(This essay was published in Agenda 22.2, Summer 1984, pp. 32-56.)
In an essay included in the Carcanet survey British Poetry Since 1970, John Pilling describes the language of C. H. Sisson's poetry as one "that is almost uniformly sober and chaste and controlled"1. Asking why Sisson should have found it "comparatively easy" to preserve (in Joyce's words) "the strict temperature of classicism", Pilling begins his answer with the suggestion that Sisson went back to Augustan models and not to other versions of classicism. "There is a big difference between going back to Catullus, Lucretius, Horace, Virgil and Ovid and going back to Provence (as Pound did), to Aquinas (as Joyce did) and to Dante (as Eliot did)."2 Whilst Pilling may be forgiven for not knowing that Sisson was to bring out in 1980 (the year of publication of Pilling's essay) his translation of The Divine Comedy, it's difficult to understand what he could make of "The Dew", "Cato" and "The Question" (in Anchises, published 1976)3, without recourse to the Purgatorio. But to say that Sisson's classicism is not confined to the influence of Augustan models is only to begin to articulate my dissatisfaction with the weighting of Pilling's essay. That Sisson's sympathies with the Latin poets are profound is plain; yet his classicism, though it may set him apart from most of his contemporaries, doesn't isolate him from the history of English verse in the last hundred years. Indeed I believe that his verse constitutes a continuum, to a degree matched by few of his contemporaries, of those traditions which dominated English poetry in the early decades of the twentieth century.
It's a critical commonplace nowadays that the two strands of writing represented, on the one hand by Pound and Eliot, and on the other by Hardy and Edward Thomas, are antagonistic. Contemporary poets, it's sometimes said (a myth fostered not only by critics) must choose which 'line' they owe allegiance to. I say myth because it seems to me that Sisson has chosen both; but this is inaccurate, for traditions choose poets, and not the reverse. Sisson's negotiation with modernism begins in earnest with the later-written poems of In the Trojan Ditch (1974) and continues through the pages of Anchises into Exactions (1980). Of the seminal poets of modernism (as the essays on those figures in Sisson's English Poetry 1900-1950: An Assessment – first published 1971, reissued 1981 – show) it's Pound that Sisson can the more wholeheartedly accept, but Eliot, with whom he's inclined to argue, who exerts the more fruitful – and dangerous – influence on him. Sisson can take Pound's verse in his stride because he isn't finally, that is to say imaginatively and ideologically, compelled by it. His modernist verse is, as one would expect, difficult: that it must be difficult is borne out by the fact that most of his critics have sidestepped the challenge it presents. This is poetry that's anything but "sober and chaste and controlled": it's fragmented, dislocated, sometimes dreamlike, even nightmarish. It's anything but the cool verse of the plain-speaking classicist to whom directness and clarity of utterance are paramount. It aims to be a poetry of the unconscious rather than a poetry of reason.
The second tradition that Sisson has inherited has been called by Geoffrey Thurley in The Ironic Harvest (1974) "the English existential tradition". Thurley traces it from Clare's "I am"4 through Hopkins, Hardy, Edward Thomas and Lawrence, adding as (then) living practitioners R. S. Thomas and Jack Clemo. But it's C. H. Sisson who has pushed and refined this tradition to a point beyond which it's daunting to imagine any other poet going. Almost every commentator on Sisson's poetry has emphasized its honesty, its need to tell the truth, its shunning of self-deception: these are qualities which Sisson certainly found in the Latin poets, but qualities which are no less important to Clare, Hardy and Thomas. My aim, then, in this essay is twofold: to trace the evolution of a modernist verse from Sisson's classicism, and subsequently his development of a lyric poetry that's no less English than that of the three poets I have just named. The crucial datum here is that all four poets are existential poets in whom the processes of nature evoke a profound response.
To read Sisson's early verse is to attend to a man in the middle years tabulating, with a directness that is both exhilarating and merciless (merciless to himself, merciless to the world), his discoveries. His are uncompromisingly poems of experience, the articulations of an intellect that has stripped itself of all pretensions and all ideals. "In a Dark Wood" might stand as a Preface to Sisson's poetic oeuvre (as it stands as Preface to his novel Christopher Homm):
Now I am forty I must lick my bruises
What has been suffered cannot be repaired
I have chosen what whoever grows up chooses
A sickening garbage that could not be shared.
My errors have been written in my senses
My body is a record of the mind
My touch is crusted with my past defences
Because my wit was dull my eye grows blind.
There is no credit in a long defection
And defect and defection are the same
I have no person fit for resurrection
Destroy then rather my half-eaten frame
But that you will not do, for that were pardon
The bodies that you pardon you replace
And that you keep for those whom you will harden
To suffer in the hard rule of your Grace.
Christians on earth may have their bodies mended
By premonition of a heavenly state
But I, by grosser flesh from Grace defended,
Can never see, never communicate.
