It isn’t a difficult poem to take in. It has the kind of simple line through it that’s essential if a poem is to communicate when you hear it just once. Its clarity of impact is partly a matter of form. Most lines have three strong stresses. Each line is a complete unit of sense, with a natural small pause at its end, and all but the last two stanzas are complete sentences with a longer pause at their end. The two stanzas that are minor sentences – ie sentences without a main clause – are given a bit of extra emphasis and deliberateness by being more strongly rhymed than most of the others. All these features contribute to breaking the poem down into sections that are easily grasped by a listening audience. Staying focused through the progression from one section to another is further aided by clear conjunctions and an element of repetition or reprise, like the repetition of “until”, or the way “beaten” and “punched” are picked up by “Thrashed and stretched and tanned”.

“Map” isn’t difficult, but it is thought-provoking and ultimately mysterious. The combination of clarity with mystery is what gives it its particular kind of effectiveness.

The sense of mystery comes from a kind of disjunction between the poem’s elements – between the calm clarity of its overall composition and the violence of the ideas it contains, and between the ideas being compared to each other. There’s a further uncertainty about the point of the comparison.

The critical theorist I. A. Richards divided metaphors into two parts, tenor and vehicle. The tenor was the idea being expressed, and the vehicle was the image used to express this idea. That gives us a nice, neat – too neat – way of thinking about the imaginative processes involved. In “The Map” I suppose you could say that the image of the destruction and disposal of a body was being used to express the real nature of cartography (perhaps to make us think about how reductive of the infinite complexity of living place mapmaking is) or you could say say the reverse, that cartography was being used to express the nature of killing. Personally I’d say that the two ideas were being brought together or banged against each other to release a flurry of suggestions that can’t be definitively pinned down, that will be different for every reader, but that are strongly felt.

An obvious effect of yoking such heterogeneous metaphor sets together is that each is strongly defined against the other. The violence done to the body seems even more horrifying, gratuitous and densely physical when set against the abstraction of a map. At the same time, it makes us almost feel the abstractness of the map’s lines. The imagination is bounced between opposite poles, between the sensitive tissue of an eyeball and the brittleness of glass, between the ghastly idea of a nipple being beaten absolutely flat and the contour lines on a map, and also between the different connotations of words as they bind the different metaphor sets together – like “punch” which makes us think both of the blow of a fist and of a piercing tool used on an inanimate surface, or “tanned” which suggests the curing of leather and the administering of a beating. There’s a similar effect in the shifting of tones, from the pitiless elegance of “they’ll slit me along my seams” to the crudity of “flopped innards full of stink”.

It’s a poem, in other words, that works simultaneously by the precision of its images and by the gaps between them. I suppose all poems do, but this one does to a marked extent. The biggest gap is the indeterminacy of who or what you are to imagine as speaking. This is what gives the poem its range of applicability, of suggestiveness. I find myself thinking of some kind of almost human fugitive creature in the first stanza, a creature that knows itself fated to an Aztec flaying ritual or the tortures of Marsyas, and later on of the world in the brilliant poem “Pelt” in Michael Symmons Roberts’ Corpus (you can read “Pelt” at http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=3484 ).

http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/sylvia-plath/wuthering-heights/

I don’t think I’ve read this poem on the page since the late seventies, but reading it now makes me aware how much it’s been hovering in my mind since then, sometimes quietly in the background, sometimes distinctly visible and audible.

This is partly because it’s brilliantly written in ways we find in many of Plath’s mature poems. It seems to evolve with almost magical fluency. Ideas and images develop in startling directions and immediately crystallise in unforgettably vivid phrases. The voice flows through complicated sentence and stanza shapes that it seems to negotiate with ease. There’s a sense of balance and completeness throughout, whether at the level of phrase, stanza or whole poem. Take the first two lines:

The horizons ring me like faggots,
Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.

