Collected poems Book

Before reading this collection, the only Spender poem I was familiar with was the well worn 'The Truly Great'

I think continually of those who were truly great.
...
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

I was vaguely aware of him as one of the 1930s Oxonian poets - Spender, Auden, MacNeice, Day Lewis. It was coming across one of his poems extracted in a Raymond Carver collection that pushed me into seeking this collection out.

Spender's poems are beautifully crafted (which can make the earlier poems feel dated, with their careful rhyming patterns) and very clear - this clarity, he writes in his introduction, became the thing he recognised in what he felt were the best of his poems, and his aim in writing all along.

War features heavily in the collection - but is interspersed with elegy, polar expeditions, a series of poems written of and for his terminally-ill sister-in-law, love poems, what what I will call, for lack of a better phrase, 'observational poems'.

Two of the latter were among my favourite pieces in the collection. While 'The Pylons' is one of the most anthologised of Spender's poems (in it, he describes the English landscape, 'The valley with its gilt and evening look / and the green chestnut / of customary root' overtaken by the march of the pylons, 'those pillars / Bare like nude, giant girls that have no secret', granting them the 'quick perspective of the future') it was two other poems that sing to the beauty and power of the machine and 'progress' that will stay with me:

The Express

After the first powerful plain manifesto
The black statement of pistons, without more fuss
But gliding like a queen, she leaves the station.
Without bowing and with restrained unconcern
She passes the houses which humbly crowd outside,
The gasworks and at last the heavy page
Of death, printed by gravestones in the cemetery.
Beyond the town there lies the open country
Where, gathering speed, she acquires mystery,
The luminous self-possession of ships on ocean.
It is now she begins to sing-at first quite low
Then loud, and at last with a jazzy madness-
The song of her whistle screaming at curves,
Of deafening tunnels, brakes, innumerable bolts.
And always light, aerial, underneath,
Goes the elate metre of her wheels.
Steaming through metal landscape on her lines
She plunges new eras of wild happiness
Where speed throws up strange shapes, broad curves
And parallels clean like the steel of guns.
At last, further than Edinburgh or Rome,
Beyond the crest of the world, she reaches night
Where only a low streamline brightness
Of phosphorus on the tossing hills is white.
Ah, like a comet through flame, she moves entranced
Wrapt in her music no bird song, no, nor bough
Breaking with honey buds, shall ever equal.

The Landscape near an Aerodrome

More beautiful and soft than any moth
With burring furred antennae feeling its huge path
Through dusk, the air-liner with shut-off engines
Glides over suburbs and the sleeves set trailing tall
To point the wind. Gently, broadly, she falls,
Scarcely disturbing charted currents of air.

Lulled by descent, the travellers across sea
And across feminine land indulging its easy limbs
In miles of softness, now let their eyes trained by watching
Penetrate through dusk the outskirts of this town
Here where industry shows a fraying edge.
Here they may see what is being done.

Beyond the winking masthead light
And the landing-ground, they observe the outposts
Of work: chimneys like lank black fingers
Or figures frightening and mad: and squat buildings
With their strange air behind trees, like women’s faces
Shattered by grief. Here where few houses
Moan with faint light behind their blinds,
They remark the unhomely sense of complaint, like a dog
Shut out and shivering at the foreign moon.

In the last sweep of love, they pass over fields
Behind the aerodrome, where boys play all day
Hacking dead grass: whose cries, like wild birds
Settle upon the nearest roofs

But soon are hid under the loud city.
Then, as they land, they hear the tolling bell
Reaching across the landscape of hysteria,

To where larger than all the charcoaled batteries
And imaged towers against that dying sky,
Religion stands, the church blocking the sun.

(These remind me a little of a set of photos I made today of aerial photos of New Zealand freezing works from the 1950s. There is a wonder to these machines and structures.)

