Adlestrop, by Edward Thomas

I've spent a lot of time on trains. Moving to the South, moving back again, long distance loves, day trips and dispersed friends; these are aspects of life which necessitate hours moving through unknown towns and countryside, nervously patting pockets to check that you haven't forgotten your railcard. Along with the BBC's programming and, of course, the weather, a train journey occupies a safe conversational space, with room for appreciation ("isn't the trip from Manchester to Sheffield pretty?"), room for despair ("I was sat next to Football Fans, ugh") and room for jovial, communal grumpiness ("Did you know that the rubbish Northern Rail trains are made from old buses? Ridiculous!") This comforting ordinariness is a far cry from fictional depictions of the rail journey, complete with wistful-window-staring and convenient extended metaphors. Poems tend not to feature getting lost in the labyrinthine hell of Birmingham New Street, eavesdropping on forced conversations between strangers, listening to children squawk to Let It Go, and avoiding eye contact with the resident drunk who has managed to hold it together long enough to mumble the words, 'Is there a limit on card?'

When I was looking for a train poem to write about, Google kept anticipating my searches with very telling suggestions: train poems about life; train poems for funerals; poems about trains and death. Hidden among all of these train-journey-as-life-journey poems, I stumbled across one about an unexpected hiatus. Adlestrop, by Edward Thomas, is a strange little poem about an unscheduled stop at the titular Gloucestershire village. I'm fond of Thomas' words – he's inspired many of my favourite writers, including Heaney and Sheers, and reminds me of the poet who inspired this blog, Thomas Traherne.


Adlestrop


Yes. I remember Adlestrop
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat, the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.


The first thing I noticed about this poem was the deceptive ease with which one can read it. It’s lovely to read aloud, perhaps because at first sight it seems like a simple recollection. The first word could be the answer to a silent interlocutor, or it could be the speaker collecting his thoughts. 

It’s not strong enough to indicate transportation, or an immediate jump into a memory, but it’s as if prior to this poem Thomas was probing his mind. “Adlestrop, it rings a bell, yes.” Thomas eases us into this poem – the first verse details the train pulling in ‘unwontedly’, as we slip into the narrative. The enjambment and the internal rhyme of ‘name’ and ‘express train’ is tempered with extended caesura, as though Thomas is piecing together fragmented thoughts into a loose whole. This continues into the second verse and creates a sense of slowing – the pace is mirrored in the image of a hot and hazy June afternoon.

The sense of haziness is important. The poem is not remembrance exactly, in spite of the detail, but an attempt at remembrance. Thomas invites autobiographical commentary with his specificity – ‘one afternoon’ in ‘late June’, and that afternoon in June really did happen. Thomas made a note of the stop in his journal and built the poem from there. Despite this, I feel that the detail is successfully undermined by the sense that the poem, and the scene, is not quite in existence. It occupies a literal and metaphorical hiatus – ‘no one left and no one came.’ It is neither the beginning, nor the end of a journey. Thomas doesn’t enter Adlestrop but the acknowledgement of the station means that the poem is not simply about nature alone, there is a wordly presence in the hissing steam and the cleared throat. It is neither clear recollection nor invented tale. Even the weather is not quite – the diminutive ‘cloudlets’ drift ‘high’ and almost out of sight. This sense is embodied in the structure of the first two verses, which are loosely bookended by Thomas’ assertion that he remembers ‘Adlestrop – only the name.’ Not the place, nor anything specific about it, only the name and the descriptions he concocts.

As previously noted, this not-quite style is tempered by the natural lexical field. The third verse is laden with the natural descriptions that Thomas is noted for, and the fecundity of the country is emphasised by the polysyndetic listing which draws together the second and third verses. Thomas may have only seen the name of Adlestrop, but he remembers much more of its nature. The listing also serves to quicken the pace; we’re moving to the end of the poem, to the edges of the memory and out of the station, and though a poem like this is not necessarily climactic, this is as close as we get to a moment of exultation:

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire

The most beautiful lines of the poem are also the ones that remind us of its painful brevity – the poem is a but a 'minute'. The singing blackbird pierces the haziness and indeed the memory. It is like a rustic evocation of Shelley's skylark – 'Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight...' The song appears to reverberate around the memory, 'close by, and round', and continues the pace as an inward-looking poem moves outwards. This too is emphasised by the assonance: 'mistier, / Farther and farther.... Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.' We have moved from not-quite Adlestrop out into the counties, and then the poem ends. However, Thomas' poem doesn't have a neat ending – it's as though the creatively enhanced memory is left open as the train goes on its way. It's a strange rush at the end of what initially seemed like a quiet little poem about an uneventful journey. 

I didn't want to do a contextual reading of this poem, because I like its nebulous style. However, it's worth noting that Thomas was on his way to visit his good friend Robert Frost when the train passed through Adlestrop. Frost encouraged Thomas to write more poetry, a decision which in part saved him from a depressive langour that could have claimed his life. Weeks after Thomas noted the sights and sounds of Adlestrop, England declared war on Germany, and three years later Thomas was killed at the Battle of Arras. The New Statesman published Adlestrop three weeks after his death. 

