Friday, October 30, 2015

John Masefield Exercises the Prerogative of his Office

The Associated Press and British Movietone News have both recently uploaded, onto YouTube, more or less their entire film archive.  They had previously been available electronically via a more convoluted route, but this development makes them freely available.  (And they can now be embedded in blogs!).

It has certainly added a lot of fascinating material to the Internet.  For example, in a clip from a reel of (I think) 1930, here is John Masefield, then Poet Laureate, reciting from one of his poems (or, as the subtitle puts it, 'exercising the prerogative of his office').  The poem is one of his better-known lyrics, 'The West Wind'.


The subtitle is not all that strikes me as unusual about this film.  I wonder if any reader is surprised by Masefield's voice and diction?  I actually found it more difficult to enjoy than I had expected, for all that Masefield is probably my favourite poet, and I have not come across any recording of his voice before.  Marvellous though it was to hear him speak, there is no hint from this son of Ledbury of any Herefordshire accent, nor, really, the slow gentleness that I think dwells in most of his poems, even if surreptitiously.  He is declaiming, really, rather than speaking.  At the 1.20 mark, for instance, he might even have been singing.

Yet, if I struggle with this recitation, several factors enforce the conclusion that the problem lies with me and not with Masefield.  His highly readable biography describes his conviction that poetry is best met read aloud, a conviction that led him to involve himself in setting up and running the Oxford Recitations, competitions in verse-speaking held annually from 1923.  His keen ear is also borne out by the very ease with which his poems run off the tongue.  

Moreover, this way of speaking is precisely how poets and verse-lovers recited poetry.  For example, in this recording of Alfred, Lord Tennyson himself reading 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', the poet's recitation takes almost no heed of the sense of the words.  (Incidentally, the original wax cylinder survived being left for a time next to a radiator... we are lucky to have it!).  That it has been something of a surprise to discover this is a reflection on the disappearance of poetry and verse-speaking from everyday life.

Even with gentler poems this declamatory approach was taken.  For instance, John Drinkwater's dreamy Moonlit Apples is a poem I always imagine being read as if in the very attic described, and would have said that nobody could read the line 'in the corridors under there is nothing but sleep' any louder than a whisper!  Yet the poet himself declaims this poem like this:



Again I struggle to enjoy it, and yet again I must acknowledge that, as an actor and playwright it was John Drinkwater's business, too, to know how to speak verse.  Indeed, there is a lecture by him, entitled 'The Speaking of Verse', uploaded by the same YouTube user (It is in two halves: one here; the other here).  What is the problem, then?  Why are my modern ears thus tone-deaf?  

A simple reason might be the disappearance of poetry from everyday life in England, and also from everyday speech.  Most of us, even poetry-lovers, are simply unused to words of this weight at all.  Masefield's poetry was once read in pubs: these days it is almost inconceivable to use those two words in the same sentence.  Then, among the new poetry that is being written, there has been the abandonment of traditional metre and rhyme, which has lifted any musical quality from much modern poetry.  When it is read aloud, it is intoned, rather than declaimed.

Almost as significant, I think, is the development of the microphone, a revolutionary invention that is surprisingly seldom discussed in those terms.  It has completely transformed public speech and speaking, so that clear vowels and meticulous enunciation are no longer indispensable to make oneself heard.  Indeed, such things survive now only in a few places, such as in the loudspeakerless chapel of King's College, Cambridge, where the modern ear is again surprised by unaccustomed speech like this (though I must say that I enjoy this reading tremendously):



How do I think poetry ought to be read, then, if I'm so clever?  The aim I would say is not really in question: to bring out the beauty the poet has put there.  And I don't think my view about going about this, in theory, actually differs much from Masefield's or Drinkwater's.  For example, most of what Drinkwater says in his lecture above makes sense to me:
Nine-tenths of the great poetry of the world is perfectly clear in its meaning, and we do not want the speaker to explain it to us... In speaking a poem, let us first get the rhythmic movement clearly fixed in our minds.  By following this, we shall give to each word the exact emphasis intended by the poet, and so avoid those inflections that are designed to brace up the nerveless speech of conversation.  The right pace of a poem will suggest itself quite readily to any sensitive mind... Let us say the poem without feeling ourselves called upon to interpret it, and we shall do all that is necessary.'
In other words, the speaker should be content to be a vessel through which a well-built and well-scanned poem — and thus indeed the poet — should literally speak for itself.  All I wish to add to Drinkwater's view is that this ought to resemble more closely the playing of music. Composers count upon the musician's skill to play their music beautifully, and not merely neutrally.  Likewise, there ought to be some room for intonation and shape in the speech.  I think the voice should sound somewhere between ease and effort, as if it is shouldering a light burden, just like a musician.  I also believe that in place of declamation (one voice speaks to a multitude) the impression ought to be given — and microphones can help with this — that in fact one heart speaks to another, as Cardinal Newman might say.  This lady's rendition of 'Moonlit Apples' more or less hits the mark for me:



