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  #11  
Unread 11-29-2011, 11:22 AM
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Steve Bucknell Steve Bucknell is offline
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This is a reading by Elizabeth Jennings of Miserere. She calls David Gascoyne "the only living English poet, apart from Eliot, in the true mystical tradition. If not directly influenced by it, his work undoubtedly leads back to the visionary poetry of Vaughan, Herbert and Traherne." (1961.)

“in the magnificent sequence of poems called Miserere the poet, in lines of extreme lucidity, examines the depths of man’s guilt and the terror of life without God. The traditional “dark night of the soul” is transferred to Christ himself—Christ who is both the victim and the conquerer:

God's wounds are numbered.
All is now withdrawn: void yawns
The rock-hewn tomb. There is no more
Regeneration in the stricken sun....

This may it be: and worse.
And may we know Thy perfect darkness.
And may we into Hell descend with Thee.


The poet sees himself as part of Christ, prepared to endure intolerable suffering and even to touch the edge of despair, but never finally to become hopeless.

In the second poem of the sequence, Pieta, the tough, lithe quality of David Gascoyne’s language and imagery begins to display itself. The tenebral cry of anguish turns to a vision of the Crucifixtion:

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.

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.


The last line of this poem shows the skill (except that “skill” is too superficial a word) with which Gascoyne has involved the whole of mankind in the act of redemption and, in an entirely concrete way, has tethered past and future to the present moment.

The third poem is a prayer for faith spoken from the depths:

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.

The poet is not afraid to go even further into darkness and we are reminded of Vaughan’s lines:

There is in God, some say,
A deep and dazzling darkness.

Kyrie explores “the black catastrophe that can lay waste our world” and pleads:

Grant us extraordinary grace.

What is notable here is the complete lack of self-pity. In Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Samson attained, after suffering and deprivation, a state of pure affirmation so that Manoa could say of him simply and honestly,

Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt...

In Lachrymae David Gascoyne affirms through tears; tears are a purgation and also a gift because they are man’s tears mingled with Christ’s:

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.

The next poem, Ex Nihilo is not a repetition of De Profundis but a development from it. It speaks of “the revelation of despair” and the stubborn acceptance of temporary defeat:

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.

The word “altar” is the key to the next poem. It is called Sanctus and though it never refers directly to the Mass or the Consecration, it is a vivid evocation of what the consecratiuon means and whence it moves. Let me put it another way: the Sanctus section of the Mass is, in this poem, like a pebble thrown in a pool. The pool causes wider and wider ripples and it is these ripples that Gascoyne is concerned with:

.......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.

This poem is the heart of the sequence. It shows more completely than any of the other poems that it is the poet’s vision itself which sanctifies and radiates. The vision is the end and not the means and once it has been achieved, however fleetingly, it illuminates all things outside it while itself remaining locked in its own lyrical form and music.. This is the hard-won triumph of all great visionary poetry.

Ecce Homo is a kind of coda to the whole sequence. It brings the passion and crucifixion down to human and contemporary terms; it refuses to ignore disgust and horror:

Whose is this horrifying face,
This putrid flesh, discoloured, flayed,
Fed on by flies, scorched by the sun?
.........................

Behold the Man: He is Man's Son.

Forget the legend, tear the decent veil
That cowardice or interest devised
..........................
He is in agony till the world's end.

The two thieves, crucified on either side of Christ, are depicted as ourselves or our contemporaries, just as Stanley Spencer has shown them in his Crucifixion, except that in Gascoyne’s picture there is nothing gentle or gracious. The “decent veil” has been torn away:

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....

And Christ, who “wept for Jerusalem,”

Now sees his prophecy extended
Across the greatest cities of the world.

At the end of the poem he is invoked as “Christ of Revolution and of Poetry” who has redeemed “our sterile misery” in order

That man’s long journey through the night
May not have been in vain.

Terrifying as the subject of this sequence is, Gascoyne has handled it with a dexterity that never deteriorates into mere smoothness, and with an unremitting candour and clarity. His subject is confusion and despair but his verse is easy and confident. The words embody the vision and the fact of being able to speak is itself a kind of small redemption.

Elizabeth Jennings from "The Restoration of Symbols" .