Lines from 'The Story of a New Name', by Elena Ferrante

"I feel I could do something much more important. Yes, and more intense, more violent. But what? What is there more important to say? And how can one be violent about the sort of things one's expected to write about? Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly–they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced."

Hemholtz, Brave New World

It may seem a strange thing, to begin a post on lines from a contemporary, realist Italian novel about poverty, women, education and friendship, with a quotation from Aldous Huxley's dystopic classic Brave New World. The texts have little in common other than, perhaps, the fact that I read them both in the same month. I'm not going to attempt to compare the two, but when reading Ferrante's work, the above lines kept coming back to me, again and again. 

To my mind, Hemholtz's words could be written about Elena Ferrante's novel. As a young girl, Ferrante's narrator Lenu is desperately striving to say something important, but she struggles to shed the high-tones of her education, which is for her both a liberation and a limitation. Her knowledge of religion and the classical languages weighs her down, suffocates her writing. In contrast, her uneducated best friend Lila has an academically untainted clarity; she knows how to pierce, how to hurt. However, the most important thing the Ferrante-Lenu narrator does is tell the story of her childhood in Naples; a story of women, a story of violence, told in language that quietly pierces – it's only after putting the books down that you realise the impact of what you've read. 

There's so very much I could talk about in relation to Ferrante; the symbolic use of dialect, feminism, the value of education, even the political power structures in Italy, but I'll stick to the purpose of this blog and take a closer look at the following passage: 

“That day, instead, I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighbourhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, or with broad behinds, swollen ankles, heavy chests, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts ... they appeared to have lost those feminine qualities that were so important to us girls ... They had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labours or the arrival of old age, of illness. When did that transformation begin? With housework? With pregnancies? With beatings?”

Ferrante's novel is a bildungsroman of sorts, and so the first think we should notice is the importance of the opening signifier. The 'day' in question is a visual awakening for the narrator, Lenu, both in the moment of realisation and in the delayed action of recounting it – she is writing many years later, and inviting us to realise as she did, and by inviting us to participate in her new (old) clarity, she achieves it again. The the specificity of 'that day' is, then, almost misleading, as what initially appears to be a sudden clarity is something that has grown and stayed with the narrator over many years. This manipulation of time is core to Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, both in the dual action of the book (the events as the happened and the events of the narrators life in the present), and in Lenu's fascination with the cyclical nature of history, from the events in the history of her town, to her country, to grander narratives of classical civilisation. 

Throughout the novel there is a juxtaposition between the minutiae of life in provincial Italy, family feuds, scraped knees and love affairs and lost dolls, and the parallels Lenu finds in her academic awakening, which, while initially distancing her from her simple neighbourhood, offers a prism through which she can see it. Dido's agony echoes around the piazza, only in Naples she takes the form of a widow who daily washes the stairs of apartment buildings, driven mad by the abandonment of her lover. Lenu sees 'the mothers of the old neighbourhood' for the first time; this phrase does not feel in anyway specific to one day, or moment. The 'old neighbourhood' is not necessarily just an old town on the outskirts of Naples – the Ferrante-Lenu narrator could be referring to any point in history, and Lenu is not only seeing the mothers of her youth and of her friends, but the very first mothers of the neighbourhood. Considered in this light, a seemingly demonstrative phrase becomes timeless. 

Ferrante then immediately emphasises the visceral physicality of the neighbourhood which textures Lenu's understanding of it; before Lenu can truly understand her grand, perhaps even high-minded narrative, she must first confront what is before her – decay, rage, neglect, wounds. A fatal combination of passivity and aggression. For Ferrante's language, that combination is not fatal but life-giving and world-making. The text is heavy with asyndeton and formulaic patterns: 'they were nervous, they were acquiescent.' The women of the old neighbourhood have lost all sense of individuality, reduced by both their circumstances and their narrator to a homogenous plural pronoun: 'they.' Ferrante strips these women of their identities, of their 'feminine qualities', enacting in her own lexis the process Lenu witnesses. The women are rendered increasingly grotesque by Ferrante's synecdoche; they are 'hollow' eyed, with 'broad behinds', 'swollen ankles' and 'heavy chests', they are a collection of noun-phrases. These epithets once again connote a mythological timelessness – the women could be old witches, harpies, fallen goddesses. 

The painfulness of the passage lies in this transference of ugliness – the neighbourhood's women are made to suffer, to be the physical manifestations of a generational, unquestioned abuse. Ferrante frames this abuse as a macabre form of consumption – the body of the woman is consumed, or perhaps subsumed by the body of the man, by his name, his home, his desires. As with earlier elements of the passage, this image could be drawn from a classical myth in both its horror and its absurdity. 

The end of the passage, however, brings us firmly back to the cold reality of this particular 'transformation': 

"When did that transformation begin? With housework? With pregnancies? With beatings?”

When *did* that transformation begin? Did it begin the moment Eve was violently torn from Adam's ribcage? There is, in this passage, a surety surrounding this treatment of women. But in this passage, social, historical and even mythical precedent are reduced to three piercing phrases. The first two, striking in their domesticity, juxtaposed with the harshness of the third. Except, in the neighbourhood, being a victim of abuse is not in tension with daily life, rather it is a part of it. Housework, pregnancy and beatings are the transformative trinity, and here Ferrante leaves us wondering – what will Lenu's realisation concede? Will she take her place in the neighbourhood, will she be unable to separate the tangible violence from the generational myth? Or will she use her newfound mastery of language to quietly pierce it? This is just an excerpt of Ferrante's work, and it's had me on edge for months. A remarkable passage from a remarkable series of novels. 

