(This essay first appeared in Poetry Wales 16.2 (Autumn 1980) pp. 12-24
For a poet in sight of his sixtieth birthday (he was born in 1923), John Ormond has published little poetry. Solely in his own name1 he has a mere two volumes – Requiem and Celebration (Christopher Davies 1968) and Definition of a Waterfall (O. U. P. 1973), and of the twenty-eight poems in the latter, eleven appeared (some in slightly different versions) in the earlier book. Penguin Modern Poets 27, which came out in 1979, also includes twenty-eight Ormond poems. Eight are previously uncollected; of the remaining twenty only four appeared in Requiem and not in Definition. I present these figures not in a pseudo-scientific spirit of pedantry but in order to suggest the provisional nature of the 1968 volume and the 'collected' aspect of that of 1973. Containing poems written over a period of a quarter of a century,2 Requiem and Celebration is at once exasperating – on account of Ormond's wilfully unchronological arrangement of his poems there – and fascinating – as testimony to the complete rethinking and remaking of his approach to his craft that seems to have occurred in his late twenties and early thirties.
Here's the opening verse of "Poem in February", a poem first published in 1943, and printed second in Requiem and Celebration:
Upon a lank sea-shore in February
(Grave curl and cry of a whirlpool bay)
My footprints set a line to mark
That once my kin lived in the rock.
Here at dunes where the tides run back
Taliesin found his sanctuary.
Here nothing is destroyed but all things made
To be unmade are re-made again,
The geometry of tides continually engraved
On every counted sandgrain's head.
Rhythmically, this falls into two parts. The first six lines run easily, tranquilly, suggesting a steady and unproblematic relationship between speaker and beachscape. (Line two, with its shriek of Dylan Thomas, is stylistically at odds with the temper of those around it.) The rhythm of the next four lines is, in contrast, irregular, emphatic, even strenuous. (Lines seven and eight suggest the hieratic Yeats of "Lapis Lazuli" – "All things fall and are built again…") These lines may impress at a first reading but come to seem mere verbal assertion and windy paradox when pressed – how is it that the poet can speak so inclusively of "all things"? and as what are they "re-made"? Finally, the closing metaphor is slack – how can the tidal geometry be said to "engrave" (an uneasy pun?) a sandgrain – more, a sandgrain's head (whatever part of a sandgrain that is, as opposed to those parts – body, arms and legs perhaps! – that remain untouched); the young poet's desire to work in a biblical allusion ("the very hairs of your head are numbered") and load every rift with ore has surely betrayed him.
This rhetorical attempt to impose significance and shape on a mindless process of elemental attrition is the product of a romantic and instinctual poetic sensibility. The desire to write verse extrinsically 'poetic' is characteristic of young poets and can be as much an earnest of their commitment to their vocation as it's an index of their immaturity, but it's more likely that it will issue in a rhetorical poetry of effect rather than substance. A sizeable proportion of the work printed in Requiem and Celebration is inferior, though it must be said that this inferior work gives abundant evidence of a sizeable talent. I would instance the majority of the poems in section I, a minority of those section II, and the long poem "City in Fire and Snow" (written between 1948 and 1952) which constitutes the fourth and final section. Section III also contains some weak poems, but these – "January Journey" is an obvious example – show the poet in a process of experimenting with style and subject in an attempt to find his own voice.
His own voice. It seems to have taken Ormond no short length of time to attain poetic maturity, but getting there has much to do with working towards a verse-line capable of expressing the rhythms and intonations of a speaking voice. The first person that addresses the reader in "Poem in February" and many other early poems is an impersonalized "I" – a lyrical and romantic first person that has no recognizably individual identity but is generalized and diffused – typically (like the first person in early Dylan Thomas) into the forms and processes of the natural world. The chief limitation of this mode is its tonelessness; longer poems in this manner than are in addition abstruse (as "City of Fire and Snow" and "Doubts of Mary, Madonna" strike me as being) are in danger of inducing boredom in a reader on two counts.
