| As
you know, one of the motives of these weekly columns is to link
with our articles on writing poetry; and specifically with choosing
topics for poems. Having selected a topic, the article aims to
show how a range of poets have treated it.
This week,
I decided to choose the word ‘walking’. I put it this way, because
I am interested in how the selection of a specific word may itself
present a challenge and an opportunity for the poet. ‘Walking’
in one sense is a participle derived from the verb ‘to walk’ as
in:
I am walking
down the street towards he setting sun.
It can also
be transitive in some applications, as in:
He met
Gertrude walking her dog in the Jardin du Luxembourg
However,
‘walking’ can also be a noun, indicating the action of a walk:
it used to be used to describe a procession, or a formal walk;
and it is used nowadays mostly in combined forms, as in ‘walking
frame’.
The poet
may use walking to have no more weight than simply describing
the action of getting from one place to another: but this is usually
to be avoided. As we have said before, the key in writing poetry
is to search for the right word; and equally poetry is a form
in which every word is selected for a purpose – never waste a
word! It is worth reading T.S. Eliot (1888 – 1965) to see how
this is done; and interestingly walking is a word he uses very
infrequently:
In the
room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
I should
have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas
I shall
wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
Miss Nancy
Ellicott
Strode across the hills and broke them,
Where the
motion does not have a specific importance, he implies translation
from one point to another often by a sequence of stills, and leaves
the passage from one location to the next to be interpolated by
the reader. Here is a fragment from a poem of mine, The Visitors,
which uses a similar approach, but more explicitly excludes the
idea of walking:
The walls
fall away like mist. Together
we move without walking
over a dark flat plain, under a starless sky.
My breath
is harsh in the still night.
I cannot hear them breathe at all.
Our movement
ceases. Around me,
they turn away, black blocks
melting into the endless plain.
However,
in Eliot’s The Waste Land there is a section called What
the Thunder Said, and it contains the following section, which
makes explicit use of the concept of walking:
Who is
the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
- But who is that on the other side of you?
Even as an
intransitive verb, where the word ‘walking’ is used in poetry,
it can appear in at least three ways: first, in the conventional
observational manner: “He is walking through the fields”; second,
as a method of setting the stage for the poet: “As I was walking
through the fields I saw a host of golden daffodils”; and third,
presenting a scenario for the reader: “Walking across the sun-assailed
desert sands the false horizon shimmers.” Later, some other uses
will become evident.
Here is the
last verse of a poem by Francis Thompson (1859 – 1907), In
no Strange Land:
Yea, in
the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry, —clinging Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water,
Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!
Here, the
use of the word ‘walking’ is, of course, essential: the image
is ‘walking on water’.
 Lewis
Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson; 1832 – 1898) has this, in Through
the Looking-Glass:
The Walrus
and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand:
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
“If this were only cleared away,”
They said, “it would be grand!”
William Blake
(1757 – 1827) in Songs of Innocence (written around 1789
– 90) has a poem called Night, inspired by the biblical
story of the lion lying down with the lamb; this is the penultimate
stanza:
And there
the lion's ruddy eyes
Shall flow with tears of gold,
And pitying the tender cries,
And walking round the fold,
Saying, "Wrath, by his meekness,
And, by his health, sickness
Is driven away
Form our immortal day.
There is
a well-known quote about walking that dates from the Restoration.
The author is William Congreve (1670 – 1729), and it is from his
fifth (and last) play, The Way of the World, which was
produced in 1700. The characters in this fragment from Act IV,
Scene iv, are Mrs. Millamant and Sir Wilfull Witwoud (the details
of the play that lead to this discussion are not important for
this piece!):
MILLAMANT
Have you any business with me, Sir Wilfull?
SIR WILFULL
WITWOUD
Not at present, cousin. Yes, I made bold to see, to come and
know if that how you were disposed to fetch a walk this evening;
if so be that I might not be troublesome, I would have sought
a walk with you.