Peaches, by Peter Davison

Today is a blue and yellow day, my favourite kind. It's crisp, bright, cold, and I am off work, so generally quite cheery. I've also been doing some baking, which is why I've chosen a taste poem for this week. I found the poem in Neil Astley's anthology, Being Alive. Anthologies are fascinating things in themselves; they can be historic artefacts, period literature guides, they can speak on one topic or many, and in this particular case, they can even double as a self-help book. I love this collection for the way it has been curated - poems by writers old and new on different themes, from 'Taste and See', to 'Being and Loss'. A teacher of mine used to base classes around poems randomly chosen from this collection, encouraging spontaneous and instinctive reactions to poems and poets unheard of - interacting with poetry this way is a lovely way of reading and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Peaches

A mouthful of language to swallow:
stretches of beach, sweet clinches,
breaches in walls, pleached branches;
britches hauled over haunches;
hunched leeches, wrenched teachers.
What English can do: ransack
the warmth that chuckles beneath
fuzzed surfaces, smooth velvet
richness, plashy juices.
I beseech you, peach,
clench me into the sweetness
of your reaches.

Peter Davison 

The first thing to note about this poem has to be the intricate sounds moving throughout it. To my mind, Davison does exactly what a good poet should: he makes the reader interact with his words by writing about a self-enacting idea. This poem is a 'mouthful', best when read aloud, when each word is tasted and tested like the sweetness of a peach. There's so much going on in these lines - noun phrases, internal rhymes, repeated sounds, multi-sensory imagery - so much so that when looked at without properly reading, or reading sequentially, the lines don't seem to make any sense. It's recognisable as English, but strangely foreign, like an Edward Lear poem, or the Jabberwocky. The chaotic devices are almost working at cross purposes. In the imagery for example, the vast 'stretches of beach' image is juxtaposed with the intimate physicality of 'sweet clinches', whilst the hard 'ch' sounds negate the softness of the rich and juicy fruit of which the poet writes. These elements exemplify Davison's thought that English can 'ransack / the warmth that chuckles beneath' - language is almost sentient in the poem. 

I want to look at two words in the poem particularly closely. To my eye, they stand out quite simply because I had to look for their definition. This may well be a reflection on my poor vocabulary, but it's interesting. The first is 'pleached', a word used to describe the branches of trees woven, interlaced or entwined together to form a cover of sorts. It's a symbol of natural growth, development, the ways in which separate elements can come together to create a new thing or purpose - it's an intriguing metaphor for language itself, forming in the mouth and emerging as communication and connection. I particularly enjoy the fact that the word itself is new to me, foreign, the way even your own language can be sometimes. The same principles follows for 'plashy', or, abounding with pools and puddles. Essentially the word means marshy, or wet, but rolls off the tongue a little sweeter. In a very simple way, plashy and pleached are enjoyable words to say, to feel in the mouth, and again Davison draws us back to the sensation of biting a juicy peach - itself a literary buzzword. So the question Davison asks is borrowed ever so slightly from an earlier poet - do I dare to eat a peach? For Davison, language is sensual, seductive, all about sound and taste. There's more to be said about his structure, the extended caesura, the compact sentences, but for me these devices simply emphasise the sweet succinct nature of his language. This is a poem to say aloud, to try for yourself, to taste. 

Lines from Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors, by William Shakespeare

Over the last fortnight the depressingly inevitable happened - I did not have time to post a poem. I started a new job, and between learning to check my emails daily and getting into the 9 to 5 routine, I had to put poetry on the backburner, which is never a nice thing to do. In light of this, I'm going to rehash some thoughts originally thunk at university, on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors. Beginning with a single line of verse, I explored ideas about language and world-making in the play, trying to stay as close to the text as possible. 

Are you a god? Would you create me new? - Antipholus of Syracuse, The Comedy of Errors

In The Comedy of Errors, truth is in the eye of the beholder. In each case of mistaken identity, we see characters insist upon their own beliefs and perceptions, until the weight of these subjective truths causes all sense of reality to collapse in on itself - each character declared ‘stark mad.’ The only hope of resolution is solid proof, and in the world of this particular play, it is not immediately found in words, but beheld in sight. It is only when as the stage direction denotes, ‘all gather to see’ the two sets of twins that the truth is finally revealed – in this moment, visual stagecraft takes precedence over linguistic denotation. However, even in the climactic final scene of the play, characters rely upon their use of language to aid the revelations of sight – if Egeon did not beg the Duke, ‘vouchsafe me speak a word’, and if the Duke did not allow him to ‘speak freely what [he] wilt’, the Antipholuses and the Dromios would remain ‘beyond human reason,’ attendant spirits or, simply, ‘errors’. Egeon's words bring about the resolution of the play, just as they bring about the action in the opening scene, as I will later discuss. Word creates action, from the physical movements on the stage, to the speeches that propel narrative and demarcate scenes, to each individual statement made by each actor. Similarly, in the opening lines of Twelfth Night Shakespeare establishes an Illyrian mode of language – just as the playwright uses his opening speech to create the world of play, Orsino uses the language of love, ‘so full of shapes’ and ‘fantastical’ potential to build himself verbal ‘bowers’ of love. So it appears that in Illyria, speech can create forms of reality even within the fictional reality that has already been created by the playwright. Both plays begin with these hints to the creative power of speech, but, as every play-world is different, from the cityscape of Ephesus to the unmappable realm of Illyria, each is subject to its own linguistic rules, and consequently each reacts differently when the verbal pressure is applied.

