Old and New Worlds

One of the earliest poems in this fine selection of Charles Tomlinson’s work opens with an assertion that will proceed to haunt this major poet’s oeuvre:

Reality is to be sought, not in concrete, But in space made articulate: The shore, for instance, Spreading between wall and wall; The sea-voice Tearing the silence from the silence.

Reality is to be discovered in encounter and it is in encounters that individual judgements, discretion and sensibility are recorded. Given this sense of the subjective meeting the objective, the seer meeting the seen, the artist is perceived as the opener of doors and it is by no means mere chance that so many of Tomlinson’s poems dwell upon images of gates, gaps, stone cromlechs. The eye, itself a window to the soul, reveals the self by studying the intricacies of form in the natural world. As the poet puts it in ‘A Meditation on John Constable’, from the early volume Seeing is Believing, ‘For what he saw / Discovered what he was’.

Charles Tomlinson may have shared a little of what Pound was referring to when he called both Louis Zukofsky and Basil Bunting ‘strugglers in the desert’. However, although Tomlinson’s reception in England may have had a touch of that wilderness sense, he certainly found generous oases in America and Mexico, in Italy and Spain. Having been engaged in a remarkable dialogue with Europe and the Americas for nearly fifty years he has been probably the foremost poet of truly international distinction

writing in England between the 1950s and the opening years of the twenty-first century. It is worth recalling that the volume containing that ‘Meditation’ upon one of the most celebrated English landscape painters appeared first in America in 1958 before being reissued in an expanded version by Oxford University Press in 1960.

The effect of the perception of objects upon the personality of the observer is discovered not only in the semi-theoretical expression of the ‘Meditation’ but also in the visual and exploratory presence of ‘The Atlantic’, published in the same volume:

Launched into an opposing wind, hangs

Grappled beneath the onrush, And there, lifts, curling in spume,

Unlocks, drops from that hold Over and shoreward.

The emphatic ‘Launched’ takes us into the teeth of something which seems to hold us back with its hard consonantal stress, for a moment, before the verse movement, mirroring the wave’s action, ‘unlocks’ us to drop us onto the beach. The new movement of the broken wave now requires a different handling in the verse and present tense becomes present participle:

The beach receives it A whitening line, collapsing Powdering off down its broken length.

The poet’s eye still follows the process as the weight of water, now with spent strength, is climbing the beach:

Then, curded, shallow, heavy With clustering bubbles, it nears

In a slow sheet that must climb Relinquishing its power, upward

Across tilted sand.

The bulk of water, ‘curded’ and ‘heavy’, is impelled forward by the speed of ‘nears’ at the line’s end. The movement is counteracted by the ‘slow sheet’ and the process of deceleration is aided by the lack of comma until, when one does appear, we have been almost ground to a halt with ‘upward’. The concluding movement of unravelling is across ‘tilted’ sand and the moment has now arrived for observation:

The sun rocks there, as the netted ripple

Into whose skeins the motion threads it Glances athwart a bed, honey-combed

By heaving stones.

Whatever truth we may be offered here does not lie in the unearthing of subconscious desires or fears. These stones move but not to confront us with a gaping horror at what might lie beneath them. Charles Tomlinson is graceful in an almost eighteenth century fashion: a concern for reticence and social decency which one comes to recognise throughout his work. ‘The Atlantic’ concludes:

That which we were Confronted by all that we are not, Grasps in subservience its replenishment.

‘A Meditation on John Constable’ presents the reader with a more discursive manner of examining the relationship between the self and the environment. It opens with a quotation from one of Constable’s lectures on landscape painting:

Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an enquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?

Tomlinson’s poem opens directly with a response as if the lecture had been delivered only a few days before the poem’s inception:

He replied to his own question, and with the unmannered Exactness of art

The measured and careful movement of the verse reflects that ‘unmannered /Exactness’ and the poem draws together both human feelings and accurately perceived shifts of light. Constable’s work begins with direct observation of what is observable fact:

Facts. And what are they? He admired accidents, because governed by laws, Representing them (since the illusion was not his end) As governed by feeling.

The attempt to perceive the present in minute detail is a movement towards self-discovery relying upon a principle of selection without which there would be a record of undifferentiated phenomena. What Constable saw ‘Discovered what he was’ and an adherence to fact, informed by personal ways of seeing, leads to the creation of a work of art:

The artists lies For the improvement of truth. Believe him.

Landscapes become registers of emotional states in Tomlinson’s poetry and it is in that way that he opens doors almost like his friend Philippe Jaccottet, the contemporary French poet who used the word ‘ouvertures’ to express the glimpse from one world into another. From the volume A Peopled Landscape (1963) Tomlinson opens his poem about ‘The Farmer’s Wife: At Fostons Ash’ with dramatic immediacy:

Scent

from the apple-loft!

The pervading sense carries a Keatsian undertone of richness as the curtains are drawn to permit our entry into another world:

I smelt it and I saw in thought behind the oak that cupboards all your wine the store in maturation webbed and waiting.

