Signet Classics. Front cover missing, found in Tesco’s in Sowerby Bridge. Rating: swollen gladius.

Scott’s Ivanhoe is supposed to be a revolutionary work of liberalism and empathy. John Henry Raleigh alleges that it is one of the first works to challenge the pantomime depiction of the Wandering Jew in English Literature, challenging the “simplistic portrait” that was afforded to Jews. Yet, when I subject myself to this battered, historical copy – feeling like Beaumanoir, the ascetic and austere Knights Templar Grand Master of the novel – I begin to understand how farcical it is, and how idiotic a literary culture must have been to venerate it as something radiating with compassion. When I began reading it – feeling like the Crusaders, loyal to Richard I, who are an endless force throughout the novel – I find one defence for it: at least Scott has done his research. Yet I later discover that, despite getting his hands on something called the Wardour Manuscript, and faithfully reading it on our behalf, he hasn’t, really. It is a novel about the twelfth century, yet you have lots of talk about friars and St. Francis. St. Francis didn’t start preaching and loitering around Italy until well after the events of the novel have occurred, in the thirteenth century, not to mention the time lag between St. Francis’ ideas coming to Italy. I knew that, but a simple search reveals countless other historial accuracies, which aren’t exactly like the kind of trivialities you find about modern films on an IMDB page. It isn’t just people having the wrong swords, it is that the kind of tournaments that he depicts post-date the events that are supposed to be occurring in the novel by about 200 years. Then there’s the improbability of the fact that the Knights Templar were about to burn Rebecca, a Jewish cabbalistic sorcerer and fitty, at the stake, before she was saved by the unproblematically heroic Wilfred of Ivanhoe, the hero of the novel. This would never have happened in the twelfth century, in which witches were simply not burned, and would not have happened until the mid-thirteenth century.

Surely if Scott had done minimal research he ought to have known that? Yet maybe we’re just laughing at Scott’s futile attempt to depict history from our quaint digital vantage point, and we should rejoice instead in the entertainment and rich dialogue of the novel. I am not really entertained by battles, especially when I know the Normans, despite their number and arrogance, are going to lose, just this once. (A huge theme of the novel is the supremacy of the Saxons as the indigenous English, although they are a little hard-headed and arrogant. Even Richard the Lionheart is traced in terms of Saxon genealogy, who was presumably very ‘Norman’.) Nor am I entertained by the dialogue. The characters all speak in this sort of hyper-racialised way, as if they are only aware of their own culture and the relevant cultural reference points, despite living in the same country and so presumably having to interact with each other a fair bit. One exception to this might be Rebecca, the Jewish lass who knows Latin and is one of the first non-anti-semitic portrayals of a Jew in English Literature, although I am sickened by the way that this point has to be made by Normans and Saxons alike finding her fit. At the end she finds Rowena (who Ivanhoe marries, despite being brought back to live by Rowena and continuing to find her fit until his dying days), and announces her departure. This is fortuitous because Ivanhoe can stop fantasising about her and get to the serious business of having a fiery Saxon wife (although it’s probably too unfair to Scott to expect him to put something as radical as intermarriage in a novel for the early-nineteenth century reading public.) Yet even Rebecca is effectively a synecdoche for the Jewish people, deprived callously of her own individual consciousness. Her speech includes the phrase, “Not in a land of war and blood, surrounded by internal factions, can Israel hope to find rest during her wanderings.”

This is just to mention the most thoroughly amazing character in the novel. There is a totally ridiculous incident – which Scott acknowledges is ridiculous and defends by saying that he was simply asked to put it in – in which the pure-blood Saxon Athelstane is resurrected at the end of the novel. He was clearly killed earlier in the novel in a battle when Our Lovely Saxon Heroes attack Torquilstone, the Norman fortification in which the Saxons have been wantonly held captive by these pantomime Frenchies. Yet he appears – alive! – in this ludicruous and fatuous deus ex machina moment in which Richard I returns to England and Richard, Ivanhoe and Cedric (Cedric became an English name because Scott misspelled the older ‘Cerdic’) all meet in the Castle of Coningsburgh, a Saxon fortification. What follows is the usual ahistorical Saxon babble: “It is certain that Zernebok hath possessed himself of my castle in my absence.” Zernebock is an evil Slavic deity, which no Christianised twelfth-century Saxon nobleman is really going to invoke. But that’s the point: Scott carefully twists and manipulates the dialogue of every character as if their whole animus is bound up in their connection to their racial identity, even in a way that is totally anachronistic. He seems to have no gift, whatsoever, for emotion, psychology or anything else that we might selfishly expect from characters.