Gurdjieff has written: "So long as a man is not horrified at himself, he knows nothing about himself." From Sisson's ruthless detachment comes poetry that is absolute in its self-criticism and in its insistence on the ineluctability of the speaker's predicament. His assertion that this predicament is that of every adult who is honest with himself – "I have chosen what whoever grows up chooses" (with the sense that if you do not see it like this, then you haven't grown up) – is one that Sisson has rarely since allowed himself to be drawn into making, but it serves to bring out the universality of the personal, that expansion of implication which alone raises verse written in the first person above the status of 'self-expression'. "In a Dark Wood" is at once headlong and controlled, precipitate and lucid. The first eight lines in effect constitute seven sentences (the third and fourth lines would, conventionally, be connected and separated by a dash), but the absence of punctuation gives one the impression of a man who, under the pressure of a flood of urgent insights, hasn't had time to do more than scribble them down as they assaulted him. The uneasy pauses at each line-end – demanded by sense and rhythm but denied by enjambment – give the poem a quality of relentlessness. There can be no arguing with the authority of these insights. Yet despite the finality of what the poem has to assert, it finishes in rhythmic suspension with the speaker left hanging in his spiritual limbo – an effect that's technically the result, I think, of the main accent of communicate falling on the second rather than the final, rhyming syllable. "In a Dark Wood" expresses two of Sisson's perennial themes: the indivisibility of body and mind, and the spiritual condition of a life that has by its own actions and convictions forever put itself beyond the reach of the Grace of God. Communicate possesses a double force: it carries first the strict theological sense that the solace of Mass, the symbolic partaking in Christ through the sacraments, is impossible for the poet; then the further meaning that his words – communication in the broadest sense – are robbed of their value by the fact that that agency which alone guarantees the significance of any human life and human act (to his way of thinking) is inoperative in his case. The poem thus anticipates one of Sisson's most ironic ideas – that poetry, alas, is a futile thing.
"In a Dark Wood" confronts one with a notably masculine sensibility. 'Dryness', 'hardness', are terms of approbation commonly applied to Sisson's poetry. Over against the masculine classic, it may be thought, stands the feminine romantic, and it's indicative of Sisson's temperament that one of his earliest mentors was T. E. Hulme: Hulme's essay "Romanticism and Classicism" argues for the poetic recovery of just those qualities which Sisson's verse possesses. But it's a gross generalisation to think of romanticism as feminine and classicism masculine when one has English poetry in mind. The texture of Pope's verse is very different from Dryden's, especially if one mentally sets Eloisa to Abelard against Absolom and Achitophel; of the great romantics, Blake is the most masculine – as one might expect a poet to be who has one foot in the eighteenth century and one in Milton; Wordsworth's stance is not dissimilar, yet his attachment is to nature (the "vegetable", in Blake's disdainful terminology) as opposed to the myth-creating imagination, and the feminine is more powerfully in evidence in his verse; Byron's poetry is appropriately bisexual; in Shelley and Keats the feminine is preponderant, although one must allow for great differences between them; Shelley's intellect is predominantly feminine, while it is Keats's achievement to have released the feminine in himself as no male poet had done before or has done since – "negative capability", I suspect, is essentially a feminine capacity; and with Keats the proper history of romanticism ends, for beyond his maximization of the feminine one cannot sensibly (he could not always sensibly) go. Literary critics tend to think of the twentieth century as 'post-romantic', and the verse of most modern male poets accommodates the feminine to a greater or lesser degree. In such a climate of poetic language, verse that's overwhelmingly masculine will seem to many uncomfortable: it's not surprising that Sisson should feel that "the poetry owners" cannot make him out. "A Girl", which first appeared in Numbers (1965), is relevant here. It begins:
You speak of love, as if there were
Some certainty that it is here.
I see you coming and avert
My eyes lest they should do you hurt.
Your gentle limbs are confident
It is a woman that was meant
And yet, the very eyes you please
Destroy you with analyses.
The girl represents one set of contraries, the speaker another; she is innocence, intuition, spirit, metaphor, femininity, romanticism; he is experience, reason, body, plain speech, masculinity, the classic. "A Girl" is untypical of its author, however, in its sympathy: the speaker's feeling for the girl is one of wonderment and regret – wonderment that such a creature can exist in his world, regret for the destructiveness of his perceptions. "The mind is its own place", one sees again: the world to the classical mind is fallen, spoilt, irredeemable, whilst to the romantic mind nothing is impossible, the world is alive with spiritual potential. One might add here that the sexual points on to the political: the classicist's state of experience leads him sexually to disbelieve in the notion of transforming love, politically to put his faith in traditional institutions; the romantic seeks sexually always the transcending experience, politically advocates revolution. (For Blake and Shelley sexual and political liberation were one and the same thing.) Sisson's political allegiances, Monarchist and Tory, have provoked predictable responses from literary quarters that are not governed by classical sensibilities.
Evident from the first in his poetry is a desire to sum up human life, to articulate succinctly, incontrovertibly, and with grim irony what it amounts to. Sometimes the life is another's, sometimes the poet's – as here in "In Honour of J. H. Fabre":
My first trick was to clutch
At my mother and suck
Soon there was nothing to catch
But darkness and a lack.
My next trick was to know
Dividing the visible
Into shapes which now
Are no longer definable.
My third trick was to love
With the pretence of identity
Accepting without proof
The objects 'her' and 'me'.
