Six years after Shakespeare’s death,  John Heminge and Henry Condell – two of the actors from his company, The King’s Men – gathered together all of his dramatic works and published them in an impressive 908 page hardback book. Bound in calfskin and measuring fourteen inches by nine inches by three inches, it was their one and only foray into publishing and was either a runaway success or a financially ruinous catastrophe, depending on which version you prefer – but whatever the truth, the original 750 copies rapidly became some of the most coveted books in the English language.

Eric Rasmussen is a recognized Shakespearean scholar and – among his many other credentials – is co-editor of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s superb Complete Works of William Shakespeare. (If you’re a Shakespeare wallah and you don’t already have the RSC Shakespeare – what are you waiting for?) He also heads a team of First Folio hunters, real-life Indiana Joneses dedicated to tracking down and cataloguing the 232 extant copies as well as trying to piece together the stories of those that are (apparently) no longer with us.

Owners of First Folios tend to be skittish characters, unwilling to let the outside world near their precious charges, but Rasmussen and his team aren’t engaged in a form of glorified train-spotting, ticking the editions off as they see them, they are on a mission to catalogue them minutely, noting stains, ink blots, replaced pages, marginalia, bullet holes and blood. Each edition is unique. No matter how well cared for, it bears the marks of its journey through nearly four centuries, and those marks mean that, even if thieves rip the covers off (oh, the pain …) the books remain easily identifiable. Rasmussen and his co-searchers are therefore offering a form of insurance.

Of course, they’re also enjoying themselves immensely and that, above all other qualities, is what makes this little book so thoroughly enjoyable. Although the author is an academic heavyweight, he wears his learning very lightly indeed – and deploys his transparent enthusiasm for the subject like a floodlight, illuminating the dark little corners of human obsession with humour and compassion, albeit leavened with a healthy dose of scepticism.

The disparate stories of the First Folios include if not actual murders, then at least mysterious and/or sudden deaths (lots of them – First Folios should come with health warnings), deception, theft and clouds and clouds of obscuring dust. There are lost copies that may or may not have been used as wrapping paper, stolen copies that were found, (ie: the Bodleian’s), and stolen copies that may yet be found, (Hereford Cathedral’s), which vanished sometime in the 17th Century. Along the way we meet a raft of extraordinary characters, like Count Gondomar, Spanish Ambassador to the Court of King James, who was one of the first owners of a First Folio and the ‘Most Hated Man in England’, or the unfortunate Caleb Fiske Harris and his wife, who inexplicably drowned in a boating lake in full public view without anyone apparently making any attempt to save them.

Nor is Rasmussen slow in telling stories at his own expense. His tale of the portrait of a bald man in Elizabethan costume that he bought at Sotheby’s for £1,000, convinced that it was a hitherto unknown portrait of Our Will, is priceless. The expensive restoration work he paid himself for revealed that the man was neither bald nor Shakespeare and his ‘handling’ of the media interest is an uncomfortable but hilarious reminder of how easy it is to end up looking like a total prat when someone shoves a microphone up your nose.

The Shakespeare Thefts is not a exhaustive, academic description of the details and histories of each and every known  First Folio copy – if you want that, you need The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue. What it is is a fascinating, educational and immensely entertaining guided tour through the most colourful history of the most stolen book in the world.

Palgrave MacMillan. 2011. ISBN 978-0-230-10941-4. 212pp.

ITV Studios 2013 aired in the U.S. in late spring on PBS ‘Masterpiece’ Season 2 begins in early 2014

Stonemouth

Stonemouth is similar to The Crow Road and The Steep Approach To Garbadale in that it deals with issues of family, loyalty, love and death in a Scottish context. In that sense, he sets his novels in the Scotland he knows and loves best, depicting its beauty, but also its darker side, including the impact of post-industrialism and the powerful cliques who have moved in to take advantage of it. Although this sounds depressing, it’s part of his charm as an author that he doesn’t write fiction to please the Scottish tourism industry.

His protagonist, Stewart Gilmour returns to his hometown after a five year absence in London, to attend the funeral of Joe Murston. Joe is the elderly patriarch of the Murstons, a powerful family, who derive much of their considerable wealth from crime, including drug-dealing. Fans of David Simon’s HBO drama, The Wire should not be too hasty to draw comparisons. These kingpins have the sort of power and influence the Barksdales can only dream about. They have connections within the police and judiciary and unlike the hapless D’Angelo Barksdale, will never have to worry about the knock on the door. Part of their power derives from the fact that they are seen to maintain a balance in the neighbourhood so that the law-abiding majority can go about their business in safety. Without that balance, goes the argument, much more feral elements would start to move in, the law-abiding would suffer, business and tourism would be ruined and chaos would ensue. One of the purposes of the narrative is to challenge this assumption and to lay bare the moral and personal  corrosion it causes in those who believe in it.

One of his devices for doing this is the figure of Stewart Gilmour. Stewart is the first person narrator, and his childhood memories are bound up Stonemouth, so he shouldn’t be regarded as completely reliable, but he is basically harmless, painfully clear-sighted and honest about his own failings and determined to stand up for himself and those he loves, although he knows what the consequences might be. Although he is essentially unthreatening, Stewart has earned the odium of the Murstons and he knows from their long association that they have the ferocious arrogance and taste for violence to do something about it. They know themselves to be fireproof and he is a very small fish. How and why he got himself into this situation is at the centre of the narrative and the way it is peeled back shows Banks’ strengths as a writer.

Banks’ use of flashbacks builds up the history between the characters and their families, while layering on character development and ratcheting up the tension, so that the reader’s interest in Stewart and those around him is aroused and maintained. Banks doesn’t write particularly short novels – in that sense, he is more Jane Austen than Muriel Spark – but his ability to do several things at once makes his writing brisk and economical. However, this doesn’t exclude emotion; like his earlier work, this novel is imbued with humour, sadness and warmth. Stewart is the son of very ordinary, loving people and it shows, from his love for his parents, to his adoration for the Murstons’ lovely ice-princess, Ellie. It shows too, in his response to a small girl at a wedding reception.