All of this is a shame because I wanted to like Scott, and I’m earnestly sad that nobody bothers to read him any more. Yet his crimes extend beyond this: Scott even makes Robin Hood into a Saxon nobleman, despite the fact that part of Robin Hood’s charm is that he is a yeoman (the class above a peasant; basically, an ordinary bloke.) So how can we work up a defence of Scott? Perhaps the only way is to say that historical authenticity is impossible, and so undesirable, and Scott has at least had a good go. Yet I cannot help but think of Scott as the perpetrator of the modern period drama. There is a great quote from Joyce (who was apparently influenced by Ivanhoe, John Henry Raleigh arguing that Blazes Boylan is based on the lusty Knights Templar, Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert) in which he says something like, “The past for some is just what hat you happen to wear”. I don’t remember the quote. I think we can thank Scott for the idea that historical dramas should be quaint little dramas in which people talk in a nice, old-world way and wear certain clothes. Of course people in the past don’t stutter, defecate, have thoughts and individuality, or even exist beyond their race. Yet, please, read Scott; you might learn something that you can at least take the pleasure in unlearning.

The reason Iain Sinclair chose the M25 as the motorway of choice to walk around in London Orbital is because it encompasses the sacred orbit of London. John Clare was exiled there, and the refuse of the city ends up circulating vertiginously around it. Sinclair’s psychogeographical project has led him to the gradual realisation that the whole city is dictated by invisible patterns of sacred geometry.

The M60 is the only actually orbital motorway in the UK. Like a planetary ring, it whirrs constantly around Manchester. As I begin my journey along its sacred orbit, I walk along Oldham Street, past the Chinese Arch, then endless developments, and a single hotel, The Sheridan. I walk past voluminous, unreadably discarded lager cans, which are more florid than dandelion leaves, and Central Park, a police station cosmeticised by its modernism.

I reach an abandoned church, which I decide to tour; the only point of entry is a door earmarked ‘toilet’. Instead of a toilet, flanked in stone are mysterious construction implements and plaster, an unfinished conversion into a bar or a nightclub. More probably, earmarked for demolition, but nobody can conjure the money to actually demolish it.

After a man informs me he’s had a call, I politely continue. There is an abandoned pub – The Weavers Arms – which taunts you with the allure of its preserved 80sness. I walk along Broadway, past the blackbird clarions and bogs of Moston Brook.

As I walk along Hollinwood Avenue, I begin to walk adjacent to the motorway. The sound of cars accelerates around my eardrums, and all I can smell is gasoline. The concrete is lined with bracken and birches. I remember I am on a prayer retreat and am supposed to do a contemplative prayer exercise now, so I perch beside a concrete pillar like a stylite. It is Ignatian visualisation. I begin but every sound is stolen by the parries of vans and lorries, and the Gospel is stolen by the morbid circularity:

Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdom of the world, and the glory of them

All I can hear is some quality in the rhythm of my motorway-voice. I am on somewhat of a hill at the moment so I begin to imagine Jesus’ whole ministry conducted thus. I imagine Jesus being tried and crucified on the M60, drivers unable to look at him.

I navigate a truly tree-infested path, which I ought to have had a scimitar to clear. I am surprised to find old-fashioned paths, which have lost their necessity. I discover beautiful landscapes that will be mostly unexplored: moss upon concrete where forests must have been cleared. I see a dead finch, and become habituated to the thrum of the motorway. I think of plans to build motorway burial corridors and reflect that these would be a charming spot for them; the dead buried under uncleared glades and will-o-the-wisp dells. Clerics would be unable to hear the prayers they made for the dead, but would be attentive only to the rhythms.

