistic hum. Indeed, ­t here is a sense in which the ­whole logic of the love triangle, between Julian, Lionel, and Camilla, is confused by a fourth presence in this poem: the presence of the ear. Near the start of the work Tennyson invokes this par­t ic­u­lar faculty when addressing the muse-­like goddess of the past, playing “some old melody” (Pt. 1, l. 20) of love. “I come, ­g reat Mistress of the ear and eye” (l. 22), he writes, and in that order. It is almost as if some other mistress of love lurked in the wings, one who might rival Camilla as the object of Julian’s desire. Read on this level, “The Lover’s Tale” becomes a kind of love poem to the ear—­a poem in which Tennyson, at the beginning of his c­ areer, is sounding out just how “far” he might go ­towards ­t hose bubbling melodies which run on and on, like Words­worth’s or Shelley’s before him. Julian’s strange fits of listening, like ­t hose suffered l­ater by the Prince in “The Princess,” w ­ ill continue to derail the story line and, as ­here, override “the nearer echoes” with sounds that seem to come from another place, or another poem. Soon ­after this passage t­ here is a further example of such aural distraction. Somewhere below the bridge, on a mossy bank where “three dark, tall cypresses” (Pt. 1, l. 526) stand (like a warning monument to threesomes), Camilla haplessly tells Julian of her love for Lionel, and he, falling down in a dead faint at the news, half-­ wakes to find that Lionel is somehow already pres­ent, like a figure released from his own subconscious. Julian, however, does not see

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or speak to his rival; instead, he listens passively to the other’s words: Fair speech was his and delicate of phrase, Falling in whispers on the sense, addressed More to the inward than the outward ear, As rain of the midsummer midnight soft [ . . . ​]   (Pt. 1, ll. 707–710) The “inward” ear, characteristically, does not so much hear “speech” as listen for something more or less than speech: “whispers” or “rain.” The sound that is searched for might indeed be a kind of “cipher-­ message for the attentive poetic ear” (Hollander 1981: ix)—an ear willing to be sidetracked, even from its own tragic story of lost love, by the lovely noises poetry might make. The difference between “inward” and “outward ear” is once again crucial, as Tennyson sets against the facts of the tale another strange perspective of inwardness, full of inattention, distraction, of a rival h ­ uman voice turning to sweet sounds: “As rain of the midsummer midnight soft.” The seductive humming of “midsummer midnight soft” may be what the inward ear is a­ fter, ­after all. Thus, while Julian’s “outward ear” hears words—­ words which spell death to his hopes and mark the dark turning point of his life—­his “inward” ear, like that of any budding poet, may only be listening for continuous “whispers,” for a sweetly side-­tracking figure of speech which has l­ittle to do with real events or feelings. In part Tennyson is listening to Words­worth h ­ ere, and to that poet’s own frequent references to an “inward ear”—­“ ‘Such rebounds our inward ear / Catches sometimes from afar’ ” (in McDonald 2012: 46)—­which is not simply the inner ear, itself already a technical term at this time, but the inward-­bound ear, as if it contained distances of inwardness not unlike ­those of the very landscape all round. Such inwardness, which ­ought to be the locus of pure subjectivity, a Romantic assertion of creative individuality, is also the place where other poets’ sounds are hummed and heard. Meanwhile, this disjunction between trauma and indifference, between nearer and further echoes, outer and inner, goes to the heart of Tennyson’s writing, often wrecking his plots and confusing his emotional purpose.

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The place of murder, suicide, and drowning, of Julian’s despair and disillusionment, is thus also the place where melodies ­bubble over, where echoes drown out nearer echoes, and where the voice of the rival comes “soft” as a lover’s, in a line that hums with m’s as if in a practice run for all ­t hose ­later bees that ­w ill fill Tennyson’s poetry. Certainly, the fact that the names of both hero and rival are ostentatiously Shelleyan makes this a work that negotiates stranger love stories than the one it tells. What Camilla gives to Julian is consciousness of a rival who is “delicate of phrase,” and whose rainy “whispers” are a reminder that this place of murder and emotional betrayal is also the cavern of the ear, where the words of an older Romantic poet might fall, “As rain,” to nourish the soil of the younger. Such incestuous dramas of the ear ghost the narrative, creating ­these moments of aural delight in the midst of danger and distress. Before this disclosure, however, the two childhood sweethearts sit together on the ground, and a chant begins—­a kind of lilting duet which w ­ ill then run through the rest of the poem. Julian recalls, of himself and Camilla playing as ­children, that        Hither we came, And sitting down upon the golden moss, Held converse sweet and low—­low converse sweet [ . . . ​] (Pt. 1, ll. 528–530) This is Tennyson catching not the sense but the tune of “converse,” which is “sweet and low” and then, indeed conversely, low and sweet. His own poetic love affair with “sweet and low,” and all its variations, is a refrain which ­w ill haunt not only this poem but also a lifetime’s writing. This may be an example of the “sad sweet over-­sweet Alfred” (1980: 14), as Stevie Smith called him, but sweetness h ­ ere is not just a tick of poetic speech. Instead, it starts to develop a narrative of its own, contrary to the macabre story line. Julian, for instance, notes the “sweetness of the place” (l. 521) of murder, Camilla’s voice has a “most prevailing sweetness” (l. 542) in “so sweet a place” (l. 547), and ­later again “her voice was very sweet and low” (l. 552) or, still ­later in the poem, “so musically low” (l. 697). Tennyson is reworking a phrase, in a “self-­borrowing” or “secret act of allusion” (Ricks 2002: 186),

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which was already a favorite, turning up in the early poem, “Hero to Leander”: “Thy voice is sweet and low” (I. 250–251, l. 33), and ­later returning in the lovely song from “The Princess,” with its rocking barcarolle: Sweet and low, sweet and low,   Wind of the western sea [ . . . ​] (II. 185–296, Pt. 2, ll. 1–2) It is not just that this poet borrows promiscuously from himself, repeating phrases that ring their changes throughout his writing, but also that his “inward ear” is addicted to a sense of noises offstage—­ noises which might keep him listening, forgetfully and forever, to some other love drama or ear-­commanding tale. For sure enough, just ­after Julian has recalled the “sweet and low” converse of his younger self, he listens to the wind. “The wind / Told a lovetale beside us” (Pt. 1, ll. 531–532), he reports. What “lovetale” is this, which is also, in both senses, “beside us”? Julian is listening, but typically not quite to the tale at hand, or even to the memory of it. He is listening to a tale told by the wind in his ear—­a tale which has dovetailed “The Lover’s Tale” into “a lovetale,” as if it ­were just a ­little dif­fer­ent from his own. In some ways, the ­whole poem has this palimpsestic quality, as if its ear ­were always trained on other sounds—­ sounds which are somehow “beside” the point of the tale. As James Longenbach puts it, “­Great poems threaten to feel beside the point precisely when we want them to reflect our importance” (2004: 11). This is the wisdom of poetry, to be often beside itself: beside what the reader expects, or beside what the world thinks is impor­tant. If, on a narrative level, Julian thus proves himself one of ­t hose irritating men who is just not listening, he is also, like Tennyson himself, listening too much and with a much wider ­angle of attention than the story requires. His ear, like the poet’s own, remains bent on tales heard in the melodies of a stream, in the humming m’s of the “midsummer midnight,” in the wind’s impersonal, passing “lovetale”—­all of them, by any calculation of narrative facts, beside the point. ­A fter this moment, the phrase “sweet and low” undergoes some curious variations. ­Here, for instance, is an early example when Julian is recalling his happy childhood days with his “foster-­sister”

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(Pt. 1, l. 227): “and strange to me, and sweet, / Sweet through strange years to know” (ll. 237–238). It is a typical Tennysonian construction, rolling from “strange” to “sweet,” then repeating “sweet” over the line break, as if savoring the word, considering its sweetness, but then just altering the sense of “strange” in “Sweet through strange years,” where “strange” also means estranging, distancing— as if the very line break could cause the prospect to shift. So the double sweetness of the remembered moment meets Tennyson’s typical “far away” perspective in “strange years” and becomes already slightly less sweet. Nevertheless, “sweet and strange,” like “sweet and low,” is an addictive twosome, a sort of aural twinning, like “Thou and I, Camilla, thou and I” (l. 51). This first “sweet and strange” then ­prepares the ear for any number of variations on its theme. For instance, when the feast is set out for Camilla’s “Winter’s Tale” resurrection from the dead—­another unashamed literary borrowing from another love tale—­Tennyson writes, across the reconsidering space of a w ­ hole paragraph break, that the scene is So rich, so strange, and stranger even than rich, But rich as for the nuptials of a king. And stranger yet [ . . . ​] (Pt. 4, ll. 210–212) He makes each Shakespearean adjective pause to reconsider itself: “so strange, and stranger,” “rich, / But rich,” “And stranger yet[. . . . ]” This incremental repetition, which presses words into slightly altered variations of themselves, thus turns them into events, into dramatic actors rather than motionless disclosers of the story. Even more momentous is the reconsideration of “stranger” in the silence of the stanza break between “king” and “And stranger,” since a “stranger” is what the Shakespearean resurrection ­w ill bring back. As Anca Rosu points out, “Language [ . . . ​] means through its movement and through the pattern of that movement—in other words, it means when it happens” (1995: 18). T ­ here is a constant tidal recoil in “The Lover’s Tale,” a qualifying impulse which insists on words being reset, reheard, and then more listened to than decoded or deciphered, so that strangeness and richness thicken like the mystery they express.

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This phrase is fi­nally recalled once more at the moment of Camilla’s resurrection, as if in a verbal gathering together of all ­t hese premonitory refrains. “I never yet beheld a ­thing so strange, / Sad, sweet, and strange together” (Pt. 4, ll. 300–301), the narrator tells. “Sad, sweet, and strange together”—­t he words are drawn from all ­t hose partnered duos: sweet and low, rich and strange, sweet and strange, but this one has the rhythm of a threesome: “Sad, sweet, and strange together.” Putting t­ hose three “together” might just hint, aurally, at what the plot could not manage: Julian, Lionel, and Camilla together. So the ear, as so often in Tennyson, tells its own love tale, one which may be at cross-­purposes with the plot, but runs its sweetly melodious course, not only within the poem but also from poem to poem, as if telling of sadness and strangeness beyond any mere local interest. “So sad, so strange, the days that are no more” (II. 232–233, l. 35), Tennyson ­w ill write in “Tears, Idle Tears,” catching up a phrase which has played in his ear so often before. Indeed, the sound of the language talking to itself, across line breaks, paragraph breaks, even breaks between poems, becomes what we also start to want to hear. What may sound like laziness, like the “sad sweet oversweet Alfred” pursuing his verbal fetishes, becomes a noise-­haunting which in fact accounts for something always g ­ oing on elsewhere—­even if nothing more than a “lovetale” for the sounds of words, or for the memory of ­t hose other voices: Shakespeare’s, Milton’s, Words­worth’s, Shelley’s, telling their own tales in the buzzing hold of a poetic tradition. “The Lover’s Tale” thus opens a box of noises, noises which can be heard in the background of the story, distracting from its momentum and developing their own eerie rationale in what Garrett Stewart has called the “churn of wording beneath and between the chain of words” (1990: 25)—­a phrase itself suggesting the liquidity of a sea beneath chains. One way in which Tennyson alerts us to “the churn” beneath “the chain” is in his repetitions, particularly where the repeat crosses a line break, to sound with a difference. Often this retake of an action conveyed in the retake of a word can be brilliantly dramatic, dealing a kind of aural blow against impossibility, as, for instance, in “the face, / The very face and form of Lionel” (Pt. 2, ll. 92–93), or “that low knell tolling his lady dead—­ / Dead—” (Pt. 4, ll. 33–34), or “It beat—­t he heart—it beat: / Faint—­but it beat” (ll. 79–80), where the

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rhythm of repetition makes something more closely seen (the face, the lady), or more staggeringly heard (the heart). Such dramatic negotiations with line breaks serve to call attention, not only to what is happening but also to the sound of its happening, as the word takes time—­a time as long as a pause—to penetrate the ear. Tennyson’s fondness for this figure, for the repeat which dramatizes some reinvigorated perception, is also the fondness which caressingly repeats words or phrases across long tracts of a work or even across the w ­ hole of his writing life. By this princi­ple, the “further echoes” of a word are always in danger of drowning out the nearer echoes of its mere narrative instance and relevance. For the poet’s ear is constantly drawn to noises off, ­whether far distant or far within—­ noises which help to confound any par­t ic­u­lar utterance with sound effects, impersonal, estranging, even downright contradictory. Akin to a kind of aural vertigo—­t rances, faints, and weird seizures—­ such moments are a reminder that the ear might have its own designs on a story, and its own version of what or how it means. Paying attention to ­those distracting acoustics in the text may confound what the reader wants to know, precisely in order to insinuate a dif­ fer­ent order of knowing. ­Here, for instance, is another example. It is the moment when Julian, waking out of his despairing dead faint to find Lionel hovering nearby, first hears the stream which now sounds like the stream of his own life beginning again:       and then I seemed to hear Its murmur, as the drowning seaman hears, Who with his head below the surface dropt Listens the muffled booming indistinct Of the confusèd floods [ . . . ​] (Pt. 1, ll. 623–627) This is a rare and belated transitive use of the verb “listens.” According to the Oxford En­glish Dictionary, the last quoted example is from an earlier poem by Tennyson, the “Ode to Memory”: “Listening the lordly m ­ usic [ . . . ]” (I. 231–235, l. 41). But ­here he uses it again, to suggest the deafening close-up of waves closing round a drowning man. This is the same stream that once made “a constant

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bubbling melody” and whose “murmur” seemed benignly natu­ral in spite of the literal drownings of man, wife, and child in the place. That another notional drowning w ­ ill come proleptically true is now suggested by this queer Miltonic simile, which then turns the murmuring stream into a stormy sea. It is in­ter­est­ing how many of ­t hese passages about heightened listening invoke an earlier poet as if, among other ­things, Tennyson ­were listening to the voices of his pre­ de­ces­sors in the language. Milton’s own transitive use of “listen” in “Comus”—­“At which I ceased, and listened them a while” (1968: 168– 229, l. 550)—­opens a passage about hearing: first, the “wonted roar” (l. 548) and “barbarous dissonance” (l. 549) of Comus and his crew, and then a silence which itself almost seems to create, in a prefiguring of the creation of Eve, the “honoured Lady” (l. 563) herself. At this moment, the attendant Spirit tells, “I was all ear, / And took in strains that might create a soul / ­Under the ribs of death” (ll. 559–561), making “strains” ring both aurally and anatomically, like a song and a constraining tightness, perhaps: “­Under the ribs.” In Tennyson’s passage, similarly, the transitive verb opens on a confusion of noise: “Listens the muffled booming indistinct,” he writes. “Listens,” ­here, seems to grapple with its “indistinct” object, as if somehow clamped fast to that “muffled booming,” which is both too soft: “muffled,” and too loud: “booming.” As an account of drowning, this ­silent roar certainly evokes the ear’s panic at hearing so much and so ­little, all at once. It is as if Tennyson’s love of pure sound, his need to be all-­ear (to Milton as well as to the sea), ­were at last satisfied, but at the risk of drowning in too much noise. However, even h ­ ere the dramatic point of waking to life’s dark tragedy, as to a sense of death, is troubled by an overlay of sound on sound. Tennyson writes of the stream, “I seemed to hear / Its murmur,” then plunges into a simile of the sea: “as the drowning seaman hears.” The “outer sea,” of course, was t­ here from the very beginning, waiting to come in. But why is it specifically the ear that drowns? Usually, drowning happens through the mouth. One answer lies in the fact that cavern and stream, places of rumors, moans, and melodies, are also places into which “the inward ear” has learned to venture at its peril. Tennyson takes the ear as far in as it might go and then suggests that it might drown in a sea of noise. So in this

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passage, he probes the two verbs, hearing and listening, as if to strain attention to the utmost: “I seemed to hear / Its murmur, as the drowning seaman hears, / Who [ . . . ​] / Listens[. . . . ]” Such an overload conveys the depths of attention, and potential confusion, of which the ear is capable. Poetry, writes Wallace Stevens, “makes us listen to words when we hear them” (1997: 662). But Tennyson knows that the poet may also listen too much and drown as a result. In a sense, this passage is the logical end of a poem which has been all about hearing, not only the sounds of the natu­ral world, which cut across its h ­ uman story, but also the rhythms and phrases of older writers who have listened to words before. “The Lover’s Tale” is a “lovetale,” not ­really for Camilla, or even for Lionel, the Shelleyan precursor, but for ­those echoes, murmurs, and hums which Tennyson ­w ill go on hearing, and sometimes drowning in, throughout his writing life. In a poem written at about the same time as “The Lover’s Tale,” “Sense and Conscience,” the poet issues a warning about the aestheticist dangers of being too much enamored of “Sense,” in the sense of “sensation,” and too l­ittle adherent to the calls of “Conscience.” The poem debates its Keatsian temptations with the difference that, for Tennyson, t­ hese are less tactile and olfactory than primarily aural:       They drove him to deep shades, A gloom monotonously musical With hum of murmurous bees, which brooded deep In ever-­t rembling flowers, and constant moan Of waterfalls i’ the distance, and low winds Wandering close to Earth, and voice of doves, Which ever bowing cooed and cooing bowed [ . . . ​]   (I. 296–300, ll. 44–50) What­ever the reproachful conscience says, the “monotonously musical” is Tennyson’s true note. ­Here are all his favorite noises: the “constant moan” of ­water, “low winds,” and that “voice of doves” which sets up the answeringly bobbing rhythm of “bowing cooed and cooing bowed.” Above all, however, t­ here is the “hum of murmurous

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bees.” The “hum” and the “murmur” w ­ ill play their basso continuo throughout his poetry, as if to express that sense of aural distraction which draws him forever back into the drowning vortices of sound-­ words. ­Those are the sounds, too, that ­will go on echoing in the ears of ­later writers, Christina Rossetti and V ­ irginia Woolf among them (see Chapter 3), as they listen back to Tennyson’s lines in their own writings. The literary story of bees is indeed a long one. Paul Fry, in his essay “The Hum of Lit­er­a­t ure,” noting its derivation from Virgil, then suggests that “the En­glish word ‘bees,’ with its referent situated more than once in a beanfield (Coleridge, ‘This Lime-­Tree Bower’; Yeats, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’), appears in lit­er­a­t ure to add an ostensive hum to the verb ‘to be’ ” (1995: 66). Certainly, as well as the hum of “bee” into “be,” as well as into “bean,” one can hear the hum of influence stretching its furtive tentacles from Coleridge’s “solitary humble-­bee / [that] Sings in the bean-­flower!” (1912, 1969: 181), to Yeats’s overcompensatingly specific “Nine bean-­ rows ­w ill I have t­ here, a hive for the honey bee” (1957: 117), or from Coleridge’s “lime-­t ree bower” (1912, 1969: 178) to Tennyson’s “long walk of limes” (“In Memoriam,” LXXXVI, 15), which, leading literally to Arthur Hallam’s rooms in Trinity College, Cambridge, then nourishes the recollected sound of bees in innumerable f­ uture poems. Humming is where one poet may meet another; it is the sound of some kind of messaging, through and beyond language, where the work of poetry from the past combines to reproduce each new ­poetic text. That bees also work cooperatively, to make both honey, “mella,” and song, “melos” (1995: 68) as Fry reminds us, is only another reason why their buzzing in verse tends to carry a sense of ­literal sound, as well as that “sound of sense” (1995: 664), as Frost puts it, which lies on the other side of the door of literary language. Certainly in Tennyson, this figure may sometimes lapse into comical silliness, as in the early poem “Dualisms”: Two bees within a chrystal flowerbell rockèd Hum a lovelay to the westwind at noontide. Both alike, they buzz together, Both alike, they hum together [ . . . ​] (I. 276–277, ll. 1–4)

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where the Keatsian compounds mime, visually, a slurring bee-­noise almost too hard to read or speak. ­Towards the end of his life, Tennyson was still humming away in similarly nonsensical stanzas, in his play “The Foresters,” for instance: “For now is the spring of the year.   So come, come!”   “Hum!”   And the bee buzzed down from the heat. (III. 572, ll. 4–7) But elsewhere, as in “The Princess,” ­those old honey-­sounding, honey-­making, ambrosial limes assert their power­f ul literary heritage: “The broad ambrosial aisles of lofty lime / Made noise with bees and breeze from end to end” (Pt. 2, ll. 87–88). The construction, “Made noise with bees,” gives the “noise” first, as if it came before the after-­explanations: “bees and breeze.” T ­ hese, of course, are then no more than continuers of the “ostensive hum” (Fry 1995: 66) now teasing our ears, with “ees” and “eeze.” Noises, in Tennyson, often come apart from the noisemakers, gathering a momentum of their own, as in t­ hose haunting lines from “Ulysses”: “the deep / Moans round with many voices” (I. 613–620, ll. 55–56). The disjunction between “Moans” and “voices,” like that between “noise” and “bees,” catches in miniature a kind of disjunction in the poet’s ear, between what he can rationally hear: “the deep,” and what he must continue to listen for, anxiously, distractedly, as if still straining to comprehend it: “Moans” or “voices.” That construction, “with bees” or “with many voices,” helps to keep apart sounds which this poet characteristically hears separately, as if in two dimensions: far and near, with the “outward” and the “inward ear,” like noises described by language and ­t hose made in language. The two lines from “The Princess” which ­V irginia Woolf ­w ill gleefully mock in her mock-­V ictorian pageant, Freshwater: “The moan of doves in immemorial elms, / And murmuring of innumerable bees” (II. 185–296, Pt. 7, ll. 206–207), clearly derive their power from this accumulated hum in Tennyson’s ear of literal and literary bees. H ­ ere too, what we first hear is the “moan” and “murmuring,” as if just a ­little detached from natu­ral history—­similar to the disjunc-

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tion in some of Words­worth’s descriptions of the work of the ear, in “Nutting,” for instance: “ ‘I heard the murmur and the murmuring sound,’ ” which Hollander describes as “one of the ­great anatomized acts of listening” (1972: 59). Certainly, the move from “murmur” to “murmuring sound” draws out of that apparent tautology an anatomization of, or disjunction between, hearing and listening to hearing, as if to recall the passage of time involved in the ear’s focus on sound. The “murmur” might still have some h ­ uman meaning, but “the murmuring sound” cancels the sense of communicable words. The evidence of much of Tennyson’s poetry is that moans, murmurs, and hums have similarly lost their necessary connection with the ­human subject but still sound on and on, like a wayward soundtrack cut off from story. That the elms are “immemorial” and the bees “innumerable” in this passage helps to crowd ­those two lines with all the other hums and murmurs that lit­er­a­t ure brings to the mind’s hearing, as well as offering nothing more than the lovely, sense-­defying allure of the bees’ a­ ctual noise in t­ hose m’s and n’s. “The Lover’s Tale,” then, offers an early Tennysonian experiment in listening—­listening to sounds in­de­pen­dent of their speakers, while being perhaps sometimes too much in love with ­t hose mere sounds’ conscienceless goings-on. The “monotonously musical” is like a sweet drone, as if the poet w ­ ere always in his poetry listening b ­ ehind, or round, or through what he means to say, to some other continuous, almost extra-­scriptorial hum. Such a noise tells of some characteristic ear-­mindedness that has ­little to do with narrative events but is passed on through channels of strange listening, from poet to poet, poet to reader, and also, in Tennyson’s case, from this poet to himself. ­Later writers, as I ­will show, then enter this buzzing auditorium from their own par­tic­u­lar ­angles of need and attention.

3 Humming Tennyson: Christina Rossetti and ­Virginia Woolf to give the air a tweak, a twist, to tune in to the sound you say I missed. What then? So maybe I pick up a hum. r. f. langley Listen to the rain, the rain, the rain, like the wings and legs of bees walking across bees, like the lyre of a thought . . . sean borodale This reading dreams an old known story: the tongs and the bones. I am sitting in a garden, reading that old midsummer dream from a summer long ago, yet tied to my own small ­here and now, a day in late June—­t hough no longer now, and neither mine nor yours any more as I write, but lost with the scent of woodbine, jasmine, thyme that I remember, in or out of a book. Reading, like writing, is a commemorative act, a loss already packed with memory’s ghosts. So in this imaginary tense of the pres­ent, I am reading a play, knowing it well, in places by heart, in a garden full of its own scents and sounds. “Where the bee sucks, / ­There suck I”—­and I, finding an Ariel tune in ­every line, also hear, four centuries ­later, the tiny boom of a bee as it dives into the jasmine’s open flower. Like the bell of a horn, the cavity of a room, each entered corolla sets the pitch of that rotary motor, working furiously against a fall. I read more fitfully now, the enchanted night stealing my after­noon, the lovers’ mix-up amusing my solitude. The lines sing, while nearby that bee grumbles and drones, and the June light softens in shadows. 70

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­ ater I look up and, in the thick of the story, with its queer moonL light acoustics, its mix of myth and fairy, homespuns and puns, I suddenly remember another line from another work: “Starry, starry ­t hings. You / can be hooked all day on a dab of song.” R. F. Langley’s “My Moth: My Song” joins a chorus of hums in the garden, tranced through and through by Shakespeare’s dream, all buzzing with wings. I’ve lost my place now, listening to this and that, then this again, distracted by near sounds, catching half a line foiled by the drone of a worker bee, reading always more or less than what’s at hand. I look down again at the book on my knee that started this wandering. So where was I, then? And read: Act IV, scene i: “Enter . . . ​Moth.” “Moth,” I mouth, flutter-­tonguing the name u ­ nder my breath—­“a dab of song.” That band of jokers comes onstage together: Pease­ blossom, Cobweb, Mustardseed and—­but who, I won­der, is Moth? So “Enter [ . . . ​] Moth,” with nothing to say, no lines to repeat, no name to translate from a word to a ­t hing. The ­others walk on, bow, respond—­a nd then translate happily into puns. Their names are mutable, proper and common, homely and usable. But who is Moth—­the incommunicable, untranslated? Did Shakespeare forget? Was something written and then erased? Or did he mean to indicate a presence, some irreducible fact or puzzling silence at the heart of the play? Cued but ignored, summoned but unapparent, Moth seems a prank against stagecraft and plot, a stage direction abandoned in the wings. ­Later I half-­sleep. The warm after­noon softens and stills. How easy is a word supposed just h ­ ere, when, in the gentled sunshine, woodbine tangling with jasmine in the hedge, something stirs. It makes a kind of blur, mid-­a ir—­a nd I know without thinking, its name on my tongue: a summer visitor, though not so rare now. It has a hazy look, all propeller flare, gift and engine. Watching its buffy fan-­t ailed abdomen, the sudden shot of orange on its wings, I remember how it stays quite still, turning “fifty wingbeats per second in figures-­of-­eight.” I lean forward to see and it darts, suddenly, away then back, and again—­its long, black, kinked filament tippling at flower heads, sipping their scents. My fairy apparition treading the still air, stopping then darting, at arm’s length—­yet trailing the

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marvelous plot of a name: hummingbird hawk-­moth. Large as a small bird, hovering like a hawk, I cue it into my world by name. So: “Enter . . . ​Moth.” What brings this visitor? How long w ­ ill it stay? If only I could reach nearer, I might be able to hear that sound—­the wuther of its infinitesimally working wings. But it’s out of my range, what­ever note it plays, fanning the air—no sound, only the memory of a name, and then this perfect hieroglyphic of a hum. a a a

In 1929, V ­ irginia Woolf published her polemical meditation on ­women and higher education, A Room of One’s Own. Near the start, in a strangely hallucinatory chapter in which journalistic realism is overlaid by memory and dream, she describes a lunch party at a Cambridge college. It becomes clear that something other than gender polemic and educational satire is involved ­here when she is suddenly distracted by the sight of a Manx cat on the lawn outside. This tail-­ less beast might be a figure for the emotionally amputated male scholar, with his entitlements of passage across the grass—­a passage earlier denied to Woolf herself when, in an earlier section, she ­describes striding across a college lawn and being waved off by “the gesticulations of a curious-­looking object, in a cut-­away coat and ­eve­n ing shirt” (1929: 9). Both cat and Beadle share an unnatural “cut-­away” look that makes them objects of pity and fun. However, Woolf’s purpose does not stop at satire, as the sight of the cat then leads to a wider meditation on other forms of disablement: “But what was lacking, what was dif­fer­ent, I asked myself, listening to the talk?” (1929: 18). Neither the Beadle’s nor the cat’s curtailed posteriors are the main object of attention h ­ ere, but rather something “lacking” more widely, as she looks beyond w ­ omen’s educational strug­gles and starts to probe the nature of writing. What follows is a meditation on the relation of pres­ent and past, novels and poetry, truth and rhythm, which seems to have l­ittle relation to the lecture she is giving. This change of direction is signaled by the key verb “listening.” No longer hearing the chatter of lunch around her, Woolf tunes in to another sound: “Nothing was changed; nothing was dif­fer­ent save

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only—­here I listened with all my ears not entirely to what was being said, but to the murmur or current ­behind it” (1929: 19). It is a classic moment of creative distraction. Unlike the eye, which e­ ither sees what is vis­i­ble or must imagine what is not, the ear is open to wave on wave of sound, the line between what is heard and what surmised remaining quite thin. Woolf’s phrase “I listened with all my ears,” while suggesting that wider reach, also elides two phrases: “with all  my heart” and “all ears,” to suggest a kind of attention both ­passionately concentrated and just a ­little offbeat. The “murmur or current” that she hears may be just the choral noise of the social scene, distanced and generalized, or it may be, as a subsequent passage suggests, a sound from altogether elsewhere: Before the war [ . . . ​] ­people would have said precisely the same ­t hings but they would have sounded dif­fer­ent, ­because in ­t hose days they ­were accompanied by a sort of humming noise, not articulate but musical, exciting, which changed the value of  the words themselves. Could one set that humming noise to  words? Perhaps with the help of the poets one could. (1929: 19) Why, in the thick of her journalistic quest for improved educational conditions for w ­ omen, does this novelist start to hear “a sort of humming noise”? At face value the comment is nonsense. P ­ eople at lunch parties before the war ­were no more hummy in their conversations than p ­ eople in Woolf’s own day. That they “would have sounded dif­fer­ent” is ­either an effect of distance, nostalgia, or pure invention, or ­else, as becomes apparent, the “humming noise” has nothing to do with parties at all but expresses something the writer herself needs. For in a reversal of the usual order of t­ hings, she fi­ nally won­ders if the hum might be “set” to “words.” Curiously, it is the noise which might be set, so that words become, conversely, a form of notation for conveying a sound. ­Behind the real­ity of social life, with its required forms of politeness and conversation, lies the “humming noise” of the literary, which takes some listening to, over and above what is merely heard. “The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices b ­ ehind a door that cuts off the words”

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(1995: 664), Robert Frost wrote a few years before, unbeknown of course to Woolf. She too, however, seems to be listening through doors h ­ ere: the blocking door of “the war,” which cuts off the past but also the door of social conventions, of what “­people would have said,” in order to catch some other order of sound b ­ ehind it. Such an order is, as it was for Tennyson, an echoing hold of murmurs and hums that belongs to the lit­er­a­t ure of the past, specifically its poetry. “Perhaps with the help of the poets,” she concludes. Looking to write, Woolf listens, and listens specifically to two poets whom her own modernist sensibility might have seemed to reject: Alfred Tennyson and Christina Rossetti. Quoting Tennyson’s “­There has fallen a splendid tear” and Rossetti’s “My heart is like a singing bird,” she finds that the first “sang in my blood” (1929: 21), and that, l­ater as she takes a walk, she herself is still singing the second. As a result, the walk she takes to Fernham, ostensibly just a constitutional interlude between lunch and dinner, becomes a scene of fictionalized literary speculation. This w ­ hole section, no more than a circumlocutionary aside in a lecture about w ­ omen’s education, then turns into a central fantasy of creation. For as Woolf walks, she starts to embody the hums of other poets, making them her own. “It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road” (1929: 21), she writes, letting the rhythms of Tennyson and Rossetti take her in their stride. It may be true, she ponders, that t­ hose poets lived in a world of illusory gardens, unchallenged by po­liti­cal catastrophes like the war; nevertheless, Tennyson’s “passion-­flower” and “larkspur,” and Rossetti’s fruit-­laden “apple tree,” start to assert the power of illusion, turning the a­ ctual autumn lights of an October day to an imaginary springtime, the yellowing leaves to lilacs and butterflies, and the literal destination to a fairy garden. As Woolf ­considers truth, the novelist’s guiding light she presumes, she calligraphically visualizes her direction as a missed turn. “For truth . . . ​­those dots mark the spot where, in search of truth, I missed the turning up to Fernham” (1929: 23), she writes. If this is a figurative walk to find her own garden of art, truth, it seems, only leads her astray. It is as if the Manx cat, with its casual right of passage, still haunts her sense of literary direction. Her own ways must be more devious and winding. T ­ hose ellipses in the text—­t hemselves the sign of some-

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thing missing and “missed”—­show very literally “the spot” (or spots) where a turn was not taken, and the “gardens of Fernham”—­the gardens of poetry, enchantment, invention, where “the door was left open and no beadles seemed about” (1929: 25)—­are momentarily overshot. Woolf is fond of ellipses. As Anne Toner has shown, in Three Guineas, they are a recurrent visual illustration of threes or fives, of having or not having money (2015: 163–164). But they are also moments when a writer skirmishes between eye and ear, as if to remind the reader that lit­er­a­ture plays one against the other— “­t hose dots mark[ing] the spot” which was missed, thus remaining essentially unspottable, but still playing their game of connections in a chance near-­rhyme to the ear. That “truth” goes down another road in this verbal quiz of now-­you-­see-it, now-­you-­hear-it, is of course part of the point of the sentence. Thus Woolf, the arch-­modernist, the rebellious ­daughter of Victorian parents, finds herself listening, walking, and writing to the rhythm of two Victorian poets whose addictive hums ring in her ears. “Could one set that humming noise to words?” This is not only a question about the relevance of Victorian poetry, about the ­music which drives its lyricism and stays in the ear, but also about the modern novelist’s attention to it—an attention which might seek to re-­“set” poetry’s old hums in prose, by walking again to their rhythms, away from the university lawns and into a garden of ­f ree fantasy. A Room of One’s Own thus begins, in this magically digressive interlude, by asserting a garden of one’s own—­a garden which is also Tennyson’s and Rossetti’s, full of their flowers and singing birds. At a time in mid-­career, when her own work would seem to be asserting its modernist differences from the past most strenuously, Woolf asks a question about sounds that haunt: old strains of poetry, like earworms or foot-­beats, that continue to call. “Perhaps with the help of the poets,” she won­ders, as if their “humming noise” in her ears might then be “set” in the composition of a new work. The novelist in her invokes a strain of the lyrical, of a distant sound effect, to which she must listen, all ears, and then follow like a turning off the road to “truth.” a a a

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Christina Rossetti never met Tennyson. On the few occasions when a meeting might have been pos­si­ble, in 1855 to hear him read Maud at the Brownings or in 1866 to visit him on the Isle of Wight, she was e­ ither not included in the invitation or was “too shy” (Marsh 1995: 175, 350) to go. Tennyson, for his part, seems never to have mentioned Rossetti. The nearest they came to meeting was to appear together in Macmillans Magazine in May  1868, a proximity which was “honourably formidable” (C. Rossetti 1997–2004: I. 308) to the latter but went unmentioned by the laureate. Like much ­else in Rossetti’s life, Tennyson figured as an indirect influence, all the more potent for remaining at a distance. Her complicated sense of his importance is hinted at in a spirited reply to Dante Gabriel, who once tried to persuade her to add a ­tournament to her long poem “The Prince’s Pro­g ress.” First, she reminds him of the “horrible bugbeardom” of Tennyson’s two tournaments in Idylls of the King. She then adds, with a typically riddling mix of humility and faux naiveté, “­were you next to propose my writing a classic epic in quantitative hexameters or in the hendecasyllables which might almost trip up Tennyson, what could I do?” (C. Rossetti 1997–2004: I. 226). While the laureate is on the one hand a horrible bugbear, inhibiting and blocking her creative view, ­Rossetti also quietly hints that she might just metrically outdo him, indeed trip him up—­t ripping and tripping up, as Goblin Market shows, being something she is good at. So she, figuratively speaking, puts out a l­ ittle toe to topple the bugbear by mischievously suggesting that she might even beat him at his own games. It is true, however, that Rossetti takes from Tennyson a life’s worth of themes for poetry. Not only does she overtly steal his titles, calling one poem “Mariana,” another “The Lotos-­Eaters,” and of course writing innumerable “Songs,” but she also endlessly reinhabits his landscapes: the moated grange, the island of Shalott, the charmed sleep-­scape of “The Day-­Dream,” or the aestheticist haven of “The Palace of Art.” Her dreamy, inaccessible w ­ omen are variants of Mariana, her islanded, lonely speakers, Ladies of Shalott, her travelers from earthly plea­sure to heavenly rewards, souls from “The Palace of Art.” On the face of it, ­t here is not much in her writing which cannot be traced back to Tennyson.

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Moreover, the young Rossetti learned much of her craft from him. ­Here, for instance, are two stanzas from the seventeen-­year-­old’s early poem “Repining”: She sat alway thro’ the long day Spinning the weary thread away; And ever said in undertone: “Come; that I be no more alone.”  . . . None lived alone, save only she; The wheel went round more wearily; She wept, and said in undertone: “Come; that I be no more alone.”   (1979–1990: III. 17–24, ll. 1–4, 15–18) ­ ere she takes the tetrameter rhythm and roundelay repeats of “MarH iana” and turns out her own exercise in spiritual weariness and poetic returns. Recycling certain Tennysonian words, like “weary” and “alone,” she offers a good aural imitation of the original, turning the “wheel” of its melancholy repeats ­until, that is, her own story somehow wakes up and takes a dif­fer­ent turn. For in “Repining” someone does indeed come, a lover or Lord, who takes the Mariana character out on a bizarre whirlwind tour of the world’s disasters: an avalanche, a shipwreck, fire, and ­battle, ­until she pleads in horror, “ ‘Let me return to whence I came’ ” (l. 250). It is an in­ter­est­ing twist on the original, as if Rossetti ­were already asking w ­ hether what lies outside the moated grange or the tower of Shalott is r­ eally worth it. The evidence of her own poetry is that, while she learns her gifts of repetition, echo, and refrain from Tennyson, she also takes from his early volumes a sense of enclosure, paralysis, and pointlessness from which her speakers do not wish to escape. The “undertone” of a sound, like the rote hum of the spinning wheel h ­ ere, draws her back to the place where being “alone” carries its rich charge of melancholy echoing rhymes. Tennysonian weariness, then, becomes Rossetti’s signature tune. His own obsession with the word “weary”: Mariana’s “ ‘I am aweary, aweary, / I would that I w ­ ere dead!’ ” (I. 205–209, ll. 11–12), the ­Lotos-­Eaters’s “Most weary seemed the sea, weary the oar, / Weary

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the wandering fields of barren foam” (I. 467–477, ll. 41–42), Oenone’s “And I am all aweary of my life” (I. 419–433, l. 32), or songs like the one which haunts Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus: “My life is full of weary days” (I. 383–384, l. 1), gives to Rossetti a word which punctuates her writing for the rest of her life: “I weary of my life / Thro’ the long sultry day” [ . . . ​] I weary of my life / Thro’ the slow tedious night” (III. 298–299, ll. 1–2, 6–7); “It’s a weary life, it is; she said” (III. 231, l. 1); “In this weary world it is so cold so cold” (III. 40, l. 13); “Oh weary wakening from a life-­true dream” (III. 232–234, Pt.2, l. 5); “Oh my love and my own own deary! / What s­ hall I do? my love is weary” (III. 295, ll. 1–2); “Oh! I am weary of life’s passing show” (III. 104–105, l. 33). Being weary, alone, and wishing to die, or wishing for a change, is a condition of such poetic richness that Rossetti’s ear goes on playing variations on it throughout her life, unwearied by its compulsive tellability. Some five or six early Tennyson poems might seem, then, to determine the w ­ hole of Rossetti’s c­ areer. One of ­t hese in par­t ic­u ­lar ­offers a narrative staging-­post for her largely unchanging story. “Three Stages” (1854), written when she was twenty-­four, almost quotes Tennyson directly: My happy happy dream is finished with,   My dream in which alone I lived so long. My heart slept—­woe is me, it wakeneth;   Was weak—­I thought it strong. [ . . . ​] I must pull down my palace that I built,   Dig up the pleasure-­gardens of my soul; Must change my laughter to sad tears for guilt,   My freedom to control. [ . . . ​] But where my palace stood, with the same stone,   I ­w ill uprear a shady hermitage; And t­ here my spirit ­shall keep ­house alone,   Accomplishing its age: ­ here other garden beds s­ hall lie around T   Full of sweet-­briar and incense-­bearing thyme;

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­ here I w T ­ ill sit, and listen for the sound   Of the last lingering chime. (III. 232–243,    ll. 1–4, 9–12, 21–28) This is Tennyson’s “Palace of Art.” “I built my soul a lordly pleasure-­ house” (I. 436–456, l. 1), he writes, in which “My soul would live alone unto herself ” (l. 11). Being “alone,” which rhymes so readily with ­t hose words of inarticulate noise: “moan” or “tone,” as well as “monotone” (III. 18), is a sound neither poet can leave alone, as if the sound of a long “oh” rings through stories of lost hope and ­continuing mournfulness. However, while Tennyson ends his morality tale of aesthetic aloneness by banishing the soul to “ ‘a cottage in the vale’ ” (l. 291), from where she might return only “with ­others” (l. 295), Rossetti transfers to a “shady hermitage” where every­thing continues the same: “my spirit s­hall keep ­house alone” (II. 23). What­ever new stage the hermitage represents—­certainly some kind of spiritual downsizing—it remains lonesome. Both poets are reluctant to give up their plea­sure palaces, but where Tennyson urges repentance and imagines a collective return, Rossetti merely goes on dreaming ­after lost pleasures: “­There I ­w ill sit, and listen for the sound / Of the last lingering chime” (ll. 27–28). It is an in­ter­est­ing difference. Tennyson repudiates the egotistical isolation of the Soul, at least ostensibly, but Rossetti embraces it. Like the speaker of “Repining” who only begs to return to her wearisome home, this speaker too refuses the older poet’s public moral. The only change that she undergoes is to be a ­little more at one remove, a ­little more at a listening distance from the “happy happy dream.” But that listening and that distance from happiness are crucial: “­There I ­w ill sit, and listen for the sound,” she writes. Her lonely, shut-in or shut-­out speakers are very often listeners, paying attention to something outside the framing narrative: in this case, to “the last lingering chime.” Chimes belong to bells and clocks, ­t hose distributors of time and death, but chimes, of course, also belong to rhymes—­a nother sound for which the poet is listening. By being both “last” and “lingering,” such chimes promise perpetual delay, a continuing after-­resonance which never quite comes to an end. Moreover, since Rossetti does not listen to, but

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“for” it, the chime is always, however “lingering,” not yet begun, caught in one of t­hose now-­and-­never temporal games so dear to this poet. What­ever it is she is “listening for” remains, as the preposition tells, just out of earshot, a sound not yet started, though also penultimately still ringing to the end. This is a long and indefinite story of “listening.” Some four years l­ater, Rossetti returns to this same Tennysonian pleasure-­house in her long poem “From House to Home” (1858). “It was a pleasure-­place within my soul; / An earthly paradise supremely fair” (I. 82–88, ll. 6–7), she begins. Full of squirrels, lizards, toads, moles, and caterpillars, this creaturely “pleasure-­place” also contains an extra presence and dimension: an angel who looks like seas, snowdrifts, and sunsets, as if an incarnation of nature itself, and who is also a singer: We sang our songs together by the way,   Calls and recalls and echoes of delight; So communed we together all the day,   And so in dreams by night. (ll. 53–56) In ­t hese lines, the song that is sung is the song that we hear, verbally doubling up on itself at e­ very point, as if we heard two singers: “sang our songs,” “Calls and recalls,” “So,” “And so,” “together,” “together,” “by day,” “by night.” The twinning of angel and speaker is beautifully caught in ­t hose matching chimes of words which sound like nothing but sound echoing. This angel recalls many other such matching presences in Rossetti’s work, like the “dream” in “Echo” (1854): “Come back to me in dreams, that I may give / Pulse for pulse, breath for breath” (I. 46, ll. 15–16). The dream that comes back in dreams, ­here, is a muddling repeat; for this poem, too, is not only a love story but also a story of loved rhythms and echoes, a story of sexual desire become metrical and sonic desire. So the “pleasure-­ place” of “From House to Home,” full of “Calls and recalls and echoes of delight,” is similarly a dream of sounding reciprocity, found in a place that is itself full of echoes. In this place the angel, w ­ hether a figure of nature, a spiritual guide, Tennyson himself, or some other brother-­poet or poet-­lover, is a dream figure who perfectly answers

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a fantasy of companionable creativity—­u ntil, that is, he seems to change his mind and runs on ahead, ­r unning “miles / And miles and miles” (ll. 67–68) and leaving the speaker, as she was before, weary and alone, unable to keep up. Echoes are both the theme and method of much of Rossetti’s writing, as they are Tennyson’s. Her language rings the changes on sound, as if always hearing words in the rebound, across long distances and against obstructions. If echo and its close relation, allusion, also offer the critic a playground of infinite connection, for poets and novelists they are the very stuff of writing. Rossetti has a way of sounding sounds, echoing echoes, and singing songs, like ­t hose self-­confirming “singing-­birds” (I. 82, l. 23) in “From House to Home,” so as to make hearing the doubleness part of what poetry requires. Her speakers are listeners even more than they are speakers, their attention often exceeding what their speech discloses. As a result, what we hear in a Rossetti poem is like the echo chamber of poetry itself, a place full of sounding rebounds from far back, or far away, or still just about to chime. That ­t hese are, in part, echoes of other poems, particularly Tennyson’s, suggests the extent to which listening to another becomes the very current of her art. Such echoes are audible in another early poem, ironically called “Looking Forward” (1849), since it mainly looks back. The speaker as usual is asleep or dead and thus able to listen in to a clearly Tenny­ sonian sound:    Listen, the ­music swells into a song, A ­simple song I loved in days of yore;    The echoes take it up and up along The hills, and the wind blows it back again.— Peace, peace, ­t here is a memory in that strain Of happy days that s­ hall return no more.   (III. 176–177, ll. 13–18) This was written a year a­ fter the publication of Tennyson’s The Princess (1847) and almost quotes a line from “Tears, Idle Tears”: “In looking on the happy Autumn-­fields, / And thinking of the days that are no more” (II. 232–233, ll. 24–25). Tennyson’s own “no more” is

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itself an echo of his own earlier poem: “Oh sad No More! Oh sweet No More! / Oh strange No More!” (I. 175, ll. 1–2), with its familiar threesome of “sad,” “sweet,” and “strange” already at work. Rossetti’s sudden command to “Listen,” h ­ ere, addresses at least three objects: the reader, who is about to hear something; the speaker in the poem, who is listening to an old song; and the poet herself, who is listening to echoes of other poems while writing her own. That “­simple song I loved” is thus replayed in the “up and up along” of echoes, to be ­fi­nally caught, named, and admitted in the more or less direct quotation of the last line. The structure is that of so many Rossetti poems: something is lost in the past, but it goes on being heard at a remove or at a distance, in “memory,” by one who knows how to “Listen.” Tennyson, that old master of echoes that “roll from soul to soul” (II. 231, l. 15), offers more than just a last lazy line ­here; he also offers the sense of song, m ­ usic, or echoes as a kind of constant para-­noise in poetry. As a last word in both poems, “no more” contains its own lingering paradox of seeming to offer, like any refrain, yet more. “Their songs wake singing echoes in my land” (I. 143–145, l. 16), declares the speaker of “Autumn” (1858). This, one of Rossetti’s ­saddest poems, is a brilliant, mature remodeling of “The Lady of Shalott.” “I dwell alone—­I dwell alone, alone” (l. 1), it begins, the same phrase l­ater finding its predictable rhyme in “They cannot hear me moan” (l. 17). The “moan” of something more ubiquitous and more ancient then fills this poem, which hungers for a livelier sound than “oh.” The speaker, like Tennyson’s Lady, remains unseen in her tower, while seeing the “flashing boats” (l. 3) and hearing the song of love-­fi lled maidens below. While Tennyson’s Lady is heard by ­others—­hers “a song that echoes cheerly” (I. 387–395, l. 30) or, as he writes at the end, “They heard her singing her last song” (l.  143)—­Rossetti’s speaker herself listens, unheard: “Their songs wake singing echoes in my land—­ / They cannot hear me moan” (ll. 16–17). Although the landscape and situation is Tennyson’s, down to the flash of ­t hose “flashing boats,” Rossetti’s speaker is dif­fer­ent; she hears, not “singing-­birds” this time but “singing echoes.” Why is it that the word “singing” in Rossetti always throws perspectives slightly out? “Hush!” (13) the voice commands, preparing for a sound which is also the sound of itself singing. T ­ hose “singing echoes” sug-

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gest the difficulty and distance of it, as if the singer cannot get to the original sound of “songs” but seems lost in failing repeats. On the other hand, “wake singing echoes” also hints at an awakened “singing” of her own, a revived creativity which w ­ ill still be “singing” ­after the “songs” have died away. In that favorite participle, Rossetti tracks the transference of sound from world to tower, original to echo, old singer to new, in a modesty trope of secondariness which is also a declaration of power in her own renewed “singing.” Somewhere in her poetic memory, then, ­these early poems by Tennyson are recalled and listened to like a lovely continuing temptation of sound. Their undersongs resurface, sometimes with the bald obtrusiveness of near-­quotation, but also increasingly with the ghostly rebound of a chime or echo, heard in a game of secondariness which then becomes Rossetti’s original note. Listening to the hum of poets before her, this poet too learns to set their songs to her own words. And so to the line which, many years ­later, would set another poet-­ novelist listening, “all ears,” and walking in time ­towards her own garden of delights: “My heart is like a singing bird” (I. 36–37, l. 1). The sense of it depends on that same, carefully placed participle. If Rossetti had written, “My heart is like a bird singing,” it would be a very dif­fer­ent line, having a literalist, adverbial weight (the heart like a bird), which the adjectival “singing bird” lightens into a figure. The resonance of the line comes from something shifted just a ­little out of the familiar. It is a sign of Rossetti’s fine ear, too, that she finds a rhythm which is not quite fixed, as the tetrameter allows itself to be stressed in two ways: “My heart is like a singing bird” or “My heart is like a singing bird,” where the emphasis on “singing” makes this not a generic kind of bird—­a songbird, say, anonymously of a kind—­but a bird known by its “singing.” The slight waver in stress means that she trips us up as we read, allowing us, if we wish, to hear more singing than bird, or to hear a singing that does not sound like a bird at all, but might sound like a heart. Or perhaps the reader might hear a kind of ongoing, not quite denotative hum, neither bird’s nor heart’s but both at once, and abstractly expressed by the attribution, “singing.” The stress of the line falls on a word which is both tautological and obvious—­what e­ lse do birds do?—­but also surprising, not quite metrically settled.

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Seven years ­after “A Birthday,” something happens to the heart’s singing bird. In the poem “Twice” (1864), the speaker accuses a lover-­f riend of causing a heartbreak made brilliantly literal: “As you set it down it broke—­ / Broke, but I did not wince” (I. 124–126, ll. 17–18). That line break and accompanying dash make a pause as resonant as Tennyson’s commas in “Break, break, break,” (II. 24, l. 1), which similarly let us hear something fragile being repeatedly smashed, before they ease into the sense of a sea which merely breaks “On [ . . . ​] rocks” (l. 2). Rossetti too lets the repeat, “it broke—­ / Broke,” conjure up the audible brutality of an action which requires two goes, and the space of a line break (how long is that?) before the heart w ­ ill quite break. The repetition is pure Tennyson, a technique of “I’ll take it again” with a difference which is everywhere in his work. That t­ here is something more at issue even than the heart, however, is then disclosed by Rossetti a few lines l­ater. Since it was broken, she explains, she has not often “sung with the singing bird” (l. 24). The heart, at some level of her thought, is always potentially a “singing bird.” Like the “singing-­birds rejoicing in t­hose trees” (I. 82–88, l. 23) in “From House to Home,” she mostly rec­ords such singing from a distance only, as an echo heard from within the palace walls, from within a tower or from beyond the grave. To the very end of her life, Rossetti goes on listening for that “singing bird” which, in its secondariness, its echoing aftereffects, might confirm her own voice. “A singing lark ­rose ­toward the sky” (II. 106–108, l. 17), she begins a late verse, “In the Willow Shade,” written some time before 1881. This first lark is then quickly seconded by another: A second like a sunlit spark   Flashed singing up his track; But never overtook that foremost lark,   And songless fluttered back. (ll. 21–24) The second singing bird, with its Wordsworthian-­Tennysonian “Flashed,” which then falls back “songless,” seems quite simply to lose its way. However, for all its flagging beside the first, overtly mas-

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culine lark, Rossetti continues the idea of companionable singing in the echoing repeats of the rest of the poem: “my work undone; / My work undone, that should be done” (ll. 48–49), “This day is lapsing,” “Is lapsing” (ll. 53–54), “And shivered as I went; / Yet shivering wondered, and I won­der still” (ll. 66–67), “that willow,” “That silvery weeping willow” (ll. 68–69). Each of ­t hese is like a verbal equivalent of the second lark flashing up the tracks of the first, calling on its song but also falling back in d ­ ying echoes. W ­ hether the first “singing lark” is Shelley, Tennyson, or Dante Gabriel, it is clear that “he” gains a height that the second singer cannot match, but that she also cannot altogether relinquish. The poem ends with a final punning line, as if to confirm this falling ­behind, falling flat: “Beside a spring in Spring” (l. 72). It is a bald pun, a literal echo with a changed sense, but the change also makes of sameness something new: not only “in Spring” then, with its new life, but perhaps also with a spring in her step, even to “trip up Tennyson.” In poetry, echoes are repeats with a difference. If much of Rossetti’s poetry depends, as Tennyson’s does, on the ebbing sounds of repeated words, on d ­ ying falls fallen away (particularly over a line break) from first song, first love, first plea­sure, nevertheless her gift is to go on evoking in verse an intense listening attention to what has been lost. A poet of echoes, of language which seconds itself constantly, this is also a poet who makes a unique life’s work of coming second. While this might be a form of female (false) modesty, on the one hand, it is on the other also a comment on how poetry more generally seconds o ­ thers, singing in the wake of sounds that have been heard before, and must be listened to once more to be set in new patterns. One last very late poem, prob­ably written within a year or two of Rossetti’s death in 1894, seems to be a final rejection of the ever-­ tempting pleasures of the “Palace of Art.” ­A fter a poetic lifetime of waiting on death, “Sleeping at Last” suggests that “at last” this poet has escaped worldly and poetic seductions: Sleeping at last, the trou­ble & tumult over, Sleeping at last, the strug­gle & horror past, Cold & white out of sight of friend & of lover Sleeping at last.