But enough carping. Ormond, I've said, finds his voice: but it would be more accurate to refer to voices – for no poet worth his or her salt has only the one voice, the one tone. In fact it seems to me that the range of voice at Ormond's command at the present time is greater than that of any other established poet writing in English in Wales – and this despite the smallness of his output: greater than that of John Tripp, whose command of voice is considerable, and greater than that of R. S. Thomas, in whose recent impressive verse voice has been whittled down to a tool to serve the specific purpose of theological-philosophical enquiry. This isn't to argue that Ormond is the finest poet currently writing in English in Wales (I wouldn't want, for one thing, to limit his achievement in terms of geographical boundaries), but it furnishes a ground sufficient in itself to value his work highly. Providing, of course, that I can make good my claim...
What Ormond worked through to in the 1950s and 1960s is a poetry that in appearance is simple and plain. Look, for example, at "At His Father's Grave" or these lines from "After a Death":
The tables and chairs are mine, the brass trinket-box,
White plates that write their O's across the dresser,
The coats and shoes in cupboards, the old letters,
The pots and pans the towels, the knives and forks,
The small effects of other people's lives...
Simplicity in poetry is often the product of naivety, of one verse-maker's inability to write in any other way. The simplicity of these lines is something else: at once a quality that has been hard-won (could it have emerged other than from a process of severe self-scrutiny and self-discipline?), and a quality that attests the honesty of the poet's response to what he perceives – the house and late possessions of his newly-dead grandfather. Here is no artificial rhetoric of grief (which is what, by contrast, I find in "Portrait of his Grandfather"), but an unsentimental and quietly moving testimony to the difficulty of speaking at all about a life outside one's own. The speaker is reduced to the bare act of naming objects – objects that mean little or nothing to him, perhaps, but which a natural human sympathy tells him were the intimate, even sacramental belongings of the dead man – outward signs of the inward man. To name them is obliquely to invoke the spirit of their late owner. By coming to know them over a process of time the poet may approach closer to the life lived through them.
Reculer pour mieux sauter: for John Ormond it seems to have been necessary to contract his linguistic horizon (which isn't to deny his plainness its eloquence), to focus on the simplest constituents of his physical world in order to establish a secure platform for his subsequent poetic efforts. From this platform he launched himself outwards with a remade expansiveness, writing in a variety of voices and styles – now plain and direct, now elaborate, ornate, one might even say rococo; he has written small-scale human comedies, poems rich in parabolic and symbolic suggestiveness, and poems that strike me as taking their place as modern additions to what F. R. Leavis called "the line of wit" – dense, paradoxical and conceited poems in which the play of the senses and the play of intellect are inseparably fused. In the remainder of this essay I will try to give some account of this variety.
One of the most immediately attractive qualities which abandoning the impersonal lyric manner released into Ormond's poetry was humour. It's the humour of a sensibility that, keenly aware of the moral complexity of the human condition, refuses either to idealise or criticise what it sees, choosing rather to view life's perennial tragi-comedy in a spirit of dispassionate sympathy, detached involvement. Paradoxical this spirit may be, but there's nothing ambivalent or ambiguous about it. In "Cathedral Builders" Ormond presents the ordinariness of his workmen's domestic lives at ground level and the extraordinariness of their achievements in the high air as aspects of the same thing – their humanity. The poem's ending – it's tricky to quote here as the poem is a sustained whole, a single forward-thrusting sentence – tells us how the builders
stood in the crowd
Well back from the vestments at the consecration,
Envied the fat bishop his warm boots,
Cocked up a squint eye and said, 'I bloody did that.'
Ormond has the ability to render a situation with great economy of means while contriving to select the most telling details. Here we're given both the builders' enviousness of the bishop and their sense of pride in their achievement: for all his pomp and ceremony, the bishop (and the builders half-realise this) would be diminished without the contributions of the common man, for it's the common man who with his skills and daring has raised up to heaven the cathedral-spire symbolic of the aspiration of the human spirit. The comic feeling that imbues the poem's ending is agreeably sane and robust.