I reach Hollinwood. I take a quick tour of the locality. It strikes me as a fairly deprived place. The Hollinwood Branch Canal was scrapped and the town has been struggling ever since. The complete fall of Oldham – the great luminary of the Industrial Revolution – does not help matters, and I assume that many Hollinwooders commute to Manchester for work. Oldham was nothing before the Industrial Revolution, and is now nothing again: a cycle. Unemployment and deprivation in Hollinwood is one of the highest in the UK, with 15% of Hollinwood claiming unemployment benefits in 2019.

I find that Hollinwood has an extremely quiet section, with mock-Tudor houses and a beautiful cemetery. I listen to the birdsong, my lungs and ears gradually recovering from the unfortunate shock-treatment.

לַמְנַצֵּחַ, מַשְׂכִּיל לִבְנֵי-קֹרַח.

כְּאַיָּל, תַּעֲרֹג עַל-אֲפִיקֵי-מָיִם– כֵּן נַפְשִׁי תַעֲרֹג אֵלֶיךָ אֱלֹהִים.

(For the leader, Maschil of the sons of Korah.) “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” – King James Bible.

The original Psalm is replete with ideas of breath, comparing men to plants and their souls to breathing essences. The King James Bible is translated as if the translators are looking forward to their next opportunity to hunt, or at least translating it in those terms so that it could be understood. I learn that the original ‘אַיָּל’ (ah-yawl) is a male deer – a ‘stag’ – and nothing as specific as a ‘hart’. A hart is a mature, male deer which was coveted by hunters, a term adapted from the Chase. It is a nice image, yet actually more specific than the original goes, almost as if the KJV translators are trying to inflate the image for some reason. Perhaps because the Psalms are supposed to be from King David – who could aptly be compared to a ‘hart’ – or perhaps because the recitation of the Psalms in Jacobean England is simply an old man’s game. Although it makes us blessed that, unlike now, the Jacobeans were sufficiently attentive to the natural world that they bothered to distinguish between different kinds of deer. Now, most translations render it as ‘deer’, which is a little more unspecific than it’s supposed to be.

Why are we supposed to imagine a ‘stag’ in the original, and why do most translators render this as ‘deer’? It might be that we are supposed to be imagining some essentially strong creature, yet one who pines for simple, innocent comforts like drinking water. It makes us curious about the recitation of Hebrew psalms, which I suppose remains shrouded in mystery. Yet such recitation must have been more grounded in ideas about the human situation within the living natural world and ecosystem, and a less clear theory of how one is separated from animals. This is evidenced by the fact that the Hebrew world for ‘soul’  – נַפְשִׁ  (nah-fesh) – merely means ‘that which breathes’. I am led into an insatiable curiosity about what the natural world was really like when the Psalms were composed and recited, which no film will ever satisfy.

“Be not righteous overmuch, neither make thyself overwise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself?”

I learn that all of these translations are based on the difficulty that English does not have a verb ‘to be wise’, a static verb (tit-hak-kam, תִּתְחַכַּ֖ם), in the original Hebrew that must have allowed a lot of very arrogant and assured phrases. “I wise”, “he wises”, “he was wising”. I think that it should be translated “don’t overwise yourself”, which makes enough sense in English to sound like a sufficiently weighted admonition you might yell at your uncle during a particularly heated argument.

I like the fact that, in this verse, Qoheleth negates ‘be wise’ and admonishes too much wisdom, in a piece of wisdom literature. There’s a great contradiction to this and it encompasses its paradox as a “Christian” text. This is the same Christ who was extremely righteous (sad-diq, צַדִּיק֙) and extremely wise, so much so that he famously effectively destroyed himself. Yet clearly the text has been chosen by centuries of scholars of all theological persuasions as fitting for the Christian canon. Maybe the text doesn’t refer to something as extreme as “destroying yourself” (תִּשּׁוֹמֵֽם, tis-so-w-mem) as “disorientating” yourself, “confusing” yourself? Apparently the original verb can mean “grow numb”: perhaps Qoheleth is referring to the sort of feeling you get from trying to milk your tired little human brain of all possible wisdom before sundown. Also, perhaps the Messiah – Christian or non-Christian – is exempt from anything that wisdom literature has to offer. Regardless, there’s a great apophatic beauty to Ecclesiastes, and I am left thirsty to actually learn Hebrew, although not too much that I feel like I’ve snorted bucketfuls of wisdom cocaine. I read about how Qoheleth is the only Hebrew Bible figure to literally address his heart, as if he’s given up on pathetic human beings and their inability to listen and turns to his own body instead.