MILLAMANT
A walk? What then?
SIR WILFULL
WITWOUD
Nay, nothing. Only for the walk's sake, that's all.
MILLAMANT
I nauseate walking: 'tis a country diversion; I loathe the country
and everything that relates to it.
 Congreve
was a remarkable man. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin,
and the Middle Temple where he studied law. His literary apprenticeship
was served under the tutelage of John Dryden (1631 - 1700), the
leading playwright of the day. Congreve wrote five plays, the
last of which was The Way of the World.
Although
The Way of the World (1700) was coolly received when it
was first acted at Lincoln's Inn Fields, it has since come to
be considered one of the most intellectually accomplished of English
comedies. The story revolves around a pair of lovers, Millamant
and Mirabell, who establish a rather unconventional marriage arrangement
based on their knowledge of the way of the world which, as they
know, is inhabited primarily by intriguers, fops, and fools. Unfortunately,
Congreve's wit and his characters' sexual freedom and experimentation
were at odds with the thinking of certain moralists of the day.
Jeremy Collier's (1650 – 1726) A Short View of the Immorality
and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) was a direct attack
on writers such as Congreve and Dryden. Collier succeeded in garnering
public support for his cause by beginning with the accepted neoclassical
doctrine that the purpose of drama is to teach and please and
then pointing out the disparity between theory and practice. Congreve
responded to Collier's accusations in Amendments of Mr. Collier's
False and Imperfect Citations (1698), but the conservative
middle class, determined to make its tastes felt, sided with Collier
and the Society for the Reformation of Manners. It became increasingly
difficult to get a play produced unless it conformed to Collier's
doctrine. Realizing that his protests were in vain, Congreve gave
up playwriting altogether, resolving to "commit his quiet
and his fame no more to the caprices of an audience." He
was only thirty years of age.
For the next
twenty-nine years, he lived mostly on his reputation and the royalties
from his plays. He died on January 19, 1729, in a carriage accident
and was buried in Westminster Abbey. The Duchess of Marlborough,
with whom he was rumored to have been romantically involved, erected
a monument over his grave.
Congreve
was responsible for several remarks that are still current. Here,
for example, are two quotations from his play The Mourning
Bride (1697). The first is the opening lines of the play,
spoken by Almeira:
"Music
has charms to soothe a savage breast,
To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak."
The second
is from Act III, spoken by Zara:
"Heav'n
has no Rage like Love to Hatred turn'd,
Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn'd."
And last,
one from The Old Bachelor (1693), spoken by Sharper:
"Thus
grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure:
Married in haste, we may repent at leisure."
To which
Setter replies:
"Some
by experience find those words misplaced:
At leisure married, they repent in haste."
O.K., so
this has only a tenuous link to ‘walking’. But I thought it was
interesting, and it’s my piece!
The first
poem of this week is by Henry Vaughan (1622 – 1695), who was an
Anglo-Welsh poet and mystic. He was born in 1621 to Thomas Vaughan
and Denise Morgan in Newton-upon-Usk in Breconshire, Wales. In
1638, it is assumed, he entered Oxford University with his twin
brother Thomas who gained fame as a hermetic philosopher and alchemist.
In 1640 Vaughan left Oxford to study law in London for two years.
His studies were interrupted by the Civil War in which Vaughan
briefly took the King’s side. He is thought to have served on
the Royalist side in South Wales sometime around 1645. Vaughan
returned to Breconshire in 1642 as secretary to Judge Lloyd, and
later began to practice medicine. By 1646 he had probably married
Catherine Wise with whom he was to have a son and three daughters.
In 1646 Poems
with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished was published.
This was followed in 1650 by the first part of Silex Scintillans,
a collection of religious poems. Silex Scintillans, meaning 'The
Fiery Flint' or 'The Flashing Flint', “refers to the stony hardness
of his heart, from which divine steel strikes fire.” It was reprinted
in 1655 with a second, additional part. In its preface Vaughan
attributed the transformation to a spiritual awakening brought
about by the poems of 'the blessed man, Mr. George Herbert'.