The style of "Cathedral Builders" is a middling one: it comprehends both the colloquial energy of the last-quoted line and the incidental felicitousness of "inhabited sky with hammers". To find Ormond at his most elaborate, his most rococo, one turns to "Design for a Tomb", where the dense, even strained language is appropriate to the setting of an earlier historical time and to the involuted chess-game of its lady-subject's lust-life. The voice of the poet soon becomes dryly regretful –
Dwell in this stone who once was tenant of flesh
Alas, lady, the phantasmagoria is over,
Your smile must come to terms with dark for ever.
– where the third line is surely as fine as nay Ormond has written. Elsewhere the writing embraces the wryly punning, as when the memorial which houses the lady's corpse is described as buoyed up "Weightlessly over you who welcomed a little weight", and the sensuously caressive – "Old melodies were loth to leave your limbs". Such incidental felicities as the gardener's hoe which is said to "Chivvy the weeds edging the garden path", and the evocative adverb in "Only to turn dazedly back into your lover's arms" again highlight Ormond's ability to select from many possible choices a word that surprises with its rightness, rendering as no other could the exact curve of the experience. This gift for precision suggest that Ormond observes physical objects and human postures with the eye of a graphic artist, and it's to the point to recall that in his youth there was a period when he wanted to be a painter.
If a reading of "Design for a Tomb" suggests that he was developing as a genuinely witty poet, this impression is confirmed as he goes on writing. A quick and quickening interplay of sense and intellect, a verbal resourcefulness that doesn't stop short of the audacious, a love of pun, paradox and conceit, these are qualities often present in his work of the last fifteen years.
His love of paradox gets its most intense expression in "Definition of a Waterfall", the title-poem of his 1973 collection. Here it is in full.
Not stitched to air or water but to both
A veil hangs broken in concealing truth
And flies in vague exactitude, a dove
Born diving between rivers out of love
In drums' crescendo beat its waters grow
Conceding thunder's pianissimo
Transfixing ancient time and legend where
A future ghost streams in the present air:
From ledge to pool breakneck across rocks
Wild calm, calm chaos skein their paradox
So that excited poise is fiercely dressed
In one long instant's constant flow of rest,
So that this bridegroom and his bride in white
Parting together headlong reunite
Among her trailing braids. The inconstancy
Is reconciled to fall, falls and falls free
This is poetry that excites both sense and intellect on a first reading, so that the investment of thought necessary before it begins to give up its many nuances of meaning isn't something that a reader is unwilling to give. Compressed and concise, the writing doesn't sacrifice image to the play of idea, for there isn't a couplet that doesn't resonate with a greater or lesser degree of metaphorical vitality. So quick is the movement of metaphor – initially from sewing lace to a bird's flight to music – that here one may safely declare, as Dr Johnson did of the metaphysicals, that heterogeneous things are linked with violence together. Ormond expertly wields the oxymoron (the four packed into lines eleven and twelve in particular are likely to bring to mind those "stationary blasts of waterfalls" that among other things so shook Wordsworth in the Simplon Pass) to impress upon us the peculiarity of the fall's condition – an interim state of water between two rivers, a state that embodies simultaneously the qualities of transitoriness and eternality. For the poet the difficulty of writing a highly-wrought poem is likely to come to a head when he has to end it: here Ormond rises to the challenge he's set himself by audaciously comparing the crashing of water at the base of the fall to the consummating orgasm experienced by bride and groom. We are, I think, to conceive (the effort is half-founded in sensuous suggestion, half-abstract in its nature) of the flowing water of the river as the husband and the white water of the fall as the bride, the second reunited with the first at the lower level. But if this is so, the metaphor strikes me as strained: doesn’t the movement by which the river becomes (becomes – that's the point) the fall constitute an alteration – a metamorphosis rather than, as the poet would have it, a separation? It's true that Ormond says "Parting together", when "together" may as well as 'at the same time' convey the sense of a common identity retained even in the apartness of these liquid lovers. Nevertheless, only what has in some sense been divided can be reunified: is the fall truly "inconstant" when it's made of the same stuff as the river? However it may be, the immediate beauty of "Among her trailing braids" is strong against cavil. Finally one must remark the absence of a full stop at the end – unique in Ormond's so carefully-punctuated verse: I presume we're meant to go straight back to the first line and start again, for the poem is ideally circular, as is fitting in the case of a subject which endlessly recreates itself; reading through again, one finds the imagery of the bride picked up in the conception of the fall as a "veil", her love re-expressed in the figure of the diving dove.
