POETS Day! Walter James Turner, “Australia’s Georgian Poet”

This is too easy. There’s a new Pope, so Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Tell your boss you’re going to mass to pray for the newly anointed Vicar of Christ. Odds are good that you’re not going to mass, so that’s a lie and lying’s a sin. Most churches offer Confession on Saturdays. Just don’t go stepping in front of buses or licking electrical sockets for twenty-four hours and you’ll be fine. (Pro tip: Save time at Confession by cutting in line. Minimal exposure.)

If your boss is Catholic, you’ll be out in seconds flat. If not, you’ll still be out in seconds flat because non-Catholics have no idea when obligations fall. If you aren’t Catholic, pretend you are by Googling and learning a few Latin phrases to say around the office: “May I borrow your stilus?” “Sorry I’m late, hora concursus traffic.” Etc. They’ll get it.

Happy POETS Day and enjoy your work-free afternoon. First, a little verse.

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I put “Australia’s Georgian Poet” in quotation marks in the title because I found them on a website providing a quote from Dominic Sheridan, Professor and/or lecturer at the University of Gdansk in Poland who researches Australian War poets of World War I in particular. “Australia’s Georgian Poet” is itself in quotation marks in the Sheridan quote, so he got it from somewhere too. Whether it was a sobriquet that followed Walter James Turner, one invented by Sheridan, or something quoted from yet an earlier source, I have no idea, but I like it. This is my roundabout way of letting you know I’ve found an interesting new (to me) website called Forgotten Poets of the First World War. There are some five hundred posts going back to 2014 and sourcing at least as far as from wherever they’re based as Gdansk. Worth a look for the curious. Looks useful.

I decided on Walter James Turner as this week’s featured poet despite having seen his name once or twice but never having read his poetry for several reasons, the first of which being that I opened to his pages after deciding to showcase whichever poet I happened on when opening the W.B. Yeats edited Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935. The second, that whoever previously owned my used copy of the book folder a corner of one of Turner’s pages; I choose to believe intentionally. Third, I’m an oddity in my family in that I’m one of the few men in our direct line going back four generations not to be named Walter James, so there’s that affinity.

That Turner is Australian would have been fourth, but I didn’t know that about him until I’d already made my decision. I have an unacted upon fetish for Australian poets. More to say I feel I should have one. Despite being populated by poisonous drop bears and aggressive spiders the size of the hands of people with really big hands, Australia seems safely exotic. At least their literature does. English, but from far away. As a result I’ve planned a down-under affirmative action project of for this series, but so far the only ones I’ve gotten around to are Clive James and Judith Wright.

I’ve read conflicting reports claiming in 1907 or in 1911, but after his father died, Turner and his mother left Melbourne for England. Per Forgotten Poets of the First World War, he “served as a Lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery Anti Aircraft Section from 1916 to 1918.” On his return to England, he became friends with various Bloomsbury Group luminaries, very good friends with Siegfried Sassoon in particular. Sassoon shared a house with Turner and his wife until something happened. I can’t find rumors or hints anywhere, but whatever it was, it caused a serious rift for which there seems never to have been a reconciliation.

I’ve read a handful of Turner’s poems, mostly selected by Yeats, so what I see as a theme in his work may be a theme in Yeats’s choosing. If there’s anything autobiographical in the persona I’ve seen, he’s a bit of a skirt chaser. If he and Sassoon bonded over a disregard for marital vows, it’s not farfetched to wonder if their friendship ended because Turner came home earlier than his wife and housemate expected.

This is the first poem in his Oxford Book section. The title means “A song or poem in celebration of a wedding.” (Shorter OED, 5^th ed.)

Epithalamium
Walter James Turner (1889-1946)

Can the lover share his soul,
Or the mistress show her mind;
Can the body beauty share,
Or lust satisfaction find?

Marriage is but keeping house,
Sharing food and company,
What has this to do with love
Or the body’s beauty?

If love means affection, I
Love old trees, hats, coats and things,
Anything that’s been with me
In my daily sufferings.

That is how one loves a wife—
There’s a human interest too,
And a pity for the days
We so soon live through.

What has this to do with love,
The anguish and the sharp despair,
The madness roving in the blood
Because a girl or hill is fair?

I have stared upon a dawn
And trembled like a man in love,
A man in love I was, and I
Could not speak and could not move.

He spends the majority of that poem explaining himself, and in doing so pushing the reader away, making it clear that his is a position that needs explaining. Then the last stanza hits. The poem shouldn’t work. I don’t want it to work, but I’m drawn into a conclusion and then blindsided. It’s not a trick. There’s no gotcha. The persona does feel as he claims about a wife. I don’t know that he’s justifying bachelorhood or adultery, but he repels trying to make something sacred seem a lesser transaction. Once I assume shallowness, he reveals a capability for intense feelings. After the last stanza, the reader can’t dismiss his argument as lack of passion. It’s either a wonderfully conceived character or a consciously conflicted poet. I am so pleased by it.

Another roguish poem:

A Love-song

The beautiful, delicate bright gazelle
That bounds upon Night’s hills
Has not more lovely, silken limbs
Than she who my heart fills.