‘The Fifth Estate’ by Robert Taylor. Published in 1978. Recovered from a Tesco book exchange in Sowerby Bridge. Rating: Radula

There is something oddly pornographic about reading late-1970s economic treatises in 2020. In this lusty little tome, Taylor expresses a vision for Britain as an “industrial democracy”. This vision – which, in the time of Brexit, Johnson, blah blah blah, etc., seems almost like the Kingdom of Heaven – is helped rather than hindered by the statistics. Taylor’s juicy oeuvre was published when the proportion of the unionised workforce had increased from 44% to 52%. Not only this, the amount of people in the National Union of Bank Employees increased by 78%. ‘Union penetration’ in sectors like banking and administration was increasing sharply.  Despite Taylor knowing full well that unions had often been used as a ‘scapegoat’, he was still somewhat optimistic that unions could continue to decentralise and to collective bargain.

Only 11.6% of people aged 20-24 are in a union. In the drug-haze of modern capitalism – which has penetrated us more deeply than any union ever could – perhaps our own relief is to be found in a wildly different set of economic assumptions. It is a matter of psychology. ‘The Fifth Estate’ is filled with union leaders of the past and curious snippets of their personal histories. These include Moss Evans, former Secretary of the now-defunct TGWU, who would drink three pints of real ale on a Sunday morning and who had not had a full cup of tea until far late into his adulthood. Let us devour these strange histories, as well as Taylor’s treatment of the TUC in almost-Gothic terms as a “mighty influence in the land”, now that unions have been mass (herd?) scape-goated to Oblivion.

There are two ways of denying that human beings are having an irrevocable effect on the global climate through the massive damage they are inflicting upon the ecosystem. The first one usually tends to defer to science and experts. This is becoming so extinct in the genuine scientific community that it is usually the preserve of journalists and politicians who defer to fringe scientific understandings. James Delingpole goes in for this: he maintains that human beings have not had a huge impact on climate change, and he tends to quote scientists largely out of context in order to maintain this opinion. James Delingpole’s resistance to the idea of “global warming” is based on the misconception that the phenomenon in question is just some sort of generalised “warming”, and not a general array of negative weather patterns. The Professor Myles Allen he quotes is the author of many studies which show the ultimate impact of anthropogenic climate change on several extreme weather events in the world: for example, Myles Allen’s work shows that anthropogenic emissions like aerosol emissions doubled the probability of extreme rainfall events in North Bangladesh.  We hear constantly about the magnitude of the climate crisis, which is intimately tied up with the damage human beings have done to it according to scientists: one disaster is occurring every week, according to the UN.

So this strategy of deferring to climate scientists is increasingly flawed based on the fact that every climate scientist’s work shows the absolute pressing urgency with which we need to stop causing unavoidable damage to the Earth. Yet there is another strategy of denying man-made climate change: rage against the whole concept of experts, professionals and global establishment lizards. This is probably a position that makes slightly more sense, and there is definitely a frustrating cult of experts and professionals in 21st century society. We are invited to worship them and see them as more than figures of mere expertise in certain aspects of quantitative data. An endless set of regulations forbid us from natural human activities like science – our lives are defined by the stronghold of institutions, which largely perpetuate their existence rather than improving society. The rage against the cult of the expert has obviously fuelled the rise of Donald Trump, and is fuelling the rise of leaders around the whole world.