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No more a tired heart downcast or overcast, No more pangs that wring or shifting fears that hover, Sleeping at last in a dreamless sleep locked fast. Fast asleep. Singing birds in their leafy cover Cannot wake her, nor shake her the gusty blast. ­Under the purple thyme & the purple clover Sleeping at last. (III. 339–340, ll. 1–11) Repeated five times in this eleven-­line poem, “Sleeping at last,” which ­ought to confirm the speaker’s rest, in fact becomes a restless self-­ echo, seemingly never quite the last. So too does the old Tennysonian refrain, “No more,” shifting as it does between adverbial and adjectival phrases, as well as between the tiniest difference in stress: “No more” followed by “No more,” as if another ­little pun in the voicing refused to lay its sense to rest. Nor is that “dreamless sleep” entirely proof against a final mention of the ­t hing that has haunted Rossetti’s ear from the beginning: “Singing birds in their leafy cover / Cannot wake her” (ll. 8–9), she writes in the final stanza. As in so many poems, the singing of t­ hose “Singing birds” is oddly per­ sis­tent, echoing in ears which, if not the ears of this sleeping-­dead person, one might call the ears of the poem. “Singing birds in their leafy cover” still sing on somewhere, far away or far back, like a figure for all the songs which first inspired this poet to listen first, then sing, listeningly. All ears, even in death, she thus strains to hear the chime of that sound—­t he sound of singing birds (singing hearts or singing poets)—­the echoes of which she has been re-echoing throughout her life, in poems which, by the magical transmogrifications of the art of the past, are also uniquely her own. a a a

A love-­song I had somewhere read,   An echo from a mea­sured strain, Beat time to nothing in my head   From some odd corner of the brain. It haunted me, the morning long,   With weary sameness in the rhymes,

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The phantom of a s­ ilent song,   That went and came a thousand times.    (I. 406–417, ll. 65–72) This is not Rossetti but Tennyson, describing in “The Miller’s ­Daughter” how an old “love-­song” can lodge like an ear worm in the memory, its words emptied to a rhythmic “echo” or “phantom” of itself, endlessly repeated. Such a sound beats “time to nothing,” as if “nothing” ­were both its origin and purpose. Seamus Perry has pointed out that “repetitiveness was a cast of mind as well as a figure of choice” (2005: 27) for Tennyson. He can enliven old phrases in intertextually resonant returns, like “No more!” or e­ lse echo himself, morendo, in failing repeats: “­dying, d ­ ying, d ­ ying” (II. 231, l. 6), or “Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud” (II. 513, 414). He can also write repeats which hold back the narrative drive, so that a word stalls or slightly turns the sense. For instance, “The plain was grassy, wild and bare, / Wild, wild” (I. 253–255, ll. 1–2), he writes in “The ­D ying Swan,” where the repetition of “wild” lets in the sense of raging as well as desolate. The two stanzas of the lyric “Sweet and low” play the same trick: “Sweet and low, sweet and low” becomes “Low, low” (II. 219–220, ll. 1, 3); “Sleep and rest, sleep and rest” becomes “Rest, rest” (ll. 9, 11), as if a description w ­ ere become an injunction, implying that it was not “low” or “rest”-­ful enough. Tennyson, particularly the young Tennyson, relishes this kind of pausing, where the words are statically repeated, but the sense changes, unrestingly, through them, as if self-­echoes with a difference might go on for ever. Echoes of course only work in a resonant cavity, a room space, where a sense of inward enclosure sets off altering dynamics, changing intonations within the same word. This poet’s own “finest ear” is infinitely susceptible to such “acoustical echoing in empty places” (Hollander 1981: 55), w ­ hether empty h ­ ouses or empty heads. Like any shell held up to the ear, his poetry contains a kind of inarticulate hum within the words, some echoic doubling up on itself, or “phantom” noise, which asks for the reader’s ears’ attention, over and above the brain’s comprehension. a a a

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“Could one set that humming noise to words?” Woolf’s question, in its very wording, turns the burden of literary indebtedness into a potential for awakened creation. Christopher Ricks has described poetic allusion as “the calling into play—by poets—of the words and phrases of previous writers” (2002: 1). Woolf’s attitude to Tennyson, often distrustful and mocking rather than openly admiring, nonetheless also calls “into play” his way with words, his echo-­fi xations, his repetitive chants, as if never quite able or willing to escape their power. However, for Woolf as for Rossetti, t­ here is first a bugbear to contend with. Her light-­hearted entertainment, Freshwater (1923), ostensibly mocks the Victorian grandee, the all-­too-­quotable poet, ever ready to bore the com­pany with self-­congratulatory readings of his work: “Browning, I tell you. But I ask you, could Browning have written: ‘The moan of doves in immemorial elms, / The murmuring of innumerable bees’ ” (1976: 16). Moans and murmurings, comically mammered by an amateur actor, lend themselves to mockery and satire. Tennyson’s bees might be an irritant to Woolf h ­ ere, but they also make a “humming noise” she ­w ill not forget. Very often, it is true, his acknowledged poetic stature could stop her in her tracks: “But did you ever know Lord Tennyson?” she reports a guest asking at a party, adding “& my eve­ning was ruined” (1979–1985: III. 285). “His god—­one need hardly say it—is Tennyson” (1987–1990: II. 48–49), she dismissively announces of another writer in a review. Yet for all her anxiety and disdain, on once suddenly hearing “Tears, Idle Tears” she was forced to concede that “the beauty of it is so much greater than we remembered” (II. 49). Remembering Tennyson, particularly Tennyson in the person and voice of her own Victorian ­father who loved to quote him, would remain a prob­lem for this ­daughter, at least u ­ ntil she wrote that prob­lem out of herself in her mid-­career novel, To the Light­house (1927). Published two years before A Room of One’s Own, this “Victorian pastoral elegy” with its “Tennysonian mood” (1927, 2000: xxxvi), as Hermione Lee puts it, is a reminder that this most experimental of writers may not be deaf to calls from the past. It is Mr.  Ramsay, of course, who constantly quotes Tennyson: “Stormed at by shot and shell, boldly we rode and well, flashed

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through the valley of death, volleyed and thundered” (1927, 2000: 36), he declaims. “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” with its refrain “Someone had blundered” (23), is Mr. Ramsay’s comic entry cue. But even as Woolf quotes and requotes t­ hose lines, they fade into a mock-­ heroic commentary on nothing more than a broken green­house roof and a promised boat trip. Yet as the words turn silly in their new context, Woolf cunningly makes us listen to them all the more acutely, usually through Mrs. Ramsay’s ears: “she listened, as if she waited for some habitual sound, some regular mechanical sound; and then, hearing something rhythmical, half said, half chanted, beginning in the garden, as her husband beat up and down the terrace, something between a croak and a song, she was soothed” (21). The sound of Tennyson—­“something between a croak and a song”—­ reduces to a familiar rhythm, a “regular mechanical sound,” so that Tennysonian quotableness becomes in her ears (like Paul Muldoon’s “parakeet / crying out in a hurricane” [1992: 9]) an almost comical noise. Yet the rhythm, the chant, the beat, however croaky, pushes against the sense of the words ­here, both Tennyson’s and Woolf’s, to remind us of the lyrical undersongs of the literary. Mrs. Ramsay lets the “regular mechanical sound” of Tennyson’s verse soothe her. And indeed, a­fter several pages of Mr.  Ramsay repeating that “Someone had blundered,” we are told that “soon, sure enough, walking up and down, he hummed it” (38). Mrs. Ramsay is listening, as Woolf herself listens to the party chatter in A Room of One’s Own, from the oblique distance of the writer’s necessary (in)attention, and from that place hears the hums that might be reset. Tennyson’s presence, however, seems to speak most loudly in the experimental m ­ iddle section of the novel, with its empty h ­ ouse, its absent characters, its roll-­ call of deaths during the ­ Great War. ­A lthough, stylistically, this represents the work’s most daring challenge to the character-­bound realism of the Victorians, it is also the section where the poetic past is most insistently recalled. Thus the light­house, which sends light into the now empty h ­ ouse, echoes its Tennysonian original: “But in the very lull of this loving caress, as the long stroke leant upon the bed [ . . . ]” (145), Woolf writes. When alive, Mrs. Ramsay had seen this same figure: “(she woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking the floor)” (72). The

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Light­house, with its “stroke” that is “stroking,” both blow and caress, has the same function of erotic, rhythmic intrusion, of something external to ­human affairs, yet intrinsically bound to their psy­ chol­ogy and imagination, that Tennyson’s poplar from “Mariana” does: “The shadow of the poplar fell / Upon her bed, across her brow” (I. 205–209, ll. 55–56). The Godrevy light­house at St Ives, as any visitor to the place can see, is much too far from Talland House to cross its rooms with light. Woolf’s memory h ­ ere is less of a real place than of a poem: “as the long stroke leant upon the bed,” she writes, turning the beam of light into another lover or violator who finds a way in. However, she is also at this point describing the pro­cess of poetic recall since, however “stroking,” the “stroke” of the light­house is also a rhythm, a beat, a repeat. It brings to mind something which w ­ ill not be forgotten b ­ ecause it comes back by rote: And this t­ hing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke. [ . . . ​] And it would lift up on it some ­little phrase or other which had been lying in her mind like that—­“­Children ­don’t forget, c­ hildren ­don’t forget”—­which she would repeat and begin adding to it, It w ­ ill end, It w ­ ill end, she said. (70) Watching the Light­house, Mrs.  Ramsay comes to hear in it the rhythm of “some l­ ittle phrase,” which is also the reason for listening to it. It is as if she too ­were learning the pro­cess of composition, as a listening to unforgettable rhythmic phrases which “she would repeat and begin adding to.” In A Letter to a Young Poet, Woolf points out the importance of rhythm: “On the floor of your mind, then—is it not this that makes you a poet?—­rhythm keeps up its perpetual beat” (1932: 24). To miss the extent to which the Light­house itself is the baton stroke of this novel’s poetry, the beat at the heart of its lyricism, is to miss its main significance. Certainly, the light­house is towering, phallic, a visual line drawn on the horizon, a finishing line in a painting, a lover-­like light that intrudes in the bedroom. But it is also a rhythm, a beat by which to conjure the words and phrases that echo underground from writer to writer, across the divisions of history and time. To listen like Mrs. Ramsay is to hear how the noises of

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language make rhythms, chants, or charms in the ear, and that ­t hese, although we do not know it, might be what we most want to hear. Listening, then, becomes the central activity of To the Light­house. Like Rossetti’s dead but listening dreamers, Woolf’s three central ­women characters—­Lily, Cam, and Mrs. Ramsay—­pay only indirect attention to events. Most of the time they are listening, through, round, or over what they hear, their focus distracted by other sounds, other stories: Come out and climb the garden path,   Luriana Lurilee. The China ­rose is all abloom and buzzing with the   yellow bee. (120) Charles Elton’s poem “Luriana, Lurilee,” recited by Mr. Ramsay at ­table, stops the conversation with a quotation itself already “buzzing” with voices, notably Tennyson’s “Come into the garden, Maud” (II. 513–584, l. 850). Interruptions like this are moments of radical ­disorientation in the narrative, when the rhythms of another language superimpose voicings from outside. As Mrs.  Ramsay, the listener, puts it, “She did not know what they meant, but, like ­music, the words seemed to be spoken by her own voice, outside her self ” (l. 120). Such ins and outs of voicing suggest one of t­hose psychic abdications of intention that is both the prerogative of the artist and, more polemically, of the modernist ego, but which is also the prerogative of the reader-­listener. By listening, Mrs. Ramsay finds “her own voice,” as if indeed, as Barthes puts it, “listening speaks” (1982, 1986: 252). If Mr. Ramsay gives Woolf the Victorian voices she needs to hear, Mrs.  Ramsay gives her a figure for the artist’s attentive-­inattentive listening for them. That “hum” of Tennyson ­r unning through this novel, and figured in Mr. Ramsay’s obsessive chantings and pacings, is “set” by Mrs. Ramsay who listens, distantly, like any writer who must hear voicings and rhythms ­behind the voices and syntax of what is merely said. In the central experimental section, “Time Passes,” listening has almost become a subject in its own right. Woolf lets us hear, not only the sounds that an empty h ­ ouse might harbor—­a general nibbling,

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humming, tapping, shuffling, creaking—­but also ­t hose indirections of listening, uncontrolled by the emotional presence of a subject, so that sounds come ­f ree of their context, and resonate. This abandonment of subject, context, and narrative purpose, in order to convey the sound of something impersonally rhythmed into lyric, is a risk the novelist takes at her peril, of course. But it is one that Woolf marvelously embraces, as she enters Mariana’s “dreamy ­house” (I. 204–209, l. 61), or the attentive empty abode of de la Mare’s “The Listeners,” and finds in them her own humming space of poetry. Two figures, of course, do appear intermittently in the empty h ­ ouse. Mrs. McNab, the old h ­ ouse­keeper, is described by Alison Light as a “reassuring ste­reo­t ype of the inarticulate lower ­orders” who sings a “tuneless song” (2007: 46). But “tuneless” is not in fact Woolf’s word. Mrs. McNab sings a song that “had been hummed and danced to” (142) many times in the past, we are told; she would “­mumble out the old ­music hall song” (143). Humming, mumbling, murmuring are words that suggest t­ hose odd goings-on in the language, where what is heard slips into a tune. Like Mr.  Ramsay reciting Tennyson, Mrs. McNab remembers the “humming noise” of a song from the past, which sets her humming again. She is part of the mechanism of listening and remembering, or listening-­speaking, which the ­whole novel enacts as it elegiacally mourns the passing of time, of parents, and of an era before the war when ­t hings, particularly the sounds of voices, “­were accompanied by a sort of humming noise” (Woolf 1929: 19). And sure enough, as if in confirmation of this drift, the other figure who is pres­ent in the empty h ­ ouse, at least figuratively, is Mr. Carmichael. He “kept his candle burning rather longer than the rest” (1927, 2000: 137), Woolf writes at the start of the section, as if some longer vigil w ­ ere in view. Halfway through we are told that he “brought out a volume of poems [ . . . ​] which had an unexpected success” (146). At the heart of this impersonal, lyrical section is the poet, who continues his work by candlelight through the dark night of the war. “Perhaps with the help of the poets” the dark night might pass. But ­t here is also a third curious presence, who turns up out of nowhere and dis­appears as fast: “the mystic, the visionary, walked the beach, stirred a puddle, looked at a stone” (143), Woolf writes,

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apparently without any connection or relevance. To “pace the beach” is a phrase which then insistently punctuates a ­later paragraph about anonymous beach-­walkers: “­t hose who had gone down to pace the beach” (145), but whose “pacing” is “stayed” u ­ ntil, she informs us, “to pace the beach was impossible” (146). Then, by some mysterious ur-­connection, the next sentence announces the publication of Mr. Carmichael’s volume of poems. Something about that pacing, by nameless solitary walkers and visionaries, connects with Mr.  Carmichael’s writing. It may be the rhythmic pacing which ­matters—­always, for Woolf, connected with creativity—or it may be the memory of another visionary, who similarly haunts the work in which he seems to have no purposeful place. One of the pictures in Tennyson’s “Palace of Art” is of        a tract of sand,   And some one pacing ­t here alone, Who paced for ever in a glimmering land . . . ​   (I. 436–456, ll. 66–68) Woolf’s own visionary, drawn from nowhere and related to nothing in the story, recalls this anonymous “pacing” presence, “Who paced forever.” The rhythm of “pacing” the beach, culminating in the announcement of Mr. Carmichael’s poems, suggests that something is at work on the floor of Woolf’s mind, which hears the old beat of the poets. Tennyson’s “one [ . . . ​] / Who paced for ever” seems to return, in confirmation of “for ever,” in her own inconsequential visionary on the beach who somehow embodies all the poets in this novel, who chant, or hum, or listen. The apparently “empty” ­middle section is thus, in fact, peopled with presences, named and unnamed, who murmur and m ­ umble, hum and pace, keeping the empty ­house full of the rhythms and echoes of poetry, in spite of the quiet. The ­house, then, becomes a place of noises as if, like so many other ­houses in lit­er­a­t ure, it ­housed something more than its narrative inmates. The word that Woolf uses at one point, in a hanging participle that is almost ungrammatical and seems to belong to no subject or object, is, once again, “Listening”: “Listening (had t­here been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty h ­ ouse only gigantic

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chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard” (146–147), she writes. “Listening” h ­ ere leads to “could have been heard,” with no help from any subject, and not much from the indecipherable object, “chaos.” As a result, the pres­ent participle becomes the object of its own attention: “Listening [ . . . ​] could have been heard,” as if by a straining sense of attention to its own imaginary ear. “Another poet teaches us [ . . . ​] to hear ourselves listen” (1958, 1969: 181), writes Bachelard, in a sentence that similarly shorts between two verbs that play up their own quizzical audibility. Woolf’s throwaway parenthesis “(had ­t here been any one to listen),” leaves “Listening” like the sole inhabitant of “the empty h ­ ouse,” a pres­ent participle turned noun which, in the senselessness of a world ravaged by war’s “gigantic chaos,” keeps an ear open still for t­ hose transactions of poetry which might outlast the destruction outside. Thus, “Listening [ . . . ​] from the upper rooms of the empty h ­ ouse” itself becomes another of ­t hose phantom listeners, like de la Mare’s in “The Listeners,” whose absent presence becomes the verb’s justifying object. In February 1927, Woolf wrote triumphantly to Vita Sackville-­West: “I’ve got an essay out of De la Mare” (1993–1994: III. 331)—in fact a pamphlet for the Hogarth Press which he never then delivered. Some ten years before, in 1918, reviewing his fifth collection of verse, she praised him as “the poet of hush and silence, of the deserted ­house” (1987–1990: II. 253), commending how, in his poetry, “the sound goes on” so that “we are still listening long ­after the words are done” (II. 254). That Woolf’s own listeningly empty h ­ ouse might be recalling “The Listeners,” a poem published just fifteen years before To the Light­house, is not beyond the bounds of possibility. Certainly, this w ­ hole section of the novel is rich in that queer attention to nearly nothing, narratively speaking, which is also every­t hing the reader needs in order to stay, like the poet, still “Listening.” “Could one set that humming noise to words? Perhaps with the help of the poets” (1929: 19). John Hollander’s passing suggestion that ­t here might be some “private melody or undersong hummed during composition” (1981: ix), marking the transposition of one work into another, resonates with Woolf’s own humming sense of Tennyson, and of poetry generally, throughout this novel. Her aspiration to lyric within the frame of prose narrative is, like that of many other nov-

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elists, an aspiration to hear voicings, rather than just characters’ voices, within the language—­voicings from ­behind a door, or from before the G ­ reat War, deflected and changed. Tennyson’s own “murmuring of innumerable bees”—­ t hat mockable yet unforgettable noise, which is also like hearing sound’s work in lit­er­a­t ure—­might then underlie the many references to humming noises that come in the space of just a few pages in this section of the novel: “the drone and hum of the fields” (1927, 2000: 141–142), “something that [ . . . ​] had been hummed and danced to” (142), “the spring with her bees humming and gnats dancing” (144), “the empty rooms seemed to murmur with the echoes of the fields and the hum of flies” (145), “what e­ lse was it murmuring?” “the voice of the beauty of the world came murmuring” (154). A murmur or a hum does not yield much communication, but it does make a sound that seems incipiently articulate while hinting at “something”—­“the beauty of the world”—­ precious, indifferent, and undestroyed by war, which might still be passed on through channels of strange attention, from poet to poet, poet to novelist, novelist to reader. Tennyson’s “murmuring of innumerable bees,” however silly sounding, still buzzes in the ear of this modernist d ­ aughter, giving her a figure for the “humming noise” that fills her own poetically experimental prose in this section. In their dif­fer­ent ways, then, both Rossetti and Woolf insist that writing is a form of listening—­a listening in par­t ic­u­lar to ­t hose indirections of sound which trou­ble articulate language and might be captured anew in each literary work. The story of debt, echo, and allusion is a story of hums and murmurs, however distracting, captivating or even laughable, which gives literary language its rich backdrop of noises from the past. Tennyson’s hum leads to humming Tennyson, as each new writer enters an already echoing h ­ ouse of sound—­a h ­ ouse that is empty yet full of phantoms—­and t­ here finds a voice within a room of her own.

4 Pennies and Horse­play: W. B. Yeats’s Recalls O what is that sound which so thrills the ear . . . ? w. h. auden If it was a hundred ­horses, or a thousand ­horses you had itself, what is the price of a thousand ­horses against a son where ­there is one son only? j. m. synge So what is that sound? First, ­t here is the thrumming pitch of cars in the distance, that low constant which does not change but increases and decreases from hour to hour, day to night. A car pulls up outside the ­house and its engine relaxes into a quieter tonic, a briefly purring tenuto that keeps its mechanical tone, unchanging and unstressed, till suddenly switched off. Then for a time ­t here is silence and absence. A blackbird pinks angrily in the hedge, a bee comes grumblingly near, and a neighbor calls to a child to come in. A few moments ­later that car starts again, g ­ oing through an upward scale of gears as it pulls away and puts on speed, quietening as it recedes. Soon it w ­ ill join the background rumble of traffic, that humming life-­breath of the modern city which is also, sometimes, at certain densities and in certain weathers, a death-­breath. The total absence of that sound, when we are lucky to find it, in the small hours of the night or in remoter places, makes a spectral silence, hollow with distances the ear cannot conceive or full of tiny noises never noticed before. Traffic limits the register of our hearing, closing us in between its blocking walls, pro96

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tecting us from the dizzy prospect of hearing too much—­t hat roar of every­t hing from far or near. But what is that other sound, now closer than cars, louder and sharper, rousing some ancient memory from its sleep? It beats time on the road, irregularly regular, as if telling the rhythm of a dance. It’s that clippety-­clop of h ­ orses, trotting, cantering, galloping, reporting ­human activity to the ear. The rhythm of h ­ orses’ hoofs has run like a commentary beside h ­ uman life through much of history—­ bringing news to the ear, expressing urgencies and routines, haste, purpose, or promise. That sentient rhythm, percussive but not ­mechanical, live and unpredictable, is very dif­fer­ent from the machine purr of a car. It is a noise that tells of muscular effort, animal power and ­human control, of an expense of body and spirit rendered audible in the pace of feet, urgent or easy. T ­ hose rhythms ring the changes of the earth’s surface: sharp and clipped on the asphalt, blunt and thuddy on grass or mud. Heard at one remove, mysterious yet interpretable, ­those rhythms disclose all the stops and swerves of a rider’s intentions and directions. A missed beat in a gallop could mean an obstacle in the way or a catastrophic fall; a skid on stopping signals exhaustion, anxiety, rush. The way that four hoofs at a trot sound like a beat of four, but at a gallop, like three, in a dotted rhythm, each footfall a double note as the iron shoe strikes the surface of the road, are sounds loaded with messages to be decoded. Listening, now, to this sound of a ­horse trotting by, like an arresting solo across the ground bass of traffic, reminds me that this par­t ic­u­lar piece of animal percussion is now not often ours to hear, and interpret. a a a

Except, perhaps, in poetry, where h ­ orses retain their long figurative connection with sound and rhythm, with a riding that suggests tempo and direction, as well as a writing in time and in step. The long and ancient tradition of h ­ orses as figures for inspiration has something to do with the sound of their hoofs ­r unning u ­ nder the control of a ­human rider. And then the visual connection, between

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blacksmith’s workshop and the layout of the ­middle ear, with its small auditory bones: the stapes, the incus and the malleus—­names first registered in print as early as 1594—­suggests the extent to which the very transmission of sound plays on a memory of t­ hose sounding hoofs. As Jonathan Ashmore explains, “The external ear shapes the spectral content of the sound and funnels sound to the ear­drum, from where it is transmitted through the chain of ossicles of the ­m iddle ear to the inner ear” (2000: 69). Sound travels through a workshop of complex parts as it makes its way into the fluid-­filled, hair-­nerved cavities of the cochlea. It is not only that sound must travel through air, but it must also then travel through the orchestral complexities of this tripartite organ, in order to be interpreted by the brain. The time lag, which may even change the nature of the sound, is part of what sound is. That ­t here is a l­ittle hammering blacksmith in the ­middle ear, beating soundwaves into the fluids of the cochlea, is a colorful description which resonates, nevertheless, with the idea of sound as a traveler, always on the move and hard to stop at any one point on its route. The physics of sound might lightly, if quirkily, confirm ­t hese terms in their equestrian resonance. Hammer and anvil are also, however, a reminder of the invisible tactility of hearing. At any frequency, even if not actually felt, soundwaves must enter and touch the vibrating ossicles and follicles of the ear, even if the threshold of felt pain is only crossed at lower or higher frequencies. Being touched by sound is a meta­phor based on fact, though a fact only known when the registers of h ­ uman hearing are transgressed. Yet the figurative sense that hearing might hurt is not hard to find among writers. So Gerard Manley Hopkins invokes “cries” that “on an age-­old anvil wince and sing” (1967: 100). He might be referring specifically to the workings of the ­middle ear, as well as to the hissing hot iron of the ­horse­shoe when, having been ­shaped on an anvil, it is dipped in ­water to cool. That word, “wince,” brings to the figure a ­human sensitivity, as of pain, which neither the iron nor the ­horse would feel. It is a word which expresses both the tactile jumpiness of the ­horse’s hot shoe, and the physical pain of noise, like haptic shocks on the ear­drum. So “wince and sing” catches the doubleness of pain and song together, of “cries” that touch and hurt when heard, but that also “sing” as the anvil shapes them:

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into sense, perhaps, or into the implied new hoof of poetic rhythm. “Nate is shaping a ­horse­shoe,” Bishop writes in “The Village.” “Oh, beautiful pure sound!” (1984: 274). Nate’s practical art of making ­horse­shoes drowns out, yet preserves, the originating mad scream of the m ­ other, struck (or hammered) into the story’s subtle art, as if in another expression of wincing and singing together. Like Bishop’s, his is an aesthetic cover-­work, which can turn a sound-­memory of painful sharpness into the beauty of a crafted “pure sound!” It is as if Bishop, like Hopkins, ­were employing the model of the ear—­t hat auditory worker through touch and time—in order to write about its memory of pain, turned into literary ­music. If the anvil for h ­ orse­shoeing (and hearing) is “age-­old,” so too, at some deeper level of consciousness, is the h ­ orse. In the West, it goes at least as far back as the classical story of the winged Pegasus, whose own hoofs, the legend goes, struck the earth on Mount Helicon and thus opened the fountain, or wellspring, of the muses. When his rider, Bellerophon, hubristically tried to r­ ide to the heaven of the gods, he was thrown off. That mythical h ­ orse’s kick, and the poetic well that opens, linger in lit­er­a­t ure long a­ fter the myth has faded— as in Seamus Heaney’s poem “Personal Helicon” (1966), which recalls a well containing, not only the echo of his “own call / With a clean new ­music in it,” but also a “white face,” spoiled by the slap-­in-­ the-­face sighting of a “rat” (1998: 15). The well, with its queer echoes, self-­reflections, and apparitions, for example in Dante Gabriel ­Rossetti’s “Willowwood” sonnets or in Robert Frost’s “For Once, Then, Something,” carries a memory of that first classical wellspring of the muses, kicked into existence by a winged ­horse. As late as 1969, Heaney, in “The Forge,” recalls the dark of a place containing the “hiss” of “a new shoe” and “the hammered anvil’s short-­ pitched ring” (1998: 19). It is a place where the poet-­blacksmith ­“expends himself in shape and ­music” (19), in a making which thus touches and sounds the object at once, as if in that other old forge of the ear. Poetry is a long-­memoried workshop, certainly, and the ­human memory for ­shaped sounds, for the ring and rhythm of the blacksmith’s hammer which ­w ill become the ring and rhythm of ­horses’ hoofs on the ground, touches on ancient stories still sounding in poetry.

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“ ‘O where are you ­going?’ said reader to rider, / ‘That valley is fatal when furnaces burn’ ” (1976: 60). Auden’s anonymous “rider” in the last of his “Five Songs” is the natu­ral companion and respondent to the “reader,” not only ­because of the easy chime of their names but also ­because, at some level, reading is a looking to ride—to go somewhere on the back of the rhythms of words, timed not by the metronome with its strict precision, but by the h ­ orse’s feet which take all the wayward irregularities of the road. Auden’s dactylic pace not only echoes the four legs, heard as three, of the ­horse’s gallop (and of the very word “galloping”), but also suggests that “reader” and “rider” are bound together in this “pediscript” (2009: 4), as Michael Donaghy puts it, of a forward rhythm orally sounded. That Auden is remembering such an oral tradition is suggested by that first contradiction of a “reader” (no longer reading but speaking), who asks of a rider, “ ‘O where are you g ­ oing?’ ” It is, of course, the question asked by all readers: where is this poem taking me? What is it about? Is it worth following? Similarly tricky questions are then asked in ­later stanzas by “fearer to farer” and by “horror to hearer,” as the poem twins each pair into an aurally inextricable bind, without giving any real answers to the questions. Instead, the galloping step of the meter runs on, the rider, farer, hearer, all figures for the poet who risks an outward journey into dangerous lands, where language plays queer tricks: “ ‘the midden [ . . . ​] ­will madden,’ ” “ ‘looking discover the lacking,’ ” “ ‘granite to grass,’ ” “ ‘swiftly’ ” to “ ‘softly’ ”—­sounds that seem to go nowhere meaningful in this compulsively twinning r­ ide. It seems, then, that the only answer to the reader’s question, “ ‘O where are you ­going?’ ” is that the destination is irrelevant, and that to go is to become also a “rider,” a “farer,” and a “hearer”—­one who must always venture forwards, and merely attend to what­ever passes on the journey. In some sense this is the same journey, and the same 3 / 4 time, as another baffling r­ ide that may have been in Auden’s ears: “I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three” (1970: 413), rattles Robert Browning in “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.” The rides, in both works, make the story lines irrelevant. Where the rider gets to, or what news the last galloper delivers from “Ghent to Aix,” is never disclosed, for t­ hese are not the point. The point is to r­ ide, faster or slower, in language that kicks into action

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through the mimetic recall of a galloping h ­ orse. For it is not “news” that m ­ atters in poetry, good news or bad, but the sound of riding to bring it, or fetch it. “It is difficult / to get the news from poems” (1988, 2000: 318), declares William Carlos Williams in a profound line from “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower.” When news is got, it quickly ­becomes irrelevant, or ­else it only hides other news, stranger and harder, in an infinite regress. Meanwhile, t­ here is the h ­ orse of poetry itself, riding on feet that might take us somewhere, risky and uncertain, ­whether into a valley of “furnaces” or on a mission of purposeless delivery, while provoking endless questions on the way. “O where are you g ­ oing?” can perhaps only be answered, not by explaining the destination or delivering the news, but only by the riding that reading might become. a a a

To turn to W. B. Yeats at this point is to turn to a poet whose curiously remembering ear delights in the calls and recalls of sound. His stock phantasmagoria of images, enriched by endless permutations of fact and invention, event and meta­phor, is a tempting pot of won­ ders for what Frost calls the “summoner” ear. “The imagination is no more than their summoner—­the imagination of the ear,” he writes of the ­human voice’s par­t ic­u­lar “tones” (2006: 642). Certainly, Yeats is a poet who would understand the function of the ear as imaginer and “summoner,” specifically a summoner of images out of the ­Great Mind, like t­ hose on which he calls in “All Souls’ Night,” as if by naming he might conjure up spirits from the past. To summon lies halfway between inventing and just calling. It suggests bringing something to mind that was ­t here already, and only waiting on the phrase or name that ­w ill stir it into life. “I summon to the winding ancient stair,” Yeats begins “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” in an intransitive summoning which is like calling himself to poetic attention, so that, mounting the stair, he might “Fix e­ very wandering thought upon / That quarter where all thought is done” (1957: 477). To summon is not necessarily to find something, but only to climb and wind up the “ancient stair,” which is also the stair of the ancients, ­settling thought into thoughtlessness so that poetry might come of

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it. The extraordinary phantasmagoria of repeat images from which Yeats draws throughout his writing life suggests a method in his creative madness, a serendipity of summonses which is also carefully calculated. To take just two of t­ hese images, pennies and h ­ orse­play (with its related swordplay), is to find how deeply layered by repetition and recall his poetry can be, and how sedimented in sounds of previous use. The summoner of t­ hose images is essentially not some self-­dramatizing magus, bringing spirits out of a hat, but the poet’s ear summoning sounds out of that rich gray area between what is heard and what remains to be listened for. A few weeks before he died, Yeats jotted down an inspired summary of the difference between philosophy and poetry. “You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the song of sixpence” (in Foster 1997–2003: II. 650), he wrote. That “song of sixpence” is something of a ritornello in his l­ ater writings. For instance, in the late essay “An Indian Monk” he won­ders of the Swami “­whether he has added that irrational ele­ment which has made ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ immortal” (1961: 434). In an essay on “Modern Poetry,” he explains of a poem by Edith Sitwell, “When you listen to this poem, you should become two ­people, one a sage [ . . . ​] one a child listening to a poem as irrational as ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ ” (1961: 502). To listen to a song of sixpence is to side with childish won­der against the rational rule of phi­los­o­pher or sage, while suggesting that its sixpenny value might be worth all their arguments. If saint and singer w ­ ere always close kin for Yeats, the song of sixpence also, perhaps, adds an extra ele­ment to the mix. For not only does the rhyme go on to tell of the domestic fate of “Four and twenty blackbirds, / Baked in a pie,” but it then announces that “When the pie was opened, / The birds began to sing” (in Opie and Opie 1951, 1973: 394). T ­ hese singing birds are not a mechanical invention, sprung from the ancient worked craft of some Byzantine goldsmith, but real birds suddenly resurrected in their star-­gazey pie. They are dead t­hings come to life, and able to sing with a suddenly nonchalant, almost comic ease. It is this ele­ment of a gratuitous and incongruous revivification that perhaps appealed to the aging Yeats. Not a chiseling goldsmith but a magical cook lies ­behind the joke of ­these ­later birds’ visionary transformation.

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Ele­ments of this sixpenny rhyme turn up in several late works. For instance, in “Cuchulain Comforted,” a poem composed just a week or so before the poet’s death, we are told that Cuchulain in the afterlife meets the convicted shades of cowards—­shades that hover uncertainly between Dante’s infernal harpies and the baked songsters of the nursery rhyme. In the end, it is a poem which offers neither justification nor condemnation of ­t hose shades which, ­after death, must “ ‘sing and sing the best we can’ ” (1957: 634). Fi­nally they are transformed into singing birds indeed, for “They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds” (635). That it is their “throats” that have “changed,” rather than their voices or their tune, is oddly anatomical, as if Yeats w ­ ere implying that their bird-­song depends on cut throats, or at least on throats cut loose from their bodies. The traditional depiction of Cuchulain with a raven on his shoulder at death seems to have merged in his mind with the blackbirds from the baked pie that “began to sing” despite being well cooked. That ­these nursery singers might have been on the poet’s mind at this time is further underlined by a poem written barely a week l­ ater, days before he died. “The Black Tower” is a bleak poem, with a refrain about the dead standing “upright” in the “tomb” and “Old bones” shaking “upon the mountain” (635). But it also contains two oddly unaccommodated lines, about the “tower’s old cook” who goes “Catching small birds in the dew of the morn” (636), presumably for baking in another pie? Into this world of the ex­pec­tant dead, still somehow standing or shaking, the figure of the cook seems anomalously busy with ordinary life. Who w ­ ill eat this meal of early morning birds? Or are they just being cooked for a song? The comic resurrection story of the “Song of Sixpence” seems to nudge at this poem, as if it’s what the “Old bones” are actually waiting for. At about this time, Yeats also wrote his last play, The Death of Cuchulain. It tells the story of the old Irish hero who is beheaded by a Blind Man for the sum of “twelve pennies.” When dead, Cuchulain explains, his soul w ­ ill take “a soft feathery shape” (1934, 1952: 702) and thus turn into a bird, as the myth dictates. Then, just as the Blind Man feels for the right place, with “This is your neck,” Cuchulain exultantly exclaims—­and they are his last words—­“I say it is about to sing” (703). Like the “throats of birds” in “Cuchulain Comforted,”

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t­ here is something impersonally neutral about “it”—­t he “neck”—­ which, severed from its living body, might continue to sing. Cuchulain says nothing more, but ­after the stage direction, “in the silence a few faint bird notes,” the stage is taken by the Street-­Singer who sings by proxy what the “harlot sang to the beggar-­man” (704). So singing goes on, the hero’s “bird notes” transferring to ­others as another retrospective telling of the tale begins. This, however, is not exactly a late Romantic affirmation of immortal song, for Cuchulain’s bird-­song comes at a price, even if it seems a whimsically specific sum. “Twelve pennies!” Cuchulain ­exclaims to the Blind Man: “What better reason for killing a man?” (702) “Twelve pennies” is certainly better than no reason at all, particularly for a hungry beggar, but it seems less valid than some ­justifiable motive. The way that Yeats throws “pennies” into the equation suggests a resurrection story both dearly bought and cheap at the price. W ­ hether sixpence or twelvepence, such pennies are almost throwaway sums which make nonsense of the deaths they buy, while also being reminders that the continuing song of the bird-­soul is bought at a price. Another mythical sum, ­t hose biblical thirty pieces of silver, might lie ­behind them, or perhaps just a real-­ life memory of the “Brown Penny” (1910), which is Yeats’s title for a prob­ably autobiographical poem published some thirty years before, which tells of a “penny, brown penny, brown penny” gambled at a fair ground “To find out if I might love” (1957: 268). Pennies weigh ambivalently in the scales of murderous motivation, on the one hand, and the caprice of a g ­ amble, on the other. Yeats’s art finds its place between them, as if dicing with death for a laugh or a dare suited his purpose, particularly in the late work. For instance, in his play The Hour-­Glass, the same mix of serious intent and foolhardy recklessness marks out the Fool, who barters his dark wisdom for “three pennies,” wagered on “twenty pennies” (1934, 1952: 322), and fi­nally offers “every­t hing for a penny” (323) but too late. Haggling for wisdom might be unwise. Yet it seems that Yeats is fascinated by the pennyworth that makes high deeds look foolish, or whimsical, or e­ lse just purposeful beyond rational purpose. He himself throws in pennies everywhere, like a careless gambler at the ­table,

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weighing the odds and counting the uncountable, in order to remind us of the saintly and irrational inexplicability of song: “You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the song of sixpence.” Sixpence is a wager, high or low, on song’s immortality. ­A fter Cuchulain’s death in the play, the Street-­Singer’s final song then tells of a meeting with a pro­cession of the ancient dead whom Cuchulain must join: I meet ­t hose long pale ­faces, Hear their ­great ­horses, then Recall what centuries have passed Since they ­were living men. (1934, 1952: 704) ­ hese “­great h T ­ orses” have a resonance from far back in Yeats’s life, which exceeds even Cuchulain’s own mythical h ­ orse­manship in the legends. ­These pale-­faced dead pass by on “­great h ­ orses,” vis­i­ble though “pale,” but their h ­ orses, interestingly, are less seen than heard: “Hear their ­great ­horses.” It is the ­imagined clip of ­horses’ hoofs that is heard, as the dead are met from “centuries” ago, traveling forwards in stately pro­cession. The mystique of ­horses, which is partly a mystique of class and partly of ancient literary lineage, seems to have started early for Yeats, as the poem “At Galway Races” (1910) suggests. In it, the racers are drawn into some larger mysterious allegory, encompassing all ­t hose “That r­ ide upon ­horses,” including an ambiguous “We”: “We, too, had good attendance once, / Hearers and hearteners of the work” (1957: 266), he writes. Something about ­horses, like something about poetry, requires “Hearers,” so that when, near the end of his life, Yeats imagines “the long pale f­aces” of the dead taking him too, in the person of Cuchulain, into the ­f uture, he has the last remaining “Singer” on stage “Hear their g ­ reat ­horses.” “Hearers and hearteners of the work” are needed by both racers and poets, both of them ­horse­men of a kind. To “Hear their ­great h ­ orses” ­w ill, of course, then be one of Yeats’s own last wishes. Throughout his life h ­ orse­men, and the sounds h ­ orses make, w ­ hether cheered and gambled for at the races or summoned in ghostly pro­ cessional state, are images for rich imaginative recall.

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Recalled from just how far back is suggested by one of two poems on “peasant visionaries,” written more than forty years before The Death of Cuchulain. The first of ­t hese begins: The dews drop slowly and dreams gather: unknown spears Suddenly hurtle before my dream-­awakened eyes, And then the clash of fallen h ­ orse­men and the cries Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears. (1957: 161) “The Valley of the Black Pig” (1896) is written in the distantly self-­ chiming rhyme-­scheme of In Memoriam—­a scheme which plays on the far and near recall of rhyme, as if indeed g ­ oing in and out of dreams. The first line is pure Yeats in its peculiar slowness, a wavering rhythmic pace which evades metrical fixing and seems to wander around its own time. Is it heptameter, hexameter, or even pentameter? Certainly, this is a line that w ­ ill not ­settle into a metrical jog but keeps us listening to hear how it should go, listening and postponing till, having read on, we might perhaps justify the meter in retrospect: prob­ably, hexameter. The first line of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” does something very similar: “I ­w ill arise and go now, and go to Innisfree” (117). It too hesitates between five, six and seven beats, as if feet ­were footsteps not quite certain of their way, not certain if that “now” holds back, making an extra stress as if to linger in the pres­ent, or lifts lightly, unstressedly forward. ­Going or not g ­ oing is a rhythmic uncertainty that contradicts the apparent assertion that he w ­ ill “go now.” As Yeats once advised in his late essay “A General Introduction for My Work,” poetry, like the first lines of Paradise Lost, is “contrapuntal”; it crosses or syncopates two voices: the “folk song” of the meter and the varying, spoken emphases of “passionate prose.” This “unvariable possibility” of meter is thus crossed and overlaid by rhythms of speech, which yet “must not exorcise the [meter’s] ghostly voice” (1961: 524). “The dews drop slowly and dreams gather: unknown spears” is a line troubled by several metrical solutions that lurk within it, offering variable choices and voicings to the reading ear. The effect is of hearing t­ hings: dif­fer­ent rhythms and intonations of voice which unsettle the pattern the ear seeks, till it s­ettles for hexameter in the l­ater lines: “And then the

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clash of fallen ­horse­men and the cries / Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears.” A ­ fter the slow wavering of dews and dreams, ­t hese “horse­men” fall with a noisier and more regular “beat,” which signals an awakening as well as another poetic recall. For t­ hese lines seem haunted by an earlier, well-­k nown poem about war: “And we are h ­ ere as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of strug­gle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night” (1954, 1967: 145). Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” seems to beat about the poet’s ears ­here, as “ignorant armies” become “unknown perishing armies” (the Latinate etymology of “ignorant” morph­ing into the related “unknown”), and their “clash by night” a “clash of fallen ­horse­men.” Arnold’s cross-­Channel echoes of war are heard again in Yeats, even as he seems to deny any knowledge of them in the twice-­repeated assertion that the “horse­men” are “unknown”: “unknown spears,” “unknown perishing armies.” Of course, what is most insistently “unknown” has a way of coming back, in defiance of the very fact. For something known about ­t hese “horse­men” gives them, even in this relatively early work, an age-­old feel, as of having come through any number of poems, both Arnold’s own, and the ­poetry he also recalls at a distance: “Sophocles long ago / Heard it [ . . . ]” (1954, 1967: 144). What the poet hears might be the sea of many poems and many h ­ orse­men. The overlay of hearing on hearing: Yeats, hearing Arnold, hearing Sophocles, hearing “it” by another sea, is a reminder of poetry’s own calls within recalls, like the under­ lying hum of war becoming audible through all t­hese ancestral voices. Pennies, swords, and h ­ orse­men w ­ ill then become part of Yeats’s lifelong dialectic of dreaming aesthete and responsible public man, private poet and elder statesman. For instance, some ten years a­ fter “The Valley of the Black Pig,” he published the short poem “All ­Things Can Tempt me” (1909), which concludes with the following lines:      When I was young, I had not given a penny for a song Did not the poet sing it with such airs That one believed he had a sword upstairs;

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Yet would be now, could I but have my wish, Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish. (1957: 267) The poet is weary of the world, weary of his old amorous temptations and of the fighting spirit he once looked for in poetry. “I had not given a penny for a song,” he declares of himself at that time, pennies and songs already twinning in his thoughts, setting up their small exchange of price and value. If “a penny for a song,” then maybe six pennies for the “song of sixpence,” or twelve pennies for the death songs of Cuchulain. Pennies are the magical roulette of use and uselessness in Yeats’s aesthetically rooted imagination, which also cannot resist the comical-­quotidian realities of money and reward. The down payment for a song is thus a sum of pennies gambled in a game, often of life and death, out of proportion to the sum required. In “All ­Things Can Tempt Me,” however, he turns away from battling in poems, with their pennyworth of make-­believe in “a sword upstairs,” in order to be private and ­silent. “Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish” is a line Paul Muldoon ­w ill lift and spin for his own purposes of recall, in his elegy to the ­woman who lies “colder and dumber than a fish” (1994: 13) in Incantata. Yet for all that Yeats would now rather be cold, dumb, and deaf in the ser­v ice of the pen’s “craft of verse,” his ear ­w ill not altogether forget the sound of ­t hose ­horse­men, riding or falling, or the “sword upstairs,” which once might have justified “a penny for a song.” To make-­believe in “a sword upstairs” may have been an affectation of youth, rejected by the more mature man, but as chance would have it, real life would re-establish the connection and give to the sword another long lease of poetic life. “ ‘A rather wonderful ­thing happened the day before yesterday’ ” (in Foster 1997–2003: II. 167), Yeats recounts in a letter of March 1920. This was the occasion when a Japa­nese visitor called Sato gave him a pres­ent: a 550-­year-­old sword wrapped in embroidered silk. What Yeats received was like the text-­ come-­true of “a sword upstairs,” so that when he wrote his g ­ reat poem, “Meditations in Time of Civil War” (1923), he seems to reassess the penny song dismissed in “All T ­ hings Can Tempt Me.” No longer set in opposition to the pen and craft of verse, now “Sato’s gift, a changeless sword, / By pen and paper lies.” The inspired accident of

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that gift—­a sword which is real, yet beautifully sheathed in “an embroidered dress” (1957: 421)—­gives the poet an emblem for that continuing dialogue between luxurious dreamscapes and po­liti­cal energy, between silk embroidery and drunken soldiery, between the poet’s songs and the pennies or cost of their po­liti­cally useless composition. The “sword upstairs” has returned and lies just “By pen and paper,” as if it now belonged quite intimately to the work of writing. Another ten years further on, in “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” (1933), the same old sword turns up even closer to home: “The consecrated blade upon my knees / Is Sato’s ancient blade,” the poet ­reports. This heraldic sword, now so close to the pen that it is held on the poet’s knees like a talisman while he writes, figures, or rather literalizes, two key ideas in Yeats’s imaginative workshop: embroidery and the bobbin. The sword, with its links to ­t hose poetic and soldiering h ­ orse­men of the earlier poems, now also gathers two more images into its orbit. In stanza 2, the Self’s voice describes how That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn From some court-­lady’s dress and round The wooden scabbard bound and wound, Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn. (1957: 477) The sword now incorporates the aristocratic temptations of love, brought to life a­ fter five centuries by that brilliant verb “torn”—­how, or by whom, was the dress “torn”?—as well as resuscitating the ­poet’s own early songs, whose words ­were once mere embroidery to be cast off in the interests of walking naked. Now the sword brings together the tumult of the po­liti­cal world—­real wars outside the tower—­but also the romance of a torn dress and of old songs “Covered with embroideries” (320). If embroidery was once a superfluity to be rejected, figuring a youthful indulgence in words for their own sakes, ­here a literally embroidered sword allows ­t hose fanciful words to return, in some heraldic act of stylized warfare. The genius of that sword is that it gave Yeats a way of keeping the debate in play and thus unwinding yet another of his poetic bobbins of visionary turns and returns, calls and recalls: “The wooden scabbard bound and wound.” That “bound and wound” is what, in “All Souls’ Night,” wraps

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mummies in their mummy-­cloths—­another kind of embroidery—­and describes the very workings of thought as it summons i­mages from its own past: “Such thought, that in it bound / I need no other ­thing, / Wound in mind’s wandering” (1957: 474), the poet writes. That it should be “thought” which is thus “Wound” suggests both the mummy-­cloths’ tight fit and an uncertain, erring movement, a “wandering” of the mind which winds its way, up a tower, perhaps, or through a mind-­f ull of old images for poetry. Being “bound” and “Wound” is a (re)turn of phrase which suits the bobbin action of Yeats’s imagination, as it chambers its own self-­echoes from the past while drawing them into each new poem on an old theme. In stanza 5 of the “Dialogue of Self and Soul,” the Soul then answers with a description of how the mind might function differently: Such fullness in that quarter overflows And falls into the basin of the mind That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind, For intellect no longer knows Is from the ­Ought, or Knower from the Known— (1957: 478) In an earlier version of that third line, Yeats had written, “is deaf and drunk and blind” (editor’s note: 478), as if just missing the echo of his own line from twenty-­five years before, though he changed it back to “dumb”—­t he correction ensuring that we hear the poet answering his younger self, who once wanted to be “Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish.” Now that real ­battles have been fought, particularly the strug­gles of 1916, he can negotiate between Self and Soul, while keeping hold of the silk-­embroidered sword on his knee—­ that emblem of poetry’s sword-­w ielding penny songs, as well as of its useless, binding embroideries. Being “deaf and dumb and blind” seems an achievement of knowledge, even if all the poet “knows” is that the grammatical-­philosophical split between “Knower” and “Known” is an outworn convention of thought to be overcome. Not knowing the difference might be, like so many other challenges to knowledge among poets in this book, just poetry’s own way of knowing with a difference. Both that sword and the h ­ orse­men then continue to make extraordinary returns in Yeats’s poetry, as if his imagination worked with

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material endlessly unwinding from the past. For instance, that early “clash of fallen h ­ orse­men,” indebted to Arnold and his classical echoes, merges in mid-­career with another more literary ­horse­man, who might also have fallen. In “Coole Park and Ballylee” (1931), Yeats grumbles about the change to “Traditional sanctity and loveliness” and concludes, “But all is changed, that high ­horse riderless, / Though mounted in that s­ addle Homer rode” (1957: 492). As a poet, he is fond of the deictic—­words like “that” or “­t hose,” which seem to summon something always close at hand, though new to the reader. Which ­horse is “that”? Clearly, the poets’ rather than the soldiers’ h ­ orse, and thus a Pegasus that rides on, having unseated not only Bellerophon perhaps, but also Homer, and that now goes “riderless,” unsteered, and uncontrolled in a world where “all is changed.” The implication of h ­ orses’ feet ­running amok in the modern world, of the old rhythms ­going perhaps too freely wild, may be part of Yeats’s debate with Pound about meter and ­free verse, or a debate with himself about traditional sanctity and revolutionary change. It is in­ter­est­ing, however, how often this “riderless” ­horse ­w ill turn up in ­later writers, as if they too wanted to save the old legend for themselves, even though, like Yeats, they meanwhile only seem to watch from the sidelines. Yeats in this poem may be registering something very much in the air in the 1920s and 1930s. Jean Cocteau’s play Orpheus, first performed in 1926 and then, in its En­glish version, in London in 1931, contains a h ­ orse whose hoofs audibly tap out the letters of sentences “more remarkable than all [Orpheus’] poems.” As Orpheus himself puts it, “I would give my complete works for one of ­those l­ittle sentences in which I listen to myself as you listen to the sea in a shell” (1962: 35). Like Cocteau’s other centaur figures—­the man-­horses in “The Testament of Orpheus,” for instance, which tap out messages like “a new kind of radio-­phonic avant-­garde poetry” (Gallo 2009: 208)—­this one performs some kind of automatic animal writing, which spells the death of Eurydice and opens an entrance to the ­underworld which she must soon explore. The h ­ orse that raps poetic messages with its hoofs suggests a writing struck into consciousness without thought, as if from outside and from long ago, in the kick-­start of Pegasus. ­W hether or not Yeats knew this work—he ­later had one of Cocteau’s plays performed at the Abbey Theatre—­his own poem, “On a Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmund Dulac” (1928),

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picks up on a mythical figure enjoying something of a fash­ion­able comeback at this time. ­Here too it is the centaur’s hoofs that leave their stamp: “I knew that horse-­play, knew it for a murderous ­thing” (1957: 442), he writes. Certainly “horseplay”—­the childish game of it, its rough soldiery and the subconscious treading poetic rhythms of it—­draws on a recurrent figure in Yeats’s lexicon. W ­ hether half-­ human, a “centaur,” or “riderless” like Pegasus who threw off his first rider, this is a ­horse which imprints its movements on the subconscious mind and stamps its rhythms on the listening ear. If Cocteau gives the h ­ orse a theatrical real­ity as the tapper of messages upon the subconscious, Yeats is no less sensitive to the idea of poetry’s hoof-­ prints, ­whether its regular meters or its softer, wavering counterrhythms. “I knew that horse-­play, knew it for a murderous t­ hing” is a line that opens up, beyond its own context, to encompass murderous ­horse­men, fash­ion­able art-­deco centaurs, and the poetic “play” of hoofs in the ear of the poet. The word “horse­play” itself is ­here reversed, from its figurative sense of raucous childish fun, to the literal sound and play of a ­horse’s hoofs, both murderously stamping but also playfully tapping on the mind’s ear. Yeats’s “horse­play,” like his sixpenny or twelvepenny songs, can be both murder and play at once. Meanwhile, “that high ­horse riderless” from “Coole Park” is a figure that returns not only in Yeats’s own late verse but also in the works of other poets. In 1942, Wallace Stevens’s lecture “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” takes the h ­ orse, w ­ hether mythical, sculptured, or wooden, as a description of the nobility of sound in poetry. In it he writes that to “listen to words when we hear them” is to conclude “that words are thoughts and not only our own thoughts but the thoughts of men and ­women ignorant of what it is that they are thinking”—­for “words, above every­t hing e­ lse, are, in poetry, sounds” (1997: 662–663). From the idea of the poet as a “Noble Rider,” Stevens reaches the conclusion that poetic words are “thoughts,” even communal thoughts beyond any one subject’s “thinking”—or rather, as his contradictory sentence suggests, “thoughts” inhabiting the pres­ent participle of “thinking” precisely when the thinker is “ignorant” of “thinking” at all. This too, like so many other dialectics of poetry and thought in this book, offers a syllogism which has it both ways: “words are thoughts” and “words [ . . . ​]

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are [ . . . ​] sounds”; logically, then, sounds are also thoughts. But all this depends on that first premise, that we “listen to words when we hear them.” The sounds of words, by being something both listened to and heard (in that familiar involution of the ear’s two dif­fer­ent ­activities), are a form of “thinking” as listening. The “Noble Rider” poet, traveling on a now imaginary, redundant, equestrian conveyer, thus discovers “the sound of words” in this ancient mythical figure of ah ­ orse that must be ridden, at least u ­ ntil the rider is shaken off. A few years l­ater, in 1947, Stevens wrote a poem with the characteristically unlikely title, “The Pure Good of Theory.” In it he ­describes footsteps in the street, heard by a “reader by the win­dow” (1997: 289)—­steps, specifically, of a “Dark h ­ orse and walker” (290) contrapuntally moving together. This par­t ic­u­lar “reader” (to rider) is thus a listener too, though listening indirectly through a win­dow, so that the sounds of a ­horse’s hoofs outside have something to do with the words that are being read silently on the page. This “Dark ­horse and walker” (a dark ­horse being also a secretive creature) make a sound which then alerts the reader at the win­dow to “Time,” described as an “inimical m ­ usic,” a play of “enchanted preludes” (290). Another fallen ­horse­man of a kind, then, this “walker” steps in time to the creature he leads and gives to the “reader by the win­dow” a sound like the sound of time itself. For as Stevens elaborates, Time is a h ­ orse that runs in the heart, a h ­ orse Without a rider on a road at night. The mind sits listening and hears it pass. (289) ­ ere t­ hese lines in Sylvia Plath’s ears in 1963, when she wrote her W poem “Words,” just a week or two before her death? In it she describes word-­echoes “like horses”—­echoes which become multiple as she describes encountering them many years ­later, “on the road”: “Words dry and riderless, / The indefatigable hoof-­taps” (1960, 1981: 270). In this poem about poems and echoes, the a­ ctual echo of Yeats’s “high ­horse riderless” is hard to ignore. Meanwhile, as meta­phors for time and for the timing of poetry, both Stevens’s and Plath’s poems mix the rote of hoofs on a “road”—­h is “horse [ . . . ​] on a road at night,” her “indefatigable hoof-­taps”—­w ith the idea of an unguided

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creature: “a ­horse / Without a rider” in the one, or a “riderless” ­horse in the other. Both poets, with Yeats in their ears perhaps, attend to the sound of time or to the echoes of words, not by riding on the high ­horse but by sitting, ­behind a win­dow or at the roadside, listening. “The mind sits listening,” Stevens writes, invoking the old, wide radius of the pres­ent participle, so that listening becomes another end in itself. Listening is what both poets are ­doing at this point—­listening both to the old “hoof-­taps” of words but also to the line of poetry that goes back through Yeats, with his “high ­horse riderless,” to Homer, and to the ­horse that first threw off his rider. It is the sound of poetry’s words which must be listened to, particularly by ­t hose writers ambitious to be noble riders themselves. And so to return to Yeats: in September 1938, a few months before his death, he wrote his poetic last word and self-­epitaph “­Under Ben Bulben.” Near the start, recalling Shelley and other “sages,” he suddenly issues a command: “Swear by ­t hose ­horse­men” (1957: 637). The unpre­ce­dented specificity of “­those ­horse­men,” as if, though not mentioned before, they had always been nearby and long familiar, comes as no surprise. Of course h ­ orse­men, w ­ hether fallen or still riding, have always been to hand in Yeats’s poetry, as figures for the threatening soldiery of the times, as well as for the visionary com­ pany of singers to which he hopes to belong. And sure enough, like the “long pale ­faces” of the dead on “their ­great ­horses” in The Death of Cuchulain, ­here they are described as “That pale, long-­v isaged com­pany”—­t he deictic signaling one of t­ hose summons with which he calls on a familiarly packed phantasmagoria. What ­else should this poet “Swear by” except “­t hose ­horse­men,” any number of them, his own and ­t hose of other poets, who have ridden to his call in poem ­after poem, in answer to some need in his long-­memoried poetic ear? At the end of the poem, he then famously summons another one of their com­pany: On limestone quarried near the spot By his command t­ hese words are cut:   Cast a cold eye   On life, on death.   Horse­man, pass by! (1957: 640)

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Horse­men, even from forty years before, are still trotting by in Yeats’s mind’s ear at the very end of his life. The stony epitaph might be read as a modesty trope, a call to the living everyman not to mourn but coldly to pass on. However, an earlier version slightly complicates this reading. For Yeats first wrote, “Horse­man pass . . . !” (640), the ellipses and exclamation mark oddly melodramatic. ­T hese ellipses, like so many, are a visual sign for the pacing sound of something absent, or passed. Thus, “Horse­man pass . . . !” visually renders the sound and (hoof-)print of a h ­ orse ­going unendingly on into the distance. We see-­hear it, as if listening vicariously through the ears of the dead to the hoof-­taps on the grass above their graves. While the final version of this line, “Horse­man, pass by!” might indeed mean: do not stop, do not mourn, do not feel anything at all, it might thus also mean its opposite: ­horse­man, come by, come past, and let me hear you still as I heard all “­those h ­ orse­men,” the ones that fought or fell, that wielded swords or rode palely by, in poems that dreamed of luxury and quiet, while always aware of the “clash” of ­battle. Horse­men, then, are also the rhythm of poetry which Yeats ­will not, even at the end, quite let pass by, but instead lets us hear how he imagines still listening to it. “Horse­man, pass by!” keeps the sound of what passes and is to come, in a “by” which has not quite finished with its own ambivalent sense, of a passing by, but also of being hard by. (Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods” makes a similar play of “by,” which t­ here means both stopping very close, and just passing.) Is Yeats’s an injunction to the ­horse­man to ­ride on, or to ­ride nearby, still within earshot? If this “Horse­man” is one of the “pale, long-­ visaged com­pany,” then the poet’s self-­epitaph is also a last listening call, as if from belowground, to the hoof-­taps that he has been summoning all his life. A ­ fter all, this poet of uncanny recalls and reincarnations, whose self-­performed death as Cuchulain might only be a twelvepenny trick, also i­magined how he might become a bird-­ shade, or “soft feathery shape”—or indeed a bird baked in that nursery pie—in order that he might achieve, in spite of reason and common sense, a kind of comic resurrection, at what­ever price. His own irrefutable songs of sixpence, defying sage and phi­los­o­pher but justifying the saint, imagine singing and listening, which also means listening to singing, beyond any bounds of life and death.

