David Gascoyne's "Miserere"
Does anyone here know the British poet David Gascoyne? Gascoyne was a surrealist when he first published in the 1930s (and was a friend of the French surrealists), though he later moved on to a more representational style. His Short History of Surrealism (1935) was widely admired and remained in print for years, and his poetry was often anthologized a few decades or so ago—maybe it still is. (I wouldn't be surprised if he's in the Norton anthology of modern poetry, although I haven't checked.)
I've recently read and reread Gascoyne's multi-section poem "Miserere" (from Psalm 51), which I find very powerful. Gascoyne wrote in this apocalyptic vein in a few of his poems, I think convincingly. The poem was printed in New British Poets (New Directions, 1949), edited by Kenneth Rexroth. I like the ambition and scope and the authenticity of the voice of this poem, and wonder what others make of it. Or I'm happy if others simply read it and get something out of it as I have. MISERERE Le désespoir a des ailes L'amour a pour aile nacré Le désespoir Les sociétés peuvent changer. —Pierre Jean Jouve Tenebrae "It is finished." The last nail Has consummated the inhuman pattern, and the veil Is torn. God's wounds are numbered. All is now withdrawn: void yawns The rock-hewn tomb. There is no more Regeneration in the stricken sun, The hope of faith no more, No height no depth no sign And no more history. This may it be: and worse. And may we know Thy perfect darkness. And may we into Hell descend with Thee. Pietà Stark in the pasture on the skull-shaped hill, In swollen aura of disaster shrunken and Unsheltered by the ruin of the sky, Intensely concentrated in themselves the banded Saints abandoned kneel. And under the unburdened tree Great in their midst, the rigid folds Of a blue cloak upholding as a text Her grief-scrawled face for the ensuing world to read, The Mother, whose dead Son's dear head Weighs like a precious blood-incrusted stone On her unfathomable breast: Holds Him God has forsaken, Word made flesh Made ransom, to the slow smoulder of her heart Till the catharsis of the race shall be complete. De Profundis Out of these depths: Where footsteps wander in the marsh of death and an Intense infernal glare is on our faces facing down: Out of these depths, what shamefaced cry Half choked in the dry throat, as though a stone Were our confounded tongue, can ever rise: Because the mind has been struck blind And may no more conceive Thy Throne . . . Because the depths Are clear with only death's Marsh-light, because the rock of grief Is clearly too extreme for us to breach: Deepen our depths, And aid our unbelief. Kyrie Is man's destructive lust insatiable? There is Grief in the blow that shatters the innocent face. Pain blots out clearer sense. And pleasure suffers The trial thrust of death in even the bride's embrace. The black catastrophe that can lay waste our worlds May be unconsciously desired. Fear masks our face; And tears as warm and cruelly wrung as blood Are tumbling even in the mouth of our grimace. How can our hope ring true? Fatality of guilt And complicated anguish confounds rime and place; While from the tottering ancestral house an angry voice Resounds in prophecy. Grant us extraordinary grace, O spirit hidden in the dark in us and deep, And bring to light the dream out of our sleep. Lachrymae Slow are the years of light: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxand more immense Than the imagination. And the years return Until the Unity is filled. And heavy are The lengths of Time with the slow weight of tears. Since Thou didst weep, on a remote hill-side Beneath the olive-trees, fires of unnumbered stars Have burnt the years away, until we see them now: Since Thou didst weep, as many tears Have flowed like hourglass sand. Thy tears were all. And when our secret face Is blind because of the mysterious Surging of tears wrung by our most profound Presentiment of evil in man's fate, our cruellest wounds Become Thy stigmata. They are Thy tears which fall. Ex Nihilo Here am I now cast down Beneath the black glare of a netherworld's Dead suns, dust in my mouth, among Dun tiers no tears refresh: am cast Down by a lofty hand, Hand that I love! Lord Light, How dark is thy arm's will and ironlike Thy ruler's finger that has sent me here! Far from Thy face I nothing understand, But kiss the Hand that has consigned Me to these latter years where I must learn The revelation of despair, and find Among the debris of all certainties The hardest stone on which to found Altar and shelter for Eternity. Sanctus Incomprehensible— O Master—fate and mystery And message and long promised Revelation! Murmur of the leaves Of life's prolific tree in the dark haze Of midsummer: and inspiration of the blood In the ecstatic secret bed: and bare Inscription on a prison wall, "For thou shalt persevere In thine identity...": a momentary glimpsed Escape into the golden dance of dust Beyond the window. These are all. Uncomprehending. But to understand Is to endure, withstand the withering blight Of winter night's long desperation, war, Confusion, till at the dense core Of this existence all the spirit's force Becomes acceptance of blind eyes To see no more. Then they may see at last; And all they see their vision sanctifies. Ecce Homo Whose is this horrifying face, This putrid flesh, discoloured, flayed, Fed on by flies, scorched by the sun? Whose are these hollow red-filmed eyes And thorn-spiked head and spear-stuck