'You keep both Rule and Energy in view'

 This morning's stab in the dark was another lucky strike: the (very slim) volume turned out to be Thom Gunn's Poems 1950-1966: A Selection (Faber paperback, 1969), and it fell open at this, Gunn's heartfelt but perfectly balanced tribute to his mentor at Stamford, Yvor Winters,  written in the style of its addressee. One fine poet salutes another – 

To Yvor Winters, 1955

I leave you in your garden.
                                            In the yard
Behind it, run the airedales you have reared
With boxer's vigilance and poet's rigour:
Dog-generations you have trained the vigour
That few can breed to train and fewer still
Control with the deliberate human will.
And in the house there rest, piled shelf on shelf,
The accumulations that compose the self –
Poem and history: for if we use
Words to maintain the actions that we choose,
Our words, with slow defining influence,
Stay to mark out our chosen lineaments.

Continual temptation waits on each
To renounce his empire over thought and speech,
Till he submit his passive faculties
To evening, come where no resistance is;
The unmotivated sadness of the air
Filling the human with his own despair.
Where now lies power to hold the evening back?
Implicit in the grey is total black;
Denial of the discriminating brain
Brings the neurotic vision, and the vein
Of necromancy. All as relative
For mind as for the sense, we have to live
In a half-world, not ours nor history's,
And learn the false from half-true premises.

But sitting in the dusk – though shapes combine,
Vague mass replacing edge and flickering line,
You keep both Rule and Energy in view,
Much power in each, most in the balanced two:
Ferocity existing in the fence
Built by an exercised intelligence.
Though night is always close, complete negation
Ready to drop on wisdom and emotion,
Night from the air or the carnivorous breath,
Still it is right to know the force of death,
And as you do, persistent, tough in will,
Raise from the excellent the better still.

Jerome in the Morning

 The early morning sun is so bright in my bedroom these days that I have been obliged to wear an eye mask to stand a chance of staying asleep. This gave me the idea for a new morning ritual...
  Facing the bed is a smallish bookshelf containing mostly poetry books (but also my butterfly books, Pevsners and Shell Guides). Each morning I rise with the eye mask still on and grope my way to the bookshelf, where I take a volume at random, open it ditto, and read whatever it falls open at (hoping that it's a poem). This morning I struck lucky when the unseen volume turned out to be Marianne Moore's Selected Poems and it opened at this – 

Leonardo da Vinci's

Saint Jerome and his lion

in that hermitage

of walls half gone,

share sanctuary for a sage--

joint-frame for impassioned ingenious

Jerome versed in language--

and for a lion like one on the skin of which

Hercules' club made no impression.

The beast, received as a guest,

although some monks fled--

with its paw dressed

that a desert thorn had made red--

stayed as guard of the monastery ass . . .

which vanished, having fed

its guard, Jerome assumed. The guest then, like an ass,

was made carry wood and did not resist,

but before long recognized

the ass and consigned

its terrorized

thieves' whole camel-train to chagrined

Saint Jerome. The vindicated beast and

saint somehow became twinned;

and now, since they behaved and also looked alike,

their lionship seems officialized.

Pacific yet passionate--

for if not both, how

could he be great?

Jerome--reduced by what he'd been through--

with tapering waist no matter what he ate,

left us the Vulgate. That in Leo,

the Nile's rise grew food checking famine,

made lion's mouth fountains appropriate,

if not universally,

at least not obscure.

And here, though hardly a summary, astronomy--

or pale paint--makes the golden pair

in Leonardo da Vinci's sketch, seem

sun-dyed. Blaze on, picture,

saint, beast; and Lion Haile Selassie, with household

lions as symbol of sovereignty.

This ekphrastic poem was inspired by Leonardo's unfinished painting of Jerome and his attendant lion. 
This one – 

My own favourite Saint Jerome picture could hardly be more different – Carpaccio's Jerome Leading the Lion into the Monastery, with the monks panicking and fleeing at sight of the remarkably benign-looking lion. This is to be found, with other wonderful Carpaccios, in the Scuola San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice. Ah, Venice...

