#c.h. sisson

[aqueleeme]

Celebrate if you will The triumph of your genes: The past is working still —That is all that it means. In every spoken word, Always, the past is heard. Perhaps silence is best, But if there must be speech, Then watch it closely, lest It stretches out of reach. The future is too far: The past is all we are.

C.H. Sisson, In the Silence

[my-ear-trumpet]

. . . so far as literature is concerned, the future is more likely to be found in the past than in the present. If Dante and Catullus, Horace or Raleigh, or some equivalent figures, are not of actual importance to you, in terms of  pleasure and enlightenment to be got from their works here and now, then literature—the designation of the permanent elements in man—is not what you are interested in as you turn to the weeklies and the Sunday supplements.

Anecdotal Evidence: "C.H. Sisson’s bracing little digression on literary tradition and its true adherents comes in the final chapter of his English Poetry 1900-1950: An Assessment, published in 1971"

[theblognamedtheboke-blog]

Geoffrey Hill on C.H. Sisson

                   from PN Review 39, Volume 11 Number 1, July - August 1984.

The text of a lecture delivered in the Department of English, University of Bristol, March 1980, during the author's tenure of the Churchill Fellowship.

Charles Sisson is a writer who has a keen engagement with, but no commitment to, politics. In saying this I try not only to describe his position but also to evoke his tone. 'Commitment', in its generally-accepted sense, is not a term that would receive his deference. The reasons for this are plain. 'Commitment' is not merely a word; it is a stance, an ethos even. And the stance is not one that attracts him; the ethos is alien to him. And yet if we were simply to suppose that a man who does not espouse commitment must of necessity be uncommitted, some study of Sisson's literary and political writings would instruct us otherwise. He has his style; and the style is a compounding of the direct and the oblique. He has observed that Richard Crashaw's was 'a mind in search of artifices to protect itself against its own passions, (Collected Essays, 470). It must be said at once that this does not describe Sisson's own style of experience or style of utterance. He seems to me one of the least self-protective of poets, unconcerned with, even disdainful of, artifice, if by artifice is meant creation of personae, or the deployment of rhetorical eloquence as a distancing or subliming medium. In the climate of our age, this ought to make him unremarkable but marketable. Pop poets and confessional poets trade in self-exposure and display. And current literary taste, emotionally misreading Wordsworth's dictum about the 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings', is not sympathetic to any suggestion that poetry is first and foremost a craft. But, in fact, Sisson is a very remarkable poet indeed, and virtually unmarketable; and we need therefore to inquire into this apparent paradox and to examine its implications.

     It is not so difficult, really. Sisson distrusts artifice precisely because he is a craftsman. In view of the fact that he writes not infrequently of 'lust and rage' one would expect him to be in close sympathy with the late poetry of W. B. Yeats, whose words these are. But he's not. His chapter on Yeats, in his book English Poetry 1900-1950, is an unignorable voice of dissent breaking into the grand chorus of critical adulation. Sisson argues that when Yeats writes of 'lust and rage' he is concerned with 'cutting a figure' (E.P., 157) and that when he celebrates 'the artifice of eternity' he is making a 'gesture, impressive in the poet, but meaningless for common life when one closes the book' (E.P., 170). On the other hand, those who wish to appeal to the spontaneous overflow of the demotic as their criterion of truth in poetry or 'common life' are not likely to receive much encouragement from Sisson either. He has said: 'It is too readily supposed that there is a "personal experience" which can be conveyed in words. In fact, the consciousness we have is a product of history . . . When it comes to the feelings of a woman abandoned by her lover, the whole force of a civilization is in play. There is no original feeling of such a situation, and no overlay of tradition' (Collected Essays, 213-4). These ideas are perhaps somewhat elliptically expressed; and I ought therefore to give you my own sense of what it is they are saying. Sisson is challenging the not-uncommon assumption that the function of language, whether in poetry or in common life, is merely to be the passive recipient of any spasm or efflux which the rampant personality chooses to deposit there. Our personal experience is not pure experience; it is acted upon by various contingencies, of some of which we may be ignorant. Among the least acknowledged of these contingent powers are those of language, and of history effective through the language that we know, the language of which we are capable. 'The depth, coherence and relevance of what one person has to say,' Sisson adds, 'will immeasurably exceed those qualities in what another says' (C.E., 214). Since, philosophically-speaking, 'solipsism' is the 'theory that self is the only object of real knowledge' (OED), it would be reasonable to suggest that Sisson writes with a distinct anti-solipsistic bias. 'When it comes to the feelings of a woman abandoned by her lover, the whole force of a civilization is in play'. There are precedents and analogues even for this, Sisson seems to imply, and to suppose that there are not is the reductio ad absurdum of solipsistic arrogance. But Sisson's rigour works in more than one direction. 'There is no original feeling of such a situation, and no overlay of tradition.' This is cryptic; too cryptic. The general sense of the essay is that it is impossible to determine the point at which the experience we 'make' and the experience which is 'made' for us come into contact. This is a fair suggestion. If I have a metaphysical quarrel with Sisson it is that he seems to deny what I would see as an undeniable paradox: that however much the 'woman abandoned by her lover' (to take his own example) suffers the experience without 'original feeling', the experience, to her, is unique.

