The Sound of Poets

 We know what poets sound like, don't we? They speak in Received Pronunciation, sometimes in a curiously strangulated form – think T.S. Eliot – or in a kind of Oxford drawl, like Philip Larkin, or in the fruitier-than-fruit tones of Dylan Thomas, or in a more relaxed version of 'posh', like Betjeman. Regional accents are allowed for Northerners – Ted Hughes (the thinking man's Sean Bean), Simon Armitage, all those Liverpudlians. But there was a time, before Received Pronunciation took over (largely thanks to the BBC), when writers, like everyone else except some members of the gentry and aristocracy, spoke in a range of provincial accents, and the world sounded very different, both from how it sounds now and from how it sounds in period dramas and historical reconstructions.
Tennyson, by all accounts, spoke with quite a broad Lincolnshire accent all his life, though he could modify it according to circumstances. He loved Lincolnshire dialect, and wrote many dialect poems (though not as many as the dialect poetry specialist William Barnes of Dorset). Johnson spoke with the accent of his native Staffordshire, and was sometimes mocked for it, good-humouredly, by his friend Garrick. Shakespeare, another great son of Mercia, no doubt spoke with a Warwickshire accent, but what exactly he sounded like we shall never know. As for Keats, how 'cockney' was he? Did he sound like a Londoner or not? Controversy rages, in a small way. In one of many hostile contemporary reviews, he was accused of using 'Cockney rhymes', such as 'thorns' and 'fawns', 'shorter' with 'water' and 'fastens' with 'parsons'. This, according to linguists, is evidence of 'nonrhoticity', the tendency to drop Rs from the end of syllables and words – though such rhymes are perfectly respectable, and have been used by poets blessed with abundant rhoticity. Keats's letters feature such usages as 'ax' for 'ask', 'ave' for 'have' and 'werry' for 'very', but these are surely there for comic effect. The likelihood is that Keats, with his intense sensitivity and easily embarrassed nature, would have adapted whatever accent he had to suit any particular social situation he found himself in. Of course we shall never know – but we do, as it happens, have some idea of what Tennyson sounded like, from a wax cylinder recording made in 1890, in which the elderly poet declaims 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'. It's an eerie sound, made all the more eerie in this 'virtual reading'...

'The chestnut pattering to the ground...'

 October already, and both the Rev. Richard Coles and Bryan Appleyard have posted Robert Frost's 'October' on Facebook (great minds, etc.). 
The advance of autumn affects poets in different ways. Emily Brontë positively welcomes it, complete with its promise of winter to come –

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;

Lengthen night and shorten day;

Every leaf speaks bliss to me

Fluttering from the autumn tree.

I shall smile when wreaths of snow

Blossom where the rose should grow;

I shall sing when night’s decay

Ushers in a drearier day.

But the general autumn mood is, of course, one of melancholy, of 'languid grief'. Here's Dante Gabriel Rossetti going for it, in his 'Autumn Song' –

Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf

How the heart feels a languid grief

Laid on it for a covering,

And how sleep seems a goodly thing

In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?

And how the swift beat of the brain

Falters because it is in vain,

In Autumn at the fall of the leaf

Knowest thou not? and how the chief

Of joys seems—not to suffer pain?

Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf

How the soul feels like a dried sheaf

Bound up at length for harvesting,

And how death seems a comely thing

In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?

But for me the most beautiful lines of autumn verse – apart from the supreme autumn poem, Keats's great ode – are these, from Tennyson's 'In Memoriam', recalling an autumn morning on the Lincolnshire Wolds...

Calm is the morn without a sound,

         Calm as to suit a calmer grief,

         And only thro' the faded leaf

The chestnut pattering to the ground:

Calm and deep peace on this high wold,

         And on these dews that drench the furze.

         And all the silvery gossamers

That twinkle into green and gold:

Calm and still light on yon great plain

         That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,

         And crowded farms and lessening towers,

To mingle with the bounding main:

Calm and deep peace in this wide air,

         These leaves that redden to the fall;

         And in my heart, if calm at all,

If any calm, a calm despair.