Yet raging against the cult of experts and relying on your intuition still leads you firmly to the opinion that something like “man-made climate change” (perhaps not in those words) is happening, although you might not call it that. The work of Ivan Illych helps us with this. In Tools for Conviviality, Illych protests against experts, who safeguard their role as “experts” simply because they are part of an institution and have access to financial resources and pay-walled academic papers. Illych rages against a society ruled by the diktats and priorities of experts. “People get better education, better health, better transportation, better entertainment, and often even better nourishment only if the experts’ goals are taken as the measurement of what ’better’ means.” ‘Education’ , ‘health’, ‘transport’ etc. have become merely institutions gifts bequeathed unto us by a benevolent society. One if Illych’s points is that we are told when we are ‘sick’ – we are not allowed to decide for ourselves what our illness might be. For Illych, everything connected to describing and facilitating human experience has become mass-produced. This has something connected to the modern rebellion of what Anne Widdecombe calls the “ignored majority”.

Yet Illych is also firm that modern forms of transportation, like the car, are clearly divorced from the ecosystem as well as being out of fit with connected and integrated communities. And Illych is plain that it is painfully obvious from intuition and without adherence to scientific professionals that we have messed up the Earth. We can tell from the air quality, or the unnatural speed of motorways. For Illych, “The degradation of the environment is dramatic and highly visible.” Nor is the environmental crisis, for Illych, something that will be solved by purely scientific and investment goals. For Illych, the crisis was started by a kind of belief in the power of institutions and speed to create a better form of humanity. In fact, for Illych, “developed” countries are backward: they create a world in which events like birth and death are screened off from you. “Only the very rich in the United States can now afford what all people in poor countries have: personal attention around the deathbed.” Illych’s thought beautifully complicates the modern “debate” about climate change because it is convicted towards creating a slower, more human and less technologically-dependent society, though maintaining the right wing’s beloved skepticism about people in authority who delight in confusing. Yet it answers them by different means: instead of carry on as we are, perhaps rediscover who we were. Then we can answer how we might solve many of the geopolitical problems which will plague us to an unprecedented degree.

(Édité et corrigé par Adeline Rivard. Merci mille fois)

“L’Europe après la pluie” par Max Ernst (1940)

Est-il vraiment possible de comprendre ou reproduire le surréalisme de notre point de vue au vingt-et-unième siècle? Définitivement en Angleterre le surréalisme est, de nos jours, simplement un synonyme d’étrange, mais on ne peut pas oublier qu’au début était une philosophie sérieuse. En fait, les poètes surréalistes avaient plus confiance en leur philosophie que par exemple les symbolistes. Ils avaient tendance à s’identifier au terme “surréalisme” et d’autre part, le terme “symbolisme” et le manifeste qui a constaté sa philosophie a été publié après l’apparition de l’œuvre principale des poètes symbolistes, par exemple ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’ de Charles Baudelaire, etc. Mais André Breton, le théoricien du surréalisme (une tâche difficile, comment théoriser l’inthéorisable?) a constaté plusieurs fois le dogme du surréalisme.

La fondation du surréalisme n’est pas si difficile à réimaginer. Après la Première Guerre Mondiale et sa fête galante du mort inimaginable, on ne pouvait pas retourner à”l’Iliade”, “la Chanson de Roland” ou même “le Bateau Ivre”. Plusieurs qui ont survécu à sa brutalité massive et ses litanies de fièvre et d’horreur corporelle ont trouvé une nouvelle réalité où toutes les associations esthétiques ne fonctionnaient plus. André Breton en était le partisan. Un de ses essais au Point du Jour constate que le mot “donc” n’est plus possible. De plus, le mot “comme” est plus important, mais le surréalisme ayant supprimé le mot “comme”, il n’y a plus besoin d’un mot qui lie sans cesse des associations. Cependant, la Première Guerre Mondiale est à l’origine de toutes ces remarques. On peut voir cela en analysant le début de l’essai dans lequel apparaît les remarques citées: “Sans croire à la folie, j’ai connu pendant la guerre un fou qui ne croyait pas à la guerre. D’après lui, les pretendes hostilités n’etaient, à une échelle très vaste, que l’image d’un tourment à lui infligé, encore qu’il ne sût dire à quelles fins (mais nous étions beaucoup dans le même cas.) ” Breton affirme que, puisque la réalité est un rêve, la poésie devrait l’être également. Selon Breton, “pour ma part, je ne refuse à y voir autre chose que l’expression d’une idée transitionelle, d’ailleurs assez timide, et qui, en ce qui regarde les tentatives poétiques et picturales d’aujourd’hui, ne rend plus compte de rien.” La guerre a encouragé ce refus, et une pensée libérée malgré elle doit devenir plus onirique et plus attentive aux racines ou aux essences d’un objet plutôt qu’à ses résonances symboliques.