After the
death of his first wife, Vaughan married her sister Elizabeth
possibly in 1655. Vaughan had another son, and three more daughters
by his second wife. He died on April 23, 1695, and was buried
in Llansantffraed churchyard.
His first
book of poems appeared in 1646, followed by a second volume in
1647. He became ‘converted’ by reading the religious poet George
Herbert (1593 – 1633), also of Welsh origin. (In 1630 Herbert
was rector at Bemerton where he became friends with Nicholas Ferrar
(1592 – 1637) who had founded a religious community in Little
Gidding nearby. The community was founded in 1626 (when Nicholas
was 34). He died in 1637 (aged 45), and in 1646 the community
was forcibly broken up by the Puritans of Cromwell's army. The
memory of the community survived to inspire and influence later
undertakings in Christian communal living. As I am sure you will
all have recognized, one of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets
is called Little Gidding.)
The poem
I have chosen is from Silex Scintillans. It is called They
Are All Gone.
Walking along
the banks of a river is an image where the walking itself is important,
and this image comes up a number of times. This is particularly
true in University towns, for example here is a fragment of a
poem dating from 1657 by Abraham Cowley (1618 – 1667), On the
Death of Mr. William Harvey:
Ye fields
of Cambridge, our dear Cambridge, say
Have ye not seen us walking every day?
Was there a tree about which did not know
The love
betwixt us two?
Henceforth, ye gentle trees, for ever fade;
Or your sad branches thicker join,
And into
darksome shades combine,
Dark
as the grave wherein my friend is laid!
I have relied
rather heavily on poems from the rather distant past, as usual.
Here is an image that is much more modern: it is a poem of mine
called North of Preston, and it uses the image of walking
in another way:
Pylons
walking across the fields
with their feet in the mist.
Naked trees in drypoint
against the agate sky.
Small houses, with their shoulders
hunched against the cold,
crowding together for comfort.
Grey schools,
where the old,
trying to remember the fire and the delight,
face the resentful unawakened young.
Of course,
the pylons do not actually walk, but their standing on four legs,
and the sequence of essentially identical shapes, allows the viewer
to imagine them as walking; the image of the Martian vehicles
in Wells’s War of the Worlds that also appears in the Star
Wars movies might come to mind.
Here is W.B.
Yeats (1865 – 1939), from his 1914 collection, Responsibilities,
a poem called A Coat:
I made
my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
 My
second poem of this week is by Antoine “Fats” Domino, Jr., who
was born in New Orleans 0n February 26th, 1928. One of eight children
in the Domino clan, Fats, as he came to be called, followed the
musical lead of his father, a violinist, and an uncle, a horn
player. At a very young age, he showed an interest in an old upright
piano that a cousin had left with the family for safekeeping,
and soon he was playing it well enough to become a very young
keyboardist in local honky tonks. As a teenager he took a factory
job but continued playing piano whenever he had the chance. He
was a regular at The Hideaway, a local music spot, where he was
noticed by a trumpeter named Dave Bartholomew, who offered him
an opportunity to sit in with his band one evening. Domino jumped
at the chance. Soon, the new Domino-Bartholomew songwriting partnership
was born and would prove to be one of the most successful from
the earliest years of the Rock N’ Roll era. His last big hit was
Walkin’
to New Orleans, and the lyric is our second poem of this
week.
My last poem
of this week is one of my own. It is one of a group of short poems
called In the Country, and this one describes a small village
in the Eden Valley, which lies to the east of the Lake District
in northern England. The poem is In Murton.
I hope you
enjoy the poems this week; it is a challenge to imagine the use
of a single word as the key, but it compels one to think about
the significance of a word – remember our mantra about poetry
being the Search for the Right Word; here we are turning that
on its head! We have the word, and now we are searching for the
right poem!
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