“Aw,” I said to Hannah. She turned away a little, but then looked back. I got a wee smile and my heart melted.’ (p205)

Stewart’s strength, his gentleness and capacity for love is also one of his greatest weaknesses. It clouds his judgment, stops him from realising how very far from general his values are and makes him vulnerable to people whose thirst for vengeance knows no limits. Through him we see the consequences of allowing untrammelled power its way, something that could easily be applied at the international level as well as on Stonemouth‘s small canvas. The outcome rarely leaves anyone untouched, something that is brought to bear on the most powerful, as well as those they persecute. Iain Banks’ wider focus and the concern he had for those suffering injustice was never far from the surface and we see it here, beautifully expressed in this apparently domestic novel.

Hatchett Digital, Little Brown. London 2012. 357pp.
also Abacus. 2013. ISBN-13: 978-0349000206. 448pp.

Mrs Weber’s Diary was also all about a sector of society I didn’t know: the anxious English middle-classes, with second homes and posh jobs. My English cousins weren’t anything like these caricatures, so I learned about this kind of  English from Posy Simmonds, before I marched down to London to work there. I loved, and read her, on and off, for twenty years, but it is only now, reading the immense compendium Mrs Weber’s Omnibus, that I realise how brilliantly she was recording social history.

It was also a bit of a shock to realise that my family had rather more in common with the Webers that I had thought. My father was a lecturer like George Weber, but not in earnest Liberal Studies. Like Wendy Weber, my mother was a stay at home mum (for a bit), and worked for the NHS, but not as a nurse. Like Belinda Weber, I was an obnoxious knowitall teenager, going out with boys my parents didn’t approve of and glowering a lot, though I was no Tory. Somehow, though I didn’t know it at the time, Mrs Weber’s Diary WAS my life.

Posy Simmonds is rightly famed for her gentle skewering of the middle classes of her day (who I think we’d now call the Elite, the Established Middle Class, and the Technical Middle Class). She clearly knew a lot about the struggles of polytechnic lecturers, of folk with small businesses, of students and teenagers, of mothers ground down by paternalistic attitudes and mothers-in-law from hell, of working women and divorcées struggling against social expectations, and of children with absolutely nothing (so they think) in common with their parents. She is a great social commentator on the modern English (not the British). The Webers are a long, long way from the Broons. One of her alter ego characters, Jocasta Wright, sardonic art student and interested critic of her father’s domestic hypocrisies, is always ready to prick the bubble of middle-class smugness. She takes it at its polite and mealy-mouthed word, and social havoc ensues. There is a lot of cosiness in Posy Simmonds’ world, but she never lets it stay cosy. She pricked consciences because it was so funny to see the anxious, guilty English middle classes writhe uncomfortably.

One of her favourite prickles was second homes. The smug upper-middle-class family with a second home is sure to suffer from cottage-related aggravation. It’s a metaphor for the colonial implantation of the middle-class into new and undiscovered areas. The Cornish village of Tresoddit stands for all remote communities replete with second homes who only come to life for three days at Christmas and in the summer holidays. Stanhope Wright uses his second home for his secret affairs that his wife really does not want to have to hear about. Visiting friends’ second home is a profoundly uncomfortable experience, when you suffer cramped conditions, eat awful food that you have to be polite about and are woken up too early by ill-conditioned children and bloody owls hooting all night.

Posy Simmonds had a particular genius for pinning down the moment by how her characters dressed. Her eye for contemporary fashions, especially of those she was taking down a few pegs, was unerring. I shrieked at the 1980s pages, with her women in angular asymmetrical black (art director types), or slimy advertising men wearing cinched-in baggy peg-tops and Miami Vice shades, and myopic, anxious businesswomen with huge shoulder pads. Contrariwise, she made sure that George and Wendy Weber wore the same style of dress for thirty years (turtlenecks, waistcoats and hippy dirndls). This was obviously a message that those who don’t bother with fashion are morally superior. Big-toothed Sloanes in high-necked piggy sweaters over turned-up collar shirts: how I loathed their predictable uniform of pearls and velvet hairbands, and how I fell about laughing at the merciless caricature of their speech, their intonation, their arrogance. Seedy, sexist businessmen: how much I enjoyed it when, in ‘The World Turned Upside Down’, secretary Penny imagines a world where women can leer at the nervous office clerk, make remarks about his lumpen body not so sotto voce, and patronise, patronise, patronise.

Posy got it right, every time. The change I was most struck by in Mrs Weber’s Omnibus was, not the absence of internet and mobile phones (can you imagine what wifi would have done for the amours of Stanhope Wright?), nor the unchanging cuts in higher education (she got it right in the last strip, when George’s poly has finally been turned into a university, to make more money), but the smoking. It is seriously astonishing to see how many characters smoked thirty years ago, where they smoked, and how often. That’s something contemporary fiction can’t show us so viscerally. Comic strip art really does record the changes in social history.

Posy Simmonds, Mrs Weber’s Omnibus (Jonathan Cape, 2012), 978-0224096836, £35.00.

Kate won her copy of Mrs Weber’s Omnibus in a competition run by her local independent bookshop: thank you, Sterling Books!

As Midsummer is fast approaching, the foxes are reclining in sun chairs, sipping on iced tea, eating refreshing watermelon – and reading good books, of course. What better way to spend these lazy-hazy-crazy days of summer?*

Monday: Kate admires the glories of 1980s British social history as recorded by Posy Simmonds in Mrs Weber’s Omnibus.

Tuesday: Sharon reviews a novel by a much-missed writer.

Wednesday: Jackie shares her thoughts about the recent TV series Mr. Selfridge airing on PBS this spring.

