Course: Basic Seminar on British Literature II Students: Sophomore (& others) Convenor: Dr Peter Cheyne

1. W. H. Auden: ‘As I Walked out One Evening’

2. W. H. Auden: ‘As I Walked out One Evening’

3. W. H. Auden: ‘As I Walked out One Evening’

4. W. H. Auden: ‘As I Walked out One Evening’

5. W. H. Auden: ‘If I Could Tell You’

6. W. H. Auden: ‘If I Could Tell You’

7. W. H. Auden:

8. Basil Bunting: ‘Briggflats’ (Part I)

9. Basil Bunting: ‘Briggflats’ (Part I)

10. Basil Bunting: ‘Briggflats’ (Part I)

11. Basil Bunting: ‘Briggflats’ (Part I)

12. Carol Anne Duffy: ‘Prayer’

13. Carol Anne Duffy: ‘Prayer’

14. Carol Anne Duffy: ‘Prayer’

15. In-class essay. This will be the final exam for this course; there will not be a separate exam.

Assessment: Students will write essays throughout the course; each essay will discuss a different poem. There will also be a final examination essay.Coursework: 50%Final essay: 50%

Objectives:Students will become familiar with the main terms of poetry and prosody and will be able to use them in discussing poems in English. They will also study eight important poems from the canon of British Literature. This is a survey course that studies British modernist and other poets in the twentieth century, with poems by W. H. Auden, and the musical modernism of Basil Bunting; to close in the twenty-first century with the current Poet Laureate, Dame Carol Anne Duffy.

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British Literature and Culture, Lectures 10 & 11 CheyneW. H. Auden (1907–1973): ‘As I Walked out One Evening’

Life and times

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York and grew up in Birmingham. After attending public (independent) schools, he read English (switching from Biology in his second year) at Christ Church, Oxford. Early in his career he taught at public schools, and then journeyed to Iceland and China to write travel literature. In 1939 he moved to the USA where he was a university professor. From 1956–61 he was the Oxford Professor of Poetry.

Auden was technically highly proficient, and could write in almost all verse forms and styles. He was also a public intellectual figure, and some of his poems became much loved by the public. His most famous works include: ‘Funeral Blues’ (used in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral, 1994), ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, ‘Refugee Blues’, ‘The Unknown Citizen’, and ‘September 1, 1939’. His poem ‘Night Mail’ (1936), written for a short documentary film about the Post Office, became an instant modern classic, and Auden achieved his goal of creating popular poetry as a widely accessible art form.He also wrote many prose works and essays on literary criticism, politics, psychology, and religion. Although he was basically left-wing, he was also a traditionalist who returned to the Anglican faith in 1940, and who reverenced classical values, as can be seen in poems such as ‘Moon Landing’ (1969), and ‘Doggerel by a Senior Citizen’ (1969).

As I Walked Out One Evening (1940)

As I walked out one evening, (1)Walking down Bristol Street, (2)The crowds upon the pavement (3)Were fields of harvest wheat. (4)

And down by the brimming river (5)I heard a lover sing (6)Under an arch of the railway: (7)'Love has no ending. (8)

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you (9)Till China and Africa meet, (10)And the river jumps over the mountain (11)

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And the salmon sing in the street, (12)

'I'll love you till the ocean (13)Is folded and hung up to dry (14)And the seven stars go squawking (15)Like geese about the sky. (16)

'The years shall run like rabbits, (17)For in my arms I hold (18)The Flower of the Ages, (19)And the first love of the world.' (20)

But all the clocks in the city (21)Began to whirr and chime: (22)'O let not Time deceive you, (23)You cannot conquer Time. (24)

'In the burrows of the Nightmare (25)Where Justice naked is, (26)Time watches from the shadow (27)And coughs when you would kiss. (28)

'In headaches and in worry (29)Vaguely life leaks away, (30)And Time will have his fancy (31)To-morrow or to-day. (32)

'Into many a green valley (33)Drifts the appalling snow; (34)Time breaks the threaded dances (35)And the diver's brilliant bow. (36)

'O plunge your hands in water, (37)Plunge them in up to the wrist; (38)Stare, stare in the basin (39)And wonder what you've missed. (40)

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard, (41)The desert sighs in the bed, (42)And the crack in the tea-cup opens (43)A lane to the land of the dead. (44)

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes (45)

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And the Giant is enchanting to Jack, (46)And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer, (47)And Jill goes down on her back. (48)

'O look, look in the mirror? (49)

O look in your distress: (50)Life remains a blessing (51)Although you cannot bless. (52)

