A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов

2b.3 The Elegy

       Stephen Regan

The Elegy

      In the summer of 1969, The Rolling Stones held a memorial tribute in Hyde Park, London, for their erstwhile guitarist, Brian Jones, who had died in July that year. Addressing an audience of over half a million people, Mick Jagger expressed the fundamental difficulty that faces any aspiring elegist: “I don't know how to do this thing, but I'm going to try” (Observer, 6 July 1969). He then recited some of the most memorable and stirring lines from Shelley's “Adonais”: “Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep– / He hath awaken'd from the dream of life” (Shelley 2003, 541; XXXIX, l. 1). Hundreds of white butterflies were released into the air. The occasion is worth noting because it demonstrates a familiar shift in elegiac art from the confession of inadequacy to the invocation of time‐honored rituals and conventions. What occurred in Hyde Park in 1969 is all the more pertinent, given that the decade has often been characterized by its denial or suppression of grief. The 1960s are frequently associated with hedonism, with sexual and political emancipation, and with release from theological and metaphysical shackles. Looking back over half a century, we can see that beneath the apparent existential freedoms of our time there has been a deeply felt public need for sustaining rituals of mourning and a persistent readiness to draw upon the consoling powers of art and song in the face of loss.

In recent times, and especially since 1960, the tendency of the elegy to question its own verbal adequacy and its own ethical, compensatory value has intensified. Even so, the urge to confront the mystery of death and to make the dead live again, if only in the precincts of poetry, has not diminished. American poets such as Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Sylvia Plath are renowned for the violence and aggression with which they have written about the dead, disrupting traditional codes of mourning in the process. By contrast, a good deal of British and Irish poetry of the postwar period seems less given to violation and more evidently marked by irony and circumspection in its elegiac procedures. This is a poetry that reveals a “principled distrust of the imagination” and a sensitive awareness of “the aggrandizements, covert indulgences, and specious claims which it may incite” (Ricks 1984, 285). Christopher Ricks is writing here about the work of Geoffrey Hill, but his comments have a particular relevance to the poetry of mourning, as they help to explain why Hill's “September Song” has come to be seen as a paradigmatic postwar elegy.

      The title “September Song” seems innocuous enough, until we glance at the unnerving dedication: “born 19.6.32 – deported 24.9.42.” Even before the stark revelation of death, the poem's ironic drift carries us from deportation to genocide: “As estimated, you died” (l. 4). That simple half line conveys the chilling precision of Nazi planning in the concentration camps, as well as the impossible task of numbering the dead, but it also points to the poem's own confounded attempts to gauge what might be an appropriate response. More candidly and explicitly than in earlier elegies, the speaker of the poem reproaches himself for what must look like a self‐interested appropriation of another's suffering:

      (I have made

      an elegy for myself it

      is true)

      (ll. 8–10)

      Hill's admission acknowledges the extent to which an elegy is always to some extent a reflection on the writer's own mortality (and here the victim's date of birth is close enough to the writer's own for this to be an acute concern), but the uncertain line‐break holds out the possibility that the elegy is nevertheless true. The poem resolutely resists the conventional elegiac ideal of seasonal return and renewal. The implied harvest in “September fattens on vines” (l. 11) only conjures up, by way of contrast, grotesque images of starvation, just as the smoke of “harmless fires” (l. 13) inevitably recalls more perilous flames. The ironic promise of peace and plenty turns the poem toward its final act of self‐chastisement. There is no resurrection or renewal here, no likelihood of imaginative indulgence: “This is plenty. This is more than enough” (Hill 2006, 30, l. 14). Intensely preoccupied with making sense of history and tradition, Hill would come to regard the elegiac tenor in his work as unavoidable, while also seeking to resist it. The title of his first major book of poems, For the Unfallen (1959), gestures toward the living, as well as the dead, subtly implicating modern warfare in the distant battles of history. His “Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings” provides a potent model for a contemporary elegiac art that mourns the losses of its own century within a long historical perspective. As Henry Hart notes, “Elegies were a natural choice for a poet whose meditations struggled to make the past present” (Hart 1986, 16), but he shows convincingly how much of Hill's work in the genre is iconoclastic and ironic.

A contrast might be drawn here with Basil Bunting, whose work after 1960 is similarly rooted in history, but far less vexed by its own elegiac tendencies. Briggflatts (1966), inspired by Bunting's visits to the Quaker hamlet of that name, is strongly autobiographical, but also deeply elegiac, a work of mourning for a lost love, a lost way of life, and an entire region. The mood of elegy derives in part from the death of the poet's son in 1952, and from the sorrowful notes of “A Song for Rustam,” written in 1964 at a time when Bunting was preparing himself for the composition of his major work. In that mournful song, Bunting complies with convention by confessing the inadequacy of his artistic resources: “Words slung to the gale / stammer and fail” (Bunting 2000, 197, ll. 19–20). In Briggflatts, he would reassert the struggle with words, but retain the brisk couplet: “Pens are too light. / Take a chisel to write” (I. 116–117). He would also retain the lilting [l] and the long vowel [a:] at the end of a verse line or section: “furrows fill with may / paving the slowworm's way” (I. 12–13). The slowworm amid the blossom is an emblem of encroaching death, and like the mason's mallet timed “to a lark's twitter” (I. 15) it serves as a powerful elegiac motif in the sonata‐like structure of the poem (Bunting 2000, 61–63). As Bunting anticipated, Briggflatts would become “a great hymn to death,” embracing a culture shaped by St. Cuthbert's love of creation, as much as by its violent Viking inheritance (Burton 2013, 358). The poem's coda asserts its own artistic originality, while keeping open an imaginative connection with the elysian fields of pastoral tradition: “A strong song tows / us […] / to fields we do not know.” (Bunting 2000, 81, ll. 1–4)

      Ten years after writing Briggflatts, Bunting composed “At Briggflatts Meetinghouse,” an elegiac meditation on final things, but also a celebratory ode in praise of the transient beauties of nature: “Look how clouds dance / under the wind's wing, and leaves / delight in transience” (Bunting 2000, 145, ll. 10–12). Bunting's own death, another decade on, prompted an elegiac tribute from Tom Pickard, who had been so instrumental in encouraging the writing of Briggflatts. “Spring Tide” observes the seasonal movements of traditional elegiac poetry, but it pushes back against the usual symbolic associations of spring. Noting, in its dedication, the birth of Basil Bunting in spring 1900 and his death in spring 1985, the poem records the political struggle of the preceding year and the breaking of the Miners' Strike by the Thatcher government. Where it finds some brief transcendence is in the delicate image of kites and the child repeating the word as keats, a poetic felicity that justifies the Keatsian beauty of “rainbow‐winged mosquitoes / stringed against the cockney clouds.” The poem is insistent, though, on its northern heritage and its unillusioned view of a world of struggle. It returns us to the North Sea and a dark horizon, and it closes with a subdued and somber waking: “You, the dark spring tide / and the spring / were gone” (Pickard 2014, 103–104; 3. 18–20).

Tony Harrison came into Bunting's orbit in Newcastle in the late 1960s, but it was the poems recalling his Leeds childhood and the death of his parents that established his reputation in the 1970s