Every Changing Shape . Mystical Experience and the Making of Poems. Deutsch 1961, Carcanet 1996.

Last edited by Steve Bucknell; 11-29-2011 at 11:24 AM.
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  #12  
Unread 11-29-2011, 12:08 PM
Cally Conan-Davies Cally Conan-Davies is offline
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Darling Steve - thank you so much for this! I've just finished reading it with my morning coffee, and as well as loving the words, I am stunned that Gascoyne has slipped by me all these years, not only for his mysticism, but for his language which has all the qualities I'm constantly listening for - tough, bare, incandescent. It's so strange, but I feel a strong love for his voice!

Ordered the Selected yesterday. Hoping it will arrive by week's end.

Thanks for feeding us this stuff, Steve! It's going straight through to the keeper.

Cally
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  #13  
Unread 11-29-2011, 02:04 PM
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Steve Bucknell Steve Bucknell is offline
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Hope this one is in your Selected, Cally


Eros Absconditus

'Wo aber sind die Freunde? Bellarmin
Mit dem Gefahrten...'
Holderlin.


Not in my lifetime, the love I envisage:
Not in this century, it may be. Nevertheless inevitable.
Having experienced a foretaste of its burning
And of its consolation, although locked in my aloneness
Still, although I know it cannot come to be
Except in reciprocity, I know
That true love is gratuitous, and will race through
The veins of the reborn world's generations, free
and sweet, like a new kind of electricity.

The love of heroes and of men like gods
Has been for long a strange thing on the earth
And monstrous to the mediocre. They
In whom such love is luminous can but transcend
The squalid inhibitions of those only half alive.
In blind content they breed who never loved a friend.

Davd Gascoyne . Poems 1945-50

Last edited by Steve Bucknell; 11-29-2011 at 02:35 PM.
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  #14  
Unread 11-29-2011, 02:08 PM
Cally Conan-Davies Cally Conan-Davies is offline
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What a killer last line.
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  #15  
Unread 11-29-2011, 04:09 PM
Gregory Dowling Gregory Dowling is offline
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Thanks, Andrew, for starting this thread. I knew very little about Gascoyne and am fascinated. And thank you Steve, as well, for all the information. I'm very intrigued to find that Elizabeth Jennings wrote about him. She's another poet who could do with a thread one day...
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  #16  
Unread 11-29-2011, 05:30 PM
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Steve Bucknell Steve Bucknell is offline
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This is Martin Seymour-Smith’s brief assessment of Gascoyne from his monumental Guide to Modern World Literature. Papermac.1986:

“David Gascoyne (1916) was more directly influenced by surrealism than either Barker or Thomas or, indeed, any other English poet. Gascoyne’s first book of poetry Roman Balcony appeared when he was sixteen; his novel Opening Day followed in 1933 when he was seventeen. A Short History of Surrealism (19360 was published when he was twenty. When he published Poems 1937-42 he had reached his maturity, although he was not yet thirty. Influenced by Jouve and by the early manifestation of the philosophy of existentialism Gascoyne is a most unusual phenomenon in English poetry; yet his “Europeanness” does not give his poetry an un-English flavour. On the contrary he remains the most English of poets, a genuine visionary writing in the tradition of Blake and Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s “The Woodspurge”. His early surrealism, where successful, achieves innocence. Unfortunately, however, the later stage in Gascoyne’s development is wanting: his later poetry has the strength of sincerity, but is grey, defeated and lachrymose:

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
Might not have been in vain.

This is too deeply felt and dignified to be platitudinous; but it is disappointing in the light of the earliest poetry, and lacks real energy. “

Last edited by Steve Bucknell; 11-29-2011 at 05:35 PM.
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  #17  
Unread 11-29-2011, 11:27 PM
Lance Levens Lance Levens is offline
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What a revelation, Andrew! Thanks so much for taking the time. I've sometimes wondered who would write or had already written a more prophetic rejoinder to Auden's at times too cerebral Horae Canonicae.
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  #18  
Unread 11-30-2011, 12:01 AM
Andrew Frisardi Andrew Frisardi is offline
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Steve, that post of Jennings's assessment of Miserere is fabulous. Thanks for it. As Gregory says, she herself is a poet well worth talking about here some day.