Plath is talking about instability, and makes you feel it both in the image of tilted, disparate, unstable horizons and in the quickening pulse of the second line, but the ideas are solidly planted, with a thoughtful pause at the end of line one, followed by the explanation. Throughout, it’s a poem that lingers over thoughts and impressions, that deliberates and qualifies, that allows time for ideas to ripen and sink in. The line endings work to reinforce punctuation by comma and full stop, subtly heightening the pauses and emphases implied by the grammatical construction rather than conflicting with them. To my mind the sense of instability is the more unsettling for being registered within and played against the solidity of the poem’s construction, as we find in a number of Plath’s poems.

The startling egocentricity of the poem is typical of Plath. From the first words almost till the end, everything keeps bending back to the speaker. The horizons ring her and elude her like false promises, the wind tries to funnel her heat away, the sheep take not things in general but her into the slots of their pupils, the sky leans not on the land but on her. She has a paranoid sense that the whole environment is personally and single-mindedly hostile to her.

But I think it achieves a kind of greatness that I don’t often find in Plath. The egocentricity is extreme but it isn’t imaginatively disabling. The landscape is unforgettably there in its physical desolation. The speaker sees the sheep with a hard, hostile and brilliantly satirical eye, where someone less selfish might have thought of them as suffering the bleakness of the weather as she suffers it. I think she speaks of the “too delicate” grass, the unhinged lintel and sill and the inarticulate air with contempt for their weakness and capitulation rather than pity for their misery, but she’s expressed that misery with almost unsurpassed intensity. Such metaphors of defeat, with the ruined houses, the whitening bones and the wind of destiny speak of a whole history of broken hopes and efforts, a history anyone can feel a sense of on those hills. When she writes “Darkness terrifies it” the insulation of contempt seems to melt away, and her own feelings to merge with those of the grass. In the last three lines I have no sense of the speaker or indeed of Plath, I feel I’m simply looking down into the narrow valleys as the lights come on –

Now in valleys narrow
And black as purses, the house lights
Gleam like small change.

I mean it as an enormous compliment when I say that those lines could have been written by the Larkin of “Nothing To Be Said”, not just because Larkin was a great poet but because the very anonymity of the ending seems like a stepping into something more universal than the sensibility of either Larkin or Plath.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all she sang there stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

Expressing the iambic rhythm in your reading necessitates almost unnaturally heavy stresses on the first syllable of “Even” in line 3 of the stanza and on “may” and “all” in line 5.

Why is this significant? Mainly, I suppose, as a contribution to the hypnotic, incantatory artificiality of the rhythm, which seems to me designed to put to sleep a critical response to what the poet is saying. This rhythm, and the phrasal repetitions make it difficult to hold the thread of an argument that has an air of scrupulous, almost pedantic precision but dissolves into vagueness at every turn. For example, the massive emphasis on “even” suggests someone wanting to concede every possible counter argument before making his claim (emphasising his willingness to do this of course adds rhetorical force to his argument). Logically in the language of Stevens’ time it should be followed by “were” (the subjunctive to express a counter-factual statement or an extremely unlikely possibility) but the indicative “was” virtually concedes that the unlikelihood isn’t really so great. The fifth line segues from the tentativeness of a heavily emphasised “may” to the grand assertiveness of a heavily emphasised “all”. Line six gives a wonderful physical presence and power to the grinding and gasping of water and wind only to be followed by the assertion that what we heard was she and not the grinding sea at all. In what sense or context the assertion is made is quite unclear – whether in the context of the whole situation or more specifically in her song.

Anyone can multiply examples and I daresay that what I’m saying is completely banal. Of course I’m not claiming that Stevens’ pretended logic should be examined as logic and found wanting. He pretends a logical analysis in order to effect the brilliantly precise orchestration of a series of impressions of the paradoxical relationship between the singer and the song on the one hand and the sea on the other, a relationship in which, from the point of view taken in the poem, they’re at once completely separate from and inseparably involved with each other.

I’m sure you can get this feeling without seeing how it is reflected in the metre, but its reflection there adds to the beauty of the poem.