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To end then, in the spirit of Yeats himself, by returning to the beginning: ­t here is a passage in his autobiographical piece “Reveries over Childhood and Youth” which might hint at the inordinate reach of the poetic imagination. In it, the poet is recalling happy childhood holidays in Sligo, near Ben Bulben—­also his final destination in the tomb—­and recalling in par­t ic­u­lar the place where his ­father read him Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome. ­These ballad poems, with their jaunty rhythms of b ­ attle and derring-­do—­“And Caius Cossus mounted, / And rode for death and life. / Loud clanged beneath his horse-­hoofs / The helmets of the dead” (1842, 1874: 95)—­were, he explains, “the first poetry that had moved me a­ fter the stable boy’s Orange rhymes” (1955, 1980: 46). The sound of that poetry being read aloud then leads to his remembering something about the place which seems, at first, casually descriptive—­except that in retrospect it rings with a certain premonitory appropriateness, as if some connection ­were already established in his thoughts, between the rollicking poetry he was hearing and a sound that lies suggestively buried close by. Thus, he recalls, in a passage too casual to be intentionally meaningful, yet perhaps too resonantly coincidental to be totally without significance: Between Sligo and Rosses Point, ­t here is a tongue of land covered with coarse grass that runs out into the sea or the mud according to the state of the tide. It is the place where dead h ­ orses are buried. (1955, 1980: 46) Like much e­ lse, ­t hose “dead ­horses” of childhood, mingled with Macaulay’s own “horse-­hoofs” metrically riding to b ­ attle, w ­ ere perhaps only awaiting their own strange resurrections, in the summons of a poetry which w ­ ill go on recalling images from the past, to the very last passing “Horse­man” of this poet’s life’s work.

5 “Coo-­ee”: Calling Walter de La Mare, Edward Thomas, Robert Frost What is the knocking? What is the knocking at the door in the night? d. h. lawrence                Its own­er’s gone nor does the idiot howl—­while I’m unquiet as a talkative ear. denise riley

Walter de la Mare is that strange t­ hing: a poet who has been both widely forgotten, yet remains widely known. He rarely features in critical accounts of twentieth-­century verse or in the canons of poetry studied at university; yet he is, in the words of his editor, Giles de la Mare, “one of the most widely anthologised poets,” some 137 of his verses having been anthologized in a recent five-­year period. This paradox of his reputation is in­ter­est­ing. On the one hand, his fate is to have been sidelined, ­either as a ­children’s poet or as a popu­lar versifier, nostalgically remembered for a few anthology pieces. On the other hand, his critical neglect is somehow linked to the sheer popularity and memorability of some of his poems. Certainly, his voice once heard, particularly if heard in childhood, can hold like the grip of a ghost, for this is a poet who has an uncanny knack of writing lines, like unfinished questions, that ­w ill not leave off tapping at the door of memory: “ ‘Is ­there anybody ­there?’ said the Traveller, / Knocking on the moonlit door” (1969: 126); or “Some

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one came knocking / At my wee, small door” (140); or “ ‘Who knocks?’ ‘I who was beautiful, / Beyond all dreams to restore’ ” (196). Knocking is de la Mare’s keynote. It is the sound, not only of ghostly presences, easily roused by the beat of the meter, but also of lingering questions for the ear—­questions that seem irresolvably caught between a ghost and a rhythm, yet stirred into life each time the poem is read. So “anybody” or “Some one” or just “Who” promise disclosures, but of course no one appears and nothing more is known of them. For de la Mare, as for most poets, the ear is not the faculty that gives answers, but the faculty that questions knowledge in the very act of asking what might be known: “Who knocks?” De la Mare was unlucky perhaps to cross in his long life, from 1873 to 1956, the deep hiatus between the Victorians and the modernists, fitting neither camp very comfortably and thus remaining, sui ­generis, a writer who might easily be overlooked as minor: as a lightweight versifier, a writer of ghost stories, a metrical traditionalist in a world of experiment. The cultural forgetting which set in from the 1960s onwards may have had something to do with the growth of ­children’s lit­er­a­ture as a marketable category, as well as with the ­notional “poetry wars” (Howarth 2005: 2) which divided, often retrospectively, the modernists from the traditionalists. This largely theoretical distinction, often promoted in ­later years, has tended to belittle the mutual re­spect and admiration between the two sides. We might forget, perhaps, that the radio program on which de la Mare’s “The Listeners” is still one of the most frequently requested works is named ­after an occasional verse by T. S. Eliot, “To Walter de la Mare,” written in 1948. In it, the ­children who “Demand some poetry, please” (2015: I. 217) are ­those who know “The whispered incantation which allows / ­Free passage to the phantoms of the mind” (I. 218). As Eliot knew well, what is clamored for in poetry is always at some level the “inexplicable mystery of sound” (I. 218), and de la Mare is one who can write sounds like the steps of a ghost stalking the language. Although he could be critical of the older poet’s romantic diction, Eliot acknowledged “certain original and valuable qualities” (I. 1057) and, on the jacket copy to de la Mare’s late poem, The Traveller, could applaud, not only “all the verbal beauty and the sense of mystery which we expect from him” but also “a depth of

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meaning which ­w ill only reveal itself to a patient receptivity” (1946: cover). As Peter Howarth has shown, de la Mare’s consistent refusal of the confessional mode, his lifelong interest in the poet as merely another “ ‘Mr. Anon’ ” (2005: 110), would have chimed with Eliot’s own insistence on poetic impersonality. Among other modernist admirers was V ­ irginia Woolf. She starts her 1918 review of de la Mare’s fifth volume, Motley and Other Poems, by recalling the “shock of surprise” at finding “a scrap of poetry” in an early miscellany, in an utterly “memorable” and “individual voice”—­a voice which still “possesses us when we read his latest volume.” That sense of being possessed does not leave her. For this, she continues, “is the poet of hush and silence, of the deserted h ­ ouse [ . . . ​] the poet who, when slumber is heavy upon the earth, hears faint stirrings and far murmurs and footfalls, for above all, perhaps, he is the poet who rouses us to an expectation of something that we can neither hear nor see” (1987–1990: II. 252–253). Such “stirrings,” “murmurs and footfalls,” which set up “an expectation” beyond mere hearing and seeing, are resonant of the sounds that ­w ill be heard, some ten years ­later, in her own “deserted ­house” in To the Light­house. Katherine Mansfield corresponded with de la Mare for some years, took three of his volumes with her into exile, and sent him many of her own stories for first approval (in Whistler 1993: 307). Even more strikingly, Ezra Pound once pointed out that, while the “ ‘over-­ modernised intellect’ ” might start by being unimpressed, “ ‘it may dawn on [the] more intelligent self that Mr. De la Mare is to be prized above many blustering egoists’ ” (in Howarth 2005: 119). Among ­others, Auden, whose direction as a poet from the age of fifteen was profoundly influenced by de la Mare’s marvelous, quirky anthology, Come Hither (2010: IV. 6), constantly praised the formal subtlety of his work: his “rhythmical variations,” “the delicacy of his metrical fingering and the graceful architecture of his stanzas” (1963: 15). Stevie Smith, similarly, discovered the breadth of En­glish poetry in her twenties when she transcribed many of the poems from Come Hither into her notebook of 1928–1930—an assimilation “crucial to her poetic developments” (1988: 87), as her biographer, Frances Spalding, reports. On his deathbed in 1928, Hardy, who knew de la Mare’s work well, asked to be read “The Listeners” once again and

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concluded, “ ‘That is possibly the finest poem of the c­ entury’ ” (Whistler 1993: 348). And as late as 1961, Robert Frost, then in his eighties, was still remembering the impact “The Listeners” had on him when he first read it, by chance, some forty years earlier, in a magazine lying on someone’s ­table (Whistler 1993: 269). “ ‘You must know you have been one of my very few con­temporary poets’ ” (Whistler 1993: 271), he wrote to de la Mare in 1938. But even as early as 1914, Frost was referring to him as “greatest of living poets” (2014: 213), and then in 1928, ­after visiting him at home in ­England, repeated that “ ‘De la Mare is one of the best of the best’ ” (in Parini 1999: 254–255), and not only on account of “The Listeners.” It is sometimes forgotten that, alongside Frost’s momentous literary relationship with Edward Thomas, t­ here was a third party who was impor­tant to both. De la Mare’s extraordinary ear for repercussive echoes, for murmurs and footfalls, knockings and stirrings, made him a central, even founding figure in this complicated threesome of literary history, as well as to many of the modernists.

Crossroads Much has been written about Thomas’s friendship with Frost, and recent biographies of Thomas, by Edna Longley (2008), Matthew Hollis (2011), and Jean Moorcroft Wilson (2015), have all focused on Frost as the main progenitor of Thomas’s gifts. However, long before he met Frost in October 1913, Thomas’s regular companion and mentor was de la Mare. They met for the first time in 1907, and for the next six years wrote to each other, visited each other, and, whenever pos­si­ble, took long walks together. Very soon Thomas was ­confiding his bouts of depression as well as his yearning to write verse. As Judy Kendall reports, it seems that already at this early stage, round about 1907, de la Mare was suggesting that parts of Thomas’s prose might have been better conceived in verse form (2012: 37). Although Thomas l­ater credited Frost with the encouragement which helped him turn prose into poetry—­Frost told him to write his prose piece In Pursuit of Spring “in verse form in exactly the same cadence” (in Whistler 1993: 215)—it seems that de la Mare had been offering such advice at least six years earlier. It was de la Mare who also on

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several occasions cheered Thomas out of his suicidal impulses—­ occasions when he would walk out on “desperate rambles” (Whistler 1993: 190), pistol in pocket, leaving his long-­suffering wife, Helen, to wait for his return. On the very day that he first met Frost, Thomas wrote to thank de la Mare for helping him overcome one of ­t hese depressive bouts: “Your letter when I found it ­here at 7 fi­ nally disarmed me,” he wrote—­t hat “disarmed” a l­ ittle too alertingly ambiguous since, he explained, he had also “made a certain purchase” (Kendall 2012: 169), prob­ably a revolver which he called his “Saviour” and kept “in [his] pocket” (170). The mix of gratitude and lingering threat in this reply hints at how difficult a friend he might have been. Evidently the habit of g ­ oing into the woods, armed rather than “disarmed,” was not ­going to stop, and Thomas let his friend know as much. His eventual resentment of de la Mare’s increasing poetic and financial success—as well as perhaps his natu­ral reticence and willing domesticity (de la Mare “could change a baby’s nappies and bake a cake” [Whistler 1993: 124])—­meant that the swing against him, when Frost offered an alternative friendship, would be vehement. Yet in spite of this swing, the writings of all three poets share echoes, figures, and phrases which suggest a continuing literary closeness. For example, Thomas once declared that his poem “The Sun Used to Shine” was about “Me and Frost” (Kendall 2007: 133); yet, as Kendall points out, the situation of two friends who walked and talked together for “easy hours” and “never disagreed / Which gate to rest on” (Thomas 2008: 122) recalls a much earlier prose piece, written long before he met Frost: “The Stile” (1911). Helen Thomas once informed de la Mare that “ ‘The Stile’ enshrines his feeling for you” (Kendall 2007: 133). Walks, gates, and crossroads are the territory of Thomas’s difficult friendships, which often had an uncanny habit of layering one passionate love over another. Although ostensibly a slight piece of journalism, “The Stile” is an example of this emotional territory. It describes a crossroads where “Three roads meet”; the fourth, “known chiefly to lovers,” is a path reached across the stile in question. At this crossroads—­always for Thomas, as for de la Mare, a place underpinned by thoughts of the suicide—­t he speaker and his friend pause to say goodbye. The language warms as Thomas recalls their conversation: “we ­were in electrical contact

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and each leapt to complete the other’s words, just as if some poet had chosen to use the form of an eclogue” (2011: II. 418)—­t he wishful figure of that “poet” hinting at Thomas’s own poetic desires at this stage, to catch perhaps the spark of inspiration from another. At the stile, however, they fall s­ ilent, and with that silence an edginess creeps in: “We wished to go on speaking but could not” (II. 419), he notes. Something unspoken in the silence then starts to interfere with the narrative: “I bent my head and tapped the toe of my shoe with my stick, wishing to speak, wishing to go” (II. 419), he writes, as if probing a h ­ uman prob­lem of embarrassment, restlessness, contradictory desires. Like lovers who have come too close, the recoil then starts, and the ­silent impasse releases another action. Some “unknown power” [ . . . ​], he writes, made speech impossible and yet was not violent enough to detach me altogether and at once from the man standing ­t here. Again my gaze wandered dallying to the hills[. . . . ​]. But always my roving eyes returned from the sky, the hills, the plain to ­t hose other greenish eyes in the dusk, and then with a growing sense of rest and love to the copse waiting ­t here[. . . . ​] I found myself saying “good-­bye.” I heard the word “good­bye” spoken. It was a signal not of a parting but of a uniting. (2011: II. 419) A ­little l­ater, the speaker makes a dash for it—we are not exactly told but assume he has crossed the stile on which he was leaning— to find himself in a place “where I and poet and lover and flower and cloud and star ­were equals” (II. 420). If, as Helen Thomas declared, this was about Thomas’s “feeling” for de la Mare, it is a feeling loaded with h ­ uman love, on the one hand—­not “a parting but [ . . . ​] a uniting”—­and on the other, with rejection, as the speaker yearns to find an equal place among the poets, the lovers and the flowers, away from his perhaps too compatible, too power­f ul companion. The presence of the other man, with his reciprocating “greenish eyes,” is now an object to be violently rebuffed and escaped, but escaped in such a way that it is also “a uniting.” The undercurrents ­here are emotional and erotic, as well as combatively creative. Meanwhile, it

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is clear that such crossroads are a place from which Thomas must choose a direction and depart, or perhaps risk missing his destination altogether and have a stake driven through the heart. The direction he chooses, one assumes, is over the stile, and then out alone among that “immortal com­pany.” ­W hether his own love is for the other man with “greenish eyes” or for the natu­ral world around him remains a ­matter of “dallying” uncertainty, till he fi­nally breaks out of the stalling cross-­purpose of the place and chooses his path ahead. De la Mare’s poem “Silence,” which was published in 1912, a year ­after “The Stile,” reads like a companion piece: When, all at peace, two friends at ease alone   Talk out their hearts—­yet still,   Between the grace-­notes of    The voice of love    From each to each  ­Trembles a rarer speech, And with its presence e­ very pause doth fill.   (1969: 131–132) De la Mare also recalls “The voice of love / From each to each” of “two friends” who “Talk out their hearts”; he similarly acknowledges the companionableness of the silence, that “rarer speech,” which goes with them and, like Thomas who repeats the word “easy” like a charm: “easily and warmly together” (2011: II. 418), “ease and confidence,” “confidence and ease” (419), “confidence and ease” (420), he too describes “easeful, lovely notes” (131) between “two friends at ease alone.” Both works, however, also register something deeply uneasy, ­whether Thomas’s abrupt departure over the stile or de la Mare’s ominous reference to war—­“the rumour of a moving host” (131)—­for which the poem’s third presence, silence, has no answers. From where does that “rumour” come? Is it a noise, a piece of overheard gossip, or an intimation of the ­future? Both works, though relatively youthful and formally slight, seem loaded with a prescience of danger and war to come. Thomas’s much ­later poem, “The Sun Used to Shine” (1916), echoes de la Mare’s “rumour of a moving host” in recalling how two friends once “turned from

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men or poetry / To rumours of the war remote” (2008: 122). Edna Longley ascribes this poem unequivocally to the years with Frost (2008: 296–299), but as so often with Thomas, the ghost of an earlier walk, an earlier friendship and earlier “rumours,” ring through it. It may be that Thomas’s repetition-­compulsion, to walk and talk with a beloved fellow-­ poet, gathering from another the strength he needed to begin writing poetry, required this very layering of love on love, memory on memory, betrayal on betrayal. In the end, of course, he cut loose from Frost too, at some notional stile or crossroads of difficult decisions, when he opted to go to France rather than to Amer­i­ca with his friend. Long and agonizing in the making, once made, that decision to enlist seemed almost whimsically abrupt and absolute, and not unlike the sudden departure of the speaker in “The Stile.” The crossroads of “The Stile,” then, is a figurative place both poets knew well. It is worth remembering that at this time, u ­ ntil 1961, suicide remained a criminal offence and, although no longer classed as hom­i­cide, the failed suicide might still be liable to prosecution. The old religious punishment of being buried at a crossroads with a stake through the heart could thus still figure for the punishment of a secular crime. In de la Mare’s short story “An Ideal Craftsman,” we are told that every­one believed an old man “had hanged himself ” and therefore that his bones lay “beneath the tramplings of the cross-­ roads” (1996–2001: II. 201). When Thomas writes, in his poem “Aspens,” that “The aspens at the cross-­roads talk together” and make of “the cross-­roads [ . . . ​] a ghostly room” (2008: 97), he is registering, not only the old myth that the aspen refused to bow its head at the Crucifixion (Longley 2008: 251), but also that crossroads contain ghosts of the outlawed dead who might at any time return from their unresolved state. De la Mare made a life’s work of listening in to t­ hese uncanny places, where the ­human spirit refuses its religious allotment of grace. Thomas, who came closer to the act of suicide itself, and who, it might have seemed to his friend, effectively took that route when he fi­nally enlisted in July 1915, perhaps buried the meanings deeper in his writings. A very late story by de la Mare, intended for publication in 1955 but omitted ­after some loss of nerve at proof-­ stage, begins, “This is the last letter my friend wrote before he shot

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himself ” (1996–2001: II. 533). The story is titled “Late,” in memory of the dead, but also in memory of a time long ago—­almost forty years in fact, biographically speaking. “ ‘But memories of the past have a life of their own’ ” (II. 533), the friend writes. That friend is the murderer of a rival lover who is also a kind of double, or secret sharer. In fact, all three men are alike: the rival, the friend, and the still living reader of the letter: “ ‘We ­were friends, almost as intimate in many t­ hings as are you and I’ ” (II. 534), the friend writes to the  reader, adding, “ ‘He too carried a gun. I used to hear him shooting in the woods’ ” (II. 535). The story ends with the friend meeting his one-­t ime spouse, Lucy, before ­going off to kill himself: “We took hands, and kissed one another, at the last stile” (II. 537), de la Mare writes, as if for a moment remembering other stiles from far back in his life, where once easy friends ­were loved and then lost. Not unlike Tennyson’s “The Lover’s Tale,” “Late” has ­little emotional logic, but it is loaded, like much of de la Mare’s work, with a lover-­l ike warmth of friendship between men, with “late” memories of Thomas’s suicidal impulses—­carrying a gun in his pocket into the woods—as well as, perhaps, by memories of that stile where difficult conversations w ­ ere held and life-­changing choices had to be faced. Thomas’s vacillations w ­ ere well known. When walking with him, Robert Frost recalled how often, at a certain point, he “would regret the choice he had made and would sigh over what he might have shown Frost if they had taken a ‘better’ direction” (in 2008: 152). Crossroads, stiles, and partings of the way are all places of difficult decisions for Thomas, where the route through involves ­either a reckless whim or ­else some hurtful, even violent separation. It is as if “The Stile” w ­ ere rehearsing the act which, many years l­ ater, would detach him from all his friends and mentors: “a strong unknown power [ . . . ​] to detach me altogether and at once from the man standing t­ here” (2011b: II. 419). To go it alone was perhaps both a real and imaginative need in this poet who, to the puzzlement of ­t hose friends, fi­nally needed to enlist in order to escape and thus find himself as a poet. In December 1914, at the start of his ­great creative period, Thomas wrote a poem, “The Signpost,” which asks, “I read the sign. Which way ­shall I go?” (2008: 37). The poem never answers, but only ends with a repetition of the question by some

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companion walker who explains that, besides the destination of a “mouthful of earth,” life itself consists of “Wondering where he ­shall journey, O where?” (37). Thomas’s autobiographical prose is full of such indecisions: “Should I go through Swindon, or Andover, or Winchester, or Southampton?” (in 2008: 153), he asks in In Pursuit of Spring. ­W hether halted by friendship, love, envy, or just by the depressive inaction of his own nature, roads for Thomas are a challenge, and not just a challenge to choose between directions, but also a challenge to take some other road not taken. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveller, long I stood [ . . . ​] (Frost 1995: 103) Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” as has long been recognized, is a teasing riposte to Thomas’s dilemmas at crossroads. T ­ hese two pedestrian poets of the countryside constantly pause in their writing to won­der at roads, walls, or stiles, moments when the direction is lost or thwarted, and the point of g ­ oing or stopping seems both too momentous or too insignificant to be grasped. For Frost, h ­ ere, the solution is logically retrospective: whichever road is taken makes “all the difference” (1995: 103), which is all and none. ­Behind this teasing debate, however, ­there might once again be a third presence. As early as 1906, before de la Mare had even met Thomas, he published a short story, “Benighted.” It is about two friends or sweethearts who lose their way in the dark and find themselves in his favorite location: a country churchyard. This does not become a ghost story, as we expect, but only a story about losing one’s way—or, perhaps, finding it. The two speakers spend the night reading the names on the headstones and surmising the fates of the dead while they wait for dawn. “ ‘I could have sworn we ­were on the right road,’ ” one of them apologizes, guiltily. The answer is swift and resonant: “ ‘But of course,’ she said, ‘the road is right. T ­ here is no other way than the way once taken. And especially this’ ” (1996–2001: I. 180). Published in 1906, it is just pos­si­ble that both Frost and Thomas knew this story. At any rate, de la Mare’s “way once taken” seems to play with the same punning senses of direction as Frost’s own “Road Not

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Taken,” in that any choice leads to the same end, while being by the way both momentous and insignificant. Ways and roads involve choices, ­mistakes, signposts, which life or writing w ­ ill eventually sort into the “right” road, “the no other way,” with the same final, unavoidable goal. Certainly, de la Mare is as much obsessed with roads as Thomas and Frost, though often his sense of direction is lost from the start: “ ‘I lost again a way lost early that morning’ ” (1996–2001: I. 157), the narrator explains in the story “The Creatures.” “ ‘Which is the way?’ ” asks the spectral presence in another churchyard story, only to find the question returned to him: “ ‘Which is yours?’ ” (I. 214). “Would you tell me the way to Somewhere?” (1969: 414), pleads the speaker of the poem called “Somewhere.” De la Mare ­here might be recalling Frost’s poem “The Sound of Trees,” with its halting impetus and its Thomas-­ish postponed conclusion: “I ­shall set forth for somewhere, / I ­shall make the reckless choice” (1995: 150). ­There are as many miles to Babylon as ­there are to “Somewhere” or “somewhere”—­a route invariably jinxed by delay, deviation, indecision, or just approaching darkness. Knowing “the way” in de la Mare is as likely to mean being lost as is the state of the suicide in the story “Strangers and Pilgrims,” whose headstone is hard to find in consecrated ground b ­ ecause, punningly, “ ‘he made away with himself’ ” (1996–2001: I. 202). T ­ hese three poets, who ­ were all wayfaring ­companions as well as meta­phorical fellow-­t ravelers in poems, find in roads, paths, and directions the underpinning structures, however wayward, of their variously shared, parallel, yet very dif­fer­ent imaginative journeys. De la Mare did not meet Frost till his trip to Amer­i­ca in 1916. At first, the latter feared he might have been left out of the En­glish poet’s itinerary, confessing in a letter of 6 November 1916: “I’m a ­little hurt” (2014: 504). A week ­later, the hurt turned into a deeper grievance, which helped cast a retrospective purposefulness on his previous non-­meetings. “My not meeting De la Mare in ­England was rather accidentally on purpose,” he wrote to Louis Untermeyer, explaining, “If he is half as bad as I am afraid he is, he might spoil the poems” (1964: 45). The sense of hurt turned resentment is clearly audible h ­ ere, as is the fact that both poets seem to have played a game

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of avoidance, no doubt fueled by the intermediary Thomas, whose sense of grievance about de la Mare was by now well known to Frost. The poems, however, ­were not spoiled, and never would be for Frost. “He’s a personal friend now,” he wrote in 1924, “but I admired him before ever I knew him” (2016: 430). The two poets did meet in 1916, as well as l­ ater, in 1928, when Frost came to E ­ ngland, and then again in 1938. “De la Mare is one of the best of the best. We had a night of poetry at his h ­ ouse” (2016: 676), Frost wrote to a friend a­ fter that first visit. A ­ fter the second, he wrote to de la Mare himself, recalling the thrill “ ‘when your first poem swam into my ken,’ ” and declaring, “ ‘You must know you have been one of my very few con­temporary poets’ ” (in Whistler 1993: 271). For his part, de la Mare reviewed Frost’s North of Boston as early as 1914, recognizing its greatness almost before anyone e­ lse. ­Later, he included three of Frost’s poems in his 1923 anthology, Come Hither, including his favorite, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Eve­ning.” ­A fter Thomas’s death in 1917, Frost and de la Mare drew closer together, perhaps overcoming the suspicion that Thomas, for complicated reasons of his own, had been keen to plant. Their recognition of each other’s gifts, however, long predated both the coldness and then the affection between them. It was “The Listeners” (1912), with its extraordinarily ­free rhythms—­ metrically more avant-­garde than anything of Frost’s as yet—­which above all gave the younger poet both that “thrill” of recognition, and an example of the counterpoint of rhythm against meter which would become the hallmark of his own poetic theories. “Is t­ here anybody t­ here?” said the Traveller,   Knocking on the moonlit door; And his ­horse in the silence champed the grasses   Of the forest’s ferny floor: And a bird flew up out of the turret,   Above the Traveller’s head: And he smote upon the door again a second time;   “Is ­t here anybody t­ here?” he said. (1969: 126) Frost once asked de la Mare “ ‘if he had noticed anything queer’ ” (in Whistler 1993: 270) about this poem’s metrics, but de la Mare claimed

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or feigned ignorance. Derek Attridge has noted its “brilliant exploitation of the dolnik rhythm” (2013: 181), a four-­beat line often carry­ing a s­ ilent fourth beat, and noted that “to scan this poem by means of classical feet [ . . . ​] would be a challenge” (2013: 182). The three-­beat rhythm of the second line, which raps out the Traveller’s call and knock, is quickly dispersed in uncertain accentual stresses in the lines that follow, as the silence spreads. By the time we reach “And he smote upon the door again a second time” (1969: 126), we hear how the knock has lost its conviction, wavering out of true as the line wavers in and out of five or six beats—­much as Yeats can make a line hesitate in its metrical direction to express dream or wandering uncertainty. So the way becomes wayward and the errand of the message lost in audibly erring rhythms. In the end, what greets the Traveller is the sound of his own listening returned, listeningly, from an apparently deserted h ­ ouse: But only a host of phantom listeners   That dwelt in the lone ­house then Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight . . . ​(1969: 126) As Kenneth Gross generalizes, this is “an image of a ghostly listening that dwells within any poem whose door you knock at” (2013: 135). Who are t­ hese “phantom listeners,” and how would they sound if we could hear? A listener is ­silent enough, but a “phantom” listener both renders the listening doubly unreal while giving it ghostly presence and body. This ­house of “phantom listeners,” which “Stood ­listening,” turns the poem into a resonant packed hold of listening—­ indeed, almost a roar. ­These phantoms are summoned by a knock, but their presence is then prolonged in­def­initely as the phantom-­ summoning ear—­t he only faculty which knows how readily reading might slip into hearing ­things—­will never simply resolve the question: “ ‘Is t­here anybody ­there?’ ” The poem’s shut door, both narrative and figurative, ensures that the story—­why the Traveller came, knocked, called, and needed to keep his word—is dispersed in this distraction of listeners, inside and out, whose unsounded sound makes a sense that might have nothing to do with who or what they are. Once again, as in so many of t­ hese texts, lyric is a form of

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attention, rather than just a verse form, and it is one which cuts across narrative by sidelining the intelligence of the eye, which wants to know who? why? for what reason? into the intelligence of the ear, which listens, or rather hears itself listen—­especially to phantoms. Frost prob­ably founded his lifelong fascination with the summoning or imagining ear on this one poem, whose rhythms continued to puzzle him. It may be that his own poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Eve­ning,” with its similarly restless h ­ orse, its listening attention, its ominous dark woods and unspecific “promises to keep,” owes more than a l­ ittle to “The Listeners,” which also ends with the challenge of a mysterious promise kept: “ ‘Tell them I came, and no one answered, / That I kept my word,’ he said” (1969: 126). Auden may have been remembering both poems when, at the end of “Their Lonely Betters,” he concluded, “Words are for t­ hose with promises to keep” (1976: 444). The very condition of poetic language might be a ­matter of kept promises which may never be disclosed. In both de la Mare’s and Frost’s poems, the promise-­burdened traveler has further to go along the road, although the seduction, the danger, the eerie plea­sure of merely stopping to listen, waylays him— in Frost’s poem almost for good: 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. (1995: 207) “Stopping by Woods” poses the question which is never answered: how long might t­ hose “dark and deep” woods detain the poet, who has “promises to keep”? For a moment, or forever? In life, Frost, like Thomas, knew the dark enticement of woods. His recurring wish to run away meant that “often he would plunge into the woods ­behind his farm and walk ­until he was exhausted” (in Cooke 1970: 76). In the poem, the contrary tug of stopping and ­going is intense as the repetition of the last two lines only asks and begs more questions: is the speaker ­going on and on, or only intending to go on, or actually falling asleep, or stubbornly refusing to sleep in order to keep g ­ oing

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and thus not die in the cold? Is he stopping, or just stopping by? Stopping, of course, like listening, is what a poem itself does: it creates a pause while apparently on the move. The intransitive pres­ent participle, “Stopping by,” is an in­def­initely continuous action of pause which juggles the sense of forever, and just for a while. The treadmill of the last two lines then heightens the contradiction. This might be a “Stopping” for good in order to sleep, literally and figuratively, in the subzero cold, or it might be the rote hum of a thought-­stopping line—­a breather from life’s ­going on, for the sake of poetry: “And miles to go [ . . . ​] And miles to go.” Repetition, ­here, is a self-­conscious stalling which finishes the poem by refusing to finish. It is also one of ­t hose examples of how the printed voice, as Eric Griffiths puts it, offers “hints at voicing” (1989: 60). The apparent redundancy of merely saying it again is alleviated by the reader’s ability to hear the dramatized, imaginary call of an e­ ager, sleepy, obsessive, reluctant, dogged, or ironic voice, coming through the words. Quoting t­ hese same lines, Glyn Maxwell asserts, “Recurrence of words ­isn’t repetition. Ever.” (2012: 53). To read, even silently, “And miles to go before I sleep” for a second time is to start to hear reasons, motives, fears, all ­t hose interpretable inflections which might explain why the poet or the speaker wants to say it again. Meanwhile, between the two lines, time passes, and the reader becomes a listener to the “phantom listeners” that hide in all poetic language, when the drive t­ owards mere disclosure finds a lyrical “Stopping.” Frost’s fascination with “The Listeners” also lies ­behind many of his comments about rhythm and meter. “Poetry plays the rhythms of dramatic speech on the grid of meter” (1995: 809), he writes in 1951, and in 1958 summarizes, “Footbeats for the metre and heartbeats for the rhythm” (1995: 847). But de la Mare was exploring ­these same effects of difference and syncopation even earlier in the ­century. In an unpublished lecture called “Craftsmanship in Poetry,” the ­papers for which w ­ ere already old in 1932 (Whistler 2003: 357), he brilliantly compares the poet to a boxer: “his foot-­play a kind of metre, the ever-­varying skilful motion of gloves and head and body their rhythmical variation” (“Craftsmanship in Poetry,” 16). Both “foot-­play” for the meter and glove-­play for the rhythm are needed

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in poetry. The boxer’s subtle timing overlays one tempo on the other, to catch out an opponent, just as the brisk trimeter of “Knocking on the moonlit door,” when it comes a second time, flummoxes the reader with its soft glove of rhythm: “And he smote upon the door again a second time” (1969: 126). Rhythm, the essay goes on, is “like a bird in the wind [that] beats against, gives way to, exults in the restrictions of metre” (18). Many of the comments on rhythm in de la Mare’s fascinating Warton Lecture “Poetry in Prose” (1935), then sound as if they developed from ­t hose discussions of metrics with Frost. “The modulations of verse are due to the attraction of prose rhythms” (1940: 107), he insists, pointing to the very ­thing he had recommended to Thomas years before, when encouraging him to turn his prose into poetry. But above all, attention to rhythm is a ­matter of listening—­ listening which might then split the understanding in two. “In all writing [ . . . ​],” de la Mare claims in the same lecture, “if we both repeat and listen to the words of which it is composed, two voices are audible and two meanings are inherent—­ t hat of the verbal sounds and that of the verbal symbols” (1940: 90). This secondary counterpoint of sound and symbol is then related to that of rhythm and meter; both involve some hard listening, and both ­discover a contrariness, or crossroads, at the heart of poetry. Moreover, the separation of “verbal sounds” from “verbal symbols” ­recalls very closely Frost’s theory of “the sound of sense”—­a theory expounded in a letter as early as July 1913. “The best place to get the abstract sound of sense,” he writes, “is from voices b ­ ehind a door that cuts off the words” (1995: 664). This, which is “the first qualification of a writer, be it of prose or verse” (665), comes from hearing the intonations of language when the a­ ctual meaning is shut out. The “door that cuts off the words” releases such voiced soundings, which might then be heard in counterpoint to their sense. However, as he concludes, the poet cannot stop at the “sound of sense,” the murmur or hum heightened by the door, but must “get cadences by skillfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of metre” (665). T ­ here is a passage in de la Mare’s unpublished essay “Craftsmanship in Poetry,” where he asks, “Is t­ here such a ­t hing as mere sound-­sense—­ sounse, as we may call it?” (25). The answer is yes: “inflexion, into-

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nation, the tune in which we say what we say. Change that tune, you may completely change the meaning” (30). Frost’s “sound of sense” is clearly related, and possibly indebted, to de la Mare’s “sound-­sense” or “sounse,” a coinage that perfectly encapsulates their shared understanding of poetic language as a haunting fret of sound against sense. It is the metrics of “The Listeners,” with its uncertain listening rhythms, its “sound-­sense” of something detectably ­t here, literally “­behind a door,” which makes it so unforgettably haunting a work. The ways in which de la Mare shapes that silence into a speaking sound that the knocked-on door both resists and releases is extraordinarily like a pre-­r un of Frost’s listening for “voices ­behind a door.” ­W hether “sounse” or “the sound of sense,” the poet’s ear pays attention to something ulterior, where the cadences of words make their own shape in the mind’s ear. To read de la Mare, Frost, and Thomas together in this way is to become aware of innumerable echoing calls between them, ­whether originating in real life or magicked into life from each other’s ­w ritings. Between de la Mare and Frost it is also pos­si­ble to find a l­ ifelong conversation about rhythm and sounds in poetry—​ ­a conversation rooted in their shared admiration for each other’s verse, which both preceded and succeeded the difficult intermediary ­presence of Thomas. If t­ hese sharings ­were complicated by ­actual loves and grievances, envy and admiration, betrayals and needs in each of them, they also remain signs of recognition between poets who continued to find, in ­t hese reciprocating echoes or undersongs of poetry, an inspiration and an incentive for their own writings. a a a

SINGING BIRDS

In 1913 de la Mare published his fourth volume of poems, Peacock Pie, which contains an occasional verse, a l­ittle rhyming call, to his old friend, Thomas: Longlegs—he yelled “Coo-­ee!”   And all across the combe Shrill and shrill it rang [ . . . ​]

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And t­ here was Longlegs straddling,   And hearkening was he, To distant Echo thrilling back   A thin “Coo-­ee!” (1969: 179) Seamus Heaney’s “Edward Thomas on the Lagans Road” recalls this “long-­legged self ” (2006: 35) in a poem full of displaced war guilt and rural longings. “He’s not in view but I can hear a step” (35), it begins, as Thomas’s presence assumes the loping foot-­beat of walks and poems together. Meanwhile, de la Mare’s “Longlegs” recalls an idyllic, prewar friendship, its “Coo-ee” thrilling “across the combe” in a reciprocal, echoing conversation. “Longlegs” also contains a ­little jokey self-­reference in the figure of “old Wat,” an archaic term for a hare based on its dialect name: Walter. In “Venus and Adonis,” Shakespeare writes, “poor Wat, far off upon a hill, / Stands on his hinder legs with listening ear” (1943: 1081). If Thomas is the energetic long-­legged fly or cranefly, urgently walking onwards to find his way out of an impasse, de la Mare is the listening hare, still, hidden, and attentive. They communicate across a space which, ­here at least, seems unthreatened by personal resentments or encroaching war. That innocent-­sounding “Coo-ee,” however, carries a significance beyond its boyish moment in the poem, as subsequent correspondence between the two poets suggests. In a prescient gesture of a three-­way friendship, de la Mare’s Peacock Pie was one of two books given by Thomas to his close friend, Eleanor Farjeon, with the recommendation that she be “worthy” of them; the other was Robert Frost’s North of Boston (Farjeon 1958, 1997: 36), published a year l­ ater. To de la Mare himself, Thomas wrote of his volume in June 1913, “I love it & I think not the less ­because ‘Magic hath stolen away’ all of me that could feel such ­t hings without your help” (in Whistler 1993: 220). This is generous, but not without a hint of pique. In fact, the quotation comes from de la Mare’s poem “The Truants,” so that the compliment, as so often with Thomas, also points a fin­ger of blame. Whose “ ‘Magic’ ” had “ ‘stolen away’ ” Thomas’s own capacities to feel without the help of his friend? He then confesses that his “perfect plea­sure” is “a ­little keener for the faintest touch of envy,” and

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signs off with a reciprocally rhyming echo: “Yours ever ET. Coo-ee” (1993: 220). In fact, “Coo-ee” was Thomas’s regular greeting to friends, especially when emerging from one of ­those dark walks in the woods. His wife Helen recalls how she would listen out for it,  anxiously, as a sign of his return (H. Thomas 1931, 1988: 145). “Coo-ee” was his signature tune, a call of affection, reciprocity, and ­human cheer a­ fter the glooms that often took him, companionless, away. De la Mare’s poem is also aware, in that one call, of the complexities of a love riddled with miseries and silences. Meanwhile, he saved Thomas’s appreciative letter about Peacock Pie and wrote on the envelope: “ ‘Very special precious’ ” (in Whistler 1993: 220). However, when in December 1914 Thomas gives what seems his own poetic answer to de la Mare’s “Longlegs” and writes of the same place in his poem “The Combe,” the reciprocal “Coo-ee” no longer sounds. “The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark. / Its mouth is stopped” (2008: 48), he writes. This silence, as of a gagged mouth, hints at autobiographical origins in Thomas’s own inner block. The combe, he continues, as if now in a clear riposte to de la Mare’s poem, is where “all the singing birds [ . . . ​] / Are quite shut out” (2008: 48), and the ancient badger has been hounded to death. T ­ hose “singing birds”—­a phrase from Boswell’s Life of Johnson which Christina ­Rossetti makes peculiarly her own—no longer visit it. Instead, Thomas’s dead badger puts a stop to the rural idyll, turning “The Combe” into a killing field where no birds sing, except, he then reconsiders, “the missel-­thrush that loves juniper” (48). Certainly, something brutal happens in Thomas’s poem, ­whether the start of the war, another bout of depression, or the failure of an old friendship which blocks the echoes that once traveled between friends. By December  1914, the reciprocal ease and correspondence of “Coo-ee” is dead. At last we hear his coo-ee from the wood, and soon he comes walking with his long swinging stride [ . . . ​] Coo-ee we both call [ . . . ​] “Quickly, quickly!” he says. “I’ve heard the first nightingale over t­ here in the hazel copse. I’ve never known one so early. You must come and hear him. He’s not in full song, but he’s

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got his best note of all.” (H. Thomas with Thomas 1931, 1988: 148–149) This episode was recalled by Helen Thomas in her unnervingly frank memoir, World Without End (1931). Ten years before, de la Mare had published his poem “Sotto Voce,” dedicated to Thomas, in which he also remembers how the younger poet would call for him to stop and listen to the sound of a nightingale “not in full song”: “It was a nightingale,” he said, “That sotto voce cons the song ­He’ll sing when dark is spread [ . . . ​] (1969: 243) This singing “sotto voce” at dusk in early summer is merely a rehearsal for the full song which w ­ ill come ­later. Thomas’s self-­identification with a bird-­song still in practice is recognized by de la Mare, perhaps belatedly, five years ­after Thomas’s death. “Sotto Voce” is a memory of shared audition, acknowledging Thomas’s pre­ce­dence in hearing birds, but also admitting the belatedness of the other poet’s emerging gift and his own recognition of it. “­He’ll sing when dark is spread” tells that the full strength of that singing ­w ill be ­after dark—­a darkness that indeed descended with the war. Two years ­later, in 1923, Frost published a poem which may also be a tribute to Thomas’s preternaturally keen ear for birds, as well as to his singing strength as a poet. “The Valley’s Singing Day” recalls a friend who, rising early, preempts the dawn chorus and sets it singing to his own calls. Frost concludes, “I should be willing to say and help you say / That once you had opened the valley’s singing day” (1995: 218). The pres­ent participle, as so often in Frost’s work, carries the title onwards beyond its context of a par­t ic­u ­lar day. For “The Valley’s Singing Day” is a dawn or daytime just minutely inflected, like Christina Rossetti’s “singing bird,” into a noun phrase which is not just the new day’s singing of birds but perhaps a new wave of singing, opening into the f­ uture. Although the motif of singing birds at this time might seem weary ­after a ­century and more of poetic use, as Daniel Karlin has suggested (2013: 4), de la Mare, Thomas, and Frost all give it an odd

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new twist. Thomas in par­t ic­u­lar is fascinated by birds which do not fit the usual classifications, ­whether poetic or naturalistic. For example, his fondness for the phrase “all the birds,” as in the last lines of “Adlestrop”—­ “all the birds / Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire” (2008: 51), or “All the thrushes of E ­ ngland” in In Pursuit of Spring (2008: 148)—­ suggests a sentimental chorus of songsters hardly warranted by the natu­ral context. Several years ­after Thomas’s death, de la Mare relives the experience of hearing birds in another poet’s com­pany, in language strangely resonant of his one-­ time friend. Visiting Thomas Hardy for the first time in June 1921, he recalls how, on a walk with the poet, “I became aware of a captivating low trilling and carolling of birds.” To Hardy’s puzzled response that he can “ ‘hear no birds,’ ” the younger poet asks, “­Were the birds that I had heard then nature’s or had Hardy magicked them into my mind” (“Thomas Hardy,” 4). The idea that birdsong might be “magicked” from one poet’s mind to another’s of course goes back to t­hose early days with Thomas and to some electric telepathic contact between poets walking and thinking along the same lines. It is a word which also distantly echoes that “very precious” letter from Thomas, lamenting that “ ‘Magic hath stolen away’ ” (Whistler 2003: 220) his own poetic gifts. The fact that, many years ­later, de la Mare attributes such magic to Hardy is a reminder that this intercommunication of poets, for good or ill, involved layerings of one on the other for all of them. W ­ hether natu­ral fact or magicked invention, bird-­song figures for both de la Mare and Thomas (though not for Hardy, who stuck to the facts ­here) as a companionable inspiration, a loaded mix of real-­life hearing and poetic recalls. The extent to which Thomas’s presence weighs heavi­ly on de la Mare, even on this visit to Hardy, is then suggested by the poem he composed in memory of the occasion. Titled “Thomas Hardy,” it contains the admittedly not very good line: “All Dorsetshire’s larks for connivance of sweetness seemed trysting to greet / Him” (1969: 388). ­W hether poetic theft or fond allusion, this old refrain of “all the birds” suggests that he is still answering the older friend who would call “coo-ee” as a summons to hear nightingales, or sometimes full choruses of singing birds together. Certainly, t­ here is some queer

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magic about birds which both de la Mare and Thomas explore, as if still pushing that Romantic image beyond the limits of ornithological interest. No one saw him: I alone could hear him Though many listened. Was it but four years Ago? or five? He never came again. Oftenest when I heard him I was alone, Nor could I ever make another hear. La-­la-­la! he called, seeming far-­off— As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world, As if the bird or I w ­ ere in a dream. (2008: 55) In Thomas’s “The Unknown Bird” (1915), the shared enterprise of listening has gone. This is a poem from beyond the stile, a­ fter the war, cut loose from companionable work: “Nor could I ever make another hear.” What kind of bird is it that sings so unlikely a song, and then, notionally, sounds like a cock crowing? Thomas has a way of writing in the register of the painstaking naturalist while sneaking in some logical absurdity which almost makes fools of us. Thomas’s “La-­la-­la!” h ­ ere, preceding Eliot’s in The Waste Land by several years, is so comically outré that it disturbs the register of the ­whole poem. What bird could emit such an unlikely sound? This is so “far-­off ” and beyond the pale of hearing that it might indeed be a cock that “crowed past the edge of the world,” to scare wandering shades back to their graves, or perhaps to broadcast the betrayal of a friend. Nightingales and missel thrushes might be heard with ­others, their “magic” shared and written into poems, but this “Unknown Bird” eludes classification outside of the dreamer’s fantasy. Thomas was already searching for this bird some two years ­before, at a time when he was still quite close to de la Mare. For in 1913, he wrote a kind of novel, or as he put it, a “very loose fiction” (2011a: I. 3), called The Happy-­Go-­Lucky Morgans. This is an odd work, and in a letter to de la Mare at the time of its publication, writing in a kind of orthographic ­free verse which, as Judy Kendall puts it, echoes “the spaced punctuation of the original,” Thomas worried about its effect:

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  Of course I should like to know just what you think  useless   incomplete ( excessively )  obscure   inconsistent (in Kendall 2007: xxiii) Unfortunately, like most of de la Mare’s return correspondence, the reply does not survive. In the story, a certain unknown bird sings alone in a cypress tree: “Only one bird sang in it, and that was a small, sad bird which I do not know the name of. [ . . . ​] It never sang for long, but frequently, and always suddenly. It was black against the sky, and I saw it nowhere ­else” (Thomas 2011a: I. 89–90). This might be a bird of ill-­omen, like Shakespeare’s in Macbeth—at least so the speaker’s f­ ather thinks, for “The day a­ fter my s­ ister died he threw a stone at it [ . . . ​] and killed it.” However, that surmise proves wrong, for “a week l­ater came another” (I. 90). The presence of this meaninglessly singing bird, which has no name and seems indestructible, brings to this “useless / incomplete,” “obscure / inconsistent” story a kind of wishfully purposeful inconsequence that suggests a poem in the making. The “small, sad bird” might be the nearest Thomas comes to hearing the poetry he ­w ill write, inspired by a singing bird that is, unlike its Romantic pre­de­ces­sors, nameless, dark, unclassifiable, and entirely his own. Such poetry draws on the dream slippages of incompletion, inconsistency, and obscurity, characteristics which ­w ill lift it out of the clamp of journalistic prose and natu­ral description, and turn it into poetry proper. It might seem as if de la Mare, in his ­later essay and poem on “Thomas Hardy,” was merely taking a cue (or coo-ee) from Thomas, by magicking imaginary birds from the scene. But of course, any ­simple narrative of debt and influence between ­these poets once again proves more complicated. For five years before Thomas’s The Happy-­ Go-­Lucky Morgans, de la Mare published a short story of his own called “The Bird of Travel” (1908). It is a story within a story, telling of a small boy who visits a ­house in the woods, reputed to belong to some scion of his own ­family, in the hope that he might “see or hear the strange Bird” (1996–2001: I. 80) supposed to haunt its precincts.

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Like Thomas’s “small, sad bird” or “Unknown Bird,” this too is not to be found in the twitchers’ cata­logue. The situation is all classic de la Mare: a deserted ­house in the woods, full of a prescient, listening silence; indeed, the story might be his own prose rehearsal for “The Listeners.” The boy approaches the door of the h ­ ouse, and instantly the reader’s attention is arrested: “ ‘I tapped and listened; tapped and listened again; and, as if it ­were Echo herself, some hidden thrush’s rapping of a snail’s shell against its sacrificial stone was my only answer” (1996–2001: I. 81). To tap or knock in de la Mare is always to want something more than what literally answers: “some hidden thrush’s rapping.” Between the boy’s tap and the thrush’s rap, and the hinted rhyme that links them across the pause of the semicolon, the reader’s ear goes on listening to the silence that might shape another sound altogether. De la Mare is already, then, imagining the oddness of a “singing bird” that is no thrush and sounds like nothing you ever heard. When the boy, returning much ­later to the empty ­house, fi­nally hears the ­actual “Bird of Travel,” the effect is startling: And then, while I was slowly returning t­owards it once more, ­u nder the still, reddish, eve­n ing sky, suddenly I heard thrice ­repeated an extraordinary call. It pierced my mind like an arrow. It almost absurdly startled me—­like the shrilling of a decoy, as if my own name had been called in a strange or forgotten tongue. [ . . . ​] Imagine such a voice twenty times more vigorous suddenly breaking in upon that eve­ning silence—­falling on from note to note as if some unearthly traveller ­were summoning from afar his strayed dog on the hillside! (1996–2001: I. 82) This is only one of de la Mare’s many peculiar birds, which may be heard but not seen, or are seen but unreal, or real, yet feared and killed. H ­ ere the bird of travel has “an extraordinary call,” which might be the sound of the boy’s own name “called in a strange or forgotten tongue.” “Imagine such a voice,” he writes, as if only the “imagining ear” might hear, like Thomas’s cock crowing “past the edge of the world,” the summons of an “unearthly traveller.” It is almost the mystery of sound itself that travels ­here, “falling on from

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note to note,” as if from beyond the sound barrier of the earth’s atmosphere. From that otherwhere, it pres­ents the riddling contradiction of the boy’s “own name” in a “forgotten tongue,” as if de la Mare ­were perhaps recalling his original Huguenot surname, “Delamare,” in this contradiction of what is both “forgotten” yet instantly recognized as his “own.” Such a bird, neither seen nor named at this point, might be the sound of foreign origins and an unknown destination which, by some weird re-routing of the airwaves, then gives back a knowledge of what we do not know, a “name” for what we have “forgotten,” a self that is not quite oneself. Is this what poetry can do? De la Mare writes that the bird’s call “almost absurdly startled me,” a phrase which in its hedging—­“almost absurdly”—­catches what is not quite startling but is somehow deeply, viscerally known, like any call to a “strayed dog” from its owner. Poetry’s listening ­attention to what lies beyond hearing turns an ear to the rememberingly unremembered, the imaginably heard, the unknowingly known. The Traveller who knocks in “The Listeners,” like this other “unearthly traveller” who calls for his dog, are figures for a poetry which travels, in sounds, across the vari­ous barriers of narrative sense and plot, to reach into the listener’s ears with a strangeness that is only “almost absurdly” startling. Such unknown birds are the dark muses of de la Mare’s, and Thomas’s, post-­Romantic imaginations. In that late long poem by de la Mare which Eliot and Auden both admired, “The Traveller” (1946), t­ here are two lines that, thirty years a­ fter Thomas’s death, still resonate with memories of their old shared destinations and queer singing birds. In “Aspens,” Thomas had written how the whispering trees, “In tempest or the night of nightingales / [ . . . ​] turn the cross-­roads to a ghostly room” (2008: 97). At the end of “The Traveller,” de la Mare’s ellipses continue an old journey, as if refusing to s­ ettle the sense of their last word: “For ­t hose who weary, and a respite crave: / Inn at the cross roads, and the ­traveller’s rest . . .” (1946: 35). In t­ hose onward prints, this traveler’s footprints seem to go on walking, across the old known “cross roads,” ever onwards along the way once taken. Moreover, Thomas’s worry that in The Happy-­Go-­Lucky Morgans he had written something “useless / incomplete (excessively) / obscure / inconsistent” also finds its pre-­echoes in de la Mare’s “Bird of Travel.” Told as a tale within a tale to a bemused audience who can

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make no sense of it, this story raises the very question of narrative consequence. “ ‘And the Bird?’ ” one of the audience cries out at the end, demanding an explanation. But the old man who tells the story “appeared not to have noticed the question.” The disgruntled listeners then dub the w ­ hole baffling tale “a poet’s story in sober earnest: incoherent, obscure, unreal, unlifelike, without an ending” (1996–2001: I. 87). ­W hether or not Thomas had read and recalled this list of attributes, the similarities are striking. Certainly, he and de la Mare must have discussed how the short story diverged from or approximated to poetry. For many years, both ­were pen-­pushing hack-­writers, forced to earn a living through reviews, critical journalism, and stories for magazines. At the same time both w ­ ere poets at heart, struggling with how fictional or journalistic prose might, on the one hand, have to be cut to the short story’s requirements of coherence, clarity, lifelikeness, conclusiveness, or might, on the other hand, trial a new kind of story, “incoherent, obscure, unreal, unlifelike,” and therefore become “a poet’s story.” That such a tale might be “without an ending,” its unearthly bird still unexplained, signals the poet at work, listening for something which w ­ ill not be resolved by decoding, but goes on calling for attention, resisting translation into a known tongue. In the end, the listeners within de la Mare’s story, like the readers outside it, are left with nothing but their questions: “ ‘And the Bird?’ ” they ask. Such questions are always, of course, more carry­ingly or travelingly satisfying than any answers they might find. And what travels best is sound, not only to the edge of the ­human ear’s small range, but as if effortlessly beyond it, from where the question itself only bounces back in a self-­defeating echo: “ ‘And the Bird?’ ” Or e­ lse, “ ‘Is ­t here anybody ­t here?’  ” In a phrase repeated and elaborated by many, including Giorgio Agamben, Paul Valéry once described poetry as “cette hésitation prolongée entre le son et le sens” (1960: 637) [this prolonged hesitation between the sound and the sense]—­a hesitation nearly erased in the near-­identity of the two sounds in French: “le son et le sens.” That they should sound so close is part of the point, as ear and eye quarrel over their likeness and difference. De la Mare himself makes a similar point when he writes in his 1935 lecture “Poetry in Prose,” “In

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all writing [ . . . ​] if we both repeat and listen to the words of which it is composed, two voices are audible and two meanings are inherent—­t hat of the verbal sounds and that of the verbal symbols” (1940: 90). To “repeat and listen to the words” is to hear, not only “two voices” but also “two meanings”—­a stereophonic difference which estranges words from their intelligible reference and gives them a sonic-­epistemic life in the listener’s ear. This is not only ­advice to the reader, but also to the writer. For as he goes on to explain, “In the act of composition the inward ear listens intently” (1940: 93). The long history of that “inward ear,” which goes back to Words­worth and is revived in Tennyson, is still ­going strong in de la Mare, as he forges from it a poetics of doubled attention to “two voices”: to sense and sound, or “sounse” together. In Come Hither, he repeats the point that “all poetry [ . . . ​] should be heard, with the inward ear at least, if not with the outer” (1923, 1973: I. 318). Less concerned with the “outer” ear of a poetry performed aloud, all of de la Mare’s writing is in some ways a commentary on how the “inward ear” might “repeat and listen,” ­whether in writing or reading poetry. The strange bird which runs through his own and Thomas’s work is a figure for that split attention, that hesitation or alteration which sets poetry listen-­speaking in the inner ear, as if to birds, or words, never heard before. And indeed, as if a memory of Thomas w ­ ere once again lurking below the surface of his thoughts at this point, de la Mare’s lecture then devotes several pages to the timing of the sounds “la la lá”—­a timing, he explains, “more minute than semitones” and “far less precisely mea­sur­able than crochets and quavers” (1940: 111). The rhythmic variations and voicings of the reading voice make of “la la lá,” like Frost’s variable “oh,” an expressive medium of infinite complexity. That de la Mare’s example should also be the call of Thomas’s “Unknown Bird,” recalled some twenty years a­ fter his death, also suggests how powerfully that companionable “Coo-ee” from the past went on ringing in this poet’s composing ears. What is heard in ­t hese unknown birds, then, is something humanly indecipherable but live and compelling, drawing the listener to a language that is recognized yet unremembered, known and unknown. T ­ hese queer singing birds might be figures for sound which does not translate into meaningful narratives, refuses to fit the

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classifications of nature, but haunts and calls through a complex web of echoes and allusions among poets, living and dead. De la Mare, Thomas, and Frost all listen for birds, as if to hear, through a companionable-­envious community of ears, the darkly estrang­ ­ing sounds that might become the sound of a new composition. Far from being an incidental outsider, de la Mare is central to this threesome, often originating ideas and figures a­ dopted by the o ­ thers, and admired by them for the intransitively listening attention his poetry both expresses and arouses. He is indeed the poet who “hears faint stirrings and far murmurs and footfalls” (1987–1990: II. 253), as Woolf puts it—­sounds which are the classic ingredients of ghost stories, but which he exploits for the way they tune up the volume of the reader’s listening—­perhaps to nothing t­ here, perhaps to no story and no answer to our questions, but in order that listening itself might speak. If “The Listeners” became a key text for many of de la Mare’s contemporaries, and indeed for readers to this very day, this is b ­ ecause it asks that crucial question about poetry in general: who listens, and what does it mean to listen to the silence of the poem on the page, which is a silence always still asking to be voiced, or to have its vari­ous voicings released from the quiet? Hearing ­t hings in that ­house of poetry may lead to ghosts and phantoms, or to the memorable rhythm of urgent knocks, or perhaps just to t­ hose open, unanswered questions which ­were our own in the first place, but are returned to us, magnified, by the hospitable acoustic openness of the poem.