My last trick was to believe
When I have the air
Of praying I at least
Join the mantis at its prayers.
Successively the comforts of the mother, intellectual knowledge, sexual love and religious faith are revealed to be transitory and illusory. The speaker offers his experience as a paradigm: life presents itself as a series of phases, each with its characteristic self-deception. The classicism of this poem is thrown into relief if one compares it with Yeats's "The Four Ages of Man" from Supernatural Songs:
He with body waged a fight,
But body won; it walks upright.
Then he struggled with the heart;
Innocence and peace depart.
Then he struggled with the mind;
His proud heart he left behind.
Now his wars on God begin;
At stroke of midnight God shall win.
Yeats presents human life as a series of dramatic conflicts waged between the self and other aspects of being which man paradoxically wins and loses. The "Now" that opens the final couplet expresses the immediacy of the wars of the fourth age for Yeats himself. God as destiny and death must inevitably win, yet God is a man-created concept (as is death), so that war with God constitutes the struggle of one part of man's being with another: to succumb to God is a necessity of being. Sisson's final stanza is by contrast sardonic, downbeat: his prayers are sham, signify nothing; a man is half a mantis, an insect whose attitude of praying is in truth one of preying – it will suck its victim dry. What for Yeats are realities are for Sisson illusions: what his poem sets out to do is to denounce them for the devices they are – devices that a man utilizes to render life liveable. Yet the poem raises a problem it cannot resolve: if all is illusion, including intellectual processes, what is the status of the statements made by the poem?
The "trick" of loving is made possible by a double presumption on the part of any pair of lovers – that each possesses an objective self which may give and receive love. This stanza takes us to the heart of Sisson's philosophical thinking. He cannot bring himself to lend any credence to commonly accepted notions of human identity. His clearest treatment of this subject is contained in his long poem "The Discarnation". In Part I of the poem he denies the cogitating 'I' of Descartes. If it were possible for one human consciousness to peer into the well of another, it would perceive
some few
Dark bits
That float on what are called our wits
But I is not found there. It is
Not found at all.
What the peering consciousness perceived would certainly not add up to what we think of as making for a man. What then does constitute a man? Not his actions, says Sisson, and not his language, for these reflect human "norms":
And everything we do is form
Of manner, language or physique.
Man is a conventional animal; human differences are slight. He can therefore arrive at the central idea in his poetry:
...what we think is less, for sure
Than what we are, and that is flesh.
If the term 'individual' signifies anything, it signifies the individual body. In Part II of "The Discarnation" Sisson describes how the mind, metaphorically-speaking, forms a "ring" around the body as the body grows – that is, completes a circle of domination over it. Later, the body revolts against the mind's restrictions, and the mind becomes a vehicle seeking means of satisfying the body's needs and desires. The mind pretends to itself that in this pursuit it acts freely and rationally, but it is, of course, deceiving itself. Then it is tricked into compliance with social rituals – notably that of marriage – which "denature" desire and render the individual a fit component of the state. In its fundamentals this account is remarkably close to Blake's in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but whilst the romantic sensibility makes its analysis the basis for the passionate advocacy of a new era in which energy is to be liberated from its mental chains, the classical sensibility rests content with analysis – implying that there is nothing to be done: that human nature is static and that the function of human societies can only be regulative, can only institutionalise the control of body by mind. This contrast again illustrates Hulme's thesis in "Romanticism and Classicism" – that the romantic is characterised by commitment to human potentiality, the classic by belief in human limitation.
Here also we stand on the brink of the great (and ironic) contradiction that lies at the centre of Sisson's verse. Succinctly put, it's this: his is a poetry of mind that denies the validity of mind. The mind lies, prevaricates, constructs tissues of illusion in which to clothe itself, is unstable and variable: this he believes. Yet poetry is a product of mind: words are mind's material stuff, and are prone to lying, prevaricating, illusion-mongering. The poet dedicates himself to speaking the truth, but words are as much the natural enemies of truth as its servants. Had poets the necessary strength of mind, they would keep their mouths shut. But of course they haven't; they are helpless against the urge to write; they must go on with the futile activity of producing poetry.
"The Discarnation" is itself, I think, damaged by the contradictory impulses in the poet. Its ending views with obvious dissatisfaction the dehumanisation of the modern world through the worship of number; yet the philosophical account of man given by Sisson is itself a dehumanising one. Can one expect to have a human world if human beings are merely 'artefacts' (though subtle ones)? The truth of the matter is that it is by our illusions that we live: to strip oneself of all illusions is to strip oneself of motives for living. Sisson knows this perfectly well, and confronts the problem in his later poetry. Meanwhile, his convictions about human identity lead him into mind-twisting realms of paradox (such as that raised in "In Honour of J. H. Fabre"): he continually asserts that he is nothing, but only a speaking voice, an 'I' (no matter how hedged about with qualifications and provisions) can express this nothingness. Of "The Discarnation" I must in conclusions say that in its formal and demanding stanzas (I mean demanding of the poet) often contains memorable writing, verse that has an apothegmic lucidity and punch; but it also frequently conveys a sense of rhythmic cramp, of words squeezed into spaces too small to accommodate them – so that since, as Sisson is right to believe, rhythm is the proof of a poem, "The Discarnation" is not in the first rank of his achievement. It's writing that's too consciously managed.