The idea that the poet still speaks when his verse is read also reminds me of another powerful aspect of poetry, and that is memory.  Poetry does not really work in the ear but in the heart, and often has its greatest beauty when words that have lingered there lighten up unexpectedly.  Just as 'blue remembered hills' are dearer than plain ordinary hills, old remembered words can overwhelm the heart.  Hence the above lady's 'treasury of remembered verse'.  Or, for instance, out on an autumn Sunday woodland walk, with undiminished aptness, into the mind might drop the words 'And the Sabbath rang slowly / In the pebbles of the holy streams'.  This can also work, mysteriously, with new and unfamiliar poems: Robert Frost actually describes the delight of reading a poem and finding himself 'remembering something I didn't know I knew.... there is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows' (The Figure a Poem Makes, 1939).  So, to paraphrase Robert Bridges, the audience's impression, with time-hallowed poetry at least, will be that old words have come to them by the riches of time.  Verse-speaking cannot really respond to this, I don't think: it all works in the heart, too mysteriously and too intimately to be for any pretentious blog-post to deal with!

Thursday, October 08, 2015

Ten Poems for National Poetry Day

Since it is National Poetry Day, there is no excuse not to compile a list (though inexhaustive) of some favourite poems that I think are worth sharing.  I think they might also appeal to any readers who consider themselves new to, or unfamiliar with poetry... or even 'averse to verse'!  If they can be read online, I have given links to them.  Here they are:
  1. 'Moonlit Apples— John Drinkwater.  A poem to be whispered at midnight... 'And quiet is the steep stair under.'
  2. 'Paddington: Mother and Son' — John Masefield.  Perhaps the simplest and the greatest war poem I know; its whole weight rests on the slow and remorseless beat of the four final words.  It is not online but is included in this anthology; a good local library ought to have a copy.
  3. 'The Trees' — Philip Larkin.  Why is it that only Larkin's sour poetry ever seems to be quoted?  He was capable of sincerely beautiful poetic utterances: this is an example.
  4. 'In Memoriam: Easter, 1915.' — Edward Thomas.  Another war poem whose weight rests upon a few words, 'left', 'should' and 'never', and whose meaning drops into the mind slowly but catastrophically.  I have written about it more here.
  5. 'A Chorus Elizabeth Jennings.  This poem sets off with great momentum and soaring majesty but gradually lowers its voice until, in the last lines, both its subject matter and its register are intimate and almost confessional.
  6. 'The Old Liberals' — John Betjeman.  It can be read about half-way down this page.  I find this poem very moving, even though I still don't completely understand it and am not sure how seriously to take it.  'Sad as an English autumn, heavy and still' is one of the truest lines of poetry I have ever come across.  And there is something about the easy conversational glibness of saying 'Ask at the fish and chips in the Market Square' that is also powerfully sorrowful.
  7. 'Pilgrimages R.S. Thomas.  It is about Bardsey Island, the 'island of twenty thousand saints', just off the edge of the Lleyn Peninsula at the tip of N. Wales.
  8. 'Love bade me welcome' — George Herbert.  Another intimate poem: its gentleness has survived intact for nearly four centuries.  'But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack / From my first entrance in...' is a line so light and so even that its gentle beauty could easily go unnoticed.  And neither has time diminished the anguished remorse and disbelief in the protest 'I, the unkinde, ungratefull?'.  Ralph Vaughan Williams also set it to music.
  9. 'Woolgathering' — Wilfrid Wilson Gibson.  It can be read halfway down this page.  A whimsical utterance in plain English which can easily be learnt by heart.
  10. 'A Gable Wall' — Maolsheachlann O Ceallaigh.  This poem, full of movement, lifts up ordinary life in order to celebrate it, as does most of his poetry.  I always enjoy, and strongly recommend, the rest of his blog as well.
There are many other poems that I could have mentioned... doubtless I will find an excuse to post them in the future!