       I entirely concur with what I take his argument to be: that solipsism is a pernicious doctrine. When Allen Tate remarked that 'self-expression' is a word which ought to be 'tarred and feathered' he was also of that opinion. But I would also maintain that in certain extreme moments, and I would include being abandoned by one's lover as one of these, we suffer solipsistically. It is the worse for us that we do; but we do. Calvin Bedient, I would suspect, is in something of the same perplexity as I am. In his useful essay on Sisson's poetry in PNR 5, he quotes Sisson's line: 'Nothing is in my own voice because I have not/Any', a line which fits logically with such prose-statements as 'the consciousness we have is a product of history'. Yet, as Bedient shrewdly notices, Sisson's 'very doubt' that he possesses a voice of his own 'gives him a voice - flat, scraped bare, joyless, edged with assertion' (PNR 5, 61). Note particularly those last words 'edged with assertion'. Sisson's is an assertive mind; and the assertive mind can never be entirely disembarrassed of the solipsistic one. His chapter on Yeats, to which I have already referred, is brilliant, necessary, prejudiced. Sisson seems to believe (and I am not out of sympathy with such a view) that it is here and now necessary to react against Yeatsian cadences that have been swept uncritically into the cultural drift; but I also believe that he is of necessity bound to assert his own mind and voice against the dominating mind and voice of Yeats, and of Eliot too, who receives even harsher treatment in Sisson's book. I mean there are two threads - and it would be very surprising if there were not: the thread of philosophical reaction and the thread of creative self-perpetuation, self-advancement, which any poet must have to survive. Again, we hit on a paradox: poets advance by reacting against that which impedes them. This is mostly done by the self-assertions of intuition. Sisson's problem is compounded by the fact that he is a seriously-engaged political thinker in one of the strongest and most creative of English traditions: radical reaction. My argument is that whereas all real poets are, at the intuitive level, radical reactionaries, not all poets are so conceptually. In the case where one is, his course is not, as one might expect, simplified, but is made more difficult; because the psychic self-will he must have to endure as a poet will from time to time irrupt as a conceptual, philosophical, dialectical wilfulness. What one is likely to get, in such situations, is a heady mixture of clear-sighted social and literary criticism and blind rage.

