Discovering F.T. Prince

One of the great pleasures in reading is of course discovery, though one often needs a little help. Late in my school life I became absorbed in the soliloquies of Shakespeare and their Victorian incarnation (or misrepresentation) in the dramatic monologues of Browning, Tennyson and then in Eliot. In the decades since one poet has led to me another. To Anthony Rudolf’s inspiring Silent Conversations: A Reader’s Life (2013) I am indebted for an introduction to F. T. Prince’s poetry.

Frank Templeton Prince (1912-2003) was a South African born poet with a Jewish and Presbyterian background, who studied at Oxford and Princeton, and converted to Catholicism in 1937. Prince served in British army intelligence during World War II and later taught at Southampton University (1946-1974). A Milton and Shakespeare scholar, he was influenced by the work of fellow countryman Roy Campbell, as well as by Yeats, Pound, Eliot and Rimbaud. He first came to prominence through Poems (1938) published by Eliot at Faber, although subsequent collections appeared with smaller presses, including Rudolf’s own Menard Press which co-published a Collected Poems in 1979. Prince is currently best served by Carcanet Press with Collected Poems 1935-1992 (and two late pamphlets from Perdika Press).

He is a fine poet: exacting, intriguing and technically highly gifted – and consequently popular with the cognoscenti. He shared his friend Geoffrey Hill’s attitude to accessibility in poetry, a feeling that poets should not talk down to their readers whatever the difficulty of the work. Difficulty in itself is no great recommendation as far as I am concerned. However, Prince has such a command of style, character and atmospheric detail that his poetry deserves be introduced to a wider audience.

He showed great interest in the dramatic monologue, where he is at his

finest producing what Peter Robinson terms ‘the psychologized portrait poem’. His subjects are generally trapped in some way by circumstances or time. We catch them mulling over their accomplishments and failures, their frustrated desires and their fates. Except that these are historical figures coerced by the corruptions of power, they are Prince and ourselves in our existential moments, confronted by what he described as ‘those two conundrums, faith / and human passion’ ( Walks in Rome). Significantly his shorter poems offer untroubled landscapes that yet reveal man’s inner turmoil and love lyrics working through metaphysical conceits, which perhaps suggest something about the hidden life.

One central characteristic of Prince’s poetry is its forefronting of style to an unusual degree. Imagery, prosody, syntax, lineation are together responsible for an overall richness of effect. Another recurrent feature is his use of the past. The idea of a courtly world offered itself as an early preoccupation, allowing Prince to explore subjects and registers sympathetic to his romantic imagination and to his love of semantic possibilities. He was able at the same time to imply contemporary parallels to the dangers of power. The old world offered rich possibilities for allegory.

The Collected Poems opens with just such a poem – and my own favourite – ‘An Epistle to a Patron’, from Poems (1938). It begins exquisitely, as a request for preferment might:

My lord, hearing lately of your opulence in promises and your house Busy with parasites, of your hands full of favours, your statues Admirable as music, and no fear of your arms not prospering, I have Considered how to serve you and breed from my talents These few secrets which I shall make plain To your intelligent glory.

In these long lines the opulence referred to is mirrored in the fulsome language the architect uses in order to convey his admiration (and his talents). He is bent on obtaining commissions, having ‘plotted’ to design ‘a hundred and fifteen buildings’. Enormous wealth has brought ‘a war-like

elegance’ to his patron’s world, which the man offers to enlarge in terms of ‘defence and offence’. There is a sensuous splendour in the architect’s vision. He writes, for instance, of window mouldings ‘as round as a girl’s chin’, of halls ‘that cannot be entered without a sensation as of myrrh’ and of his magical craft: ‘None better knowing how to gain from the slow pains of a marble / Bruised, breathing strange climates’. All is to be beautified by light (‘That to me is breath, food and drink’) the effects of which he will manipulate. The whole will be an inventory of delights he reassures his patron.

There remains a dark contrast in the epistle with the man’s own circumstances. Words like ‘agony’, ‘starved’ and ‘failure’ he associates with his present position and a household comprised of ‘a pregnant wife, one female and one boy child and an elder bastard’. The architect yearns for the freedom of being bound to his patron and it is his urgency that brings the poem to life. His is an ego that admits to having no patience but hope, wherein he can almost taste his patron’s indulgence.

