{"id":614,"date":"2012-01-05T12:27:48","date_gmt":"2012-01-05T12:27:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=614"},"modified":"2014-02-11T22:06:09","modified_gmt":"2014-02-11T22:06:09","slug":"alice-oswald-a-sleepwalk-on-the-severn-lines-1-12","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=614","title":{"rendered":"Alice Oswald, A Sleepwalk on the Severn, lines 1 – 12"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Sleepwalk on the Severn<\/em> kept coming into my mind while I was reading Memorial<\/em>. It\u2019s full of passages of extreme beauty and originality that I should have written about when I first read it. An overall review would be redundant now but I want to say something about the first twelve lines of the prologue:<\/p>\n

Flat stone sometimes lit sometimes not
\nOne among many moodswung creatures
\nThat have settled in this beautiful
\nUncountry of an estuary<\/p>\n

Swans pitching your wings
\nIn the reedy layby of a vacancy
\nWhere the house of the sea
\nCan be set up quickly and taken down in an hour<\/p>\n

All you flooded and stranded weeds whose workplace
\nIs both a barren mudsite and a speeded up garden
\nFull of lake offerings and slabs of light
\nWhich then unwills itself listen<\/p>\n

It\u2019s immediately obvious that we\u2019re reading a major poet, not just in the startling beauty of a line like \u201cfull of lake offerings and slabs of light\u201d or the startling originality of a coinage like \u201cuncountry\u201d but in more muted effects, like that of the first line. Simplicity, originality and sheer poetic skill come together in a way that is subtle and spell-binding almost from the first word. On the level of lexis and of statement what could be more ordinary, more banal, more bathetic even, than this line? But of course no reader of poetry would register that level on its own. The spell created by rhythm is also part of the meaning. The pattern of stresses makes the words space themselves out with a slight pause between \u201cflat\u201d and \u201cstone\u201d and longer pauses between \u201cstone\u201d and \u201clit\u201d and between \u201clit\u201d and \u201csometimes\u201d[i]<\/a>. This gives the line a stately, almost incantatory pace and a tone that I think weirdly combines rapt contemplation with a suggestion of mischievous humour at the (yes) ordinariness<\/em> of what is being so extraordinarily evoked.<\/p>\n

Oswald\u2019s style is formal, each word carefully weighed by the poet and asking to be weighed as carefully by the reader. Formality can seem stiff and imprisoning (as I think it does in the rhythms of her recent TS Eliot Award rival Sean O\u2019Brien). It can also be full of suppleness and grace, as it is here, both in the movement of the verse and still more in the movements of meaning. In the hands of a really capable poet formality seems less like a restraint than a liberation; it creates a kind of field of aesthetic force within which a dancing multiplicity of suggestions and associations, some fleeting, others sustained and developed, can spin off from the poem as it proceeds. Everything that carries meaning in poetry is involved in creating this effect. I\u2019ve said something about metre. I also want to comment on one or two semantic details, and a couple of allusions.<\/p>\n

Semantically there\u2019s an obvious brilliance about the invention of the word \u201cuncountry\u201d to describe the estuary. Less conspicuous perhaps but almost equally important is the way Oswald releases multiple energies from a simple word like \u201csettled\u201d, which both evokes a vast, shadowy sense of all the creatures, including the swans and humans, who\u2019ve made their homes in the Severn Estuary[ii]<\/a> and also makes me see a highly specific image of the flat stone itself slowly spinning through the water and settling in the mud. I say \u201cme\u201d because this may only be a personal image. Nothing explicitly says that the stone is small enough to fall through the water in that way. But I do think my image is triggered by something out there in the writing rather than just by personal association: \u201cmoodswung<\/em>\u201d in the line before slips the image of a rocking movement like of a small flat stone falling through flowing water into my mind. In other words the verbal brilliance isn\u2019t just an obvious matter of making up words but also a subtly inventive sensitivity to the subliminal pressure words exert on each other. The potentially flat word \u201cbeautiful\u201d seems to me to become extraordinarily charged and renewed by being placed on the line break before \u201cuncountry\u201d. Finally, I want to pick out the unusual use of the word \u201ccreatures\u201d. While this makes us think of \u201ccreatures\u201d in the modern meaning of the word (ie biologically living beings), its application to a stone harks back to the older medieval and renaissance meaning, which included all created things<\/em>, animate or inanimate. The use of the word in such a sense would be enough on its own to precipitate thought, but here it\u2019s integrally connected to the sense of the passage as a whole.<\/p>\n

Allusions give a continual added depth and texture to the writing. Among the more fleeting of them is the echo of the beginning of Keats\u2019 \u201cBright star\u201d sonnet heard in the first two words of this poem. Just put the phrases \u201cBright star\u201d and \u201cFlat stone\u201d together, remembering that both are vocatives and each is the beginning of a poem, and you can see how delicately crafted but strong the allusion is. Fleeting though it is, an incidental enhancement rather than a determinant of larger meanings, it\u2019s an instance of something I think is pervasive in the whole poem and in Oswald\u2019s work in general \u2013 a volatile richness of imaginative texture achieved partly through a subtle mastery of allusion. I think there\u2019s a lot to be said about it.[iii]<\/a><\/p>\n