  There are enough metaphors in Sisson's book on English Poetry to justify my argument turning on suggestions of deep psychic impulse. Sisson's recurring metaphors are those of the root and the well. He writes of the danger that a poet may 'become content to draw from too shallow wells' (E.P., 24); Herbert Read's weakness as a poet is that 'the spring was drained off before it was operating at any pressure' (E.P., 186). The strength of Berkeley and Coleridge, according to Sisson, is that, even while they dealt in terms of abstract thought, 'such expression touched the roots of the mind' (E.P., 127). He says, of the late poems of Yeats, that, 'while the impulse for the poems unquestionably comes from deep sources, there is a strong element of preconception in the subject-matter . . . ' (E.P., 165); and his concession to Yeats's struggle as an artist is cast in terms of the same metaphor: 'there is no doubt, however, that in these final poems Yeats is trying desperately to cast aside pretences and to get to the root of his mind' (E.P., 157). It is both a 'radical' and an 'artesian' metaphor. 'Artesian' is the adjective from 'Artois', and refers to the wells made there in the eighteenth century 'in which a perpendicular boring into a synclinal fold or basin of the strata produces a constant supply of water rising spontaneously to the surface of the ground' (OED). The interesting, even disconcerting, thing is that whereas Sisson is deeply engaged with the 'forms of words' and what they 'allow us to feel' (Collected Essays, 213), what I have called his 'artesian' metaphor seems to draw less on the strata, the 'verticals' of language-in-history, for its strength and pressure than on something which Jung would call the anima and Yeats the spiritus mundi. And yet, at the level of discursive argument, I would infer nothing but hostility in Sisson's attitude towards the Yeatsian-Jungian axis and its possible incitement of several forms of currently fashionable mysticism. 'The language of the deep,' he writes, 'became the recognized intellectual medium of the twentieth century. The way to all kinds of poetic pseudo-profundity was opened up, to the great confusion of shallow minds' (E.P., 199). Again, a fecund perplexity: that so resolute an anti-mystic can, at times, promulgate a form of racial mysticism. Praising Ezra Pound's well-known version of the Old English poem The Seafarer, Sisson appeals to 'the heavy yet athletic brooding, the sense of doom without abandon, which are still central to the English character' (E.P., 113-4). Can one really generalize like this? 'Still central to the English character' is not myth but jargon; and it is deeply worrying when a writer like Sisson, who quite justly detests jargon, himself perpetrates it. It is possible, I think, to trace this to a source. In an essay written in 1961, on the Dorset poet and philological scholar William Barnes, he quotes Barnes's note on the 'Character and Intelligence of the Britons' and adds that 'he exhibits the prejudices and loyalties of a race untouched by liberal delusions' (Collected Essays, 196). Sisson's difficulty, a fascinating one, and so intractable that I doubt whether he ever satisfactorily resolves it, is how to reconcile the kind of prejudice which is of all things the most inimical to poetry' (26). I say does not. He writes in English Poetry of 'the easy flow of prejudice which is of all things the most inimical of poetry' (26). I say 'reconcile' quite deliberately; because I would acknowledge that Sisson distinguishes between them clearly enough in his own mind. If we replace his latter phrase in its context we see that he is speaking in praise of Thomas Hardy: 'The combination of an imaginative reach into the past with a dogged insistence on his right to his own differences gave Hardy a strong protection against the easy flow of prejudice which is of all things the most inimical to poetry.' The distinction is essentially between what might colloquially be called 'cussedness', dogged contrariness, on the one hand, and mere 'cultural drift', the prejudice of 'public opinion', on the other.