But though this loveliness I lose
When I shall lie with her,
I do but pass that Image on
For new eyes to discover.

And an excerpt from another:

from The World made Flesh

But when a man is old, married, and in despair
Has slept with the bodies of many women,
And many women have attempted him vainly;

Then if he meet a woman whose loveliness
Is young and yet troubled with power;
Of the earth and yet not of the earth, homeless
He will find her chained by distance.

The second line from the excerpt is as concise a character study as I’m likely to see.

In addition to poetry, he wrote novels and plays, and was a music critic at the New Statesman for twenty-five years. Wikipedia writes that his “reputation rests on his biographies of the composers Mozart, Beethoven, and Berlioz.” Yeats treats Turner as a touchstone in his Oxford Book introductions; other poets are less than or more than Turner in various ways or one built upon his work. In it he wrote,

“I think of him as the first poet to read a mathematical equation, a musical score, a book of verse, with an equal understanding; he seems to ride in an observation balloon, blue heaven above, earth beneath an abstract pattern.”

This last is long in comparison to what’s normally included here. I include it because someone asked a question in the comments last week. I wanted to answer, but I wanted to answer precisely, get it just right. As a result, I dithered and considered because I’m not so certain of the answer and then time had passed. I didn’t think anyone would look back.

The commenter wanted to know why William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” was poetry instead of indented prose. I’ve got my beef with free verse. The best consideration in search of a definition of poetry I’ve read in James Matthew Wilson’s The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking. It’s hard to read without coming away convinced that poetry must be metered, first and foremost. But then what?

I find Wilson’s arguments near unassailable. I agree with him, but I’m not ready to excommunicate Pound, Plath, Cummings, and a host of others from the art. I think Wilson has problems reckoning with his own conclusions to a degree because I’ve seen him lecture admiringly on Eliot. There was a rush to find something new at the beginnings. Imagism, as example, aimed “to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.” They didn’t deny that poetry needs rhythm and structure, just that metered feet were not the only way rhythm and structure could be established. Many played with indentation, punctuation, and form. Marianne Moore would freely write a first stanza indulging whims as they came, and then repeat exactly the syllables of the first in the following stanzas. People fiddled and failed. Sometimes there were triumphs.

I’m a proponent of rhythm and meter as traditionally understood. Poetry needs guidelines. But I’m open to clever interpretations of how patterns are understood. I suppose I’ll consider blank verse, but the burden of proof lies with the candidate work. “The Red Wheelbarrow” calls attention to its three word/one word stanza structure and is about constructing poetic images. It works for me, but I see where it might not for others.

That’s a terrible answer, but it’s what I’ve got. The poem below – long, as I said – is on and off iambic, but there’s no consistency. This is free verse. It reads like prose in the beginning, but there’s a build. He breaks up sentences and phrases. He forces pauses here and there so as a reader, I fall into a song. It’s subtle, but by the last paragraph, I’m reading with energy and I’m impassioned. I love what he did and I understand those that balk.

Hymn to her Unkown

In despair at not being able to rival the creations of God
I thought on her
Whom I saw on the twenty-fourth of August nineteen thirty-four
Having a tea on the fifth story of Sawn and Edgar’s
In Piccadilly Circus.

She sat facing me with an older woman and a younger
And a little boy aged about five;
I could see that she was his mother,
Also she wore a wedding-ring and one set with diamonds.

She was about twenty-five years old,
Slim, graceful, disciplined;
She had none of the mannerism of the suburbs,
No affectations, a low clear speech, good manners,
Hair thick and undyed.

She knew that she was beautiful and exceedingly attractive,
Every line of her dress showed it;
She was cool and determined and laughed heartily,
A wide mouth with magnificent teeth.

And having said this I come to the beginning of my despair,
Despair that I in no way can describe her
Or bring before the eyes of the present or the future
This image that I saw.

Hundreds and hundreds of women do I see
But rarely a woman on whom my eyes linger
As the eyes of Venus lingered on Adonis.

What is the use of being a poet?
Is it not a farce to call an artist a creator,
Who can create nothing, not even re-present what his eyes have seen?

She never showed a sign that she saw me
But I knew and she knew I knew—
Our eyes fleeting past, never meeting directly
Like that vernal twinkling of butterflies
To which Coleridge compared Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis.

And, like Venus, I lavished my love upon her
I dallied with her hair, her delicate skin and smooth limbs,
On her arms were heavy thick bangles
Like the ropes of my heart’s blood.

Could I express the ecstasy of my adoration?
Mating with her were itself a separation!
Only our bodies fusing in a flame of crystal
Burning in an infinite empyrean
Until all the blue of the limitless heaven were drunken
In one globe of united perfection
Like a bubble that is all the oceans of the world ascending
To the fire that is the fire of fires, transcending
The love of God, the love of God, the love of God—
Ah! my pitiful efforts now ending
I remember a bough of coral
Flower of the transparent sea
Delicate pink as though a ray of the sun descending
Pathless into the ocean
Printed the foot of Venus
Where bloomed this asphodel.