Thursday: Moira is unexpectedly rivetted by the story of Shakespeare’s First Folio and  the effort that’s being put into identifying every extant copy as she looks at The Shakespeare Thefts by Eric Rasmussen.

Friday: Hilary re-reads The Leopard, and finally gets it.

Saturday: Leena tries to cull her excess books, but fails miserably.

*) Well, it’s raining cats and dogs here, but I assume it’s sunny in some part of the fox world… hopefully.

(The wonderful picture above is ‘Fox in the Watermelon’ from TheMemorableImage Etsy shop. I was also quite taken with the hippo in the teacup and the panda behind the curtain. Squee!)

Looking down on empty streets, all she can see
Are the dreams all made solid
Are the dreams all made real

All of the buildings, all of those cars
Were once just a dream
In somebody’s head

She pictures the broken glass, she pictures the steam
She pictures a soul
With no leak at the seam

Let’s take the boat out
Wait until darkness
Let’s take the boat out
Wait until darkness comes

Nowhere in the corridors of pale green and grey
Nowhere in the suburbs
In the cold light of day
There in the midst of it so alive and alone
Words support like bone

Dreaming of Mercy Street
Wear your inside out
Looking for mercy
In your daddy’s arms again
Dreaming of Mercy Street
‘Swear they moved that sign
Looking for mercy
In your daddy’s arms

Pulling out the papers from drawers that slide smooth
Tugging at the darkness, word upon word
Confessing all the secret things in the warm velvet box
To the priest, he’s the doctor
He can handle the shocks
Dreaming of the tenderness, the tremble in the hips
Of kissing Mary’s lips

Dreaming of Mercy Street
Wear your inside out
Dreaming of mercy
In your daddy’s arms again
Dreaming of Mercy Street
‘Swear they moved that sign
Looking for mercy
In your daddy’s arms

Looking for mercy
Looking for mercy
Looking for mercy
Mercy, mercy

Anne, with her father is out in the boat
Riding the water
Riding the waves on the sea

Track duration: 06:48
“Mercy Street” as written by Peter Gabriel
Lyrics © EMI Music Publishing

This song was my introduction to Anne Sexton. It appeared on Peter Gabriel’s 1986 album So, which was his most commercially successful, having such huge hits as Sledgehammer and In Your Eyes(the song from John Cusack’s movie “Say Anything”). It’s an excellent example of biography in song, mixing the person and the poet.
Anne Sexton was born in 1928 to a well to do family in Boston, Massachusetts where she went to private schools and briefly became a model in her late teens. She eloped with her husband at 20 and had two daughters soon after.
Accounts vary on when she began writing poetry, but her first collection To Bedlam and Part Way Back was published in 1960. Nearly every year after that was a new book, including the four for children she wrote with lifelong friend and Poet Laureate Maxine Kumin. Her career was going wonderfully, a Pulitzer Prize, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and numerous other awards, grants and fellowships, along with teaching gigs, including one at Oberlin College, here in Ohio. Her play Mercy Street premiered Off Broadway in 1969. But increasingly, manic episodes and suicide attempts led to hospital stays which interrupted her writing and wreaked havok on her family. Alcohol worsened things. So, at the age of 46, one autumn afternoon in 1974, she committed suicide. From the song, I assumed she had drowned herself, and was surprised to learn that actually she put on her mother’s fur coat, took a glass of vodka and locked herself in her garage with the car motor running.
Why do we remember so many women writers for their suicides? Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Sexton. Sure, male writers kill themselves, but that’s not the main focus of their lives. Hemingway committed suicide, but we mostly remember his macho activities; big game hunting, running with the bulls. Why is it different with women?
I don’t really like Sexton’s poetry, that’s why I am approaching it through Peter Gabriel’s song instead. Her work is very raw, with personal symbols and full of vibrant pain. She is usually classified as a confessional poet and it’s easy to see why. She wrote about taboo subjects, which even now are sometimes startling, so I can imagine how shocking they must have been in the 60′s. As she grew older, she became more religious and that imagery became more frequent. It’s also evident that she was having a love affair with death.
The title of one her last collections was The Awful Rowing Towards God and this is what Gabriel refers to, “let’s take the boat out” is an invitation to suicide, “wait until darkness” reminds us that things can always get worse. The “corridors of pale green and grey”, “to the priest, he’s the doctor/he can handle the shocks” and “wear your inside out” are all about her stays in mental hospitals, which included electroshock therapy. The last term and the “soul/with no leak at the seam”, “papers from drawers” have double meanings, to both her medical treatments and the process of writing. Many of the phrases Gabriel uses are from Sexton’s own and he matches the tone and mystery of her work with his. If you’d like to compare, PoetryFoundation has over 30 of her poems from her various books. It’s a smattering from such a prolific writer(several more volumes were published posthumously), but it’s a good sample if you’re unfamiliar with Sexton’s work.
One of the most troubling aspects of both her poems and life was the repeated accusations of incest. Some of Sexton’s own comments cast doubt upon them. But she certainly violently abused her own daughters, especially the eldest, who wrote a memoir about growing up with such an unstable mother decades after her death. Secrets were never kept where Sexton was concerned, one of her psychiatrists published recordings of their sessions in the 1990′s in a potentially unethical move. Even for one so open about her private life, it’s questionable whether Sexton would’ve approved.
Sexton’s poetry can be overwhelming and very, very dark. The isolation and hopelessness she expressed is very vivid in her work. This review has been difficult to write because of that oppressive nature and I shied away from it. But I remind myself that as awful as it is to deal with for the limited time it takes to read and write about, it’s nothing compared to the experience of living with those feelings continually, on a daily basis, for years. Anne Sexton should be praised and remembered for taking those feelings and making art out of them. And Peter Gabriel should be commended for honoring her with such a musical tribute.