Dependent on a complex conceit as its ending is, "Definition of a Waterfall" is by no means Ormond's most conceited poem: this, surely, is "Design for a Quilt", which is to be found in the Penguin selection. Here the act of imagining the girl's quilt at once exercises Ormond's powers of sensuous evocation and exemplifies his intelligence at its wittiest and most playful. After four stanzas evoking the tree, the chief element in the design, the poem continues:
Feather-stitch on every bough
A bird, one neat French-knot its eye,
To sing a silent night-long lullaby
And not disturb her or disbud her.
See that the entwining motives run
In and about themselves to bring
To bed the sheens and mossy lawns of Eden;
For I would have a perfect thing
To echo if not equal Paradise
As garden for her true temptation...
How rich this is! – not only in surface word-play (the quibble in "Feather-stitch", the delicate innuendo of the secondary meaning of "disbud", the double entendre in "bring / to bed") but in the larger elaboration of ideas. The poem is one sustained conceit, the quilt a metaphorical Eden which is seen both as nurturing the girl's innocence through childhood and as providing the natural setting for her "temptation" and sexual initiation (her "disbudding"). In the hands of a poet of lesser talent this conception could easily have come unstuck, with banality in place of its freshness and its tone of affectionate solicitude lapsing into sentimentality. But the writing is taut. Ormond's control never falters. "Design for a Quilt" is a delightful and self-delighting poem and should quicken the nerves of any but the most moribund reader.
I've now touched more than once on the sensuous qualities of Ormond's work: it’s a topic that demands expansion. Sensuous effects in English verse may roughly be divided into 'hard' and 'soft', into masculine and feminine orders of sound and onomatopoeia.3 Keats's sensuousness, for example, is predominantly soft, whereas Hopkins's poetry contains instances of both kinds. Ormond's "Old melodies were loth to leave your limbs" and "The sheens and mossy lawns of Eden" both exemplify the soft, as is in keeping with the female subjects of the two "Design" poems. Yet it wouldn't do to suggest that such effects are commonest in his work: the truth is surely the reverse, for his poetic sensibility, certainly in so far as his mature work is concerned, is notably masculine. The most strongly masculine of creative sensibilities, in which feeling is typically disciplined by intellect (which is neither to suggest that in them feeling must lack intensity, nor to imply that such discipline takes the shape of a domination of 'content' by 'form' – I deny this dualism) – such sensibilities may still from time to time express the feminine in themselves. To find John Ormond's sensuousness at its most 'hard' one may go to "Salmon":
A hundred times
They lunge and strike
Against the hurdles of the rock;
Though hammering water
Beats them back
Still their desire will not break.
They flourish, whip and kick,
Tensile for their truth's
Sake...
This is memorable physical writing, and to feel in its skilful accommodation of phrase to verse-line the formally contained and thereby intensified energies of Sprung Rhythm is to sense the liberating example of an innovatory predecessor: Hopkins – an example in marked contrast to the regressive influence exerted on Ormond's early work by the lesser talent of Dylan Thomas.
