POETS Day! Richard Aldington

Illustration by Rene Sears

It’s POETS Day.

Do what you must. Lie to your boss. Fake a cough at school. Invite Jamaal Bowman to do his thing. Nothing productive gets done on a Friday after lunch anyway.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

But first, take time for a little verse.

***

“As for ‘free verse’, I expressed my view twenty-five years ago by saying that no verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job. No one has better cause to know than I, that a great deal of bad prose has been written under the name of free verse; though whether its authors wrote bad prose or bad verse, or bad verse in one style or in another, seems to me a matter of indifference. But only a bad poet could welcome free verse as a liberation from form. It was a revolt against dead form, and a preparation for new form or for the renewal of the old; it was an insistence upon the inner unity which is unique to every poem, against the outer unity which is typical. The poem comes before form, in the sense that a form grows out of the attempt of somebody to say something; just as a system of prosody is only a formulation of the identities in the rhythms of a succession of poets influenced by each other.”
                             – T.S. Eliot “The Music of Poetry”

I very much enjoyed Paul Johnson’s book, The Quest for God: A Personal Pilgrimage. I took a great deal from it but one of the things I most remember coming away with was an admiration for his practical appreciation of Catholicism.

He was very fond of the age and history of the Church, the scholarship and arguments – even those about angels and pin heads, which is a punch line though it shouldn’t be – of two thousand years. He felt a weight lifted. There may be facets and tenets that made no sense or seemed at odds to him, but he could put doubts aside and rest easy, secure in the knowledge that wiser and more learned heads than his had considered, deliberated, and concluded. He found faith.

I read Quest when it came out in 1996, and I took the idea a little tongue in cheek. I’m too argumentative to quiet doubts so easily and I suspect Johnson was too, but it was a humble thought and good people want to be humble whenever they might be wrong about something. So, I’d deploy what I took from him in throw away lines. I didn’t know about proper diet, quantum physics, regular physics, women, etc. All manner of etc. When I didn’t know any better than to trust an authority, I’d say “Good enough for Johnson” to no one in particular and carry on.

In 1998, piqued by Johnson’s public pronouncements on religion, morality, and marriage, his mistress of eleven years went to the papers with news of their affair. He came off a bit blowhard-y and I soured on him for a while. I’m a fan again, and so, it seems, is the public. That’s good news. He’s a wonderful historian and quite a juggler, within the confines of a decade. But I did stop with my “Good enough for Johnson” stuff. Inherit the Wind filled the void.

I’d played Bertram Cates, the fictionalized version of John Scopes from the “Monkey Trial,” in high school and remembered bits from hours of running lines. A few from the voir dire (Law & Order for jury selection) scene served, but not as well. Drummond, the Clarence Darrow counterpart, was interviewing a local businessman.

DRUMMOND: Mr. Sillers, you just said you were a religious man. Tell me something. Do you work at it very hard?

SILLERS: Well, I’m pretty busy down at the feed store. My wife tends to the religion for both of us.

DRUMMOND: In other words, you take care of this life, and your wife takes care of the next one?

“Good enough for Sillers,” didn’t have the same snap, but it was faith in the faith of others and worked well enough.

The above quote from Eliot serves a similar purpose. When pressed for a definition of poetry, I insist on meter as a qualifying characteristic, but there are a great many works of free verse I think the world of. I’m unwilling to excommunicate Pound, HD, Eliot, and others as craftsmen. I think some of their free verse works are among the best poetry written. I object to unmetered works in principle but adore instances in practice. I can’t reconcile this satisfactorily, at least not so far. Eliot gives me cover by casting it as a necessary transition. I like that. I can like it without nagging at myself. “It’s good enough for Eliot.”

I’ve mentioned here before that a favorite book of mine is Des Imagistes, a collection of poems by eleven poets edited by Ezra Pound. The Imagism movement was guided by three principles as agreed on by Pound, F.S. Flint, HD, and Richard Aldington, who is the focus of this post though it may not seem like it quite yet. The third states, “As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.” It’s not a rejection of meter, but it is emancipatory; they would not be bound.