Here is Peter Gabriel singing the song in concert July 1987(when he still had hair). It blurs a lot in full screen, so it’s best seen small: In Concert 1987

There is a black and white official music video for it by Matt Mahurin, but it is so eerie and unsettling to me that I’ve only seen it once. It’s considered disturbing by souls less wimpier than I, so be forewarned. Here is the link to it: Mahurin video of “Mercy Street”

HD or Hilda Doolittle

To start: a personal admission, and dedication. This piece is for Jackie.

Every year we do a poetry week and for some reason Bookfox Jackie (known as Arty Fox in the den) encourages me to do a piece for it. This year, I was tearing my hair out I wondered what I should do.  I have a strange love-hate relationship with poetry and it’s interesting to see that this seems to be a common theme for our Poetry theme week this year with Simon’s brilliant piece on his struggles with poetry and various admissions from some of the other literature-loving foxes that poetry is often problematic for them. Perhaps Sam’s highlighted quote from Veronique Omni’s “Beside the Sea”, a rather poetic disjointed novel showing the disordered thoughts of a tragic mind, says it best. The main character says:

“I like songs. They say things I can’t seem to say. If I didn’t have these rotten teeth I’d sing a lot more, a lot more often, I’d sing my boys to sleep in the evenings, tales of sailors and magical beds, but there you are, we can’t be good at everything, we can’t know how to do everything, all of it, that’s what I tell the social worker till I’m blue in the face.”

This is what poetry can do so well. It can hit us with an image, a song, a rhythm, a feeling, a sense and – most important to me – a doubleness, an openness to several meanings at once, which allows us in. It can be closer to the visual or musical forms than the novel with its characters,  plot, and relatively straight-forward narrative sense. Poetry can be lyrical and sentimental or the opposite – spiky and unmusical, or so opaque as to leave you cold – both intriguing and maddening at the same time.

And with that little set-up, I turn to HD. And I turn to her because, again, like Blake, like Eliot – who I have covered before on Vulpes Libris – I was first introduced to her at university. Where I struggled with her. But she was the first poet who really got me interested and really thinking about the roots of language. Today, when I argue with my geeky boyfriend or my sister or anyone else about the appallingness of our spelling system and why I think we should keep it despite all the arguments against me – it’s to HD where my mind often drifts. Because she introduced me to the idea of a ghosts and histories being present in words. Indeed, how much of our poetry would we lose if we standardised our spelling system to match the US or started spelling everything phoenetically? Poetry mines words for their history and recognises their Russian doll type nature -how words can hold changing meanings in their spellings – changing languages, shadows of our history, roots of our culture. Is that (and the ability to enjoy crosswords!) enough to override all the literacy and accessibility arguments thrown at me by my partner and sibling? Well it depends on your point of view and I should point out that my own spelling is utterly appalling. But being someone who values the arts and their ability to carry hidden messages – I cannot give that up lightly, despite understanding all the opposing arguments. Poetry pampthlets are private but can be shared. The more obscure you are the more able to make points that can travel under the surface. Which is why poetry – however elite, however niche, however poverty-enducing for its creators – remains at the apex of our cultural experience and at times of oppression or totalitarianism is (alongside theatre) often the last place you can find expressed, however oliquely, dissident or rebellious thought and communication.

But, I digress.

On to HD…

HD (or to give her her rather less than glamorous real name of Hilda Doolittle) is not, in my view,  a rival to Eliot or Stevens as is claimed on the back of my edition of Trilogy – the book that contains her three poetic works “The Walls Do Not Fall”, “Tribute to the Angels” or “The Flowering of the Rod”. Where I instantly loved Eliot and turned my nose up  at and then came to admire Blake, HD is neither an instant nor a more analytic love of mine. Her poetry goes on a bit. And on. And on. The short snappy sentences too often unleavened by a musical touch. Quick sentences can be dragged down by words that would sound more appropriate in an intellectual treatise – somehow neither satisfying to the head or the heart. All that being said, she has wonderful moments, and as an Imagist poet, maybe that is most fitting.

The start of “The Wall Do Not Fall” is HD at her best:

An incident here and there,

And rails gone (for guns)

From your(and my) old town square:

Mist and mist-grey, no colour,

Still the Luxor bee, chick and hare

Pursue unalterable purpose

In green, rose-red, lapis;

They continue to prophesy

From the stone papyrus:

There, as here, ruin opens

The tomb, the temple; enter,

There as here, there are no doors:

The shrine lies open to the sky,

The rain falls, here, there

Sand drifts; eternity endures:

Then after another page of colons comes the conclusion of this first sentence:

The flesh? It was melted away,

The heart burnt out dead ember,

Tendons, muscles shattered, outer husk dismembered

Yet the frame held:

We passed the flame: we wonder

What saved us? What for?

The wonderful evocation of the ruined, bombed-out city left desolate by war, and the echoing of that war and that desolation into other times, other civilisations, other histories, is powerful. But also powerful is HD’s strong statement “the frame held”. We are still here. We don’t know why we’ve been saved or what for. But the frame held: the walls do not fall. Which, to compare to, say, Eliot’s The Waste Land - which showed a world of shattered and disintegrating civilisation after the First World War is – if not exactly cheery – more like a devastated but purposeful sigh of relief. The Walls, the frame – the roots and echoes of our civilisation – is still here.

For me, the walls that do not fall are an underlying connection, map, structure if you like connecting us to all those ancient civilisations. They remain standing no matter what the desolation is on the surface. H.D. compares bombed out London during the Blitz to the Egyptian tombs she had experience of seeing opened and excavated. The surface is wiped out and devastated – but the walls, the framework, the patterns are all still there.

This seems to relate for me to H.D.’s fascination with the roots of language. She loves to deconstruct words into other words – she plays with names of gods and twists their meanings – she echoes ideas and associations across times and places.