'O stand, stand at the window (53)As the tears scald and start; (54)You shall love your crooked neighbour (55)With your crooked heart.' (56)

It was late, late in the evening, (57)The lovers they were gone; (58)The clocks had ceased their chiming, (59)And the deep river ran on. (60)

Rhythmic and metrical structure

This is a fifteen stanza poem of 60 lines, with each stanza being a quatrain. The first and third lines are unrhymed, but the second and fourth lines rhyme in each stanza (e.g. ‘street’ and ‘wheat’ (lines 2 and 4). Auden uses the ballad form, which traditionally consists of quatrains with consistent rhyme schemes written in iambic lines of alternating tetrameter and trimeter (or at least 4-stress and 3-stress lines). Auden sometimes diverges from the underlying iambic structure (‘O LOOK, LOOK in the MIRror’).

The story / narrative

A man goes out for a walk one evening, and the phrasing of the first two lines, including the naming of a specific street, would typically announce an interesting anecdote about everyday life. However, l. 4 suddenly launches us into the absurd, or into some kind of visionary experience, as the city pedestrians become ‘fields of harvest wheat’. This image works as a metaphor describing the golden tinged light at evening illuminating the people. But there is also a second, darker meaning. This is the first allusion to Time (bringer of Death) as a

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reaper––recall how Time appears in Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 116’, as ‘rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending sickle’s compass come’.

Then, as the speaker reaches the river, already containing the threat of ‘brimming’ (l. 5), he eavesdrops on a conversation between two lovers, and an absurdist, paradoxical declaration of undying love that will last till ‘the river jumps over the mountain, / And the salmon sing in the street’. The paradoxical declaration is reminiscent of the rhyming couplet ending Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 116’.

The lover is declaring that there is a timeless quality that love brings, so that when someone feels true love, it is the very same love as the very ‘first love of the world’ (l. 20). Here passion and a yearning for the eternal brought by love have brought the lovers to absurd and paradoxical reasoning. At this moment, heightening the absurdity, the clocks, representing time itself, begin to speak, and warn them that ‘You cannot conquer Time’. This contest between the change and mortality brought by Time, and the yearning for constancy and immortality felt by Love is again reminiscent of Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 116’.

The clocks explain how Time hides ‘In the burrows of the Nightmare’ (l. 25) and ‘coughs when you would kiss’ (l. 28), breaking in to break things up during ‘headaches and in worry’ (l. 29). Against Time’s attacks, ‘life leaks away’ (l. 30). The clocks convincingly argue that ‘the appalling snow’ always ‘Drifts’ into ‘many a green valley’ (ll. 33–4), meaning that no happiness can escape the icy death of Time.

They then say that even objects of everyday comfort, ‘the cupboard’, ‘the bed’, ‘the teacup’ prophesy of the doom that Time brings, so that ‘the crack in the tea-cup opens / A lane to the land of the dead’ (ll. 43–4). Here traditional truths are inverted, as beggars now have so much cash they can ‘raffle the banknotes’ (l. 45), the Giant is not longer seen by Jack as an enemy, but as charming (l. 46); the pure ‘Lilywhite Boy is a Roarer’ (perhaps a troublemaker) (l. 47); and Jill from the innocent Jack and Jill nursery rhyme reaches sexual maturity and becomes quite lustful and ‘easy’ to bed (l. 48). NB The liywhite boy is a character in the traditional English nursery rhyme, ‘Green Grow the Rushes, Ho!’. The same nursery rhyme mentions ‘seven stars in the sky’, which Auden mentions in l. 15.

Despite the harsh, illusion-shattering warning from the clocks, the final three stanzas provide a resolution of hope. ‘Life remains a blessing/ Although you cannot bless’ (ll. 50-1). That is, we are

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blessed in that the love felt is still real, but we can no longer bless, because we have lost our purity. Lines 55–6 reaffirm the Christian message that ‘You shall love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart.' This is to say that it is not a terrible disaster that our hearts are crooked; in fact it is fitting, as our neighbour is crooked too. We have no excuse not to love others, as we are all crooked, yet the love is still real. The final lines affirm after the voices of Love and Time pass, the river of Life flows on.

The urban and the natural

The poem uses many incongruous juxtapositions of urban, man-made things with natural objects and processes. Although at first incongruous, these juxtapositions force us to be reminded that the slow and natural processes of time will destroy the everyday manmade comforts of our lives. We cannot escape time with cupboards, beds, cities, and tea-cups. Students should write a list of all of these juxtapositions, including examples where natural and manmade objects are deliberately placed near each other or in corresponding positions, such as ‘river’ and ‘railway’ in lines 5 and 7.