  We could look again at the dichotomy in his argument between 'deep' and 'shallow', a dichotomy complicated by Sisson's entirely proper observation that nothing appeals to the shallow mind more than 'pseudo-profundity'. The intellectual and emotional distinction is clear enough to Sisson. What I have loosely called 'reconciling' is a technical implication, which I would want to be taken as covering a range of options, some of which might not appear to be very conciliatory at all. Technical reconciliation, the 'reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities', as Coleridge put it, is of course something other than the simple melting away of differences or antagonisms. But one has to consider also the implications of one of Sisson's most acute critical insights, when he said of Ezra Pound that 'the transition from generalization to practice completely eluded him, and since the whole agony of practical affairs is in that transition, the gap was a pretty serious one' (E.P., 102). An important contingent interest in the study of Sisson is that he was, prior to his retirement from public life, an administrator of public 'practical affairs' at a high level of accomplishment and responsibility as a principal under-secretary in the Minstry of Labour. I call it an important contingent interest. The crucial central interest is his poetry and literary and political criticism; and the making of a poem or of a critical essay is that facet of 'practical affairs' with which we are essentially concerned. I will not sentimentalize or patronize his book, The Spirit of British Administration (1959), by calling it a poet's book. It is a work of description and evaluation, a comparative study of British and European administrative systems, by a student of administration who is also a practitioner of it. But the student of Sisson may not be wrong in perceiving analogies and drawing out certain cross-references. Sisson writes, in The Spirit of British Administration, that that 'which repels [the British-style administrator] in the continental systems is a certain Byzantinism'; and we are to gloss the meaning of this term by his immediate quotation of H. F. Jolowicz's critique of the Justinian legal code: 'A preference for abstract standards, referable to definite and conscious ethical conceptions . . . and a taste for logical arrangement which sometimes degenerates into the multiplication of unreal and practically useless distinctions' (British Administration, 71). Sisson's criticisms of both Pound and Yeats are partly suggested by the 'Byzantinism' of both poets, who each in his respective way celebrated that city for absolute values which they believed it to represent: Pound, in Canto 98, for its control of interest and in his essay on Cavalcanti for the "medieval clean line", as distinct from medieval niggle' (Literary Essays, 1954, 150); Yeats, in two major poems written in his sixties, for its value as 'an imaginative triumph of formalism over random agitation', to quote Richard Ellmann (Eminent Domain, 1967, 17). It is with some irony that Sisson comments upon the concern displayed by the French writer Robert Catherine, for the achievement of a pure administrative style: 'He can underline the inelegance of a phrase, or note that an adverb may conceal an inadequacy in a thought, but it is with the complaisance of a mandarin whose empire might be crumbling unobserved before his eyes that he notes the relationship between the administrative sentence and the sentence of Proust . . .' (British Administration, 120). It is not quite true to suggest, as David Wright has done, that Sisson has evolved a 'prose style as spare as Swift's and with a savagery as remorseless and elegant' (Agenda 13/3, 8), since 'elegance' for Sisson is more an attribute of the mandarin or the closely-related Byzantine. What one can say is that Sisson's ideal attainment, whether in prose or verse, is the plain style. And it is precisely at this point that his work as an administrator and as a poet and verse-translator can be seen to exist in a satisfying complementary pattern. His 'Foreword' to the 'Selected Translations' section of In the Trojan Ditch could profitably be studied in conjunction with chapter 10, 'The Mind of the Administrator', in The Spirit of British Administration. He writes there that the 'subjunctive may be said to characterize the French Civil Service as plain words do the British' (120). In the 'Foreword' to 'Selected Translations' he writes of the impulse behind his earliest exercises in this genre: 'If I had been asked what I was after, I should have said plainness, not certain whether I meant in verse or in prose, and thinking more probably the latter' (In the Trojan Ditch, 160). In English Poetry Sisson singles out a key-sentence from Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading: 'the poetic bunk of the preceding centuries gave way to the new prose' of Flaubert and Stendhal, and 'poetry then remained the inferior art until it caught up with the prose of these two writers'; and he adds that Pound's statement 'is, in fact, a key to the verse literature of the century, and the catching up, so far as this country is concerned, took place largely through the agency of Ford Madox Ford' (E.P., 109). Sisson, in the same work, finds it possible to praise a minor turn-of-the-century poet, A. H. Bullen, because he 'found his way to re-establish a link between verse and the language that is spoken'. 'And this, as much as anything,' he adds, 'is what the history of 1900-1950 is about' (E.P., 16).

  We must appreciate that this re-establishment of connexions between verse and the spoken language involves two technical faculties: rhythm and understanding. A natural rhythm of thought and sense is inherent in the language as it is spoken, but subject to 'random agitation'. The poet's struggle, after Flaubert, is concerned with the bringing of random agitation within the domain of formalism by methods more or less Byzantine. That 'more or less' glosses over the crucial struggle which is waged in the mind and heart of every poet between what he strives for in principle and what he finds it possible to achieve in fact. The struggle and the rare but possible equilibrium are well-caught in Sisson's appraisal of the philologist poet William Barnes whom he so much admires: 'It must be admitted that Barnes's exercises in the purification of language led finally to ludicrous excesses of Saxonizing, of which English Speech-Craft (1878) contains instructive illustrations. But the theoretical aberration never upset the balance of the language he used in his verse, for which he had a true touchstone in his early memories' (Collected Essays, 197). If we take 'ludicrous excesses of Saxonizing', 'theoretical aberration', as Byzantinisms then Barnes's feeling for 'the language that is spoken', rooted in, or springing from, his 'early memories', 'the natural speech of his boyhood' (201), is what saved him for 'lucidity' (200). For Sisson, rhythm is 'the essence of poetry' (E.P., 182). 'The real proof of originality' is always to be looked for 'in the rhythm' (PNR 5, 55).