A Thousand!

 Well, here's an unexpected development: a recent post on this blog has attracted 1,000 views – a figure unheard of since the good old days when blogging was enjoying its golden age. The post in question was this one – and it looks as if several other posts could soon be following it into the fabled land of four figures. What is happening? Nigeness doesn't seem to be attracting the attention of unlikely countries (as has happened in the past from time to time), not does anything suspicious appear to be going on. Could it be a sign of the long overdue blog renaissance, when people finally come to their senses, abandon the delusive charms of Facebook, Instagram and X, and return to the blogosphere, natural home of that pleasing and often rewarding genre, the informal short-form essay? I doubt it, but a man can dream... 

'What they're saying doesn't matter'

 The garden of our house in Lichfield backs onto a school playing field – which is good news because (a) it means the garden has an open view and is not overlooked, and (b) we both happen to like hearing the voices of children at play, at least when they're of primary school age. 
Gavin Ewart writes about this in a poem called 'Back' –

They come back, the terrible old words,
words like 'heart-piercing', 
from the bad poems in the anthologies,
when I hear the voices of the children playing –
but not what they are saying.

I think back, ten or eleven years,
when we could hear sing
our own kids' trebles – the tree of knowledge is
apt to grow too fast in any London garden –
and soon our feelings harden.

They float back, like an archaic rhyme,
brightly transpiercing
parental minds, strong as old theologies,
sweet, that all too soon will grow both sour and flatter – 
what they're saying doesn't matter. 

(A clever rhyme scheme there, with lines two and three of each stanza rhyming across the whole poem.) 'Back' is one of Ewart's more tender poems – and here is another, one to appeal to any cat-lover –

A 14-Year-Old Convalescent Cat in the Winter

I want him to have another living summer,
to lie in the sun and enjoy the douceur de vivre – 
because the sun, like golden rum in a rummer, 
is what makes an idle cat un tout petit peu ivre – 

I want him to lie stretched out, contented,
revelling in the heat, his fur all dry and warm,
an old age pensioner, retired, resented
by no one, and happiness in a beelike swarm

to settle on him – postponed for another season
that last fated hateful journey to the vet
from which there is no return (and age the reason),
which must soon come – as I cannot forget. 

'I did not know how lucky I was'

Appended to Sassoon's The Old Century is a further memoir, Seven More Years, which carries young Siegfried's story forward into the new century. Towards the end of it comes his memorable encounter with a Camberwell Beauty, which some readers might remember from my book, The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment. While in the large room at the top of his family home, Sassoon becomes aware of a butterfly trapped between the skylight and the gauze tacked over it...

'By standing on a chair – which I placed on a table – I could just get my hand between the gauze and the glass. The butterfly was ungratefully elusive, and more than once the chair almost toppled over. Successful at last, I climbed down, and was about to put the butterfly out of the window when I observed between my fingers that it wasn't the Small Tortoiseshell or Cabbage White that I had assumed it to be. Its dark wings had yellowish borders with blue spots on them. It was more than seven years since I had entomologically squeezed the thorax of a "specimen". Doing so now, I discovered that one of the loftiest ambitions of my childhood had been belatedly realised. I had caught a Camberwell Beauty.'

I had forgotten what it was the young Siegfried was doing when the fluttering Beauty caught his attention. He was, or intended to be, reading among the impressive books he had recently been collecting to form his own library...

'I decided that I really must read some Ruskin, in whom I had heavy arrears to make up, for during my final term at Cambridge I had  somewhat fortuitously subscribed for that Library Edition of his works which was being gradually issued in thirty-nine volumes. Thirty of them had already arrived, and they were uniformly corpulent ... Attracted by its name, I made a start with The Crown of Wild Olive, but after a few pages I lost the thread and lapsed into leaf-cutting – an occupation which was more compatible with my wandering thoughts. I might have continued cutting the leaves of Ruskin's work for the rest of the morning, but I began to be bothered by the flutterings of a butterfly....'

