Sunday Night Journal — June 7, 2010
I keep a list of planned topics for this journal, and this has
been on the list for a while—for something close to a year, in
fact, as I just discovered by looking through my email. It was in
June of last year that Dale Nelson sent me a packet of information
about Pitter, including a generous sample of her poetry and a copy of
the introduction to her Collected Poems.
I think this followed a discussion of her work in comments here,
but since those comments don’t appear in searches, I can’t
easily locate them.
I seem to have a fondness for
minor poets, or I should say for minor artists in general. It’s
not a deliberate choice on my part. I don’t think I’m
doing it out of any sort of desire to be contrary or to go against
the grain; if I am, it’s not conscious. I tend to be drawn to
the modest, the unassuming, the plain, and also to the off-center and
slightly, or more than slightly, strange. And as a rule, those qualities
are not characteristic of capital-G Greatness in art.
So if Ruth Pitter is a minor
poet—which is not my judgment, but a simple observation of the
fact that no one seems to be claiming otherwise—that’s
not much of a criticism, and a minor poet may have written some great
poems, only not as many as the greater poets.
Pitter is one of those modern
poets, of whom there have been more in England than in America, who
did not embrace formal Modernism, and chose instead to stick with
rhyme and meter. Auden, of course, is another, and he certainly
proved that modernism in form was not a requirement for writing verse
that speaks to our time. Or is our time still their time at all? I’m
not sure, but I suppose it’s enough to say that Auden, for
instance, was highly regarded in his lifetime and still is. I think
the flight from strict form and fairly straightforward sense
was not the inevitable thing that Pound,
Eliot, and others tried to make it. I suspect that in general one
ought to suspect poets who are also critics of erecting critical
principles that justify and praise their own practice, which is
probably more determined by what they can
do than what they might do if they could choose their own
gifts. I love Eliot’s poetry, and rank Four Quartets
among my favorite books of any kind and any time, but I do think
there was sometimes a self-serving aspect to his early criticism, an
attempt to make it seem that the characteristically modernist modes
of expression were historically inevitable.
The same sort of thing happened
in music, and just as in music there were composers like Samuel
Barber who proved by their achievement that hard atonalism was not
the inevitable music of the future, so there were poets who proved
that one could write very well in traditional forms simply by doing
it.
And yet the modernists did have a
point. Something had changed in the language, and it was harder in
the 20th
century to use those techniques effectively. Or perhaps it was simply
a change in taste and habits—but then those change the
language, too…well, whatever the reasons, and the reciprocal causes
and effects, it seems to me to be a fact that the strain of using
rhyme and meter is often apparent in the work of those who chose to
stay with them.
This is true sometimes of Pitter,
and I think more often in her longer and more complex poems, which of
course is not surprising. One of her great virtues, it seems to me,
is a quick, sharp clarity, and this quality tends to be dissipated in the
longer poems. Of the poems I’ve read, I prefer the shorter
ones in some fairly simple quatrain form. At their best (well, the
best of the two dozen or so poems I’ve read), her poems in this
style are as skillfully natural-sounding as those of Wordsworth or
Frost.
Her subject matter is both
domestic and mystical, sometimes in the same poem. Sometimes the
domestic aspect is decidedly earthy and even ribald, as in a comic
poem about a lewdly-shaped potato (never explicitly described, but we
can guess). It’s the mystical streak that makes her more than
mildly interesting to me. It’s a very Christian mysticism, at
least implicitly—I add that qualification because she came to
Christianity relatively late, when she was well over forty, and I
don’t know when most of the poems I’ve been reading were
composed. Some are pretty specifically Christian, while others could
have been written by one who is on the path, who clearly has the
spiritual intuitions and desires which have led so many of us to the
faith. Her conversion was heavily influenced by C.S. Lewis, and some
of the poems seem to show thought like his. Whether this is influence
or just natural affinity I can’t guess without knowing when the
poems were written.
The Spring
Where is the spring of my
delight,
Now every spring is dry?
There is no blossom in my sight,
No sun is in the sky:The birds are still and love is
past,
And danger whistles shrill,
And life itself now looks aghast
And birth becomes an ill:And yet the spring of my delight
Leaps up beyond belief,
As if it sprang in very spite—
In very spite of grief:And yet the secret stream of
grace
Flows on, and swells the same,
As if from out another place
Where sorrow has no name.
As much as the best of the poems,
I like Pitter’s preface to her Collected Poems.
In only a few pages—four, to be exact—she says a great
deal that is profound about art, life, and God. I’d really like
to quote the whole thing, but here is a sample:
But the summits of poetry are
mysteries; they are shiftingly veiled, and those who catch the
glimpses see different aspects of the transcendental; but they have
seen something, and
they come down with the glory lingering on them. Overtones,
undertones, echoes, intuitions, deep memories, ancestral fears and
immortal longings, are gathered by the spell, raised from the dead,
affecting the reader even to tears. Some people cannot pronounce some
passages aloud without weeping. The mind has suddenly become a great
soundboard, echoing far beyond its accustomed range into its own vast
borderlands, where lost paradise and hoped-for heaven have betaken
themselves; and we are shaken by a cosmic wind, and know ourselves
for creatures of a far greater range than we are commonly aware of.
I think I spend about 10% of my
time in the condition she describes, which can be induced by many
things other than poetry, and the other 90% trying to keep myself
from sliding into the pit in which the 10% appears as hopelessly
wishful thinking.
Here are two articles I found
online which I’ve only had time to glance at but which look
very interesting: one
on the friendship between Pitter and Lewis, the
other a lengthy review of a biography of Pitter, Hunting the Unicorn.
I expect I’ll be buying the
Collected Poems,
though I don’t know when I think I’ll have time to read
it. And thanks to Dale Nelson for introducing me to her. I think
others may have recommended her as well, but, sorry, I don’t remember who.
The Wikipedia biography
quotes her description of her Christianity as “Straight prayer-book Anglican,
nothing fancy.” Not a very tenable position anymore, I think; if it were
I might have remained one.
Light On Dark Water 
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