The opening lines of The Comedy of Errors establish the fate of Egeon, as the Duke sentences him to death. We are deposited into a world where the immediate form of establishment (and language) belongs to the law; the law is the Duke, and in one speech-act the Duke can take away life - what he says, goes. So, the play begins life with a verbal proclamation of an ending, as the final line of the Duke's monologue denotes: ‘Therefore by law thou art condemned to die.’ Egeon's response acknowledges this fate – ‘Yet this my comfort: when your words are done, / My woes end likewise with the evening sun/’ - but he also seems to suggest that the Duke's ‘words’ are the direct cause of his death. The half line, ‘Yet this my comfort:’ frames the rest of the couplet, placing the emphasis on the middle clause which stands alone - “when your words are done”. Equally, the absence of the auxiliary verb 'will' in between ‘woes’ and ‘end’ create a direct cause and effect relationship between the words being done and the woes being ended. For Egeon, the verbal proclamation makes his death an inevitability, as sure as the sun will set. However, it is not only the Duke's speech that has the power to bring about events. The Duke's request that Egeon ‘say in brief the cause’ of his arrival in Ephesus, and Egeon's attempt to ‘speak [his] griefs unspeakable’ ignite the action in the rest of the play. The paradoxical phrasing of speaking the unspeakable and contravening his own emotional rules leads to the delay in his execution creates the timespan in which the story (and his story) can unfold, and his removal to custody – the physical action of which removes him from the stage and allows the play to progress.

Egeon's lines capture the way in which words can manipulate and forge a path through narrative, in this case it is the search for his family as opposed to his death. In Twelfth Night however, speech is able to create realities as well as stimulating the action within them. Just as the Duke establishes the function of speech in Ephesus, the Duke Orsino sets the linguistic tone in Illyria. Crucially, we begin our journey into the play-world with the subjunctive formation, ‘If... be.’ Immediately, the tone is one of hypothesis, possibility, and condition – it becomes impossible to tether the play-world, or indeed the narrative to any sense of actuality or reality, from the thoughts of Orsino to the entire progression of the play. This mode is later built upon by Viola, but first Shakespeare offers a glimpse into the creative potency of words and imagination. The monologue is one of imagination and sense, to be experienced both aurally and visually by both the audience and the speaker. Orsino envisions ‘the sweet sound/That breathes upon a bank of violets/stealing and giving odour.’ The synaesthetic imagery along with the music playing on stage creates several layers of reality and sense, enhanced by the multiplicity in each word; ‘violets’, ‘the sea’ and the ‘shapes of fancy’ - each shape containing a thought or a possibility for ‘fantastical’ creations. 

Whether Orsino is creating an illusion or merely deluding himself, he uses language to create his own world of excessive love. However, it is the entrance of Viola that truly galvanises the action in the play. Like Orsino, Viola's first lines serve to establish the world she is in, though her arrival necessitates some exposition of narrative – ‘This is Illyria, lady.’ However, her question, ‘And what should I do in Illyria?’, with its use of the modal auxiliary, opens the scene up to several options. Firstly, it requires an answer or an intervention, and if we consider the varied use of the word ‘perchance’ it seems likely that the phrase is waiting for a twist of fate. Secondly, it allows for a discussion of identity and vocation – the desire or obligation to “do” something means the question may be read as ‘Who am I in Illyria?’, indicating that the narrative may resolve that question. Finally, the question can be used to define Illyria itself – the speech unit identifies Illyria as a new reality, a clean slate on which Viola can perform any function, creation or identity. The latter reading offers an insight into Viola's decision later in the scene:

VIOLA:                         O that I served that lady,

               And might not be delivered to the world

               Till I had made my own occasion mellow,

               What my estate is. (1.2.38-41)

Through her speech, Viola creates an optative space in which to plan her course of action. The grammatical tense is once of longing, but the syntactical structure of the first line establishes that the potential action of serving is actually a tool which will enable further journeys and possibilities. The half line represents in structure what it does in plot – it provides momentum for the rest of the verse, and the rest of the play. However, the passage is grammatically disjunctive, as the optative tense is followed by a weaker expression of the volitional subjunctive in ‘might’, followed by the hypothetical action of Viola making her own occasion. The final, present tense description of what her estate ‘is’ marks the transition from an imagined wish to a reality – in the space of four lines Viola conceives, hypothesises and actualises a reality, harnessing the creative power of speech, and setting in motion the events of the play. However, the imagery works against the tenses of the verse, with ‘mellow’ connoting that which is ripe, seasonal, inevitable and of the world. The act of ‘being delivered’ also hinting at an external system of control. It seems that Viola's volition can only exist up to a certain point in the liminal realm of Illyria, whereupon she will be in the ‘world’, wherever that may be, but certainly not where is now.