What we see developing in the later poems of In the Trojan Ditch (that is, in its earlier pages, since its contents are printed counter to the order in which they were written), and through Anchises, is a determinedly modernist and irrational poetry. Sisson's thinking, we saw, led him into fundamental contradiction: nothing, which ought to be tongueless, insists upon speaking. Of the realm that nothingness inhabits, reason cannot be an adequate investigator; what's required is a poetic language that can slip rational constraints and accepted grammatical and semantic procedures. The poet of conscious reason is compelled, by force of logic, to transform himself into a poet of the unconscious.
Sisson's clearest (and wittiest) statement of the insufficiency of reason is the poem entitled "Reason" that appears in Exactions. But this is a product of the period following that of his most radical experiment: it's more to my purpose to glance at a couple of poems that enact an abandonment of constraints. The first of these is "The Descent", which is to be found in the translation section of In the Trojan Ditch. In his Foreword to the translations included there Sisson says of this poem and another ("Palinurus") that "the use made of the original is so indirect that there might be some hesitation as to whether they belonged to this or to the earlier part of the volume" (i.e. that which contains "original" work). To read this "translation" – a wholly inadequate term – against a literal one can only confirm the truth of these words. "The Descent" is a violently compressed "account" of Aeneas's visit to the Underworld in Aeneid VI. But not only does it edit Virgil, omitting a host of significant events along the way, it literally parts company with him at a certain point. The impression is of a translator whose temperament does not square with that of his text: what in it is incompatible with his way of thinking, he leaves out; but there comes a point at which he cannot accept anything the text says – and the "translation" collapses altogether. The last two paragraphs of "The Descent" are these:
I cannot however see the dead
Wailing by the water-side.
Why should they go over? A sordid
Old man, watching the girls.
Let them come to him. Charon,
Do not tip the boat in your excitement.
The dead are not lovers when
They pass your way.
I can hardly move now,
Aeneas, without your wishes.
There are several ghosts
I would wish to see.
And one especially, her hair
Plentiful where they have it,
Weeps from her head,
Too fragrant to be among the dead,
And beyond her,
One whose matted hair
Resembles Charon's.
Of him
Nothing is to be said, except
I came to seek him and
He does not exist.
The mist
Swirls up over Tal-y-maes.
He is gone with it.
An empty hill-side.
Fortune, if you are old.
Sisson can follow Virgil into the Underworld, but he can see none of the dead souls Aeneas sees: neither the newly arrived – those waiting to be ferried across the Styx by Charon, nor the helmsman Palinurus, nor the infant souls waiting at the entrance, nor Dido, nor Deiphobus, nor ultimately his father Anchises. It becomes plain that Sisson's descent is not that of a disinterested spectator: he is implicated in what is taking place – he wishes to see ghosts of importance to himself: but, simply, they do not exist: for him there is nothing on the further side of death – no afterlife, no reunion with one's loved ones. The effect is of a man parting company with not only Virgil and Aeneas but with the world-picture of classicism itself. He's left alone on a vacant Welsh hillside with the ambiguous words "Fortune, if you are old", which may mean either 'The best you can hope for if you are old is a bit of luck' or, perhaps better, 'The best luck you can have in life is to reach old age'.
The group of poems entitled "Metamorphoses" makes use of a number of sources, classical and otherwise: for example, that part of section IV which deals with Jupiter and Europa constitutes a much-compressed version of Ovid's account in Metamorphoses II. If one compares individual poems – say I and VII with VI and VIII – one can see Sisson moving from a poetry of plain narrative statement to one that is elliptical and associative. The octosyllabics of I and VII are almost uniformly regular: this is quick-moving, businesslike verse, whose matter-of-factness (seasoned in VII with a mocking cynicism) conveys the complete detachment of the narrator from the events he's describing. (When for once in I, which deals with Actaeon and Diana, Sisson breaks the rhythm in the penultimate line in order to suggest Diana's physical, half-sexual response to Actaeon's death, the reader is brought up short: "Diana by the fountain still / Shuddered like the water on her flesh / And after that there came the night." But otherwise, these octosyllabics verge on the bland.) The regularity of the verse of VI and VIII, however, is offset by the radically different way the poetry proceeds. Here Sisson, rather than following a track provided by his source, blazes one across unmapped ground: one senses a mind feeling its way forward, asking questions, testing ideals, making connections between the personal, the historic and the mythic. It's a poetry of discovery. VIII is circular, beginning with an unattached relative clause that mimics its subject, abortion:
Which otherwise might have been born.
They carried in a bloody tray
This unripe apple plucked within
The forest of the uterus.
This one at least will not arrive
At ages suitable for tears.
Within this forest everything
Begins.
As all life begins in this "forest", so all human experience (death included) is rooted there. Sisson's argument is with the explanation given in Genesis as to how experience entered the world. He proposes that the original and only ground of temptation is the human body – "Eve's cave"; that the true apples of knowledge are children. Then:
how could Adam come to find
A tree more naked than himself,
Excoriate of leaves and fruit
And he himself nailed to the boughs?