I leave this at your ear for when you wake

A creature in its abstract cage asleep

Your dreams blindfold you by the light they make

The owl called from the naked-woman tree

As I came down by the Kyle farm to hear

Your house silent by the speaking sea.

I have come late but I have come before

Later with slaked steps from stone to stone

To hope to find you listening for the door.

I stand in the ticking room. My dear, I take

A moth kiss from your breath. The shore gulls cry.

I leave this at your ear for when you wake.

The fourteen-line sonnet and the villanelle are similar poetic forms. They were both imported from Continental Europe, and both require a similar level of skill to execute and work well. Yet for some reason the sonnet has garnered a particular credence in English poetry whereas the villanelle has been scorned as a bit too jinglish and pop-song-y. Gerard Manley Hopkins was quite happy to innovate in the field of writing sonnets, which he was fond of inflating and deflating, yet for people who wrote villanelles he had a particular scorn. To be momentarily scientific, we might as well say that villanelles involve five tercets (three-line stanzas) with a final quatrain. The first and third lines of the first stanza recur alternately, and then both reappear in the final quatrain. The first and third line of each stanza rhymes.

This structure was stuck to in quite a dogmatic way throughout the first examples of villanelles, and the refrains always emphasised repetition and circular thinking, with the final stanza emphasising the coming together of the two circular thoughts. For this, the villanelle pattern was adhered to rigidly: the notion that it originates in music is crucial and the refrains never modify because they are musical repetitions. The Victorian poet Ernest Dowson’s villanelle – “Villanelle of His Lady’s Treasures” – uses the villanelle to depict the folly and desperation of memory, as if the speaker in the poem is trying to draw some slapdash MS paint image of his absent lover:

I took her dainty eyes, as well
As silken tendrils of her hair:
And so I made a Villanelle!

I took her voice, a silver bell,
As clear as song, as soft as prayer;
I took her dainty eyes as well.

Even though villanelles emerged as depictions of pastoral subjects, they are naturally suited to loss – the first line in the first villanelle by Jean Passeret is ‘J’ay perdu ma Tourterelle’ – I’ve lost my turtle-dove.’ Much of the auditory imagery that is found in Dowson echoes the origins of villanelles in pastoral poetry: in Passeret, we find ‘Ta plainte se renouvelle’ (‘Your plaintive song starts up again’?.) In Dowson, ‘I took her voice, a silver bell, / As clear as song, as soft as prayer.’ Dowson’s villanelle is also in tetrameter, staying true to the origins of the villanelle as the kind of thing you’d sing in tandem with some sort of moody guitar riff at an open mic night in Camden.

This is an emphasis that Sylvia Plath continues in the twentieth century: her own villanelles tend to stick thoroughly to the rigidity of the villanelle as embodying the desperation of memory, as, for example, ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’ :

