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All is now withdrawn: void yawns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:

I copied this from Kathleen Raine’s essay on him (which is how I first found his work), “David Gascoyne and the Prophetic Role,” in her book of essays Defending Ancient Springs. She was a main champion of Gascoyne’s work, and a close friend.

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:

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.

Only through time is time conquered
 

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.

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

electricity
 

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

love is luminous
 

What a killer last line.

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...

grey and defeated?
 

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. “

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.

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.

we know each other's names
 

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.

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.

That line should begin or end or somewhere be in a poem, Andrew.

Now I have to find some Jouve! It's the contiguity of the surreal and the mystical that's fascinating me here. I long for my copy to arrive so I can explore.

Timeline
 

I found this short essay helpful in piecing together the timeline of David Gascoyne's creative life, as well as throwing light on his connections with poets like Ginsberg and Iain Sinclair.

http://critique-magazine.com/article/gascoyne.html

Joy! My selected just arrived!

"my lonely bones will drown"
 

These are the beautiful closing bars of Night Thoughts:

[First voice]

In the gardens of the Night, breathed on by newly freshened air, wrapped in the sheltering arms of shadows cast by slowly growing things, the consolation of profound Serenity is to be found. Here, in forgetting by degrees the crude immediacies of day, talk’s trivialities, the well-worn props and tokens of habitual routine, it is possible to recall to mind and to draw near again to something vastly fundamental, self-effacingly withdrawn, that is lying there and is there all the time. It is an ever-new discovery to find it still awaiting our return, unsmiling, taciturn, yet limitlessly tolerant and all-comprehending, ready to take us back into obscurity, to share with us its poverty, to close and soothe our eyes.

[Second Voice]

The Earth, Nature, Unconsciousness and Death. We are drawn down and back towards them in the Night. But there is Vigil where the walker in the garden stands and wonders in the dark.

[First Voice]

Now the man who spoke aloud just now out of his dark into the darkness: (to no one? To someone? The mystery is not mine to solve that each must face alone) the man who has said: ’I could not cry if I were in despair’, turns presently towards the lighted windows he had left behind him earlier, and slowly makes his way back through the scented plants and dangling leaves of the dumbly sleeping garden to his wife and home, his books and bed.

[Second voice]

And as he goes, begins to realize that something has changed in him. The open air, the space about him had first stirred his heart, he lifted up his heart and it had opened, and the wind that blows when it will and comes from nowhere that we know and passes on as unaccountably, had inspired it with its own more vital, lighter, unrestricted and revivifying breath. Silence had delivered its essential message to him, and he had responded. Now he feels he no longer has the need to reassure himself with words.

[Third Voice]

He goes back to his house, he returns to his wife and children. The children have long been asleep upstairs. His wife is sitting where he left her, under the reading lamp. She closes her book as he enters, looks up at her husband and smiles slowly at him, sleepily. He kisses her.

[First Voice]

They are together. The primary division of the human family at night is that which sets those who are alone apart from those who are together. And yet all are alone, as the man realised earlier in the garden; and all those who are isolated in their solitude are really alone only because they do not realize the presence of other human beings like themselves in the world.

[Second Voice]

Greetings to the solitary. Friends, fellow beings, you are not strangers to us. We are closer to one another than we realise. Let us remember one another at night, even though we do not know each other’s names.