Wanhope

                  On an Etching by J.S. Cotman

                   I wept to see the visionary man 

        – Dryden's Virgil

   There is no richness in this scene,
No life to answer his abstracted stare –
And what we take it that these emblems mean
Is but the index of his inward care;

   The summer-house will always stay
About to fall, the river make no sound
As Lethe-like it bears his strength away
And lapses to the darkness underground;

   And poised above the silent flood
The couchant lion waits, a mask of stone,
Impassive by the tree that will not bud,
The spell-bound youth, beleaguered and alone.

   The landscape is an open grave
At which the artist and his subject gaze;
When acid eats the plate, his skills engrave
Wanhope, a mind that falters and decays.


Yesterday I found myself in a bookshop in Chichester – just the kind of cramped, overstocked, mildly eccentric second-hand bookshop that always gives me a little bibliophilic thrill of anticipation. I scanned the poetry shelves – and straight away spotted the first Dick Davis collection I have ever found in a bookshop. Naturally I bought it. It was The Covenant (1984, Anvil Press), and the ekphrastic poem above gives the collection its cover image – A Summer-House on the Banks of the River Ware by J.S. Cotman. Davis's poem, I think, reflects perfectly the mood of the etching, which he encapsulates in the unfamiliar, officially obsolete word 'wanhope', meaning a state of despair in which all hope is lost, and a sense of futility and defeat pervades everything. 
  The Covenant takes its title from the heartbreaker that opens the collection – 

Fräulein X

And it turned out that with her thanks for the poison Fräulein X had still on more request:
would the friend sing Brahms's 'Vier ernste Gesänge' before they parted.

– Diary of Reck-Malleczewen, December 1938

   

Unseen, preserved beneath dark velvet, lie
Pale water-colours fugitive to light –
Displayed to none but friendship's gentler eye,
The sanctuaries of her sequestered sight –

Views of the Rhine and of the Holy Land, 
Deep vistas of the spirit's need and rest:
Frail on glass shelfs Venetian glasses stand,
The keepsakes of a life secure and blessed.

Now, in this last desire, she redeclares
Old faith in what is hers – Judaic psalms,
The German tongue: that heritage she shares –
Immutably – with Luther and with Brahms:

And though that sheltered world her childhood knew
Is shrunk to a dark room, though in the street
The mob bays hatred to the German Jew,
This covenant survives, beyond defeat.

The quotation is from Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen's posthumously published Diary of a Man in Despair, his journal of life under the Nazi regime. He died in Dachau.
Brahms's 'Vier ernste Gesänge' (four serious songs) is a late, death-haunted song cycle setting words from the Luther Bible.