Long sentences subtly inflected by metre and stanza pattern are characteristic of Adam Thorpe’s style and essential to what he does. He’s a poet of complex, nuanced reflection, a poet who weaves things together rather than isolating them, who makes you feel whole sequences of ideas taking light from, generating and collapsing into others. The deepest pleasures and illuminations of his writing are to be found in following these long tracking movements of feeling and thought.

Take this from “The Swimming Pool (Kinshasa, 1968)”:

Our gardener would rake its gloom
like a patch of ground, stirring it

to a distressed, even darker core
of the almost-living and the nearly drowned:

scooped with a net for the rusty bucket,
he’d pour them out in the no-man’s-land

before the proper bush: each night’s haul
a sprawl of drunken guests, bristling

with feelers and sodden legs, still
in a rush to be free: capsized hulls with oars,

tiny nests of torment …

This is brilliantly precise, vivid description of the remembered scene, with the division into couplet-length stanzas holding a magnifying glass of attention over the details even as the syntax and punctuation insistently pull us on past them, even at a point (the colon after “drowned”) where we might have been allowed to stop. The alertness of the language makes itself felt at every level, in the immaculate pacing of syntax and line-ending, in the patterning and expressiveness of sound, and in the depth of resonance in individual words. There’s a wonderful imaginative energy behind the passage’s metaphorical transformations, particularly, for me, in the transformation of overturned bugs into capsized hulls with oars.  The mere presence of such imaginative energy in the description of suffering creates frissons of cruelty and perversity which both suggest the fascinated horror of the child staring into the pool and (later in the poem) turn to sharp compassion. But of course much more is going on than just description of an African swimming pool, or even the reliving of a haunting childhood memory. Ripples of analogy carry our imaginations through a range of human indignities and catastrophes. These obviously include the catastrophes of Africa, particularly of the Congo, and of Europe’s relation to them. Kinshasa was Leopoldville, the administrative heart of King Leopold’s murderous exploitation of the Congo and its peoples, chillingly investigated in Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost and the inspiration for Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The very phrase “heart of darkness” seems to be recalled by “darker core”. 1968 is only a few years after the horrors of the first Congolese civil war. Several phrases within the passage glow with a particular heat in the context of the Congo’s prolonged sufferings. Later in the poem it’s easy to associate the boy’s helpless compassion for the insects with the ineffectuality of Western aid in that region. Crucially, though, the flow of suggestions is never stilled or hardened into allegory or into a single set of metaphorical relations. The poem keeps moving on, one idea keeps turning into another.

“The Swimming Pool” illustrates key strengths of the volume as a whole. None of Thorpe’s poems stay where they start; all move through wide circles of association, most gathering a considerable weight of implication and reflection on the way. A number involve striking quasi-Metaphysical conceits, like “Subtraction”, a poem set in the Carthaginian quarry, which begins “El Haouaria, where they hollowed out / Carthage, is now a vaulted omega of absence”, and explores this thought and its implications for another 22 lines. In a sense a Metaphysical conceit is very abstract in that it uses a concrete vehicle to define abstract ideas. What is impressive in Thorpe’s poetry, though, is how much the intellectual and abstract returns to the concrete. In my last quotation, an abstract idea is given a wonderful physical presence by language. Equally important is something I’d relate to the fact that Thorpe is a novelist as well as a poet. Ideas in this book are always developing out of and returning to richly evoked experiences, to situations and stories – in this case the actual experience of visiting the quarry, the imagined experience of the slaves who worked there (“Beneath the silence you can hear the moans”) and Thorpe’s concern for his own children.