  I have spoken of the 'two technical faculties, rhythm and understanding', but I must add that perhaps the chief reason for Sisson's deep admiration for William Barnes is that in his work rhythm and understanding so intimately cohere:'. . . he was a listener and it is in the turns of language that people most plainly reveal themselves' (C.E., 200). For Sisson, particularly, 'understanding' means, in the full richness of the old phrase, being 'understanded of the people'. He quotes the phrase, significantly enough, in his book on British Administration: 'this country retains enough of the fruits of the Reformation to prefer to be governed in a language that is "understanded of the people" ' (16). It is a phrase steeped in the religio-political context of the history of this country. It is, in fact, from Article 24 of the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1562, which reads: 'It is a thing plainly repugnant to the Word of God, and the custom of the Primitive Church, to have publick prayer in the Church, or to minister the Sacraments in a tongue not understanded of the people'. Its implications have taken Sisson into the heart of his most recent controversy, the deposition by the Anglican Synod of the 1611 Bible and the 1662 Prayer Book from their traditional central place in the liturgy of the Church of England. The essential documents for a student of this matter are to be found in PNR 13, 'Crisis for Cranmer and King James', guest-edited by David Martin under the general editorship of Donald Davie, Michael Schmidt and C.H. Sisson. Sisson contributed an essay 'Shared Memory' to this issue, and also wrote an article on the controversy which appeared in the TLS, 7 December 1979, in which once more he takes as his motif the old phrase from Article 24, 'understanded of the people': 'Of course there are arguments for the use in church of a language "understanded of the people", but the crass ignorance of many of the apologists of the New English Bible and the Good News Bible and the services known as "Series 3" is that they suppose that such speech is within the grasp of anyone who chooses to open his mouth, and certainly of the respectable scholars and public relations men who have put the current inferior wares on the market. Of course, to be "understanded of the people" on any subject is a matter of the greatest difficulty, and on matters so little in the ordinary course of listening and viewing as the Incarnation and its consequences there may perhaps be a little more than the common difficulty' (TLS, 93).

  It is other writers in the PNR symposium who state explicitly what is implicit in Sisson's own brief note and in his general approach: (1) that the great hold which the 1611 Bible and 1662 Prayer Book exert over the understandings of the people is realized very largely in terms of their marriage of rhythm with sense: 'placing the emphasis where it ought to be, developing the thought to its proper culmination, expressing the dominant emotion; and doing all these things so simply and directly that the effect continues to be achieved throughout constant repetition' (Basil Mitchell, PNR 13, p. 7 column 1). (2) 'The liturgy is the political act that calls all others into question' (Richard K. Fenn, p. 12, column 1). A key-perception in Sisson is his quotation of a dictum by the French monarchist writer Charles Maurras: 'Reason may convince, but it is rhythm that persuades' (Schmidt, 50 Modern British Poets, 268). I see how this could be a potentially dangerous doctrine; and a recognition that it requires a particular kind of resistant intelligence to cope with it is what makes Michael Schmidt's introduction to Sisson's Collected Essays particularly valuable. Schmidt indicates both the similarities and the differences between Sisson and T.E. Hulme by whom he was certainly influenced: Sisson speaks of the 'good fortune' of discovering Hulme (C.E., 135). Schmidt argues that whereas Hulme 'points towards an authoritarian politics', Sisson 'points in quite another direction' (C.E., 5). Schmidt adds that 'when Sisson calls for "a central authority armed with strong powers for limited purposes" he expresses a tenable and inclusive politics. The phrase "for limited purposes" is the validating clause, containing the entire tact of his politics, as indeed of his literary criticism'. I agree entirely with this. 'Strong powers for limited purposes' sums up Sisson's view of poetic, as well as of political, structure. Whatever his yearning for emotional generalizations of a more absolute kind, he is in practice essentially a constitutionalist: in his poetics as in his politics. A remark by Calvin Bedient might be taken as an illuminating corollary to Schmidt's argument. Noting, as I have already remarked, Sisson's claim that 'the real proof of originality' is always to be looked for 'in the rhythm', he adds, 'he will not be deceived by rhythms, throaty sounds' (PNR 5, 55). 'But is rhythm a part of the truth?' asks Sisson in another place (C.E., 163) and answers 'It seems odd to say so'; implying, I think, 'it may sound odd, but that's how it is'. And he goes on to say that 'evading other people's rhythm is part of finding your own words'. So, although we seem to start with a bit of absolutist dogma: 'reason may convince, but it is rhythm that persuades', by the time Sisson has done with the proposal it has been turned this way and that, by a process allied to what the political constitutionalists would call 'mutually checking powers'. And yet this phrase sounds too slack and 'Whiggish' for what Sisson is after. Sisson is a decided anti-Whig, as students of his book The Case of Walter Bagehot (1972) will not need to be informed. What Sisson is after is, as I say, something knottier and thornier than the bland reciprocities implied by phrases such as 'mutual checking powers'. 'Constitutional' was a fortuitous pun. What I have called Sisson's 'resistant intelligence' is partly constitutional, i.e. part of his innate psychic constitution. He has said: 'My beginnings were altogether without facility, and when I was forced into verse it was through having something not altogether easy to say' (In the Trojan Ditch, 13). Also innate, though rationalized, is his stated preference for 'the mere animal stubbornness of those of my unthinking fellow-countrymen' who, at the outbreak of the Second World War, 'assumed that they would go on'. The comparison there is with 'windbags' who had to invent 'ideals' for going on (C.E., 141).