We are arguably in a reality of Viola's making – confusion and action occur when she and her brother enter the world of Illyria, and, like foreign bodies, interfere with the natural way of things. Had the storm not occurred, we could assume that Orsino would have carried on pursuing Olivia without success, or even that she may have submitted. For a play described as ‘striving into the future’, it is pregnant with images of unnatural, almost artificially kept life, from the overpowering ‘excess’ of language and sensuality in Orsino's opening lines, to the frenzied, festive energies of Sir Andrew and Sir Toby. Most notably perhaps is Olivia's preserved state of mourning; she is as ‘addicted to melancholy’ as Orsino is to love:

VALENTINE: But, like a cloistress, she will veiled walk
                        And water once a day her chamber round
                        With eye-offending brine: all this to season
                        A brother's dead love, which she would keep fresh
                        And lasting in her sad remembrance. (1.1.27-31)

Olivia has created a reality for herself, just like the other characters, and a performative identity as ‘cloistress’. The image of seasoning connotes the unnecessary nature of her behaviour, and suggests that like Orsino she is willing to make herself an illusion, or again, a delusion of an emotional state. The state of ‘remembrance’ is what she creates, and the syntax of the ‘brother's dead love’ suggest that her attempts to keep it fresh are in fact what has killed the true emotion. For Olivia, the experience of losing her brother has become almost like an artificial memory, prompting her to veil herself from the real world (if Illyria is indeed 'real') and exist in one of her own creation. Olivia's reality of mourning inspires Orsino's world of pining, and both stimulate Viola's own reality. So, each sphere, related through speech, feeds the other as Viola then inspires Olivia's new fixation – Cesario.

Though worlds do not so clearly spring for speech in The Comedy of Errors, there are moments in the play when it functions as more than an explanatory tool or an instigator of plot. In Act 3 Scene 2 of the play, Luciana and Antipholus of Syracuse debate both the power and the morality of the spoken word. Luciana speaks of the manipulative skill in speech, noting that ‘Ill deeds is doubled with an evil word’, and that the ‘sweet breath of flattery conquers strife’, drawing attention to the persuasive power of in speech whilst performing that very act. However, in the context of the mistaken identity, Antipholus of Syracuse almost wilfully misinterprets Luciana's speech, latching not upon the content (her advice regarding Adriana) but on the power she invests in speech:

ANT. OF SYRACUSE: That folded meaning of your words' deceit.

                                       Against my soul's pure truth why labour you

                                       To make it wander in an unknown field?

                                        Are you a god? Would you create me new? (3.2.36-39)

                                       

Antipholus believes Luciana's words to be deceitful, as they advise him against his ‘soul's pure truth’ to love Luciana herself - once again, individual perspective and belief is in tension with verbal explanation. However, the phrase ‘folded meaning’ does far more than describe Luciana's monologue, or her ‘words' deceit”. The syntax of the line frames the deceit as belonging to the words, rather than to the figure that spoke them, imbuing 'words' with a sentient ability to manipulate and deceive – an independent body of action. This line is then re-imagined by Antipholus' question – ‘Are you a god? Would you create me new?’ The words that he knows (in his soul) to be false, he then grants the power to “create” him new – so, if he acquiesces to Luciana's speech he will be ‘transformed’ by the words.  Luciana's speech is given divine power – she has the potential to create a new character, just as Viola manipulates a world to her will. The word ‘folded’ is glossed as 'hidden' in the Norton edition of the text, but its possibilities extend beyond a suggestion of implicit meaning. The tangible qualities of the adjective ‘folded’ are many: it could mean to bend, twist, or coil , and perhaps most suggestively, to double. Equally, if the action is repeated, it creates something dense and compact, that moves in on itself. Actions such as these can be seen in individual moments of the play, from the doubling of characters (identity folded in on itself, or shared across two bodies, brothers or husband and wife) to the tightly wound coil of confusion at the centre of the play. Folded meaning pervades both speech, action and narrative, and the space for interpretation suggests that language has creative power.

In Twelfth Night, the idea of ‘folded meaning’ is exemplified by the linguistic wordplay of Feste, the fool. Feste directly addresses the ways in which language can shape form more than any other character; he is a ‘corrupter of words’, but he is very much aware of it, as Terry Eagleton suggests when analysing the following lines:

FESTE: To see this age! A sentence is but a chev’ril glove to a good wit. How quickly the wrong side may be turn’d outward! . . . I can yield you [no reason] without words, and words are grown so false I am loath to prove reason with them. (3.1.10-22)

Eagleton suggests that Feste harnesses both the creative and the destructive power in speech, as reality can only be expressed in language, but language can also serve to falsify reality – the paradox shown by the chiasmic structure of the second sentence. In contrast to Viola however, Feste distances himself from speech – he exists externally from it, he can ‘see [the] age’, whereas Viola lives in an experience of her own linguistic creation. Imagination and reality become the same, made possible by each act of speech. For example, when Viola is mistaken for Sebastian and considers that he may yet be alive, she cries ‘Prove true, imagination, o prove true!’. Once again, Viola's speech performs an act, her imagination does indeed prove true, moving the play nearer to its conclusion.