However, the really extensive allusion in this passage is to Shakespeare\u2019s The Tempest<\/em>, to the great speech in which Prospero renounces his art:<\/p>\n

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
\nAnd ye that on the sands with printless foot
\nDo chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
\nWhen he comes back; you demi-puppets that
\nBy moonshine do the green sour ringlets make
\nWhereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime
\nIs to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
\nTo hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid,
\nWeak masters though ye be, I have bedimmed
\nThe noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,
\nAnd ‘twixt the green sea and the azured vault
\nSet roaring war …<\/p>\n

What the passages share is the stance of speaking to a world in which everything is imagined as alive \u2013 in which all creatures <\/em>in the older meaning of the word are imagined as creatures in the modern sense. This is the sense in which Ariel, speaking on Prospero\u2019s behalf earlier in The Tempest<\/em>, has said \u201cThe powers, delaying, not forgetting, have \/ Incens\u2019d the seas and shores, yea, all the<\/em> creatures<\/em> \/ Against your peace\u201d. I call it an allusion, but really it\u2019s the recovery of an imaginative stance of extraordinary poetic power. Its power as sheer recovery of an older way of seeing the world is testified to by its impact on people who haven\u2019t made any conscious association with The Tempest<\/em>, and may never have read or seen it. This, of course, is the fundamental test. I find confirmation of my personal sense that Oswald is a really major writer in the ability of her poetry to speak straight to the hearts and imaginations of people who are imaginative and sensitive to words without necessarily being literary specialists.<\/p>\n

At the same time, I think it enhances one\u2019s reading of this passage if one does see it against the background of Prospero\u2019s speech. The visually open texture of Oswald\u2019s prologue, the shifting line lengths and the lack of punctuation give it a wavery, evanescent quality appropriate to the water-and-moonlight world it describes, and this quality defines itself against the way Prospero\u2019s speech unfolds towards a climax through a surging accumulation of sets of parallel clauses. But syntactically, despite the lack of punctuational signals, Oswald\u2019s prologue is also a single sentence (one which goes on for another 16 lines after my quotation). Its surface may be full of swirls and eddies but under them, included within the passage, there\u2019s the powerful swell of the speech from The Tempest<\/em>. Of course the suggestiveness of the allusion leads beyond the passage itself in multiple ways, among them into thoughts about similarities and dissimilarities between Prospero and the dream-led note-taking figure of the poet in Oswald\u2019s poem, and the relation between this figure and the power of the moon (and beyond it of the whole natural order) as she describes it. And I think the allusion is an act of homage, the expression of a debt, specifically to Shakespeare\u2019s art and way of seeing in The Tempest<\/em> but also more generally and broadly to older ways of seeing and writing that flow into and through A Sleepwalk<\/em> and that we follow both into the poem and beyond it. It suggests a writer who not only absorbs and richly transmutes influences from the wider literary tradition but who consciously enters into it as a participant in a great ongoing conversation between poems, plays (with allusions to Under Milk Wood<\/em> and more surprisingly Waiting for Godot<\/em> as well as to The Tempest<\/em>) and no doubt novels too.<\/p>\n

\n
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[i]<\/a> Oswald doesn\u2019t need the spacebar to create this effect: it happens of itself because two stressed syllables coming together fend each other off like the positive poles of two magnets. This creates various kinds of animating tension. The absence of punctuation or extra spacing means that we\u2019re visually impelled to read the line continuously but the metre prevents our doing so. You just have to imagine commas after \u201cstone\u201d and \u201clit\u201d to see how the tension would collapse as the movements created by inner ear and by eye were brought into alignment with each other, an intonation pattern appropriate to the introduction of qualifying phrases in speech was introduced and the stately, almost incantatory pace of the line as actually written dissolved into prose.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[ii]<\/a> Wide and varied perspectives open and flow into each other here \u2013 the movement of peoples through history and prehistory but also minor individual relocations with furniture vans; biological adaptations and colonisations as different plant and animal species flow into the area; plant and rock sedimentations over geological ages, and so on.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[iii]<\/a> Of course the shimmering interplay between Keats\u2019 scene and tone and Oswald\u2019s will have different effects on different people, and on the same people at different times. For me now the effects include simple pleasure at the sudden opening of a verbal window on Keats\u2019 very different nocturne; pleasure in the wit with which Oswald subverts Keats\u2019 bright star with her own flat stone or \u2013 contrariwise \u2013 her flat stone with Keats\u2019 star; recognition that stars and stones have their own different beauties; recognition that romantic yearning for fixity and for the serene, ethereal, intangible beauty of stars as seen from earth has one kind of beauty and goodness, while mature resignation to change and to passivity and a prosaic valuing of the solidity and presentness of stones have another; and recognition that all these things represent complementary rather than necessarily antagonistic aspects of life. I suppose the larger point that I\u2019m trying to get at through this small example is that Oswald\u2019s sensitivity of expression is worth poring over because it is the expression of a generous, open, mobile imagination. As one reads through the poem as a whole one absorbs these finer suggestions in a largely subliminal way.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Sleepwalk on the Severn kept coming into my mind while I was reading Memorial. It\u2019s full of passages of extreme beauty and originality that I should have written about when I first read it. An overall review would be redundant now but I want to say something about the first twelve lines of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alice-oswald"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=614"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1381,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614\/revisions\/1381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}