  So, 'resistant intelligence' is made up of 'animal stubbornness', together with something that William Blake called 'intanglement with incoherent roots' and something else: the hard-won articulacy of the 'honest artificer' (Donald Davie, The Poet in the Imaginary Museum, 1977, 272). Honest artifice. I began by saying that Sisson distrusts artifice; and I stand by that. The current ordinary sense of 'artifice' is 'an ingenious expedient, a manoeuvre, stratagem, device, contrivance, trick' (OED). 'Artificer' is a slightly antiquated word meaning 'one who makes by art or skill . . . a craftsman' (OED). 'Strong powers for limited purposes': this is both the strength and the limitation of the 'artificer':

    Dark wind, dark wind that makes the river black

- Two swans upon it are the serpent's eyes -

Wind through the meadows as you twist your heart.

  Twisted are trees, especially this oak . . .

('In Insula Avalonia', Trojan Ditch, 22)

    A few lines from one of the magnificent Somerset poems written in recent years: 'In Insula Avalonia'. Its key words, 'wind', 'twist', are a hint of a technique described by Robie Macauley in an essay on Ford Madox Ford: 'Going from particular surroundings to general ideas or generalized observation of his characters, Ford gently dissolves time and we again find ourselves in a particular landscape' (Kenyon Critics, 156). The capacity to interfuse ideas with landscape is one of the great creative secrets: to make a tree or a field either draw out, or reciprocate, or feed images into, the life of the mind. It is a great art we become palpably aware of in Wordsworth; scarcely anyone does it more beautifully than George Eliot. Ford Madox Ford, in a passage from one of the Tietjens novels, deliberately eschews balanced reciprocity: the mind and the landscape mirroring and stabilizing each other; shows, instead, the 'wind', 'twist', of the process of memory and its blank-faced twin aphasia. Tietjens is in the trenches: his groping for the name of George Herbert's parish (Bemerton) is partly an unconscious strategy to ward off shell-shocked despair and paranoia; partly the attachment of a particular religious and political vision to the soil of England itself; an intellectual sensuousness, a sensuousness of intellect: 'But what chance had quiet fields, Anglican sainthood, accuracy of thought, heavy-leaved, timbered hedgerows . . .'.

  Sisson has repeatedly put on record his admiration for Ford; and I would suggest that a conjunction of phrases such as we have here - 'accuracy of thought, heavy-leaved, timbered hedgerows' - has had a profound effect upon him. Some sentences from his most polemical, contentious book to date, his attack on the 'Whig' economist and man-of-letters Walter Bagehot, suggest as much: 'The central object of Bagehot's writing - and it is a destructive one - was to give exclusive respectability to the pursuit of lucre, and to remove whatever social and intellectual impediments stood in the way of it. Intellectual pursuits, and whatever strives in the direction of permanence and stillness, have to give way to the provisional and divisive excitements of gain. In the end one is left contemplating numbers over a great void' (The Case of Walter Bagehot, 118). 'Accuracy of thought, heavy-leaved, timbered hedgerows'; 'Intellectual pursuits, and whatever strives in the direction of permanence and stillness . . .'. Look, in the light of this, at the second and fourth sections of 'On My Fifty-First Birthday' (In the Trojan Ditch, 85):

    II

A great sunlit field full of lambs.