I think that Seymour-Smith's judgment is way off the mark, and probably indicates a personal discomfort with the overtly religious symbolism. Jennings is the more intuitive reader of the piece: "Terrifying as the subject of this sequence is, Gascoyne has handled it with a dexterity that never deteriorates into mere smoothness, and with an unremitting candour and clarity. His subject is confusion and despair but his verse is easy and confident. The words embody the vision and the fact of being able to speak is itself a kind of small redemption."

So well put.

When I have some time I'll add some more of Kathleen Raine's comments on this poem. She thinks, and I agree, that Gascoyne wrote his most lasting poetry after his surrealist period. I also want to put some of his late-ish poem Night Thoughts up here. Robin Skelton considers it Gascoyne's best. The title "Night Thoughts" is from Edward Young's poem, which Blake illustrated and Gascoyne considered an ancestor of surrealism.
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Unread 11-30-2011, 04:13 AM
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Night Thoughts looks very exciting. His last major work, it reads to me like an attempt to integrate the energy of his early surrealism with the spiritual depth and formality of his later verse. It was meant as a piece for radio, part in verse, part in prose. As Jennings writes on Night Thoughts: “For the truth is that his lyric gift is an entirely personal not a dramatic one. His subjects are always dramatic but his treatment is meditative; he moves by monologue not by dialogue, he is more interested in the fears and aspirations which men share than in those emotions where they show themselves to be most diverse.”

I can’t resist quoting this section from early on in Night Thoughts:

Can you believe,
O foreigner I’m thinking of, woman unknown to me,
Lying awake somewhere in Europe, can you now
Believe you have friends lying alone,
In darkness, overseas, who can imagine how you feel
And wish, and wish—ah, what? What can be done
For anyone, what can we do alone, alas, how can
The lonely people without power, who hardly know
How best to help neighbours they know, help those
Who surely would be neighbours like themselves, if they but knew
How to break through the silence and the noise and the great night
Of all that is unknown to us, that weighs us down in between
One lonely human being and another? Who can hear
My thoughts, or know how my heart grieves, or feel
That I just like themselves long to believe
That lonely human beings love each other?”

Very powerful, expressing deep personal and social concerns. It’s a piece that reads well in the context of the global 99% movement that is rising up around us. Gascoyne would have loved the expressions of solidarity that movement has engendered.

This is Skelton’s summing-up:

"Night Thoughts
is David Gascoyne’s most ambitious work to date, and his greatest single achievement. In it he moves easily from Dantesque nightmare to social satire, from free-flowing prose to classically neat verse, and throughout the whole drama retains absolute control over his various themes and symbols. It is a study of our urban civilisation and also of the universal condition of man. It sums up, in its exploration of solitude and despair, many of his earlier perceptions, and places him alongside Yeats, Eliot, Auden and MacNeice as one of the select company of British poets who have attempted, and achieved, the construction of a major new form.” Introduction to Collected Poems 1963.

Steve.

Last edited by Steve Bucknell; 11-30-2011 at 05:40 AM.
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  #20  
Unread 11-30-2011, 06:45 AM
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Andrew Mandelbaum Andrew Mandelbaum is offline
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Here is a snip from those introductory notes written by Gascoyne regarding the influence of Jouve. Forgive any typos I miss.


In autumn of 1937, my discovery of a copy of the 1930 edition of Pierre Jean Jouve's Poemes de la Folie de Hölderlin in a book dealer's box on the Paris quays marked a turning point in my approach to poetry. I had not so much become disillusioned with Surrealism as begun to wish to explore other territories than the sub-- or unconscious, the oneiric and the aleatory. Jouve's Hölderlin translations led not only to my essay, poems, and translations published by Dent the following year as Hölderlin's Madness, but to an exciting first reading of Jouve's own poetry and prose, and before long to an acquaintance with the poet and his psychiatrist wife which was to last nearly thirty years. The use of lines quoted from Jouve as epigraphs in certain sections of Poems 1937-1942 is insufficient indication of the enormous influence that his poetry , outlook, and conversation were to have on me for many years to come.

He goes on to underline some specific places the influence shows in his work. But I am late to go dig holes in the cold wet Georgia clay. Yeesh.
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