Parents, children, hollowing, absence. There’s a powerful group of poems on the death of the poet’s father in which the hollowing out of the father and his absence after death are strongly felt, and generate subtle thoughts about the emptiness underlying all life. This group in the middle of the volume perhaps forms its imaginative core. And yet these pieces, and the book as a whole, are anything but depressing. Poem after poem glints with wit, sometimes darkly sardonic, sometimes humorous and warm, sometimes both at once. “Niagara” – a beautiful expression of wonder at nature’s power – includes a description of the sudden vanishing of the river’s flow “as if God were suddenly to come across // His own absence, or that human trick / He’s never quite fathomed // called letting your hair down, / called letting everything go.” Look at the blending of tones there, the subtlety of the theological humour, the rueful yet resilient acceptance of mortality, the impossibility of separating the downbeat from the upbeat, the sophisticated poise, the lightness of touch and, at the same time, the groundedness suggested by the colloquial expressions. Voluntary richly repays reading and rereading for the range of its subject matter, the sensitivity and depth of its feeling for life and the way it enlarges one’s sense of the possibilities of poetic expression.

This review appeared in Acumen 74 and I would like to thank Acumen’s editors for their permission to post it here.

You can find the text at http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=25361

In Yellow Tulips: Poems 1968 – 2011 the poem appears with the dedication “i.m. Mick Imlah”.

The appearance of Yellow Tulips is a major publishing event and there’s a great deal in “At the Kerb” that I admire very much indeed, both for its sheer accomplishment and for its imaginative daring. To take the last point, how many modern English poets would dare write in such an overtly artificial way, starting a poem with the syntactical inversion of the first three words and the archaic flavour of the repeated use of “bestow”? In fact almost every every separate phrase in the first and third stanzas is full not just of artificiality but of older art, whether in syntax, imagery, diction, or all three at once. The phrasing of the second line pretty obviously recalls the fourth stanza of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, but this is a minor flourish compared to how strongly the imagery of the stanza as a whole evokes funerary processions in Greek and Roman sculpture and vase painting. The lack of syntactical drive in the first four lines, the absence of enjambement, the lingering, hesitant rhythms, and the feminine endings of the odd-numbered lines all support this evocation of a solemn funerary frieze. To my ear line 12 catches the note of a poem like Ben Jonson’s “Slow, slow, fresh fount” almost exactly. The middle stanza is different in some ways: its simile is drawn from the world of twentieth century political atrocity and develops through a series of three fast-moving scenes like little film clips. But even this stanza sounds archaic with its elaborately formal construction and the hint of personification in its first line.

These features give the poem a ceremoniousness, a dignity and a formal beauty that honour the memory of the person who has died and seek to bring consolation to the grief of his loss, rather as the rituals of a funeral service do. They contrast poignantly with the brute fact of his illness and death. Civility and art do what they can to create a shelter for human feeling and values in face of the most absolute reminder of how little those values can ultimately prevail. The historical allusiveness of the poem and its impersonality make us feel how these human values have been built up and have endured over time, how behind them is the accumulated effort of whole cultures, a whole species. All these things and the sheer beauty of its phonetic flow make me admire the poem and be moved by it.

Yet somehow, reading the poem as it appears in Yellow Tulips, with dedication, I’m not quite satisfied or convinced. It feels as if there’s something missing. The poem pushes things so far in the direction of formal art and tradition, is so sumptuously beautiful in its sounds and phrasing, uses metaphors so far removed from the particularity of Imlah’s life and death, that he himself and any individual feeling for him seem to disappear. And perhaps this is how things should be. This isn’t a fictional creation but a poem about a real person and a real death. If it was a fictional creation the creator would have to create the illusion of a real individual person in his poem, but people who actually knew Imlah in real life can take the real individual and the grief of his friends for granted. They will be moved by the things that are in the poem without feeling a lack because of the things that aren’t, that for them don’t need to be stated. Those who didn’t know him have no right to expect a confessional baring of the heart by the poet who did, and the poet himself might well feel that such a wearing on his sleeve of too personal feelings would be indecent and exploitative.