The distant perspectives are of the patched earth

With hedges creeping about. If I were to die now

No need of angels to carry me to paradise.

O Lord my God, simplify my existence.

  IV

The gulls come inland, alight on the brown land

And bring their sea-cries to this stillness.

It was waves and the surf running they heard before

And now the lark-song and the respiration of leaves.

    Calvin Bedient has written accurately of this last line: ' "Respiration" could not be more unexpectedly beautiful. That the word itself breathes, and gently, suddenly swelling and subsiding, is given as the directest kind of knowledge' (PNR 5, 57). When Sisson talks of rhythm, or when we talk of rhythm in Sisson's poetry, the word must be understood as taking in the lightest pressure and exhalation of breath, like this. But does that sound too expressionistic? My meaning is better defined by Sisson himself, in a few words on the craft of Thomas Hardy: 'The rhythm of the verse, with its hesitations, sudden speeds, and pauses which are almost silences, is the very rhythm of thought' (E.P., 30). Consider, in this light:

                       The resurrection

Will hoist me also before the judge

I do not want to see, and my grudge-

Eaten mind be emptied before him.

(In the Trojan Ditch, 43)

    We note the management of pause and speed: 'the judge/I do not want to see', the enjambement, 'and my grudge-/Eaten mind'. Rhyme is also taken up into the 'rhythm of thought'. How expected, how unexpected, is the rhyme 'judge/grudge'? How much of a rhyme is it, as it is rapidly elided into the next word and line?

  'Honest artificer' Davie calls him; and adds that 'Sisson is an extremely reticent writer whether in verse or prose' (Imaginary Museum, 271). I'm less than fully persuaded of the aptness of 'reticent'. Sisson reveals a good deal. I began by saying that he seems to me one of the least self-protective of poets; and I hold to that. He strikes me as having the artificer's canniness and his rage; in some ways reminiscent of the skill and anger of the nineteenth-century yeoman-artisan-craftsman class from which he sprang. 'He was born in Bristol in 1914, son of a suburban watchmaker and optician who had emigrated from Kendal in Westmorland after the closure of ... a comb mill which had been in the . . . family since the eighteenth century. His mother came from a long line of West Country farmers' (David Wright, Agenda 13/3, 5). Michael Schmidt suggests that Sisson is a 'Tory . . . radical' (C.E., 10) and I've no reason to suppose that Sisson would dispute that. As he writes in the final sentence of his 'Sevenoaks Essays': 'From the time Charles raised his standard at Nottingham, Toryism as defined by Johnson has almost always been a doctrine of opposition, and so it will remain' (C.E., 222).

    The poetry owners cannot make me out

  Nor I them. And the big mouths of learning

Open and close over my thoughts without biting.

Under the shadow of politics I have no teeth.

  I am no man, Caesar, to stand by you,

Nor have the whimsical humour of pre-war Oxford

But my unrecognized style was made by sorrow.

(In the Trojan Ditch, 63-4)

    It is a mood and argument that brings him close in sentiment (though he might bridle at being told so) to a poet of left-of-centre sympathies, Jeffrey Wainwright (b. 1944). In his 'editorial comment' in Volume 17/3 of Jon Silkin's magazine Stand, Wainwright recalled: 'In the earliest designated "poetry lesson" I can remember at primary school the class sat up very straight and opening our mouths exaggeratedly wide recited in unison "Leisure by W. H. Davies". The purpose of this seems to have been twofold. Firstly, the recitation was an elocution exercise - our mouths were being washed out with poetry - and secondly we were being inculcated with a proper respect for verse, introduced to a part of "our" culture which we could scarcely be expected to know about. Poetry, it must have been assumed, was utterly foreign to us and that should be put right.'

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The Filling of the Cisterns

We are not interested in the poetry of brainlessness, now almost universally practised in Anglo-Saxondom. This does not mean that we are interested in verse written by a process of ratiocination or academic parti pris. Far from it. It means that we think a poet should use his brains, as well as his other faculties, and should not regard himself as excused by (what has become) the soppy title of poet. He should study to the full whatever he has an aptitude for, and if his studies are greatly restricted the mind which informs his poetry is likely also to be a narrow one. For the poet a great deal of reading, a great deal of work, goes to the making of a small and very indirect result. Intellectual openness is important for the filling of the cisterns from which poetry may pour (or drip) and certainly has a bearing on the quality of the work produced. The open mind will sometimes emit sentiments which are unfashionable and unpopular, but it is a terrible intellectual servitude to restrict oneself to the most acceptable whims of the moment.