Reflection

Although the clocks warn with a message of inevitable doom, requiring that the naive confidence of the lover’s declarations be modified with reflection on the reality of time, change, and the demise of all mortal things, there is also hope.

The clocks tell the poet to ‘plunge your hands in water’ (l. 37), and ‘Stare, stare in the basin’ (l. 39). This is an image of self-reflection, asking him to look at his own face reflected in the water, and to reflect on life and the things around him. All objects contain a deep echo and prophecy of doom. The clocks repeat the injunction, now asking him to ‘look, look in the mirror’ (l. 49), but then when he sees his ‘distress’ (l. 50), comfort him that all is well, because love exists through all the crookedness, and even redeems it.

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British Literature and Culture, Lecture 1 CheyneBasil Bunting (1900–1985): ‘Briggflats: An Autobiography’ (Part I)

Life and times

Basil Bunting is generally acknowledged to be Britain’s greatest modernist poet, and the long poem Briggflats is his masterpiece. He was born in Scotswood-on-Tyne, Northumberland, educated at Quaker schools. He was imprisoned for over a year as a conscientious objector in 1918. He went to university at the London School of Economics, but left without a degree and went to France, where he met US modernist poet Ezra Pound. He travelled around Europe for much of his adult life, working as a journalist (e.g. for the Times), and also as a spy for the British in Turkey during World War II (and perhaps for longer). He also worked for the British Embassy in Tehran until he was expelled in 1952 and returned to Britain. There, he worked for the Evening Chronicle in Newcastle, he ceased to publish poetry for thirteen years until his magnum opus, Briggflats, made him a star of the poetry scene.

Advice to Young Poets

I SUGGEST

1. Compose aloud; poetry is a sound.2. Vary rhythm enough to stir the emotion you want but not

so as to lose impetus.3. Use spoken words and syntax.4. Fear adjectives; they bleed nouns. Hate the passive.5. Jettison ornament gaily but keep shape.

Put your poem away until you forget it, then:6. Cut out every word you dare.7. Do it again a week later, and again.

Never explain --- your reader is as smart as you.

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Briggflatts (1966)IBrag, sweet tenor bull,descant on Rawthey’s madrigal, each pebble its part for the fells’ late spring. Dance tiptoe, bull, black against may. Ridiculous and lovelychase hurdling shadows morning into noon. May on the bull’s hide and through the dale furrows fill with may, paving the slowworm’s way.A mason times his mallet to a lark’s twitter,listening while the marble rests, lays his ruleat a letter’s edge,fingertips checking,till the stone spells a name naming none,a man abolished.Painful lark, labouring to rise! The solemn mallet says: In the grave’s slothe lies. We rot.

Decay thrusts the blade, wheat stands in excrement trembling. Rawthey trembles. Tongue stumbles, ears err for fear of spring.Rub the stone with sand, wet sandstone rending roughness away. Fingers ache on the rubbing stone.The mason says: Rockshappen by chance.No one here bolts the door,love is so sore.

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Stone smooth as skin, cold as the dead they load on a low lorry by night. The moon sits on the fell but it will rain.Under sacks on the stone two children lie,hear the horse stale, the mason whistle, harness mutter to shaft, felloe to axle squeak, rut thud the rim,crushed grit.

Stocking to stocking, jersey to jersey,head to a hard arm,they kiss under the rain, bruised by their marble bed. In Garsdale, dawn;at Hawes, tea from the can. Rain stops, sackssteam in the sun, they sit up. Copper-wire moustache, sea-reflecting eyesand Baltic plainsong speech declare: By such rocksmen killed Bloodaxe.

Composition

Bunting was the Times new correspondent in Tehran, until he was expelled by the Iranian Prime Minister in 1952. Returned to Britain, he could not find a position suitable to his literary talents, and he became a sub-editor at the Newcastle Evening Chronicle newspaper. He wrote 10,000 lines of a poem that was to become Briggflats

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during that period, much of the poem being written while commuting by train to and from work (six lines a day, he said, Briggflatts Bloodaxe Books 77). He would write some lines on the way into work, and on the return journey he would edit them down and polish them to perfection. The 10,000 lines became edited down to the 700-line poem, Briggflats.

The poem is basically autobiographical, containing also scenes from ancient Northumbrian history. We will focus on the first four verse paragraphs of Part I. The poem opens as Bunting recalls his first childhood sweetheart and their innocent love. Part I describes the surrounding natural life; his sweetheart’s father, a mason (here inscribing gravestones); a first kiss; and a reminder of the area’s history, when King Eric Bloodaxe was killed in an act of treachery.

