PATTERN AND POET

Southland Times, Issue 23374, 4 December 1937, Page 14

PATTERN AND POET

Edith Sitwell’s Wallpaper

By

ROBIN HYDE

But after all, after a long-standing reluctance to pay any homage whatever to the tribe of Sitwell, I like Edith’s wallpaper. If the patterns in “The Sleeping Beauty” didn’t grip the attention, the colours must.

In courtyards stained with the black night like wine . . .

How sand-like quivers the gold light Under the large black leaves of shadow; mirage-bright It lies, that dusty light, Untouched of any air, Like Dead Sea fruit carved in cornelian . •

When the small music-box of the sweet snow Gave half-forgotten tunes, and our nurse told Us tales that fell with the same tinkling note . . .

When reynard-haired Malinn Walks by rock and cave The Sim, a Chinese mandarin. Comes dripping, from the wave.

Reynard-haired! What a wild maiden. And look again at that “small musicbox of the sweet snow” image, on the face of it a typical Sitwellism. Can’t you imagine a child Edith Sitwell, a nursery of incredibly pinafored and i curled young Sitwells, listening perhaps to their music-box, and in Osbert’s hand one of those thick glass globes which, when inverted, shake down on prim pine-trees a sky of miniature snowflakes? You cannot buy them today; but Edith Sitwell, a snow-globe, and a musical box are hereafter matched in my mind. She is a writer accused of intellect and guilty in fact of ingenuity, wit, and such a painstaking, deft-handed way with words that the enchanted forest of this book, “The Sleeping Beauty,” never becomes tangled, seldom unreal, in a pedantic or tiresome way. But it is not intellectual Edith who emerges from the wood; it is a curiously juvenile, wistful, and regretful poet, halted, in her white pinafore midway between the empty nursery and the eighteenthcentury china cabinet. All her intellectual capacity has been spent on the mating and matching of words, the weaving of words into a pattern so successful that strangers find it bewildering. Poetic wallpaper seldom went in lovelier, springier rhythms, produced more delicate tigers, loaded the cornices with more curiosities. WALLPAPER IT IS ... . The question remains: Should any poet’s imagery go so splendiferously to seed? Should a writer of Edith Sitwell’s obvious brilliance be pinned like a butterfly among the trailing similes and metaphors, derelict fairies and limping witches of her own wallpaper? Wallpaper it is . . .a poetry which devotes itself exclusively to decoration, achieves decorative success, and lacks a meaning, except the pathetic meaning that Edith, still in her white pinafore, stands fascinated before it, and has seemingly no notion why she did it. Pattern has overwhelmed poet. In the preface to another book, an anthology of her poems, Edith complains that hers is the most misunderstood poetry of the twentieth century. She won’t win that sack-race without furious competition, and not only competition from her own sex. The misunderstood husband has gone out of fashion; but the twenthieth century is a picnic-ground for poets whose hearts are breaking (too slowly!) because they can find nobody to misunderstand their poetry.

Then all the beauty of the world lay clear Mirrored within the beauty water-clear Of flowering boughs; Helen and Deirdre

dreamed And fading, wakened in that loveliness Of watery branches. In that dead wild spring Through the bird's shaken voice we heard

God sing. But age has dimmed our innocent paradise With a faint shadow, shaken dust within

our eyes— And we are one now with the lonely wise, Knowing that spring is only the clear mirage Of an eternal beauty that is not. Those were the days when the fleet summer

seemed The warmth and infinite loveliness of God, Who cared for us, within a childish Heaven. We could believe then. Oh the lips and

eyes That spoke of some far undimmed paradise! Those were the days. . . .

This is the closest one comes, in “The Sleeping Beauty,” to the poet escaped from the pattern; and, with all its loveliness, the passage shows her immature as well as regretful. It was right that Edith Sitwell should turn the most perfect of fairy tales into a pattern-poem, for the fairy tale is a parable of her own nature and talent. Edith planted the thorny hedge of obscurities, waved the wands, good and bad, at the christening, spindle-pricked her finger (“Oh, the curious bliss!”), and lay down to invite the century of dream. Her poem does not end with an awakening:

No footsteps now will climb Down from Jane's attic. She forgets the

time, Her wages, plainness, and how none could

love A maid with cockscomb hair, in Sleep’s dark grove.

DOGMAS AND DOG-COLLARS

Well, to every ostrich its place in the sand; and beauty of line, phrase, rhythm, entitles Edith Sitwell to more consideration than some of the stiffnecked young Leftist poets, who are Sitwells under the skin, and who wear their dogmas like dog-collars. Their poetic world is at least as impalpable as hers; they are not manual workers or mechanics, and they do not write for manual workers or mechanics, but only about their private chimerical concepts of manual workers and mechanics. Their idea of Leftism is a new dimension, a plank thrust out into nothingness. They insist on walking it; and by doing so they probably don’t harm the world, though I can’t see that they will save it, either. There are so many whose first idea of saving the world is to confuse it.