Unlike Eliot’s The Waste Land, whose wounded Fisher King sits on the river whilst his land falls sick around him, where “April is the cruellest month” because it is the month after the trauma where life is forced out of unconsciousness, bringing with it the cruelty of memory and desire, H.D’s vision of endurance is perhaps more traditional, and in that sense rather less arresting and striking. The Waste Land is steeped in depression, nostalgia and pessimism and was written at a time when Eliot himself had endured a terrible nervous breakdown (although he always denied that anything personal should ever be read into this great work). H.D. lost a brother, her husband had suffered badly from the effects of the first world war and she had miscarried, she always thought, through shock. For her, the losses of war were very real. Yet her poem remains grimly determined.

Both Eliot and H.D. seem obsessed with a past tradition, past cultures – but, again, where Eliot  sees the shards of civilisation lying around him and seems to retreat under a rock whilst he presents a world of culture disintegrating into soulless and sordid minglings in grotty bedsits – H.D’s poetry is a grim, almost triumphant evocation of the endurance of civilisation, of humanity, the importance of poetry and words echoing through time and through different cultures, places and periods of history.

We have been tested to the maximum. But those roots holding us to civilisation cannot be rooted out. The fire may rip over the surface, may kill, may destroy, but those walls are still there – and those walls are, in my view, words themselves.

In HD’s work there is not just acceptance (like Elliot) but there is a sense of hope – however desolate – in that image of ruins. H.D’s faith remains that civilisation endures – carried by, echoing in, contained in,  words. Or poetry itself.

the indicated flute or lyre-notes
on papyrus or parchment

are magic, indelibly stamped
on the atmosphere somewhere,

forever; remember, O Sword,
you are the younger brother, the latter-born,

your Triumph, however exultant,
must one day be over,

in the beginning
was the Word.

The location is 1930s Oxford. At the edges of the story the clouds of war are starting to gather, but they are of no immediate or direct relevance to the plot of the book – that of an unhinged mind disturbing the tranquillity of an all-female college with a hate campaign of poison pen letters, obscene graffiti and vandalism.

Women’s further education is a contentious subject in the 1930s and the Dean of  Shrewsbury College is unwilling to call in the police lest it attract unwelcome attention and publicity, so she turns instead to a former Shrewsbury graduate – a writer of detective fiction with a colourful past and an aristocratic admirer with a reputation as an amateur sleuth.

The writer is Harriet Vane, the aristocrat is Lord Peter Wimsey and the book is Dorothy L Sayers’ Gaudy Night.

Gaudy Night was Sayers’ tenth Wimsey novel and the third to feature Harriet Vane – the woman he saved from the gallows when she was falsely accused of the murder of her lover. Lord Peter’s dogged but courteous pursuit of Harriet has been a long, drawn out affair: starting in Strong Poison and continuing through Have His Carcase, the courtship reaches its climax as the pair work together to uncover the author of the letters. In fact, their mating dance – more pavane than tango – is a powerful, even erotic, sub-plot played out against the beautiful backdrop of the ancient university city.

Harriet at first attempts to solve the mystery of the poison pen alone and, using the excuse of wanting to research the life and works of Sheridan le Fanu at the Bodleian Library, moves into the college. In the peace of Oxford and away from the pressures of everyday London life, she finds something unexpected  happening:

The singing voice, stifled long ago by the pressure for existence, and throttled into dumbness by that queer, unhappy contact with physical passion, began to stammer a few uncertain notes. Great golden phrases, rising from nothing and leading to nothing, swam out of her dreaming mind …

The outcome is a poem – or more precisely the first eight lines of a sonnet:

Here, then, at home by no more storms distrest,
Folding laborious hands we sit, wings furled;
Here in close perfume lies the rose-leaf curled,
Here the sun stands and knows not east or west,
Here no tide runs; we have come, last and best,
From the wide zone through dizzying circles hurled,
To that still centre where the spinning world
Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.

Unable to take the image of Oxford being at the calm centre of a stormy and confusing world any further, she lays the poem to one side and applies herself to  narrowing down the list of poison pen suspects. As the trouble escalates however, culminating in the attempted suicide of a mentally over-wrought undergraduate, Harriet writes to Wimsey to ask for advice.

Inevitably, as Shrewsbury is an all-female college, the possibility that the crimes are being perpetrated by a sexually frustrated female don cannot be ignored, and the whole investigation causes Harriet to re-examine both her tempestuous and (by the standards of the time) deeply scandalous life and her ambivalent attitudes to love, academia and Peter Wimsey. Then, out of the blue, into this rather over-heated soup steps the man himself:

Peter Wimsey. Peter, of all people. Peter, who was supposed to be in Warsaw, planted placidly in the High as though he had grown there from the beginning. Peter, wearing cap and gown like any orthodox Master of Arts, presenting every appearance of having piously attended the University Sermon, and now talking mild academic shop with two Fellows of All Souls and the Master of Balliol.

Harriet hands Peter her extensive file of notes on the problems at the college, containing the poison pen letters, the whereabouts of everyone in the college at crucial moments and all the background information she has managed to gather. He reads it all and returns the file to her, then vanishes off to York for no immediately apparent reason. Curious to see if he’s made any notes in the dossier, she opens it up and realizes, to her slight consternation, that she accidentally included her unfinished sonnet with the papers. Not only that, but Wimsey both found it and completed it for her.

And the way in which he completed it was more revealing than anything the guarded and self-deprecatory man had ever said or done before:

If she wanted an answer to her questions about Peter, there it was, appallingly plain. He did not want to forget, or to be quiet, or to be spared things, or to stay put. All he wanted was some kind of central stability, and he was apparently ready to take anything that came along, so long as it stimulated him to keep that precarious balance. And of course, if he really felt like that, everything he had ever said or done, as far as she was concerned, was perfectly consistent … If that was his attitude it was clearly ridiculous to urge him, in kindly tones, to stand aside for fear he might get a rap over the shins.

