Cornish swan
Kathleen Raine
A Life: Collected Poems A. L. Rowse (William Blackwood, Edinburgh £9.95)
Dr A. L. Rowse, distinguished scholar, notable Oxford personality, often em- battled in controversy, much hated by en- trenched mediocrity more concerned to obscure than to proclaim certain standards and values about which A. L. Rowse refuses to be silent — what lies at the heart of that Fellow of All Souls whose scholar's Mask ought to fit him so well, and yet brings consternation rather than reassurance to so many of his colleagues? I suggest that it is the poet in him, for the Poet always has to speak the kind of truth that disturbs the world of received opinion and accepted values. That world is well prepared to deal with that other stereotype, the bohemian, the Wayward outsider, without sound scholar- ship or all those other protective resources against the folk du logis; but when the folly of Poetry penetrates the precincts of Academe the encounter is bound to be a Painful one both for Academe and for the Poet who is always, whether he wishes this to be so or not, a subversive presence, an enemy within the gates; a subversive presence even within himself. Something like this, perhaps, has both complicated the life of Dr Rowse and enabled him to call his soul his own. There lives on in him a lonely, long-ago country boy whose heart, while his mind was given to Oxford, has never left his native Cornwall. That deep and lifelong loyalty has been the lifeblood of verse writ- ten in timeless, literate English seldom met in these days, but which is itself perhaps a language foreign to a heart that delights to evoke places named in an older language no longer spoken except in those names — which for A. L. Rowse are a kind of litany of the heart.
The theme paramount in any oral tradi- tion is love of the land itself, the wedding of the imagination to certain hills and headlands, a certain light, climate, certain bardic memories of kings and heroes who become the more real as they become legendary. Cornwall is a Celtic country and to common with Wales, Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland remains a place of the imagination while England has for the Most part lost all but its geographical and historical identity. Logres, Lyoness, Tin- tagel, the mysterious Cornwall of the im- agination yet remains a mysterious trace- element in the 'matter of Britain'. A. L.
Rowse is a kind of Cornish bardic poet in exile.
_of course he has written many poems on triendship, Oxford, personal themes of MailY kinds; and also some very fine
perceptive verse on the 'matter of America', with which country — its places and its history — he has an unexpected and very real sympathy, approaching America as a bardic poet should, through its im- aginative topography. He has a true lyric gift, above all when he is writing of Corn- wall, his imaginative home.
I may be mistaken, but somewhere in this region, I suggest, lies the key to a certain lonely integrity which sets this volume of collected poems apart from the general mediocrity of verse written by distinguished Academics.
In spite of being given to words I never have been able to express Fully the sense of life at heart, Find the right words for the mystery.
But then, who can?
The poet's deepest experience has, in the nature of things, been one largely unshared, probably unshareable; his poems are not those of an Oxford don, and his heart's loyalties are to a land lost, like Avalon, under the waves of time.
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