side? Behold the Man: He is Man's Son. Forget the legend, tear the decent veil That cowardice or interest devised To make their mortal enemy a friend, To hide the bitter truth all His wounds tell, Lest the great scandal be no more disguised: He is in agony till the world's end, And we must never sleep during that time! He is suspended on the cross-tree now And we are onlookers at the crime, Callous contemporaries of the slow Torture of God. Here is the hill Made ghastly by His spattered blood. Whereon He hangs and suffers still: See, the centurions wear riding-boots, Black shirts and badges and peaked caps, Greet one another with raised-arm salutes; They have cold eyes, unsmiling lips; Yet these His brothers know not what they do. And on his either side hang dead A labourer and a factory hand, Or one is maybe a lynched Jew And one a Negro or a Red, Coolie or Ethiopian, Irishman, Spaniard or German democrat. Behind His lolling head the sky Glares like a fiery cataract Red with the murders of two thousand years Committed in His name and by Crusaders, Christian warriors Defending faith and property. Amid the plain beneath His transfixed hands, Exuding darkness as indelible As guilty stains, fanned by funereal And lurid airs, besieged by drifting sands And clefted landslides our about-to-be Bombed and abandoned cities stand. He who wept for Jerusalem Now sees His prophecy extend Across the greatest cities of the world, A guilty panic reason cannot stem Rising to raze them all as He foretold; And He must watch this drama to the end. Though often named, He is unknown To the dark kingdoms at His feet Where everything disparages His words, And each man bears the common guilt alone And goes blindfolded to his fate, And fear and greed are sovereign lords. The turning point of history Must come. Yet the complacent and the proud And who exploit and kill, may be denied Christ of Revolution and of Poetry The resurrection and the life Wrought by your spirit's blood. Involved in their own sophistry The black priest and the upright man Faced by subversive truth shall be struck dumb, Christ of Revolution and of Poetry, While the rejected and condemned become Agents of the divine. 'Not from a monstrance silver- wrought But from the tree of human pain Redeem our sterile misery, Christ of Revolution and of Poetry, That man's long journey through the night May not have been in vain. |
I've printed this out to read while working in the Holiday Retail Silk Mines today, Andrew. I've always been curious about his work, but never read any of it. Thanks.
Nemo |
Neither have I, and I'm very glad to be introduced, Andrew. I had to stop half way through reading this to thank you, because I've read lines already that have made my throat lumpen. I'll be studying this for some time, I know it.
Cally |
"Grant us extraordinary grace"
Hi Andrew,
I first read David Gascoyne in the influential 1996 Picador anthology Conductors of Chaos edited by Iain Sinclair.”The work I value is that which seems most remote, alienated, fractured. I don’t claim to “understand” it but I like having it around.” Sinclair. In this anthology Sinclair “Invited a number of poets to nominate significant figures from previous generations; thus demonstrating that a Ouija board wasn’t required to establish contact with an intelligent and provocative body of poetry.” Gascoyne was invited and accepted an invitation from Jeremy Reed. Jeremy Reed wrote, in his introduction: “Gascoyne personifies the youthful genius who risks everything and burns out early. His incandescent, powerful, visionary poetry, which looked back to the tradition of Holderlin, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautremont, and forward to the violently juxtaposed images of the French surrealists, was largely written in his twenties.” You can’t help feeling that Reed does Gascoyne a disservice, implying again and again in this short introduction that it was “the poetry that Gascoyne wrote in the 1930’s” that was valuable. “He is a marvellous antidote to the pedestrianism of so much post-Larkin writing.” The selection of Gascoyne’s work focuses on the Surrealist-influenced early work: the wonderful “And the Seventh Dream Is the Dream of Isis” and “SalvadorDali” (who Gascoyne knew.) “The face of the precipice is black with lovers;/The sun above them is a bag of nails...” I think that this focus on Gascoyne as an important conduit of European modernism and Surrealist influence has buried his interesting, and brave post-war development as a poet with strong personal, political and spiritual themes. “In 1937 he first made contact with the poet-philosopher Benjamin Fondane and discovered Pierre Jean Jouve. It was a significant turning point. He entered into analysis for several months with Jouve’s psychiatrist wife, Blanche Reverchon. Gascoyne’s Hölderlin’s Madness (1938), with four original poems interpolated in the "free adaptations" of the German poet, was his response to Jouve’s Poèmes de la folie de Hölderlin. In Gascoyne’s third collection, Poems 1937-42 (1943, with eight striking reproductions in colour by Graham Sutherland), he found his mature voice and emerged as a religious poet”. Times Obituary 2001. “Cyril Connolly claimed that the poems "take us in their chill, calm, sensitive language as near the edge of the precipice as a human being is able to go and still turn back"” Times Obituary 2001. A work like “Miserere” echoes back to a poet like Clare and forward to Geoffrey Hill and R.S.Thomas.In Ecce