He had tried standing aside. “I have been running away from myself for twenty years and it doesn’t work.” … Even in the five years or so that she had known him, Harriet had seen him strip off his protections layer by layer, till there was uncommonly little left but the naked truth.

Any number of other writers – indeed probably MOST other writers – would have brought about the sea change in Harriet’s attitude to Peter by means of an emotional scene, by having him do something that causes the scales to fall from her eyes so she can see him as he truly is.  Not Dorothy L Sayers. She did it with a sonnet – a beautiful and accomplished sonnet of her own composing:

Here, then, at home by no more storms distrest,
Folding laborious hands we sit, wings furled;
Here in close perfume lies the rose-leaf curled,
Here the sun stands and knows not east or west,
Here no tide runs; we have come, last and best,
From the wide zone through dizzying circles hurled,
To that still centre where the spinning world
Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.

Lay on thy whips, O Love, that me upright,
Poised on the perilous point, in no lax bed
May sleep, as tension at the verberant core
Of music sleeps; for if thou spare to smite,
Staggering, we stoop, stooping, fall dumb and dead,
And, dying so, sleep our sweet sleep no more.

Harriet’s peaceful humming top has become, for Peter, a whipping top – kept spinning and in balance only by the sometimes painful stimulus of emotion … It’s not only a  poignant and vivid image, it’s also one of the classiest plot devices in the whole of detective fiction.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons)

‘A light song of light believes nothing

It started with the death of his mother, which Kei Miller felt as both a personal sadness and a test to his beliefs about the utilitarianism of poetry. Could it – the act of writing, the act of reading – help him sing his way out of sadness? And if not, what was the point? A Light Song of Light is a bold response to that challenge, a demonstration of the healing, enabling power of words, and a delightful treat for every reader, whether you read poetry regularly or not.

Miller has a feel for the interrelationship between light and dark, their mutual dependency: the darkness that confers significance on the light, the light that creates shadows through it’s very existence. A Light Song of Light is yin and yang, day time and night time, Jamaica and the UK. It explores a range of subjects through the prism of the personal, including Jamaican history, colonialism, immigration, family, and experiences of homosexuality. At its heart lies the Singerman, a member of Jamaica’s road construction gangs in the 1930s, whose job it was to sing while others broke stones. He weaves in and out of the action, an emblematic response to Miller’s central questions: how can song be useful? Will we sing for those who cannot sing themselves? And who will sing for us when we need it most?

‘When we have lost song,’ Miller writes with conviction, ‘we have lost everything.’ Throughout the collection, form is fluid yet always free, redolent with Miller’s broad and expressive Jamaican accent. A Light Song of Light is poetry as song, poetry as aural experience, poetry that wears its heart on its sleeve and asks the same from the reader. If these are wonderful on paper, they are even more so when read aloud. They have the feeling of intimate confession, of smiling while crying, of everything that is important in life but that we relegate to the sidelines most of the time.

There is political significance to everyday lives. In ‘Unsung’ Miller sings a thank you to his father, a song for the ‘man whose life has not been the stuff of ballads / but has lived each day in incredible and untrumpeted ways.’ It is one of the standouts of the collection, a simple thank you from a son to a father and one of a handful of poems that brought a tear to my eye.

Miller’s personal circles are not limited to his family. As everyday lives are significant, so too are they personal, whether the individual in question is known or not. ‘Questions for Martin Carter’ considers the life of Guyanese poet Martin Carter who was under such surveillance that some of his work survives only  from pictures government spies took of the fence on which he wrote many of his poems. And it cannot be forgotten that the Singerman’s song, for all its utilitarianism, came ‘at the price of history…which, even now, you cannot fully consider.’

In the prose poem, ‘A Smaller Song’, Miller responds to a news article about a young man killed for cohabiting with his older brother. Its one of many poems that explore the experience of homosexuality, documenting discrimination and hate in a deeply superstitious society, but also, at other times, tenderness and love. ‘A Short History of Beds We Have Slept in Together’ carries with it an almost fairy tale vision of love built despite the odds:

‘If we are amazed at anything let it be this:
not that we have fallen from love,
but that we were always resurrected
into it, like children who climb sweetly
back to bed.’

I first read A Light Song of Light in the cloisters of Toledo Cathedral, just outside Madrid. It was a timeless blue sky sort of day, pockets of light drifting between the branches of four orange trees, the patter of tourists around me. There I sat in the shade with my back against a cold stone wall and read. It was one of those rare and wonderful occasions when the atmosphere and content of a book perfectly matches the surroundings in which it is being read. I will long remember that wonderful afternoon. But the book is worth more than that single experience. I have reread it a number of times since, sitting in the first sun of a long overdue spring, and with rain pouring down outside. Each time it moved me as it did that first time. Almost every line of the title sequence, ‘Twelve Notes for a Light Song of Light’, produces something inside me. It is almost a manifesto for what poetry can be, and I come away wishing there were a place to sign up at the end.

Similarly, in ‘A Creed’, Miller unites all those for whom the dark has become all too familiar, a lightness of shared experience takes over.

‘when you are done with the news
because it no longer beaks your heart,
and you now know sand
where there once was river in your inner parts;
when you are ready
to say – I have done terrible things,
and there is a room somewhere that holds
this evidence, a thumbprint
made in blood;

then this creed is for you.
We belong to a single country,
and this is our sad anthem.’

A Light Song of Light invites the reader to share all of these emotions, to empathise with experiences of loss, living between cultures, discrimination. In it, Kei Miller celebrates our incredible and abundant lives, facing the darkness head on yet constructing around it a light and inspiring song of light. A Light Song of Light sings a defiant, fragile song, a ‘brave and terrible song’, a song of love, and compassion, and acceptance, and gratitude, and anger because the world isn’t always as we might hope. It is everything poetry can and should be, a clear argument for poetry that communicates with the directness and universality of a song, and carries a similar emotional resonance. I love it. And if you need some persuading to give poetry a go, take Miller’s last words as a guide:

‘…turn these pages slowly
push the sun down, down, down the horizon – and a story will
come to steal your breath.’

a poet reading aloud

First, why do this? Because if you can find the poem’s structure, you’ll know more about it. You’ll know what the poet was working from when she was fitting the words in place, and you’ll be able to see the places where she changed the pattern. If a poet changes the pattern, it’s for a reason, to draw your attention to the words or meaning, so we need to work out what the pattern is.