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

Plath is much clearer than Dowson about how memory might actually be deceiving us, playing tricks on us, etc. One of the refrains is the maudlin ‘I think I made you up inside my head.’ Yet Plath’s villanelle is unusual in its relative coherence to the form, despite her use of iambic pentameter (inappropriate for what is essentially a pop jingle, and marking it as a more ‘serious’ kind of poem.) In the twentieth century, poets really started to play around with the villanelle – changing the refrains around slightly and mocking its repetitiveness by messing with you. Pound’s villanelle – which just repeats the two refrains together – is probably an anomaly to this particular trend, though it’s worth mentioning given the huge volume of poetic developments Pound contributed to. We have, for Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’, in which the refrains mostly remain virtually identical but often change subtly but still echo how they originally appeared to emphasise the villanelle as a collection of incantations. ‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master’ repeats exactly until it changes subtly (yet remains almost acoustically identical, though totally different in terms of meaning) with ‘The art of losing’s not too hard to master’. It becomes almost colloquial. Similarly, the refrain ‘to be lost that their loss is no disaster’ changes a fair bit. It becomes ‘I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster’ and ends, finally, with ‘though it may look like (Write it!) like a disaster.’ The poem ends as the speaker comes to terms with the real loss that has been repressed: the loss of a loved one, which has been knowingly falsely equated with a material object – like ‘lost door keys’. Probably, in a couple of words, the villanelle becomes more self-conscious, as if it’s an exercise you’ve been given by some sort of annoying psychoanalyst to help process your grief at having been broken up with by the love of your life or having lost a loved one. One of my favourite examples of this type of villanelle is Michael Donaghy’s ‘Khalypso’, in which the refrains start adamantly in false imperatives as the speaker depicts the experience of a forced rupture with a genuine loved one, compared to sailing adrift (warning: the link depicts copyrighted material.) The poem begins:

Cast off old love like substance from a flame;
Cast off that ballast from your memory.
But leave me and you leave behind your name.

Yet the poem ends less certainly than it begins, with the successful mooring of some drifting lover just becoming an even closer intimacy than before:

Cast off, old love, like substance from a flame.
Now leave me. I will live behind your name.

The refrains come together more awkwardly than they did in the villanelle of Dowson: together, they seem to suggest going in totally contradictory directions, and ‘leave behind’ morphs into the similar ‘live behind’. And so it transpires that the villanelle involves excellent potential for subtlety, for messing around with sense and expressing contradictions.

If the twentieth century was the turning point for messing around with the villanelle, the twenty-first century might be the ultimate apogee. If we’ve got ‘asemic writing’, we can certainly find interesting ways of exploiting this seventeenth-century form. Despite post-modernism or whatever they’re calling it, we still live in a culture completely saturated with repetition – through advertising etc. – and so we still respond powerfully to refrains, especially when they completely defy us and force us to think about things in a new way. We live in a totally copy-and-paste culture and it probably takes a poet to point this out, or perhaps a lollypop lady. My favourite example of a twenty-first century villanelle is ‘Villanelle (un Paisaje)‘, written by a bilingual English and Spanish poet, Leo Boix. A work of ekphrasis about ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ by Hieronymous Bosch, the poem is a villanelle only insofar as the rhymes recur in the same fashion as a villanelle and come together in the final stanza. And the rhymes only work if one pronounces them in a certain way, not in English RP. The effect is enough: ‘gold’ becomes a metaphor for greed but also a transcendental colour for seeing beyond the vagaries of the ‘world’, the very thing it rhymes with. One prays for a bright new world of messing around with the villanelle: it might be a fun way to undermine our totally repetitious culture.

As we keel our ships towards some landscape that looks a little like Brexit – a land of milk, honey, Jerusalem artichokes and potential post-capitalist dystopia – it becomes pertinent to revisit arch-Brexiteers like Enoch Powell. One of the original opponents of the EEC and staunchly anti-mass immigration, Powell nonetheless had many conceptions which would make him an extremely uncomfortable reader of the modern Daily Mail. A long-serving MP and cabinet member, Powell nonetheless railed against exactly the sort of political rhetoric used by the Brexit campaign and the general quality of political language. An article called ‘The Language of Politics’ written in a magazine dedicated to serious Linguistic exploration (!) (and collected in Reflections of A Statesman: The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell [Bellew Publishing, 1991]) has Powell fuming against the disintegration of etymology and metaphor as used by all contemporaneous Labour and Conservative politicians. Analysing a 1940 speech by Aneurin Bevin, he states the following:

The most marked feature of the language is the quantity of metaphor eroded to the point of cliché.

