Sandstone Press

I leave this at your ear

Posted by RLD on 11th October 2009

The year shuts down earlier here in the Highlands than it does further south. Yesterday I took my walk and noted that many of the trees are on the turn. What was green has gone gold and scatterings of leaves lie around their roots. Morning and evening light strikes at a lower angle to pick out landscape details, a quality it held in the spring but lost in the high days of summer. Up on the high summits this lasts for longer through the day and is one of the glories of moving around in these parts.

Ross-shire had gone all autumnal and the first of the geese have arrived on the Cromarty Firth. They are in small groups still, but soon skeins numbering thousands will sweep over Dingwall on their feeding routes between the Firth and the Wyvis foothills. They will fly low over Sandstone Towers and their cries will wake me. I will go to the window although it is dark, and look up to watch them pass against the stars because I am as much a slave to that half instinct, half response as they are themselves.

The seasonal change has this year passed me by. On my way back from the Edinburgh International Book Festival I felt a pain inside that was quite acute. A few nights later it very much worsened. I was noting how it felt like someone was not only holding a hot stone against the inside of my back but pressing it against the wall of my torso, when I was bitten by a huge mosquito on the outside. Or so it felt.

The doctor diagnosed shingles, prescribed some virus murdering drug and predicted a hard time. She was not wrong. Pain and, even more disturbingly, a lowering of the spirit, indeed the will to go on, followed and lasted for weeks. A second doctor told me how the pain can be so bad as to warrant a nerve numbing drug with severe side effects and that the lowering of morale can reach the depths of clinical depression. My own prescription was work and single malt whisky.

I got off light in spite of this, but mental stamina was lowered by a huge proportion and my daily walk became impossible. Once or twice I got to the corner and came back only to fall asleep with the day effectively ended. At time of writing I have managed five successive daily walks but it comes and goes, as I was warned. Two days ago, a good day, I climbed a hill above the town to look down on MacDonald’s Tower and along the Firth to Invergordon and the Soutars and watch those few geese rising from the estuary. When I got home I looked out the Selected Poems of W. S. Graham.

Sydney’s poetry has become as much a part of my life as Norman McCaig’s or Auden’s, or even that of Iain Crichton Smith. Then again, I could go through a long list of poets whose work has contributed to making me what I am, or at least the best of me. Once, in a long conversation with Iain in Dingwall, he spoke to me of compassion as a necessary quality in the poet, by which he meant also ‘the writer’ I am sure.

It was my own thinking from that point that led me to value compassion more highly than love; love which allows little room for choice and, too often, prompts self-damage, even self-destruction, in its cause. Compassion allows detachment and consideration. It allows you, me, us, to do our best and if necessary let go. There should be a beatitude for compassion. Religion should elevate it above the tyrant love. There should be no guilt associated with the failure to love since not loving is not really a failure. Because love goes its own way it does not allow for choice. Compassion does, and so should have governments quaking in their boots.

Sydney Graham was a slave to poetry. It captured him early and did not let go from childhood until he died at home in Madron, Cornwall in 1986. His other love was his wife, Nessie Dunsmuir. They met when they were at Newbattle Abbey College together, lived together for a while and broke up. He had another deep relationship in his life, and a child, but it did not last and it is apparent from the letters and poems that Nessie was the love of his life. Given his lifestyle my guess is that he could not have survived without her.

Poetry took Sydney’s life to itself. He embraced poverty as Nessie, in embracing Sydney, also had to do. He was deeply uncomfortable with the language politics of poetry in Scotland at that time and for that reason, but perhaps also answering the call that the South has had for many Scots, had to get out. As a Greenock lad he may also have found it difficult to fit in with an essentially Edinburgh crowd, but Synthetic Scots (MacDiarmid’s term) was most certainly not for him. Nor was the resentful nationalism it had been placed in service of, much as dialect in Scotland has now been placed in service of a resentful class consciousness.

He moved to London and then Cornwall where Nessie eventually joined him among a post-War gathering of artists that included Bryan Winter, Sven Berlin and Roger Hilton. Booze was always big with Sydney, and with most of them, but it was cranked up to a new level when the already heavily drinking painter Peter Lanyon and his wife, the musician Ruth Lanyon, arrived.

Sometime in this period he wrote one of English’s great love lyrics for Nessie. It could have been voiced for any working, drinking man who valued what he came home to more than, for most of us, words could tell and is titled I Leave This At Your Ear.