6 A Book, a Face, a Phantom: Walter de La Mare’s “The Green Room” I ask’d thee oft, what Poets thou hast read, And lik’st the best? Still thou reply’st, The dead. I ­shall, ere long, with green turfs cover’d be; Then sure thou’t like, or thou wilt envie me. robert herrick   the damn’d would make no noise, But listen to thee (walking in thy chamber) Melting melodious words, to lutes of amber. robert herrick I am reading a story at home, alone. It’s late, and dark outside. The hearth is gray with last week’s ash, but the night is warm, and the open win­dow shows a sky of stars. Looking up and about, I am struck by ­t hese neutral durable t­ hings, indifferent companions, living with us in their obdurate silence: a drained tea cup, some books face-­down on the floor, that dancer on the hearth whose outspread arms might welcome nothing but dust and cobwebs, poised to dance forever out of my life. How still they are, ­these ­things acquired, inherited, given, sadly filling the spaces we leave . . . I am reading a story called “The Green Room,” but my ears are elsewhere, hearing the night outside the win­dow, as if you could hear the bulky upright shapes of trees, the lit neon of a lamppost in the street, even the flickering unimaginable time travel of the vis­i­ble stars. My tiny relative eyes and ears are lost in ­t hose spaces, lost in the vast arch of a sky that turns, insensibly, with this turning planet. Sound and time are irrelevant ­t here, where a silence more absolute

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than absence reigns, and where any one star might suddenly seem to gleam brightly, though dead for centuries. My minuscule time-­ keeping keeps its routine: the tick of a clock, the beat of a heart—­ irrelevant against ­t hose incalculable lightyears in the bent expanding circles of space. Why, then, in all this round of sky, can I not draw you back from ­there—­just for an eve­ning, invite you in for a chat, a catch-up? Maybe ­you’re not yet far on that high road, where dead stars blink at me, millennially old, on the other side of air. See, the win­dow is wide open to­n ight. You might drop by any time you please, tap at the win­dow, knock at the door. It’s thirty years, but I keep open h ­ ouse to the thought of a visit, hearing how the quiet stands to attention, as I sit half-­dreaming, trying to read. For grief is the strangest visitor too, capricious and inconsiderate, suddenly crossing when we least ­expect it—­crossing like gold, or a suddenly remembered line of poetry, the palm of the ordinary. You and grief might even coincide—­and listen! we’d make a party of it, carouse till the first ghost-­glimmers of dawn. Reading might let you in, see ­here, between the lines, out of the corner of an eye, in a pause for thought . . . How utterly quiet and still it is. It’s your kind of time—­t he kind I imagine y­ ou’re used to out t­ here? T ­ hings you remember ­won’t show their surprise if you just walk in, calm as anything, all unchanged in an old tweed jacket—­and I, I could read and not turn to stare, not peep over my shoulder to check you out. I’d pretend not to hear if, somewhere among t­ hese obdurate ­t hings, you took your place, and the heard shape of you suddenly made the faintest stirring of air. . . . a a a

“Would you tell me the way to Somewhere?” (1969: 414), Walter de la Mare asks in one of his poems. As an art of sound in time, lit­er­a­ ture is always a journey somewhere, a reading in time from h ­ ere to ­t here, though the destination may be, as it is in this poem, wished but unspecific: just “Somewhere, Somewhere, Somewhere, SOMEWHERE—” (415), the repeat, with its visual calls on voicing, catching the endgame of a “where” that is never more than somewhere or other. Getting “Somewhere” o ­ ught to be the answer to a puzzle, the ­solution

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to a prob­lem, the finish of a narrative or a life, or ­else, as in many of this poet’s stories, always just part of its own question: “Would you tell me the way . . . ?” Knowing where we are or where we are ­going, as readers, is often a puzzling business—­a m ­ atter of being stranded among words, in that strange medium between their apparent visibility and their multiple phantom voicings, between eye and ear. Comprehension, that elusive object when it comes to lit­er­a­ture, involves moving between the two. So the story that seems, sometimes frustratingly, “incoherent, obscure, unreal, unlifelike, without an ending” (1996–2001: I. 87), as de la Mare puts it in “The Bird of Travel,” is the one that, like poetry, seeks to reor­ga­ nize the relationship between reading in order to get somewhere—­ some end, with its clarity and resolution—or reading only to ask, and then ask again, for “the way to Somewhere?” In his recent book The Work of Lit­er­a­ture, Derek Attridge enters a current debate about lit­er­a­ture’s knowing when he proposes that “Works of art ­don’t ‘know’ or ‘think’, then, though they can involve the viewer, reader, or auditor in a per­for­mance of knowing or thinking,” which is also “not simply a ­matter of knowledge acquired” (2015: 255). And yet, in asking how this might apply to the non-verbal arts of m ­ usic or painting, he proposes that “to make such claims, one would have to show that we can think with sounds and with visual images,” which is less likely, u ­ nless the m ­ usic is narrative or the painting sequential or filmic, for “the moving images of film are a much more likely place to find the staging of thought pro­cesses” (250). But to make “knowing or thinking” necessarily sequential and narrative in this way might perhaps be to miss how the artwork constantly challenges the progressivist, consequential sense of knowing and thinking, in order to probe what we do not know we know, or perhaps, harder still, the knowledge so ordinary that it is already known. It may be that such knowledge is not exactly a route in time, assuming an accumulation of wisdom on the way and a destination that fulfills it, but belongs in another tense altogether, like stopping or listening. It is perhaps no accident that many of ­these writers keep returning to the pres­ent participle’s peculiar grammatical time, of now-­a nd-­t hen, current-­a nd-­becoming—­a time which invites a “knowing and thinking,” which does not finish

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in the known or the thought. That “we can think with sounds and with visual images,” as in Barenboim’s “wisdom that becomes audible to the thinking ear” (2008: 3) or Lucien Freud’s “Reflection Listening” (2012: 99), not only becomes pos­si­ble therefore, but necessary. For shifting the very grammar of thought is something the art work is good at, even if such shifts must rebuff, to some extent, the critic’s process-­bound explanations of that thought. And so to a story, or rather two stories, both of which toy with a book, a face, and a phantom. Both are technically ghost stories, about the visual memorability of a face returned from the past, but both are in fact about the act of reading, and the way that reading might become a call on the remembering-­imagining ear. In 2009, Alice Munro published a story specifically titled “Face.” ­Towards the end of it, the protagonist finds himself spending a night in hospital, ­recovering from a wasp sting to his eyelid. Half-­sleeping, half-­waking, his eye ban­daged so that, he explains, “my hearing grew more acute,” he hears a ­woman approach who introduces herself as his “reader” (2009, 2010: 159). In time this ­woman comes to seem his old childhood companion, Nancy, who once cut her cheek with a razor blade in sympathetic imitation of his own birthmark. At one point, as if in confirmation of this memory, the w ­ oman seems to lay her cheek on his. But she also reads poetry to him, playing a game in which he completes her unfinished poetic quotations. He is good at this game, having been a reader and radio presenter of poetry, and he remembers all the follow-up lines, u ­ ntil she comes to one he does not ­recognize. “ ‘None w ­ ill long mourn for you, / Pray for you, miss you / Your place vacant—’ ” (161), she recites, and waits for the concluding line. He is puzzled, and she becomes increasingly irritated. When she leaves, he seems to wake, wondering if he had fallen asleep and if so, why ­after so many years he should have dreamed of Nancy. Months ­later, leafing through some old books in his childhood home, he finds the same poem, written in an unknown hand on a loose scrap of paper, and realizes, “I must have buried the words in a deep cubbyhole of my mind. And why? Just so that I could be teased by them, or teased by a determined girl-­child phantom, in a dream?” (161). So the ­woman becomes a “child,” the “Face” a “phantom,” and the encounter a “dream,” while the story turns on the strangeness of re-

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membering and forgetting, knowing and not knowing, a poem. The narrative connections remain unexplained: was the protagonist awake or asleep? Whose is the “Face?” Was she a real hospital visitor or a figure in a dream? And if a dream, is she a w ­ oman or a “girl-­child phantom”? Moreover, who wrote the lines of poetry, and how could the narrator both know and not know them: know to dream them, but not know how to recognize or finish them? Meanwhile the dream, the memory, and the lines of poetry float ­f ree of each other, teasing with their own phantom-­like mix of purpose and inconsequentiality. What the speaker does discover, however, is that the ­author of the poem is Walter de la Mare. The story, like much of de la Mare’s own writing, is about a sound so memorable it survives the logic of dreamtime and real time. Like his stories too, it explores the ghostly as a banal but fi­nally inexplicable puzzle. The puzzle is not only on the level of the narrative, which may involve a real dream, a delayed wish fulfillment, or an ­actual return of the ­woman from the past, but is also a trick of reading ­because somehow, even if not heard before, the lines seem familiar and the missing line heard. For of course lines of poetry haunt like phantoms, letting us know what we did not know, hear what is inaudible, or dream what we might have forgotten. So we detect how the last line might go, shaping rhythmically in the blank of that dash: “ ‘Your place vacant—’ ” (161), its phantom sound still knocking at the door of memory. All the possibilities of the narrative—­t hat the ­children might have been related, that they might have loved each other if not separated early, that the adult Nancy might indeed have come back while the man half-­slept—­are contained in a poem about no longer being t­ here—­a poem recited, significantly, just a­ fter the ­woman lays “the side of her face” (160) on the speaker’s own birth-­marked cheek. The “Face,” then, as well as the face-­to-­face closeness of this encounter, slips into the wish fulfillment of memory ­beside the colder, faceless memorial of de la Mare’s line: “Your place vacant—” But all memories in this story are unreliable, and the words of the poem change accordingly. For instance, the anonymous handwritten lines found by the protagonist are dif­fer­ent from the lines heard in the dream: “Your place forgotten / You not t­ here” (162), he reads.

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In fact, neither version is quite accurate, since de la Mare actually wrote, “Your place left vacant” (1969: 393). The remembering ear plays tricks (as any reader knows), and memory is mixed with desire, repetition with imagination. ­These va­ri­e­ties of false recall in the story, ­whether intended by the author or not, only drive home the extent to which phantoms and poems are both summoned by inaccurate memorialists writing their own stories, possibly even their own epitaphs. But this absence or vacancy, which leads to the poem’s concluding line, “You not t­ here,” is also where the phantoms of a half-­ heard memory come out to play. If de la Mare lies b ­ ehind this dream-­reading story, of a “Face” which is also a phantom and a poem, this might be ­because Munro is also remembering the way his poems can knock for entry, years ­after they are first read, known and then forgotten. His ghosts, like this “girl-­child phantom,” are summoned into existence by acts of strange remembering, and by the ear’s very hospitality to sounds, even unremembered, unknown sounds, which call for entry in dream or half-­dream. In 1925, de la Mare published a short story called “The Green Room.” It is, like many of his works, a ghost story in outline. The protagonist, Alan, frequents a second-­hand bookshop owned by a certain Mr. Elliott, who then introduces him to a private upstairs parlor full of books. T ­ hese belonged to a previous owner of the h ­ ouse and remain unsorted. In this pretty room, painted a shade of “apple green,” Alan picks up a copy of Robert Herrick’s Hesperides and starts to read. ­A fter a while, however, his “wits [ . . . ​] wool-­gathering,” he becomes distracted and looks about him: And as he did so [ . . . ​] out of some day-­dream, it seemed, of which u ­ ntil then he had been unaware, t­ here had appeared to him from the world of fantasy the image of a face. No known or remembered face—­a phantom face, as alien and inscrutable as are the apparitions that occasionally visit the mind in sleep. (1996–2001: II. 127) This face, day-­dreamed from the act of reading, leaves him disquieted in the dusky room, alert and “listening” (II. 128). De la Mare’s favorite verb then starts to play its customary tricks. Alan imagines

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hearing the “faint sound” of silk from the far side of the room and asks, “Was ­t here a listener ­behind that door?” (II. 128). Listening as usual begets listeners, especially from ­behind doors, as the “face,” though only a “phantom face” and not “known or remembered,” comes to be recognized. This uneasy threshold has something to do with reading lines of poetry and dreaming through them, just as in Munro’s story, “Face,” the “girl-­child phantom” is part of a conjuring memory of a forgotten poem. In both, the dreamed face, born from reading, or listening to reading, comes “true,” almost as if each story enacted the event of reading itself, as an interplay between sounded words and the reader’s own memories or desires. On a subsequent visit to the parlor, Alan actually sees a ghostly ­woman and realizes that “the face [ . . . ​] was without any question the face he had shared with Herrick’s Hesperides” (II. 132). It is an odd construction, for this is not a face i­ magined or summoned from a book of verse, but “shared with” it. Not even the author’s but the book’s face trafficks between poem and reader, print and real­ity, between what was earlier “not known or remembered” and is now recalled “without any question.” The two of them, Alan then thinks of the phantom w ­ oman, might be “old cronies who had met again ­after a long absence” (II. 132). “No known or remembered face” thus starts to be remembered, like the phantom of that very literary hospitality which de la Mare attributes both to the act of writing and of reading: “The ­great reader, like the ­great novelist, is hospitality itself. [ . . . ​] So far he ­w ill keep open h ­ ouse” (“Truth to Life,” 12). Reading is a ­matter of welcoming the stranger, perhaps from beyond the limits of the earth. Like all phantoms, however, this one has a life and history of her own, which is not altogether ­under the control of her vari­ous readers. Rummaging one day in an upper room, Alan discovers a photo­graph slipped into a handwritten exercise book of poems, by one, E. F. The poems w ­ ere written, he presumes, by the niece or ward, or whoever she may be, of the old doctor of the h ­ ouse. Lighting on the photo­ graph, he then realizes, “He knew this face; and yet not this face” (II. 136). So which? Knowing ­faces in this story turns on the tiny ­d ifferential between “this face” and “this face,” as if the empirical authority of the eye, to know what it sees, ­were constantly ­under

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threat. So a face from a book, the face of a phantom, and the face in a photo­graph shift like eerie holograms, in a game of endless false, or is it true? recall. Soon t­hese very memories become suspect, however, as Alan seems to fall, like an infatuated lover, into serial recognitions and forgettings. For instance, once he starts reading what he assumes to be the girl-­w riter’s lovelorn verses, he finds it “almost impossible to recall the face not of the photo­graph but of his phantasm” (II. 145). So much emphasis on a face, and on its queer superimpositions, begins to seem questionable, as if decoying the observer with visual clues that are never in fact vis­i­ble. As each new face supplants the last, the visualism of the story, as seen through Alan’s eyes, itself comes to seem suspect. Eventually, he decides to ask Mr. Elliott about previous inhabitants of the ­house. Seeming to know more than he ever tells, the bookshop owner is suddenly graphic in his description of the young ward’s death: “ ‘Strychnine, sir—­t hat was the way of it.’ ” He then adds, with somehow unnecessary detail: “It erects up the body like an arch, sir. So” (II. 147). The line, as Theresa Whistler notes, is an almost exact transcription of something that happened to the five-­year-­old de la Mare himself almost fifty years before writing the story, when he overheard friends of his parents describe the effect of a death by strychnine: “ ‘His body was arched up on the bed—­like this’ ” (1993: 20), he recalled. That motion of the hand, “like this,” is repeated in the startling specificity of Mr. Elliott’s similarly sketching gesture: “So.” So the story hospitably h ­ ouses distant revenants from the poet’s own past—­revenants from another told story, perhaps both forgotten and remembered by him, though cued by a word which might pass unnoticed except to the word-­ haunted: “arched,” which becomes, in “The Green Room,” “like an arch.” But this word has its own strange afterlife in the story, as if more than the distantly remembered dead might stir in this tale of book-­haunting. For words return like revenants in this work, as if to undercut the more familiar apparition of a face. Having deci­ded to publish the manuscript of the presumed ward’s poems at his own expense, in an act of envious authorship disguised as generosity, Alan is then woken in the night by another ambiguous dream or daydream: “the living presentment of the young face in the

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photo­graph” (II. 150). This is not quite, as one might expect, a presentiment but a “presentment,” not a feeling in advance of the facts but a pres­ent entity, a change almost as slight and easily overlooked as that between “this face” and “this face.” Soon a­ fter, Alan returns to the green room with his parcel full of now-­printed books, opens it, and waits. Sure enough, “at some remote inward summons”—­a summons both impersonally detached and “inward” enough to suggest subconscious desire—­t he apparition returns: “standing ­t here in precisely the same attitude—­the high-­heeled shoe coquettishly arched on the lowest of the three steps” (II. 152). This is a repeat of the young w ­ oman’s earlier appearance, but the careful reader might notice that t­ here is a slight change to the wording since she stood ­t here for the first time, “her right foot with its high-­heeled shoe poised delicately on the lowest of the three steps” (II. 131). The change from “poised delicately” to “coquettishly arched” is a slip, easily overlooked, which throws unnerving light on Alan’s perceptions and motives, now of course colored by his hearing that graphic visualization of the ­woman’s dead body, “arched up so.” The innocent “arch” of the instep has taken on a sexual, culpable character, as he begins to perceive her through the story of a self-­inflicted death by strychnine. Most first-­t ime readers of the narrative, decoyed by the phrase “in precisely the same attitude,” might miss the ways in which this sentence is not “precisely the same.” What has entered the story is the word “arch,” punning on an innocent noun (the arch of the instep), an attitude of mind suggesting supercilious irony, and a memory of death that haunts, not only Alan but also the writer himself. The reader-­sleuth must have ears wide open, not to the account given by the protagonist, but to the cues of language, with all their phantom stirrings from other usages, other meanings, other attributions. Listen to “arch,” and alongside the graphic-­ memorable sketch of the girl suicide given by the bookseller, we start to hear how words, as well as f­ aces, slip from one significance to another. It is as if the poet w ­ ere planting clues for the ear, not in order to unlock the details of a suicide mystery from the past—­one likely to involve, as Mr. Elliott ner­vously warns, “the police” (II. 149)—­but clues to something ­else:

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“Arch!” My God, “arch” was the word! Alan was shivering. How about the ravages that life’s privy paw had made in his own fastidious consciousness? Had his own heart been a shade more faithful would the horror which he knew was now distorting his rather girlish features and looking out of his pale blue eyes have been quite so poisonously b ­ itter? Fortunately his back was turned to the win­dow, and he could in part conceal his face with his hand before this visitor had had time to be fully aware what that face was saying. (II. 153) A moment ­later the phantom ­woman, “bold as grass-­green paint,” dis­appears and, we are told in a strikingly impersonal tense: “the door above at the top of the narrow staircase, as if in a sudden access of bravado, violently slammed: ‘Touch me, tap at me, force me, if you dare!’ ” (II. 153). This is a power­f ul reversal. First, the “face” in view is no longer the ­woman’s but Alan’s own, which suddenly reveals its distortion, from “girlish” to poisonous, as if the language pointed to a connection between the strychnine and this “poisonously b ­ itter” countenance. He tries to hide his face with a hand, aware that the ghost might read what it is betraying, even reflected in the win­dow. This is not then, as we might have thought, a mystery-­unravelling story about an illicit love affair and a long-­dead suicide. It is not the girl’s face, or even her “arched” foot, which has to be decoded, but Alan’s own living face. Who is he? Or rather, who was he before? “ ‘Arch!’ My God, ‘arch’ was the word!” introduces a recognition scene that has l­ittle to do with e­ ither the delicate or coquettishly arched instep of the ghost, or even with her notionally death-­arched body, but instead with another face we might not have noticed, with its “girlish features” and its poisonous looks. What “that face was saying” might be understood only if we are prepared to read from another a­ ngle, as if in a looking-­glass reversal, and indeed read less through looking than through listening. For words carry their ­underground connectives, their humming undersongs and understories, against the current of the speaker’s narrative. To read the poet’s story in this tale about poetry, w ­ hether Herrick’s or the dead girl’s, is to listen to the listening that happens ­behind a door; but also to refuse to “Touch,” “tap” or “force” it open.

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The door, of course, has run through this story as the crucial ­divide between the living and the dead, readers and books, even perhaps between men in a bookshop and a ­woman in a book. Moreover, it seems to be the door that speaks on slamming shut: “ ‘Touch me, tap at me, force me, if you dare!’ ” Given the sexual burdens of the story, it is hard not to hear the voice of the ­woman, touched or forced perhaps in the story of her own life, but also forced, in the pres­ent, by this living man whose reading of her, both her face and her poems, has swung violently from “delicate” to “coquettish,” before being ashamed of what might be read on his own face. The uncanny sense of a repeat violation carried out by men: by the original doctor, possibly by Mr. Elliott, who conceals more than he tells, and now by Alan himself—­each of them somehow too knowing, too controlling, and too self-­deceiving—is expressed by the door’s challenge. Who has forced whom, and when? Whose face is being read, and how? Whose poems are being reprinted, and why? When, fi­nally, like the girl’s last gesture of defiance, the ceiling suddenly crashes in, wrecking the newly printed pile of poetry books, de la Mare writes of the two men still standing below: “they ­were both of them caught up and staring starkly at one another—­like conspirators caught in the act” (II. 154). As so often, the detail of the language is choice: the men are “caught” twice in this sentence, both “caught up” together in a ghost story, but also “caught in the act” of some perfidious forcing of their own. The clues are not in the storyteller’s control but in the poet’s language, which tweaks what is written, turning the ­tables on the two male protagonists, and constantly calling up the punning ghosts of words to speak more than is known. The very emphasis on f­ aces—­read, dreamed, remembered, photographed, or reflected f­ aces—­becomes an obfuscation. To hunt down the story of this ghost as if following a trail of criminal evidence is to miss the ­whole point; it is a story about poetry, writing it, reading it, wanting to appropriate it, in which the poem answers back: “ ‘Touch me, tap at me, force me, if you dare!’ ” It is the door that speaks ­here, challenging Alan’s sleuthing attitudes, reminding us that b ­ ehind the doors of poetry are the voicings, the phantoms, the phantom listeners, that must be listened to rather than decoded and incriminated. The point of the ­whole story is to turn us into

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­ ospitable readers—of Herrick, of a manuscript of girlish verses, or h indeed of “The Green Room” itself, which is “a poet’s story in sober earnest: incoherent, obscure, unreal, unlifelike, without an ending” (I. 87). Like Munro’s “Face,” then, this story outfaces its reader with a mystery that ­doesn’t altogether add up, but which, for that very reason, touches on that other mystery of reading and writing, imagining and knowing. Even the title, suggesting a place of rehearsal, a room beside the real stage of life, turns out to have another provenance if we pay attention. For the phrase turns up in one of the girl-­ghost’s poems, “Lines on Ophelia”: “She found an exit from her life; / She to an earthly green-­room sped” (II. 142). If one “green room” is the “apple green” parlor of the girl’s unhappy and prob­ably short life, the place of her “green” youth and inexperience, the other “green-­room” is the suicide’s destined bed of earth, outside consecrated ground, of course, and eerily hinted at in Alan’s own misnomer of the phantom face as “bold as grass-­green paint” (II. 153). The poet in de la Mare enjoys t­ hese punning slips, where the logic of the story is derailed by the games words can play: “arched” to “arch,” “caught up” to “caught,” “green room” to “green-­room,” while each “face”—­t he day-­dreamed face, the girl-­ghost’s face, the photo­graph’s and Alan’s own face—­slides into the o ­ thers, leaving us with an undercurrent of words, playing tricks of their own against our ways of knowing. Indeed, true to the “poet’s story,” the sense of an ending is explic­ itly withheld at the end. Having narrowly escaped the crash of plaster from the ceiling, Alan, we are told in the penultimate paragraph, just goes on standing ­there: “His mind was a void. He was listening again—­and so intently that it might be supposed the faintest stirrings even on the uttermost outskirts of the unseen might reach his ear” (II. 154). This is the same receptive emptiness of mind which played host to phantoms at the start. Perhaps by the end Alan has learned to lend an ear, without preconceptions, to the ghosts that emerge from that threshold, where seeing ­faces or phantoms must give way to listening, and listening without satisfactory answers, to ­t hose “faintest stirrings even on the uttermost outskirts of the unseen.” Only one t­ hing might return from beyond this threshold, and

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that is sound itself: the strange bird, the traveler, the phantom caller or listener from beyond the limits of the door, where poetry’s words, with all their unexpected voicings and soundings, might stir. We are back to the beginning at the end, having perhaps found “the way to Somewhere” that was nowhere we ­were at all expecting. It was inspired of Alice Munro to make the origin of her story’s “determined girl-­child phantom,” with her haunting, interchangeable “Face” and her remembered-­forgotten verses, in fact a poem by Walter de la Mare. ­W hether or not “The Green Room” was a source, with its own puzzle of a book, a face, a phantom, de la Mare is a writer, certainly, who made a life’s work of keeping open ­house, as well as, one might add, leaving closed doors. The open h ­ ouse is the writer’s and the reader’s, while the closed door ensures that we listen to words when we hear them, paying attention to the ghostly purposes of literary language itself. He is, as Woolf once put it, almost echoing the penultimate paragraph of this story, the poet who “hears faint stirrings and far murmurs and footfalls” (1987–1990: II. 253). He is the poet who thus keeps us listening to listening, as if to the ­silent printed page of the literary text which only listens back.

7 Hearing Something: Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorie Graham And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something— derek mahon        which made me think // of something ­else, then something ­else again. paul muldoon

How to kéep—is ­t here ány any, is ­t here none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key to keep Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, . . . ​from vanishing away? (1967: 91) In 1882, when Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote ­those lines, “beauty” might have seemed to be far from “vanishing.” Ten years earlier his tutor at Oxford, Walter Pater, began his influential study, The Re­nais­ sance, with the admission that “many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract” (1980: xix). Since Plato at least, “beauty in the abstract” has been the object of philosophical attention, but by the 1870s it was also a fash­ion­able literary topic, carry­ing an extra frisson of the forbidden from the French of Gautier and Baudelaire. For the next five de­cades beauty would continue to figure as an alluring object of desire, a word to repeat, cherish, redefine, its shine seemingly unspoiled by use. When, in 1925, I. A. Richards launched a fierce attack on what he called that “paralysing 158

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apparition Beauty, the ineffable, ultimate, unanalysable, ­simple Idea” (1925, 1926: 12), he was challenging the word’s seemingly indiscriminate ubiquity and familiarity. Baggy with overuse, it might have seemed to have become redundant, emptily “ineffable,” and of no ­great interest in the age of mechanical reproduction and mass warfare. Poets and novelists, however, might have been less sure. Well into the 1920s and 1930s, Woolf keeps returning to the word as if to a talisman for something she cannot dismiss or quite forget. In A Letter to a Young Poet (1932), for instance, she casts for the missing ingredient of much con­temporary verse, and lights again on that one word, “beauty.” More specifically, she lights on the sound and duple rhythm of it, hearing “the repetition in the bass of one word intoned over and over again by some malcontent” (1932: 23–24). That “beauty” sounds like a “repetition” suggests a word grown tired, certainly, but also a word that nags like a charm, a tune, a beat in the brain. Less object or idea, “beauty” is now a haunting noise, a rhythmic ground bass, almost a kind of poetic time signature: “one word intoned over and over again.” Was Woolf, perhaps, hearing Hopkins himself, over and overring “in the bass,” intoning “beauty, beauty, beauty, . . .” while his ellipses seem to notate an ­etcetera ­going in­def­initely into the ­f uture, never quite letting up on its empty rote, even in the absence of “braid or brace, lace, latch or catch.” Woolf first read Hopkins in 1919, a year a­ fter the first publication of his poetry, and wrote about him with the enthusiasm of self-­d iscovery: “I should like to have written that myself ” (1993–1994: II. 415), she remarked of one poem. Certainly, the appearance of his poetry at a time when the modernists might have wanted to repudiate their Victorian heritage, complicates the story of beauty as it passes from the nineteenth into the twentieth ­century. If the word has become a nearly redundant echo of itself, reduced to a kind of sounding ditto, it is also no less hauntingly insistent in the ears of this par­t ic­u­lar novelist. The story at the next ­century’s end is equally complex. “ ‘Beauty is the forbidden word of our age, as Sex was to the Victorians’ ” (1980, 2004: 29), complains one of the characters in Shirley Hazzard’s novel, The Transit of Venus. Judging by the spate of book titles which follow, however, the forbidden was already poised for a return: among poets and novelists, for instance: Jorie Graham’s The End of

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Beauty (1987), Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband (2001), Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004), Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005), Jane Hirshfield’s The Beauty (2015), Rebecca Perry’s Beauty / Beauty (2015), Caroline Kennedy’s She Walks in Beauty (2016), and, among critics and writers more generally: James Kirwan’s Beauty (1999), Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (1999), Denis Donoghue’s Speaking of Beauty (2003), Umberto Eco’s On Beauty (2005), Roger Scruton’s Beauty (2009, 2011), and Fiona Reynolds’s The Fight for Beauty (2016). The word might seem to be back with a vengeance as another ­century reconsiders and renews its aesthetic heritage. But did it ever go away? The trou­ble with beauty, which has been defined and redefined by phi­los­o­phers, often as part of a duo with truth, goodness, justice, ugliness, real­ity, use, is that the word refers to so many t­ hings: it is a notional ideal and a local attribute, an abstract generalization and a subjective appreciation; it is, nominally, a ­t hing in itself and, adjectivally, the mere appearance of a t­ hing. Beauty is an object, an idea, a standard, as well as a subjective impression, wish, or desire. It is a philosophically heavyweight abstraction as well as passing conversational shorthand. It figures in many disciplines—­t heological, aesthetic, artistic, mathematical, cosmetic—­and it comes readily to the tongue in casual interchange. “beauty, beauty, beauty”—­t he word is richly resourceful and always in danger of its own redundancy. With this backdrop of resourcefulness and overload in mind, I nonetheless want to take a ­little journey, back and forth in history, before returning to my three poets: Frost, Bishop, and Jorie Graham. a a a

In 1578 the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross, wrote a poem which seems to be about the lure of beauty, its worldly temptations and all its desirable tastes and touches. It begins and ends with the refrain: For all the beauty t­ here may be I’ll never throw away my soul; only for something I d ­ on’t know that one may come on randomly. (1972: 85)

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This is the ascetic’s familiar rejection of beauty, but with a catch. “For all the beauty,” the poet sings, then finds a tiny exception to his rule of self-­denial: “only for something I d ­ on’t know”: “sino por un no sé qué.” Only for “something”—­unknown, lucky, come upon by chance, “por ventura” (1972: 84)—­m ight the poet perhaps throw away his soul or self. The construction is a cunning paradox of “not for anything,” and yet perhaps, who knows? “for something.” This saint-­ mystic might throw away his soul for beauty ­after all, or if not for beauty, at least “for something I ­don’t know.” Roy Campbell’s more savingly specific and cheerful translation, “Save for one t­hing I know not what / Which lucky chance may bring my way” (1979: 85), does not quite convey the mysteriousness of the original. St. John’s “un no sé qué” is one of the first instances of a phrase which, deriving from the Latin nescio quid, ­w ill then proliferate in seventeenth-­ and eighteenth-­century Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­t ure. In En­glish, the translation is difficult: the word “something,” open-­ended and uncertain, being a better rendering than Campbell’s “one ­t hing,” which seems too materially single and objective. What­ever it is, this “something I d ­ on’t know,” which might incite us to listen or look out, not knowing what it is, ­here makes a ­little chink in the saint’s rule of self-­abnegation. Four centuries l­ater, another poet, in a very dif­fer­ent context and in another language, found himself considering the old puzzle of beauty: Once more on the lawns in brilliant sun. Ah, beauty, beauty! What is truth? Balls. What is love? Shite. What is God? Bug­­ ger. Ah, but what is beauty? Boy, you got sump’n ­t here. I should like to know. (1992: 16) This is the nineteen-­year-­old Philip Larkin musing on the college lawns at Oxford in 1941. His list of adolescent expletives, “Balls,” “Shite,” “Bugger,” quickly dispenses with truth, love, and God. But “beauty” cannot quite be waived away. “Ah, beauty, beauty!” Larkin, like Hopkins, gets stuck on the word, as if turning up the volume of its sound for the sheer mysterious relish of it. So the philosophical question “what is beauty?” provokes in him no disquisition on

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a­ esthetics, no abstract explanations, and no rude dismissal. Instead, it leaves the sound of “beauty, beauty!” hanging, unexplained, unparaphrased, as if, like Woolf, he too w ­ ere haunted by a mere “repetition in the bass.” It is a sound that stops him in his tracks and challenges his assurance: “Boy, you got sump’n ­t here. I should like to know.” “Only for something I ­don’t know,” wrote St. John of the Cross centuries before. Beauty gives pause, creates a change of register, derails the logic of what is known. Meanwhile, both writers resort to the idea of “something,” which is just enough to keep beauty angling for attention, calling to be known beyond what is known: “something I ­don’t know,” or “sump’n. I should like to know.” Ten years l­ater, in 1951, Larkin published a poem called “Latest Face.” This is in some ways a classic aestheticist work, haunted by a phantom face which, like ­others, is partly of the poet’s own making. It ­ought to be a love poem, but something interferes with the h ­ uman story: Latest face, so effortless Your ­great arrival at my eyes, No one standing near could guess Your beauty had no home till then; Precious vagrant, recognise My look, and do not turn again. (2012: 43) “I have learnt to love you late, Beauty at once so ancient and so new!” (1961: 231), St.  Augustine wrote of another unknowably elusive presence. A hint of something “so ancient and so new” also lurks in Larkin’s “Latest face”—­“Latest” being late, but not perhaps last, in an implied line of ­faces—­faces known to the poet perhaps, or e­ lse just lining up throughout literary as well as theological history. ­A mbiguously both a face and its “beauty,” the one blurring into the other, this “vagrant” love object is hailed and invited to stop at home. Wandering from face to “Latest face,” this other­wise indiscriminate drifter is then caught in a momentary exchange of looks between speaker and object, which is surprised, chancy, but transient. ­After all, “do not turn again” is ambiguously ­either a plea not to turn away, or not to turn back. The lines which follow, rejecting all the bargains and

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pain of messy ­human affairs, suggest the latter. For what this poet-­ aesthete desires is, not the wrangling business of ­human love, but the “always-­planned salute” of a greeting more planned than achieved. As Elaine Scarry puts it, “The moment one comes into the presence of something beautiful, it greets you” (1999: 25). Beauty leaves ­little to be kept or saved, no latch or catch to cling to, but is the passing call of nothing more than a greeting. As Hopkins also asks, in “To what serves mortal beauty,” “how meet beauty? Merely meet it; own, / Home at heart, heaven’s sweet gift; then leave, let that alone” (1967: 98). Hopkins’s word, “own,” poised uncertainly at the end of the line, registers the ambivalence of beauty’s being owned and its own special ­t hing, but also unowned, since “own,” is curbed by that comma and seems to have no natu­ral object, neither “Home” nor “heaven.” Larkin’s similar greeting to the “Precious vagrant” may, grammatically and logically, be a greeting only to the homelessly wandering “beauty” which is not to be stopped or possessed but, as in Hardy’s The Well-­Beloved, continually wanders through ­faces. And sure enough, in the last stanza, “the statue of your beauty” walks away, leaving one of t­ hose unspecific somethings, which is also something-­or-­nothing: “Something’s found—or is not found” (2012: 43), the poet writes. Larkin’s “or” is neither a choice nor an opposition. Instead, it carelessly offers ­either, or both, or neither, as if to say: this is “Something,” ­whether found or not. For both Larkin and Hopkins, the sense of beauty’s “home,” or “Home at heart,” is perfectly consistent with leaving it “alone,” or even with just leaving. ­These are, admittedly, rather opportunistic comparisons. But the similarities suggest some continuous, recurrent anxiety about the nature of beauty in the literary tradition. The very word harbors a sea-­ change, from packed philosophical abstraction to almost hollow sound effect. If it calls from far back, it also calls with the reduced sense of a refrain or a repeat, of something knocking at the door of its own meaning, in question rather than in confirmation. Meanwhile, on the fringes of philosophy and aesthetics proper, another tradition of commentary might be traced. In 1671, a book was published in France which would remain influential for a c­ entury and more: Dominique Bouhours’s Les Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène (Conversations of Aristo and Eugene). Bouhours devotes long sections of

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this book to a phrase which was just becoming current and fash­ion­ able: the je ne sais quoi. Hard to translate into En­glish, this “I ­don’t know what” has the effect of turning an event of not knowing into the aesthetically desirable object itself, of knowing. As Richard Scholar glosses, not only does the je ne sais quoi “mark the limits of what can be known” (2005: 23), but it is also “the property of a person or ­thing possessing an inexplicable charm” (280). That word “charm,” which w ­ ill also develop a rich early modern history, brings together the senses of beauty, grace (theological and secular), ease, plea­sure, ability, art, sweetness, and song (28–30). As Herbert Tucker points out, the word comes from “carmen, the Latin word for song” (2017: 111), so carries in its very bones the aural sounding which magic charms have always put to efficacious purpose. By the nineteenth ­century, particularly in Hawthorne and Henry James, for instance (see Poole 2011: 117–120), charm has corrupted a l­ ittle into mere superficial attraction. But for Bouhours, charm and beauty circle round each other, alongside the idea of “something” unknowable—­“a ­t hing that exists only ­because no one can say what it is” (1671, 1962: 150). It may be that this triangle of beauty, charm, and the je ne sais quoi, which w ­ ill feed into both the strife-­ridden history of theology and the secular domain of aesthetics, has an even longer afterlife in the arts than Scholar’s early modern bound­aries imply. In 1957, the French theorist Vladimir Jankélévitch published a work called Le Je-­ne-­sais-­quoi et le Presque-­rien (The Je Ne Sais Quoi and the Next-­to-­Nothing). Friend of Barthes and Levinas, though never as fash­ion­able as they and not much translated into En­glish, Jankélévitch draws on Bouhours in his resuscitation of old debates about beauty, charm, and the je ne sais quoi. This latter, he writes, is something whose invisible presence satisfies us and whose inexplicable absence leaves us strangely unsettled; something that does not exist and yet is the most impor­tant t­ hing of all, the only one worth expressing, and yet precisely the only one that cannot be expressed! (in Scholar 2005: 7) The language for this elusive “something” has to s­ ettle, somehow, for a roundabout reference, both about and not about, both pres­ent and absent, both indicative and erasing. This is the language, admit-

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tedly, of mystical discourse, but its closeness to the language of poetry and the language poets use is suggestive. Jankélévitch, like Bouhours, tracks the connections between charm, beauty, and that “something” which is next to nothing: “something that does not exist and yet is the most impor­t ant t­ hing of all.” Such open reference, where “something” may be some ­t hing, or something or other, or next to nothing, or just nothing at all, might help in understanding the strangely open reference of lit­er­a­t ure itself. Words like something, beauty, and charm may be frustrating, evasive, unhelpfully ineffable, but they keep the ear tuned to literariness, to a knowledge that must search its own sounding appeal. As Jankélévitch writes in ­Music and the Ineffable, “To what does one pay attention? The listener believes that he understands something where, in real­ity, ­t here is nothing to understand” (1961, 2003: 99–100). The idea of beauty, or charm, emerges from this conjuror’s trick with language, which is a trick played not to the eye but to the ear of the listener. Juggling verbs and predicates, playing contradictory alternatives of this or that, or even just repeating a word till its burden is almost too heavy to mean anything, may be a way to turn nothing into “something” of ­great value, or something to nothing, precisely b ­ ecause each is “I know not what.” Bouhours and Jankélévitch might seem to belong to a minor Gallic tradition of semi-­mystical theorizing—­a tradition inimical to the Anglo-­A merican, and in par­tic­u­lar inimical to the twentieth-­century secular realities of Frost and Bishop. It is true that beauty, with its fuzzy halo-­light of inexpressibility, along with its rather fey companions, “charm” and “the je ne sais quoi,” seems not to figure much in the poetry or prose of ­t hese two matter-­minded poets. And yet, on the rare occasions when it does figure, the effect can be surprising. ­Here, for instance, is a passage from a lecture which Frost delivered in 1930, called “Education by Poetry”: The person who gets close enough to poetry, he is ­going to know more about the word belief than anybody e­ lse knows, even in religion nowadays.  [ . . . ​] E ­ very time a poem is written, e­ very time a short story is written, it is written not by cunning, but by belief. The beauty, the something, the ­little charm of the ­t hing to be, is more felt than known. (1995: 726)

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­ hether by accident or design (the religious context of “belief ” W may have encouraged it), Frost reproduces that l­ittle trio of words which have circled round each other for de­cades ­after Bouhours: “beauty, the something, the ­little charm.” His sentence, with its hesitations, its gestures t­owards an unfolding sense of “the t­ hing to be,” barely more specific than “something,” sounds distinctly Jamesian. Indeed, James’s own hesitating prose relishes words which force on the reader a similar kind of optional uncertainty, like Maisie’s wise and innocent knowing. Of Michelangelo, James once mused, “He has something—he retains something, ­after all experience—­which belongs only to himself. This transcendent ‘something’ ” (in Freedman 1990: 133). The word “something” that refuses to be thus solved or dissolved in paraphrase, only calling attention to its own heightened repetition, is a word that starts to sing its own peculiar self-­sufficiency to the ear. Similarly, the “beauty, the something, the ­little charm of the ­t hing” are much less nouns expressing specific objects than verbal efforts to believe in what­ever it is a literary work might be for. Reading Frost, one begins to hear, like another repetition in the bass, the extraordinary frequency of “something.” Apparently casual and idiomatic, a merely ser­v iceable pronoun, it can also turn from “something” to some ­thing, and so bring rabbits magically out of a hat. “Something t­here is that ­doesn’t love a wall” (1995: 39) is the first line, for instance, of the oddly titled poem “Mending Wall.” Like Larkin, Frost loves the pres­ent participle in titles, particularly when it blurs into other parts of speech: the  noun-­verb or gerund, “a mending,” or into the adjectival “mending” to describe the ­character of a wall, or even, by implication, into an adverbial “mending” to describe the action of a wall. “Mending Wall” means both the act of mending a wall and the ways in which a wall might mend ­either itself or ­human relationships. Such participles are everywhere in Frost, reminding us that even this most literal-­m inded of poets likes to keep sense open, on the move. It is this that takes the poem beyond the simplicities  of good neighborly work, with its easy moral that “ ‘Good fences make good neighbours’ ” (1995: 40), into a more mysterious register:

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Something t­ here is that d ­ oesn’t love a wall, That sends the frozen-­ground-­swell u ­ nder it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun [ . . . ​] he begins. ­Later he returns, with a difference, to the prob­lem of use, purpose, morality:   “But ­here ­t here are no cows. Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. Something t­ here is that d ­ oesn’t love a wall, That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him, But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather He said it for himself. (1995: 39–40) What­ever the reason that walls might need mending—­f rost (frost being both a proper and common noun, as T. Kendall [2012: 52] points out), subsidence, tree roots, hunters, cows—­might be irrelevant. It might be none of t­ hose, but “elves”; yet “it’s not elves exactly.” So what is it? Well, self-­evidently still “Something”: “Something ­there is.” But is ­there? The repetition of that line is both its own ­sufficient proof as well as an incremental sense of doubt. Walls are usually, Frost explains, a “walling in or walling out.” But without cows? Meanwhile, the poet has opened a space within the too clinching literalness of a poem which ­w ill not close up again. “Something” persists; it might be “elves,” creatures of lucky or unlucky charms, or “not elves exactly,” and yet not not exactly, ­either. In the end, he shrugs off responsibility: “I’d rather / He said it for himself.” It’s like a ­little hint to the reader who may be, like a good neighbor, apt at mending walls and keeping tidy morals, or e­ lse may become a good reader, who likes the chinks that unmended walls might leave, for “elves” perhaps. Once noticed, the word “something” seems everywhere in Frost, from the earliest to the latest poems: “Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun, / Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound” (1995: 26); “Something inspires the only cow of late / To make no

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more of a wall than an open gate” (120); “Steer straight off ­after something into space” (227); “Was something brushed across my mind / That no one on earth w ­ ill ever find?” (227); “Something sinister in the tone / Told me my secret must be known” (230); “Something I saw or thought I saw” (264); “We may choose something like a star” (365). “Something,” which may be a noun, pronoun, adverb, or adjective, contains its own slippery games of reference, as well as the always open possibility of nothing at all. Certainly, juggling between some t­ hing and no t­ hing suits the kind of lightweight magic Frost makes in poetry. On the one hand, utterly exact and exacting, concerned for the s­ imple specifics of a wall and how it might be broken or built; on the other, this poetry’s very simplicity opens up beyond the literal, where the work of elves, or “not elves exactly,” of frost or the other Frost, might be believed. ­There is no object so real, no wall so wall-­y in his work, that one ­doesn’t start to won­der about something in it—­“Something ­t here is”—­w ithout knowing precisely where or what. This is the case with one of his best-­k nown poems, “For Once, Then, Something.” This ­ought to be a sonnet but has an extra line, fifteen altogether. That extra m ­ atters, for this is also a poem about extras, about what may be looked for in the dark of a well which is in addition to the facts. Frost may have been remembering Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Willowwood” sonnets, where the well is both a self-­reflecting mirror and a glassy nothing which intensifies into phantom ­things: into a “certain secret ­thing” (2003: 149), or into “this ­thing” that holds her [the dead lover] still “wandering” (2003: 150) (Leighton 2009: 507–509), or even further back in time, remembering the well or spring of Helicon. Wells go deep in lit­er­a­ture, their sought-­after self-­reflections often throwing up surprises. With Frost too, “Something” does not quite fit the moral, of being able to see in the well only a Narcissus-­like reflection of “Me myself in the summer heaven godlike” (1995: 208). The first six lines of this poem have almost no punctuation, ­running quickly into what can be easily seen: “Me myself,” as if language thus imitated the ­water’s still clarity, its plain sense of ­t hings which fits the poet’s self-­regarding self-­image. Thereafter, the syntax twists and turns between fussy punctuation, as if to reveal something more obscure, difficult:

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  a something white, uncertain, Something more of the depths—­and then I lost it.   [ . . . ​] What was that whiteness? Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something. (208) The word “something,” repeated three times, gradu­ates from being an expression of difficulty, uncertainty, near invisibility, to being the ­t hing itself, achieved: “For once, then.” But is it “For once,” if it is three times at least? Meanwhile, this ­t hing lies, not at the bottom but “at bottom”—­a phrase that shifts the sense, barely but just perceptibly, from t­ hings seen literally down a well to what might lie “at bottom”—of what? an argument? of every­t hing? Then comes the marvelous last line: “Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.” This, what­ever it is (this je ne sais quoi), might be “Truth?” or might be just a whitish stone. As Tim Kendall (2012: 325) points out, it was Democritus who found truth at the bottom of a well. However, for this earth-­bound farmer-­poet, truth and a pebble may be equally impor­tant, weighty. When found “at bottom,” a “pebble of quartz,” with its eerily shining whiteness, so ghostly-­ordinary, might be all the “Truth” we need. But ­t here is something ­else in this last line which hovers round the idea of truth like an old sparring partner. Truth and beauty have, at least since Keats, made a pair. For Frost, a­ fter all, the relation between “beauty” and “something” lies at the heart of what a poet believes: “Beauty, the something, the ­little charm of the ­t hing” (1995: 726). That last line is hard to read without hearing in it both Keats’s syllogism, “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,” and Frost’s own quieter, less certain slant on that syllogism: Truth, or something. This is an extra, a satisfying solution to the ­either / or which precedes it; but it is also something saved, or gained, as if instead of the absent expected word, “beauty,” the poet had at least found “something.” Beauty, then, might lurk somewhere in Frost, in cognate terms which frustrate his own clear-­eyed objectivity and moral purpose. Something, in his poetry, is always more than a con­ve­nient pronoun, and less than a t­ hing. ­Here it is found, beyond both “Truth” and a “pebble of quartz,” like an unaccountable extra—an extra line, an extra phrase—to suggest where elves might be at work blurring the

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look of what actually lies ­t here, undermining the tidy walls of our thinking’s compartments. “What was that whiteness?” By not being able to answer, the poem gives us the very t­ hing that lies “at bottom” of it all: just “something.” “My three ‘favourite’ poets,” Elizabeth Bishop once declared, “are Herbert, Hopkins, and Baudelaire” (2008: 703). Her essay on “Timing” in Hopkins contains one sentence, taken from the critic M. W. Croll, which suggests the extent to which poetic timing might be, for her too, a m ­ atter for thought. The aim of his poetry, she quotes, is “ ‘to portray, not a thought, but a mind thinking’ ” (666). Like so many poets before and ­after her, the pres­ent participle ­provides Bishop with a vocabulary for poetry’s work: its work of timing, which may be continuous virtual time as well as rhythmic time in the ears, but also its work of “thinking,” which is not the conclusive given of a “thought.” Hopkins’s own sprung rhythm, like “the caprice of a perfectly trained acrobat” (663) she writes, is thus of the essence of the mind’s “thinking” in words. How to think, without closing in a thought, might be the poet’s special aim with words. When it comes to beauty, however, Bishop like Frost seems to have ­little to say in her letters or essays. Yet a telling anecdote, recalled by a friend, suggests that her silence may speak as loudly. As that friend recounts, Bishop was at a party in Paris when she was caught up in a prob­ably drunken argument: For her beauty ­really was one of the eternal verities, the most impor­tant t­ hing in life [ . . . ​] John was [ . . . ​] arguing that beauty was in the eye of the beholder [ . . . ​] Bishop got very upset [ . . . ​] and went into the kitchen. I found her ­t here ten minutes ­later drinking a large glass of gin and weeping profusely. She said, “Well, you know, p ­ eople s­ houldn’t discuss ­things like that.” This was very personal; it meant too much to argue about. She was very very upset. (in Ellis 2006: 62) It was perhaps not for lack of caring that Bishop kept the word “beauty” out of her poetry and much of her prose: “ ‘Well, you know, ­people ­shouldn’t discuss ­t hings like that.’ ” Too impor­tant to name, too precious to debate, “beauty,” which is one of the “eternal verities”

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and not just a subjective impression, is a word she saves for the unspoken. Beneath the timing of her own work it might be pos­si­ble to detect the continuing elusive presence of this idea, still r­ unning like an undercurrent beat, echo, or just a repetition which she cannot quite forget. A curious tale written in 1937, called “The Sea and the Shore,” portrays a queer Beckettian character, Edwin Boomer, who lives by scavenging bits of paper on the shoreline. This is, Bishop quips, “the life of letters” (2008: 575)—­a life dedicated to bits of writing, literally, but also writing which might then come to life. Boomer was her own ­mother’s maiden name, thus suggesting a line of descent from the frightening madness described in “In the Village” to Bishop’s own life of letters. In “The Sea and the Shore,” printed paper transmutes into birds and birds into print—­one bird in par­t ic­u­lar: Boomer held up the lantern and watched a sandpiper rushing distractedly this way and that. It looked, to his strained eyesight, like a point of punctuation against the “rounded, rolling waves.” It left fine prints with its feet. Its feathers w ­ ere speckled; and especially on the narrow hems of the wings appeared marks that looked as if they might be letters, if only he could get close enough to read them. (580) Bishop may perhaps have been recalling another shoreline bird: “only I’ll / Have an eye to the sakes of him, quaint moonmarks, to his pelted plumage ­u nder / Wings.” Hopkins’s “­g reat stormfowl,” who walks the “thunder-­purple seabeach” (1967: 80) in his sonnet “Henry Purcell,” shares with Bishop’s smaller “sandpipers” a kind of surreally readable specificity, as well as a stalking purpose on the edge of land. ­Those sandpipers invite an infinite regression of readability, their lettering available to Boomer “if only he could get close enough to read them.” How close must one come to the world to see the letters in it, or how close to letters to see the world in them, and so read the nature of t­ hings? T ­ hose “fine prints,” to one who finds printed paper everywhere, “might be letters” indeed, or at the very least “a point of punctuation” absurdly trying to put a stop to the waves.