The very title of the play encapsulates the dialectic of things as they are, and things as character and speech create them: Twelfth Night, Or What You Will. The 'will' here is both optative and determined – the play can be what you wish it, as can the language, as can reality, when inspired by a certain stimulus – in this case the point of beginning for Viola is the virtual reality of Illyria, which spawns several different articulated worlds. At the end of both plays, we are confronted with the potential end of a world – in Ephesus, balance has been restored, names realigned – the characters end where they begun before the world of the play existed – a family as was recollected in Egeon's first speech. In Twelfth Night however, the ‘excess’ of language, of love and of the multiple realities created in speech, is not so easily resolved. Like The Comedy of Errors, the play ends where it began, in Illyria, but unlike other comedies such as a Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It, there is no return to an external, stable world – characters remain locked into their own realities, realities which could only happen in Illyria. The only character who emerges is Feste, alone on the stage in the ‘wind and the rain’, beginning his final song with a definitive ‘when’ to contrast Orsino's ‘if’ and bookend the play. So, language begins and ends the world of the play, but the course of events formed by Viola's optative choices and verbal assertions continue – Feste does not undo them, as he did not create them. Viola, Orsino, Olivia and Sebastian remain inextricably linked by their intertwined, speech-shaped realities: despite the fact that the ‘play is done’ - the linguistic world endures.

Landmark, by Owen Sheers

On this sleepy Sunday I’ve been rooting through my boxes of books (still not unpacked from university) and I pulled out a lovely collection of poems that I’d forgotten I owned. I say owned, I mean pinched from my secondary school on the last day of term. Owen Sheers’ Skirrid Hill is an earthy, crisp and suggestive book of poems about cultural inheritance and changing identities, moving between modern cities and rural Wales. Though there are obvious parallels between Sheers and other ‘nature’ poets such as Seamus Heaney and R.S Thomas, for me his work evokes older sensibilities. When I re-read the collection, my thoughts ran to another Welsh poet named Henry Vaughan, who wrote in the early 17^th century. He too explored the disjunct between man and nature, the marks we make on our landscape, and the marks made upon us. In the preface to the collection, we are told that Skirrid comes “from the Welsh . . . Ysgariad meaning divorce or separation" – in a reading of the following poem, ‘Landmark’, I’m going to explore this thought.

Landmark 

Afterwards they were timeless
and they lay that way for a while before standing
and dressing, reclaiming their clothes

from the white-blossomed branches of the blackthorn tree.
And already they were part of things again:
his watch, her ear-rings, their clumsy shoes.

They noticed the telephone wires, the time,
even the broken rug of a long-dead sheep
folded at the bottom of the bank.

On going they stopped to turn and look back,
holding each other as if to let go would mean forever,
and they saw where they had been -

a double shadow of green pressed grass, weight imprinted.
A sarcophagus, shallow among the long stems
and complete without them.

By Owen Sheers

In ‘Landmark’, we enter the scene of the poem just a fraction too late. We are belatedly witnessing the ‘afterwards’, the denouement, without having seen the main event. The event of the poem is secondary to a prior scene, a scene that Sheers gradually intimates – a couple have most likely just had sex, and are hidden away behind ‘the branches of the blackthorn tree.’ Here I’m reminded of the dreaming speaker in Keats’ The Fall of Hyperion, arriving too late to the banquet and desperately gorging on the left over fruits. The flashes of intimacy have been withheld from us, and these ideas of privacy, of withholding and of a lapsed moment of bliss are at the heart of the poem.

In the first stanza, Sheers’ articulation of time establishes an ethereal quality in the poem, as he notes that ‘afterwards they were timeless’ and that they ‘lay that way for a while…’ It appears that the couple are suspended in their after-moment – they may have been lay for ten minutes, or ten years – it feels as though their awakening is only precipitated by our presence as the reader, as the witness. The lack of specificity in terms of both time and identity creates the first whisperings of an association between this couple, and the classic depiction of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Sheers teases out this parallel in several ways. The syntax of the first stanza echoes the linguistic devices often found in Biblical verse. The methodical progression of each sentence, along with the anaphora of ‘and’ in lines two, three and five, and the slight internal rhymes (standing, dressing, reclaiming), each contribute to the measured tone. The imagery strongly evokes Edenic tropes – after the unseen moment of bliss, perhaps sin, there is the ‘reclaiming of clothes’, the world of material ‘things’ and the ‘clumsy’ humanity that typifies the fallen state of man. The clothing here is a modern imagining of the fig leaf; the clumsiness is the loss of grace. The couple are laden with material signifiers of their change in, and removal from, nature, and Sheers’ language mirrors this, emphasised by the short clauses and listing of objects:

‘And already they were part of things again:

his watch, her ear-rings, their clumsy shoes.’