Bowdler

 Born on this day in 1754 was one of those rare men whose name has survived as a verb (and, by extension, noun and adjective) – Thomas Bowdler, whose cleaned-up edition of Shakespeare was the original 'bowdlerised' text. His work, The Family Shakespeare: in which nothing is added to the original Text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a Family, was first published in 1807, with a more complete edition following in 1818. The first edition was apparently the work of Bowdler's sister Harriet, but both editions were presented as the work of Thomas alone, presumably because it would have been unseemly for a lady to have immersed herself so studiously in Shakespeare's bawdy. The Family Shakespeare was a great commercial success, running into eleven editions by 1850. 
  Bowdler has long been a byword for Victorian prudery (overlooking the fact that his Shakespeare was first published long before Victoria's reign, and Bowdler himself was 12 years dead when she ascended the throne). In fact the damage he did to Shakespeare's text was slight compared to earlier editors such as Nahum Tate, who took it upon himself to give King Lear a happy ending, and The Family Shakespeare was certainly useful at a time when the plays were commonly read aloud in the family circle – hence the public appetite for it.  One man who vigorously defended Bowdler was the famously degenerate Algernon Charles Swinburne: 'More nauseous and more foolish cant was never chattered than that which would deride the memory or depreciate the merits of Bowdler. No man ever did better service to Shakespeare than the man who made it possible to put him into the hands of intelligent and imaginative children.' He had a point. 

Two Survivors

 Well, I have finally managed to unpack and shelve all my books (yes, I know it's been a long time – I shan't bore you with an account of the various delays, obstructions and diversions that have slowed everything down). Along the way, I've had some happy reunions and surprises of various kinds, and I achieved another drastic cull: seven boxes stuffed with books are destined for whatever charity will accept them.
   I was pleased to find that I still own two 18th-century leather-bound books, humble products of a period that was surely the golden age of book-making. The paper in both – being made of rag rather than wood pulp – is in remarkably good condition, and the bindings still tight. The less interesting of the two was, I think, inherited via my grandmother, and is Volume III (of VII) of The History of Sir Charles Grandison, in a Series of Letters published from the Originals, By the Editor of Pamela and Clarissa, i.e. written by Samuel Richardson, who had a bigger success with Grandison than with either Pamela or Clarissa. My copy of this stray volume is from the library of Isabella Powlett, whose name is beautifully inscribed on the flyleaf, with the date 1754 and the number 216 (she must have had an impressive library for a 17-year-old). Isabella was the only daughter of Lord Nassau Powlett, and she became, by marriage, Countess of Egmont. Her armorial bearings – three downward-pointing swords – are on the front board.
Here is how the first letter of Volume III begins: 
'SELF, my dear Lucy, is a very wicked thing; a sanctifier, if one would give way to its partialities, of actions, which, in others, we should have no doubt to condemn. DELICACY, too, is often a misleader; an idol, at whose shrine we sometimes offer up our Sincerity; but, in that case, it should be called Indelicacy.'
Well, quite... I did not read on.
   Much more interesting is my other 18th-century survivor – Miscellanies, the Sixth Volume, by Dr Swift (London, 1751). This is a collection of Swift's minor essays and what we would now call open letters (and by pure coincidence 'the more obscure regions of Swift's work' are also Patrick Kurp's subject today). Here are, for example, A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture, Some Arguments Against Enlarging the Power of the Bishops, A Short View of the State of Ireland, etc. What caught my eye immediately was A Letter from Captain Gulliver to His Cousin Sympson, written in the Year 1727. In this Lemuel Gulliver takes his cousin to task for prevailing upon him to 'publish a very loose and uncorrect Account of my Travels', relying on 'some young Gentleman of either University' to put it in order. 'But I do not remember,' Gulliver continues, 'I gave you Power to consent, that any thing should be omitted, and much less that any thing should be inserted: Therefore, as to the latter, I do here renounce every thing of that kind; particularly, a Paragraph about Her Majesty Queen Anne, of most glorious and pious Memory; although I did reverence and esteem her more than any of human Species.' This is Swift with tongue very firmly in cheek: Queen Anne disliked and distrusted him, and the feeling was mutual. 
   Later in the letter, Gulliver laments, without surprise, the failure of his published Travels to reform the morals of the Yahoos (i.e. the common run of humanity). Rather, the Yahoos have turned on the author, finding fault and condemning his work. 'If the Censure of the Yahoos could any way affect me,' writes Gulliver, 'I should have great Reason to complain, that some of them are so bold as to think my Book of Travels a mere Fiction out of mine own Brain; and have gone so far as to drop Hints, that the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos have no more existence than the Inhabitants of Utopia.' (Oddly, he also complains that the name Brobdingnag is an erroneous transcription, and it should correctly be Brobdingrag – why?).
   Gulliver concludes that he 'should never have attempted so absurd a Project as that of reforming the Yahoo race in this Kingdom: But, I have now done with all such visionary Schemes for ever.'