In fact the more I think about it the more I feel that my dissatisfaction with “At the Kerb” as it appears in Yellow Tulips is not to do with the reticence of the poem itself, or with its formality, but with the way this reticence is compromised in the collected version. The dedication moves it from being a poem with a clear separation between its public and private faces to one which lets down its guard just enough to prompt one to read it with the expectation of more intimate disclosures than it is in its nature to make.

Here’s a famous poem whose success depends on how completely it embodies an opposite principle, a poem that lives by its blaze of personal conviction and the power with which it tells us how Shelley feels:

ENGLAND IN 1819

An old, mad, blind, despis’d, and dying king,
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn – mud from a muddy spring,
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,
A people starv’d and stabb’d in the untill’d field,
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edg’d sword to all who wield,
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay,
Religion Christless, Godless – a book seal’d,
A Senate – Time’s worst statute unrepeal’d,
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

In fact wouldn’t a universal application of “show, don’t tell” napalm pretty well all poetry of intense personality, passion or personal conviction? And doesn’t “show, don’t tell” depend very heavily on shared responses? This makes it unlikely to produce a poetry that disturbs a pre-existing consensus of attitudes and emotions.

I’ve just heard Ruth Padel’s broadcast of the Wordsworth Trust poetry workshop meeting on Radio 4. She talked about the importance of line breaks and used William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheel Barrow” to illustrate how unexpected they could be. What strikes me is how much emphasis these breaks throw on nouns. Three of the four breaks within stanzas come between nouns and their modifiers. Cumulatively this is highly unnatural. Moreover, it leaves each noun forming a one-word line poised on the edge of the gap between stanzas – a gap that itself seems huge in proportion to the space taken by the words it separates. This throws an extreme emphasis on those three nouns, but that’s not all. Two of the modifiers are themselves words we’d most commonly find as nouns, though they’re being used adjectivally here – “wheel” and “rain”. The effect is to emphasise how much what we see in the poem is made up of things being brought together.

As Padel pointed out, this is a highly patterned poem. She talked about the stresses (two to each first line, one to each second). In terms of words, there’s a pattern of three words to each first line, with one to each second line (and all the second lines are two syllables). And there’s that emphasis on nouns that I’ve mentioned. So it’s a highly artful poem, but what it talks about couldn’t be more ordinary. This leads to another beauty – the triumphant way it courts and overcomes bathos. Each stanza builds up to and emphasises its final word, but each final word is and refers to something almost startlingly ordinary. Somehow instead of these things seeming anticlimactic, the poem makes them glow. They arrive with a kind of modest, witty triumph in their sheer expectedness and rightness, as if saying “Ha! you thought you were in for a conjuring trick but I’m just showing you what actually is.”

I hope I’m allowed to quote from the Guardian article in which Padel talks about the effect of line endings. Her point isn’t unusual in itself, but the fineness with which she expresses it is:

“Poems are sound: the “ear” is crucial. But you need the eye too. Readers take in a poem through a delicate triangulation of ear, brain and eye. The white space around words on a page is visual silence. It shapes the poem like barometric pressure, or like a musical pause” (Ruth Padel, “Deconstructing Poetry on the Radio”, The Guardian, Friday 2 November).

Seferis once wrote,

Any explanation of a poem is, I think, absurd. Everyone who has the slightest idea of how an artist works knows this. He may have lived long, he may have acquired much learning, he may have been trained as an acrobat. When, however, the time comes for him to create, the mariner’s compass that directs him is the sure instinct that knows, above all, how to bring to light or sink in the twilight of his consciousness the things (or, as I should prefer to say, the tones) that are necessary, that are unnecessary or that are just sufficient for the creation of this something: the poem. He does not think of these materials; he fingers them, he weighs them, he feels their pulse.[i]

I ask the reader to accept that although some of what I say may look like an attempted explanation of the poem, it’s really only an explanation of the ideas and associations that make me respond to the poem as I do.

I want to glance briefly at how the long Elpenor passage in Section II plays against the short reference to Socrates in Section III – at least in my mind.