The natural, primal scene becomes irretrievably linked to a modern world, from the purity of the white-blossom exchanged for telephone wires cutting through silence, and even the ‘long-dead sheep’ re-imagined as a household object, a ‘rug.’ The couple begin to ‘notice’, to awaken as it were. The final image of the first line of the first stanza and the first line of the third oppose one another – from timelessness we have moved to the present, more definite ‘time.’ For me the poem seems to accelerate as soon as the couple begins to dress. Within the stanzas, the listing creates a quickened pace, and each taut little tercet seems to act as a point of removal, as another pace away from that initial timelessness and bliss, and from our natural place in a natural environment. This movement is emphasised in the fourth stanza. The phrase ‘On going they stopped’ is an odd one, oxymoronic in essence. I think that this moment is a crucial one within the entire collection, as it seems to perfectly describe a point of hesitance, of being torn between two states – the moment before the full separation or remove. The image of the couple, holding one another and briefly looking back, again evokes the image of Adam and Eve leaving Eden together, so far removed from their prior incarnations that they ‘saw where they had been’ from the same detached perspective as the reader. This is a shift from the previous inferences of sacred intimacy. Traditionally, blackthorn trees were used to make hedges, emphasising the secrecy of the moment before the poem, but now the couple look openly at the scene as we do.

In the final stanza Sheers fully realises a thought that echoes through the poem. We see the marks made on the couple by their things, but what mark do they, or their preternatural selves leave on the land? The image of a ‘double shadow of green pressed grass, weight imprinted’ is remarkably allusive, and in this line, and this stanza, Sheers taps into several different histories and mythologies. The idea of the shadow draws us back to the notion of an prior self and a secondary moment, even echo, but Sheers renders the imperceptible idea of a shadow tangible, giving it body, colour, making it into a physical scar on the landscape. The concept of an ‘imprint’ is something I find completely fascinating - it evokes the moment of impression, again it emphasises the idea of something secondary and derived, and it’s explored throughout history, from Descartes’ ‘wax argument’ to the concept of ‘love at first sight’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

However, these images all describe something that is directly linked to a prior creator – the thing that makes the imprint, in this case the couple. Sheers negates this notion in his final sentence. The image of the ‘sarcophagus’ – yet another mythology - symbolises death, but also preservation. The idea that the shadow, an imprint, that an echo of the primal scene can be ‘complete without’ what made it is the twist of the poem, as it were. That’s probably far too simplistic an assertion, but that’s what the Landmark is. It is an echo of something primal and vital which draws together many histories and mythologies, be they religious, spiritual, or even the simple intimacies of a couple in the countryside. The quiet intimacy should not be forgotten, the couple remain bound together throughout the poem, despite their distinction from the natural environment. So, although we witness a separation as the couple move away from nature, a part of them is irretrievably left behind in the ‘green pressed grass.’

Drawing, by Ted Hughes

For my first post I haven chosen a poem by Ted Hughes, taken from his collection Birthday Letters. It was probably the first book of poetry I read cover to cover, frantically turning pages as if I was reading the latest Scandi-thriller. I was introduced to the collection by an incredible teacher who gave it to our class because there was hardly any criticism available on it. We could approach these strange and exciting poems with complete freedom, and Birthday Letters has been a 'familiar foreign object' on my bookshelf ever since.

Drawing

Drawing calmed you. Your poker infernal pen 
Was like a branding iron. Objects
Suffered into their new presence, tortured 
Into final position. As you drew
I felt released, calm. Time opened
When you drew the market at Benidorm.
I sat near you, scribbling something.
Hours burned away. The stall-keepers
Kept coming to see you had them properly.
We sat on those steps, in our rope-soles,
And were happy. Our tourist novelty
Had worn off, we knew our own ways
Through the town’s runs. We were familiar
Foreign objects. When he’d sold his bananas
The banana seller gave us a solo
Violin performance on his banana stalk.
Everybody crowded to praise your drawing.
You drew doggedly on, arresting details,
Till you had the whole scene imprisoned.
Here it is. You rescued for ever
Our otherwise lost morning. Your patience,
Your lip-gnawing scowl, got the portrait
Of a market–place that still slept
In the Middle Ages. Just before
It woke and disappeared
Under the screams of a million summer migrants
And the cliff of dazzling hotels. As your hand
Went under Heptonstall to be held
By endless darkness. While my pen travels on
Only two hundred miles from your hand,
Holding this memory of your red, white-spotted bandana, 
Your shorts, your short-sleeved jumper —
One of the thirty I lugged around Europe —
And your long brown legs, propping your pad,
And the contemplative calm
I drank from your concentrated quiet,
In this contemplative calm
Now I drink from your stillness that neither
Of us can disturb or escape.

What I find most enticing about this poem is the unsettled and unsettling feeling that runs through it; it is a feeling that hangs over this entire collection, from the personal narratives that are presented, to the juxtaposition of domestic familiarity and the embers of volatility in this particular poem. In ‘Drawing’, Hughes invites us to remember something with him - a single memory stretched out across three perspectives. There is the imagined present of Hughes as he makes the poem, a recalled past of the scene itself embodied by the repeated addresses of a first person 'I', and the 'you' who is the third figure in the poem. Hughes creates a nestled box of scenes. The poem is a memory of one scene in which the Hughes-speaker recalls another scene of Plath drawing the market-place, which itself is being 'tortured into final position' by Plath and her 'branding iron.' For Hughes, 'time opened' as Plath drew, and for the reader it opens as he writes.