What in the experience of Adam inevitably produces the experience of Christ? What links the tree of knowledge to the tree of sacrifice? Answer: the natural processes of human existence. The myth of the fall of man is superfluous. Sisson ironically transforms the serpent of lust into a serpent of hope. Given hope, the inseminatory spasm and the act of parturition, you will get Cain and Abel – "The brothers Murder and Incite" – and all human history from Noah and Abraham to
now the surgeon with his smile
And sister's deferential cough.
– the cant-ridden modern world. The poem is returned to its beginning, and the serpent of history swallows its tail.
The octosyllabic line survives in Metamorphoses but has broken in "The Descent" and "Eurydice" (this last a contraction and interpretation of Ovid's account of Orpheus's visit to the Underworld in Metamorphoses X.) It's not difficult to see why: Sisson's octosyllabics lack flexibility and variety; the ruling iamb doesn't allow his speaking voice the run of its own rhythms to the extent that free verse can; and for a poet whose growing need was to escape the restrictions of reason and to release the unconscious, its formalities were no longer tenable.
The new order of poetry appearing in the later-written pages of In the Trojan Ditch, a kind that dominates Anchises, may be seen in "Martigues" and "Somerton Moor". The writing is, in comparison with earlier work, less direct, less harsh, more mysterious, indeed more musical; here are the beginnings of the formal lyrical verse that was to surface in Exactions: Sisson, one may say, finds his lyrical voice through writing free verse (earlier, when he writes in what one might think are lyric stanzas – in, for example, "The Discarnation", "The Person", "The Rope" – he produces a tough intellectual poetry). Individual lines, sentences, paragraphs of these new poems have meanings to suggest, but the poems as wholes remain elusive, just beyond one's confident grasp. Here is the third section of "Somerton Moor":
Last speech. Accustomed as I am to speech
And she to silence, excellence is hard
For nothing that is facile can be heard
And nothing hard can be endured for long.
So sleep. Pass out between the willow-boughs
Out of my dream into the cool of death.
There, where the resurrection that you hope,
Though tardy, comes at last
The instrument I carry is untuned.
This is a haunted verse of exquisite cadences, a Sissonian Lucy poem in which the feminine presence seems at once to exist in the speaker's reverie and to be dissolved into the landscape of the moor. It is, I imagine, the sort of poetry Hardy might have written had he matured poetically in the aftermath of T. S. Eliot. The reference to Orpheus in the final line suggests the poet's inability (it's the inability of poetry) to give the woman any more than a tenuous existence in his verses.
The French poems that open In the Trojan Ditch and Anchises explore the persistence of memories: the landscapes and places of the present, held in the perceiving or half-perceiving mind, are hauntingly interpenetrated by images from the past. In this poetry of loss, Sisson returns again and again to the idea of the Underworld. Avernus is at once the domain of the ghosts that trouble him and the mysterious realm of the unconscious to which he must descend (compelled, against his inclination, by imagination, or involuntarily in dreams) if he is to bring back the questionable stuff of poetry. These poems contain much of the most sheerly beautiful writing that Sisson has done. "Sillans-la-Cascade" begins:
Water falling over these rocks
Like tears
Not for myself, but for another.
Lovely hair, cascading over a brow
Troubled now. I saw her in sleep
So touching and so betrayed.
There is no enemy but the hater.
Once passed, once gone
There is no meeting but in Acheron
Where the full-fledged ghosts wait underneath
And the rock falls
Sisyphus.
I have no sense here, as I have with the octosyllabic poems and "The Discarnation", of a predetermined form dictating rhythm to the poet; rather I feel that he has succeeded in tapping into the subterraneous flow of language that exists below the threshold of conscious thought. Eliot, formulating his celebrated "objective correlative" in his essay on Hamlet, talked of "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion".5 What this account omits – and it’s fundamental, not optional – is that without the presence of a rhythmic correlative no set of objects or what have you is worth a fig in evoking an emotion. In the paragraph quoted above, the emotion is one of haunted regret, a regret that modulates into the speaker's unselfpitying sense of his damnation as he identifies himself with Sisyphus.
The first person is used in the French poems without self-consciousness. In other poems, which confront the experience of ageing, the "I" is at once insubstantial, drained of attachment to the human world and human affairs, and stubborn in its refusal finally to fall away. I take "The Corridor" (which I've briefly discussed elsewhere6) to be one of the great poems of the English existential tradition, and its fourteenth section to constitute one of Sisson's most remarkable achievements. It begins:
The backward road
Must be under the marshes
Glutinous, harsh
Darker than ever, resistant
Darker than ever, I would go that way but I cannot
Even the difficult road to Avernus is denied him: he's condemned to a "stretched" existence (the epithet catches exactly the right note of tormented and partial physicality) in a featureless limbo located on "the edge of the universe". He gropes his way along from phrase to phrase, from line to line, hesitating, stumbling, making a statement only to deny it, his "progress" clotted with negatives (indeed without the negative there could be no possibility of progressing), and one sees that it's a triumph to be able to move at all in this most peripheral region of being. With typical Sissonian paradoxicality, mind and body, thought and the senses, are implicated in the proceedings only to be denied. The section ends:
I am on the edge, beyond the touch of reason
As of the flesh
If a word takes me, it is in its flight
From another mouth
It cannot be my ear
Hears
The last two lines undermine the possibility raised in the previous two, and the reader is left hanging in the silence that follows the final stranded verb.