Peter Quartermain has suggested that Bunting identifies with Bloodaxe. The Old Norse King was an itinerant, like himself, and was king for brief times in Norway, Dublin, Orkney, and Northumberland. Bloodaxe ‘wandered around, looking for a tribe to king, and was eventually killed while still searching’ (Quartermain, Stubborn Poetries, University of Alabama Press, 2013, p. 52). This search for his destiny Quartermain likens to the fate of the poète maudit (the cursed poet) who occurs through the poem.

Being very much a regional poem of the North of England, Briggflats uses Northern dialect and is to be read in a Northern accent (Bunting was recorded reading Briggflats, which can be found in the Bloodaxe Books edition of the poem). Also, the sentences are fairly short and paratactic, i.e. the conjunctions are coordinating rather than subordinating. Some parataxis, especially in literary uses, combines events or objects with no obvious connection.

‘Mountain structure’

The poem has five parts, or cantos (songs), and Bunting described its overall shape as a range of mountains with two apexes (or climaxes) in the middle, the second being stronger than the first. Spring in the area around Briggflats, a Quaker town near Sedburgh, Cumbria, is represented in Part I, which opens with the young bull

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showing off to the cows with his mating dance and his tenor bragging. The spring is also the spring of Bunting’s life, in his early teens. Bunting describes this movement through the seasons: ‘Spring is around Briggflats, Summer is all over the place––London, the Arctic, the Mediterranean. Autumn is mostly in the Dales, and the last part is mainly on the Northumbrian coast.’ (Cited in Burton, A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting, Prospecta Press, 2013, p. 388.)

As the poet’s life unfolds through the four seasons, Northumbrian history and world events are interwoven with themes of love, development, violence and peace, land and sea, before closing with a meditation of time and space and the interstellar distance as the light from a star reaches Earth. Bunting said that the way he interweaves themes is influenced from music, especially Scarlatti’s sonatas, and is also influenced by the Lindisfarne illuminated Gospels, and also by Turkish and Persian poetic texts.

Quakerism

Bunting grew up a Quaker, a Christian denomination formally called the Society of Friends. Brigflats (with one ‘g’) is the name of the hamlet (small village) with a Quaker meeting house that he often visited as a boy with his family and where he first fell in love. He returned there late in life too. Quakers are pacifist, and Bunting indeed spent the First World War in prison because he refused to fight on grounds of conscience, and he also refused to work for the war effort, as that would ‘free another man to fight’. Quakerism is also quietly spiritual, and one can detect some of these beliefs in his poems. However, although Quakerism gave Bunting some spiritual shape, he did not agree with all the religious beliefs it entailed. Bunting, said that Quakerism ‘fortunately is a religion with no dogma at all––and consequently, there’s very little you can quarrel with, and I don’t have to believe this, that, or the other’. He described ‘the real essence of the Quaker business’ as:

if you sit in silence, if you empty your head of all the things you usually waste your brain thinking about, there is some faint hope that something, no doubt out of the unconscious or where you

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will, will appear––just as George Fox would have called it, the voice of God; and that will bring you, if not nearer to God, at any rate nearer to your own built-in certainties’ (cited in Burton, 2013, pp. 393–4).

He said his belief was closer to pantheism than anything else—i.e. the belief that ‘the divine’ is suffused throughout, or indeed identical to, all existence. Although he was deeply meditative and spiritual, it would be wrong to describe him as a ‘Quaker poet’.

Vocabulary

Note the especially high number of non-Latinate words. Many of the words in Briggflats are of Viking or Anglo-Saxon origin.

brag:

descant:

tenor:

Rawthey:

madrigal:

fells:

may (not the month!):

hurdling:

hide (bull’s hide):

dale:

furrows:

paving:

slowworm:

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mason:

mallet:

lark:

twitter:

marble:

rule:

abolished:

labouring:

solemn:

slot:

decay:

thrusts:

excrement:

trembling:

stumbles:

err:

(wet) sandstone:

rending:

bolts (the door):

to load (on a low lorry):

harness:

mutter:

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felloe:

axle:

squeak:

rut:

thud:

rim:

grit:

jersey:

stocking to stocking, jersey to jersey:

bruised:

marble:

Baltic:

plainsong:

British Literature and Culture, Lecture 15 CheyneCarol Anne Duffy (b. 1955)

Life and times

Dame Carol Anne Duffy was born to a Scottish father and an Irish mother in the Gorbals, the poorest part of Glasgow. She was raised Catholic, and she has a prayerful attitude to writing poetry, although she no longer maintains her religious faith. Her father was an electrician, and the family moved to Stafford in the Midlands when her father started to work for English Electric.