And there it was... I remember that 39-volume set of Ruskin from my early years, when it sat unsold and unwanted on the shelves of many a provincial second-hand bookshop, its author's reputation having sunk below the horizon. Nowadays, with Ruskin back in favour (up to  a point), you would have to pay a considerable sum to get your hands on a complete set. 
  Seven More Years is every bit as engagingly readable as The Old Century, and, having finished it, I think I'm going to have to read more of Sassoon's memoirs. Here is the closing scene of the book, in which young Siegfried is in the garden of the family home, on the edge of the Kentish weald...

'Meanwhile this September morning looked as if nothing could change its meridian prosperity. As I turned to go up to the house, I couldn't imagine what it would feel like to be more than twenty-one. Lucky to be in love with life, I did not know how lucky I was.'

'A called-for falling glide and whirl'

 I have rather too much going on at the moment, including some soul-sapping technical difficulties resulting from a change of computer, and a couple of books to read for review at something of a breakneck speed (for me) – but, on the positive side, I did manage an epic day trip down to the south coast and back yesterday to see an old friend who also happens to have a magical ability to fix bad backs, of which I have had one, in a small way, lately.  
  Anyhow (a word Siegfried Sassoon uses surprisingly often in The Old Century at the beginning of paragraphs), somewhere along the way I came across this short poem by Richard Wilbur (from Things of This World), a vivid miniature that struck me as, well, just beautiful...

Piazza di Spagna, Early Morning

            I can't forget
   How she stood at the top of that long marble stair
   Amazed, and then with a sleepy pirouette
Went dancing slowly down to the fountain-quieted square;

          Nothing upon her face
But some impersonal loneliness, – not then a girl,
    But as it were a reverie of the place,
       A called-for falling glide and whirl;

   As when a leaf, petal, or thin chip
Is drawn to the falls of a pool and, circling a moment above it,
           Rides on over the lip – 
     Perfectly beautiful, perfectly ignorant of it. 

To me, the image in that last stanza recalls Wilbur's masterpiece, 'A Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa Sciarra'.

   

An Unlikely Editor

 I've been  reading Siegfried Sassoon's memoir of his early years, The Old Century (and a very good read it is).
Being born a Sassoon, Siegfried was vaguely aware that he had a lot of rich relations, but he saw nothing of them – with one exception, Auntie Rachel, his father's sister, who was Mrs Frederick Beer, and who lived with her husband in an oppressively grand Mayfair mansion.  There were footmen and a butler, electric lighting, expensive furnishings and antiques galore. In the grand dining room, 'The food was a series of succulent surprises, and there were wonderful pictures on the walls. But every time we went there the floor became more densely occupied by piles of books. They were stacked all around the room and none of them had ever been opened, though they ought to have been because they were, to be precise, review copies sent to the Sunday Times, of which Auntie Rachel was the editor.' This nugget caught me up short – how could Auntie Rachel, 'well known for always being late for everything' and described by Sassoon as 'vague and desultory', be editing a national newspaper? 
 Sassoon explains: 'At that time both The Observer and the Sunday Times, which in those days were rather unobtrusive and retiring newspaper, belonged to Mr Beer, whose father had been a financier.' What is more (as he doesn't mention), Auntie Rachel was also the editor of The Observer – and was indeed the first woman to edit a national newspaper. The world of journalism was obviously very different in the 1890s, but even the young Sassoon found it hard to believe that his aunt could be editing a paper: 'I have often wondered how the Sunday Times managed to appear once a week under her editorship. I have also wondered how the printers succeeded in deciphering her handwriting, which was the most illegible hieroglyphic I have ever puzzled over.' Despite her husband becoming increasingly ill, she continued to edit both papers until 1901. On Frederick Beer's death in 1903, the papers changed hands again. Rachel herself was ill for many years, and when she died she left a large bequest to her nephew Siegfried, with which he was able to buy Heytesbury House in Wiltshire, where he lived for the rest of his life, forever grateful to Auntie Rachel.