Sisson's sense of his nothingness in "The Corridor" and other poems is intimately related to his understanding of his cultural, historical and religious predicament – though it's impossible to say whether that sense is cause, symptom, or cause and symptom both. It may be said that his spiritual nothingness is consequent upon his awareness of God's absence from him – or that, being nothing, he possesses no substantial being that God might inhabit. His consciousness of belonging to a civilisation and culture at the end of its tether is conveyed notably in Anchises in those poems which ruminate the fall of Troy. Among them is "Est in Conspectu Tenedos", which demands to be given in full:
1
The day goes slowly, it is the first day
After the fall of Troy. I walk upon the beaches,
A ghost among ghosts, but the most shadowy I
O Tenedos O the thin island
Hiding the ships. They need not hide from me
I am the least figure upon the shore,
Which the wind does not notice, the water refract, or the sands count
As one of their number. I was a warrior,
Yes, in Troy
Before all reason was lost.
Where did Helen come from? Where is she now?
All reason is lost and so is she.
I was only a parcel of her reason
Now of her loss
Ghosts
Cannot be companionable; parts, shreds,
All that I am, ghost of a part of a part
2
Desolate shore, dark night
I have lost so much that I am not now myself
That lost it, I am the broken wind
The lost eagle flying, the dawn
Rising over Tenedos
3
Not any more I, that is the last thing
Rise or fall, sunrise or sunset
It is all one. The moon is not friendly
No, nor the sun
Nor darkness, nor
Even the bands of maidens bringing offerings
Pouring libations, buried
Among the ineluctable dead.
4
Dead, ineluctable, certain
The fate of all men.
The passage in Aeneid II to which the title refers runs, in W. F. Jackson Knight's rendering:
Within sight of Troy is the island of Tenedos. In the days of Priam's Empire it had wealth and power and was well known and famous, but there is nothing there now, except the curve of the bay affording its treacherous anchorage.
When the Greeks left the wooden horse outside Troy, it was behind Tenedos they concealed their fleet and from Tenedos they sailed, "under the friendly secrecy of a hidden moon" (the moon of section 3 of Sisson's poem) when the Trojans took the horse into their city. Clearly, fallen Troy (in another poem "the common grave of Europe and Asia") acts as a focus for Sisson's feelings about the state of the civilisation to which he belongs. Indeed Tenedos, "the thin island", cannot but suggest itself as a metaphor for Britain. Sisson once wrote that after the death of Charles I "the intelligence of England deteriorated", and this idea inevitably rises to the surface of my mind when I read "I was a warrior, / Yes, in Troy / Before all reason was lost". The line "I have lost so much that I am not now myself" suggests the loss both of qualities that go to form personality and of elements that compose a cultural and political identity (if the two can be so separated). Reading "Est in Conspectu Tenedos" I'm struck again by the appropriateness of the title In the Trojan Ditch for Sisson's Collected Poems of 1974: "ditch" suggests the general predicament of the besieged Trojans as well as the actual ditch in and around which some of the bitterest fighting in the Iliad takes place. Acquaintance with the essays in The Avoidance of Literature (Carcanet 1978) can leave Sisson's reader in no doubt that he believes contemporary England to be languishing in a morass. "Est in Conspectu Tenedos" is penetrated by a sense of desolation comparable to that of the great Anglo-Saxon poems The Wanderer and The Seafarer, whose protagonists are similarly men bereft of all except the slenderest hold upon existence. Those poems stand at the gateway of the English existential tradition, and though the impetus of Sisson's poem derives from Virgil, the sensibility it expresses is immemorially English.
The most persistent presence in Sisson's modernist verse is T. S. Eliot's. Sisson was, comparatively speaking, a late starter as a poet, and it's unusual for a poet so immediately and maturely his own man, as Sisson is, to come so strongly under the influence of another poet at the time of his writing life that he did. It's dangerous to soak oneself in so distinctive and penetrative a poet as Eliot, and yet there's much to be said in favour of the necessity of doing it. For contemporary English poets who write as if Eliot never existed risk another peril: he tackled so brilliantly the twentieth-century urban predicament in a new poetic language and in new poetic forms that to ignore his work may be to ignore that predicament, new language, new forms – to choose the peripheral. Objections to the cultivation of Eliot may at this point be heard: (1) It's impossible to develop Eliot, since Eliot logically and comprehensively drove his own poetry through to its end; (2) It's impossible to travel any nearer to absurdity that Eliot did without arriving (and remaining?) there; (3) It's impossible to dislocate language, indeed to empty it of semantic content, to a greater degree than Eliot did without becoming unintelligible or writing gibberish. The honest reply to these objections (there are doubtless others) is of course that one cannot go 'beyond' Eliot on Eliot's own terms: if there was a beyond to get to, Eliot would have gone there himself. But one may travel 'beside' him on (and in) one's own terms. Should a voice object that it doesn't wish to travel 'beside' anyone, I answer that willy-nilly that's what we all have to do, poets included: as Eliot himself observed, the field of human experience is limited, but since language and sensibility change from generation to generation it's possible for a poet to handle time-honoured themes in modern dress. Michael Edwards says in his penetrating monograph Eliot/Language:
The writer who believes that language (along with everything else) is fallen, faces an intricate problem. He has to write poetry that, in one way or another, fails, without simply being bad poetry.