Homo he provides the unknown Christ to go with Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. Gascoyne struggled with depression into the post-war years. After his father’s death he endured periods in hospital. I wonder whether the treatments included ECT, common at the time, which may have further compounded his problems with writers block. It was in Whitecroft Hospital on the Isle of Wight that Gascoyne met his wife, Judy Lewis, in a remarkable coincidence. Judy explained: “ One of my favourite poems was called September Sun. I read it one afternoon and one of the patients came up to me afterwards and said 'I wrote that', I put my hand on his shoulder and said 'Of course you did, dear'. Then of course when I got to know him I realised he had.” Wikipedia. September Sun: 1947. Magnificent strong sun! in these last days So prodigally generous of pristine light That’s wasted only by men’s sight who will not see And by self-darkened spirits from whose night Can rise no longer orison or praise: Let us consume in fire unfed like yours And may the quickened gold within me come To mintage in due season, and not be Transmuted to no better end than dumb And self-sufficient usury. These days and years May bring the sudden call to harvesting, When if the fields Man labours only yield Glitter and husks, then with an angrier sun may He Who first with His gold seed the sightless field Of Chaos planted, all our trash to cinders bring. His marriage in 1975 to Judy Lewis brought about a renaissance: he began writing poetry again and new editions of his earlier work brought him back to public attention. Before he died, he was appointed Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French government. “ His anguish at the fate of the world's "Bombed and abandoned cities" ('Ecce Homo') remained undimmed. In his late poem, 'Prelude to a New Fin-de-Siècle', this takes the form of a litany of the century's wars. In the face of atrocity Gascoyne wonders aloud what poetry can do: "- If this is a poem, where are the images?/- What images suffice?". Gascoyne's imagination was always stalked by despair but his strength in not yielding to it gives his poems their iron-like durability. He believed in "The faithful fire of vision" ('The Sacred Hearth') even though it abandoned him for long periods of his life.” Poetry Archive. http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetrya....do?poetId=173 I have a copy of his 1965 Collected Poems OUP , edited and introduced by Robin Skelton. Thanks to this thread I am now reading it beyond the early, astonishing, surrealist poems. Having read more about Gascoyne I am struck by the fascinating story of his life, his early fame, his embrace of European modernism and his “excommunication” by Andre Breton as his poetry changed and developed. A good biography is needed. Steve. |
Wow, Steve - that's great. I think I'm in love. With his language. The iron in it. What a discovery this day has brought!
Still taking in Miserere, and now I'm dying in "an angrier sun"... I've just enquired of our bookshelves, and Gascoyne isn't in the house, so I'll have to find a Collected. |
I have here a 1994 Selected Works of his that has a very interesting introductory notes section where he briefly unpacks some of work and reasoning. (Published by Enitharmon Press)
Here is my favorite piece of his (thus far) : Epilogue The severed artery The sand-obliterated face Amazed eyes high above catastrophe Distributed -- Is this the man's remains Who walked the lap of lands, and sang? Explosions of every dimension Directions run away Towards the sun The bitter sunset, or Who knows, where all things rise and fall, Revolve, and meet themselves again? This is the man of matted hair And music, whom a wanderer Had scented a long way off, by reason of The salt blood in his heart The black sun in his blood The gestures of his skeleton, simplicity Of white bones worn away Like rock by milk of love. Dissolve and meet themselves again All things; the sandy artery The severed head Limbs strewn across the rocks Like broken boats: So shall their widespread body rise And march, and marching sing. The end faintly recalls a crazy corpse poem by some scribbler I read somewhere recently. |
Fabulous stuff, Steve and Andrew, and I’m glad you’re interested Nemo and Cally! I agree with that statement in Steve’s post, that it’s a mistake to write off Gascoyne’s post-surrealist work, which is the work that made him famous. All his work was for salvaging the imagination in a world that doesn’t want it. This is from his Short Survey of Surrealism:
Quote:
Gascoyne was a visionary in a time that generally doesn’t believe in visionaries. But he was low key not doctrinaire or bent on proselytizing his views. These are quotes from a review I wrote of his Selected Prose: Quote:
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Thanks for sharing this, Andrew. I see a biography by Robert Fraser is forthcoming from OUP:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Night-Though...2556482&sr=1-1 |
Thought-fox
Great news, thanks Susan ! I'm really keen to read this now. Fraser describes himself as "an academic fox" and looks like a lively writer: http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/english/rf-work.shtml
Steve |
Yes, that's excellent news for bringing him more to people's attention again. I'm not generally a big reader of biographies but I might make an exception in this case.
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