I've argued that the emergence of 'voice' in Ormond's poetry was a condition of its maturation. In "After a Death" and "My Dusty Kinsfolk" the reader views persons and events through the medium of a first person which attests the contemplative and feeling involvement of poet with subject. Some of Ormond's more recent poems show him to have taken this process a step further. In them I detect a profounder emphasis on the personal, a franker readiness to reveal and explore his own beliefs, feelings and experiences than was present in the poems of the 1950s and 1960s. The most remarkable example of this development is "An Ending", a moving poem about the death of the poet's mother. Less formal in structure than the typical Ormond poem (his poems' tendency to possess strongly-defined structures is one of their persistent characteristics), "An Ending" in its comparative looseness implies that the author felt the need to relax formal constraints here in order the more effectively to release the personal. The larger part of the poem is taken up with a gradual exploration of three statements uttered by the mother. Dying, she has moved out and away from the dimension inhabited by her son, and entered a state of being in which her perceptions are first altered, then liberated. Her words, her son's only clues to the nature of the strange realm she now occupies, though on the face of it prosaic, come to seem mysteriously elusive – her experience is beyond both the sharing and the imagining. The last movement the poem deals with her death and its aftermath:
At last, in my arms still, those far snows
Finally kept you. The rituals done,
We stayed that night in the house together.
Neighbours fussed, grudgingly left us
Each with the other. I had no fear, mother.
And it was in my waking that I heard them,
My neighbours making up their morning fires
On either side. In the same world as them
I went down into the day that they and I would wear,
The winter sun's new garment. Into the room where you lay
I entered, took back the sheet from your face
And, without grief, grateful for your easy going,
Gave you the token of the love you were aware
No longer of, the kiss you could not share.
Forgive me for what happened then.
My lips upon your forehead tasted the foul grave
And I spat it to my hand and rushed
To wash the error from my proud flesh.
There is an awkwardness about this writing here and there – most noticeably in the obtrusively inelegant chime in the fifth-quoted line (would the early Ormond have allowed it to stand?) – and a certain adjectival stiffness (in "the foul grave" and "my proud flesh") which both witnesses the unpoetical nature of what's being treated, and reads as the deliberately-adopted policy of a poet determined not to be tempted into the insincerities of poetic embroidery. The transition in the passage from a calm and deep tenderness to blunt disgust – "the foul grave" (and, implied in the counter-balancing "my proud flesh", its swift reflection in disgusted self-contempt) is abrupt and stark. A confessional poem, then? I dislike the connotations of the term: it smacks too much of the reluctant admissions of the catholic sinner closeted with his priest and (which may be thought to come to much the same thing) of the pained revelations of the analysand on the couch. We assent to personal poetry when we recognise it as articulating experiences we ourselves have had, or experiences we might come to have, or experiences we can – on account of our common humanity – imagine ourselves having: just so long as those experiences illustrate what Wordsworth called "the primary laws of our nature". "An Ending" surely illuminates one of those primary laws.
Ormond has come a long way since "Poem in February" and "Doubts of Mary, Madonna". His development has been exemplary – and by development I mean, not some sort of poetical running on the spot, but a progression which is a movement forward through new ways of apprehending and embodying that complex of elements which constitutes the raw stuff of poetry. Any young poet writing in English who wants to expand his awareness and knowledge of his craft couldn't fail to find food for thought in a close reading of John Ormond's poetry.
Back to top ^
Notes
1 Indications (1943) featured very early work and included poems by two other poets. John Ormond's Selected Poems appeared from Seren in 1987 and included a substantial number of uncollected poems. He died in 1990.
2 I'm indebted here for the datings given for individual poems to Randal Jenkins's perceptive essay on Ormond in Poetry Wales (Summer 1972).
3 Revising this essay in 2002, I see no reason to re-conceive these terms. There is a masculine and a feminine in the many varieties of sexual identity and behaviour (both heterosexual and homosexual) that cuts across gender boundaries. Some recent feminist literary critics have embraced the notion of a masculine and a feminine in discussing poetry. (See also "The Poetry of C. H. Sisson" on this website.)
Back to top ^