A significant portion of the poems are elegies - the series for Margaret Spender, and also poems in memory of various peers. Spender focuses as much on the power of intellect as his love and fondness in these poems, (it's almost a biographical approach to memorial) and I came to love the way he describes the mind as a shining, lancing, entity.

The opening lines from 'Spiritual Explorations (For Cecil Day Lewis)':

We fly through a night of stars
Whose remote frozen tongues speak
A language of mirrors, mineral Greek
Glittering across space, each to each --'

From 'Auden at Milwaukee':

Dined with Auden. He'd been at Milwaukee
Three days, talking to the students.
...
He knows they're young and, better, that he's old.
He shares their distance from him like a joke.
They love him for it. This, because they feel
That he belongs to none, yet gives to all.
They see him as an object,. artefact, that time
Has ploughed criss-cross with all these lines
Yet has a core within that purely burns.

From 'Louis MacNeice':

Like skyscrapers with high windows staring down from the sun
Some faces suggest
Elevation. Their way-up eyes
Look down at you diagonally and their aloof
Hooded glance suggests
A laugh turning somersaults in some high penthouse
Of their skulls. ...

From 'Late Stravinsky Listening to Late Beethoven':

I see you on your bed under the ceiling
Weightless as your spirit, happiness
Shining through pain. You have become
Purged of every self but the transparent
Intelligence, through which the sounds revolve
Their furious machine. With delectation
You watch Beethoven rage, hammer
Crash plucked strings, escape
On wings transfiguring horizons: transcend
The discords in his head that were
The prisoning bars of deafness.

There's a strain of guilt to Spender's poetry (goodness knows his personal life was complex and sad) that touched me; of quite raw yet also measured, considered self-reflection. 'The Double Shame' captures this for me.

You must live through the time when everything hurts
When the space of the ripe, loaded afternoon
Expands to a landscape of white heat frozen
And trees are weighed down with hearts of stone
And green stares back where you stare alone,
And the walking eyes throw flinty comments
And the words which carry most knives are the blind
Phrases searching to be kind.

Solid and usual objects are ghosts
The furniture carries cargoes of memory,
The staircase has corners which remember
As fire blows red in gusty embers,
And each empty dress cuts out an image
In fur and evening and summer and gold
Of her who was different in each.

Pull down the blind and lie on the bed
And clasp the hour in the glass of one room
Against your mouth like a crystal doom.
Take up the book and look at the letters
Hieroglyphs on sand and as meaningless
Here birds crossed once and cries were uttered
In a mist where sight and sound are blurred.

For the story of those who made mistakes
Of one whose happiness pierced like a star
Eludes and evades between sentences
And the letters break into eyes which read
What the blood is now writing in your head,
As though the characters sought for some clue
To their being so perfectly living and dead
In your story, worse than theirs, but true.

Set in the mind of their poet, they compare
Their tragic bliss with your trivial despair
And they have fingers which accuse
You of the double way of shame.
At first you did not love enough
And afterwards you loved too much
And you lacked the confidence to choose
And you have only yourself to blame.

'And the words which carry most knives are the blind / Phrases searching to be kind.' - it's a line you can't read without shuddering in recognition.

Spender is often bracketed (perhaps less favourably) with Auden. He has a sensuality however that I don't think I find in Auden - one of my favourite single lines, which I kept returning to -- 'the supple surface of summer-brown muscle' -- is not one I could ever imagine from Auden. But it's a poem that's not in the collection that hits me right in that soft spot I have for poems that shimmer with a dreamy sexiness, a delicate but not shy physicality: 'O Night O Trembling Night"

O night O trembling night O night of sighs
O night when my body was a rod O night
When my mouth was a vague animal cry
Pasturing on her flesh O night
When the close darkness was a nest
Made of her hair and filled with my eyes

(O stars impenetrable above
The fragile tent poled with our thighs
Among the petals falling fields of time
O night revolving all our dark away)

O day O gradual day O sheeted light
Covering her body as with dews
Until I brushed her sealing sleep away
To read once more in the uncurtained day
Her naked love, my great good news.