Eliot faced the problem. Has any other poet ever done so, apart from Mallarmé?7
I submit the name of Charles Sisson. Sisson has, in his own terms, travelled the route that traverses the landscapes of "Gerontion" and The Waste Land, passes through the twilight world of "The Hollow Men" and the desert of Ash Wednesday, and arrives, if not in the rose-garden of Four Quartets, then certainly in a garden. Knowing that Eliot has travelled this route before him, Sisson hasn't at all times been able to hold off the magnetic attraction of the great explorer's progress-reports; among his poems, "The End" and "The Inscription" (Anchises) and "The Desert" (Exactions) contain too much undigested Eliot for my particular comfort, and there are scatterings of quotation in other poems. Sisson's awareness of the relationship between his own journey and Eliot's is made manifest in "Au Clair de la Lune", which begins with an attack on the "old hag" Reason, jumps from a pastiche of the song that concludes "The Hollow Men" to a parody of "The Journey of the Magi", and ends:
A great bowl of sand. I alone am the moon-figure
Walking there.
Is there no hovel for fornication?
The palace of luxury which is alone worth finding?
An old hermit sitting at the door – it is myself –
And inside,
Her limbs stretched on a bed, rationality
– Smooth as lard.
Eliot's magi had gone inn search of a birth, but had found that birth – "A hard and bitter agony – to be a death, their death. Eliot's search, through them, is for spiritual renewal, and as always it presents itself in ambiguous terms. What the traveller finds in "Au Clair de la Lune" is an old hermit – himself – and the naked waiting body of reason: at once repulsive and inviting, it is inescapable. Sisson's poem not only signals his temperamental difference from Eliot (he is no less "in a dark wood" now than at the beginning of his writing career), but acts as a criticism of what he finds a debilitating influence in Eliot's later poetry. Discussing "Burnt Norton" in English Poetry 1900-1950 he speaks of Eliot's declension into "a style of discourse" that
does not convince us as poetic apprehension of something hitherto undiscovered. It is not a "raid on the inarticulate" but the articulation of an idea already consciously accepted.8
Eliot's poetry founders in portentous and abstract ratiocination, in that body "Smooth as lard"; Four Quartets are the work of a man immensely accomplished but not impelled. "Au Clair de la Lune" signals the point at which Eliot's and Sisson's path must fork.
There can be no possibility of spiritual renewal, metaphysical or literal, for Sisson. He's stuck with things as they are, with obstinate materiality. Yet it seems to have been his recognition that there is no escaping the existential predicament which created the conditions for a series of memorable poems that articulate new feelings, and move towards an acceptance of a world that's simply what it appears to be, without purpose but not without the power to mystify, to delight and to console. The first of these poems, "Ham Hill", in which the poet identifies with the stone of the hill, literally expresses the bedrock condition of existential being that's preliminary to a positive response: it ends:
It is enough to be here,
Not too much, enough;
The equal of any love;
That is why I am here.
In "The Garden of the Hesperides", "The Herb-Garden", "The Red Admiral" and "For Passing the Time" (I name what seem to be the most notable poems of the group), Sisson is writing as if about a world he's just discovered and is seeing with new eyes, with an altered and heightened consciousness. Here's Part 4 of "The Garden of the Hesperides":
However, something has happened. The thin air
Is certainly thinner and finer than before:
I can see things. It is not that there is light
Anywhere in particular, unless it is every night
Has its moon, every day its sun,
Equal everywhere. Trees tower and streams run
Everywhere lighted. Animals come out
In broad daylight fearless, minnow and trout
Agitate in a water clear as air.
What is the meaning of this? The meaning is where
The objects are, it does not bother me.
All of us are disproven, but gently.
There is a new lightness and limpidity in this verse – it pushes forward through its perceptions, it wants to move. The poet has moved beyond his concern with the tyrannous first person: it's enough now that "I" (or "you") is capable of perception. It’s enough that the I sees, and that what's seen gives pleasure. In "The Red Admiral" the poet chooses (the contrast with "Ham Hill" is instructive) a butterfly as his vehicle, a creature that enjoys but is unconscious that it enjoys, a creature that exists in pure being:
Its fingers lighter than spiders, the red admiral
Considers, as I do, with little movement;
With little of anything that is meant:
But let the meaning go, movement is all.