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Sandpipers readily become, for Bishop, a writing let loose from context, or an invitation to read writing which is not immediately legible: “grammar that suddenly turns and shines / like flocks of sandpipers flying” (2008: 64), she writes in her “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore.” In an early uncollected poem, “The Flood,” she notes where “two sand-­pipers have stepped, and left / four star-­ prints high and dry” (191). To leave “star-­prints high and dry” in a poem about a sea-­flood that drowns the w ­ hole world—­church and town and hills—is a l­ ittle joke. But ­t hese “star-­prints” are also, of course, ­etymologically asterisks—­a nother punctuation mark, like ellipses, which signals something missing or invisibly continuing in the ear, as well as potentially shiningly legible. In this topsy-­t urvy place, of “ships above” the waves and ringing church bells below them, ­t hose sandpipers alone seem to have been spared, as they stake out their starry territory on “the upper beach.” Prints, footprints, asterisks, ellipses, points of punctuation are everywhere in Bishop, as if to ­remind us how to read, or read differently, or read again, more closely, for something missed or hidden. Like Frost, she is a poet of the minutely observed literal but also of the literal become hyperrealistically legible. Of Boomer, for instance, she writes, “The sand itself, if he picked some of it up and held it close to one eye, looked a ­little like printed paper, ground up or chewed” (580). This one-­eyed view might also recall Bishop’s many attempts to write “a poem called ‘Grand­mother’s Glass Eye’ which should be about the prob­lem of writing poetry” (706), as if poetry could only happen when sight is a ­little squinted. H ­ ere, she ends up with an object ground into the name of itself, a t­ hing become most perfectly its own “literal,” in the sense of both t­ hing and letters, sand and print. What ­else is such a ­t hing but a poem? But what has this to do with beauty? T ­ here is a curious poem with the Shakespearean title: “Twelfth Morning; or What You ­W ill,” which describes the banal ordinariness of a backstreet scene in a seaside town. It contains a black boy, Balthazár, a fence, a h ­ orse, and one of ­t hose drowned ­houses which, like many ­others in Bishop, is “found­ered” on a sandy beach. Like “The Sea and the Shore,” this is a scene of dull daily-­ness apocalyptically threatened by waves. It is also, yet again, a place for sandpipers:

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The sea’s off somewhere, ­doing nothing. Listen. An expelled breath. And faint, faint, faint (or are you hearing ­t hings), the sandpipers’   heart-­broken cries. The fence, three-­strand, barbed-­w ire, all pure rust, three dotted lines, comes forward hopefully across the lots; thinks better of it; turns   a sort of corner . . . ​(2008: 89) This is Bishop’s characteristic one-­eyed view, a view that looks so closely at t­ hings that they become riddlingly legible. The “three-­ strand” fence becomes “three dotted lines,” and then three literal dots ­after “a sort of corner . . .” The fence thus takes shape on the page, leading nowhere very impor­tant, as if Bishop’s own verse-­ “turns” ­were also, at some level, remembering Woolf’s “search of truth” in A Room of One’s Own, where ellipses marked where she “missed the turning” (1929: 23). Is Bishop’s fence another sign for that deviation from truth which the poem must make, no longer ­going “forward hopefully” but turning “a sort of corner . . .” as if ­towards truth’s old binary other? Like Woolf’s roundabout way, Bishop’s fence is a hopeless line-­maker, changing its mind in mid-­ direction, but also, as if ­there might be some moral point to it, turning “a sort of corner . . .” ­Those ellipses show the way round this imagined or merely haphazard turning point. In retrospect, of ­ course, we w ­ ere already hearing the sound of three dots in that earlier threesome: “faint, faint, faint / (or are you hearing t­ hings), the sandpipers’ / heart-­broken cries.” Bishop is one of the g ­ reat poets of parentheses, themselves, of course, a kind of fence to keep ­things in, or out. H ­ ere the warning “(or are you hearing t­ hings),” without any question mark, only makes the reader hear ­things all the more keenly: “faint, faint, faint,” for instance, which sounds like sandpipers piping faintly, or sounds faintly like sandpipers, or e­ lse sounds like something enacting its own “faint” or falling. That “faint, faint, faint” is piped in our ears, as if the magic of the rhythm w ­ ere irresistible, and sandpipers, too, w ­ ere turning back into sound-­dots, into punctuated notation for a sound.

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It is extraordinary how often Bishop resorts to threesomes in her poetry, as if constantly pressing language into numbered sound ­effects: “round and round and round” (9), she writes in “Large Bad Picture”; “ ‘Deny deny deny’ ” (30) in “Roosters”; “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” (34) in “The Fish; “argue argue argue” (60) in “Argument”; “so—­so—so” (124)” in “Filling Station”; “Baa, baa, baa and shriek, shriek, shriek” (154) in “Crusoe in E ­ ngland”; “shush, shush, shush” (175) in “Santarém”; “repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise” (177) in “North Haven”; “roses, roses, roses” (255) in “Vague Poem.” She once politely but forcibly defended her poem “Roosters” and its “bad case of the Threes” (1994: 96) against Marianne Moore’s criticisms. ­Those sandpipers which are “faint, faint, faint” seem to provide a ground bass for poetry which lies deep in Bishop’s consciousness—­a piping in threes which hints at something continuous and distant, even imaginary—­“(or are you hearing t­ hings)”—­which returns like a noise in her ears, faint as bird calls. To say it three times is an insistence which might mean less rather than more, or mean more for being less, as it empties meaning into a hum or beat or magical charm. “Twelfth Morning” is a kind of epiphany too, though containing only one king, the poor boy, Balthazár, who bears on his head a “four-­ gallon can” of ­water which flashes in the sunlight. Balthazár sings with lordly assurance as he carries his offering of fresh ­water in this nearly sea-­drowned place. But t­ here is no savior in the poem, and no guiding star. Instead, t­ here is another presence, anomalous, outsize, and curiously incidentally impor­tant: “­Don’t ask the big white h ­ orse, Are you supposed / to be inside the fence or out? He’s still asleep,” Bishop writes. Was she recalling Frost’s “Mending Wall,” another poem which ponders the prob­lem of “What I was walling in or walling out?” Keeping ­things in or out is difficult for poets. Certainly, poems have walls or fences intended to contain their content, w ­ hether cows or a white ­horse. But Bishop’s rickety fence, which collapses into its pointlessly turned corner, lets out as much as it keeps in, for her ­horse is not only “big” but “bigger than the ­house,” somehow larger than life. H ­ ere too, it seems, t­ here are elves about, undermining fences and walls, t­hose dividing lines that keep a poem sane and sensible, and ­horses in their place. Bishop may also be remembering, as ­Eleanor Cook (1998: 175–176) has noted, another puzzling epiphany: T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi.” Although much more

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weighted with biblical allegory, it too contains a line which seems to get out, escaping the religious symbolism and moral of the journey: “And an old white ­horse galloped away in the meadow” (2015: I. 101). Galloped where? Why? This “old white ­horse,” like Bishop’s “big white h ­ orse,” ­w ill not be fenced into the poem which should contain him. It is as if some irrelevant, gate-­crashing ele­ment, some surreal or too real white h ­ orse escaped the theological fences of both poems. Not mending walls well enough, and letting the elves in, seems to be in the very nature of what poetry can do. ­  there’s nothing in nor out o’ the world Good except truth: yet this, the something ­else, What’s this then, which proves good yet seems untrue?   (1971: 41) So asks the tricksy narrator of Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book. The only good is “truth,” he pronounces, but then immediately admits an exception: “the something e­ lse,” what­ever it is, which is still only a question: “What’s this then . . . ?” “Only for something I ­don’t know,” sang St. John of the Cross. Against “truth,” this “something ­else” still presses its claims, not in Keats’s easy ­s yllogism, but more deviously, indirectly, troublingly. ­There’s the good, the true—­and then “something e­ lse.” The word that wants to be substituted is, of course, the old third of the trio, “beauty”; but Browning, like some of his ­later descendants, is reluctant to name it. Three years before her death, Bishop was reminded, on rereading one of her poems, that “yes, all my life I have lived and behaved very much like that sandpiper—­just ­r unning along the edges of dif­fer­ent countries and continents, ‘looking for something’ ” (2008: 731–732). In the poem called “Sandpiper,” the bird is “watching his toes,” or —­Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them, where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains [ . . . ​]   [ . . . ​] His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied, looking for something, something, something. Poor bird, he is obsessed! (125–126)

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Like Boomer, whose “eyes searched the sand” (575) for the “fine prints” (580) of newspapers or birds’ feet, so h ­ ere, the poet-­bird searches for “something.” “(no detail too small),” Bishop explains in another advisory parenthesis, as if summing up her own art. What does a sandpiper look for? Lugworms, prob­ably. But of course, it’s not worms but something ­else which lures this par­t ic­u­lar bird. And not only “something” but, like “faint, faint, faint,” it’s “something, something, something.” This is the old beat, in both senses: it is the place of potentially devastating seas and maddening choices, where only sandpipers with their asterisking feet manage to survive the universal flood, and it is also a rhythm of t­riple repeats luring the poet on, by a route which is not the straight road to truth but the to-­and-­f ro darting of a bird hunting for food. Jamie McKendrick has noted the connections between Bishop’s poem and Frost’s “For Once, Then, Something,” both of which contain, as he summarizes, “the presence of quartz and three somethings” (2002: 134). I would add that t­ here might be yet another echo in this poem—an echo which links it, by a chain reaction, to a long recurrent story in lit­er­a­t ure: “How to keep [  .  .  . ​]  /  Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, . . .”—­“something, something, something.” Too impor­tant to discuss, that haunting word, in par­t ic­u­lar the trochaic rhythm of it, lay deep in Bishop’s consciousness, supplying, perhaps at one remove, the ­t riple, compulsive movements of her sandpipery searches. The echo may be “faint, faint, faint,” and, it is true, you may say I am “hearing ­t hings,” but I suggest that “something” carries in its sound-­bones the idea of an object constantly sought for, longed for, believed in, even if, sometimes, too precious to name. For both Frost and Bishop, that object is no longer the aesthetes’ boldly named abstraction, “beauty,” but some tentative close relation, open-­ended, unfenced in its reference, uncertain and beyond knowing: the old je ne sais quoi which provides the poet with yet another version of what must still be kept from vanishing away. What­ever it is, “something” offers t­ hese two poets an object which cannot satisfy, yet cannot be done without; which is ineffable, yet constantly requires putting into words. Such a word is almost nothing more than a sound, a rhythm, or the memory of a rhythm, which sets the poet listening again

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to the “faint, faint, faint” echoes of itself, deep set in the poetic tradition. a a a

Perhaps, for literary critics too, the nature of beauty is not to be located, named, and defined once and for all; is not to be too much fenced into its ideological or philosophical place, but is always something other, “something I ­don’t know,” which instigates, inspires, and then recharges the act of interpretation. As Denis Donoghue puts it in Speaking of Beauty, “A theory of beauty would be a good ­t hing to have, if it could be secured without ideological insistence” (2003: 25). Perhaps I would suggest, not even necessarily “without ideological insistence,” but rather at a necessary tangent to it, so that beauty remains a space, a hiatus, a puzzle, within the vari­ous pleadings of our critical discourse. To re­spect that space is to find a way of writing about lit­er­a­ture which itself aspires to literariness, to telling a story about a story, in defiance of the fashionably transient ideologies of the day. It may be that this awkward, embarrassing “je ne sais quoi” of the literary text is the very t­hing that both rebuffs and rescues the act of interpretation. It is, on the one hand, a call to humility in relation to the text, but it is also, on the other, a call to perpetual, inventive answerability. To lose sight of it, or to let it out of our hearing, is to lose the very t­ hing that gives lit­er­a­t ure its value and power. That such a ­thing might be no more than just “something,” no more, no less, also of course saves it from becoming another “theory” bound by “ideological insistence.” This word, “beauty,” then, is both an inexhaustible subject and nothing but a word. It has the richness of the long philosophical and critical tradition b ­ ehind it—­a tradition which has always theorized how art is read and perceived; but it is also as empty as a tin can, rattling small change in the by-­ways of aesthetic history. It is, moreover, a word which has been in and out of fashion at dif­fer­ent times. For much of the nineteenth ­century, it was a name dropped at ­ every opportunity, invoked, hymned, analyzed, justified. For much of the twentieth c­ entury, however, its use has been more circumspect: sometimes dismissed as a silliness, an anachronism,

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hedged about with ironies, disclaimers, and sometimes challenged by its serious alternatives: responsibility, relevance, purpose, truth. But t­ here is no getting away from the fact that beauty, and the idea of beauty, go to the heart of something that the artist needs and the critic should not ignore—­something absurd, wild, frivolous, elusive, but as necessary to the act of creation as that “something, something, something” which is, ­after all, food for thought (as well as a kind of food for sandpipers). In 1987, at a time when the word might have seemed at its lowest ebb of popularity, Jorie Graham brought out a volume of poetry called The End of Beauty. It is a title which quibbles nicely between two senses of an ending: is this the finish of beauty’s tradition, or is beauty still the destination? Are we looking back at something ended, or forward to an end not yet in sight? The volume then makes play of the word, asking in one poem, “Pollock and Canvas,” “Oh but we wanted to paint what is not beauty, how can one paint what is not beauty . . . ?” (1987: 84). Once again, the word “beauty” is followed by the inarticulate breakdown, or by the unending possibilities, of dot, dot, dot. Hopkins’s own “beauty, . . .” lives on in the (not quite) end of beauty in both con­temporary poet and painter, h ­ ere. In the final poem of the volume, “Imperialism,” Graham takes the opposite tack, however, and discovers “a plot, a / shape, one of the finished ­things, one of the  //  beauties (hear it click shut?)” (98). Beauty, alongside its equally ghostly technical term, “form,” slips in and out of ­these poems like a haunting. When, in the voice of the painter Jackson Pollock, she asks “what is not beauty,” the grammar of the sentence looks both ways: ­toward a desired “not beauty” and ­toward its impossibility: “how can one paint” without aspiring to beauty? Beauty, it seems, might be the only alternative to what lies outside the work itself: “not beauty.” In “Imperialism”—­a title which could not be more ideologically insistent—­beauty may be a shaping and finishing, or a clicking shut. “(hear it click shut?),” Graham asks, making the box vis­i­ble in ­those bracketing parentheses, but also leaving the box a l­ittle open, as parentheses are. Like Bishop’s “(or are you hearing ­t hings),” Graham reminds us that hearing belongs in brackets, with a question mark, as if she ­were drawing a parenthetical ear, but also signaling the curbing wall or door round which

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we might have to listen. That beauty should not be “one of the finished t­ hings,” and not “click shut,” is nonetheless the desire of the poem and the w ­ hole volume. Against the “click shut” of words, which closes them down into moralized boxes, the sense of “beauties” may still have a role to play, even if followed by a question mark, or by that marked path of continuing ellipses. One last poem from this volume, called “Noli Me Tangere,” considers the touch of Mary Magdalene and the risen Christ—­a touch forbidden in the biblical story, but h ­ ere achieved in words. Once again, Graham resorts to the word “beauty” as if to the longed-­for destination of her own artistry: “I’ve listened where the words and the minutes would touch, / I’ve tried to hear in that slippage what / beauty is—” (42). That “beauty” might be, not the beauty of the risen body, long apotheosized in art history, but a “slippage” that is barely an object, and then only an object heard or listened for—­ “I’ve listened,” “I’ve tried to hear”—is a means of taking it out of the realm of the tangible altogether. For the poet, as opposed to the painter, beauty lies in ­t hose places where something slips: the visual into the aural, objectivity into audibility, body into word, as well as word into a dash. Christ’s command, “Do not touch me,” instigates the moment when beauty is no longer focused, sexually or visually, on its object, but instead becomes a “slippage” between words—­a “slippage” to tune up poet’s and reader’s ears to what might be heard, even if only heard in the blank, unfinished dash which follows its naming and leaves the definition unspoken: “what / beauty is—.” Beauty, then, is like poetry’s other odd reroutings of attention, where something we thought we understood turns into something hard to hear. “I’ve listened,” “I’ve tried to hear,” is Graham’s cautionary explanation to the reader, who may still be trying to catch (or even touch) the drift. But the drift is precisely what you cannot catch, at least not with any hand or eye. The drift is what escapes, evades, but goes on tantalizing the ear like something always about to be disclosed. Yet hearing ­t hings, especially hearing this one, historically recurring something, remains the poet’s aim and purpose. In their dif­fer­ent ways, Frost, Bishop, and Graham all keep the notion of beauty alive, even if alive as a secret, devious sense within

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the poem. To understand such beauty as nothing more than just “For once, then, something,” or as “something, something, something,” or as “that slippage” where the ear sidetracks what is merely truthful, might be the best way to keep it one of lit­er­a­t ure’s recurringly elusive and desired goals.

8  “Wherever You Listen From”: W. S. Graham’s Art of the Letter For what is a letter, but to speak one’s thoughts at a distance? Which is why poems and prayers are letters. mary ruefle Sing sing sing are you listening can you hear me I ­can’t breathe it’s cold it’s cold comfort calling and calling . . . michael symons roberts Meanwhile surely t­ here must be something to say, Maybe not suitable but at least happy In a sense h ­ ere between us two whoever We are. (Graham 2004: 161–162) The opening line of W.  S. Graham’s poem “The Constructed Space” raises expectations of ­matter and purpose which are soon quashed. Finding “something to say” as if intimately from one friend to another, “between us two,” is not ultimately this poet’s aim or wish, as he goes on to explain, “This is a public place / Achieved against subjective odds and then / Mainly an obstacle to what I mean” (162). Such a space, which is also “an obstacle,” has nothing to do with the poet’s “subjective” wish to “say,” or indeed with any predetermining intentions or meanings. Instead, the poem is “public,” open to and inhabitable by many, its form of communication an exercise in shared senses. Above all, once constructed, the poem overrides the claims of t­ hose “subjective odds,” becoming instead “an obstacle to what I mean.” Meaning, then, is not disclosed but blocked by the poem, which is a ­t hing both empty as “Space” and solid as an

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“obstacle.” This nice conundrum, of a constructed space into which we might bump but within which we might also range freely, imagines the poem as both containing and open, both full and empty, both authored by the wish for “something to say,” yet lost in the “public place” which it becomes and which is open to all the dif­fer­ent pronouns that might claim it. For all its abstraction, then, this space does also contain h ­ uman presences, between which ­t here is a kind of communication, transaction, or exchange. The poem happens, and might be “happy,” in all its senses of lucky and content, “­here between us two whoever / We are,” Graham writes invitingly. This space is where intelligences might meet, and where an “I” still calls for the attention of a “you,” even if without obligations of intention, purpose, or identity. We ­don’t know much about this space except that, at least for a time, we are in it, “whoever / We are.” The weight of that “whoever” qualifies, as it does so often in Graham’s writings, the interaction of his pronouns, so that “We” is already a question about who “We are.” Fi­nally, the poetic space is constructed, like a formal box or design of language, in order that “somehow something,” what­ever it is (perhaps just another je ne sais quoi or sense of beauty?) might ­ride the “habits of language to you and me” (162) and make it stranger than we think. It is the deeply distrusted, yet also urgent, sense of “you and me” in Graham, which makes his poetry and prose so personally and dramatically arresting, while also remaining impersonal and self-­d istant. For all its blank and abstract openness, “The Constructed Space” registers a tussle between pronouns, between the “whoever / We are” of an “I,” a “you,” or a “We,” who might still strug­gle to communicate in the “habits of language.” Such a strug­gle might meet nothing but an “obstacle”; nevertheless, it is the threesome of writer, poem, and reader which makes that “obstacle” expressive and directed, as well as strange and resistant. The poem, with its public dramas and its loose fit of pronouns, may not therefore be too dif­fer­ent from its related form: the epistolary missive. a a a

The art of the letter has always lurked in the shadows of lit­er­a­t ure proper. For critics, a rich source of biographical information, giver

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of names, places, dates, the letter also offers an insight into notionally unguarded communication, still bound by an assumption of privacy. The letters of writers may also, of course, be trea­sure troves of first thoughts, trial runs, experiments in thinking and writing which have not yet found their “public place.” Yet already in our culture the letter as intimate object, addressed to you, signed by me, sealed and sent on a journey, may seem to have become a ­dying art. ­Perhaps it has been d ­ ying for some time. More than two de­cades ago, Frank Kermode and Anita Kermode, in The Oxford Book of Letters, observed that the form was u ­ nder threat from the telephone, fax, and email (1995: xix); t­oday we might add even more forms of instant communication. Although some might still write emails to look like letters, addressing, spacing and signing them with the old formalities, the product is essentially dif­fer­ent. It is not just the absence of an enclosed, handled object; it is also the difference in time. For the letter must travel to reach its reader, the message dependent on its delivery. This sense of time taken and space overcome defined the letter long before other modes of communication threw it into ­relief. In her own open Letter to a Young Poet, ­Virginia Woolf, for instance, recalled the opinion of “the old gentleman [who] used to say” that the “penny post [ . . . ​] has killed the art of letter-­writing” (1932: 182). Started in 1840, the penny post already appeared to some too speedy and cheap a method of delivery for the gravitas of the letter. Something about the weighty substance of the form is defined by the ­labor of time taken: the time it takes to write, but also to send, to be received, to be read, pondered, and answered. Between missive and response ­t here is a lag, itself defining the object which must cross it. That ele­ment of delay may sometimes have been terribly resonant. For instance, all of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s letters to her f­ ather ­after her elopement w ­ ere returned to her at his death, unopened, even the one edged in black to signify a death. T ­ hose sealed letters express, more harshly than anything, how the letter’s mute appeal might also be refused—­a refusal strengthened and renewed, year ­after year, in the fact that ­t hese ­were also kept, unopened. Another Elizabeth, Elizabeth Bishop, knew the emotional trauma of letters arrived too late. She once received a postcard from a repudiated lover who had, meantime, committed suicide. The card read, pointedly,

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“Go to hell, Elizabeth” (in Millier 1993: 112). In her poem “The Bight,” the double meaning of “old correspondences” haunts the work, creating an uncanny connection between the subtitle “On my birthday” (2008: 46–47), the storm-­wrecked white boats in the harbor, and the “torn-­open, unanswered letters” on her desk with which they are compared. “The bight is littered with old correspondences” (47), she observes of the boats, while letting the puns in “littered” and “correspondences” pile up their call for attention and answers, against  the mainly visual emphasis of the poem. Although the phrase “like torn-­open, unanswered letters” is only a figure for white, storm-­tossed boats, the subtitle tells another story. Is “my birthday” the day on which Bishop looks out at the bight, the day she composes her poem about it, or the day on which she receives letters and correspondences which stay on her desk, and perhaps in her mind? ­A fter the eagerness of “torn-­open,” the sudden temporizing of “unanswered letters”—­what has happened between opening and not answering?—­hints that other ­things, as well as boats, might not be “sal­vaged [ . . . ​] from the last bad storm” (47). That letters are like boats only works if that “last bad storm” provides the connecting link: a wrecking which leaves boats unusable and letters unanswerable. The poem’s date, “On my birthday,” is thus stressed and darkened by letters (or are they cards?) “torn-­open, unanswered”—­reactions full of their own stormy expectations, fears, and desires—­and by that coma between the two words, which may signal the time they take to read, or a lifetime, or the time of not being able to answer any more. Letters, then, are creatures of time: the time they take to be written, delivered, opened, read, replied to, or perhaps just left unnervingly lying ­t here. As a result, t­ here is a potential dead letter at the heart of ­every missive: “cries like dead letters sent / To dearest him that lives, alas! away” (1967: 101), Hopkins once wrote. That “dearest him,” ­whether friend, f­ ather, fellow-­artist, muse, lover, or God, makes the letter difficult and precious, hopeful and risky, longing and ex­pec­ tant, precisely by being addressed “away.” That a literal “Dead Letter Office” existed at this time, for mail incorrectly addressed and to be returned to sender, highlights the oddness of Hopkins’s phrasing: “like dead letters sent” suggests almost an intention and foresight of misdelivery, as if the address ­were too strange and far to be known,

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and the letter already “dead” before “sent.” As John Durham Peters suggests, in Speaking into the Air, in acts of communication “such elliptical sending is as impor­tant as circular reciprocity” (1999: 152). Certainly, as a form of communication, the letter is always to some extent thrown to chance, to the delays of time and to the vagaries of a destination that cannot be guaranteed. Its intimate direct speech may remain unreceived, unanswered, even by a “dearest him,” and its route only lead to another Dead Letter Office. In trying to define the art of the letter, critics and poets have strug­ gled with a form as elusive as it seems specific. Tom Paulin, in “Writing to the Moment,” asks if ­t here is “a poetics of the familiar letter?” and answers in the negative, that letters “construct themselves on an anti-­aesthetic, a refusal of the literary” (1996: 216). His “to the Moment” identifies letter writing as largely improvisatory, immediate, personal, spurning the l­abor of finish which marks the aesthetic work. The “gifted correspondent has to appear negligent of effect” (228), he explains. His phrasing, however, betrays the very opposite, since “to appear negligent of effect” already sounds like a worked-­for effect of negligence, as onerous, perhaps, as writing a poem. Paulin’s very definition ends up undermining the category it is meant to serve. By contrast, Bishop’s own proposal for a seminar series on the epistolary form once summarized the subject as “just letters—as an art form or something” (1994: 544). However throwaway—­and her se­lection of letters would include one literally thrown away, “found in the street” (545)—­her category, “an art form or something,” is both artful and whimsical. Langdon Hammer, in an article on Bishop’s letters and poems, argues that the “personal letter exists on the threshold of lit­er­a­ture, where ordinary and literary ­discourses interact” (1997: 163), though the distinction between “ordinary” and “literary” is never made clear. This “generic indeterminacy” (164), he claims, marks a poem like Bishop’s “The End of March,” which uses the language “of a letter to one’s self, ­really a kind of muttering” (176). But of course, “muttering,” like hums or murmurs or other forms of indistinctly heard speech, may be just as expressive a form of communication. Rilke once wrote to his close confidant, Lou Andreas-­Salomé, “This might be, between us, the right moment a­ fter all to push a few half-­words, murmurish as they

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are, out onto the old accustomed leaves” (2006: 234). His correspondent then duly acknowledged the communicable power of mere murmuring: “Your ‘murmurish’ words murmured so many ­ things to me—­t hank you for them!” (235) she replied. No sooner are distinctions made, between aesthetic and nonaesthetic, monologue and ­dialogue, between murmurish murmurs and purposeful communication, than their dividing lines start to wobble. The letter may hesitate between them, slipping from one to the other as the writer changes tack, or even as the receiver chooses or refuses to interpret it. Examples of this thin line might be found anywhere in the work of the g ­ reat duos of epistolary writing: Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Hopkins and Bridges, Frost and Untermeyer, Bishop and Lowell, Rilke and Andreas-­Salomé. The letter may be the place where a poem takes shape, where lines of poetry emerge from the prose, where talking to another becomes talking to oneself and vice versa, and therefore where generic distinctions break down. As Jonathan Ellis points out, acknowledging Jolly and Stanley’s s­ eminal essay, “Letters as / not genre,” “blurring categories and distinctions is the hallmark of literary letter writing” (2015: 11). Moreover, the fact that both poem and letter invoke or yearn for an ­addressee, named or implicit, familiar or stranger, also suggests that between poetic and epistolary modes distinctions are not hard-­a nd-­fast. William W ­ aters, extending Jonathan Culler’s association of lyric and address, argues that lyrical poetry is “not so much a stable communicative situation as a chronic hesitation, a faltering, between monologue and dialogue, between ‘talking about’ and ‘talking to,’ third and second person, indifference to interlocutors and the yearning to have one” (2003: 8). It would not be hard to extend this to the letter’s own “chronic hesitation” between an addressed “you,” who may be a real person, and a “you” who is merely a pretext for talking to oneself; between a language of heartfelt directness and one of composed literariness. Jacques Derrida, in his own epistolary exploration of the letter form in La Carte Postale, acknowledges at the start the switch-­back tactics of the epistolary address:

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The word—­apostrophizes—­speaks of the words addressed to the singular one, a live interpellation (the man of discourse or writing interrupts the continuous development of the sequence, abruptly turns ­toward someone, that is, something, addresses himself to you), but the word also speaks of the address to be detoured. (1987: 4) It is a tortuous sentence, but its very shifting insinuations hint at the timescale of the letter by which intentions are changed. So the ­“singular one,” perhaps the individually named and known addressee, becomes in the course of the sentence “someone,” then merely “something,” then a generalized “you” from whom the address itself is fi­nally “to be detoured.” Refusing to be caught on the hooks of personal identity, of a specified I and you, Derrida characteristically lets the writing invoke and negate them—­a having it both ways which is typical of the methods of deconstruction, but might also be typical of the letter form. If address is the mainspring of the letter, its defining rationale and purpose, it may also be the source of its continually readdressing sidetracks. For the letter also contains a “chronic hesitation, a faltering, between monologue and dialogue, between ‘talking about’ and ‘talking to’ ” (­Waters 2003: 8)​—in other words, a hesitation about the extent to which anyone might be ­t here, or be interested, or be reached at all. For the letter must not only be written but also sent, and in that sending meet all the risks of delay, misdelivery, indifference, or outright refusal from its addressee. Against that danger, the letter, like the poem, might hedge its bets “between monologue and dialogue, between ‘talking about’ and ‘talking to,’ third and second person, indifference to interlocutors and the yearning to have one” (2003: 8). To turn at this point to one of the g ­ reat letter writers among poets, W. S. Graham, is to find all ­these nuances and contradictions at work. The publication of his Selected Letters in 1999 has only increased the standing of this once neglected, but increasingly admired poet. A Scot, born in Greenock, who lived most of his life in Cornwall, Graham was cut off from many of the literary movements of his time. He took his artistic bearings, instead, from paint­ers and sculptors, particularly ­t hose of the St. Ives school who lived nearby and

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whom he came to know: Roger Hilton, Terry Frost, John Minton, Ben Nicholson, Peter Lanyon, and Bryan Wynter. Although Graham was often living within walking or cycling distance of them, he would nevertheless write to them: letters of apology, anguish, argument, concern, or sheer delicious bravura. At the start, it seems, he was driven by loneliness. Living in a friend’s ramshackle caravan in 1943, he writes rather forlornly to Ben Nicholson, “I’ve been h ­ ere three months and I would like to talk to someone. I’m quite alone ­here. Could I please visit you” (1999: 16). That theme of loneliness then becomes a recurring motif: “I’m afraid I’m at a lonely low wretched ebb. [ . . . ​] I h ­ aven’t seen a soul over Christmas and new year” (78), he grumbles in 1949. A year ­later he muses to the Scottish poet, Edwin Morgan, “What do I write to say? I ­don’t know. I ­haven’t spoken to anyone for five days” (118). In 1958, he apologizes: “Forgive me how I go on for com­pany,” but also points out, “I’m terribly desperate for a pair of shoes or boots” (156). His practical needs ­were sometimes as exigent as his need for com­pany. In 1975 he is still harping on loneliness: “Of course, maybe I’m just lonely and I must write something” (297). By 1979 he can sum up: “I am an expert of aloneness” (356). Unfortunately, Graham was not a conserver of paper—he burned swathes of letters and manuscripts, and when he moved h ­ ouse tended just to walk out, leaving the door wide open—so ­little remains of the return correspondence. Yet for all his pleading, t­ hese letters do not immediately elicit an answer, and the loneliness they bewail is never assuaged. Indeed, it comes to seem the condition for writing at all, as if the yearning to find a listener, a reader, an addressee ­were the mainspring for such epistolary outpourings. The “chronic hesitation [ . . . ​] between monologue and dialogue” (2003: 8) which ­Waters attributes to the lyric becomes, in ­t hese letters, an almost flirtatious game of need and rejection, asking and refusing, a playing fast-­and-­ loose with a “you” already half-­invented for the purpose of having someone to address. “In this letter do not expect anything direct,” Graham explains. “I am only practising how to speak to speak myself out of myself ” (1999: 297). T ­ here is a sense in which he was courting the long-­distance communication of the letter, not in order to say something or to beg for com­pany or boots, but in order to learn “how to speak to speak.” And such speech was not to get “out

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of myself,” in the familiar phrase, but rather more circuitously, “to speak myself out of myself.” This strange kind of “self out of myself ” is less an escape from “self ” than a rediscovery or reinvention of it. Graham’s curious epipsychidion depends on practicing epistolary evasions from which his correspondent must learn not to “expect anything direct.” In spite of ­t hese cries of loneliness, Michael Snow, the editor of the letters, has confessed his surprise at discovering how many artists Graham knew. He gives a vivid account of his own first visit to the poet in the late 1950s when, trying to conduct an interview, he found his questions increasingly ignored and rerouted. Instead of answering, Graham would slip into a bizarre unstoppable monologue, a game of self-­invention in which he became, “in quick succession, a Red Indian chief, an explorer trudging through the snow, or Livingstone lost in the jungle[. . . . ​] At intervals he would burst into song, Scottish ballads or snatches of operatic arias, sung with g ­ reat voice and considerable feeling” (2002: 11). Anything so straightforward as an interview had to be met and parried by voices, voices intent on an entirely other game of imaginary identity. Some idea of what this might have been like is found in a letter to Anthony Astbury of 1978, which suddenly swerves without warning or apology into one of Graham’s explorer fantasies: Why did I set out anyhow on this white hell of a journey? Who to find? [ . . . ​] The dogs have very good been. Remember them. I had to eat Jessie. It was necessary. She was unusually tough (I’ve eaten dogs before in China, on the banks of Yangtze in a barge-­haulers’ village [ . . . ​] where I was summoned by Ezra Pound to help him translate but I fell into the midnight ­water of the moon and was not a g ­ reat help.) but a certain part which ­shall not be mentioned went down alright. Please ­don’t think I am unhappy. The dogs have been very good. I almost ate you the night before last but I realised ­t here ­wouldn’t be anybody to write to. (1999: 343) This weird farrago of hunger, heroism, and arctic loneliness—­themes which recur in much of the poetry—­suggests that speaking “myself out of myself ” was both second nature and a rich source of invention.

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The hapless correspondent can only be a passive onlooker (or on-­ listener), or, worse, more meat to the story—­though not yet eaten, for the good reason that “­there ­wouldn’t be anybody to write to.” The logic is wild, but also oddly purposeful, for the tale needs a listener, the letter an addressee, even while, as Natalie Pollard points out, “poking fun at the notion of a stable specificity of address” (2012: 53). Somebody out ­t here is needed to alleviate and justify the loneliness of the traveler-­writer, or rather, not somebody but, once again, “anybody”: “­there ­wouldn’t be anybody to write to.” Just “anybody” might do, so long as ­t here is some leash out into the world of ­ordinary facts and other lives. In this game of epistolary derring-do, hilarious in the sanity of its madness, the recipient of the letter is only another interchangeable game-­player, whose role is to be “anybody” to the poet’s own, perpetually recast “myself.” From this imaginary place, where the only rescue from the demands of Ezra Pound’s ­t ranslations might indeed be the madman’s “midnight ­water of the moon,” the poet casts himself as letter writer, while also making mincemeat of the epistolary conventions of address: “I almost ate you the night before last.” As Michael Snow hints—­h is own surname only more grist to Graham’s imaginative mill—it was not the most grateful form of communication for the poet’s friends. Indeed, friends who received missives like this might be forgiven for assuming Graham was drunk. Certainly, drink took its toll of inspiration and energy among the artistic community in Cornwall. The poet Arthur Caddick recalls being disturbed one night by a noise outside, and finding “Sydney [Graham], with Ruth Hilton, and a ­bottle of Scotch” in “a clump of artichokes” at the bottom of the garden. Invited in, the response was less than grateful: “Sydney, in full voice, harangued me on prosody till half-­past three” (2004: 148). Roger Hilton’s second wife, Rose, has blamed Graham for enticing the painter into drink-­f ueled, wasted days, often three times a week. “I am such a shy man,” Graham once admitted, “I have to take to the drink to meet somebody” (1999: 278). The relationship with Hilton, fond, inspiring, abusive, quarrelsome, became increasingly violent till, for the last three years of Hilton’s life, they ceased to meet altogether. “All this virile anger and destruction,” Graham once accused his friend. “Why not somehow say it through your paintings”

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(235). One painting by Hilton which might be saying it is called “Elephants Fighting.” With a wonderfully absurd ferocity, it shows a ­couple of circus elephants, tusk to tusk in b ­ attle, in front of some minimally drawn tents. It is now owned by another artist, Maggi Hambling, who explains, “I’d had it on the wall for at least three months before I realized that ­t here was a line of writing in it—­across the painting just above the centre. It reads ‘­women and ­children last,’ which made me laugh” (in Lambirth 2007: 254). T ­ hose half-­v isible words b ­ ehind the paint might be quietly acknowledging Graham’s accusation, noting the cost to “­women and ­children” of their friendship’s bull aggression. For all her regrets about their drunken quarrels, however, Rose Hilton also admitted that “ ‘Roger loved Sydney’ ” (in Lambirth 2007: 211). ­There was a deep, tormenting bond between them, which is evident in the tussles of the letters. Graham begins one of them, “My dear (are you my dear?) Roger, across the moors and roads like lines [ . . . ]” (1999: 234), and signs off, increasingly without punctuation: “Are you a man or a dog? But I like you fine as you are do I maybe ­don’t ask me I think y­ ou’re spiffing” (235). So the double-­talk goes on, love / hate, endearment / abuse, man / dog. Meanwhile that key word, “lines,” not only makes a connection between painting and poetry, arts of the vis­i­ble line, but also reminds us that “roads like lines” lead out, and must take time to travel along. Such lines ­w ill be taken by the written lines of the letter itself, which must go in time “across the moors and roads” ­towards the dear friend or ­enemy living “alas! away.” So the love letter recalls its saving, perhaps permissive distance: the time taken in lines of writing, and then in lines of delivery, before it reaches the beloved, difficult addressee. From the safety of that epistolary distance, it may be pos­si­ble to say such ­things as “My dear (are you my dear?)” without locking horns or taking to drink. In another letter to Hilton, Graham follows up the declaration “I do not know ­whether I love you or not” with an aside which shows him typically ducking into indirections. He won­ders, “How can anything be said from one man to another? The sent-­out meaning always goes somewhere astray in the saying.” Then, as if to show just how that straying goes, he adds, “The man on the radio has just given

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the synopsis of the next act [ . . . ​]. He says something like ‘and ­really ­under the guise of the female castrato she falls in love with Belovio who is ­really her aunt in the guise of a painter’ ” (221). Quite who falls in love with whom in t­ hese letters is no easier to decode. Shape-­ shifting, sex-­changing, game-­playing, the daft plot of a romantic opera suits Graham’s games of verbal disguise. So “the sent-­out meaning,” the direct address of “­whether I love you or not,” goes happily astray, taking that Derridaean detour of the apostrophe away into the mad pantomime of “ ‘­really her aunt in the guise of a painter.’ ” Who is “­really” who is not a question to be ascertained and fixed by the conventions of address, by an I who writes and a you who responds. Instead, the private twosomes of the letter are exploded by Graham into the imagination’s multiplying word games and identity shifts. Nor is this merely a m ­ atter of emotionally self-­protective male jousting—­jousting which, in the absence of Hilton’s replies, seems like tilting at shadows—it is also a deep-­seated resource of Graham’s writing. The letter form gives him scope to act out a drama, premised on the necessary loneliness of the act of writing, in which every­t hing is up for invention, including the real-­life players. As Graham puts it, a ­little more demotically, “Who the fucking hell am I anyhow? Do not answer. Ever” (221). It might also be a question and instruction to that other reader of literary letters who is always peeping over the shoulder of the named addressee: the ­f uture literary critic. Graham’s early essay, “Notes on a Poetry of Release” (1946), in which he first defines his poetics, contains two words which w ­ ill ­become central to his practice: “line” and “obstacle.” “I try to remember ­those adventures along t­hose lines of words” (382), he ­declares, characteristically turning calligraphic lines into “adventures.” He also points out that “All the poet’s knowledge and experience [ . . . ​] is contained in the language which is obstacle and vehicle at the same time” (380). Like that “obstacle” in “The Constructed Space”—­“mainly an obstacle to what I mean” (2004: 162)—­language ­here is vehicular access and roadblock at once. T ­ hose “lines of words,” on the one hand, go somewhere; on the other hand, they block the easy way. A favorite line of Graham’s, which recurs in letters and poems, seems to encapsulate this ambiguity. “I fall down

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darkness in a line of words” (222), he writes to Hilton, quoting from a poem written many years before, “No, Listen, for this I Tell.” To fall down a line is, of course, both to follow the linear way of words on the page, to their end or conclusion, and to fall into a “darkness,” or “down darkness,” which might never end. A “line of words” is both what the poet might travel by, but also what he might fall forever into, never emerging again into the light. If writing is a line on the page, to “fall” in it is to know that poetry’s directions, though still lines in time, have nothing to do with narrative consequentiality or with final elucidation. Lines may be precipices into “darkness,” plunging out of their level ways. However, ­there is another reason why the line should signify for Graham. It is a word which brings together the literal act of writing, the visual arts of the drawn line, with which he had become so familiar in St. Ives, but also the line of sound which carries in poetry. This becomes clear in a poem which, like so many o ­ thers, takes its title from the form of a letter: “Dear Who I Mean” (2004: 160–161). This “Dear Who,” like that other “whoever / We are” (2004: 161–162), questions the very assumptions of address, for it sends out a poetic missive to some unnamed “Dear”—­“(are you my dear?)”—­both addressed, yet with no known name or address, both directed, yet anonymous. And the missive he sends is then figured as a kite, which suddenly falls: Dear who I mean but more Than ­because of the lonely stumble In the spiked bramble a­ fter The wrecked dragon caught In the five high singing wires Its tail twisting the wind Into visibility, I turn To where is it you lodge Now at the other end Of this letter let out On the end of its fine string [ . . . ​] (2004: 160) Made in part of “printed paper” (161), this poem-­letter-­k ite first goes out and up into the wind. Graham may be recalling Dickens’s poetic

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alter ego, Mr.  Dick, in David Copperfield, who also lets his manuscripts fly, but Graham’s kite flyer seems less a­ dept, and the poem starts already ­after “the lonely stumble / In the spiked bramble.” The speaker has met an obstacle which trips him up, and the kite has  snagged. For “language [ . . . ​] is obstacle and vehicle at the same time.” This is not necessarily a misdirected poem, wrecked and lost in its delivery, but one which needs precisely “the lonely stumble” of its author in order to hold its distant reader lodged, somewhere, “at the other end.” The poem-­as-­letter works by keeping its reader at bay, encountered beyond the stumbling block of itself, which also calls to be heard. ­After all, “Dear who I mean” is “more / Than ­because of the lonely stumble”—­more dear, it seems, ­because held at arm’s length, beyond the place where language, though “let out / On the end of its fine string,” collapses. From that place “at the other end,” the dear reader does not receive a very clear message or even a very bright dragon, but rather something e­ lse, like a flat-­packed toy to “Reassemble”: “You might even / Reassemble for your own sake / A dragon” (161), Graham proposes. The reader’s dragon is not quite the writer’s, but one rescued somehow and put together again from the spiked torn version that was first sent out, but that fell down its own line into the dark of the brambly undergrowth. If this is, on the one hand, about the look of a line of writing on the page, it is also about language sounded. For the displaced message is caught and waylaid by wires overhead, which might be t­ hose of a telegraph or ­else of a stave: “five high singing wires,” Graham specifies, as if the kite’s twisting tail gets somehow transposed into ­music or messages on the way. On the one hand, the tail twists “the wind / Into visibility”; on the other, it catches on t­ hose “singing wires” and adds its own queer notation to the humming lines overhead. So the “fine string” of the kite, which sends a letter out to some “Dear who,” does not simply reach its object and ask to be read, but meets the obstacle which reroutes its meaning and snags it into sound. This rerouting of the letter (or kite) into a poem depends on this equivalent rerouting of the brightly vis­i­ble into the audible. The vis­i­ble dragon might be reassembled by the reader at the other end, but the poem’s sound, snagged in ­t hose overhead wires, is what the reader needs to listen for.

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So although Graham often draws on a paint­erly vocabulary, his sense of the musical ele­ment of poetry is as strong, or even stronger. He himself had a good singing voice; he once considered training as a professional singer and was an enthusiastic singer of part-­songs down at the pub. Certainly, musical imagery fills his letters. “My long poem [ . . . ​] becomes like the work of a composer [ . . . ​],” he writes to John Minton in 1945, “a kind of counterpointing idea ­going all through” (1999: 45). Elsewhere he writes, “Larks mount the invisible elevators of May coloraturawise” (126), where “elevators,” by being “invisible,” recover their older etymology, while making way for that brilliant figure of sound: “coloraturawise,” which contains both the color and the twist of its singing sound. When Graham writes about lines, he is as often hearing as seeing the object—as ­here where the spiral of “wise” carries the color-­sound of the voice’s “coloratura.” In another letter, he pauses to comment on the m ­ usic he hears on the radio. Of a Mozart violin concerto, he explains, “The violinist in this is so very exact and ‘clean’ in his playing. He makes almost a visual line in the air—­I think of Klee’s phrase—­‘taking a line for a walk’ ” (78). Like a dog, Klee’s hand-­drawn line is partly on a lead, partly g ­ oing its own way. For Graham, it has become a line of sound “in the air,” heard “almost” visually, but only “almost,” as if he wanted to save the paint­er’s line also for his own “mind’s ear” (162), and so describe the shape of a tune. Everywhere in ­t hese letters, visual meta­phors mix with aural ones, paint­ers tussle with musicians, as Graham seeks an explanation of poetry in which lines might configure synesthetically. “the ear speaks more than the tongue listen” (37), he expostulates to John Minton, returning to that mixed meta­phor of a listening that speaks, and thus commands a listening in return. That “the ear speaks” (like Valéry’s “His ear speaks to him” [1985: 174]), tunes us in to the speaking effect of silence—­not passive silence but a listening silence, a g ­ reat hall of silence, open to all the singing wires and wirelesses of poetry. Thus Graham’s own ear-­speaking taps into the written poem’s auditory pressure to be heard. As he writes in “Clusters Travelling Out,” a poem about tapping words in lines through the pipes of a prison or asylum’s wall, “I think I hear you hearing me” (2004: 192), as if what t­hose taps convey is less a decodable

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message than a s­haped quiet to be listened to from both sides. Through doors or walls, poetry carries its charge of significance, to and from the ear. For this poet, to take “ ‘a line for a walk,’ ” then, is to parade it not only on paper, visibly, and not only along the straight lines of grammar and signification, but also in the open vestibules of the listening ear. Poetry’s lines, it seems, are also fault lines, between sound and sense, ear and eye, listening and speaking. “Can you hear me tapping along the invisible lines?” (1999: 246), Graham once addressed his friend and patron, Robin Skelton, calling attention to the typewriter on which he tapped out his ringing-­visible lines of writing. The fierce injunction “Can you hear me [ . . . ​]?” not only collars its correspondent urgently, accusingly, but also opens up the spaces and times of the letter’s as yet unlistened-to art. Of course ­t here’s nobody ­t here, and of course no one can hear the poet “tapping.” The letter’s pres­ent tense creates a fiction of immediacy which assuages the loneliness of the long-­distance writer and implicates the absent reader in his games. But this fiction is also a wish writ large, the very lines of which only mea­sure the temporal and spatial ­distances between them. For the letter goes out on the off-­chance that ­there might be a listener eventually, somewhere, at the other end of the line. Meanwhile, however, ­there is only the delay, the longer or shorter time it takes for words to be delivered and heard. Letters have this in common with poems: that they constantly look for, even listen for, good listeners, while knowing that ­those ­will be not yet, not now, but only some time in the unknown ­future. The lines of Graham’s letters, like ­those of his poems, ask for a kind of listening across distances, walls, or doors—­obstacles which cause the message to be derailed, the dragon snagged on the way, the tapping distorted by the asylum’s old plumbing. While it is clear, therefore, that letters are often poems in the making for this poet, the equivalence also works in reverse. His poems are very often letters too, as their titles tell: “Three Letters,” “Seven Letters,” “The Eighth Letter,” “Letter X,” “A Note to the Difficult One,” “Dear Makar Norman,” “Dear Bryan Wynter,” “To My Wife at Midnight,” “How are the C ­ hildren Robin,” “Yours Truly,” “Dear Who I Mean,” “A Letter more likely to Myself.” The idea of a poem as an address to someone who cannot (yet) answer,

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who may not be t­ here and may not even exist, involves a knotty contradiction which Graham loves to tangle further. T ­ hese o ­ ught to be epistolary lyr­ics, directed to a known and named someone, and certainly their playful, loving, ragging tones suggest a reader who seems both intimate, and answerable to a message. But although constructed as direct addresses—­“How are the ­Children Robin”—­very often the address is lost (like the question mark ­here), the sent-­out meaning goes astray, and communication turns into something ­else, snarled in its own linguistic difficulty. Long before Derrida theorized the apostrophic detour of the letter, Graham was sending out t­ hese extraordinarily inventive, identity-­deregulating, address-­reassessing constructions. That such poems, with their indirections, their “chronic hesitation” between monologue and dialogue, come close to the methods of his letters suggests that distinctions between epistle and lyric, personal and impersonal, private and public are, for this poet, almost non­ex­is­tent. In one late letter to Robin Skelton, which also begs Skelton not to stop his regular payments for Graham’s manuscript worksheets, the signing-­off runs into a bizarre short story, thus crossing yet another divide between literary genres: “I ­w ill say cheerio farewell love to both now and begin a Graham’s Fury Tale and go till the paper O is all stopped” (1999: 290). The poet thus vents his fury at needing and begging for money, while producing another literal object, a manuscript story, which might help turn charity to payment. The “Fury Tale” (not quite fairy tale) that he writes is another free-­wheeling account of the lucky-­funny inconsequentialities of writing. It is the story of a word, called Word, who cannot read and does not know who he is, and who wanders from place to place, mouth to mouth, and mouth to ear, in search of his beloved Princess. Word’s travels take in all Graham’s favorite images: g ­ oing into the “whorl” of an ear till “in the inner dark the anvil was struck,” or traveling along telegraph wires “in cahoots with the electric,” or curled in a book in a library, specifically: “Page 955, para five, two lines down, he in print slept dreaming of his name” (291). In a sense, this is about language in search of itself: in search of the name for Word, in search of a dream of print, as well as about language in search of the addressee who ­w ill give name and meaning, love and perhaps payment, for all

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its words. The lines Word follows are all attempts to reach the beloved royal reader, the Princess, who awaits somewhere at the other end of his journey. If letters depend on posting to an address, so too do stories and poems. This improvised story, written to fill up paper which is itself a gift of pos­si­ble ­f uture worth to its reader, enacts t­ hose epistolary routes, the wires and cross-­wires, the lines and scrambles, of Graham’s poetry writing. So Word travels through the whorls of an ear, along the wires of telegraphy or in the lines of a printed book, ­towards the beloved addressee who waits. That “­towards,” as critics have pointed out (see Pite and Jones 2004), may itself be the only direction-­cum-­destination a poet can hope for. However, in this story the letter is delivered and Word arrives. With the help of “a boy with a clear musical voice” (1999: 291), he finds his way to the Princess, the one who knows what he himself does not know: his real name. She greets him with brisk and delighted recognition: “Your name is Fuck said the Princess and they lived happily ever ­after” (292). The story ends with a reciprocating answer, which perhaps combines Graham’s own “Fury Tale” feelings—­f uck to Skelton?—­and his need to be heard, loved, answered by readers, as in the fairy-­tale ending, “ever ­after.” As an allegory of the reading pro­cess this repeats, in another form, the old obsession: that literary communication is an epistolary gesture of faith in the destination; that writing goes out in time along its lines—­story lines, print lines, sound lines, lines of time or place—in the hope of finding the ­beloved reader who, in the “inner dark [ . . . ​] anvil” of her ear, w ­ ill recognize something to reassemble from its words, or Word: “Your name is Fuck.” It is pos­si­ble, then, to plot an under­lying poetics of the letter in Graham’s writing—­a poetics which crosses all the genre bound­aries of letters, poems, and stories, and which insists on the time taken, perhaps never to arrive, by the text destined for the ear of the reader. That the reader is in part an invention of Graham’s own, and in part a necessary reinventor of the poem, is all grist to the imagination’s mill. The adventure of language begins, for Graham, when mere contingencies of person and personality, his own and his addressee’s, are forfeit to the obstacle course that the text w ­ ill become—­part of the wild journeys of the imagination which are both appeals to an ear at the other end, but are also lonely missives, snarled in the ways of their own words.

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Three final poems might suggest the extent to which this contradictory epistolary mode calls from distances only listening can cross. “I Leave this at your Ear” (2004: 166) is the title of Graham’s lovely letter-­poem to his wife, Nessie Dunsmuir. It is a poem full of sounds: the calling owl, the ­silent ­house, “the speaking sea,” footsteps on stone, a “listening” at the door, the “ticking room,” the sleeper’s “breath,” the gulls’ cry. All ­t hese are gathered into that pointed deixis, “this,” as if the poet, staggering home late from the pub, ­were carry­ing and saving all the noises of the night in this gift-­poem for Nessie, who is asleep. But “this” also calls attention to a l­ittle noise of its own: the tiny rustle of the poem’s paper “at your ear.” The poem is not left at your bedside or on your pillow, but “at your ear for when you wake,” as if the poet-­postman ­were delivering his work directly to its aural destination. Even this delivery, however, must take time, at least all the time till morning “when you wake,” when it may be heard, read, understood, made sense of, and possibly answered. To “leave this at your ear” is to hope for a line of delivery that is also poetry’s own singing line, which calls on the sleeper, in her own time, to start hearing t­hings in all the s­ilent sounds the poem makes: speaking, stepping, listening, ticking. For “this,” which rustles at the ear of more than one sleeper, is a dialogue—­“maybe I’m just lonely and I must write something” (1999: 297)—­even if a dialogue interrupted by the epistolary hiatus of a delay. In some cases, the delay may be longer than just one night. “Are you ­t here are you t­ here listening?” (1999: 264) Graham once wrote in a letter to the painter, Bryan Wynter. A similar question crops up in the epistolary poem titled “Dear Bryan Wynter”: “Are you t­ here at all?” the poet asks, then adds: Speaking to you and not Knowing if you are ­t here Is not too difficult. My words are used to that. (2004: 258) Indeed, all Graham’s letters and poems “are used to that,” playing as they do on the paradoxical near-­a nd-­far-­ness of the addressee. “not / Knowing if you are ­t here” is the condition of the letter—­t hat word in the ear, private and familiar, which is also a word thrown

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upon the happy chances of the airwaves and the post. “Dear Bryan Wynter” addresses its object like any of Graham’s letters, with a mix of cajoling raillery, tomfoolery, and sheer verbal fun. “Do you want anything? / Where ­shall I send something?” (259) he asks, as if seeking a lost address. And indeed an address might be what he is ­after, but in a wider sense now; for Bryan Wynter is dead and the poem is an elegy. “The Bryan Wynter poem shatters me still” (1999: 331), Graham wrote three years l­ater. His elegies are some of his best poems, for the very reason that their range is still that of the intimately casual letter. “This is only a note / To say how sorry I am / You died” (2004: 258), this one begins, as if still expecting an answer “when you wake.” The extra distance of death is, ­after all, only an extension of the letter’s (and the poem’s) long time lines. Perhaps the letter is always, at some level, elegiac, its urgent invocations always a desperate mea­sure of speech against the odds of silence and space; or against the odds that the lines might go awry, be tangled in another, dif­fer­ent wiring and never reach the beloved ear. That the letter is always in some sense a dead letter is knowledge that pervades all Graham’s work, epistolary and poetic. The greatness of his writing lies in letting us hear that distance—­t he absence that lies round all poems and letters, making them lonely ­t hings, but ­t hings which also reach out along their lines to the sleeping listeners who might perhaps make sense of them, when they wake. “The Thermal Stair” was written for another painter friend, Peter Lanyon, who died in 1964 in a gliding accident. Lanyon had become a keen glider, and many of his l­ater paintings look at the Cornish landscape from above, across an airy blue distance. Graham’s title recalls one painting in par­t ic­u­lar, called “Thermal,” which seems to be all sky except for an indistinct stairway below on the left. Graham picks up its hint of a broken Jacob’s Ladder, and writes “The Thermal Stair,” as if to suggest a slower way up to the thermals in his own lines. The poem begins with “I called t­ oday, Peter, and you w ­ ere away” (2004: 163). It’s a heart-­stopping first line, which casts the poem as a note left in the man’s absence—­t he kind of note you might slip through a door, finding a friend is out. But the sense of “called” must be changed to an intransitive cry, as must the word “away,” for this is closer to Hopkins’s “alas! away” than to any mea­sur­able dis-

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tance. Yet poems, even elegies to the dead for Graham, are letters always implicitly listening for a reply, casting for the soundwaves that ­w ill take their dogged imperatives: “Find me,” “Sit h ­ ere,” “Give me,” “Climb ­here,” “listen” (164–166), far away to the desired listener. This poem, like so many ­others, thus opens up into a hall of listening: that imaginary space, or perhaps “constructed space,” where listening speaks as much as any speaking words. For the address of the letter form creates a listener even in his absence, and thus gives to all the other listeners, or readers, a peculiarly angled place to “listen from.” “The Thermal Stair” is not only a memorial and an elegy to the dead; it is also an audition of the dead, a checking out of the dead as another potential listener at the end of the line(s): Uneasy, lovable man, give me your painting Hand to steady me taking the word-­road home. Lanyon, why is it y­ ou’re earlier away? Remember me wherever you listen from. Lanyon, dingdong, dingdong from carn to carn. It seems to­night all Closing bells are tolling Across the Duchy shire wherever I turn. (2004: 166) Graham’s “word-­road” is not the paint­er’s road, though it may benefit from a paint­er’s helping “Hand.” If the poet’s lines need steadying (particularly when the road is a drunken route back from the pub ­after closing hour), ­those lines are also time lines, sent out to all the many addressed listeners of the poem. None of t­ hose can reply in any conventional sense. But they might attend, audibly, at the ­imagined other end of the poem’s time, turning the poet’s lonely monologue into a kind of alternating, reciprocal dialogue, or even an intimately quarrelsome dispute: “dingdong, dingdong.” The bells that toll for death, or for the pub’s “Closing” time, are ones that go on sounding that imaginary conversation between living and dead that the ­whole poem prolongs, and is. The address, then, w ­ hether epistolary or poetic, mea­sures the distances “away” that must be traveled in speech—­distances even as unpredictable and unlikely as to the dead—­and meanwhile opens a path or road to the other listeners, ourselves, who somewhere ­behind

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all the named I’s and you’s (“whoever / We are”) of the poem, might try to listen back. “Remember me wherever you listen from,” Graham asks, thus opening all the pos­si­ble distances of “from”: past or f­ uture, ­here or ­there, which Lanyon’s absence gathers up into its own ­unknown anywhere. The words of Graham’s elegies, like all his poetry, work like ears at the heart of language, ears pricked in all directions, as if the written word might still be heard, called for, delivered somehow to its far-­away address, like any dead letter. The line ­“wherever you listen from” ­w ill not quite give up on ­t hose lines of communication: letters, roads, telegraphs, staves, as well as lines of poetry, which depend on a kind of postal ser­v ice to the reader’s ear—an ear which might still, in spite of absence and silence, be ­imagined as hearing t­ hings.