In his opening lines Hughes initiates several core ideas. This poem is about capturing images, about seeing, witnessing, recording and remembering. We have Hughes' own 'scribbling', Plath's 'arresting details', stall-keepers checking up on their painted doubles - this is anecdotal ekphrasis. To me, this act of ekphrasis denotes a repeated transfer of creative energy, as the various figures feed off one another’s vitality and artistic output. Plath desperately arrests her characters into position, and many years later Hughes molds her into one of the characters she originally sought to capture, as she becomes the focus of this particular piece of art. At first Hughes leads us to believe that this is a poem of tranquility, of a quiet moment shared between two lovers. The tone is outwardly peaceful and the simplicity of the opening statement ‘Drawing calmed you’ emphasises that idea. In the fifth line Hughes’ own emotions mirror his description of Plath’s, as he felt ‘released, calm.’ Yet, the half-line ‘I felt released, calm’ is emblematic of the shifting meanings operating in the poem. In the ostensibly peaceful scene there is an undercurrent of energy that is both creative and unstable. The parataxis of the half-line places the two units of meaning alongside one another, and so it initially appears that in this context, Hughes’ ‘calm’ is synonymous with his ‘release.’ However, the enjambment of the line connects the idea of ‘release’ with the language of the preceding clause, in which Hughes uses this striking sentence:

                                    Objects

Suffered into their new presence, tortured

Into final position.

For me, Hughes associates the feeling of ‘release’ with a sense of gratifying exhilaration as well as a sense of calm. The semantic field of suffering, torture and imprisonment is almost sadistically pleasurable for Hughes, in that it offers him the ‘release’ and ‘calm’ he needs to write, both in the moment recalled in the poem, and when writing the poem itself. The tone of instability is underpinned by Hughes’ language – the ‘poker infernal pen’, the ‘branding iron’, the ‘hours burned away’, the ‘screams’ of the ‘migrants’ and the ‘lip-gnawing scowl’ of Plath in the ‘endless darkness’ create a hellish scene. Equally, the word ‘suffered’ is subject to a shifting meaning; the idea of something suffered into position reinforces the meta-poetic trope that runs through the poem. To be suffered is to be passive, to endure pain, to be manipulated by a dominant force. In this case, Hughes and Plath both represent a dominant creative force, suffering each other and their surroundings into position like artistic parasites. This parasitic nature is epitomised by their description as ‘familiar foreign objects’ in the market. A foreign object is something unnatural, something that invades the body, something that must be repelled. The phrase perfectly captures the strong duality running through the poem – the juxtaposition between the calm scene and its fiery undertones, the sleepy market and the ‘dazzling’ tourist hotspot, the past and present memory, and between the two writers themselves. To my mind, this neat little utterance perfectly captures the relationship between Hughes and Plath – inextricably drawn together in work and reputation, though constantly at odds.

In the second half of the poem the temporal shifts become more apparent, indicated by the mirrored phrases ‘just before’, ‘as your hand went’ and ‘while my pen travels’. From Plath’s frantic attempts to imprison the life of the market scene, we see Plath herself become imprisoned in death, in the ‘endless darkness.’ The reference to Heptonstall and the site of Plath’s grave is an example of the repeated synecdoche in the poem, including the paralleled phrases of ‘my pen’ and ‘your hand’ representing Hughes and Plath themselves, the descriptions of Plath’s clothing and her ‘long brown legs.’ There is a poignant intimacy in these lines as Hughes searches for something tangible to cling to in these long-gone objects, impossibly ‘holding’ the ‘memory’ as he holds the painting: ‘here it is.’ As Hughes moves through time, seeking and replicating his moments with Plath, his syntax becomes increasingly complex. The caesura in the final ten lines creates an anecdotal tone; the nod to carrying Plath’s luggage around Europe is an almost banal example of married life, stressing the aforementioned juxtaposition between domestic familiarity and the volatility of their relationship. Equally, the anaphoric repetition of ‘and’ drives the meditative sense of recollection, as though Hughes is trying to get closer and closer to a disappearing moment, much like the image of the dissolving market and Plath’s hand in the endless darkness.

Finally, the repeated phrases of ‘contemplative calm’ and ‘concentrated quiet’ structured around the past tense ‘drank’ and present ‘drink’ take us back to the key concept of a continual transfer of creative and emotional energy from Plath to Hughes, even in her ‘stillness.’ Perhaps it is even evocative of the vampiric persona Plath bestows upon Hughes in her own ‘Daddy.’ Despite the enjambment, the final line jars – despite the time passed, Hughes and Plath are still the ‘familiar foreign objects’ they were in that Spanish market, and so neither of them can ‘escape’ one another, or Plath’s fate. In ‘Drawing’, we move deftly from shifting perspectives and time frames to a suspended, bittersweet moment created by and inhabited by Hughes and Plath together. From the sweet recollections of a red-spotted bandana, to the rumbling imprints of a concentrated moment left behind in on a piece of paper, it is a surprisingly heated poem that for me provokes a disconcerting sense of voyeuristic pleasure, even comfort. It's an invitation to be intimate with the pair, as is the whole collection.