‘Words from Edmund Burke’ is a second character portrait of a voice crying out to be used, another ‘artisan of fire’. Here the eighteenth century AngloIrish statesman both bridles in frustration and delights in moral rectitude as he commits himself to ‘the odious office of a priest / Among a diseased and desperate people’. It is creative labour, hard but fulfilling, ‘To give the truth my voice’.

Prince’s diction is again extravagant, the syntax strained from the first to capture the passion of the orator’s task and to comment thematically on the creative process as a labour, literary and philosophical:

To the vigilance of my exertions a lax pause, Offering in the vehicle and wavering colour of evening My weakness to my judgement

Again the imagery is vividly achieved, as we see in his description of London:

like a fuscous rose, her door-ways Warm with the flux of quality, her shops bundles of muslin sown with rubies, Her frigates tilted above the mud at low tide, and the town Like a heap of fresh wet stars

The other long monologue of the 1938 collection is ‘Chaka’, a poem in the voice of the Zulu warrior-king, a self-styled ‘bird of prey’. In four sections of the poem Chaka indulges in contemplation of his power, a pleasure flecked with doubt. At first he is the watcher contemplating the judgement of the world of night on his ambition:

I have wandered out in the thin tang of white stars While my friends were asleep below the hills. Depending only on rumours of my starry meals, It was not for them to know how far my gaze was set.

He dwells on tribal customs, how they ‘reverenced the dead’ and then, conquering all, added greatly to that number. His awesome power he has expressed through regiments of impis, who ‘weep with hurry at my commands’. Chaka turns his thoughts to tribal festivals and how ‘I have brought fear to this people, / I have rendered them as rich and smooth as oxblood’. In part four he deliberates on penitence, but concludes that all are guilty, ‘And there is only this, that we are worthy.’ ‘Chaka’ ends with the voices of his people, ‘the People of Heaven’, celebrating ‘the gifts inflicted upon us who trembled / At their brilliance.’ The chilling paradox lies in the poem’s last line where Chaka’s people speak of ‘our noons made loud by abolished clans’.

There are a number of shorter, lyric poems in Poems (1938) which deal with love’s complications. ‘Into the Wood’ is a Yeatsian love poem in which the speaker wishes to remove even himself in order to admire his lover freed ‘of all but being’. ‘On a Cold Night’ captures our interest from the outset with its curious syntax and question:

What mind lying open to my mind, At a brazier crouching do I watch A winter’s night?

The shrouded answer is that of a departed lover’s, we assume, though possibly departed in two senses of the word. Similarly enigmatic are ‘The Intention’, with its play on betrayal and reflection and ‘The Token’, another love poem out of sorts. The idea of betrayal – this time on the part of the speaker – returns in ‘The Letter’, while ‘False Bay’ begins ‘She I love leaves me, and I leave my friends / In the dusky capital’. There is a restlessness, a resigned sense of loss in these poems, captured in such titles as ‘For the Deserted’ and ‘For Fugitives’, which boasts extravagant imagery:

For you who loved me too As the mistress of transparent towns that showed Like sea-beasts the embodied ruins As their bones

Such poems, temporally unstable and ingenious in expression, really do not necessitate ‘decoding’ to enjoy. Their meanings are matched by the pleasures of their craft. There are occasional poems, however, which readily offer up their meanings. ‘To a Man on his Horse’ is one in which Prince figuratively evokes the dance of an Arab stallion for an envious observer, and ‘The Babiaantje’, in which wild hyacinth cannot summon the youth who has lost his peace of mind. (It was of ‘The Babiaantje’ that John Ashbery wrote, ‘The charm… has nothing to do with its “meaning”, which is obvious.’)

F. T. Prince’s later poetry is of equal interest. Lyrics aside there are absorbing monologues of characters ‘Rooted in limitation, strength and weakness / Of fiery piercing mind that wears the waning body’. Among the finest of these are ‘Apollo and the Sybil’ and ‘The Old Age of Michelangelo’ from Soldiers Bathing (1954), the collection famous for its much anthologised title poem (‘Their flesh worn by the trade of war, revives / And my mind

towards the meaning of it strives.’). Then there are ‘Strafford’ and ‘Gregory Nazianzen’ from The Doors of Stone (1963).