Composed in iambic (pentameter) triplets it rhymes on a and c and opens and closes with the same line. The poet has returned ‘with slaked steps from stone to stone’, presumably from the pub, in hope of finding her ‘listening for the door’. Instead she has gone to bed, perhaps sickened by the repetition of this experience, perhaps confident and comfortable in the sureness of the relationship. He closes thus:-

I stand in the ticking room. My dear, I take
A moth kiss from your breath. The shore gulls cry.
I leave this at your ear for when you wake.

As a formerly working poet I note with admiration the caesura in the central unrhymed line into which the sounds of the outer world, the natural world, rush and from which they depart.

Sydney’s acceptance as a major poet came with his fourth book, The Nightfishing (1955). Incidentally, he winkingly punned with the title of his second, 2ND Poems (1945). Did you get To Nessie Dunsmuir? In his writing life he moved through a poetry of metaphor and symbolism into a more elegiac poetry and from there into an abstraction which loses my interest with the final volume, Implements in their Places (1977). The Nightfishing was a brilliantly self aware title for a poet who did much of his work by lamplight and who did not know of what he wrote until it was written.

The title poem of The Nightfishing runs to nineteen pages in Faber’s Selected, in seven differently formed sections. The long (very long) third section treats of the journey itself and I have returned to it again and again over the years without, I am sure, fully plumbing its depths. For all that my favourite poems are those of love and elegy. Sydney was inhabited by love and a slave to that same half instinct, half response that brings the greylag geese from Greenland to waken me with their cries.

I am cautious with the word ‘suffer’ when it comes to artists. So much is self-inflicted, the self-abuses, these days all too often the drugs, the emotional morass are entered apparently freely.  After years of drink induced ill health that compromised many friendships as well as destroying his marriage Peter Lanyon was killed in, of all things, a gliding accident.

In response Sydney wrote what I think is his most beautiful poem, The Thermal Stair. Presenting it as a single unit he nonetheless constructs it in three parts. Seven stanzas are written in the same form as soon would be I Leave This At Your Ear, the following page and a half section is reduced to (more demanding for the poet) hexameters, and it closes with eleven lines of acceptance, resignation and, yes, again, love.

Let me quote two stanzas from the sweeping first section. The previous line ends with the word ‘some’:-

Time three foxglove summers ago, you came.
The days are shortening over Little Park Owles.
The poet or painter steers his life to maim

Himself somehow for the job. His job is love
Imagined into words or paint to make
An object that will stand and will not move.

‘An object that will stand and will not move’ more closely resembles love than compassion. Caution though, love does not allow for freedom and it may be that, against any will of mine and perhaps Iain’s, the essential poetic element, compassion, lives within love and cannot live without it.

Sydney moved away from symbolism and metaphor but words are themselves symbols and language necessarily means something more than vibrations in the air or marks on paper or, for that matter, on a screen. Messages of feeling from a position of isolation would be both Sydney’s final subject and his final means. Death, I think, was moving in. In a later poem he would write ‘Breathing water is easy/If you put your mind to it.’

Sydney, if you are at my shoulder, I am not ready to follow. I think you should not have gone where you went so early but that’s love for you.

The extract above jumps out of The Thermal Stair, at least for me, and out of that extract two lines insistently demand to be viewed the way the jewel is viewed in the ring, or Rembrandt’s self-portrait is in The Night Watch, as the real subject. The gap between verses demands a pause but I will close them here.

The poet or painter steers his life to maim himself somehow for the job. His job is love

*** **

Two days after posting I Leave This At Your Ear I came across these lines by Alasdair Gray.

Faust is bewildered. Life and art is born
From those whose inner selves are most torn
Apart by pains that will not let them rest
Before they reach the highest and the best.

*** **

W. S. Graham’s Poetry Archive entry can be read here http://bit.ly/wG1CH
Here is my Faber Selected on Amazon http://bit.ly/2MUa1h
Here is Faber’s New Collected http://bit.ly/1A4RQW
The Nightfisherman is the Selected Letters by Michael and Margaret Snow. Besides being an astounding demonstration of poetic language sustained over a lifetime it gives a unique picture of working artists in Britain in the 1950s and 60s especially. It is also a beautiful production, a real enhancement to the Sandstone Library. The cover image is by Alfred Wallis, or alfred wallis as he signed them. http://bit.ly/kpzST

For good measure here is Rodger Glass’s biography of Alasdair Gray, which pictures a similar scene in a slightly different place at a slightly different time. It is also a very entertaining read. http://bit.ly/2WNBQJ