9 Incarnations in the Ear: Hearing Presence in Les Murray Your ports are all superfluous ­here, Save That which lets in faith, the ear. richard crashaw To make a calm form, To shape three notes of ­music, To listen, so that listening becomes an act of creation— elizabeth jennings We are walking to the island. Lindisfarne’s not far to go, but time is short—­six hours only till the tide ­will drown us. How short a time only our watches tell, for the day seems ours, and all to come. This tarmacked causeway rises above mud flats on e­ ither side—­t he North Sea’s gray exposed underbelly where ­little w ­ ill grow. This is the land of hermits and their birds, of wanderers, seafarers, weather, and hard lives. ­Here, for a time, something was believed, and day a­ fter day a monk called Eadfrith wrote it down, on calfskin vellum carefully ­prepared, with quill or reed, in a regular insular majuscule script, embellishing the tale with all the beasts and birds he could remember, seen and unseen. And thus he labored, bringing the letters to life, embellishing words with animal, vegetable, mineral life in many-­ colored dyes. H ­ ere he bound the world to a story, and found the story was full of this world. We walk, and the abbey’s broken arch comes clear, its pock-­marked sandstone gouged by weather, chipped and smoothed by centuries of salt where it meets the sky’s scriptorium of rain. It’s only February, a week from her death, and the day is dreich. We come like ­others,

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drawn to the place from some half-­pressing wish or grief, wondering what to feel and paying to try—­touched meanwhile by distances and old time. It’s a slow approach, by way of the birds on e­ ither side: redshank and curlew, godwit and knott, turnstone and sandpiper. Our causeway crosses the flats’ open platter—­easy pickings for the early birds, waders with sharp eyes and listening toes. How often Cuthbert must have seen the same, crossing by the tides, returning home till home also seemed too near and easy, and he rowed out with only ­t hese fellow creatures for com­pany, to the distant Farnes to be alone and die. Cuddy’s Ducks, they call them, the black and white eiders, and we listen again for that queer glissando, that long low gossipy coo, half-­chuckle, half-­t une. And as we walk steadily forward, the North Sea’s drizzle crimping our hair, spangling our coats, the slow way out from land to sea seems right somehow, ancient, deliberate, as if we ­were following an old instinct to the end of the road. ­Later, we take the path past the abbey, seaward still, seeking the quiet away from the crowds. And ­t here fi­nally, approaching the sea’s edge, we hear ­those ducks telling their lugubrious jokes, gloating and teasing on the open waves, as if they knew that the end of all walking to the edge of the earth is only cause for mirth. “Sea-­fowls’ loudness was for me laughter,” I recall from The Seafarer, in Pound’s translation. “Sea-­fowls’ loudness . . .” We trudge on and on, our loss too ­ordinary for anything more than pondered memories, their quiet memorial to how ­t hings must be. And so we chat, noting a container boat on the horizon, remarking the damp’s thick gansey around us, the hours passing—­but mostly fall ­silent, hearing the waves, rough grass on our boots—­and still that knowing innuendo, that queer riff, calling and teasing from the invisible distance. From ­here we can see the visitor’s center ­behind us, its stores of ­simples meant for mementos: tinctures and balms, sweetmeats and mead, manuscript samplers and puppet monks. Who’s to say what ­w ill help for a cure? Something they did ­here—­copying a story, standing day a­ fter day in the silence, turning letters into creaturely arabesques, words into birds—­draws us still to this cold view, riddled by low waves and, b ­ ehind us in the distance, the remaining arch of a broken chancel fronting the ele­ments, holding its ground like the last stand of a prayer.

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Out on the dunes directions get confused. We steer by the sound of the sea on our right, the abbey b ­ ehind, scrambling up and down identical small hillocks and baffled by the white sand’s ponderous overshoes. Our ­little day’s already short of light, and soon we ­w ill return. Cuthbert’s sea lies empty and restless, always ahead of us. What did he think, ­going alone with only the seabirds and otters for com­pany? “Sea-­fowls’ loudness . . .” Our pathless slipway is tacked with marram, sharp green threads stitching the earth. ­There’s not much to hold us, standing on the seashore, watching how waves chip at the land, our pilgrim’s route now lost in the dunes’ shifting arrangements. How quickly the time goes. Soon the causeway ­will go back to sea, the wide gray flats replenish their feeding grounds, and the last sandpipers return to shore, outrunning the quick fin­gers of the tide. Soon we too ­will play catch-­as-­catch-­can with the oncoming deluge, as the sea returns to claim its dues, and the causeway that gave such easy passage slides out of sight. Soon w ­ e’ll forget both grief and its consolations, the lovely illuminated words and their birds, the white dunes and their slippy directions—­and no longer hear Cuddy’s Ducks in the distance, or won­der what joke it is that they repeat. a a a

In Günter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum, ­t here is a curious-­f unny episode when the boy, Oskar, for a second time visits the Church of the Sacred Heart in Gdansk, and once again puts his drum into the plaster-­cast hands of a statue of the boy Jesus: “ ‘sweet l­ittle plaster Jesus, go on and drum!’ ” (1961, 1971: 350) he laughingly incites, certain this time that he knows the outcome. On the first occasion the statue did not move, and Oskar lost his child’s faith—­a faith that might have moved mountains or statues. But this time the joke’s on himself. To his amazement, Jesus begins to beat the drum, in s­ imple and complex rhythms and in many dif­fer­ent styles, secular and religious. In fact, Oskar is forced to admit, “He was a musician through and through” (350). In fury he snatches back his instrument. “ ‘­You’ve got your cross, that should do you’ ” (351), he rages u ­ nder his breath and starts to run as fast as he can, out of the Church and all it stands

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for. But a voice catches up with him, and t­ here follows an ironic repeat of Peter’s questioning by Christ—­a questioning which, to ­Oskar’s dismay, only confirms his own Petrine role. ­Here is the passage in Ralph Manheim’s translation: “Dost thou love me, Oskar?” [the voice asks.] Without turning, I replied: “Not that I know of.” Whereupon he, without raising his voice: “Dost thou love me, Oskar?” This time my tone was more biting: “Sorry, old man, I’m afraid not.” For the third time he came at me with that irritating voice of his: “Oskar, dost thou love me?” I turned around and looked him full in the face: “You bastard, I hate you, you and all your hocus-­pocus.” (1961, 1971: 351) This surprising interchange, which ­ought logically to confirm the boy’s belief, at least in drumming statues and mysterious voices, only infuriates him. “You bastard, I hate you,” he replies, though the German original is less ferocious: “Ich hasse dich, Bürschchen” (1959: 240)—in Breon Mitchell’s more literal translation: “I hate you, ­little fellow” (2009: 338). In a work published the year before Grass’s novel, a similar vehemence is vented against the Christian God. In B ­ eckett’s Endgame, Hamm and Clov kneel to pray and, getting no reply, conclude, “The bastard! He d ­ oesn’t exist!” (1958: 38). God, it seems, is cursed if he does, and cursed if he ­doesn’t exist. “ ‘You bastard, I hate you, you and all your hocus-­pocus,’ ” Oskar retorts when faced with the slightly tacky miracle of a God who not only moves and speaks, but also plays the drum like a real musician. Manheim’s “hocus-­ pocus” is an idiosyncratic rendering of the German “Klimbim,” meaning junk or trash, but t­ here’s a stroke of genius about it. The phrase expresses, first of all, the ele­ment of cheap magic in the situation; it means a magic trick, a conjuring. But since the late seventeenth ­century it has also carried mocking Reformation overtones of the Latin mass: “hoc est corpus.” Oskar’s final expletive, “ ‘you and all your hocus-­pocus,’ ” reviles the church’s “trick” of presence while paradoxically also repeating and substantiating it. For indeed, the moving, drumming, speaking Jesus comes back to life in the novelist’s magically real, yet ironically self-­mocking

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“hocus-­pocus” of his own. The plaster statue turns into a real presence—­a presence substantiated not only by Grass’s exuberantly kitsch narrative at this point, but also by the En­glish translator’s resonantly re-­substantiating word, which gives us the “hoc est” of transubstantiation within the contemptuous conjuring of “hocus-­pocus.” For the novelist, then, the “Word made flesh” of the incarnation may become the flesh made word of the writer’s trade, through some cheerful abracadabra or hocus-­pocus of his own. Grass writes about the statue with such matter-­of-­fact realism that its believability o ­ ught to beggar belief; except that Oskar, conversely, is only outraged to find his disbelief disproved. So the novelist turns the ­tables on theology, and gives us a kind of hyper-­real real presence to confound his protagonist’s skepticism. The episode is a reminder that both theology, at least Catholic theology, and fiction share a deep investment in presence, and in the language which, through vari­ous kinds of meta­phor, conjures presence. Both, for instance, rely on the power of language to carry that transference of word made flesh through the effects of charm, ritual, incantation. “ ‘Dost thou love me, Oskar?’ ” Jesus asks three times, ritually repeating a question which, given Oskar’s hostile response, seems senseless. But the repetition itself is seductive, asserting, over and above the logic of rejection, the sway of its own sweet assurance. Jesus is not only a musician but a poet too, conjuring words into a kind of love-­charm which then becomes real in another dimension: that of sound in the listening ear. The repetition which develops a conviction of its own, turning what is absent into another kind of presence, what­ever the evidence, might come quite close to that other theological “presence” in the Eucharist, which also depends on the ritual power of words to make it true: “hoc est enim corpus meus.” In his translation of a hymn by Thomas Aquinas, Gerard Manley Hopkins once described the mystery of the hidden God in the Eucharist as believable, perhaps, only through hearing: “Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived; / How says trusty hearing? that ­shall be believed” (1967: 211). Not ­great lines of poetry, to be sure, but they repeat an idea that is everywhere in his poetry: that the work of the ear might more readily lend itself to belief in invisible presences than that of sight, touch, or taste, the empirical senses. To “read

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it with the ears” (Hopkins 1935, 1955: 79) is to hear poetry’s other senses, ones which break the old alliance of eye and intellect, and might in the pro­cess afford not only readerly belief but also the satisfaction of another kind of knowledge—­which may be, of course, what belief is. That phrase, “trusty hearing”—­for Aquinas’s “auditu solo tuto creditur”—­contains, however, the tiniest catch in an other­ wise exact translation. Hearing is believing, Aquinas seems to say, but rather than e­ither believing or believable, Hopkins writes “trusty.” But is this “trusty” in the sense of “trustworthy,” or in the sense of trusting what it hears?—­t he second even less assured than the first. The two senses jostle in Hopkins’s word, as if to keep open both the assurance and the uncertainty of what is heard in words. That “trusty,” paradoxically, contains a hesitation while asking to be trusted. Is the ear, the least provable of the senses, for that very reason the most faithful con­vey­or of presence, as that which hovers always on the edge of proof, like another register of real­ity or of knowledge? ­There’s a short but in­ter­est­ing commentary on the Eucharistic replay of “Word made flesh” in Augustine’s treatise On Christian Doctrine. Invoking the analogy of ­human speech in order to explain the mystery of the Incarnation, he writes, It is as when we speak. In order that what we are thinking may reach the mind of the listener through the fleshly ears, that which we have in mind is expressed in words and is called speech. But our thought is not transformed into sounds; it remains entire in itself and assumes the form of words by means of which it may reach the ears without suffering any deterioration in itself. In the same way the Word of God was made flesh without change that He might dwell among us. (1958: 14) The theologian, h ­ ere, explains the Incarnation by assuming the priority of “thought” over “speech,” the “mind of the listener” over his “fleshly ears.” The “Word of God,” being not exactly a word or thought but presence itself, transmits into flesh without being deformed, just as “thought” might be communicated directly to another mind, in spite of having to traverse the medium of speech and the

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faculty of hearing. The analogy works, as all such dualisms do, by privileging something spiritual or inner which might be expressed in language, yet remains intact in itself. In this scheme, speech, sound, and ears are all figures for what is external to, and deteriorated from, “thinking” or “thought,” the latter being analogous to “the Word of God” before it becomes flesh. But of course ­t here is a cross-­purpose in Augustine’s argument, too, since the Christian log­os contains, in its very word, an assumption of verbal audibility. And indeed, elsewhere, Augustine is less certain of t­ hese hierarchies. In The City of God, for instance, he reflects on a more spiritual ear, an ear within the ear, which might be unspoilt by the limitations of the flesh. H ­ ere he writes, when “ ‘we hear with the inner ear some part of the speech of God, we approximate to the angels’ ” (in Peters 1999: 72). This “inner” or angelic ear—­a theological precursor of its many ­later poetic va­r i­e­t ies—­m ight have access to God’s speech, thus breaking through the inside / outside, thought / word dualism, and so overcome the need for translation or exchange—­though much might depend on the mea­sure of that verb, “approximate.” At the heart of the theological prob­lem of the Incarnation, then, lies the prob­lem, for Augustine as for ­others, of the workings of ­language. Message and medium, content and form, flesh and word, even Word made flesh, are deep-­seated doubles in our language and thinking, which the very structure of grammar keeps in place. Augustine strug­gles with meta­phors of translation, of turning one ­thing into another, while insisting that the Incarnation both preempts and supersedes the division. It may be that the “ ‘inner ear,’ ” like Hopkins’s “trusty ear,” must somehow overcome, not only the grammar of our thought pro­cesses but also the limitations of our senses, and thus hear beyond hearing, or even hear innerly an absent sound that shapes itself as a presence. Both religious belief and poetic imagination evidently depend on communication through language. But belief and poetry are of course not identical, and when brought too close may quarrel. George Steiner has argued for their near-­identity in his book Real Presences, when he writes that “the experience of aesthetic meaning” in the arts “infers the necessary possibility of [God’s] ‘real presence’ ” (1989: 3). That “necessary possibility” hedges its bets a l­ittle between the

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e­ ssential and the merely pos­si­ble, as Steiner tries to refute poststructuralism’s all-­out attack on “presence.” However, the prob­lem with such a statement is that, on the one hand it works by diluting the theological significance of “real presence” in the Catholic, sacramental tradition, and on the other it ropes all art into some “necessary,” numinous purpose. ­There is a difference between theological “real presence,” which makes calls on the worshipper’s belief, and notions of presence, neither real nor unreal, which in art encourage a suspension of belief. While Augustine argues that, like God in the Eucharist, “our thought is not transformed into sounds; it remains entire in itself,” in poetry, one might argue, the opposite is true; for ­here, sounds become thought, words are flesh, leaving l­ ittle residue of what we might call thought-­content in their play of form. By its very nature, poetry challenges the Word / flesh, word / thought dichotomy on which theology depends, evoking presence inside, not outside, words, as if thinking, understanding, even believing might happen only in the aural, somehow efficacious happening of language. It is this formal self-­ s ufficiency which keeps poetry at a tangent to ­t heology, related but dif­fer­ent. For poetry, pace George Steiner, is untroubled by real presence, however defined, and unaffected by calibrations of faith and doubt. Its incarnations in the ear, one might say, leave nothing more to be desired or believed. But to turn from generalizations to specifics, from theological paradoxes to poetic examples, in this chapter I want to consider the work of the con­temporary Australian poet, Les Murray. Murray was raised a “wee ­f ree” Presbyterian but converted to Catholicism in his early twenties. The move was momentous, in the sense of being both a denominational rejection of his religious heritage and an imaginative self-­discovery. It was personally costly too. “My ­father was so disgusted,” he recalls, “that he never, in nearly forty years, deigned to speak of my perfidy” (2005). From 1982 onwards, Murray prefaced each of his volumes of poetry with the Jesuit motto, “to the glory of God.” Yet it is in­ter­est­i ng that, unlike, say, Herbert, Hopkins, or R. S. Thomas, Murray is not readily classed as a religious poet. This may have something to do with the lyric tradition in En­glish, which has a long history of poetry as prayer or

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invocation, from George Herbert’s “Prayer,” with its tentative conclusion: “Something understood” (2007: 178), ­whether “Some­t hing understood” or “Something u ­ nderstood”—­t hat is, a something-­or-­ nothing, or e­ lse a conclusive understanding—to Carol Ann Duffy’s “Prayer,” which ends with the secular litany of the shipping forecast: “the radio’s prayer—­ / Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre” (1993: 52). Poetry can be a prayer even without belief in an answer. “I pray and incur / silence” (2001: 391), writes R. S. Thomas in a poem paradoxically called “The Presence.” “The bastard! He d ­ oesn’t exist” is only, as Beckett knows well, a ­negative kind of prayer. Curse, praise, invocation, address, outright denial, or just the rigmarole of a charm—­all ­these can mark the overlap between poem and prayer, each sending out a cry to some known or unknown “you” in the work’s imaginary ear—­a “you,” however shadowy, s­haped by the grammar of address. Murray, however, does not quite fit this category. His poems are very rarely addresses, and he rarely hails a divine presence. Instead, the numinous or godly turn up in unexpected places in his work, in words like “presence,” which can thicken with reference beyond the example of something pres­ent. Murray’s God is not out t­ here, attending to poems like an i­ magined external audience, an answer to a plea, but is in them like a verbal instance of the t­ hing itself, an incarnated presence. In his “Aquinas Lecture” of 1986, “Embodiment and Incarnation,” he offers the following summary: “In that unique Divine embodiment for which we reserve the term Incarnation, Jesus lives from the first in a w ­ holeness no mortal artist can sustain; he lives on the level of poetry” (1997: 324). He thus makes a ­simple equation between the Word made flesh and poetry’s words. The poem, in that it stands for every­t hing which challenges social and doctrinal correctness and is pres­ent only in its own verbal presentness, is equivalent to the “Incarnation.” The “­wholeness” of Christ’s life is, however, something “the mortal artist” can only aspire to. The same point is made in Murray’s manifesto poem “Poetry and Religion,” which argues for a reversal of priorities between t­ hose two—­a reversal which radically alters the nature of what we mean by thought:

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Religions are poems. They concert our daylight and dreaming mind, our emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture into the only w ­ hole thinking: poetry. (1998: 267) That poems have a special claim to “thinking” means that Murray, unlike Augustine, puts them first in the ranking order. This is not, however, thought which must be translated or conveyed into speech, as it is for Augustine, but poetry which thinks or rather which is a kind of “thinking:” as if that pres­ent participle followed by a colon marked, not exactly a conclusion but a direction. This might indeed be Longenbach’s “sound of a mind alive in the syntactical pro­cess of discovering what it might be thinking” (2004: 73–74). Murray’s “­whole thinking:” pauses to draw the act into its own intransitive pro­cess, which is indeed “poetry,” and all the dreaming, breathing, gesturing language into which poetry draws us. Meanwhile, the unusual word “concert,” meaning to justify and bring together, does not altogether erase the other more familiar sense of “concert,” a playing together of ­music. So poetry brings together, and perhaps also musicalizes, the mind of daylight and of dream. It is this mixed mind, of daytime and night, clarity and haze, a mind concerted and also playing its concert of sounds, which constitutes “the only ­whole thinking.” If we start by thinking that thinking is what poetry does best, and that other more familiar kinds of thinking—­ theological, philosophical, argumentative, theoretical—­ are one-­ sided approaches to thinking, missing the dream, the “breath,” and “gesture” of words, then we might start with poetry and all its concerts in order to reconsider the very nature of thought. But what has this to do with sound? Murray’s reversal of the theological priority of thought as log­os, drawn from the Christian binary of an incarnational Word made flesh, results in a notionally concerted poetry, but one that still shows the fissures of language, however ­rationalized by the Eucharistic model, on the one hand, and the theory of a “­whole thinking,” on the other. In his book, The End of the Poem, Giorgio Agamben takes Valéry’s definition: “ ‘The poem: a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense’ (1999: 109)—­‘Le poème—­cette hésitation prolongée entre le son e le sens)’ ” (Valéry 1960:

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637)—as the main springboard for his claim that “the poem as a formal structure would not and could not end [ . . . ​] since the end would imply [ . . . ​] the exact coincidence of sound and sense” (1999: 113). In ­those poems of Murray’s which are not, like “Poetry and ­Religion,” a missionary statement of poetic belief, this hesitation becomes widely and inventively audible. In par­t ic­u­lar, it is in his ­g reat animal poems that the idea of presence, which ­ought to be singular and unitary, opens a conflict of voices between animal and ­human, fact and meta­phor, sound and sense, which rarely resolves into an “exact coincidence.” Far from being concerted, then, the poem’s voices perform a concert of strange voicings, interpretable rather than humanly or even animal-ly expressive. The noise they make keeps that “hesitation” audible, even while Murray elaborates a kind of Eucharistic theology through them. ­Here, for example, is the start of a witty l­ ittle poem about watching fish swimming, called “Shoal”: Eye-­and-­eye eye an eye each. What blinks is I, unison of the w ­ hole shoal. Thinks: a dark idea circling by— again the eyes’ I winks. (1998: 372) What carries the momentum of this poem are the sounds: “Eye-­ and-­eye” and “eye an eye” as well as “I,” playing eye-­rhyme and ear-­rhyme against each other, muddling nouns and verbs, creating an “eye” the look of which becomes a listen. This eyed shoal is all-­ eyes, as well as ambiguously one “I” that “blinks,” in a shifty switchback of sudden new directions taken as one. That “unison of the ­whole shoal”—­itself a play between the perfectly vis­i­ble synchronicity of the shoal, and the sound, “uni-­son,” that their silence might make—is ambiguously a ­matter of one eye each, doubled or multiplied in this audible mirror image. Murray, like Joyce, can see-­hear a word till it provokes a vertigo of attention, and indeed the reader “blinks.” ­A fter that blurring long vowel of “eye” and “I,” the playful stops of the short form, in “blinks,” “Thinks,” and “winks,” wittily capture the rhythms and pauses, the stops and starts, of a shoal g ­ oing

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by, watching, winking, but also sounding like something—is it us or it?—­t hat “Thinks.” ­W hether it is an observing ­human “I,” or t­ hose instinctively synchronous fish-­“eyes,” “Thinks” might mysteriously coalesce into “a dark idea circling by.” However, between “Thinks:” and “a dark idea,” Murray puts another colon, which stops the second being merely the object of the first. Something happens across the end-­of-­line pause, as the intransitive verb “Thinks:” stops ­t here, isolated in a place where “Eye and eye” and “I” have already blurred comically in this tongue-­t wister of a verse, which does not exactly tell who or what might be thinking. That the poem itself “Thinks:” might be a way to instruct the reader, caught in that disorientation between the sound and the sense, to think it—­though not necessarily to think anything of it, since all this might be no more than a ­little poking (wink wink) of fun. Poetry’s “Thinks:” perhaps unlike theology’s, does not have to be taken too seriously. Nevertheless, in Murray’s works the language of the one constantly impinges on the other. In an interview of 2009, he was asked about his conversion and explained, “I was wowed and fascinated by the sacramental bridge between earth and heaven that Catholicism offered, by the doctrine of the real presence” (2009: 10). Ignoring all the theological disputes about “real presence,” its muddling historical crossovers from Protestant to Catholic Chris­tian­ity, he simply plumps for a “sacramental bridge,” a link “between earth and heaven” which might then underpin the very workings of poetry. Fifteen years before, he had answered in much the same vein: “ ‘I was fascinated by the idea of the Eucharist. It absolutely wowed me. Anybody who’s interested in imagery has to be interested in that type of ­f usion, meta­phor taken all the way to identity’ ” (in Alexander 2000: 106). The Eucharist, then, takes meta­phor to its end point in “ ‘identity,’ ” which means, evidently, not personality but the state of being the same, pres­ent and self-­present. The imagery of poetry similarly takes meta­phor, with its hierarchy of two terms, tenor and vehicle, “all the way to identity” in a “fusion” which incarnates the sense of the ­t hing in words, where words are so nearly the ­t hing that t­ here may be nothing ­else to them. The mystery of presence, of a coincidence or identity of two t­ hings become one, is a poetic-­t heological idea which lies at the heart of Murray’s writing.

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The extent to which it does so is suggested by the title of his extraordinary sequence of 1992: “Presence: Translations from the Natu­ral World.” It is a title which juxtaposes two potentially incompatible words: “Presence” and “Translations.” In looking to the natu­ral world, Murray wants to catch its presentness, its just being ­t here, outside language, but in ­doing so he is inevitably caught in the business of translating, from life to language, from animal to ­human, from “identity” to “meta­phor.” At the time of writing this volume, the poet was recovering from one of his periodic bouts of depression, the Black Dog. “I gave my stupid self a rest,” he writes, “and tried to enter imaginatively into the life of non-­human creatures and somehow translate that life into h ­ uman speech” (2009: 14). To get “the life of non-­human creatures” into poetry might be a task of translation beyond possibility. Such poetry, Murray quips, is “ ‘neither Walt Disney nor Ted Hughes,’ ” and contains “ ‘not much meta­phor or sense of time, no consequences, no mercy’ ” (in Alexander 2000: 244). Evidently, the brute real­ity of the natu­ral world is outside meta­phor, outside pity or care, beyond redemption, mercy, or time. It is a condition of mere existence or, put another way, of secular “presence” pure and ­simple. However, to write about it in “­human speech” necessarily involves the poet in complex transactions with all of t­ hose. For to catch “presence” in the act of translation is to engage in a near contradiction in terms, but one which, in its sense of difficulty, perhaps even in its absurdity, touches on the incarnational paradox at the heart of his poetic language. It also touches on that “hesitation” between sound and sense which might reflect the divide between animal and ­human worlds. What Murray means by “presence” is similar, in many ways, to what his first ­great mentor, Hopkins, meant by “self ”: “Selves—­goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, / Crying What I do is me: for that I came” (1967: 90). This sonnet, “As kingfishers catch fire,” prob­ably fired Murray’s own poem about firetail finches—­a poem which also tries to catch the essence of self and self-­presence in a glimpsed flock of birds. Hopkins’s kingfishers cry “Selves [ . . . ​] myself ”; Murray’s finches, in the words of the title, cry “MeMeMe” as they feed. Thus, he writes, “a shower of firetail (me me) finches into seed grass / flickers feeding (me) in drabs and red pinches of rhyme” (1998: 383). Like

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much of Hopkins’s, Murray’s language thickens with action, not only the flashed instance of “flickers feeding (me),” with its noun-­verb flickering in and out of grammatical sight, but also the mixed sound and pronoun, staged in parentheses, of “(me).” This “(me)” is both the finches themselves, given in an aside which tells that “(me)” might not be merely “me,” as well as the sound finches make, tweeting and twittering as they flock to feed. The language ­here does double duty as a word and a noise, as sense and sound, though the fact that it is held in parentheses also points to the self-­questioning complexities of a word which both means and does not mean “(me).” Parentheses are not only an aside to the reader, like Bishop’s “(or are you hearing ­t hings?)” (2008: 89), as if precisely to remind us to hear t­ hings, but also a way of cupping the ­t hing heard (another hand to an ear), in order to signal that we should also listen to the space of hearing. Meanwhile, “drabs and red pinches” suggest the look of a flock flying in sudden stray bits and pieces, as well as the darting red flash of the bird as it “pinches” its seed, and so becomes a pinch itself. But then t­ here’s a surprise: Murray writes “red pinches of rhyme.” Not only does “rhyme” turn “pinches” into something we might hear rather than see—­and it rhymes, incidentally, with “time” four lines back—­but it also muddles the comparison: “pinches of rhyme” looks and sounds at once, the analogy (pinches are like rhyme) forced into a new t­ hing: “pinches of rhyme,” like pinches of snuff or salt. That “pinches” also rhymes internally with “finches” creates another crossbred sound-­t hing, whereby the bird becomes its own pinching action while rhyming, doubly, with the rhyme that it is. Birds might be “red pinches of rhyme,” and thus fit both their thieving and their singing nature. For “All pres­ent is perfect,” Murray adds. Certainly, he has brought language as near as it might come to the instance of a bird flying and calling at once. However, he does not write “All pres­ent are perfect,” which would stay focused on the birds, but “pres­ent is perfect,” which turns our attention on the abstract idea of presence. Is this a grammatical tense, the pres­ent perfect, or a statement about the perfection of the moment—­the birds being pres­ent in themselves, no more, no less? Or is it a sly reminder of that other “presence,” so perfectly pres­ent in the world that it cannot be distinguished from it, in “meta­phor taken all the way to identity”?

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The poet seems to catch (as kingfishers catch fire) a metaphysical idea of presence in his birds, just as he lightly and inconspicuously slips “rhyme” into the firetails’ “red pinches” to make us see-­hear how the object becomes a poem: bird and word at once. In “MeMeMe,” Murray emphasizes a hesitation between the onomatopoeic noise of bird-­speak and ­human grammar with its sense of self and pres­ent time, between the pinching sound of “(me me)” and the h ­ uman complexity of the pronoun “me.” T ­ here’s a meta­ phorical transference in that hesitation, as ear and brain squabble over the sound and sense: over a “me” which is just the twittering of finches, and a “me” who might be me myself, in my own time and language. Thus, he exploits the poem’s ability to open that gap and raise a query at the very heart of the poetic word. The word “pres­ent” then returns in the final line of the poem: “pres­ent and still-­present bringing steps that mute crickets’ simmer” (1998: 383), he writes. Although describing the birds’ “heart-­rate of instants”—­a sense of time entirely clocked in the pres­ent of being alive—­t he poet concludes, with a hint of Keatsian autumnal transience, with “steps that mute crickets’ simmer.” On the one hand, this is simply about the birds: each time the finches return, in the pres­ent, the noise of crickets stops or is muted—­a perfectly naturalistic fact. However, “pres­ent and still-­present” are not adjectives but nouns, grown thick therefore with a sense of their own presence. It is not exactly finches any more, but this abstract time-­t hing coming back, which is “bringing steps that mute.” Murray once claimed that this volume would contain “not much meta­phor or sense of time, no consequences,” but it is hard not to hear in that last line something like “consequences”; for “steps,” a­ fter all, usually lead somewhere. Something about ­t hese “steps” of time is not so merely “pres­ent” that it ­will not be “bringing” (in the hinted ­f uture timescale of that pres­ent participle) the “crickets’ simmer” to an end in winter. Does the verb “mute” mean just to dampen down, as in a musical instrument, or to silence altogether, as in making dumb? In this quiet­est of double ­entendres, Murray takes us into a world where ­every addition of presence brings “steps” t­ owards silence. “All pres­ent is perfect,” he writes, but poetic language, by its very nature, carries past and f­ uture on its timed, metrical road, on its own forward

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steps to silence at the end. “Presence: Translations from the Natu­ral World” thus expresses a self-­presence of ­things without ­human consciousness which, nonetheless, can never be written without consciousness: of meta­phor, translation, time, which lie at the heart of all language. “Presence,” then, the philosophical-­t heological idea of it, is everywhere in this collection, signaling the aspirations of a creation as creatively articulate as it is literally mute. The joke of what can be said by unspeaking beasts plays on the pun of an abstraction, which is existence itself. Thus, “what is presence?” the sunflowers ask, gazing at the “fiercely dopey” (1998: 385–386) sun. “I could not have put myself better [ . . . ​] than my presence did” (393), says the beetle. The mollusc becomes “the weave of presence” (375); the ­great bole concludes, “I blaze presence” (377); the elephants declare that “presence resembles every­t hing” (379), while the DNA in the cell intones “Presence and hungers,” “Presence and freedom” (385). The more Murray probes the mind-­set of nature, the more he repeats a word which seems, a­ fter all, hardly natu­ral to a sunflower, a beetle, or a mollusc. Instead, it stirs with all ­t hose ­human connotations of time, of consciousness, of being ­here, and even of that sacramental “meta­ phor all the way to identity” contained in the Eucharist: real ­presence. It is as if he takes us about as far as we can go from ­either ­human or divine worlds, in order to discover a real­ity which plays its own hocus-­pocus between brute existence and divine purpose, between animal sound and ­human speech, between “MeMeMe” in instants and a h ­ uman “(me)” in “steps” of time. Hesitating between them, while containing both, is the poem. Is it this hesitation, then, which might mark the difference, the thin line, between religion and poetry, between the Eucharistic “real presence” and poetry’s verbal games of presence, full of meta­phor, shifts, and tricks of translation? One might say that religious belief seeks to overcome hesitation, to find the “identity” of Christ’s self-­ presence, which overrides doubt, however hard to achieve; but poetry, by contrast, exploits hesitation, letting us hear the shifts of sound and sense, fact and language, flesh and word which open up within a poem. It is that hesitation which calls the imagination into

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action, as it tries to perceive a shoal that “Thinks:” or finches becoming “red pinches of rhyme.” Such perception might be the start of a challenge to the reader to discover and accept, not the thought in a poem, but the “­whole thinking” it might continually enact and re-enact. The idea of presence is then central to another poem, “From Where We Live on Presence,” even though, or perhaps precisely ­because, it is a poem spoken by a beetle. “A ­human is a comet streamed in language far down time” (1998: 392), it begins. If this is a beetle speaking, who are “We” in the title? It is as if Murray has taken Kafka’s short story “Metamorphosis”—­another text about meta-­phor and trans-­substance—­and inhabited the beetle’s worldview. But unlike Kafka’s insect, which gives out only a “horrible twittering squeak” (Kafka 1961: 11), Murray’s beetle is perfectly rational and marvelously acute: “A h ­ uman is a comet streamed in language far down time,” it tells, suggesting that language is of the very timed essence of the h ­ uman. The line captures the paradox of the self-­ present beetle, outside time, looking from a distance on humanity’s timed route to self-­extinction, while speaking (how e­ lse?) but in the language of h ­ uman time. Meanwhile, Murray writes, “Beetlehood . . . ​ was said in fluted burnish,” forcing the abstraction of what “was said” into an impersonal past tense, but also into a shine and this-­ness as if in some poetic equivalent of the creation’s fiat. Yet, for all the beetle’s practical working parts, its mechanisms for merely living, this creature is a phi­los­o­pher. Its last words are: “I translate into segments, laminates, / cachou eyes, pungent chemistry, cusps. But I remain the true word for me” (393). Murray does not write “I remains the true word,” which would focus on the “word,” as if the beetle w ­ ere still something e­ lse, outside words. Instead he writes “I remain the true word for me,” which makes the verb agree with “I,” the creature, rather than the word. This is a kind of incarnational theology in itself, “the true word” being the word made ­t hing, or word made flesh—­even beetle flesh. The notion of “presence” then, which is what “We Live on,” spans both the creature’s tiny existence of mere “chemistry” and “cusps” and the theological presence of another Word made flesh, and another communion.

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Indeed, in the title’s odd phrasing, with its generalized, inclusive “We,” ­t here is a hint of that other Eucharistic dining which is also, Murray might argue, what “We Live on.” So the beetle expresses its physical self, its mere “jaw-­tools,” “laminates,” and “cachou eyes,” in a past tense and in words loaded with theologically transformative meanings: “communion,” “presence,” “translate.” “I translate into segments, laminates,” the creature asserts, taking theology’s technical term for the assumption of the saint into heaven to describe its own biological makeup of parts. But “translation” is also a verbal concern, of the poet who must turn animal wordlessness into ­human speech. “I could not have put myself better . . . ​t han my presence did,” says the beetle, wittily speaking of itself not speaking, but just putting itself into “presence” as if into some irreducible selfhood, un-­wordy and untranslatable. But of course, “presence” cannot escape e­ ither its own status as word, conceptual and abstract, or the idea of the Word, the log­os, gesturing within it—­gesturing in par­t ic­u­lar ­towards “the true word for me,” which is an “I” no beetle could conceive of, and is a word precisely ­because some other “true word” is also at stake h ­ ere. “Translations from the Natu­ral World” thus translate in all sorts of directions: down to creaturely “segments, laminates,” but also upwards, t­ owards a Eucharistic redemption of all ­things, even t­hose ­things eaten in a raw communion of decayed m ­ atter for beetles. In this animal world, which is a world of language hesitating between what is sounded and what is sensed, we find, in the merely pres­ent object, a sense of “presence”: that is, both an irreducible ­t hing and a possibility of divine transformation at the heart of t­ hings. Murray’s constant return to the word “presence” thus hints at that hocus-­pocus of poetic language which plays between animal and ­human, sound and sense, t­ hing and concept, while also making apparent the differences between them. Deeply meta­phorical (what­ever the poet says), ­t hese poems might be an example of that “only ­whole thinking” which, never thinking just one ­t hing, is poetry. For poetry is a thinking at the heart of words—­a “Thinks:” which does not seek to overcome logical doubt, but opens up the doubts, pauses, and hesitations which themselves then become the mechanisms through which the world is made (another) sense of. Animal and h ­ uman per-

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spectives diverge only to come together ­under a theological banner of presence, itself a meta­phor of difference “taken all the way to identity.” So “We” in the title means both “we beetles” and “we ­human beings within the w ­ hole creation,” while alerting us to the hocus-­ pocus, of t­hings into words, words into t­hings, which makes such an incarnational coincidence pos­si­ble. Theological incarnation is then the very subject of “Animal ­Nativity,” where the birth of Christ is described as if observed through the eyes of ­cattle, spiders, lambs, and dogs. It ends with an account seen through the eyes of this last: Dogs, less enslaved but as starving as the poorest h ­ umans ­t here crouch, agog at a crux of presence remembered as a star. (1998: 389) In that one phrase, “agog at a crux of presence,” we get the w ­ hole story: the cross recalled in the word “crux” and the incarnation ­recalled in “presence.” Once again Murray returns to “presence” as the crux, in many senses, of what poetic language is up to: both a cross and a crucial t­ hing, both dif­fer­ent and the same. E ­ ither of t­ hose perspectives might leave us, like the dogs, “agog,” even if at nothing more specific than a “star.” Yet being “agog” might be, for the poet, the best kind of thinking. If what we want is an explanation, a parable, or paraphrase, reading ­t hese poems w ­ ill defeat us. They ­w ill not yield a message or allegory, least of all a comforting religious message about Christ’s presence. But if we are prepared to let the ear, “the trusty ear,” believe in what ­causes won­der and thought—­phrases like “a crux of presence”—­t hen we get that sense of incarnations in the ear, of something made real in words which speak both sound and sense, however divergent, even if, like the dogs, we might not be sure what it is. It is “remembered as a star,” that is all. Religious belief might need more than this being “agog,” but the poetic imagination prob­ably ­doesn’t. When asked on one occasion about his attitude to poetic form, Murray explained that he was always, restlessly, trying out new “devices” and “layouts,” but then impatiently dismissed the subject: “I

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hew more closely to a concern for rhythm; it’s far more impor­tant.” While “form” might be a static category, apparent only to the eye, rhythm and sound are of the essence of poetry in that they appeal to the ear. He then goes on to explain the importance of sound in poetry: I love sound imagery[. . . . ​] Sound is the extra, celestial conversation that showers in on me between the intended meanings. I love catching the sounds of life. [ . . . ​] Sound’s a mystery, though—­I think I’d keep it so, for myself. And it may be another refuge from the thought police. (Murray 2005) He refuses to define “sound” in poetry; it is a “mystery,” which offers a way to evade what seems most hostile to it: “the thought police.” The term refers on the one hand to Murray’s own experiences of sexual, po­liti­cal, or academic thought-­coercion in his life—­ experiences which it took many years to overcome—­but also, on the other hand, to “thought” itself, which might try to “police” the mind with its own appropriate rights and wrongs, its own Calvinist control. The “­whole thinking” of poetry is the opposite of “the thought police,” which locks the mind up in its vari­ous prison-­houses. And of course, the aspect of poetry which most easily escapes our social or personal policing by thought is that unruly, anarchic ­thing: “sound.” Murray’s beautiful account of “sound,” as an “extra, celestial conversation that showers in on me between the intended meanings,” points to the ele­ment of the unpredictable and mysterious in it. It is a lucky “extra,” a blessing not to be counted on, but recognized when it comes. Certainly, while the poet might intend a par­t ic­u­lar meaning, the poem only comes right when that intention is crossed or interrupted, as by a shower of rain, in some unexpected, two-­way “celestial conversation.” With whom? one might ask. But ­really it ­doesn’t ­matter. The impor­t ant ­t hing is that it is a “conversation,” therefore not in the poet’s control, but dependent on some external force that speaks and listens from outside, interrupting and changing the “intended meanings.” Sound, which seems “celestial,” in that it comes from another region, weather, or world, plays havoc with what­ever the poet intended to say, or meant to write, and thus

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turns a ­matter of mere purpose into a poem. Of course, if the poet is lucky enough to catch this sound-­shower in writing, it means that the reader w ­ ill also start looking, or rather listening, for it. This ele­ment of listening back in writing might be heard in the poem for which Murray is perhaps best known and which sums up his poetics of incarnation. In 1985, the poet came across two Welsh verses consisting almost entirely of vowels, and ­t hese became the seed of his own composition. “Bats’ Ultrasound” starts with exact and witty observation: “Sleeping-­bagged in a duplex wing” (1998: 368), but then opens, like so many of ­t hese poems, into the ultra-­ sound of what the animal self might sound like, if translated into words: ah, eyrie-­ire, aero hour, eh? O’er our ur-­area (our era aye ere your raw row) we air our array, err, yaw, row wry—­aura our orrery, our eerie ü our ray, our arrow. A rare ear, our aery Yahweh. (368) The echolocation of bats is perhaps the perfect instance of that speaking-­listen advocated by so many of the poets in this book. For a bat both sounds, and sounds off, the obstacles in its way by listening to the return echoes of its own high-­pitched squeaks. So Jean-­Luc Nancy might be describing the calling-­listening flight of a bat when he writes of “the arch-­music of that resonance where it listens to itself [ . . . ​] by listening to itself finds itself [ . . . ​] and by finding itself ­deviates from itself in order to resound further away” (2002, 2007: 35). Certainly this creature, with its predatory “fine teeth bared to sing,” explores a world transposed into sounds almost beyond hearing, “above highest C.” Such a place is “at the peak of our hearing,” as if the ear had mountains as well as pitch. The bat’s landscape, then, is a soundscape—­a world notated in sounds, like the poet’s own, but as in all t­ hese poems, this is not a ­matter of mere onomatopoeic noise. For ­t hese airy words are also meaningful, sensible, spanning heights as if they ­were places to be

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charted on a map of the universe. The direction is up, as the last stanza goes from “ah, eyrie-­ire, aero hour, eh?,” that is, via an ea­gle’s nest (an eyrie) into the higher “aero” dynamics of time, t­owards an “ur-­area,” a place beyond areas, and “yaw,” a word for the deviation of an aircraft, till we reach “aura our orrery,” a glowing or golden model of the solar system. As well as being a translation of notional noise, this is also a direction that goes, quite logically, up and out of the world, through its atmosphere of air to the highest conceivable point. The stereophonic effect of that old “hesitation” between sound and sense is acute h ­ ere, as the ear attends to the aero-­phonics of bat-­ speak, while eye and brain decipher the sense of the words, with their plotted geography leading upwards, as if by an “arrow,” to that marvelous last line—it takes a small break, like a leap (of faith), to reach it—­“A rare ear, our aery Yahweh.” Is this, one might ask, a God, a bat, or an ear? Is it a figurative translation of divine presence, or a witty description of a bat, all ears, and high as God? Certainly, the sound of it answers ­those ­h igh-­a ltitude vowels, “air our array,” “aura our orrery,” “ray, our arrow,” which naturally open into “our aery Jahweh.” But it is typical of Murray to avoid the rankings of meta­phor ­here. This is not one ­thing looking like another; in fact, likeness is not the issue. This is a bat, an ear, and a God, caught in a line that embodies them as sounds, fleshed in noises, and outside all theological or logical justification. But this is also the old short-­circuit of an ear to an ear, a listening made to be listened to, that has seemed to lie at the heart of so many works in this book. For the bat’s “one tufty crinkled ear” at the start meets, or perhaps fi­nally becomes, “A rare ear”—­a listening device which may be Jahweh’s, thus turning the poem into a kind of prayer, or may be the bat’s, as it echolocates its way between voicing and listening, or may be the poem’s own ear, which holds words as if in a speaking silence on the page—­a silence which the reader’s ear must then summon into presence and sound. “A rare ear, our aery Yahweh.” To give ear to a “rare ear” might indeed be to enter into an “extra, celestial conversation,” to hear how “a, ea, ou, ae, ah, eh” falls out over and above what makes sense, like luck or grace. A “conversation” suggests interaction, some kind of “celestial” response, w ­ hether from “Yahweh” or from a “rare ear” be-

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yond the sound thresholds of the h ­uman. The street-­ singer in Mrs. Dalloway offers a similarly imaginable melisma, when she sings “ee um fah um so / foo swee too eem oo—” (Woolf 1925, 1992: 88), in lines that must be set apart as poetry. Murray’s bats are poetry writers and poetry readers at once, listeners who sing, singers (even through bared teeth) who listen, and thus navigate, all ears, beyond the heights of ­human sound to reach a place where ­either God as bat, or bat as God, might be conceived. In his lecture “Embodiment and Incarnation,” Murray offers the following account of poetry’s effect on the reader: “We may say that the poem is dancing us to its rhythm, even as we sit apparently still, reading it. It is, discreetly, borrowing our body to embody itself ” (1997: 316). While language is always, by its very nature, analogy, meta­phor, and translation, a carry­ing across of finches feeding or of bats’ ultrasound into words which mean something, however remote or archaic, the mystery of rhythm and sound, ­t hose queer noises picked up by the attentive ear, are a means by which language might be embodied, lived in and made pres­ent, as if by another incarnation: an incarnation in the ear. The solution to the poem’s puzzle of meaning ultimately lies, not in explaining it (like all this!) but in hearing it again, and then again. That aural journey is a journey through sound, to where sound becomes so thick that it is, almost, the ­t hing itself. It is as if Murray w ­ ere suggesting that all sound in poetry is an ultrasound—­a sound beyond the ear which calls on it to listen differently, and to summon its hearings, not so much into ghost-­presences but into “presence” itself—­t hat religiously inflected word which contains and enacts the Christian drama of the incarnation. So in this, Murray takes us on a listening journey to some “extra, celestial” place, which is also just the poem’s ­here and now, where sound “thinks:” and makes us think, and then think again, in a kind of “­whole thinking” which may be without conclusions but is full of presence and attention.