The oracle in ‘Apollo and the Sybil’ has been reduced to deathless age for denying the god. She is found ruminating on the sensual joys of a living world she is denied (‘White sunlight and the dripping oars!’). She remains caught between the effects of her refusal and her inability to love:

And sitting upon my rock alone, unrecognisable to myself, Moving motionless to death, I see That one must suffer what one sees, Living what it is not and it is. And as I live my centuries, Rejoicing in my choice that was Either of happiness or this

Michelangelo is another lost soul, worn out by the reality of self-sacrifice to his art. He sees his work as a perpetually losing battle to wrest beauty from nature (‘I finish nothing I begin. / And the dream sleeps in the stone, to be unveiled / Or half-unveiled’). He also broods on the impossibility of realising his other dream, of personal happiness. Returning to Rome for the last time, lost in images of wings and Heaven, he longs to look upon his beloved (‘My dream grows drunk within me’) but is ultimately aware that he is only an old man in need of indulgence.

Prince’s other great portrait is of ‘Strafford’ (Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, Lord Deputy of Ireland) who died in defence of the obdurate though vacillating King Charles 1. The rough syntax and imagery of the poem’s opening suggests his authoritarian presence:

Dark steel, the muffled flash On iron sleeve and cuff; black storm of armour, Half-moons and wedges, scaly wings and hinges, Ovals and quadrilaterals and cylinders Moulded in nightshade metal.

So he stands

In the poem, ‘the black-browed Yorkshire magnate’ is portrayed in his last days, an ambitious man congenitally unsatisfied, a man with an insatiable desire for power, driven ‘Not for the greatness only, but the difficulty’ in attaining it. Prince debates a late ‘sweetness’ that came over the condemned man when betrayed by his monarch. He dies with dignity ‘forgiving all the world / From my dislodging soul.’

Two other monologues remind us of the Catholic Prince’s interest in the agonies of faith: ‘Gregory Nazianzen’ and ‘Campanella’. In the first the theologian is praying for God’s love (‘Whose dancing deluges the world with light’) to resolve theological in-fighting among his countrymen. The appeal of the poem, as often in Prince, lies in its descriptive power:

Drenched in the silver of old olive-trees The little bay lies empty, in a trance. I watch the far sea bathed in pale blue light, And on the rough sea-wall the tone of time

‘Campanella’ concerns the Italian Dominican philosopher, a utopian conspirator, who after so many years of imprisonment urges in his unhappiness the intercession of God (‘Transfer my sorrow to eternal gain’) for he feels that ultimately he will fail in his fortitude ‘And that the time will come when I repent’.

Later in his career Prince added to the monologues and the shorter lyrics sequences on the Hasidic Jews and the poems of Po Chü-i, verse autobiography, and literary ruminations. These last have a biographical fascination. Afterword on Rupert Brooke (1976) weighs the life versus the legend:

And if we are honest, And if we have not misunderstood already, And if we want to understand anything now,

We must take all there is, and see and weigh it all If possible, like those who loved and outlived him And hearing he was dead would feel unbearably The thought ‘It had to be, just that’

In this poem, written in the prosier form of syllabics in order to distance emotion, Prince captures the social loves, frustrated creativity and honesty of Brooke, with imaginative attention to the period (‘We cannot disinter the girls of nineteen-eight / Or nine, ten and eleven, from the faded layers / Of verse, dead leaf on leaf’).

‘A Byron–Shelley Conversation’ appears in Later On (1983), the spirits of the two – rebel and revolutionary – discuss unlicensed erotic joy: passion as innocence. A Last Attachment (1979) concerns Laurence Sterne’s amour. The author languishes in love as his young sweetheart, Eliza Draper, ‘a last best pearl’, sails to India to return to an unhappy marriage:

What we dread for ourselves may be more real to us. But we see he had to bid, buy with his heart’s blood A hope that looks either a little mad or quite mad; And then to burn out that ‘weak taper of life’ With added flame, and through a body like old paper That tears easily –to look, love and work on.

Is there a downside to F. T. Prince’s poetry? T. S. Eliot twice published Prince in ‘The Criterion’ before Faber produced the woodenly named Poems in 1938. He rejected later work as being too painterly, as ‘straining after something too grandiose’, or lacking ‘that feeling of the relation of the ideas to the private passion’. Was he correct? Is there finally something overweening in the ambition of Prince’s work? The poet who was able to ‘catch at visions, worlds in brief’ could be extravagant, perhaps too eclectic, too bookish at times, but he is splendid nevertheless. He offered another facet of modernism while adding to the resources of the dramatic monologue. And the proof is that Prince’s poetry is still with us – albeit half in shadow – a discovery in waiting.