Elpenor is a recurring figure in Seferis’s poems and essays. In the Odyssey, he was the youngest of Odysseus’s companions on the journey home. After Odysseus had subdued the witch Circe she told him he could find the way back to Ithaca by going to the land of the dead to ask directions of the ghost of the prophet Tiresias. Elpenor had gone to sleep drunk on Circe’s roof; hearing the crew preparing to launch ship he fell off the roof and broke his neck.

The ineffectuality of the Elpenor figure in “Thrush II” is obvious. He’s muttering rapidly, urgently trying to engage the woman he speaks to; she hardly attends to him, speaks briefly and dismissively when she speaks at all, and peremptorily interrupts him in mid sentence to break the conversation off completely. I think that even without the reference to Elpenor we would think of him as young because of his garrulousness, the sheer tumbling urgency of his attempt to explain his feelings to her when she’s so blatantly not interested in him or them, the naive sincerity that makes him unable either to stop himself or to adjust what he says to put it in a form that might be more persuasive to her, and the way idealism and sensuality are fused in his feelings. There’s a lovely delicacy of sound and suppleness of flow to the way his outpourings are phrased by Keeley and Sherrard, though I can’t say how true this is to the style of the Greek[ii]. Some of his images are images of terror, oppression or remorse. One can interpret these intellectually in terms of the ambiguity of the Greek cultural inheritance, both inspiring and overwhelming, but intellectual interpretation isn’t the point, as Seferis tells us in the prose passage I quoted at the beginning. The real point is to feel them as a way of experiencing (among many other things) what it is like to live with the sense of such a legacy.  Other images are intensely  sensuous in a way that fuses voluptuousness and erotic yearning with chastity (the coolness, the moonlight, the delicacy and evanescence of the images, the earnestness of the attempt to understand and explain):

                     And yet the statues
bend sometimes, dividing desire in two,
like a peach; and the flame
becomes a kiss on the limbs, then a sob,
then a cool leaf carried off by the wind;
they bend; they become light with a human weight.
You don’t forget it.’

In a way these statues with their “strange virginity” are reminiscent of the figures sculpted on Keats’s Grecian urn, so vibrant with variously touching and intoxicating suggestions of life, so haunting in the way they stir human feeling but themselves ultimately “cold”. But for the reader of Seferis they and their coldness have a very different meaning. Seferis’s concern isn’t with the intersection of timelessness with time, it’s with the relation between being Greek now and the Hellenism of antiquity. Within the poem the Elpenor figure can neither escape the statues’ imaginative power nor, it seems, take it anywhere or do anything with it. The effect remains locked within his own fevered subjectivity. Without my seeing any definite evidence for this it feels to me as if Seferis shares both the young man’s yearning to grasp more fully the mysterious messages and promises that the statues appear to offer and his frustration at his inability to do so, or to communicate his feelings to the woman he’s speaking to. The yearning may be frustrated because the statues’ spells and promises are illusory or because Elpenor is too weak and self-involved to seize them properly or because the disastrousness and corruption of the present crushes the possibility of doing so.

However, Section III does make one feel the continuing power of another inheritance from Greek antiquity in the short allusion to Socrates. This is a power that survives the disastrousness of German occupation and the repression preceding the Greek civil war just as it survived the death sentence on Socrates at the beginning of the fourth century BC. It is a power marked by calm, by stillness, by immoveable self-possession, by selflessness, and has an intrinsic moral weight that doesn’t need to be spelled out. I find the moment when we hear Socrates immensely moving:

And then the voice of the old man reached me; I felt it
falling into the heart of day,
quietly, as though motionless:
‘And if you condemn me to drink poison, I thank you.
Your law will be my law; how can I go
wandering from one foreign country to another, a rolling stone.
I prefer death.
Whose path is for the better only God knows.’

We know that the old man is Socrates because his words are based on Socrates’s speech in Plato’s Apology, although what has immediately preceded his appearance might have led us to expect Tiresias (the previous five lines are based on Odysseus’s visit to the land of the dead when he offers blood to the ghosts so that they can speak to him and specifically so that Tiresias can tell him the way home).