The careful choice of language here gives us ‘webbed’ referring not merely to the cobwebbed bottles in store but also to the labyrinth of rich associations which surround this farm and its heritage. The three-ply verse structure, inherited from Tomlinson’s close reading of William Carlos Williams, serves to slow the movement to a measured fullness, a stateliness, endorsed by the alliteration in those last two lines. The reflective measure is then taken up with talk:

There we paused in talk the labyrinth of lofts above us and the stair beneath, bound for a labyrinth of cellars

It is almost as if the poet and the farmer’s wife stand conversing at the centre of a web of meanings: above, the labyrinth of lofts suggests a network which finds its echo in the labyrinth of cellars. The apples, the scent of which opened the poem, find a counterpart in the cellar, traditional home of cider and the interlacing of meaning is enriched with ‘bound’. In this world the darkness ‘leaned and loomed’ and the light ‘crossing it’ reveals through the opened door the ‘inheritances’ of a well-run farm: hens, herds and ‘your cider-orchard’. In this interweaving of natural environment with human domestic value we can hear the cadences of Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’. Where the seventeenth century poet’s view of the Sidney country estate presents us with ‘Each banke doth yield thee conyes’ and ponds ‘that pay thee tribute fish’ at Foston’s Ash we have:

the gabled bulk still riding there as though it could command the crops upwards out of willing land

A different voice from the seventeenth century can be heard in ‘The Picture of J.T. in a Prospect of Stone’ bringing into the 1960s Andrew Marvell’s metaphysical enchantment of the young Theophilia Cornwall in ‘The Picture of little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers’. Whereas in Marvell’s poem the girl is seen as the ‘Darling of the Gods’ giving wild flowers their names as she plays in the green grass, in Tomlinson’s poem his daughter is framed in a mouth of stone dividing ‘graves’ and ‘green’, death and new life. The stone gateway seems in a sense unchanging resisting:

the slow corrosives and the flight of time

However, the stone also hints at an active process, taking the ‘play’ and ‘fluency/from light’. Movement is caught in a painterly stillness and anticipates the later poem from 1980s, ‘The Flood’.

Written in July 1979 this poem gives an account of the floodwater’s invasion of the poet’s cottage in Gloucestershire. For the poet who had written about the stone walls at Chew Magna, and the ‘kindred flame’ that gathered ‘within the stone’ at Holwell Farm this night time’s invasion of the excess water pouring from the ‘Cisterns of stone’ above their valley after heavy rain was a daunting experience. The flood had ‘no end to its sources and resources’ but instead had the power:

To grow and to go wherever it would Taking one with it.

The liquid element filled in spaces as opposed to delineating them and Tomlinson vainly attempts to erect structures that will channel the water back to its origin:

I dragged

Sacks, full of a mush of soil Dug in the rain, and bagged each threshold.

Spade in hand, why should I not make Channels to guide the water back

Into the river, before my barricade Proved how weak it was?

But the flood is more than water and it ‘first took away/My trust in stone’. The welling up from the springs of the imagination is not to be balked by sacks which have themselves been filled with soil dug in the rain. The effect of this flood will be the ‘swealing away/Past shape and self’. When confronted with a challenge to the solidity of those meticulous details upon which the ordered mind has relied for so long then the words of others may be something to act as support and the poet attempts to put a stair:

Between the world of books and water.

That which had been so trustworthy in ‘At Holwell Farm’ was located in a quality of air (a phrase taken from one of Keats’s letters from 1819) and light reflected on walls ‘shielded in stone’. It was to be found in a domestication, neighbourhood, kindred and dignity within the framework of which humans live: I say That night diminished my trust in stone –

As porous as a sponge, where once I’d seen The image of a constancy, a ground for the play

And fluency of light. That night diminished Yet did not quite betray my trust.

For the walls held.

The encounters that go to make up Tomlinson’s ‘space made articulate’ allow us to come to some understanding of ourselves by our recognition of differences. We perceive by discrimination, becoming aware both of the difference between things themselves and the relationship between them and the observer. The French poet Francis Ponge sought for ‘la qualité differentielle’ and his concern was for appearances: the eye is attracted by contrasts, edges, contours and meeting places where one thing ends and another begins. Rather than write about the immensity of oceans Ponge preferred in 1934 ‘Bords de Mer’ (‘The Seashore’):

Right up to its very brim the sea is a simple idea repeating itself over and over again. But even Nature’s simplest things do not unravel their hidden depths without putting on a range of expressions, airs and graces in which depths present themselves as shallows. This is why, bitterly opposed to overwhelming immensity, we steer ourselves towards the edges of things in order to recognise them. The rational mind, immersed in immensity, bobs around gasping for air; it seeks for mental footholds on which to construct a pattern of appearances.

(Translated by Ian Brinton in Ponge, Oystercatcher Books 2015)

It is entirely appropriate that David Morley should have chosen the title Swimming Chenango Lake for this book and the poem of that name, written in September 1967, stands as ‘Prologue’ to a volume which will at last place Charles Tomlinson’s name at the forefront of the poetry of the twentieth century. Based upon personal reminiscence of swimming in the New York State lake the poet explores the engagement ‘As he scissors the waterscape apart/And sways it to tatters’. As he relinquishes himself to the cold instant he immediately encounters a new world:

Its coldness Holding him to itself, he grants the grasp, For to swim is also to take hold On water’s meaning, to move in its embrace And to be, between grasp and grasping, free.

The swimmer reaches into a space ‘The body is heir to’ and ‘The image he has torn/Flows-to behind him, healing itself’. The reality of space being made articulate is there and Constable’s ‘inquiry into the laws of nature’ reveals for Tomlinson ‘a geometry of water’:

It is a geometry and not A fantasia of distorting forms, but each Liquid variation answerable to the theme It makes away from, plays before: It is a consistency, the grain of the pulsating flow.