10 Justifying Time in Ticks and Tocks Rhythm is not arithmetic. john cage I was a piece of work, ticking. And my songs ­were their mea­sure of longing. emma jones “Style is a very ­simple ­matter; it is all rhythm,” ­Virginia Woolf once pronounced in a letter to Vita Sackville-­West in 1926. But clearly the simplicity of the ­matter left her uneasy, and she went on to won­der if, a­ fter sitting “half the morning” unable to write “for lack of the right rhythm,” ­t hings might not be so “­simple” ­after all. “Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it” (1993–1994: III. 247), she continues. Rhythm, then, is not only an easy synonym for style, and for the voice which makes it distinctive, but is also “very profound,” even “deeper than words,” as if hailing from a place below and before articulate speech. Moreover, this founding pulse or impulse also comes from far away; it is like a “wave in the mind,” which eventually breaks on the distant shore of language, irregularly regular as waves are. So rhythm, in its pre-verbal sounding, is not unlike that pre-emptive “humming noise” in A Room of One’s Own, which calls both inarticulately and musically to be “set” to “words.” “Could one set that humming noise to words?” (1929: 19), Woolf writes ­t here, articulating both a question and a wish. In both examples she regards words as a secondary means of expression, adjustable to some prelinguistic noise, w ­ hether rhythm or hum, which bypasses any com226

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municative purpose or ­w ill of the author’s. The “set” or “fit” of language involves a sense of difference from t­ hose originating impulses, as well as a difference overcome. “Poetry is a composition of words set to ­music” (1960: 437), Ezra Pound proposed in 1918, using that same word, “set,” to emphasize the distinction between “­music” and “Poetry,” but also their approximation, which allows the slight puns in “composition” and “set” to work both ways. Like Woolf, he too makes the “set” of words appeal to some non-verbal instinct or pulse. By “­music,” Pound generally means rhythm or time, rather than tune, and it is in his comments about rhythm that he offers some of his most original accounts of poetry’s sounding effects. He writes, for example, in his essay “Prologomena,” “ ‘I believe in an ‘absolute rhythm,’ a rhythm, that is, in poetry which corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed’ ” (1978: 469). Woolf might find the correspondence between “emotion” and expression to be a l­ ittle less quick and exact, since rhythm travels like “a wave in the mind, long before” it reaches expression; nevertheless, the diagram is the same: “rhythm” is the charge by which “emotion” is recovered from its preverbal silence. Both accounts, of course, are variations on Words­worth’s “emotion recollected in tranquillity” (Words­worth and Coleridge 1963, 1991: 266), but “rhythm,” rather than h ­ uman recollection, now forms the means of recovering such emotion. Woolf and Pound both remove the h ­ uman context of “emotion,” making it impersonal, self-­ distanced, almost unspecific, by putting it through the apparently technical filter of “rhythm.” Pound’s “ ‘absolute rhythm’ ” then characteristically gives the word an even more hieratic status, as if its dictates w ­ ere beyond any merely h ­ uman accounting or resisting. In his 1942 essay “The M ­ usic of Poetry,” T.  S. Eliot rehearses this same sense of priorities when he writes, “I know that a poem, or a passage of a poem, may tend to realize itself first as a par­t ic­u ­lar rhythm before it reaches expression in words” (1957: 38). That the origin of poetic language might be “a par­tic­u­lar rhythm,” rather than some purpose, intention, or even emotion in the writer, is typical of Eliot’s distrust of the Romantics’ apparently self-­originating ­theories of creativity. It is the impersonal auditory force of “rhythm” which first makes itself felt, thus nudging ­those older terms, inspiration or

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imagination, out of the way. What lies b ­ ehind this change in emphasis may in part be Pater’s influential privileging of m ­ usic in his theory and practice of writing, and in part the extra fillip given to the idea of rhythm in the early twentieth c­ entury by such works as George Saintsbury’s A History of En­glish Prose Rhythm (1912) and Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Lit­er­a­ture (1919). Saintsbury, for example, argues in one place that “dreams themselves are nothing if not rhythmical,” since their combination of “variety with the least pos­si­ble disturbance” is “the very soul—­the quintessence, the constituting form and idea” (1912: 311) of rhythmic prose. Symons on Mallarmé similarly emphasizes “rhythm, which is the executive soul” of writing: it is something like a “sensation” forming in the “brain, at first prob­ably no more than a rhythm, absolutely without words” (1919: 197), he explains. In both, rhythm is no longer a textbook ­counter of time, a property of language that is usable, alongside meter, as a means of scanning, but a word that carries the self-­ justifying mystique of literary writing, as stemming from a force outside writer and work. Rhythm is the “dream” or “soul” of writing, in the sense of a guiding plan or propulsion, and the way it is invoked increasingly emphasizes a mechanism outside any volition of the dreamer-­w riter. Eliot’s own account of that “par­t ic­u­lar rhythm before it reaches expression in words” may be indebted to a famous passage from an essay of 1939 by Paul Valéry, in which he attempts to explain the origin of his g ­ reat poem “Le Cimetière Marin”: As I went along the street where I live, I was suddenly gripped by a rhythm which took possession of me and soon gave me the impression of some force outside myself. [ . . . ​] Then another rhythm overtook and combined with the first, and certain strange transverse relations w ­ ere set up between t­ hese two princi­ ples[. . . . ​] They combined the movement of my walking legs and some kind of song I was murmuring, or rather which was being murmured through me. (1958, 1985: 61) This apparently autobiographical passage slightly fudges the issue of ­whether the second rhythm is or is not the murmured “song” itself,

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but it does insist that rhythm is more complex than the mere march of footsteps. For the poet hears two rhythms in “transverse relations,” in a cross or counterpoint which complicates the beat, so that t­ here is the rhythm of “walking legs,” but also another which traverses it, and is “some kind of song I was murmuring.” The resulting syncopated effect then becomes the ground plan of the poem. T ­ here is both a literal step, which might be a stepping in time, and then another rhythm, which may even be the indistinct noise in the poet’s head of “murmuring.” If the first grips him like an outside force and sets him walking to time, like Woolf walking to the hum of Tennyson and Rossetti in A Room of One’s Own, the second is a murmurish noise which complicates that time, as if by a counterpoint action. That both are designated by the term “rhythm” is a sign of how wide a remit this word has now acquired. It is a founding princi­ple, a pulse outside the self, but it is also the sounded m ­ usic or song of writing, “murmuring” or “murmured” against the beat of any ­simple time signature mea­sur­able by meter. Clearly, rhythm is no longer just a pulse to be extrapolated from the finished text, but the starting engine of a complexity of motion to which, first the writer, then the reader, must be alert. Valéry’s, of course, is not a new insight, though the specificity of his example is startling. For rhythm, as opposed to meter, has always opened up the sense of a mea­sure comparatively more varied and complex than the second. As Derek Attridge nicely summarizes, “A poem is a real-­t ime event” (1995: 2), not a dead object showing the anatomy of time. While rhythm is heard in the breaking of waves or in walking footsteps, even, as we ­shall see, in certain ways of hearing a ticking clock, it is also a cross-­beat or cross-­current, as well as the hum or “murmuring” of a song within. Unlike the template of classical meter, which might be applied to any text, rhythm is both unique and minutely variable—­and “variable” is the word that is repeated endlessly, as writers strug­gle to describe a beat which does not keep regular time. Sidney Lanier, for instance, writing in The Science of En­glish Verse (1909), offers a memorable example of how even clock time (or “primary rhythm” as he calls it, as opposed to “secondary”) might not be a hard-­and-­fast term, but one whose mea­sure is infinitely interpretable. His influential and much-­quoted example of this

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difference explains, “The ticks of a clock are exactly alike: they fulfil the definition of primary rhythm[. . . . ​] But ­every one who has been in a room alone with a ticking clock must have observed that ­every other tick seems to be dif­fer­ent, somehow, from its fellow, as if it said, ‘Tick-­tack, tick-­tack,’ &c” (1909: 63). It is the presence of “­every one” which makes the difference h ­ ere. The clock’s regular tick-­t ick-­t ick is changed into alternating pitches, even into a kind of imaginable dotted rhythm, by the presence of t­ hose solitary listeners who hear a rhythm already being set into language: “tick-­tack.” For the ear, rather than being an empirically passive receptor of sound, is already, he notes, an interpreter and imaginer, hearing t­ hings just a l­ittle “out.” The “imagining ear,” as Frost called it a few years ­later in 1915, is the ear that can hear “tones” as well as “words.” “When you listen to a speaker, you hear words, to be sure,—­but you also hear tones” (1995: 687), he writes. T ­ hese “tones,” unlike “words,” are interpretable stresses, intonations, pitches, which belong to a voice, or ­perhaps to the many voicings the ear might hear, even in the monotonous regularity of a clock. Just as, for Lanier, the hearer of the clock starts to alter its time, to make variety where ­t here is none and to make a tune of mere ticks, so for Frost, the hearer-­w riter or reader of poetry listens for the altering “tones” or voicings which lie within, but also cross, the impersonal words of the language. When Frank Kermode, in The Sense of an Ending (1966), takes this same image of the “clock’s tick-­tock” as a model for plot in fiction, and therefore for time with its beginnings, endings and indefinite stretches in the ­middle, he too rec­ords that “the fictional difference between the two sounds,” of “tick and “tock” (1979: 44), is merely the product of our language-­bound ears. Our “sense of an ending” thus gives to “tock” a definition which is dif­fer­ent from “tick,” and the length between becomes, like the length of a novel (or of life itself ), potentially stretchable. “Tick-­tock,” then, becomes a figure for the competing or “transverse relations” between a­ ctual clock-­time, on the one hand, and the interpreted time heard by the listener who cannot bear mere mechanical repetition, on the other. Rhythm is not an abstract rule or repetitive metronome of time, applied a­ fter the event; rather, it is the articulation and stress brought to language at each specific reading. One might say that t­here are phantom listeners at

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the very heart of rhythm, hearing, altering, interpreting the sounds it makes. Lanier was not the first to define rhythm in terms of solitary ­listeners whose ears re-imagine the tick of a clock. A few years before, in “The Symbolism of Poetry” (1900), Yeats also invokes it to s­ uggest a sound rendered slightly out of true. He proposes, for instance, that the moment of contemplation which precedes writing involves an attention to rhythm, “hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety” (1961: 159). The combination of “monotony” and “variety,” which keeps the writer in a trance-­like state between sleep and wake, is then characterized by the figure of a ticking watch: “If certain sensitive persons listen per­sis­tently to the ticking of a watch [ . . . ​] they fall into the hypnotic trance; and rhythm is but the ticking of a watch made softer, that one must needs listen, and vari­ous, that one may not be swept beyond memory or grow weary of listening” (1961: 159). So rhythm in poetry is like a “softer” tick, overlaid on the exact time-­keeping of the watch. The “ticking of a watch made softer” is also a ticking made more “vari­ous,” to ­counter the “monotony” of the metronome or, by implication, the meter. Characteristically, “monotony” and “variety,” the “watch” and the “watch made softer,” go together like a tiny incompatibility, a hiatus which ensures we should not “grow weary of listening.” As in Lanier, it is the listener’s “listening” that softens the watch, bringing to it the “variety” that its ­actual “ticking” lacks. Yeats, like Valéry ­after him, welcomes the sense of a double movement, a syncopation of clockwork and superimposed half-­imaginary ear-­work, which keeps the listener, ­whether poet or reader, awake. To “listen per­sis­ tently” is essential to the ticking of rhythm, but in order not to “grow weary of listening” (that intransitive pres­ent participle again), the ear seeks a “softer” variety of tick, which is of course partly its own imaginative invention. Accounting for rhythm, then, means accounting for that strange act of “listening” which accompanies it, and which, in the case of poetry read silently on the page, is a constant, and constantly varying, interpreting achievement. Just such a differential is the princi­ple used by Yeats to scan the first line of Paradise Lost, in a passage already quoted from his late essay “A General Introduction for My Work.” To “emphasise its

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five feet,” he writes of Milton’s poem, is to hear the “folk song” in it, which is the meter’s “unvariable possibility.” But the meter, he writes, must be crossed with “another emphasis, that of passionate prose” (1961: 524), not in order to erase the first, but to make the two audible at once. This cross or transverse effect, as of variable beat over “unvariable” meter, “passionate” prose over jog-­trot “folk song,” “softer watch” over a time-­keeping watch, is the way to listen to the complex rhythms of Milton’s lines. Frost may have been remembering Yeats’s own rejection of mid-­Victorian verse, with its “energetic rhythms, as of a man r­ unning” (1961: 163), when he summarized, “Footbeats for the metre and heartbeats for the rhythm” (1995: 847). While meter mea­sures time with the accuracy of a machine, pedometer, or ticking clock, rhythm works within the very dif­fer­ent time signature of what varies: tone, pronunciation, word stress, per­ for­mance, interpretation—­all of them emotionally inflected, as by a “heartbeat.” As Burns Cooper summarizes in Mysterious ­Music: Rhythm and ­Free Verse, “the perception of stress in speech is, like the perception of rhythm generally, a subjective and interpretive activity” (1998: 24). To listen to rhythm in poetry, then, is to listen for possibilities or promises which refuse to ­settle into a single scheme, and for which ­t here may be no technical vocabulary of explanation. As Kenneth Burke once suggested, “Rhythm is a promise which the poet makes to the reader” (1931, 1968: 140). Such a promise is open, uncertain of its fulfillment, and pointing forward in time. It is not necessarily a promise of anything, except perhaps of time itself, continuing in time. “But I have promises to keep” (1995: 207), writes Frost in the last stanza of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Eve­ning,” just before he falls into the repetition of the last two lines, as if thus keeping a kind of rhythmical promise, the meaning of which lies only in the promise, in the sense of movement in a standstill. Like Burke, most poets have been happy to keep the idea of rhythm a ­little mysteriously workable, a pulse attached to distant emotional impulses in the writer, as well as to expectations and variations in the ear of the reader. But critics too have always tended to emphasize the freer emotional potential of rhythm. It is, Clive Scott proposes in Reading the Rhythm, “not some comfortable, unified entity providing, for ­every

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poem, roughly the same kind of infrastructure, but something variable and elusive, redefined and relocated with each new text” (1993: 1). ­Here too the word “variable” serves to describe that ele­ment of uncertainty about rhythm, its wavering unaccountability, as well as its imaginary provenance deep within the mind’s workings. It is a founding movement, as well as a moving fundamental of the text. That rhythm might be “variable and elusive,” rather than exact and mea­sur­able, is what keeps it ripe for redefinition by each new generation of critics and poets. Thus, increasingly between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it becomes the key term, not only for the kind of race politics tracked by Michael Golston in Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry (2008) but also more broadly for the ­whole mystery of sound and attention in lit­er­a­t ure. As Reuven Tsur argues, in Poetic Rhythm, Structure and Per­for­mance, against Wellek and Warren’s tripartite ­account of rhythm as meter, stress pattern, and pattern of per­for­ mance, the third of t­ hese three always encompasses the other two: “per­for­mance is a dimension of lines of any complexity, ­whether read aloud or silently” (1998: 30). As he explains, “No reader can ever ­experience the interaction of the metric pattern and the stress pattern, or the sound stratum of a poem, ­unless it is performed in some way” (1998: 26). So the perception of rhythm always depends on print becoming printed voice, or rather printed voicings, in the performing ear of the reader. The writer, too, hears and performs a rhythm, often, as we have seen, before knowing the words in which it ­w ill sound. Rhythm might begin as a summons from outside, and only ­later become a variable audibility within the text, which thus calls to the “summoning ear” of the reader, not just to chant, tap, or sing along, but to try listening, and then try listening for longer, differently, to all the variations of accent and stress that per­for­mance might yield. Such an interpreting activity w ­ ill involve constantly adjusting, or rather justifying, in the old compositor’s sense, the time in question. Rhythm, then, is never an abstract rule for turning verse into marching tunes but is instead a summons to listen, and to listen to all the competing movements of language as it sets beat against accent, mea­sure against stress, or more loosely sense against sound. As

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soon as rhythm becomes a “wave in the mind,” a “transverse” complexity of relational beats, or a “softer,” more “vari­ous” timer, the word loses its simplified sense of clockwork and gains the quieter, ear-­dependent sense of sound’s work, modulating and altering as it is read. To turn to the poets themselves is then to find this alterability constantly insisted on. For instance, in an early essay on Hopkins subtitled “Notes on Timing in His Poetry,” Elizabeth Bishop compares his poetry to “the caprice of a perfectly trained acrobat” who can “afford an extra turn and flourish” within the per­for­mance of a fall. She then concludes that poetic timing “might be defined paradoxically as the accuracy with which poetry keeps up with itself ” (2008: 663). What can be heard in the very construction of her ­sentence is a ghostly double movement, as of feet slightly out of sync. ­There is “poetry” and “itself,” their “accuracy” dependent on the tiniest difference, like a ­r unning to keep up. It is a good description of rhythm in poetry ­because, like Yeats’s “variable” time, it makes us listen, not to the easy run of it but to the sprint and falter of its steps. Bishop’s acrobat keeps to time but also cocks a snoop at time with that “extra turn and flourish.” That “poetry keeps up with itself ” is an assertion that must overcome the ­imagined lag of its own doubleness, ­whether ­r unning or somersaulting in the time it takes. ­T here is an improvisatory freedom in the per­ for­mance of such “timing,” even if necessarily a freedom within constraints. As twentieth-­century poetry thus f­ rees itself from the shackles of classical scanning, of the “folk song” as Yeats calls it, so the word “rhythm” offers a performable alternative, which keeps a sense of mea­sure but loosens its control. The quirks and oddities of the En­ glish language, which do not necessarily fit the dual pattern of stressed or unstressed “beats” and “offbeats” (1982: 77) as Attridge calls them, then start to come into prominence. For En­glish has always been a difficult language to scan, not only b ­ ecause it runs on the ­little legs of so many short words: prepositions and conjunctions more or less accented, but also b ­ ecause its syllabic stresses are minutely variable. It is full of stretchable sounds, diphthongs, and elisions, which take their timing from context, from adjacent letters and sounds, and from meaning. To take just one instance: the sheer

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number of “er” endings which pepper (as in “pepper”) the language, and the tiny variations in pace they require, like the difference between winter and prayer, listener and traveler, anger and watcher, create minute differences of length within any system of beats and offbeats. Such ubiquitous “er” sounds make for an erring, wandering movement at the heart of the language, an uncertainty of stress and length which, especially at the ends of words, gives to the ear considerable scope for freedom. Add to t­hese all the words that end in sounds related to “or,” “ar,” “ear,” and o ­ thers, like all the airy ultrasounds of Les Murray’s bat, and the very fabric of the language seems to waver at its core. This becomes evident when the rhythm of the language is set against the rhythm of m ­ usic, as in the first line of Christina Rossetti’s “A Christmas Carol” (1979–1990: I. 216). Holst’s well-­k nown musical setting, with its clear 4 / 4 time, is hard to get out of our ears as we read “In the bleak mid-­win ter .” But without Holst’s memorable tune, it might read differently. For instance, following the natu­ral stresses of the language, a first instinct might be to try a conversational two-­beat line: “In the bleak mid-­winter.” But Rossetti’s line is in­ter­est­ing for its sheer pliability: it could be two-­beat, it could be three: “In the bleak mid-­winter.” Chances are that, on a first reading (if we can remember reading before singing it), we let it hang, then check with its matching line and justify in retrospect. But in fact the matching line does not help much: “Earth stood hard as iron” (1979– 1990: I. 217), since “iron” itself hovers uncertainly between one and two syllables. Holst spins it out to two, which is nearly unpronounceable, even in singing. He insists on a beat which pulls the natu­ral stresses of the language marvelously and memorably out of shape, fixing the temporal vagaries of the words into mea­sur­able lengths of notes. But Rossetti, as I have already shown, loves the rhythmic uncertainty of unpredictable stress patterns, loves to make the reader work, and thus listen to how much time “winter” might take, or how much weight to give to “iron.” Moreover, it is not just the pronunciation which can alter and might in any case be regional, but the timing of the words, as the reader chooses w ­ hether or not to linger on the second syllable of “winter.” Poetry, then, may be less a “composition of words set to ­music,” as Pound asserted, than of words set

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to time, so long as “set” does not mean “set fast.” For any timing depends on the reader’s ear hearing and internally voicing words to a rhythm, ­whether Holst’s or another’s. Moreover, t­hose timings may be plural, falling in a combination of stresses which cross and ­counter each other without ever quite settling. This is the case with the first line of a poem to which I keep returning in this book: de la Mare’s “The Listeners.” “ ‘Is t­ here anybody ­t here?’ said the Traveller” (1969: 126). De la Mare once offered his own account of poetry’s timing as a kind of “keeping up with itself,” as if t­here ­were always two movements to reckon with. For poetry, he explains in his unpublished essay “Craftsmanship in Poetry,” might be compared to the movements of a boxer: “his foot-­play a kind of metre, the ever-­varying skilful motion of gloves and head and body their rhythmical variation” (16). Once again ­those key words, “varying” and “variation,” pinpoint the difference. If “foot-­ play” is grounded and basic, and by implication regular, the skill of the boxer lies in the unpredictable counterrhythms of “gloves and head and body.” In a sense, the very nature of the En­glish language plays the boxer’s game of setting a complexity of movements across the more plodding dance of feet, just as in “The Listeners” it sets the wavering time of the first line against the loud, ­t riple knock of the second: “ ‘Is t­ here anybody ­t here?’ said the Traveller / Knocking on the moonlit door.” As the “er” of “Traveller” trails off, forfeiting its rights to a second beat, it seems to probe some unanswering uncertainty which the ­whole poem ­w ill then make more audible. Indeed, the consonance between “Traveller” and “Listeners” already hints at some shared identity or purpose, both of them listening b ­ ehind a door to the quiet on the other side. And even in that first line, “Traveller” chimes with two other “er” sounds. “ ‘Is ­t here anybody ­there?’ ” is a question which alerts us to the difference in timing between the two parts of speech: the second adverbial “­t here” being considerably longer than the first, as if straining to hear what is “­t here.” In other words, the uncertainty begins in our ears at the start, in that erring of “er,” which already forces us to justify the rhythm of the line against the metrical imperatives of “Knocking.” In this poem about Listeners and Travellers, about something being “­t here” and not “­t here,” the “queer metrics” which so piqued Frost

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become a kind of secret clue to some universal uncertainty, roused by the poem’s listening to the quiet. The second knock, when it comes some lines ­later, then marvelously confirms this uncertainty, while betraying the faltering conviction of the knocker, in a long line that wavers in and out of five beats or six: “And he smote upon the door again a second time” (1969: 126). This is a line that w ­ ill not ­settle into a metrical pattern but catches on the tiniest pause around that extra word, “again.” De la Mare might have written, “And he smote upon the door a second time,” without losing anything except the tautological sense of “again”—­what ­else is “a second time”?—­but meanwhile losing every­ thing of the line’s uneasy hesitation, as if “again” expressed the overemphatic silliness of continuing to knock when no one answers. Rhythm, then, is not only a complexity of timing deep in the very nature of the language, with its diphthongs (“door”) and variable “er” endings, but it is also an ear at the heart of the poem, set to listen, and so justify the work of “Listeners” inside and out. And of course, an ear is exactly what this h ­ ouse ­w ill disclose, as if in answer to the poem’s very first question. That “phantom listeners [ . . . ​] / Stood listening” is another near-­tautology, a kind of ear to an ear, which gives the Traveller nothing to hear, yet every­t hing still to listen for—­as if a “phantom” sound might yet be audible across the poem’s peremptory knocks and calls. Another poet whose ear is exceptionally attentive to the uncertain timings of “er,” perhaps b ­ ecause she can hear their New E ­ ngland pronunciation ­behind the En­glish, is Anne Stevenson. She once ­explained the importance of rhythm in her own writing as an echo of phrases or “cadences” in the works of ­others: “I still write poems by overhearing the rhythms of what I used to call ‘inevitable cadences’ ” (1998: 125–126), she writes. The inevitability of ­those “cadences” depends on the poet’s hearing, or “overhearing,” as if somewhere in the history of poetry itself, the inevitability of a rhythmic phrase. H ­ ere, for example, is a short passage from the poem “A Report from the Border.” It consists of a debate between two voices about economic power, but it is also a poem which plays, waveringly, with the half-­ rhyming, eye-­or ear-­rhyming, sounds that the word “Border” sets up. It begins:

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Wars in peacetime d ­ on’t behave like wars. So loving they are. Kissed on both cheeks, silk-­lined ambassadors Pose and confer. (2004: 27) At the start, t­ hose “wars” find appropriate near-­rhymes in “are,” “ambassadors,” “confer”—­words that play their variations on the uncertain stress of any word ending in “ar,” “or,” or “er.” The four-­syllable time of “ambassadors” can then e­ ither be spun out to a two-­beat word, to fulfill the pentameter and stress the rhyme on “wars,” or curtailed, as it might be spoken, to one beat: ambassadors, which just misses its emphasis as a rhyme word. Certainly, the sheer length of “ambassadors” seems awkwardly pushy, elbowing its way into a small space, as if into a small country. But a­ fter the preachy voices of stanzas 2 and 3, it is the sound and timing of the last stanza that contains the surprise: This from the party of good intent. From the other, Hunger’s stare, Drowned crops, charred hopes, fear, stupor, prayer And lit­er­a­t ure. (2004: 27) ­ ere the rhyme words are “other,” “stare,” “prayer,” and “lit­er­a­t ure,” H modified by yet more internal rhymes and near-­rhymes: “Hunger’s stare,” “charred,” “fear,” “stupor.” T ­ hese “ar,” “er,” and “or” endings, with their altering syllabic lengths and stress, start to distract the ear with borderland sounds—­sounds that blur the edges of words and mess with the meter: “charred hopes, fear, stupor, prayer / And lit­er­ a­t ure.” The weight of that last word, falling where the reader least expects it, among the disasters, has the surprise of a rebuff to our party lines. It also, draggingly, plays for time. Unlike “ambassadors,” which pushes greedily into a small space, “lit­er­a­t ure” fills out almost a w ­ hole line of its own. It is a word full of ­t hose wavering noises, making it hard to know where the stress should fall: ­literature, as we might say it? Or literature, to bring out the rhyme scheme? Or lit­-­er­-a­ ­-­ture, to savor the drawn-­out strangeness of a word found, perhaps, in the wrong place—or a wrong place that

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ironically turns out right? So Stevenson makes the reader justify the time of that line, taking it again, letting one word, with its normally one-­beat pronunciation, extend almost to a tetrameter, since “lit­er­a­ ture” h ­ ere might be the one fitting, and unfitting, answer to the economic prob­lems raised by the poem. Justifying time thus becomes an act, not of ­simple scanning but of interpretative sounding. The length of “lit­er­a­t ure,” like the length of “ambassadors,” is a rhythmic prob­lem to be, if not solved, at least continually reassessed, while weighing lightly in the scales of other more momentous irregularities to be justified. Such a word plays on the borderlands of the language, the places from which poems, as opposed to newspapers full of mere news, might indeed “report.” The waverings of poetic time, then, are part of the poet’s invitation to the ear, and to the ear’s freedom to find voices which may not resolve into a single regular tom-­tom or tick. If “rhythm is a promise which the poet makes to the reader” (Burke 1931, 1968: 140), it is a promise of continually required attention. A “promise,” a­ fter all, is essentially a postponement into the f­ uture of what cannot be disclosed ­today. Burke’s definition suggests that rhythm is not only a continuing satisfaction of mea­sure but also an uncertainty at the heart of mea­sure, just as a promise, by its very nature, keeps the secret of its disclosure. The “promise” of poetry is that the reader should keep hearing that tick-­t ick, while justifying its time into the ear’s registering of a tick-­tock or tick-­tack. So the ­little inbuilt jokes of “er” in the language help to keep the reader alert to rhythms working across the monotonous sound of the clock—­rather like the scampering mouse in the nursery rhyme, which runs up on the striking hour as if to embody the skitter, the tiny variation on a clock’s regular chime, in “Hickory, dickory, dock” (Opie and Opie 1951, 1973: 206). Any number of examples could be given of how the sound “er” points up the instability of mea­sure in En­glish, but one is contained in the title of Trevor Joyce’s poem “Time Piece. Clocks Err through Anger of the Watcher,” from his volume They Hunt the Cold (2001: 75). Clearly this “Time Piece” does not go to strict time, but errs—­ that is, deviates or wanders—as it meets ­t hose ­little embodiments of “Err” in the words that follow: “Anger of the Watcher.” It is as if

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Joyce ­were putting Lanier into verse, ­here. It is the subjective, angry “Watcher” who puts the clock’s time out, and of course the poem’s time too, as “Anger of the Watcher,” with its metrical unease, its lightly chiming last syllables, somehow falls over its own feet. That “Clocks Err” is thus embodied in t­ hose two nouns which put “Err” into practice but also, like Rossetti’s “winter” and de la Mare’s “Traveller,” let us hear how clock time slips into a performative dotted rhythm, and how t­ hose secondary syllables trail off into unspecifically lengthened sounds. The poet lets us hear the mouse in the workings of this “Time Piece,” which is the poem. “To tick it, tock it, turn it true” (1997: 136), writes Wallace Stevens in “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” This is not the main serenader of the poem, who ­w ill ­later turn the green of nature into the imagination’s blue, but the “man number one,” whose timing is too numerically (and metrically) “true” and who therefore might only “drive the dagger in his heart” (135) and “nail his thought across the door” (136), as if in some exacting torture chamber. (Stevens’s attempt at paraphrasing the poem in a letter recalls, at this point, “a hawk [ . . . ​] nailed up” or perhaps “a crow” [1966: 359].) “So that’s life, then: ­t hings as they are?” (1997: 136), the poet then asks, as if such brutal anatomizing of “heart” and “thought” troubled him. But ­t here is another player in this poem, whose purpose is to miss both metrical fit and the repre­sen­ta­t ional fit of words to ­t hings: “to miss, by that, t­ hings as they are,” and so achieve “the serenade” that might be “ ‘A tune beyond us, yet ourselves’ ” (135). For Stevens, “To tick it, tock it” is to play too close to “­t hings as they are,” leaving no space for the imagination “to miss,” and thus achieve another kind of “true.” Between “the blue guitar” and “­t hings as they are” is a difference of epistemological perception continually emphasized, yet also made proximate, by their rhyme. Stevens w ­ ill not let go of, even while he relishes, the drawn-­out sound of “ar,” which brings together the two polarized realities of imagination and t­ hings, m ­ usic and real­ity, the “guitar” and “­t hings” that “are.” So “­t hings as they are” ­w ill keep being repeated in this long, difficult poem, to be touched and missed continually by the “blue guitar,” which seeks to play them, but at a tangent and more freely than in that other, nailing sense of “To tick it, tock it.”

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The story of clocks and poems is of course a long and complex one. All poems, by their very nature, carry an internal clock, if not of meter at least of rhythm, however ­free. And a poem by its very shape and nature calls on the reader to time it, according to the rules of stress, phrasing, punctuation, and space—­rules that are not laid down but must be found in the pro­cess of reading. However, between the clock and the poem ­there is also a difference—­and it is this difference which becomes the subject of another of Stevenson’s verses, the title of which makes a l­ittle wave to Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle “One Art”: “To Write It.” “It,” ­here, is the silence lost to the poet in the perpetual buzz of a new hearing aid, which paradoxically restores her hearing at the expense of a silence she can no longer hear. So she recalls: Silence, sliding between that breath and now this breath, severing the tick from the tock on the alarm clock, mea­sur­ing the absence of ­else. (2004: 287) Clocks must err, the watches go softer, and silence must sever “the tick / from the tock,” creating a space for that mysterious conclusion: the immeasurably mea­sured “absence of ­else.” ­Here too the clock meta­phor offers a kind of ground bass, a beat with which the poem’s working rhythm is in dialogue. Thus, the line end itself helps to sever “the tick / from the tock,” offering a space of time which, in confirmation of the sense, puts the clock slightly out. Similarly, “between that breath / and now this breath” is a “between” that lasts as long as a breath might be held—­while breath, of course, is exactly what the poem transfers to the reader who performs, between breaths, the sound of this poetically erring “alarm clock.” So clock time must give way to breath time, as the poem gives itself to the reader to repeat, and time, and temporize, seeing the catches on the page which become voiced pauses. Rhythm is “a promise,” an expectation and a gift, but it might be as halting and open as that spaced silence, “severing the tick / from the tock,” which makes a kind of nonsense, too, of what the clock determines. In the end, “mea­sur­ing the absence of e­ lse” is a metaphysical joke about an “­else,” so otherwhere and absent that it also tells how “mea­sur­ing” might be the

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inescapable condition of life, without which life’s breaths, as well as poetry’s, could not go on. So rhythm is above all a word for something listened to and for, rather than simply calculated—­something which cannot be discussed in isolation from all the forms of justification, or adjustment, which reading involves. Unlike inspiration or imagination, it seems to have no magic allure, yet its purpose is often the same: to suggest an impetus from outside the sense-­making ways of words which inspire the writer to write. But rhythm also exercises the difficulties of being in time by letting us hear ­those irregularities and vagaries of the language which tell against the clock’s tick-­tick, while not altogether eclipsing it. All t­ hese writers invoke rhythm, sometimes as an inspirational fount of creation and sometimes as a variable engine of form, but always to remind us that the literary text is essentially a listening creature, alive to a kind of answering conversation with the reader—­a conversation which is also a dialogue of listeners. It is “the ticking of a watch made softer, that one must needs listen, and vari­ous, that one may not be swept beyond memory or grow weary of listening” (1961: 159), as Yeats put it. The multitude of ways in which rhythm calls on the ear—­many more than I have selected h ­ ere—­are all aids to hearing ­t hings, as if with the accentual stress falling on “hearing” rather than on “­t hings”—as if to say, we must “miss, by that, t­ hings as they are,” in order to hear, not “­t hings” but words, with all their poetically varying accentual tones and stresses. Listen Listen Listen Listen * They are returning to the rain’s den, the grey folk, rolling up their veils, taking the steel taps out of their tips and heels. (1996: 2) Alice Oswald’s first volume of 1996, The ­Thing in the Gap-­Stone Stile, contains a poem about gardening and rain, and rain easing, which ­w ill become a hallmark of her aesthetic. Halfway through “A Greyhound in the Eve­ning ­after a Long Day of Rain,” the poet calls on the reader to listen. The loud beat of the tetrameter repetition then meets the pause of that one asterisk, like rain stopping or leaving a splash mark, and then in the quiet we hear the packing up

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of “the grey folk,” in a line which might come out of Pope, with its symmetry and inverted sound pattern: “taking the steel taps out of their tips and heels.” This is a hexametrical tick-­tock already softening, by implication of its “taps” and “tips,” to “tip-­tap,” as if to suggest how the once cleated rain now goes on tip­toe. ­There is a “softer watch” within this “steel” clitter-­clatter of rainfall already diminishing. “Listen,” however, also points beyond ­t hese self-­consciously metrical noises to the rhythmically freer, un-­question-­marked question at the end: But what I want to know is whose is the ­great grey wicker-­limbed hound, like a stepping on coal, g ­ oing softly away . . . ​(1996: 3) Like all ellipses, t­ hese keep the reader’s ears in her eyes, see-­hearing sounds gone just out of range. They are a way of keeping the poem’s sounds open, as if “taps” w ­ ere still audible “­going softy away” in the “wicker” lightness of this greyhound’s rain-­dropping footsteps. Ellipses, which seem to miss something, are also a reminder that the poem on the page is itself a missing—­m issing t­hings, missing sounds—­which also therefore gains by the loss, so that the ear might imagine them instead. The rain-­hound goes “softly away . . .” as if the “softer” watch of rhythm ­were still ticking, and answering to a listening which might have no par­t ic­u­lar object now, except to hear what rainfall stopping might still sound like. If ellipses are a joke at the expense of the printed word, they are also a jokey recovery of an essential ingredient of the printed word: its imaginary audibility in the face of a determinedly s­ ilent page. In 2000, Oswald published an essay, ostensibly about gardening, which seems to return to the rainy theme of the earlier poem: “The Universe in Time of Rain Makes the World Alive with Noise.” Answering the question of what she most likes about gardening, the poet replies with an extended meditation on gardening as writing, and listening: The truth is, it’s the sound. I ­don’t know anything lovelier than ­t hose ­f ree shocks of sound happening against the backsound of your heartbeat. Machinery, spade-­scrapes, birdsong, gravel, rain

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on polythene, macks moving, aeroplanes, seeds kept in paper, potatoes coming out of boxes, high small leaves or large head-­ height leaves being shaken, frost on grass, strimmers, hoses . . . ​ also, when you look up, (and your eyes are still half in your ears) the modulation of outlines, the landscape as a physical score, the periodicity of ­t hings—­weather, daylight, woods, all long unstable rhythms and dissonance. When I’m writing a poem, the first t­ hing I hear is its shape somewhere among all that noise. I try to avoid conventional metre in favour of this metre that is already a­ ctual. I try to keep listening, letting each line grow slowly out of the landscape. I have my left hand cupped like an ear [ . . . ​] It d ­ oesn’t m ­ atter how a poem is made. What’s impor­tant is that listening, and gardening as a form of listening, is a way of forcing a poem open to what lies bodily beyond it. B ­ ecause the eye is an instrument tuned to surfaces, but the ear tells you about volume, depth, content—­like tapping a large iron shape to find if it’s full or not. The ear hears into, not just at what surrounds it. (2000: 35–37) To start with, the “sound” she hears is a beat, or rather two kinds of beat in “transverse relations.” On the one hand, t­ here is the “backsound” (not just the background) of a “heartbeat,” regulating and continuous if literally inaudible, and on the other hand, ­t here is the more startling rhythm of t­ hose “­free shocks of sound happening against the backsound.” Already this is a kind of musical score, like Valéry’s walking and murmuring, which crosses a ground bass with a syncopating “­f ree” rhythm above it. That t­ hese are “­f ree shocks” not only f­ rees them from being metrically monotonous familiars, but also hints at the potential touch in them, since “shocks” are shocking, in the sense that sound waves send tremors through the air to shock on skin or ear­d rum. Oswald’s “shocks of sound,” like Hopkins’s “wince and sing,” recalls the physics of sound impinging on the ear, while also reminding us that to open our ears so far might be to feel and hear too much. It “would be like hearing the grass grow” (1871– 1872, 1965: 226), George Eliot warns, or indeed, for this poet-­ gardener, like hearing “potatoes,” or “leaves,” or “frost on grass.”

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Oswald’s random list of sounds, mixing “Machinery,” “birdsong,” “aeroplanes” with o ­ thers beyond our sound threshold, thus starts to do what poetry aims at: to create a promise of listening beyond listening’s scope, ­whether “potatoes coming out of boxes,” or poems. Like Pater, who similarly loves lists of incompatible random objects, and like innumerable other writers in this book, Oswald then lets the old intransitive verb do mysterious duty for “how a poem is made.” “What’s impor­t ant is that listening,” she declares. In both gardening and writing, the point is to pay attention to the ear’s capacity to interpret sounds. While the eye meets surfaces and can therefore be assured of encountering empirical t­ hings as they are, the ear meets depths, which are less encountered than surmised or gauged. It is the ear, she explains, which “tells you about volume, depth, content—­like tapping a large iron shape to find if it’s full or not.” The poem, then, is a w ­ ater butt to be tapped and listened to, both for its “volume, depth, content,” but also for what we ­don’t yet know. It is a well of potentiality from which the imagining-­ interpreting ear draws sounds to discover how to “know” in sounds. Thus, Oswald explains her craft almost entirely in terms of the ear, in a language which is already half-­changing into a poem. What would it mean to look up and find “your eyes are still half in your ears,” as she puts it? Such synesthetic play then leads to t­ hose mixed meta­phors, a “modulation of outlines,” “a physical score,” a “periodicity of t­hings,” as if the ­whole world could be transposed into a ­musical notation or rhythm for hearing it. “When I’m writing a poem,” she claims, “the first t­hing I hear is its shape somewhere among all that noise.” To “hear” a “shape” is both to stop it simply taking shape, and also to prevent it becoming just another noise. It is to keep it ear-­shaped, somehow, in the mind. Some thirty years before, in Listening and Voice, Don Ihde made exactly the same point: “we hear shapes” (1976, 2007: 61), he declared, adding in explanation: “Unaccustomed as we are to the language of hearing shapes and surfaces, we may remain unaware of the full possibilities of listening” (68). Poetry advances ­t hose “possibilities.” For the poem is a kind of aural apparition, a timed arrangement on the page which calls to be heard, setting eye against ear to satisfy neither, but to keep both in play. Oswald’s heard shape of a poem, “somewhere

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among all that noise,” may be a sensual contradiction in terms, but it is also therefore of the very nature of the written poem. As she points out, to “keep listening” is to keep “my left hand cupped like an ear”—­not quite to an ear, like Lucien Freud’s “Reflection Listening,” but as if a hand might make an ear shape and so feel the tactility of sound in its hold. Like all lists, my own choice of writers in this chapter is not meant to represent a special tradition, separable from the rest, but is, rather, both haphazard and yet representative. ­These are writers who happen to echo each other and to reiterate certain ideas about rhythm, clocks, and timing, but I might have chosen from any number of o ­ thers and come to similar conclusions. Certainly, the prevalence of the word “rhythm” from the late nineteenth ­century onwards marks a shift away from ­t hose founding Romantic terms like inspiration or imagination, as well as a shift away from strictly metrical verse, though of course rhythm and meter, as formal techniques of mea­sure, always overlap at the edges. Nevertheless, as Yeats’s reading of Milton shows, En­glish verse has often displayed that overlay of accentual irregularity over metrical regularity, sometimes just from the very nature of the stress rhythms of the language. What happens in the twentieth ­century is that writers begin to hear and theorize that “overlay” or cross, while lifting the word “rhythm” out of its formal textbook use, to retain a sense of its mysterious, infinitely variable workings. I ­w ill end with a final recent poem, from Oswald’s latest collection, Falling Awake (2016). “Tithonus” (45–80), which has no page references but whose clock markings of seconds are vis­i­ble on the left-­hand margin of each page, in vertical rows of dots, is a poem the per­for­mance of which, by reader and musician, is meant to be timed to the second. It is indeed a clock poem, which should last precisely forty-­six minutes between darkness and midsummer dawn. In a recent email to me, Oswald, in reading this chapter, found herself suddenly recalling an event in childhood which it brought to mind. She writes, One of my earliest memories is of pressing my head to an emerald alarm clock which first ticked then skipped between ticks then wobbled between skips then shivered and jangled and in

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the end I could hear w ­ hole symphonies between each tick. I suppose it was just the auditory imagination filling in gaps but I was always terrified of that clock and thought I had inadvertently discovered fairy land. ­ hether this was a faulty alarm clock, or just a clock which opened, W between ticks, to the child’s wondering-­summoning ear, does not ­matter. What ­matters is that, like Lanier, Oswald hears a tick-­t ick freighted by all ­t hose alarming other rhythms: skips and wobbles, shivers and jangles, and in the end “­whole symphonies” of noise ­refusing to obey the rule of clockwork, but opening instead into a terrifying, magical “fairy land.” Listening is, as all t­hese writers know, a wondering-­summoning activity of the ear, as well as one which plays for time within the ticks of mere recurrence. The extent to which that erratic alarm clock might have been the founding timer of Oswald’s art is suggested by the very form of “Tithonus.” For like Tennyson’s poem of the same name, which begins, “The woods decay, the woods decay and fall” (1969, 1987: II. 607), this too is a poem caught in its own calendar repetitions, yet driven by the longing to break with time—­ precisely Tithonus’s own fate and longing. Reduced to a chirping grasshopper in the classical legend, he nevertheless goes on rhythmically repeating a story of love for the ever-­returning dawn, as if forever trapped in life’s clock, yet yearning to die and slip out of it. That what lies between ticks might be both terror and “fairy land” are pertinent figures for this poet, whose listening both needs, and also needs to soften, vary, or break up, the clock’s tick. Near the start, Oswald writes how dawn is like “two sounds”: first this: the sound of every­t hing  repeating then this: the sound of every­t hing  repeating Tennyson’s first line, the rhythm of which haunted the ears of William Empson, Stevie Smith, and Paul Muldoon, may have been in Oswald’s ears as well, as she plays her own ­little joke on repetition,

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reducing the “two sounds” to an absurd identity. Of course Tithonus is in love, not only with the dawn but with the rhythm that brings dawn back each day. In a sense, this is a poem about telling the time, and being in time, to the last tick-­tock of a clock whose markings are set, like a pernickety metronome, visibly down the margins of each page. Yet within ­those strictures, the improvisations of the ­musician, and the readings of the live performer or the s­ ilent reader, remain peculiarly f­ ree, delivered in verse that mostly eschews regular or metrical time. For ­after all, this is also a poem about dawn—­a moment that is, as we perceive it, an indeterminate beginning, a mere slow clarification of light from dark, of “bleak shapes” and “half-­ formed f­ aces” emerging from dream and night. The juxtaposition of fixed time and ­f ree verse thus becomes another of ­t hose rhythmic cross-­purposes that marks both Tithonus’s fate and the verse which describes it. Utterly diminished by his unrelenting age, he remains in the grip of a life which w ­ ill not stop ticking:   which is me old unfinished not yet gone ­here I go again   as soon as a hand whose hand as soon as the fin­gers feel for the clock To read t­ hese lines, and give credit to the space at the line ends, is to hear a voice struggling to make sense, falling awake into its old unintended joke: “yet gone h ­ ere I go again,” though of course not “gone” ever, but still groping within time for that “alarm clock” which counts in seconds, and is about to tell the precise time: “4.22.” Clock time in this poem is an obsessive, meticulously plotted tick-­tock—­like “a sewing machine might write with no thread a line of small holes,” Oswald precisely points out—­but set against the almost arrhythmic splutters and non sequiturs of the still living Tithonus, whose living is both a concession to, and a defiance of, the minutes which trap him. His final tragic plea, “may I stop please” (without a question mark and therefore without question), isolated on an empty page still marked by the marginalia’s tick-­tock, stops the poem in the ironic midst of an unstopping old story.

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“Tithonus,” then, expresses the cruel condition of a dawn both desired and dreaded. The continual “murmur of a man praying” to be let off praying is a sound, heroically and tragically set against the visual methodical beat of t­ hose marginal markings. But this is also a poem which plays voice time against clock time, and hearing against sight. Tithonus’s old-­man rambling, which “starts and starts” and stops, in a paratactic accumulation of inconsequential perceptions, is a fitful interrupter of that “line of small holes,” which visibly demarcates time in this poem. The w ­ hole structure, then, is like a “transverse” account of ­f ree verse against strict, of a lifetime against the clock, but also of visual set against aural rendition. The machine in the margins goes visibly on, but the poetry and the ­music open into something rather like “­whole symphonies between each tick.” Ticking, as this poet knows, is a computation of time which might be listened into, and thus made softer, or more varied, or more magically, terrifyingly “fairy,” by the ear’s capacity to hear t­hings. “What’s impor­tant is that listening” (2000: 37), Oswald writes. At the end a voice, perhaps the Dawn’s own, is heard in a final, stanzaic verse about Tithonus’s “dwindling away,” which itself dwindles visibly away, as the print fades literally into another of Oswald’s un-­question-­marked questions and visual jokes: what is the word for something fashioned in the quick of hearing but never quite but never quite   appearing Hearing t­ hings and having them appear are two activities which the very nature of poetry sets at odds. It is characteristic of this poet, then, to end with a question about a word—­“appearing”—­which ­literally dis­appears from sight on the page, but is meanwhile also “fashioned in the quick of hearing.” Between “appearing” and “hearing,” ­there is an incompatibility which sponsors the connection, as the last word, for all its fading, s­ ettles for a rhyme which is conclusively heard. Such a word might stand for all ­these words of a poem that has been read, already disappearing in the reader’s memory, in order to be quickened into life again at each new “hearing,” each

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new “falling awake” into poetic language, as into a kind of old-­new dawn of time mea­sured, and time immeasurably ­else. That phrase, “in the quick of hearing,” is both very quick, as the marginal tick-­ tock of this work has constantly reminded us—­only forty-­six minutes from beginning to end—­but also very quick-­alive, in the way that only “hearing” ­t hings can be, when something is heard in the skips and wobble, the shiver and jangle, and then perhaps in the w ­ hole symphony of a poetic work, playing both to, and within, the rhythm of its own very marked alarm clock.

11 Poetry’s Knowing: So What Do We Know? I cannot give the reasons, I only sing the tunes: the sadness of the seasons the madness of the moons. I cannot be didactic or lucid, but I can be quite obscure and practic-­ ally marzipan. mervin peake Thinkers without final thoughts . . . wallace stevens

One day I was chatting with a phi­los­o­pher friend about the meanings of words. He was defending philosophy’s need for abstraction and generalization. “Pig-­headed, for instance,” he offered (I hope not pointedly). “It’s ­simple. It means stubbornly, obtusely opinionated. It c­ an’t mean anything ­else.” “Yes,” I agreed. Then paused: “Ah, but what if it’s applied to a pig?” We both laughed. “Well,” he conceded, “I suppose that’s the poet speaking.” I d ­ on’t know if a pig-­headed pig suggests a poet, but the exchange alerted us both to the fun of slipped contexts. Such a creature might be simply beautifully pig-­like, its pig-­ headedness literally fitting. Our l­ittle exchange had thrown up one of ­those duck-­rabbit moments which language relishes: seen one way, it’s a stubborn person, seen another, it’s a well-­t urned pig. The moments when language shifts from one ­thing to another—­fact to

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figure, sense to sound, or sense to nonsense—­are all, as my companion noted, the beginning of poetry, the beginning of something verbally wayward, slippery, playful—or just deliciously daft: “practic / ally marzipan.” a a a

This final chapter is a non-phi­los­o­pher’s meditation on knowing in poetry, a subject that each of t­ hese chapters has touched on in passing and that many of ­t hese accounts of sound entail. Mine, however, is not a logically deductive argument, a step-­by-­step proof of a thesis, but rather, as the title suggests, an exploration of the ways of poetry’s knowing and, like that verb in the continuous pres­ent, a tentative, unfinished journey. But since journeying and discovering are also the gist of what this book is about, perhaps a certain formal open-­ endedness suits the content. I have called it “Poetry’s Knowing” rather than “knowledge,” not only in order to skirt the vast field of philosophical epistemology which lies b ­ ehind that noun (while also making some small incursions into it), but also in order to keep the subject questionable, and alert to its own limitations. Poetry, as I have suggested throughout, has its own va­ri­e­ties of cognitive purpose, but its form of knowledge may be better conceived as a verb rather than a noun, a pro­cess rather than a destination, a way of “knowing” rather than an object known. For poetry’s knowing w ­ ill always, in the end, remain a question rather than an answer, and thus still be asking, so what do we know? As the history of aesthetics suggests, the relations between lit­er­a­ ture and philosophy have always been tantalizingly close, yet troublingly at odds. Both are dependent on language and therefore, to some extent, at the mercy of its quirks and limitations. Both are disciplines which happen in time, along a line of narrative or argument, and both ultimately rely on a conventional, comprehensible language of speech which is fine-­t uned or specialized in some way. In the case of poetry and philosophy, ­these also have enough in common to be aware of the assumptions and powers of the other, and to be sometimes distrustful or envious. ­There are poets who have written va­ri­e­t ies of philosophy: T. S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens, for

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instance, and phi­los­o­phers who have written kinds of poetry: Nietz­ sche is the most obvious. A handful have succeeded in both fields, but they are very few: Lucretius, perhaps, or Lewis Carroll. ­Other­w ise, the lines of demarcation are also fairly clear: t­here is poetry with its emphasis on the par­t ic­u­lar and philosophy with its emphasis on the general or abstract; ­t here is poetry’s sense of form, sound, and rhythm and philosophy’s sense of the truth or m ­ atter to be conveyed; ­there is poetry’s aim to give aural plea­sure and philosophy’s to develop arguments bound by an extra-­linguistic sense of truth. Each makes par­tic­u­lar assumptions about what the language is for, as well as assumptions about where our thinking happens: in language or through it. Yet it is in­ter­est­ing how many poets, particularly in the twentieth ­century, have looked to philosophy for justification, inspiration, and even, as in the case of Wallace Stevens, for a ­whole poetic vocabulary. Stevens’s essay “A Collect of Philosophy” (1951) reveals his reading of, among ­others, Plato, Berkeley, Leibnitz, Hegel, Nietz­ sche, Bergson, Santayana, and Russell. “Poets and phi­los­o­phers often think alike” (1997: 853), he argues ­there, but adds that the difference lies in the writing: “the probing of the phi­los­o­pher is deliberate [ . . . ​] the probing of the poet is fortuitous” (863). T ­ here is something chancy about poems, their sense, plucked from beyond the rules of common sense-­making, whereas (most) philosophy ­follows certain lines of argument and consequence. Stevens’s own poetry, with its fondness for philosophical assertions and abstractions—­“It Must Be Abstract” (329)—­a nd its appearance at least of logical sequentiality, might seem to contradict this difference. However, to read closely is to find that the ostensible argument soon found­ers on the “fortuitous,” on connections made, not by “deliberate” or sequential purpose but by the chances of sound and rhythm. Randall Jarrell, who criticized Stevens’s “habit of philosophizing in poetry—or of seeming to philosophize,” and who ­concluded therefore that “poetry is a bad medium for philosophy” (1999: 116), perhaps missed the mock-­heroic strain in that poetry. It may be that Stevens’s work was never intended as a “medium for” anything, as the stylistic container for philosophical thought. Instead, although he often seems to ventriloquize philosophical discourse, in

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fact he renders it poetic by removing the connections, avoiding worked-­for conclusions and heightening the charmed, aural powers of words. In an essay on “Poetry and Philosophy” (2007), Peter Porter explains that his “real concern is with the resources and practice of poetry and how dif­fer­ent they are from t­hose of philosophy.” He quickly adds, however, that “poetry is based on thinking (and disinterested thinking at that) as much as philosophy is” (93). A clear difference is thus followed by a surprising similarity: poetry is a ­matter of “disinterested thinking” too. ­W hether or not all philosophy would claim to be “disinterested”—­that tricky Kantian word— it is true that “thinking” is not the first activity we might associate with poetry, e­ ither its composition or its reception. Yet Porter emphatically insists that this pres­ ent participle—­ “thinking” rather than thought—­belongs to poetic work. Nor is his an isolated voice. Some seventy years before, Paul Valéry similarly hedged his bets in an essay on “Poetry and Abstract Thought” (1939). H ­ ere he insists that “­every true poet is much more capable than is generally known of right reasoning and abstract thought” (1958, 1985: 77). However, where poetry differs from philosophy is in its being what he calls a “complete system of lucky finds” (76)—­specifically “finds” that are discovered in the language. For ideas, he points out, “are ­t hings that I can note, provoke, and ­handle. . . . ​But I cannot say the same of my unexpected rhymes” (62). Chancy, unpredictable, and ultimately directive, the luck of language is what drives poetry, and that luck depends on being willing to hear, among all the noises that beset the ear, the phrase come right. It is “hearing” that “­will offer us all we need for our definition,” Valéry concludes, for “we live by ear in the world of noises” (66). The poet, then, though capable of “abstract thought” and of ­handling “ideas,” differs from the phi­ los­o­pher in that ­t hose are only the means to some other lucky find, some chance rhyme that comes “by ear,” and then commands us, in a “world of noises,” to know it “by ear.” When T. S. Eliot in his essay on “Dante” (1920, 1960) similarly defends the poet’s philosophical credentials, he too worries at the likeness and difference between the two:

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Without doubt, the effort of the phil[o]sopher proper, the man who is trying to deal with ideas in themselves, and the effort of the poet, who may be trying to realize ideas, cannot be carried on at the same time. But this is not to deny that poetry can be in some sense philosophic. (162) ­ ere too, t­ here is a sense of wanting to have it both ways: poetry H is like and unlike philosophy. The difference between the phi­los­o­ pher’s “ideas in themselves” and the poet’s “trying to realize ideas” hinges on the difference between an essential object-­noun which must be grasped, and an ongoing activity expressed by an unfinished verb: “trying to realize.” Eliot does not explain how one might know ­these essential “ideas in themselves” except through language, nor does he explain in what the poet’s realization of such ideas might consist. Are ideas which are still to be realized more or less real than “ideas in themselves”? But in the end, the poet’s business seems to lie with the ongoing verb “trying.” Having reached this knotty impasse, Eliot then throws up his hands in weariness and resorts to his favorite device of the evasive double negative: “this is not to deny that poetry can in some sense be philosophic” (162). Of course, “not to deny” is prob­ably a ­little less than forcefully to assert, while the nature of the similarity still hangs on a very thin thread: “in some sense.” Yet in Eliot, as in Stevens, Porter, and Valéry, one can hear the poet seeking the same credentials as the phi­los­o­pher for serious thinking, while also demarcating a small but crucial difference between them. To turn to phi­los­o­phers is often to find a comparable play of similarity and dissimilarity, envy and distrust. For example, Nietz­sche’s skirmishes with poetic language are particularly evident in that most literary of works, The Gay Science, which contains a playful mix of genres: prose passages, aphorisms, proverbs, songs, and rhymes. “Good prose,” Nietz­sche writes, “is written only face to face with  poetry. For it is an uninterrupted, well-­mannered war with poetry[. . . . ​] Every­thing abstract wants to be read as a prank against poetry and as with a mocking voice” (1887, 1974: 145). The good prose of philosophy, which is “abstract,” has an eye to poetry

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even if, surprisingly, a mocking, prankster’s eye. T ­ here is a “war” between them, if only ­because each looks to the other in order to distinguish itself in opposition. If Stevens mimics the phi­los­o­pher, ­here the phi­los­o­pher mimics the poet, but mockingly, so as to ensure a proper distance. Nietz­sche’s “Prelude in German Rhymes” is merely versified philosophy, but the “Appendix” does contain what he calls songs, one of which, “The Poet’s Call,” openly acknowledges the lure of poetry, which is the lure of a rhythmic sound which beats through words: “a distant ticking sound / Seemed to beat an endless mea­sure,” he writes. To this call of time and mea­sure he responds with ­ here was nothing I could do, T ­Until I, just like a poet, Spoke in that strange ticktock, too. (1887, 1974: 351) Malgré lui, the phi­los­o­pher ­here is “just like a poet,” led not by the dictates of argument but by the “ticktock” of meter or rhythm. It only takes the seduction of “mea­sure” to turn the one into the other (although the verdict of posterity might be that it takes something more than this, something more like Valéry’s “lucky finds”). Nietz­ sche’s verse, published in a complete edition in En­glish in 2010, trips along in regular mea­sure, but remains, I think, a kind of versified thought rather than thoughtful verse. The difference lies less in the fact of “measure”—­one could argue that poetry is not defined by mea­sure and that prose, even philosophical prose, may be mea­sured or rhythmical—­and more in the fact that this verse remains a kind of thought set to rhythm, rather than rhythmed thinking. In other words, this is not poetry’s knowing, but philosophical knowledge conveyed in the manner of poetry. It’s a slender distinction, but essentially in philosophy, the knowledge, the thought, the idea are all extractable from their “ticktock” casing; in poetry, the “ticktock” that calls on our ears might be the only knowledge available. Another phi­los­o­pher who flirts with the tempting possibilities of poetry is of course Wittgenstein. In his many scattered notes and jottings gathered together in Culture and Value, he frequently considers the closeness between philosophy and the arts. “What I ­invent are new similes” (1977, 1980: 19e), he declares, and elsewhere

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remarks on the “queer resemblance between a philosophical investigation [ . . . ​] and an aesthetic one” (25e). The similarity has something to do with meta­phor, and indeed with the lucky chances of what words, rather than thoughts, might express. His much quoted phrase, “Often my writing is nothing but ‘stuttering’ ” (18e) [Stammeln (18)], seems to formulate a kind of philosophy so fragmentary and tentative, so much a short trial of words, as to approximate the lines of a poem. Philosophy, he asserts point-­blank in one place, “­ought ­really to be written only as a poetic composition” (24e). The idea of a language somehow broken down, stuttery and uncertain, seems to Wittgenstein to offer a greater approximation to philosophical ­investigations of knowledge than clear, consecutive prose might do. Like Nietz­sche, he delights in the maxim, the aphorism, in the ­u nfinished, tantalizingly suggestive turn of phrase, which leaves nothing more to be said yet every­t hing still to be understood. However, in l­ater years he changes tack: “If I w ­ ere to write a good sentence which by accident turned out to consist of two rhyming lines, that would be a blunder” (58), he insists. It’s a curious worry. If “a good sentence,” why should chance rhyme be “a blunder?” Such an anxiety, while seeming to contradict the statement about philosophy as “poetic composition,” also acknowledges the fact that poetic language, with its “unexpected rhymes” (1958, 1985: 62) as Valéry puts it, might radically affect the nature of what is expressed. ­W hether desired or feared, poetry, with its temptations of rhyme and simile, somehow shadows the language of philosophy like a power­f ul or threatening alternative. The ­t hing that usually underpins and challenges Wittgenstein’s thinking about language, however, is not so much poetry as ­music—­t he art form that lay closest to home for him. At one point in The Brown Book, he suggests that “ ‘understanding a sentence’ has, in many cases, a much greater similarity to understanding a musical theme than we might be inclined to think” (1958, 1972: 167). This similarity then raises the question of ­music’s thought content, and how it might be expressed: “This tune says something,” and it is as though I had to find what it says. And yet I know that it d ­ oesn’t say anything such that I

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might express in words or pictures what it says. And if, recognizing this, I resign myself to saying “It just expresses a musical thought,” this would mean no more than saying “It expresses itself.” (1958, 1972: 166) It is almost as if the phi­los­o­pher ­here has hit on the conundrum of all art criticism: t­ here is the search for “what it says,” the wish and need to describe, explain, paraphrase, alongside the knowledge that “it d ­ oesn’t say anything” other than itself and therefore constantly beggars interpretation. The argument comes full circle, as “something,” even “a musical thought,” is lost in the tautology of “ ‘It ­expresses itself.’ ” The tune speaks, without speaking about; it is expressive, without expressing anything. The need to know what a tune says leads, therefore, to the knowledge that knowing might have to be revised in the pro­cess. Something is said and unsaid, expressed and unexpressed, known and unknown, in this verbal journey ­toward understanding the arts of sound. When it comes to m ­ usic, or even language, the question of knowing is a starting point which also then becomes the point at issue. This same passage appears in Philosophical Investigations, where Wittgenstein adds the following summary: “One would like to say ‘­Because I know what it’s all about.’ But what is it all about? I should not be able to say” (1953, 1974: 143). This is the same round-­trip from desiring something to finding nothing, with, one might notice, its own accidental echoes on the way: “to say” / “to say,” “all about” / “all about?” ­W hether or not such rime riche is a “blunder,” it seems that even philosophy might sometimes call for, and embody, a formulation which defeats the need to “know what it’s all about.” To remove the sense of knowing about from the act of interpretation does not invalidate the wonderfully open activity of merely knowing. A sentence might be similar to “a musical theme” in that it asks for a revision of the verb “to know,” from transitive to intransitive or, even more radically, from knowing to not knowing. Wittgenstein is prodding at the very limits of philosophy h ­ ere, while touching on a c­ entral prob­lem of the arts: they arouse a desire in the reader / listener / observer to know, but also invalidate the means. Poetry offers something to be known, something to be admired, expressed, explained, but it then