This method of poetry dissection only works with traditional metred verse, with or without rhyme. This means pretty much all poetry written before 1930 or so, but not for poetry in Anglo-Saxon: that uses a different way of rhyming. It’s more difficult to use with modern verse that does not use metre or regular rhyme schemes.

Metre

You’re looking at the poem you want to take apart. Count the syllables in each line and write down the number at the end of the line, but not too close in. You’ll end up with a column of numbers running the length of the poem. The number of syllables in some words will be tricky, especially if they’re artificially compressed by replacing a letter with an apostrophe. Heav’nly is a common example, where the three syllables of Hea- ven – ly have been reduced to the two of Heav – nly. The poet does this to squeeze the word into the counted metre, or to make sure the stressed syllable - Heav – falls in the right place in the line. Going in the opposite direction, a poet may add a syllable where there would not normally be one, often indicated by a backwards accent (a ‘grave’ in French), as in storèd, so the single syllable of stored  becomes two, as stor – èd.

So now you have a column of numbers. They tell you how many syllables are in each line, which lines have the same number of syllables, and how likely it is that the lines will be in either a three-foot or a two-foot metre. Whoa.

Time out for technical explanation: a foot is the unit of measurement for a line of poetry, and measures or counts the beat of the line. The foot of a line, or a poem, is named in Greek: iambic and trochaic feet have two syllables. The difference between them is that an iamb holds the stress on the second syllable (da DUM), and the trochee on the first syllable (DAH da). The three-syllable feet are more various, because, as mathematics will tell you, there are more possible arrangements for three syllables of which only one is stressed. The most commonly used are the anapaest (an a PAEST), the dactyl (LAH la la), and the amphibrach (la LAH la).

Going back to the column of numbers, here’s an example:

12

11

12

12

13

12

12

12

12

11

12

12

Most of these lines have 12 syllables. Of those that don’t, there is only one syllable extra or missing (more on this later). We can thus assume that 12 is the common number, with a bit of admissible stretching or compressing going on. 12 is divisible by 2 and by 3, so this needs some attention. (A line of 10 syllables is only divisible by 2, so is very easily seen as iambic or trochaic  – the two-syllable feet – and pentameter – five-footed.) To work out whether your 12-syllable line is to be divided into groups, or feet, of 2 or 3 syllables, you need to speak the lines aloud, and listen to where the stresses fall.

Sir Philip Sidney

As a tip, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, the small words and the ‘joining’ words in English, are rarely stressed, so don’t rely on your eyes, you really do have to read the lines aloud to hear the pattern. Reading poetry aloud is far more informative, and more fun, than merely looking at it. Have a go: read out this line by Sir Philip Sidney:

Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show

Here’s the line with the stressed syllables marked in bold:

Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show

This line clearly uses a two-syllable foot. Apart from the first foot – Loving – which is a trochee (a trochaic substitution, in technical terms), this is an iambic line. Because there are six feet in the line (12 divided by 2 is 6), this is a line of iambic hexameter. Monometer is a 1-foot metre, dimeter is 2 feet, and the rest are trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, and then it gets rare and unusual.

Felicia Hemans

Here’s a line by Felicia Hemans: read this aloud too, and listen for the stresses:

I lay on that rock where the storms have their dwelling

This line uses a three-syllable foot, an amphibrach, so this line is in amphibrachic tetrameter (as is the poem).

Where does this bring us? If you apply this method of dissection to a poem, you end up with a nameable metrical pattern that fits most if not all the lines. The lines that do not fit are the most interesting, because here the poet has deliberately broken the pattern to show you something. It might be a visual effect in spelling, or in punctuation, drawing your attention to the meaning of the words, to what the poem is saying at that point. It might be an aural effect, matched patterns of sounds at the beginnings or ends of words, or sounds that echo the meaning of the words or that part of the poem.

Rhyme scheme

Go back to the ends of each line, and say each end word aloud: listen to  the vowel sound of the word, label it A, and write down A at the end of the line. The end rhyme of the second line may also have an A rhyme, in which case label it so. But if the sound is different, label it B. Carry on to the end of the stanza (equivalent to a verse in a song), adding new labels C, D, E as new end rhymes are identified. Start again with A at the start of the next stanza, no matter what the vowel sound of that first end-rhyme is.

You’re marking differences here, rather than what the sound actually is. The labels A and B have no connection to the actual vowel sound of the rhymes, they’re just convenient labels. You could use numbers instead, or bird’s names, but A, B, etc are conventional. You’ll end up with a second column, which might look like this. [The formatting won't allow me to show the line breaks, so these are three 4-line stanzas.]

A

A

B

A

A

A

C

A

A

A

B

B

The pattern of the rhyme scheme shows you what kind of poetical form has been used. Here, it looks like a ballad: short stanzas, repeated and limited end-rhymes, the third line in each stanza uses a different rhyme, and will probably (because this is a break in the pattern) carry important or new information in that line. The last two lines also break the pattern as a rhyming couplet, and signal the end of the poem.

Sometimes, the pattern of the metre and feet combined with the pattern of the end rhymes will work together to tell you even more about the poem, what it’s saying, how the poet has worked to get those effects. In this example, if the metre and the rhyme scheme above are from the same poem, it’s actually a very odd ballad because the second and fourth lines are not shorter then lines 1 and 3, which they should be. This too is useful information about what the poet was trying to do.