He compares this with a speech by William Gladstone – an unnatural hero for a Tory – whose speech he pinpoints as being rich in genuine metaphor and periphrases rather than the deconstructed pseudo-English of the day. If Powell had problems with Bevin’s metaphor, what kind of problems would he have had with the English employed by Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage? Similarly, Powell held many political positions which accorded with Mahatma Gandhi or the Glasgow Catholic Worker rather than the Tories and Brexitters of today. Powell was revolutionary in his anti-nuclear stance as well as his unreservedly anti-corporal punishment and anti-death penalty stance, which he propounded in the 1970s when there was severe popular opposition to these ideas (Farage, Johnson et al are rather keen to cling on to these policies in a manner presumably unrelated to their garnering of popular support.) Powell constantly reiterated the idea that hanging is not an effective deterrent and that nobody’s life has ever been saved by it. In a similar way, Powell claimed in a Defence debate in 1970 – when it was highly controversial to do so – that “the whole theory of the tactical nuclear weapon, or the tactical use of nuclear weapons, is an unmitigated absurdity.” Powell was not a ‘pacifist’ per se but he had enough practical sense to know that the very idea of nuclear weapons was a logical fallacy – that nothing is preferable to the threat of mass destruction, and that this threat was not necessary.

As well as a Classical scholar who became a Professor in Cambridge at the age of 25, Powell is also something that neither Farage nor Boris Johnson, nor any modern Daily Mail columnist, can ever be conceived of being: a poet. As someone who spoke very capably more than ten languages – including French, German, Russian and Welsh (his interest in Welsh reflecting a genuine interest in linguistic plurality within the United Kingdom) – Powell’s poetry is suffused with myth and ‘collective consciousness’ as well as philosophy and poetry from around the world. It is strictly metrical and anti-free verse: by modern standards, it is far too rigid to be applauded. Yet Powell achieves some remarkable effects in his poetry. The only copy of his stuff I’ve been able to get hold of is the 1951 collection Dancer’s End; and, The Wedding Gift, which Liverpool Central Library happened to have in their stock. In the collection, there are some very good poems. Powell wrote the poems in the collection either during his military service in World War II or just after it: indeed, one extremely good defence of his poetry is that he is trying to process his involvement in the war through the lens of order and control (I probably forgot to mention that he was Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, where his knowledge of Russian was useful but where he also acquired Portuguese and read poetry in that tongue.) Here is one of the poems in the collection:

I dreamt I saw with waking eyes the scene
So often in imagination wrought,
The flame-wall in the night at Alamein
Before the attack. And I was glad, and thought
“My sorrow and despair was after all
Some evil dream. It still is not too late,
My friends who passed before me through that wall
Not lost, nor I for ever separate
From them condemned to live. I break to-night
As they did through the fire, and so again.”
Knowing and known, shall pass into their sight
But then I woke, and recollection came
That I for ever and alone remain
On this side of the separating flame.

Powell writes a sonnet about the Battle of El-Alemein, a 1942 battle with heavy Allied casualties, reflecting the familiar sentiment of the living that they must continue to do so despite the fact that so many of their dear ones have entered the Kingdom of Death. He reflects that he still does not fully believe the battle took place. It is difficult to imagine bereavement on such a large scale, and Powell does so skilfully, writing a rigid sonnet to try to get a lid on the absurd events but letting even the rhyme scheme of the sonnet occasionally slip from his grasp. For example, the sonnet ends with a rhyming triplet conveying the sheer monotony and cruel fate of being compelled to live – certainly a rather irritating thing. It ends up being rather moving to read it in Liverpool Central Library, in a city up-risen from the complete devastation inflicted on it in World War II.

Check out the other poems in the collection, or try to find Powell’s Collected Poems, which is a larger collection. One thing certainly becomes abundantly clear: Powell is so much more than his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. I personally am vehemently against all the sentiments expressed in this 1968 speech, but I believe that Powell is misrepresented and falsely valorised by many of the right-wingers of today, who should more fully investigate his life and politics. Russell Brand referring to Nigel Farage as a ‘pound shop Enoch Powell’ was untrue: Farage doesn’t even begin to have the nuanced thinking that Powell had.