Des Imagistes opens with Richard Aldington’s “Choricos.” The poem was first published in Harriet Monroe’s magazine, Poetry. I couldn’t find it in the Poetry archives, but according to Robert Crawford in the London Review of Books (January, 22, 2015) Monroe wrote in the November 1912 issue that “Mr Richard Aldington is a young English poet, one of the ‘Imagistes’, a group of ardent Hellenists who are pursuing interesting experiments in vers libre.” Of “Choricos,” she would later write, “one of the most beautiful death songs in the language.”

Pound’s Des Imagistes was published in 1914, so “Choricos” may or may not have been intended to mark a passing before “a preparation for new form or for the renewal of the old” as Eliot wrote, but it seems that its wording fit that purpose. The poem is fairly long for the purposes of this space, but these first few lines show why Pound, always wanting to “Make it new,” might see it as a fine introduction to what he hoped would be a poetic revolution.

from Choricos
Richard Aldington (1892-1962)

The ancient songs
Pass deathward mournfully.

Cold lips that sing no more, and withered wreaths
Regretful eyes, and drooping breasts and wings—
Symbols of ancient songs
Mournfully passing
Down to the great white surges,
Watched of none
Save the frail sea-birds
And the lithe pale girls,
Daughters of Okeanus.

Aldington went off to war in 1916 and returned a different man. He’s been described as “bitter,” “disillusioned,” and “and angry young man.” He continued to write poetry after his service, but eventually concentrated on writing novels and biographies. I can’t say that’s a shame, not having read his novels or biographies, but as a young poet he showed obvious talent and creativity.

Like “Choricos,” “Au Vieux Jardin” was printed in that November 1912 Poetry issue and reprinted in Des Imagistes. I think I’m being unfair to him, but the poem is a bit attention seeking; “I enjoy what all you enjoy, but I’m sensitive and see more.” The reason I think I’m being unfair is that seeing something extra by virtue of sensitivity is kinda poetry in a nutshell, but for whatever reason, this time it seems a little smug to me. Beautifully done, though. Turns like “divers-hued trees of late summer” give him cause to be smug.

Here he is before shell shock and war fatigue, finding something transcendent in mundane stepping stones, popularly overlooked, while the rest of us are blinded by flora.

Au Vieux Jardin

I have sat here happy in the gardens,
Watching the still pool and the reeds
And the dark clouds
Which the wind of upper air
Tore like the green leafy boughs
Of the divers-hued trees of late summer;
But though I greatly delight
In these and the water lilies,
That which sets me nighest to weeping
Is the rose and white colour of the smooth flag-stones,
And the pale yellow grasses
Among them.

Aldington married HD in 1913. The marriage lasted longer than it lasted; they separated in 1919 but didn’t finalize divorce until 1938. Before 1913, she had been engaged to Pound. The three of them travelled together, lived in a row of apartments, and worked together. I’ve never read that their marriage was open, but boy have I thought it.

There was a baby born while Aldington was off at war. HD moved in with the composer and music critic Cecil Gray during her husband’s deployment. Both Gray and Aldington “denied paternity,” according to Wikipedia. By 1919 when Aldington returned from the war, HD had moved in with the shipping heiress, writer, and patron Bryher, who she would remain with for the rest of her life. It sounds like an engaging soap opera script, but Aldington and HD remained friendly.

I’m assuming “Lesbia” was written about HD when the two were dating or early in their marriage. It, too, was included in Des Imagistes. I’m reminded of the first principle of Imagism: “Direct treatment of the ‘thing’, whether subjective or objective.” Strip away everything, and there she is.

Lesbia

Use no more speech now;
Let the silence spread gold hair above us
Fold on delicate fold;
You had the ivory of my life to carve.
Use no more speech.
. . . .
And Picus of Mirandola is dead;
And all the gods they dreamed and fabled of,
Hermes, and Toth, and Christ, are rotten now,
Rotten and dank.
. . . .
And through it all I see your pale Greek face;
Tenderness makes me as eager as a little child
To love you

You morsel left half cold on Caesar’s plate.