In ‘Letter on “The Thrush”’ Seferis writes

I try to understand how it came about that in “The Thrush” I had to substitute Socrates for Tiresias. My first answer is that I saw elsewhere the tones that were necessary for the ensemble that I was attempting to complete; the idea of the Theban never even occurred to me. Then – autobiographically – because the Apology is one of the books that has most influenced me in my life; perhaps because my generation has grown up and lived in this age of injustice. Thirdly because I have a very organic feeling that identifies humaneness with the Greek landscape.

I think there’s a fundamental point that Seferis doesn’t make anything of here, perhaps because it is so obvious. Elpenor failed to get home. Socrates the Athenian is home and is saying he would rather die than go into exile, and that being sentenced to death by his country’s laws doesn’t affect his commitment to her and love of her. In the context of Seferis’ work, with his utter dedication to Greece and at the same time his sense of contemporary Greeks as exiles from their own cultural heritage and being, with his recurring images of exile and of the search for homecoming, this moment has immensely powerful resonances both of bitterness at contemporary Greece’s injustice and of an inspiring example of how to meet such injustice.

The first part of the second section is beautifully translated in a way that generally sticks very close to the literal meanings of the Greek but achieves a natural fluency and force in English that I find quite remarkable. How many writers could set a scene as vividly and economically, with such sensitive use of line endings to space and pace things out as that first paragraph does? And it’s not just a matter of setting the scene with maximum clarity; we already begin to feel something of that breathless urgency that dominates the direct speech of Elpenor in the rush towards some of those line endings, and the faint stumbling at them, as if the speaker has to pause a moment to catch up with himself. At the end of the paragraph the stanza-break doesn’t just suggest the yawning gulf between the narrative voice and the young man’s babbling ardour; it allows us space to prepare ourselves for the very different note sounded by the sudden shift of tone. Two utterly different worlds seem to collide: a bald world of cigarette butts, failed pick-ups, gramophones and frying fish, against the magical world of the young man’s speech with its intense sensuality and its elusive shimmering between callowness and vision.

Disaster comes in the rhymed second half of the section, which I find very hard to read in Keeley and Sherrard’s version. We’re suddenly plunged into phrasing that’s twisted by syntactical inversions, that’s sometimes grotesquely elaborate and sometimes grossly bathetic, apparently largely for the sake of keeping the rhyming structure of this part of the original. All right, in suddenly switching to regular rhyme Seferis is (I think) trying to suggest something of what he saw as the glibness and triteness of commercial popular song, and I think he does create a sense of something rather desperately brittle in the attempt to keep threatening realities at bay. But he doesn’t do so crudely or to an extent that overwhelms other elements. I can’t say exactly how the tone would strike a Greek speaker, but the language of the Greek is certainly much more straightforward than that of the English. To take one small example, “yineka pooh ehases to fos” literally means “Woman who lost / has lost the light”. That is simple in a way that may be meant to strike us as simplistic when we read it simply as a song in itself, but that also opens out into the larger ideas of “Thrush” as a whole, with the blind Oedipus and the wonderful passage on the light in the final section. In fact I don’t think we need to read that section to find the ideas suggested by “yineka pooh ehases to fos” suddenly haunting and disturbing despite the glibness surrounding it, and I’d say the same for the penultimate lines of all the stanzas in the song. In fact my feeling  is that in the Greek the poet and the parodist entwine throughout this section, but that the parodist virtually stifles the poet in the English version.

(Apologies for the clumsy transliteration: I’ve spent half an hour trying but can’t find how to carry Greek letters over from Word to WordPress.)

Anyway, a poetry lover who doesn’t know Seferis can give herself a treat by going to “Thrush” at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/181853 and just reading it a few times.

I don’t want to be intrusive with my commentary but will throw in a few further remarks. Some are  very subjective and they can easily be ignored.