  

Great at the Time

 Not Only... But Also, the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch series, is one of those shows that has entered the realm of myth and legend, shining forth in retrospect as an all-time comedy great, an imperishable classic. The myth has been burnished by the passage of time, and, crucially, by the fact that so many episodes were lost, 'wiped', as was then customary, by the BBC. But was Not Only... But Also that good? On the evidence of last night's compilation show (and others shown some while back), the answer is No. The sketches are lame and painfully overstretched, mostly consisting of a potentially good idea hammered slowly to death. It's a shame, as both men were very talented, and Cook, with the right material, was one of the funniest men who ever drew breath – but even he could make nothing of most of these scripts. It seemed brilliantly funny at the time – and strikingly ambitious in its set-ups (it must have had a huge budget) – but that time is long gone, The Fast Show having put the final nail in the coffin of the overstretched sketch show. The only parts of Not Only... But Also that still shine are of course the Dagenham Dialogues, where a large part of the fun is in watching Pete and especially Dud desperately struggling not to laugh. The rest is, alas, history, of only historical interest. Nothing unusual about that: most TV comedy is of its time, and doesn't outlast that time. And even at the time it was rarely as funny as we remember it being. 

Lunched and Refurbed

 Despite my recent comments on the state of the metropolis, I must report that today I thoroughly enjoyed  a day – well, an afternoon – in London. I was lunching with an old friend whom I hadn't seen face to face in way too long – and it was a very good lunch, which always helps – then after it we strolled off to have a look at the newly refurbished and reopened National Portrait Gallery. The refurb seemed to both of us to be a great success, making the place feel much more open and spacious and less difficult to get around  – and get into, come to that: the new main entrance on the North side of the building works brilliantly. The rehang of the portraits, which now include many new items and a higher proportion of photographs (some brilliant, some very ordinary), also works well, managing to be at once chronologically structured and unpredictable, so that you never know quite what you'll happen upon next. And – wonder of wonders – there didn't seem to be any of those tiresome 'interpretative' captions pointing out the deplorable failure of  people from the past to conform to the moral postures of the 21st century. 
  In an earlier life, I spent quite a lot of time at launches and other jollies at the NPG, and I remember on one occasion getting trapped for what seemed like an eternity in front of a double portrait of Neil and Glenys Kinnock, a picture that at first looks pretty ordinary, but becomes weirder and weirder, and more and more disturbing, the longer you look at it. On this visit, happily, I didn't spot it: I hope it has been consigned to the stores, and that it will remain there.

The Island

 An interesting piece in The Critic by Jaspreet Singh Bopari rightly deplores the sad fact that Paradise Lost, the greatest epic poem in English, 'seems to be fading slowly from public view', seldom even being taught in schools, let alone read. He also laments the failure of subsequent English poets to come up with any kind of satisfactory national epic: even Tennyson and Browning, perhaps the two best equipped to do it, only managed the sonorous 'private fantasies' of Idylls of the King, and the magnificent but undeniably Italian The Ring and the Book. With the coming of modernism, all hope was of course lost.
   However, there was one wholehearted attempt at an English national epic – The Island by Francis Brett Young, a work now so completely forgotten that Bopari doesn't mention it. I only know it because it was a great favourite of my father, who read it repeatedly. The Island is a rousingly patriotic verse history of Britain, from the Bronze Age to the Battle of Britain – just the kind of thing to appeal to my history-loving, deeply patriotic father. Published in 1944, it was a huge success, the first edition (of 23,500) selling out immediately – an extraordinary feat in wartime conditions – and numerous reprints following. Up until then, Francis Brett Young had been a successful middle-brow novelist, author of, among other things, a string of 'Mercian novels', set in and celebrating the West Midlands. Sadly, soon after the publication of The Island, his frail health deteriorated and his writing career was effectively over. He died in 1954 in Cape Town, and his ashes are buried in Worcester cathedral.
  Here is an Arthurian passage from The Island –

…. And all that coloured tale a tapestry
Woven by poets. As the spider’s skeins
Are spun of its own substance, so have they
Embroidered empty legend – What remains?

This: That when Rome fell, like a writhen oak
That age had sapped and cankered at the root,
Resistant, from her topmost bough there broke
The miracle of one unwithering shoot.

Which was the spirit of Britain – that certain men
Uncouth, untutored, of our island brood
Loved freedom better than their lives; and when
The tempest crashed around them, rose and stood

And charged into the storm’s black heart, with sword
Lifted, or lance in rest, and rode there, helmed
With a strange majesty that the heathen horde
Remembered when all were overwhelmed;

And made of them a legend, to their chief,
Arthur, Ambrosius – no man knows his name –
Granting a gallantry beyond belief,
And to his knights imperishable fame.

They were so few . . . We know not in what manner
Or where they fell – whether they went
Riding into the dark under Christ’s banner
Or died beneath the blood-red dragon of Gwent.

Well, it's not Milton, or even Miltonic – but epic it surely is, and absolutely English.