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.

My freelance journalist work has been published mainly in The Guardian and the Catholic Herald. It always relies on careful field work, long interviews and non-judgemental immersion into unfamiliar situations in order to gain a deeper perspective. It focuses on a combination of spiritual themes and social issues. My journalist style is influenced by Louis Theroux, John Ronson and Will Self. When commissioned, I tend to get around in as environmentally-friendly ways as possible. I am currently working on a piece for The Tablet about Camphill and L’Arche communities and their place in modern social care practice.

You can trust me to do a very diligent job, but I can also work fast if this is required!

The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/festival-ready/2016/jul/22/no-drink-no-drugs-whats-drawing-young-people-to-teetotal-festivals – Explores the diverse reasons for teetotal festivals. Involved attending Buddhafield and individually meeting teetotal festival organisers in Petersfield and Nottingham.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/jan/02/gap-year-stories-getting-a-taste-of-communal-living – Discusses my experiences in London Catholic Worker, an intentional community and refugee shelter I lived in for a long time.

Catholic Herald

7th+April+2018 – ‘Rise of the urban monks’: a piece evaluating “urban monasticism”, in which I visited people in places like St. Mary Aldermary and St. Luke’s in Peckham.

26th+May+2018 – ‘A lonely alcoholic’s poetic quest for God’. A piece about Lionel Johnson, a little-known Catholic poet of the nineteenth century.

Going Under
A sea of silence sometimes strikes this bed –
a shore of sedatives. Sounds are separated
at first: a pillow’s plink against my head,
then I give my arm. I writhe against the fate
you’ve decreed: drugs that wash the rivers bled
in secrecy. Fearfully I meditate
out loud. I’ve got some “poems”. Three or four
describing silence. Then I hit the sea-floor
head-first: a screech of sound, absence. A death
sort of desired, arrives, or permeates?

 

 

My gosh. Well? How long was I under for?
Only a quatrain? Gosh.  I want to *leave* the shore.

As – alas – love dies, reserve

for me, dear lover, the last force

felt. Then blast, eject, preserve

each pique. Lovers gaze, adore,

(endear!?), and mourn, preserved

coy, in twain, blinking,

lay, at gibe, to dug rot.

Lit. Ex. (I)

Rules:

• Each poem must be made from words formed in a hypothetical game of Scrabble, in order, with no inserted or deleted letters. Multiple words count.
• Any letters left over must be declared. One should have no letters left over although one or two is acceptable.
• Inventing words is okay.
• Each poem must be a functioning stand-alone poem that makes sense.

 

So soon? For newly wax before the sky

javelins firing in jets of night

zephyring toward the quiet moon.

Then our sail glides, limber or nude

to cover: an arc. A….

 

 

 

 

 

No, that won’t do. A blank page will never speak

the stirs of silence that will overtake

all sense, rather than just alleviate

the daily headaches of our Twitter feed.

 

Fine. I’ll try to show you what I mean.

 

You see? Here we are. Right back again

where we left it. Dry old patterns on a screen

(or page!?), type-faced. It simply does not work.

Like an interval within a play,

maybe. After B and A’s exchange

 

They take a break. You fill in every word

when “silence” is so much more. It is, I’d say,

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a sequence of sonnets, all of which are missing one vowel, for pointless pretentious reasons that the Reader is best left to discover.

Grail Sonnet IV

Every other moment blue-grey slabs of stone

are sculpted as a monument of dawn

and she appears as clear as before –

but, because you haven’t ever loved a ghost

you get ready for another day alone.

But then you feel her press these marble claws

and hear her, gentle, enter through your core,

and occupy your body as a host.

You’ve never even loved a ghost before

and assumed somehow a ghost’s one human form

but her ghost’s every ghost you heard that day

or every sound that scraped the hard, stone floor

or other ghost that laboured to be born

under the sculpture of that blue-and-grey.