Looking just at the first section, the passage from “sometimes, near the sea, in naked rooms” strikes me as extraordinarily evocative in a sensual way, haunting and emotionally suggestive, and I think that Keeley and Sherrard have given a compelling musicality to their translation. Here, it doesn’t bother me at all that I find some of what’s being said elusive or ambiguous; in fact I positively Iike the sense that the poet’s thoughts and impressions are mysterious even to himself, that they arrive in all their unanswerable vividness without his feeling compelled or perhaps being able to interpret them completely. A condition of this is that key emotional suggestions are, or at least seem to me to be, clear, simple, strong, and filled with Seferis’s distinctive sensibility. Take the way loneliness and alienation are evoked in

Sometimes, near the sea, in naked rooms
with a single iron bed and nothing of my own
watching the evening spider

“Naked rooms” and “watching the evening spider” may seem to draw us momentarily close to the Eliot of “Preludes”, but “nothing of my own” takes us into tones that separate Seferis from Eliot (the grumpiness that’s been there from the beginning of the poem) and (together with “near the sea”) strikes a taproot into Seferis’s preoccupation with a sense of personal, ethnic and cultural displacement and alienation, figured throughout Mythistorema  and in many of his other poems in images of hopeless wandering*. Smyrna, Syracuse and Alexandria, of course, are all part of the lost greater Greece of classical and Hellenistic times, and Rhodes hadn’t been reunited with Greece yet when Seferis wrote”Thrush”, though it did become part of the Greek nation in the month of “Thrush”’s first publication, so all these names carry a sense of cultural and national loss**. The erotic images of the beautiful woman, lost or only dreamed, and of the lost southern ports have a powerful sensual immediacy that makes a sharp impact on the imagination in the way so much does in the work of this very physical poet, but “returning” connects the idea of this woman elusively and ambiguously with a fundamental element in Seferis’s poetic imagination, something also seen in the hopelessly yearning attempt to find home in Mythistorema, the glimpse of the return of Aphrodite at the end of “Thrush” itself, and a similar glimpse at the end of “Memory I”. I think the combination of clarity and imaginative force with elusiveness is crucial because it’s together that they draw us into Seferis’s own imagination and into feelings that for the poet himself are both intense and elusive because they are a part of his very self, not ideas to detach for abstract contemplation. I think it’s a great testimony to Keeley and Sherrard’s skill that they have captured both qualities so delicately and so strongly in this passage.

I find the first part of the section less satisfactory in their translated form. Here too, some lines are wonderfully fresh and immediately effective; in others, I feel the power of the idea but it seems to reach me muffled by being a little stilted, if only by Keeley and Sherrard’s own high standards. My Greek was never nearly good enough to know whether they are at all awkwardly expressed in the original.

*    More broadly, I think Seferis’s art in this poem is much sparer, subtler and more mature than that of “Preludes”. He doesn’t tell us anything about the spider, he leaves it to be as a piece of the external world that exists on its own terms, and this reticence allows us to imagine a range of ways in which the lonely man watching it might feel about it. He might see it as lonely like him, or as sinister, he might contrast its purposefulness with his own passivity or he might watch it and be made to feel helpless and entrapped, as Seferis felt helpless and entrapped by his role in the Greek foreign ministry during and after the war. In contrast, the life of Eliot’s brilliant poem is in its lurid subjectivity. “At the corner of the street / A lonely cab horse steams and stamps”. Who knows whether a cab horse in such circumstances does feel lonely? All that matters for Eliot is that it reminds him of his own loneliness, and by projecting this onto the horse and everything else in the poem he can drown the reader in it too. “Preludes” is very much a young man’s poem – an extraordinarily brilliant young man’s poem, of course  – but more generally I feel that Seferis’s rootedness in and happiness with the body goes with a healthier, more robust attitude to the external world than Eliot enjoyed.

** In the case of Smyrna, of personal loss too.