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undermines the terms of the offering with a kind of shrug: “so what do we know?” Of course, games of knowing and not knowing can also be found in philosophy, starting with Socrates. But t­ hese tend to be spoken with the phi­los­o­pher’s modesty, not the artist’s pride. When Nietz­ sche advises in one place that phi­los­o­phers might learn “to be good at not knowing, as artists!” (1887, 1974: 37), he is pointing to an artistic advantage. Wittgenstein comes close to the artist’s boast when he admits, “I ­really do think with my pen, b ­ ecause my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing” (1977, 1980: 17e). Certainly, not knowing, or knowing nothing, is not altogether inimical to philosophy. In the end, however, this is a discipline which cannot afford to repudiate too much; it depends on the possibility that t­ here is some transferable content of knowledge to be passed on, some advancement of learning. Poets, however, often worry that knowledge itself might be the prob­lem. Robert Frost, for instance, rebukes the scholar for being “too avid of knowledge,” and advises that by contrast, the “poet’s instinct is to shun or shed more ­k nowledge than he can swing or sing” (1995: 836). The freight of knowledge needs to be carefully weighed by this poet who, unlike Wittgenstein and like Valéry, then relishes words that chancily rhyme: “swing or sing.” Elsewhere, Frost declares that the delight of writing poetry “is in the surprise of remembering something I ­didn’t know I knew” (1995: 777). This has the familiarity of a commonplace, but it also reminds us that knowing and not knowing are not absolute opposites for the poet, for the one might be layered over the other and both “known” at once. The poet might come to know what he ­doesn’t know or not know what he knows. The contradiction catches something of the surprise and familiarity that poetry can bring, often at the same time, and to both writer and reader. It is not an exchange of knowledge-­content, passed through the pleas­u r­able medium of rhythmic language; it is, instead, a constant, mutual rediscovery of “something I d ­ idn’t know I knew.” As W. S. Graham once put it, “The poet does not write what he knows but what he ­doesn’t know” (1999: 14). To write “what he ­doesn’t know” is to bring something into knowledge which w ­ asn’t ­there before, not even to the writer who nonetheless somehow knows enough to

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write it. If Nietz­sche and Wittgenstein occasionally admit to “not knowing” what they write, or wish for a greater irresponsibility ­towards knowing, ­t hese poets make not knowing almost the condition of writing at all. “Nobody, nobody told me / What nobody, nobody knows” (1969: 450), Walter de la Mare begins one of his short poems, “­Under the Rose.” “Nobody” has always had a rich double meaning in lit­er­a­t ure, the very word ghosting a someone over no one. De la Mare multiplies the possibilities by repeating the word, as a child might, though ­whether t­ hese are also the nobodies who neither know nor tell, or dif­fer­ent ones, of course nobody knows. This may be a conspiracy of silence or a tragic universal ignorance. Meanwhile, the complaining lilt of the voice, child’s or adult’s, crying “Nobody, nobody told me,” only increases both the importance of knowing, and the scary but wondering disadvantage of not knowing at all. “Phi­los­o­ phers,” Wittgenstein once noted, “often behave like ­little ­children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-­ups ‘What’s that?’ ” (1977, 1980: 17). It is an intriguing statement, which nicely scuppers the idea that philosophy merely sets worked-­out thought into ser­v iceable language. Certainly, poetry has always offered itself to the reader as a “What’s that?”—as a language which d ­ oesn’t instantly translate. Wittgenstein is being a l­ ittle mischievous in relation to philosophy, but it may be that knowing “What’s that?” is not always the point ­either of poetry or, sometimes, of philosophy. And nobody knows   (Tiddely pom), How cold my toes   (Tiddely pom), How cold my toes   (Tiddely pom),   Are growing. (1928, 2007: 2) So Winnie the Pooh, himself the best of poets (and phi­los­o­phers), takes up the motif of “nobody knows” in the hum which he hums at

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the beginning of The House at Pooh Corner. When questioned, he explains to Piglet that he put “pom” in “ ‘to make it more hummy’ ” (6)—­t he hum being of the very essential nature of a poem. So Milne takes the Tennysonian hum, as the honey-­making, melody-­making noise that poets might make, to its logical conclusion. What drives a hum, then, is humminess; what drives a rhyme is rhyminess. Piglet, the rationalist, still ­doesn’t get the point, however. He points out, with a note of real grievance, that “ ‘it i­sn’t the toes so much as the ears’ ” (7). Deaf to the lucky-­funny accidents of rhyme in “knows” and “toes,” which are themselves also what the poem knows, he insists, pig-­headedly perhaps, on the facts of the ­matter: as a cloven creature without toes but with cold ears, the poem, to him, is simply wrong. If this might be read as a l­ ittle commentary on the nature of truth in poetry, Pooh’s hum, meanwhile, reminds us that the “hum” of verse works in spite of literal truths. It captures what Piglet misses: the lovely noises and the “lucky finds” of repetition and rhyme, as well as the sheer intransitive won­der of the phrase “nobody knows.” Of course, this is only Pooh’s cold feet, set to a ticktock rhythm. But it also says something more about poetry’s knowing and not knowing, about the ways in which poetry might elicit a desire for what “nobody knows,” while also promoting a kind of cheerful won­der at simply not knowing—­“Tiddely pom.” I am of course making a mountain out of a few opportunistically sampled lines. Nevertheless, the numbers of literary texts that seek to manage and reclassify the idea of knowing are, as I have suggested in this book, innumerable. For instance, Henry James’s novel, What Maisie Knew, offers an ongoing commentary on the nature of knowing. If the title suggests a disclosure, a “What” to be found out, the text in fact takes e­ very opportunity to thwart that promise. James takes the child’s-­eye view and pres­ents it with the moral mess of adult sexuality—­a mess in which the verb “knowing” carries its own loaded charge. Maisie, however, remains at a tangent to that mess, asserting a dif­fer­ent kind of knowing. She is, in James’s repeated words, “my wondering witness” (2008: 7), “our ­little wonder-­working agent” (5). Maisie both won­ders and works won­der. ­Because nobody nobody tells her, she learns how to know, as well as how to be knowing, by

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watching and listening like any good reader of a literary work, prose or poetry. The following passage makes this clear: “He’s with her,” Mrs Wix desolately said. “He’s with her,” she reiterated. “Do you mean in her own room?” Maisie continued. She waited an instant. “God knows!” Maisie wondered a ­little why, or how, God should know [ . . . ​]. (2008: 238) Maisie’s language has what Stanley Cavell has attributed to Beckett: “the quality” of “hidden literality” (1969, 2002: 119). In this passage, the idea of knowing shifts from Mrs.  Wix’s sexually corrupt ­k nowingness, to the expostulated cliché “God knows!” (which Maisie misunderstands and takes literally), to the open wondering that is the child’s characteristic reaction: she “wondered a l­ittle why, or how, God should know.” In that one line, James packs the sense of Maisie’s innocence, her religious ignorance, but also her most likeable, generous quality of s­ imple awareness: she “wondered a l­ittle.” What she won­ders is a question, of course—­“why, or how”—­but it is the won­der, rather than the answer to the won­der, that is the driving force of the novel. What Maisie knows all the way through is how to won­der at the world around her. The “mystery of her verb” (2008: viii), as Adrian Poole puts it in the introduction, is what keeps the reader still hoping to know, or perhaps wanting to know less, even while knowing morally and sexually all too much. In the final sentence of the work, James offers what seems like an assertion of Maisie’s triumphant achievement of knowledge, as she and Mrs. Wix fi­nally seem to change places in won­der and knowledge: “Mrs Wix gave a sidelong look. She still had room for won­der at what Maisie knew” (2008: 275). That “Maisie knew,” fi­nally, o ­ ught to satisfy the ­whole narrative drive of the novel in its unravelling of a complex tale of desire and power. But what does she know? James’s last word is still intransitive and still, like the title, in the past tense. It is pos­si­ble that Maisie knows no more than she did before or that she always knew. We, the reader, who now know plenty, might still not know the t­ hing that makes Maisie so mysterious and attractive:

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her capacity for won­der and surprise. What Maisie Knew, like much poetry, is less a disclosure of the narrative’s “What” than an exploration, indeed a lyrical exploration, of some almost objectless, still wondrous knowing: knowing that is open to a multitude of ­t hings, none of them necessarily straightforward objects of that verb, “For it is owing to their won­der,” Aristotle declares in his Metaphysics, “that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize” (1984: 1554). If, as he implies, the purpose of philosophy was always to allay or ease the sense of “won­der,” it may be that the purpose of lit­er­a­t ure, and poetry in par­tic­u ­lar, is to increase it, to remain a “wonder-­working agent.” The ways that poems ask to be read, and read again, and seem, however well known (even known by heart), to want to be known again, as if knowing ­were a constantly refreshed, unfinished activity, might be a point of divergence from (most) ­philosophy, where won­der diminishes in relation to knowledge. The phi­los­o­pher seeks knowledge in order to allay won­der, but the poet and the novelist may find in won­der just another kind of knowledge. If I am stretching the meaning of knowledge well beyond its philosophical compass, h ­ ere, that too may be part of lit­er­a­ture’s purpose. The sense of knowledge as wondrous knowing rather than object known seems to be what drives the famous last section of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “At the Fish­houses”: Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, the clear gray icy ­water . . . [ . . . ​] It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly ­f ree, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. (2008: 52) To compare the sea to knowledge is to offer no real clarification of ­either, in spite of declaring, three times, that something is “clear.” ­Those lists of adjectives, sometimes unpunctuated, “Cold dark deep,” “clear gray icy,” “cold hard,” sometimes thoughtfully slowed up by

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commas, “dark, salt, clear, moving,” “historical, flowing, and flown,” seem to describe both sea and knowledge in a muddle of tenor and vehicle ­until the reader forgets which was which. The sense of flow is emphasized by Bishop’s beautifully exact word, “derived,” which then realizes its etymological origins (dériver: down river), as it joins the flow of becoming “like what we imagine knowledge to be.” What­ ever that is, less an object to be observed than a condition to be imaginatively entered into, the language rides the continuous movement of the pres­ent participle: “flowing and drawn,” “flowing, and flown.” For “knowledge is historical” in the sense of being time bound, temporal, transient, like the act of reading itself, which must follow the flow u ­ ntil, in the end, the object has “flown.” This is not a proposition about knowledge which might be added to our philosophical stock, but a knowing in action which is already, as we know it, “flowing, and flown.” So what do we know? Only that something is happening in the sound of the flow of the lines which, by the end, makes us want to return to the beginning, to read once more how it might still . . . ​have “flown.” Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Plain Sense of T ­ hings” makes an in­ter­est­ing companion-­piece to Bishop’s, since this too is a poem about imagining knowledge. Like her repeated word, “clear,” Stevens’s “plain” is a tricksy misnomer, as the “plain sense of ­t hings” in the title and opening lines seems anything but:   [ . . . ​] we return To a plain sense of ­t hings. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir. (1997: 428) So Stevens seems to play at sound-­scrabble in turning “imagination” into “Inanimate,” and then into “inert,” as if merely reor­ga­niz­ing his pieces. What is at least “plain” is that, without “imagination,” our knowledge is an “inert savoir.” Fi­nally, staring at the “­great pond,” at the repeated “plain sense of it, without reflections” (428), which is rather like the blue guitar’s “­t hings as they are” (137), Stevens offers a figure which suddenly disturbs the unreflective stillness of the scene: it is “silence // Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see, / The

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­ reat pond and its waste of the lilies” (428). Like many of his poems, g this seems to offer a philosophical proposition in verse. It has the didactic tone of an assertion, about knowledge and imagination, about “how the absence of imagination can be i­ magined” (2009: 435), as Charles Altieri puts it. The pond clogged with leaves blocks the reflective mechanisms of the imagination, so that the w ­ hole landscape seems dead, while we too land in an impasse of meaning: “Inanimate in an inert savoir.” This last is a brilliantly intransigent phrase, each “in”: “Inanimate in . . . ​inert,” pushing for a negative which then aurally flowers in the rare surprise of “savoir.” Is ­t here a “savoir-­faire” in this “inert savoir”? Certainly, however dead, other meanings start to stir. Like Beckett’s “imagination dead imagine” (1999: 35), this is the imagination staying alive at the thought of its own death, or a kind of knowledge in fact stirring out of knowing nothing. The poem trumps its own philosophical plain-­speakingness with this aestheticist counter-­sense of a “savoir” as far-­fetched as it is savvy, and also saving. However, something does indeed then literally stir in this inanimate scene: “silence of a rat come out to see.” ­There is a scuttle in the “silence,” a movement in the stillness, a life in death. So, Stevens concludes, “all this / Had to be i­ magined as an inevitable knowledge” (428). Not quite “the end of imagination,” then, this is imagination revived and come back to imagine knowing its own scene of despair: “a rat come out to see, / The g ­ reat pond.” What does the rat see? The line does not quite run over into the next but is curbed by that comma which keeps the verb “to see,” partly intransitive. The rat sees, in a verb which stays open, unsatisfied, full of the wisdom of seeing every­ thing and nothing. This diminutive seer thus opens the poem to “an inevitable knowledge” which, in retrospect now, “Had to be ­imagined.” It is the imagination which alters, but also saves, knowledge, as it does for Bishop. For both poets, knowledge, however cold, inert, or dead, might still be ­imagined as something worth saving—­even if (as Heaney too suggests in the reflection-­ distorting passage of a rat in “Personal Helicon”) ­imagined as a disturbance of what is plain to see. Peter Porter once commented on Stevens’s work, “This is the ­Poetry of Almost Knowing” (2007: 9). In spite of the promise of its

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title, “The Plain Sense of T ­ hings” hardly offers some plain-­ speaking, commonsense view of ­t hings. The meaning, indeed the poem’s very understanding of knowledge, remains tied to the work of the imagination, even the work of the i­magined absent imagination. That “all this / Had to be i­magined as an inevitable knowledge” gives us “knowledge” of a kind, but knowledge that belongs in the sounds and syntax of the poem, in the intricacies of what is almost just a word game for the ear, infinitely replayable. This is indeed, as Barenboim puts it, “wisdom that becomes audible to the thinking ear” (2008: 3). If the reader is willing to give permission to the ear to think through hearing, then it might be satisfied with a “savoir” no longer “inert,” but repeatedly hearing its own possibilities of knowing. Of course, poetry’s aural powers have always had an affiliation with ­music. Writing about musical meaning in his book on Beauty, Roger Scruton recalls the two uses of the term “ ‘expression’: a ­t ransitive use, which invites the question ‘expression of what?’ and an intransitive use which forbids that question” (2009, 2011: 99), as in musical “expression.” In the case of poetry, both have a role. A poem expresses something—it must have reference, however inconsequential, ­whether leaves, a pond, a rat—­and at the same time a poem is intransitively expressive to the ear. Yet we lack a philosophy or an aesthetics for describing this intransitive expression of meaning. Since language is always a noise of some kind, and poetic language a noise of an especially composed and complex kind, this seems regrettable. Being expressive, however, is above all an appeal to the ear, and to the activity that so many writers have invoked to describe how the ear might know: that is, listening. In Must We Mean What We Say, Stanley Cavell notes that “one cannot be commanded to hear a sound, though one can be commanded to listen to it, or for it” (1969, 2002: 191). T ­ hose very constructions, “listen to it, or for it,” put the object at a slightly disadvantageous distance, as if the act of reaching to listen w ­ ere more impor­tant than the object heard. Roger Scruton adopts similar constructions in his book, Understanding ­Music (2009), when he writes, “We hear sounds, just as animals hear them. We also listen to them, listen out for them, attend to them, and so on” (2009: 30). The act of listening, as opposed to merely hearing, feels the

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­ ressure of its own agency, its own strain and reach. To “listen out p for” something is also to hear how far “out” it might remain—­even out of hearing. This is a reminder that, with a few isolated exceptions, the heard aspects of language have mostly not been impor­tant to phi­los­o­phers. Yet poetry is predominantly something heard, and what we want from a poem is not ultimately a message, a story, a graspable or ­paraphrasable content of some kind, but rather an invitation to listen, and to listen again. It is the curious self-­sufficiency of the act of listening which seems to say something about the arts of sound. For “listening speaks” (1982, 1986: 252), as Barthes summarizes, with a speakingness which itself satisfies the verb it describes. In that same passage about hearing and listening to ­music, Cavell then goes on to ask, “How does it happen that the achievement or result of using a sense organ comes to be thought of as the activity of that organ—as though the aesthetic experience had the form not merely of a continuous effort (e.g., listening) but of a continuous achievement (e.g., hearing).” How is it that effort and achievement become the same ­t hing? Yet when, in the next paragraph, Cavell turns to the epistemological implications of this self-­justifying act, he crucially changes the verb: And what that seems to say is that works of art are objects of the sort that can only be known in sensing. It is not, as in the case of ordinary material objects, that I know ­because I see, or that seeing is how I know. [ . . . ​] It is rather, one may wish to say, that what I know is what I see; or even: seeing feels like knowing. (1969, 2002: 191) It is in­ter­est­ing that even so word and music-­conscious a phi­los­o­ pher as Cavell h ­ ere slips from hearing and listening into the much more conventional figure of “seeing”—­a verb which has an old and easy connection with knowing. Although he is grappling with the notion that to know a work of m ­ usic or poetry is to enter the “continuous effort” of listening and the “continuous achievement” of hearing, even he cannot quite keep to the tricky activity of ­t hose verbs: “I know ­because I see” and “seeing is how I know,” he writes.

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To say “I hear it,” or “I listen to it,” is to invoke a much more uncertain act, for seeing has old empirical credentials which hearing does not. To know by hearing or listening requires a new way of putting it—­a reor­ga­ni­za­t ion, almost, of the ways in which we think we know at all. It may be that, for such hearing-­k nowing, one has to turn back to the poets themselves, to t­ hose who dare to challenge the very grammar of thinking from within. This is what Paul Valéry starts to do in his account of writing “Le Cimetière Marin”: If I am questioned; if anyone won­ders (as happens sometimes quite peremptorily) what I “wanted to say” in a certain poem, I reply that I did not want to say, but wanted to make, and that it was the intention of making which wanted what I said[. . . . ​] (1958, 1985: 147–148) Such a sentence takes us on a journey which involves shedding, on the way, the idea that ­human wish or purpose must precede expression, or has any purchase at all on the act of writing poetry. The poet ­here has no wish or want to say. It is “the intention of making,” rather, which “wanted what I said.” “I” is not the agent but the responder, and as Valéry’s subsequent paragraph makes clear, even this “intention” does not belong to a recognizable h ­ uman agency: “this intention was at first no more than a rhythmic figure, empty, or filled with meaningless syllables, which obsessed me for some time” (1958, 1985: 148), he explains. What intends the speech of the poet, then, is “rhythm,” a sound that, like a tom-­tom from outside, might remove the dignity of ­human purpose, wish, or want from the poem’s expression. Poetry starts, by implication, not even with an outside rhythm but with listening in, or listening out for it. The purpose of the poet is to re-­create the listening that first obsessed him or her, and pass it to the reader. Poetry, one might say, is a kind of transference of listening—­a transference sent across the peculiar visual-­aural arrangements of language that it makes on the page. ­There is no guarantee, of course, that the transference ­w ill work, and that the reader w ­ ill hear with the same gripped attention what first caught the poet impersonally unawares. But certainly, as Valéry insists, what

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is required is to shed that question: what does the poet want to say? as if poetry involved a s­ imple transaction of wishes into words and instead learn to rethink, reknow, how poetry’s knowing lies in listening—­perhaps only to the rhythm that both precedes and then inhabits language. It may be, then, that poetry does in fact offer something akin to philosophy: that is, an examination of the very nature of knowing. Again and again we find poets pushing at the par­ameters of that verb, opening it up to include wondering, unknowing, not knowing, imagining, listening—­activities which have something to do with how the mind works, but mostly shed the burden of any obviously attainable object. If the purpose of philosophy is to extract that object from the verbal means of finding it, and so pass it on, the purpose of poetry is to play on the means and perhaps lose the object in the pro­cess. This is not quite “cognition without content” (2007: 223), which is how Peter Kivy describes listening to ­music, ­because of course ­t here is “content” within poems, but it is, perhaps, cognition beyond content. To understand this kind of cognition may mean falling back on the intransitive mode of the verb or on the pres­ ent participle—­ t hat grammatical equivalent of something never quite reaching the end of its own seeking. As Peter Lamarque writes in his essay on “Poetry and Abstract Thought,” readers of poetry “attend far more closely, and in a dif­fer­ent way from philosophy, to the pro­cess of thought” (2009: 50). Such a pro­cess, rather than being one of logical connections, may be one of sound and syntax, rhythm and accent, of sense sparked by the collocations and connotations of words. For ­these, too, may become a form of “knowing.” John Gibson changes the verb when he writes, for instance, that literary works “represent ways of acknowledging the world rather than knowing it” (2009: 482). But perhaps we should keep the idea of “knowing” in play, as poets very often do, in order to force it to include pro­cess and replay, won­der and unknowing, seeing and listening. To help us to know differently, in all the word-­ bound, sound-­bound, rhythm-­bound ways of poetic language, is what poetry, as opposed to philosophy, can offer. I ­w ill end with one last poem by Stevens. “Of Modern Poetry” begins, philosophically enough, with what sounds like a proposition

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or definition, but crucially lacking a main verb: “The poem of the mind in the act of finding / What ­w ill suffice” (1997: 218). Without the main verb, we are left with a statement about “finding” which is oddly not (yet) sufficient, grammatically at least. This is classic Stevens. He offers a poem full of statements of fact, apparently, skirmishing with philosophical propositions about the mind which seem to hang fire, decisively inconclusive. The “actor,” who figures as a kind of poet, is, he writes, “A metaphysician in the dark, twanging / An instrument [ . . . ]” (219). In that corollary, “in the dark,” we can hear how he both yearns for and rebuffs the connection between poet and phi­los­o­pher. Simon Critchley paraphrases the phrase as the poet’s “dark metaphysical talk” (2005: 40), as if “in the dark” merely contained difficult, abstruse m ­ atter. But of course it also carries the much more devastating sense of being indeed lost, at a loss, ignorant even of its own metaphysics. However much of a “metaphysician” this poet-­ actor may be, he also knows nothing, sees nothing, is as much “in the dark” as any hapless reader who perhaps loses, in the course of the poem, a clear train of thought or plain sense of ­t hings. Of modern poetry, Stevens then repeats ­ towards the end, “It must / Be the finding of a satisfaction [ . . . ]” (219). Yet for all the force of the injunction, “It must,” what it must be is no more than another indefinite participle: a “finding.” Like that first “act of finding / What w ­ ill suffice,” this tells us less about the found satisfaction of the act, and more about the sufficiency of the pro­cess of “finding,” which may or may not lead anywhere. Although in his poetry Stevens appears to rely on that critical c­ ounter of philosophical argument, the abstract noun, in fact the syntax of his sentences more often than not emphasizes the pres­ent participle, something which has not yet finished its business of disclosure. In his essay on “Aesthetic Experience,” Monroe Beardsley once proposed that “one of the central components in art experience must be the experience of discovery,” adding for clarification, “I call this ‘active discovery’ to draw attention to the excitement of meeting a cognitive challenge” (1982: 292). He too, like many of ­t hese poets, invokes an objectless activity in “discovery.” The same word is used by Robert Frost in his attempt to explain what a poem should be about. “Should a poem be on a subject,” he asks in one of his Notebooks, and answers, “No but it should be a pro­

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cess of discovering a subject and not only to the reader but to the writer” (2006: 667). Like Stevens’s own “act of finding / What w ­ ill suffice” and Monroe’s “ ‘active discovery,’ ” this puts the onus on the verb, “discovering a subject,” which may be the best that ­either poet or reader can hope for. Finding, discovering, knowing are all verbs tempted by the intransitive sufficiency of their own actions. The reason for this repeated “finding” in Stevens has something to do with that paean to the ear in the ­middle section of the poem. The actor-­metaphysician twangs his instrument (another blue guitar, perhaps?), in order to “speak words [ . . . ​] in the ear, / In the delicatest ear of the mind”—­words which in fact seem to speak less than they “sound,” and to which sound, Stevens writes, “an invisible audience listens, / Not to the play, but to itself ” (1997: 219). The syntax of this passage is yet another example of that fascination with the ear’s inwardly spiraling attention (like its literal cochlear construction). Not only the “ear” but the “ear of the mind” must hear, for this is an ­intellectual faculty, a “thinking ear” seeking the means of cognition. Meanwhile, that “invisible audience” (dif­fer­ent from the mind itself, or is this already the mind’s ear listening?) “listens.” ­There seem to be four kinds of ear in this passage: a literal ear, the mind’s ear, the mind’s “delicatest ear,” and then the ear of the “invisible audience” that “listens [ . . . ​] to itself.” We have gone so far into this double, ­triple auditory attention—an attention to nearly nothing—­that t­ here seems no way out. What we are listening to is a question that becomes progressively less relevant as Stevens abandons the sense of “words” spoken out loud by a literal actor, and instead makes the inner mind’s listening the object we are listening to, or for. ­Those “words” may have been the subject, or pretext, of the actor-­metaphysician’s ­music, but the point is then to make us forget them for the sake of this heightened awareness, this listening which starts to develop a curious high volume of its own. The w ­ hole passage works like another shell to an ear, giving back nothing but the sea-­noise of self-­attention, while also being a resonant description of how poetry takes us into a listening that only postpones “What ­w ill suffice,” in order to go on “finding,” discovering, and rediscovering it. In the end, poetry and philosophy, for all their close connections, their mutual admiration, distrust or envy, take slightly dif­fer­ent

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routes through language. For philosophy, the burden ultimately falls on “what” might be known, on a body of knowledge which allows itself to be lifted and passed on. In poetry, the burden falls on the ongoing “how” of it, on the sounds and syntax which draw us, again and again, to an act of discovery: “The poem of the mind in the act of finding [ . . . ​].” Both require a willingness to think, and so let the mind follow the pro­cesses of language t­ owards something that “­w ill suffice”; but in the end, poetry’s knowing remains sufficiently insufficient, like a verb without an object, or like a suspended pres­ent participle—­something to be found only in the finding, discovered in the discovering, heard and listened for only in the hearing and listening—­“in the delicatest ear of the mind.” That ear, located deep within the mind’s own faculties, rather than apart from them, is the writer’s and the reader’s means of paying attention to what we might know when, in writing or reading, we might also, if listening widely or closely, be “hearing t­ hings.”

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Acknowl­edgments

This book has grown over the years from vari­ous roots, in commissioned essays, invited lectures, conference papers, even poetry readings, as well as from discussions with colleagues and students. Its breadth is the fruit, but also the penalty, of ­those multifarious ­beginnings. Anyone who tries to write a book on a wide range of authors ­today knows the difficulties of keeping up with critical writings in many fields, and therefore the associated risks of omission. Between the calls of general readability and ­those of footnoting accountability I have tried to steer a ­m iddle course, while acknowledging that some conflict between them remains, as well as loss on both sides. I also owe a huge debt of thanks to many friends and colleagues who have lent me their ears as readers, ­either of the ­whole typescript at vari­ous stages—­Harriet Marland and Stefan Collini first of all, who patiently read or reread it, commenting from their dif­fer­ent ­angles of expertise—or of par­t ic­u­lar chapters, often at earlier stages of writing: Derek Attridge, Matthew Bevis, Giles de la Mare, Robert Douglas-­Fairhurst, Jonathan Ellis, John Kerrigan, Peter McDonald, Subha Mukherji, Michael O’Neill, Alice Oswald, Seamus Perry, Adrian Poole, Anne Stevenson, Rowan Williams, Susan Wolfson, and William Wootton. ­Others have given invaluable tips in passing or have helped with translations: Gillian Beer, Mark Chinca, Heather Glen, Yui Kajita, William Logan, Michael S ­ ullivan, and David Trotter. My two anonymous readers for Harvard University Press offered detailed and wonderfully pertinent suggestions in their ­reports. Par­tic­u­lar thanks are also due to the librarians who chased up elusive manuscripts, particularly Colin Harris in the Special Collections at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and John Wells in

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Acknowl­edgments

the manuscripts department of the University Library, Cambridge, and to the librarians at the Wren Library and Trinity College Library for their unfailing helpfulness. Some parts of Chapter 1 ­were first published in “Thresholds of Attention: On Listening in Lit­er­a­ture,” in Thinking on Thresholds: The Poetics of Transitive Spaces, ed. Subha Mukherji (London: Anthem Press, 2011), 199–212, © 2011 Subha Mukherji, editorial ­matter and se­lection; individual chapters © individual contributors. Some parts of Chapter 3 ­were first published in “Tennyson, by Ear,” in Tennyson among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays, ed. Robert Douglas-­Fairhurst and Seamus Perry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 336– 355, © The Several Contributors, 2009, reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. Chapter  7 is a much revised and expanded version of “Something in the Works: Frost, Bishop and the Idea of Beauty,” in The Per­sis­tence of Beauty: Victorians to Moderns, ed. Michael O’Neill, Mark Sandy, and Sarah Wootton (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2015), 103–116; Chapter  8 of “ ‘Wherever You Listen From’: W. S. Graham and the Art of the Letter,” in Letter Writing among Poets: From William Words­worth to Elizabeth Bishop, ed. Jonathan Ellis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 202–215; Chapter  9 of “Incarnations in the Ear: On Poetry and Presence,” in Poetic Revelations: Word Made Flesh Made Word, ed. Mark  S. Burrows, Jean Ward, and Malgorzata Grzegorzewska (London: Routledge, 2017), 149–163; and Chapter 11 of “Poetry’s Knowing: So What Do We Know?,” in The Philosophy of Poetry, ed. John Gibson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 162–182, © The Several Contributors, 2009, reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. For permission to quote from the poems of Walter de la Mare, grateful acknowl­edgment to Giles de la Mare and to The Literary Trustees of Walter de la Mare and The Society of Authors as their representative. I am grateful to Anne Stevenson and to Bloodaxe Books for permission to quote parts of Stevenson’s poem “A Report from the Border,” from A Report from the Border (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2003), 33, and “To Write It,” from Poems: 1955–2005 (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2004), 287, all rights reserved. In addition, thanks to Alice Oswald and Giles de la Mare for permission to quote portions of their emails to me.

Acknowl­edgments

289

I am also grateful to my editors at Harvard University Press, first John Kulka, then Sharmila Sen and Heather Hughes, who steered the book through publication, as well as my painstaking copyeditors, John Donohue and Gillian Dickens. But above all, my thanks to Trinity College, Cambridge, for benignly supporting a proj­ect that for some years took second place to other forms of writing, even while, I hope, benefiting from them.

Index

Agamben, Giorgio, 142 Agbabi, Patience, 18 Alexander, Peter F., 214, 215 Altieri, Charles, 265 Andreas-­Salomé, Lou, 185–186 Aquinas, Thomas, 207–208 Aristotle, 263 Arnold, Matthew, 111; “Dover Beach,” 107 Ashmore, Jonathan, 4, 98 Astbury, Anthony, 189 Attridge, Derek, 129, 147, 229, 234 Auden, Wystan Hugh, 32, 51, 119, 141 Works: “Five Songs,” 100; “Their Lonely Betters,” 130 Augustine of Hippo, St., 162, 208–210, 212 Bachelard, Gaston, 9, 27, 31, 94 Barenboim, Daniel, 22, 47, 148, 266 Barthes, Roland, 8, 27, 91, 267 Bates, H. E., The Sleepless Moon, 41 Baudelaire, Charles, 158, 170 Beardsley, Monroe, 270 Beauty, 158–163, 170, 172; beauty, charm, and the je ne sais quoi, 164–166, 175, 177–180, 182 Beckett, Samuel: “Endgame,” 206; “Imagine Dead Imagine,” 265 Bevis, Matthew, 33 Bishop, Elizabeth, 165, 263–265; asides, 216; essay on Hopkins, 234; life of letters, 170–172; threes, charms, and beauty, 175–177 Works: “At the Fish­houses,” 263–264; “The Bight,” 184; “Crusoe in ­England,” 174; “The End of March,” 185; “Filling Station,” 38–40, 174; “The Fish,” 174; “The Flood,” 172; “In



the Village,” 38–40, 99, 171; “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore,” 172; “Large Bad Picture,” 174; “North Haven,” 174; “Notes on Timing in His Poetry,” 234; “One Art,” 241; “Roosters,” 174; “Sandpiper,” 175; “Santarém,” 174; “The Sea and the Shore,” 170–171; “Timing,” 170; “Twelfth Morning,” 172, 174 Boswell, James, 135 Bouhours, Dominique, 163–166 Bridges, Robert, 1, 186 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 183, 186 Browning, Robert, 88, 186 Works: “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,” 100; The Ring and the Book, 175 Bucknell, Brad, 36 Burke, Kenneth, 232, 239 Byron, George Gordon, “The Dream,” 54 Caddick, Arthur, 190 Campbell, Roy, 161 Carroll, Lewis, 253 Carson, Anne, The Beauty of the Husband, 160 Cavell, Stanley, 262, 266–268 Chandler, Marilyn, 45 Cocteau, Jean: Orpheus, 111–112; “The Testament of Orpheus,” 111 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 227; “This Lime-­Tree Bower,” 67 Connor, Steven, 53 Cook, Eleanor, 13–14, 174 Cooke, William, 130 Cooper, Burns, 232 Corradi Fiumara, Gemma, 9 Critchley, Simon, 270

291

292 ­INDEX Croll, Morris W., 170 Culler, Jonathan, 7–8, 18, 25, 186 Daumal, René, 27 de la Mare, Giles, 117 de la Mare, Walter, 23, 32–33, 92, 117, 121–128, 130–144, 146, 149–150, 260; admiration for, 118–120; friendships with Frost and E. Thomas, 133–135; meeting and friendship with Frost, 127–128; original Huguenot surname, “Delamare,” 141; poetry as movements of a boxer, 236–237; praise for “hush and silence,” 94; rhythm, 131–132; road and direction images, 126–127; sound-­sense— ­sounse, 132–133 Works: “Benighted,” 126; “The Bird of Travel,” 139–141, 147; Come Hither, 119, 128, 143; “Craftsmanship in Poetry,” 131–132, 236; “The Creatures,” 127; “The Green Room,” 145, 150–157; “An Ideal Craftsman,” 124; “Late,” 124; “The Listeners,” 92, 94, 118–120, 128–131, 133, 140–141, 144, 236–237; “Longlegs,” 134–135; Motley and Other Poems, 119; Peacock Pie, 133–135; “Poetry in Prose,” 132, 142; “Silence,” 123; “Some One,” 32–33; “Somewhere,” 127; “Sotto Voce,” 136; “Strangers and Pilgrims,” 127; “Thomas Hardy,” 137, 139; “The Traveller,” 118, 141, 240; “The Truants,” 134; “­Under the Rose,” 260 Derrida, Jacques, 186–187, 192, 197 Dickens, Charles, David Copperfield, 193 Donaghy, Michael, 100 Donoghue, Denis, 160, 177 Duffy, Carol Ann, “Prayer,” 211 Dunsmuir, Nessie, 199 Dylan, Bob, 18 Ear: “anxious ear,” 50, 55; imagination of the ear, 6–7, 101; “inward ear,” 59, 61, 65, 68, 143; medical terminology, 19–20, 98; meta­phors of hearing, 21; stupid, 51; summoner of sound, 8–9; trust in hearing, 207–208. See also Hearing Eco, Umberto, 160

Eliot, George, Middlemarch, 23, 37, 244 Eliot, T. S., 9, 51, 118, 174, 252, 254–255; “inexplicable mystery of sound,” 118–119; “a par­t ic­u ­lar rhythm” of poetic language, 227–228 Works: “Dante,” 254–255; “Journey of the Magi,” 174; “The M ­ usic of Poetry,” 227; “To Walter de la Mare,” 118; The Waste Land, 138 Ellipses, 12; in Bishop, 172–173, 179; in de la Mare, 141; in Hopkins, 159; in Muldoon, 52; in Oswald, 243; something missing and missed, 74–75, 115 Ellis, Jonathan, 170, 186 Elton, Charles, “Luriana, Lurilee,” 91 Empson, William, “Missing Dates,” 51 Farjeon, Eleanor, 134 Fitzgerald, Penelope, 52 Foster, Roy, 102, 108 Freedman, Jonathan, 166 Freud, Lucian, 256; “Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening (Self-­Portrait),” 22–25, 148, 246 Frost, Robert, 99, 136, 143, 174, 176, 179, 186, 232, 259, 270; de la Mare admirer, 120–121; dolnik rhythm, 129; friendships with de la Mare and E. Thomas, 124–135; meeting with de la Mare, 127–128; repetition in, 131; rhythm, 131, 236; “something” in, 165–169; “summoner” or “imagining” ear, 6–8, 21, 28, 48, 101, 230; voices b ­ ehind a door, 31–33, 67, 74 Works: “Education by Poetry,” 165–166; “For Once, Then, Something,” 99, 168–169, 176, 180; “The Lockless Door,” 33; “Mending Wall,” 166–167, 174; North of Boston, 128, 134; Notebooks, 270–271; “The Road Not Taken,” 126–127; “The Sound of Trees,” 127; “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Eve­n ing,” 115, 128–131, 232; “The Valley’s Singing Day,” 136 Fry, Paul H., 67, 68 Gadamer, Hans-­G eorg, 10 Gallo, Rubén, 111 Gibson, John, 269 Golston, Michael, 233

INDEX Graham, Jorie, 159–160 Works: “Imperialism,” 178; “Noli Me Tangere,” 179; “Pollock and Canvas,” 178 Graham, W. S., 181–182, 187–202, 259; drunkenness, 190–191; elegies, 199–202; hunger, heroism, and arctic loneliness, 188–189; letter images in poems, 196–197; letters theme, 196; “line” and “obstacle,” 192–194; “the mind’s ear,” 21; musical imagery, 195; “singing wires,” 195; sounds in, 199; visual and aural meta­phors, 195–196 Works: “Clusters Travelling Out,” 195; “The Constructed Space,” 181–182, 192; “Dear Bryan Wynter,” 199–200; “Dear Who I Mean,” 193; “Fury Tale,” 197–198; “I Leave this at your Ear,” 199; “No, Listen, for this I Tell,” 193; “Notes on a Poetry of Release,” 192; “The Thermal Stair,” 200–201 Grass, Günter, The Tin Drum, 205–207 Griffiths, Eric, 7–8, 18, 25, 51, 131 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, “The Six Servants,” 23 Gross, Kenneth, 129 Hallam, Arthur, 50, 53, 67 Halliday, Sam, 15 Hambling, Maggi, 191 Hammer, Langdon, 185 Hardy, Thomas, 119, 137; The Well-­ Beloved, 163 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 164 Hazzard, Shirley, The Transit of Venus, 159 Heaney, Seamus, 21, 134, 265 Works: “Edward Thomas on the Lagans Road,” 134; “The Forge,” 99; “Personal Helicon,” 99; “Sounding Auden,” 32 Hearing, 145–146, 177; believability through, 207–209; in Bishop’s work, 176, 216, 241; in C. Rossetti’s work, 28–29, 78–86; in de la Mare, 129, 132, 136–137, 144, 151, 153; ear as true writer and reader, 48; “an ear-­sighted view,” 33; ellipses, 173; in E. Thomas’s work, 136, 138–139, 141; in G. Eliot’s work, 244; “hearing with thought,” 22; in Hopkins’s work, 207; intonations of

293 language, 132; in J. Graham’s work, 178–179; Keats’s syllogism, 169; and listening, 5, 8, 27–28, 69, 267–268, 272; Munro’s, 148; in Murray’s work, 216–217, 223–225; in Oswald’s work, 243, 245, 249–250; physics of, 4–5; in Pound’s work, 204; repetition and, 225; rhythm and timing, 229–231, 236–237, 239; and seeing, 119, 195, 243, 249; sense of, 21; silence, 96, 199, 202, 241; in Stevenson’s work, 237; in Tennyson’s work, 49–69; thinking through, 266–267; unhearing, 42; in Valéry’s work, 254, 268; in Woolf’s work, 69, 72, 88–89, 95, 119, 159, 173; in W. S. Graham’s work, 195, 199; in Yeats’s work, 98, 105–107, 116, 242 Heidegger, Martin, 11–13 Helsinger, Elizabeth, 15 Herbert, George, 170 Works: “Love,” 52; “Prayer,” 211 Herrick, Robert, 150–151, 154, 156 Hilton, Roger: bond with W. S. Graham, 190–193; “Elephants Fighting,” 191 Hilton, Rose, 190–191 Hilton, Ruth, 190 Hirshfield, Jane, The Beauty, 160 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 11–12 Hollander, John, 16, 51–53, 59, 69, 87, 94 Hollinghurst, Alan, The Line of Beauty, 160 Hollis, Matthew, 120 Holst, Gustav, 235–236 Homer, 111, 114 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 1–3, 170–171, 186, 200, 215–216, 234; on beauty, 158–159, 163, 178; effects by sound, 50; letters of, 184; reading with the eyes or ears, 5–6, 21; “trusty ear,” 207–209 Works: “Henry Purcell,” 171; “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo,” 158–159, 178; “The Loss of the Euridyce,” 1; “No worst, ­t here is none,” 98–99; “To what serves mortal beauty,” 163 Howarth, Peter, 118, 119 Hughes, Langston, 18 Humming / hums, 60, 67, 69, 73; bees and insects, 41, 66, 72, 95; in Bishop’s work, 174; in C. Rossetti’s work, 77, 83; in Frost’s work, 131–132; in letters, 185; in

294 ­INDEX Humming / hums (continued ) Milne’s work, 260–261; in Milton’s work, 49–50; mockery of Victorian poets, 88–89; in Morrison’s work, 46–47; repetitions, 174; and sound, 96; in Tennyson’s work, 49–50, 52–53, 57–59, 61, 66–69, 87, 95; undersongs, 154; in Valéry’s work, 229; of war, 107; in Woolf’s work, 73, 75, 91–95, 226, 229; in W. S. Graham’s work, 194; in Yeats’s work, 107. See also Murmuring / murmurs; Rhythm Hunt, John Dixon, 50 Ihde, Don, 4, 9–10, 245 Intransitive, 52; cry, 200; in Frost, 131; knowing, 261–262, 265–266, 269, 271; listening, 24, 30, 37, 144; in Murray, 214; in Oswald, 245; pro­cess, 212; summoning, 101; and transitive, 26, 258; in Yeats, 231 James, Henry, 164, 166–167; What Maisie Knew, 261–262 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 164–165 Jarrell, Randall, 253 Jarvis, Simon, 13, 15 Jay, Martin, 11 John of the Cross, St., 160, 162, 175 Johnson, Jeri, 34 Joyce, James, 21, 78 Works: “The Dead,” 34–35; Finnegans Wake, 33; Ulysses, 33, 36–38 Joyce, Stanislaus, 33 Joyce, Trevor, 239–240 Works: “Time Piece. Clocks Err through Anger of the Watcher,” 239–240 Jump, John D., 50 Kafka, Franz, “Metamorphosis,” 219 Karlin, Daniel, 136 Keats, John, 66; “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 169, 175 Kendall, Judy, 120, 121, 138–139 Kendall, Tim, 167, 169 Kennedy, Caroline, 160 Kermode, Anita, 183 Kermode, Frank, 183, 230 Kirwan, James, 160 Kivy, Peter, 31, 269

Klee, Paul, 195 Know / knowing, 10, 22, 27, 64, 233; beyond, 176; comprehension, 147; ­faces, 151; grammatical-­philosophical split with “Known,” 110; innuendo, 204; listening in, 196; listening power, 11; and not knowing, 149, 161, 164, 199; poetry’s knowing, 251–272; too knowing, 155–156; “the way,” 127; wise and innocent, 166 Kruth, Patricia, 3 Lamarque, Peter, 269 Lambirth, Andrew, 191 Langley, R. F., “My Moth: My Song,” 71 Lanier, Sidney, 229–231, 240 Lanyon, Peter, 200–202 Larkin, Philip, 161; “Latest Face,” 162–163 Lee, Hermione, 88 Leighton, Angela, 26, 47, 168 Light, Alison, 92 Listening, 16–17; act of, 10–11, 47; heard aspect of language, 267–268; “hear ourselves listen,” 27; heightened listening, 64; listening and knowing, 266–272; listening as “deciphering,” 27; listening from, in W. S. Graham’s work, 181–202; listening to rhythm, 226–250; “listen in” to Auden, 32; make a listening listened to, 22–25; ­mental speaking, 12–13; philosophy and, 12–13; ­silent, 8; “superlisten,” 31; transitive verb, 64–65 Longenbach, James, 14–15, 61, 212 Longley, Edna, 120, 124 Lowell, Robert, 186 Lucretius, 253 Lyric / lyrical, 6–8, 50, 87, 188, 263; epistle and, 197; form of attention, 129; hesitation, 186; and narrative mode, 44; poetic parody, 35; in prose narrative, 75, 90, 92, 94; song, 46–47; tradition, 210; undersongs, 89 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Lays of Ancient Rome, 116 Manheim, Ralph, 206 Mansfield, Katherine, 119 Marsh, Jan, 76 Masefield, John, 52–53

INDEX Masson, Loys, 9 Maxwell, Glyn, 131 McDonald, Peter, 52, 59 McKendrick, Jamie, 176 Millier, Brett, 39, 184 Milne, A. A., The House at Pooh Corner, 260–261 Milton, John, 231–232, 246; “hum of men,” 49–51; transitive verb use, 65 Works: “Comus,” 65; Paradise Lost, 106, 231 Minton, John, 195 Mitchell, Breon, 206 Moore, Marianne, 174 Morgan, Edwin, 188 Morrison, Toni, Beloved, 45–47 Muldoon, Paul, 51–52, 89, 247; Incantata, 108 Munro, Alice, “Face,” 148–151, 156–157 Murmuring / murmurs, 7; bees and insects, 53, 66–68, 95; in Bishop’s work, 185–186; in de la Mare’s work, 120, 132, 144; in Oswald’s work, 249; in Tennyson’s work, 65–68, 95; in T. S. Eliot’s work, 228–229; undercurrent, 25, 73; in Valéry’s work, 244; in Woolf’s work, 73, 88, 92–93, 157; in Words­worth’s work, 69; in Yeats’s work, 53, 119. See also Humming /  hums Murray, Les, 210–225; asides, 24, 216; conversion to Catholicism, 210, 214–215; non-­human creatures, 215–221; “presence,” 216–221; “­whole thinking,” 212 Works: “Animal Nativity,” 220; “Bats’ Ultrasound,” 223–225; “Embodiment and Incarnation,” 211, 225; “From Where We Live on Presence,” 219–220; “MeMeMe,” 24, 215, 217–218; “Poetry and Religion,” 211–213; “Presence,” 215, 218, 220; “Shoal,” 213–214 Nancy, Jean-­Luc, 12–13, 16, 18, 24, 43, 223 Nicholson, Ben, 188 Nietz­sche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 253, 255–256, 259–260 Works: The Gay Science, 255; “The Poet’s Call,” 256; “Prelude in German Rhymes,” 256

295 Ong, Walter J., 5 Opie, Iona and Peter, 102, 239 Oswald, Alice, 18, 51, 242–249 Works: “A Greyhound in the Eve­n ing ­after a Long Day of Rain,” 242–243; “Tithonus,” 51, 246–249; “The Universe in Time of Rain Makes the World Alive with Noise,” 243–244 Parentheses: in Bishop, 173, 176; in J. Graham, 178–179; like cupped hands, 24; in Murray, 216 Parini, Jay, 120 Participle: in Frost, 136, 147, 166, 170; hanging, 93–94; impersonal form, 35, 83; indefinite, 270; intransitive pres­ent, 131, 231; knowing and thinking, 254–272; listening, 24, 26, 31; in Murray, 212, 217; open-­ ended, 35; pres­ent, 14, 16; in Stevens, 112, 114 Pater, Walter, 25–26, 158, 228, 245 Paulin, Tom, 185 Perloff, Marjorie, 17 Perry, Rebecca, 160 Perry, Seamus, 54, 87 Peters, John Durham, 185, 209 Pite, Ralph, and Hester Jones, 198 Plath, Sylvia: “Morning Song,” 52; “Words,” 113–114 Pollard, Natalie, 190 Pollock, Jackson, 178 Ponge, Francis, 12 Poole, Adrian, 164, 262 Pope, Alexander, 243 Porter, Peter, 254–255, 265 Pound, Ezra, 111, 119, 190, 204, 235 Works: “Prologomena,” 227; “The Seafarer ,” 204 Rabaté, Jean-­M ichel, 36 Reynolds, Fiona, 160 Rhythm, 131–132, 226–250; Burke’s definition, 239; clock time (tick-­t ack), 229–231, 241, 248; C. Rossetti and, 235; Oswald and, 242–250; Pound’s view, 227; Stevenson and, 237–239, 241–242; T. S. Eliot’s view, 227–229; Valéry’s view, 228–229; Woolf on rhythm, 226; Yeats’s view, 242

296 ­INDEX Richards, I. A., 51, 158 Ricks, Christopher, 51, 60, 88 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 185–186 Robinson, Marilynne: House­keeping, 42–45; “Wondrous Love,” 42 Rossetti, Christina, 28–29, 41, 67, 74–88, 91, 95; bird motif, 135–136; echoes and singing in, 81–84; rhythm of m ­ usic in, 235; Tennyson, influence of, 74–88; “undertone” of a sound, 77 Works: “Autumn,” 82; “A Birthday,” 84; “A Christmas Carol,” 235; “The Day-­Dream,” 76; “Echo,” 80; “From House to Home,” 80–81, 84; Goblin Market, 76; “A Green Cornfield,” 28–29; “In the Willow Shade,” 84–85; “Looking Forward,” 81; “The Lotos-­Eaters,” 76; “Mariana,” 76–77; The Palace of Art,” 76, 79; “The Prince’s Pro­g ress,” 76; “Repining,” 77, 79–80; “Sleeping at Last,” 85–86; “Three Stages,” 78–79; “Twice,” 84 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 76; “Willowwood” sonnets, 99, 168 Rosu, Anca, 62 Sackville-­West, Vita, 94, 226 Saintsbury, George, 228 Scarry, Elaine, 160, 163 Schaffer, Murray, 4 Scholar, Richard, 164 Schuchard, Ronald, 53 Scott, Clive, 8, 232 Scruton, Roger, 160, 266 Shakespeare, William, 15, 71 Works: Macbeth, 139; “Venus and Adonis,” 134 Shaw, Marion, 54 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 29, 53–54, 58, 114 Works: “The Boat on the Serchio,” 54; “Julian and Maddalo,” 54; “Rosalind and Helen,” 54 Singing bird: C. Rossetti’s, 83–84, 86; de la Mare’s and E. Thomas’s, 133–144; as model for the poet, 28, 74, 75; Yeats’s blackbirds, 102–103, 115 Sitwell, Edith, 102 Skelton, Robin, 196–198 Smith, Bruce, 10

Smith, Stevie, 51, 60, 119, 247; Novel on Yellow Paper, 51 Smith, Zadie, On Beauty, 160 Snow, Michael, 189–190 Sophocles, 107 Spalding, Frances, 119 Steiner, George, 209–210 Stevens, Wallace, 36, 112–114, 240, 256, 269, 271; philosophical assertions, 252–254; poetry makes us listen, 26–27, 29–30, 66 Works: “A Collect of Philosophy,” 253; “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” 240; “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” 25–26, 112–114; “Of Modern Poetry,” 269–271; “The Plain Sense of ­Things,” 264–266; “The Pure Good of Theory,” 113; “The Snow Man,” 29–30 Stevenson, Anne: “A Report from the Border,” 237–239, “To Write It,” 241 Stewart, Garrett, 5, 25, 30, 63 Stewart, Susan, 6 Stobart, Henry, 3 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 52–53 Symons, Arthur, 228 Szendy, Peter, 24 Tempest, Kate, 18 Tennyson, Alfred (Lord), 18, 38, 49–69, 74–95, 125, 143; aural vertigo, 64; effects by sound, 50–51; finest ear since Milton, 51; heightened listening in, 64; humming bees, 88, 95, 261; “inward ear,” 61, 65; language talking to itself, 52; repetitions, 63–64; thought in melody, 51; transitive verb use, 64–65 Works: “Armageddon,” 49, 50, 53, 55; “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” ­ ying 89; “Dualisms,” 67; “The D Swan,” 87; “The Foresters,” 68; “Hero to Leander,” 61; Idylls of the King, 76; “In Memoriam,” 67; “The Lady of Shalott,” 82; “The Lover’s Tale,” 53–69, 125; “Mariana,” 90; Maud, 76; “The Miller’s D ­ aughter,” 86–87; “Ode to Memory,” 64; “The Palace of Art,” 79, 93; “The Princess,” 68, 81; “Sense and Conscience,” 66; “Tears, Idle Tears,” 63; “Tithonus,” 51–52, 247

INDEX Thomas, Edward, 130, 132–144; friendships with Frost and de la Mare, 120–128, 133–135; indecision of, 125–126; suicidal impulses, 121, 124–125 Works: “Adlestrop,” 137; “Aspens,” 124, 141; “The Combe,” 135 The Happy-­Go-­Lucky Morgans, 138–139, 141; In Pursuit of Spring, 120, 126, 137; “The Signpost,” 125–126; “The Stile,” 121–125; “The Sun Used to Shine,” 121, 123; “The Unknown Bird,” 138, 140, 143 Thomas, Helen, 121–122, 135–136 Thomas, R. S., “The Presence,” 211 Toner, Anne, 75 Toop, David, 4, 23 Tsur, Reuven, 233 Tucker, Herbert, 47, 164 Untermeyer, Louis, 127, 186 Valéry, Paul, 8, 142, 195, 212, 228–229, 231, 244, 254, 256–257, 268 Works: “Le Cimetière Marin,” 228, 268; “Poetry and Abstract Thought,” 254; “A Poet’s Notebook,” 8 Vendler, Helen, 14 Virgil, 67 Voegelin, Salomé, 10 Voice / voicing, difference between, 7–8, 17–18, 25, 86; in de la Mare, 146; in Murray, 224, 236; in Woolf, 91, 131 Warren, Austin, 233 ­Waters, William, 186, 187–188 Wellek, René, 233 Whistler, Theresa, 119–121, 128, 131, 134–135, 137, 152 White, Harry, 33 Wilbur, Richard, “First Snow in Alsace,” 35, 41 Wilkinson, John, 14 Williams, William Carlos, “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower,” 101 Wilson, Jean Moorcroft, 120 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 256–260

297 Wolfson, Susan, 27 Woolf, ­V irginia, 67–68, 72–75, 88–95, 225, 226–227; admiration for de la Mare, 119; humming noise, 144, 157; humming sense of Tennyson and C. Rossetti, 88–95, 229; listening to Victorian poets, 72–75, 88; repetition by, 159, 162 Works: Freshwater, 68, 88; A Letter to a Young Poet, 90, 159, 183; Mrs Dalloway, 225; A Room of One’s Own, 72–74, 75, 88–89, 173, 226, 229; To the Light­house, 88–95, 119 Words­worth, William, 16, 27, 50, 54, 56–59, 63, 69, 84, 143, 227 Works: “Nutting,” 16, 69; The Prelude, 27 Wynter, Bryan, 199–200 Yeats, William Butler, 101–116, 129, 242; clock time (tick-­t ack) and, 231–232; composing voice, 52–53; “contrapuntal” poetry, 106; ear as summoner of images, 101; Frost’s view of, 232; Japa­nese sword gift, 108–111; on Milton, 246; penny images, 103–105, 108, 115; “song of sixpence,” 102–104, 115; “variable” time, 234 Works: “All Souls’ Night,” 101, 109–110; “All ­Things Can Tempt Me,” 107–108; “The Black Tower,” 103; “Brown Penny,” 104; “Coole Park and Ballylee,” 111–112; “Cuchulain Comforted,” 103; The Death of Cuchulain, 103–104, 114–115; “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” 101, 109, 110; “At Galway Races,” 105; “A General Introduction for My Work,” 106, 231; The Hour-­Glass, 104; “An Indian Monk,” 102; “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” 67, 106; “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” 108; “Modern Poetry,” 102; “On a Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmund Dulac,” 111–112; “Reveries over Childhood and Youth,” 116; “The Symbolism of Poetry,” 231; “­Under Ben Bulben,” 114; “The Valley of the Black Pig,” 106