As in "The Garden of the Hesperides", meaning is regarded as superfluous: it's something that ratiocination imposes upon objects and situations which are purely phenomenal. The correction (?) of "Ripeness is all" (what can possibly be wrong with unripeness? – ripeness couldn’t exist without it) is implied in truly existential spirit. "The Herb-Garden" brings Eliot's rose-garden to mind, but Sisson has neither wish nor need to construct a theory around experience: his experience is fresh, it's not something to be pursued through the corridors of memory. The first three stanzas are critical of the blunderings of the giant poet in the delicate Lilliput of the garden, yet also contrive to suggest the alienness of his body as he contemplates its motions – it's as if it is his and not his. Then come two magnificent stanzas:
Epithalamia are dreamed in this atmosphere
Which towers like a blue fastness over my head.
My head is full of rumours, but the perceptions
Dry like lavender within my skull.
Herb-garden, dream, scent of rosemary,
Scent of thyme, the deep error of sage,
Fennel that falls like a fountain, rue that says nothing,
Blue leaves, in a garden of green.
The duality of feeling present in the early verses blossoms in the fourth, where the dreaming seems to take place both inside and outside the poet, in the dreaming mind and in the dreaming air, in the limiting enclosure of his head and in the unfettered sky. In the fifth and last stanza, bemused by the sense-impressions drifting in on him, the poet is reduced simply to naming, in a sequence of appositions that are attached to one another but to no further syntactical element that might place and resolve them (that is, give meaning to them), appositions that combine the qualities of litany and reverie, the elements which pervade his sensorium.
"The Herb-Garden" is pure Sisson: it could be by no one else. At the same time it's the work of a poet who is the inheritor both of the tradition of Hardy and Edward Thomas, of an existential poetry of man in nature, and of modernism. Elsewhere. in these later poems, the lyrical English tradition of the poet contemplating himself and the movement of the seasons in an outdoor setting, appears with notable purity:
Broken-backed willow, elder and the sharp tree
Which is loaded with berries presently,
Heap upon heap, hawthorn, while the rose-hip
Beside me offers her paler lip.
("Autumn Poems" 2)
Conclusions of great ideological moment have been drawn in certain quarters from the increasing significance of landscapes and natural objects in Sisson's poetry, but needlessly: it’s typical of poets to reflect on whatever lies about them, and Sisson, after a lifetime of public service that left its jaundiced mark on his earlier work, is living in retirement in the country. The meaning is where, and what, the objects are. He states his position quite plainly in "Autumn Poems" 5:
I am looking for contentment out of nothing
For new things are made out of what is new
And I have none except this: the birds' song,
The rain, the evening sky, the grass on the lawn.
"Autumn Poems" mark an emotional cooling, a reversion to a poetry of quiet existential exploration. The poet's sense of his nothingness has returned. In "The Cobblestone" he is "not pleased with anything", has (disappointingly too like Gerontion) lost the use of his senses and become a dusty stone lying in the gutter. A number of the later poems in Exactions, accomplished though they are, tread again ground that he has already trodden. But with "Burrington Combe", which closes the volume, he shows that his resources are not exhausted. Here is a quintessentially English poetry:
When I walk out there will be nothing missing
That I can see;
The pond will be there with its fish,
The rosemary
Spreading itself over the garden
As if still aided by my hand;
The mulberry-tree that I planted, and the cherry,
The old apple-tree and
The plums stretching up against the wall
Over which the church-tower still looks;
Starlings and swallows, the swans flying over,
And always the rooks.
And that distance into which I shall have vanished
Will still be there;
It was always dear to me, is now
In the thickening air.
No distance was ever like this one
The flat land with its willows, and the great sky
With the river reflecting its uncertainty
But no more I.
This is writing that combines the conversational and the lyric: the longer, expansive lines with their fluid speech-rhythms flow effortlessly into the shorter lines which tend to fetch up short at the rhyme-words; the timeless persistence of the landscape and the abruptness of death are thus implied in the poem's rhythms. It's writing of commanding simplicity; even so, the poem is tonally elusive – there is affection certainly, but beyond that I can't be sure: what I sense as regret suddenly seems to be a quality of satisfaction, and vice versa: the dissolution of his troublesome first person into the distances of the landscape gives Sisson ambiguous food for thought.
With such a fine poem, one thinks, a poet might decide to rest on his laurels. To call it quits. But it’s a measure of Sisson's stature and resourcefulness that one can say of him: here is a poet who seems repeatedly capable of making his final, definitive utterance. I count myself firmly among those who hope that he will go on making it for some time to come.9
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Notes
1 British Poetry Since 1970 (Carcanet 1980) p. 20.
2 Ibid. p. 15.
3 All Sisson's poetry collections from In the Trojan Ditch (1974) onwards were published by Carcanet Press.
4 "Clare's great poem is existential in that it affirms existence and nothing but existence: he has penetrated to a bedrock condition at which nothing of the social man or his acquired character remains: he knows only that he exists." (p. 27)
5 Selected Essays (Faber 1972) p. 145.
6 In "Minds to Dwell in": Poetry Wales 15.1 (Summer 1979).
7 Aquila 1976, p. 38.
8 Carcanet 1981 p. 151.
9 C. H. Sisson died in September 2003 having published a significant additional body of original poetry including the collections God Bless Karl Marx! (1987) and What and Who (1994).
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