(C.H. Sisson, The Avoidance of Literature, pg. 561)

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A Wilful Ignorance

A passion for poetry, in any depth and in any width, involves learning more than speaking - learning, in the sense of acquainting oneself with the varieties of thought and feeling which our tradition has produced over the course of history. It is as well to know, before one becomes to ecstatic about the marvels of the modern stage, how little has been added to comic technique since Plautus; two thousand years and here we are. Or that the political penetration of our poets of public affairs is not profound, beside that of Dante. One could go on. But since, however it chooses to view itself at a particular moment, the mind, as to its form and content, is largely a historical phenomenon, an acquaintance with the best writing of the past is not irrelevant to our perception of the world we view now...For the writer, for the poet, a wilful ignorance of the past is suicidal. Hundreds of young men and women, encouraged to do what is called 'expressing themselves' to the point when the Arts Council will subsidize their public readings, may think otherwise, but for their productions some other word than 'poetry' ought to be found.

(C.H. Sisson, The Avoidance of Literature, pg. 560)

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‘Loquitur Senex’ By C.H. Sisson

Portrait of C.H. Sisson By Patrick Swift

I return to the horror of truth After a life of business: I was happy to be employed But now my hunger is extreme.

The swans drift by and the bridge Is pendulous over the profound stream: The water is habitable by the mind And the stationary fish are swimming against it.

Where were the fish when I, Flurried by consultation, Laboured to distinguish myself In vanity and discursive reason?

Now, with the fish, nose pressed Against reality, I look through the watery glass At weeds standing on the stone.

The age is lost that had Laughter hidden under the hand But in the peace that remains There is still what lives in the eye.

Gracious God, when the tension gives And I am swept below the weir Do as Berkeley says Hold this world in your mind.

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''The Usk" by C.H. Sisson

Christ is the language in which we speak to God And also God, therefore we speak in truth; He in us, we in Him, speaking To one another, to Him, the City of God.

I.

Such a fool as I am you had better ignore Tongue twist, malevolent, fat mouthed I have no language but that other one His the Devil’s, no mouse I, creeping out of the cheese With a peaked cap scanning the distance Looking for truth. Words when I have them, come out, the Devil Encouraging, grinning from the other side of the street And my tears Streaming, a blubbered face, when I am not laughing Where in all this Is calm, measure, Exactness The Lord’s peace?

II.

Nothing is in my own voice because I have not Any. Nothing in my own name Here inscribed on water, nothing but flow A ripple, outwards. Standing beside the Usk You flow like truth, river, I will get in Over me, through me perhaps, river let me be crystalline As I shall not be, shivering upon the bank. A swan passed. So is it, the surface, sometimes Benign like a mirror, but not I passing, the bird.

III.

Under the bridge, meet reward, the water Falling in cascades or worse, you devil, for truthfulness Is no part of the illusion, the clear sky Is not yours, the water Falling not yours Only the sheep Munching at the river brim Perhaps

IV.

What I had hoped for, the clear line Tremulous like water but Clear also to the stones underneath Has not come that way, for my truth Was not public enough, nor perhaps true. Holy Father, Almighty God Stop me before I speak                                                                    — per Christum.

V.

Lies on my tongue. Get up and bolt the door For I am coming not to be believed The messenger of anything I say. So I am come, stand in the cold tonight The servant of the grain upon my tongue, Beware, I am the man, and let me in.

VI.

So speech is treasured, for the things it gives Which I can not have, for I speak too plain Yet not so plain as to be understood. It is confusion and a madman’s tongue. Where drops the reason, there is no one by. Torture my mind: and so swim through the night As envy cannot touch you, or myself Sleep comes, and let her, warm at my side, like death. The Holy Spirit and the Holy One Of Israel be my guide. So among tombs Truth may be sought, and found, if we rejoice With Ham and Shem and Japhet in the dark. The ark rolls onward over a wide sea. Come sleep, come lightening, comes the dove at last.