And that’s just the beginning: you can look inside the lines for more rhymes and sound effects, you can look at the way the words are arranged to make repeated patterns, and you can notice patterns in the meanings of words as well. Working from the smallest elements (the letters and syllables) up to the largest scale (patterns of meaning and sound across lines and stanzas) will reveal the meaning of the poem.

Welcome to prosody.

Kate loves teaching poetry, and knitting while listening to really long poems on audiobook. She has podcasted about Beowulf, The Faerie Queene, The Rape of the Lock, The Princess and Paradise Lost on http://www.reallylikethisbook.com

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?  Er, actually, I’d rather you didn’t.

Dear foxes and fox readers, I hate to be a downer in the middle of Poetry Week, but… oh, poetry.  You and I aren’t friends.  I would love to be the sort of person who quotes Wordsworth while wandering through fields of daffodils, quotes Wilfred Owen while visiting warfields, quotes Keats while wandering through, erm, a Grecian urn… but I am resolutely the sort who will quote Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare (the plays, you understand) etc. etc., but the nearest I get to mentioning poetry in everyday life is my favourite poetry-related joke, said of poor tennis players: they sometimes serve, but mostly stand and wait.

Can I explain why this is, I wonder?  It’s like anything that one doesn’t like – it’s much more difficult to date than a moment of epiphany where one thinks “gosh, yes, I love scrapbooking / making choux pastry / crocheting hats for animals”, or whatever it may be.  I’ve managed to get through English GCSE, A Level, undergraduate degree, master’s degree, and doctorate without my lightbulb moment.  Well, that’s not quite true.  I still have a few months left of my DPhil, so perhaps, before I become Dr Thomas, I’ll discover an unexpected love of Benjamin Zephaniah or Lord Byron.

But I love prose.  I love drama – fairly often I read plays, so it’s not as though I’m simply reluctant to leave the safe confines of novels.  I even love poetic language – I revel in the beautiful words of Virginia Woolf or the observant precision of Katherine Mansfield, but the moment the corner turns… I’m lost.  I think my main problem is that I read too fast for poetry.  It demands to be read slowly, preferably aloud… and I’m usually haring on to find out what happens.  And then there is character – surely it is easier to experience the full creation of a character over 300 pages of prose than it is in a page of short lines?  Unless we’re counting things like The Faerie Queene here.  I read half that blinkin’ ‘poem’ once.  I thought I might die.  Perhaps I did.  (I didn’t.)

Does it come with age?  Will I hit 30 (or 40 or 50 or 80 or 90) and suddenly want to kick back in an armchair and read ‘Ozymandias’?  There are a few poems I enjoy now – Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’ gives me chills, but I have no idea if it’s considered good verse or doggerel; I love many of the Psalms, but that’s wandering off into different territory – but I can’t imagine ever doing what the lead character of a novel I read recently did, which was (on her sick bed) request a big fat book of Victoria Verse.  No, sirree.  On my sick bed, give me E.M. Delafield or P.G. Wodehouse.  Or just a nice big piece of cake and a cup of tea.  But not poetry.

And yet I am one of those appalling people who don’t read poetry, but write it instead.  There is probably a circle of hell for the likes of us.  You’ll be pleased to know (perhaps) that I steer away from the free verse “Why does everyone misunderstand me?” variety of ‘poetry’ beloved by teenagers the world over (or, if I have ever written it, it’s staying locked away from prying eyes) – but I have tried to emulate the only form of poetry I ever find enjoyable.  For while epic verse leaves me cold, and anything which mentions ‘bowers’ (i.e. everything Tennyson ever wrote) is blacklisted, I have a definite admiration for short, rhyming, comic verse.

Yes, I’m one of those people who ‘likes poems to rhyme’.  Luckily I’m aware that I know precisely nothing about poetry appreciation, so I don’t pretend my standard is anything other than subjective.  I enjoy hearing quick poetic quips, along the lines of Dorothy Parker (of “Men don’t make passes / At girls who wear glasses” fame, although she’s written better.)  And recently, on my blog, I decided it would be fun to have a go at writing these for certain authors.  Given my modus rhymerandi (that’s Latin, honest) I aim for humour, slightly biting but mostly affectionate.  If you don’t mind a few Thomas originals glaringly out of place in a week that (I presume) will be featuring some of the world’s finest poets, then here are a few of the little snippets I came up with:

What the dickens?

Oh Charles, you saw

The humble poor

In such disarming detail -

But somehow missed

In all of this

A single real female.

DostoyWHEVsky*

If reading should be nourishment,

Your book’s not worth our time:

An awful lot of punishment

And hardly any crime.

*I have to admit that I’ve never read it…

 

Philip Larkin’s Legacy

Oh Larkin, yes, you swore; that’s fine.

But no-one knows the second line.

What’s troublin’ ya?

I am glum; something’s marred me.

Life is hard; I am Hardy.

So, I started by saying that I don’t really get poetry, and I ended by exposing some of my own.  Oh dear.  I’d love to hear some recommendations for the sort of poetry I can cope with – comic verse, particularly if it’s at all literary.  And remember, everyone, poetry has to rhyme, capiche?  (Here’s hoping Oxford University don’t read this, or they might not give me that doctorate after all…)

“Poetry” photo by V. H. Hammer of Flickr and shared here under a Creative Commons Licence. Clicking the image will load the source page.

Monday- Simon Thomas sits down and tries to work out why he’s never got on with poetry and (unwisely) gives versification a go himself.

Tuesday- Kate shows us how to take a poem apart to find its structure, and why.

Wednesday- Sam shares his thoughts on Kei Miller’s collection A Light Song of Light.

Thursday- Moira considers the use of poetry as a plot device in – of all things – a detective novel.

Friday- RosyB takes a look at The Walls Do Not Fall by HD to see if they still stand up to scrutiny.

Saturday- Jackie delves into Anne Sexton’s work by way of Peter Gabriel.

Photo of book and flowers courtesy of Favim.com