She began writing poems from age 11, and was first published at age 15. She studied Philosophy at Liverpool University, graduating in 1977, and she won the National Poetry Prize in 1983. Duffy is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. In 2009, she was appointed Britain’s Poet Laureate, and

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is the first woman, and the first Scot, to hold that esteemed position. Her collections of poetry include Standing Female Nude (1985), Mean Times (1993), and a collection of love poems entitled Rapture (2005).

Prayer

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer (1)utters itself. So, a woman will lift (2)her head from the sieve of her hands and stare (3)at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift. (4)

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth (5)enters our hearts, that small familiar pain; (6)then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth (7)in the distant Latin chanting of a train. (8)

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales (9)console the lodger looking out across (10)a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls (11)a child's name as though they named their loss. (12)Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer - (13)Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre. (14)

(from Mean Time, Anvil, 1994)

Rhythm and metrical structure

The poem is composed in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet, with an octave of two quatrains forming the proposition, and the third quatrain and rhyming couplet making the sestet that forms the resolution. The rhyme scheme is abab, cdcd, efef, aa. The ninth line is the volta: ‘Pray for us now.’

Vocabulary

sieve: minims:

faithless:

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stock-still:

chanting:

Grade 1 piano scales:

lodger:

Midlands:

dusk:

Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre:

Prayer in everyday actions

While Duffy no longer retains the Christian faith of her childhood, she still believes that prayer is an essential part of life that ‘utters itself’ (l. 2). The use of enjambment between ll. 1 and 2 calls the reader to contemplate the meaning of a prayer uttering itself, and how this might happen. The poem describes some ordinary actions as embodiments of the need for prayer.

Her first example is of a woman lifting her head from her hands to stare at a tree as she hears birdsong come from it. Her worry or despair is lightened by this natural music, and she takes it as ‘a gift’. Here is a sign of hope that gives her a chance to pray naturally and spontaneously, even though she cannot bring herself to pray deliberately. The image of a sieve conveys both the literal effect of finger splayed across the face they support, and the idea of the woman’s tears falling from the holes in a colander as from a washed lettuce. Her prayer exists in that she sits still and stares as she takes comfort in the ‘gift’ of birdsong. Duffy emphasizes that staring by making us imagine that the woman is staring at the minims, the half-notes sung by the birds, as if they appear in the air surrounding the tree.

The second quatrain repeats the notion of being unable to pray, yet being helped by a natural process. This time it is ‘that small familiar pain’ that ‘enters our hearts’ (l. 6). A rhythmic sound, a train, recalls sounds from a man’s youth, and these are the sounds of Christian chants in Latin. Similar to the woman sitting still and staring while

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listening to birdsong in the first quatrain, the man in the second now stands ‘stock-still’, and we are brought to associate such attentive stillness with prayer.

Note how the first quatrain begins ‘Some days’, while the second begins ‘Some nights’. The move from the woman in the first to the man in the second scene also helps to show the universal compas of her notion of prayer. With this economy of words and with just two examples, Duffy suggests a broad range of similar experiences of spontaneous prayer by day and by night.

With the two examples suggestively establishing a universal human need for prayer, the volta of the third quatrain occurs in a deliberate petitionary prayer: ‘Pray for us now.’ We are then offered a secular sense of what prayer is and how it works by offering comfort. A lodger, who we can imagine to be lonely (one does not lodge with friends or family), is consoled by hearing ‘Grade 1 piano scales’ (l. 9). The scales are perfectly harmonious, and gently repetitive––there are no surprises or shocks as the familiar scales ascend and descend. The meaning of this sound, aside from its soothing qualities, is that someone is learning to play music, and someone is teaching that person. This is the consolation of the continuance and cultivation of aesthetic beauty around the world. And then follows an example at dusk, and the calling of a child’s name seems to name a loss.

The rhyming couplet at the end produces a resolution at once satisfying, familiar, and mysterious. An ordinary scenario: ‘Darkness outside’, with the radio on inside. Yet it is described as ‘the radio’s prayer’, as if––expanding on the previous notion that everyday repetitive and soothing gestures are what constitute prayer––prayer is the human response to darkness and worry it signifies. The radio then enunciates its prayer: ‘Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.’ These are European areas at sea given during the Shipping Forecast on BBC Radio 4. The same areas are given a weather forecast every day, in the same order, with a forecaster’s calm voice at the end of each day. There is some solace in the familiarity, and in the fact that this is a forecast, we humans has at least some insight into the future. Moreover, it is a forecast for those on ships at sea, who need this new to avoid grave danger. The final word adds depth, Finisterre, the endmost point of France, jutting out to the sea, finis terre: the end of the earth.

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