[SPECIALLY WRITTEN FOR THE SOUTHLAND TIMES]

But it is interesting, even exciting, to watch the twenthieth century conflict ■ between pattern and poet. Gerard Manley Hopkins, gifted if now slightly overworked originator of “sprung rhythm,” is responsible for a considerable amount of the pattern-stuff in prose as well as in verse. (Read the letter which induced the heroine to elope, in Christina Stead’s novel, “The Beauties and the Furies,” and see whether you think it would have been written in the same form, had no Gerard Manley Hopkins existed; ditto, with much poetry written by the Spen-der-Auden-Lewis group, who love Hopkins like a father—as well they might.) THE STERILITY OF PATTERN Naturally poetry deriving form from so original a pattern bears a very strong family likeness, wherever it crops up, and all over this century are scattered little books of which it would be impolite to ask, “Whose grandchild are you?” It is easier to imitate or follow a more usual form in which the content surpasses the words, however exact and beautiful the words may be, than to follow the pattern-poet without becoming too imitative, too derivative. For instance, one can imagine a thousand sonnets in Shakespearean form, and (provided they were not plagiarisms) no cry raised of “Baby Shakespeare.” Shakespeare, in blank verse, lyric, sonnet, was himself—not a given pattern or sequence of patterns. He made use of words and form, instead of allowing his instruments to make use of him. But copy the short, easy, quick-flowing rhythms of Humbert Wolfe—exquisite sometimes in the original, though so dominated by pattern that in the end they give a facile, almost trite, impression—and see how little promise your copy gives of any new contribution to the language. And of course all this is heresy to a well-attended school—massive workers like Ezra Pound, scholarly and able, at the same time over-intellectualized and a little stupid, to whom the pattern is a life-work and a private rebellion. It gives them swing and scope; it makes old-fashioned, old-maidenly critics tear any remaining hair; it must give them manv a chuckle, and also, as they sink deeper into their own obscurities, a sense of sorcery, for what they write is in cipher. Future generations will have their work cut out, -unlocking this. And among their own kind, which includes those susceptible to a violent dislike of them, as well as their adorers, the pattern gives them reputation. They lack nothing, except a channel of communication with any reasonable intelligence; not necessarily with the whole public, but with those who are awake, listening, or willing to listen after persuasion, perhaps in need of the poet’s interpretation of life. But anticipating Babel, the patternpoets have spoken with a Babel-lan-guage; which may look less heroic at the far end of 50 years, when proportions being to appear free of personality and publicity. THE POET UNTETHERED The English exceptions who sit cooling their heels in running brooks and

weighing to a feather the perfect adjective for “owl” or “stoat” are pleasant to read—restful people; but they, too, are pattern-poets, and lazy into the bargain. Their pattern isn’t so hard on the eyes, so striking as some of the new stuff; but they are almost as faithfully a projection into a hypothetical English past as the Spenders and Audens are a projection into a hypothetical English future. For me, I don’t want either. Something a little more brpadminded, please. We can’t all be green and English any more than we can all he red and Russian; and I don’t see why we should have to take a chameleon for a muse. I like my world to be a world and the poet an untethered poet. Exceptions? Look at A. E. Housman: pattern strict enough, not novel or bizarre, but nowhere insipid or shiftless; tongue, most often of men, occasionally of a very dark angel, but not of Babel.

Crossing alone the nighted ferry. With the one coin for fee. Whom on the wharf of Lethe waiting Count you to find? Not me.

The brisk, fond fool to fetch and carry, The true, sick-hearted slave, Look not for him in the just city And the free land of the grave. And Ruth Fitter, who owes modem as well as ancient times a debt. If modernism did nothing else, it enabled her to use “Oh God Auntie Mabel!” for a line in one of the best of her “Mad Lady’s Garland” poems. The first book seemed to me more human than the second one; but clear, pure, and direct is the poetry of “A Trophy of Arms.” Dorothy Wellesley, whose Collected Poems are fearfully prefaced by Yeats —here’s an Edith Sitwell, escaped from pinafore and wallpaper, consequently a thousand times more effective. She has a poem about the fishes of Galilee which might be isolated from experimental poetry and kept under glass, with Ezra Pound’s poem about the ilex leaves, to show what the moderns really meant — the magic and the strangeness, the lines of approach, oblique and yet swift, the wide-open doors. Roy Campbell, I think, is infinitely more effective as Campbell plain and simple than as pattern-poet, which he now tends to become. His early “Adamastor” was a far better book of poems than his recent “Mithraic Emblems.” Words, words, words! ... If there are many more ways of killing a poet than choking him with patterns and words, in the name of Heaven and originality, why doesn’t somebody try one? In New Zealand? Much the same, but more self-consciously attempted; dewy tear or sweat, according to type, more palpable in the results. Our isolation makes parodies of us all. It is probably convenient that by the time the ruffled pool grows still enough to act as a mirror other Melisandes will look down at the water.