In sorrow uttering songs of joy
David Wright
GEORGE BARKER: COLLECTED POEMS edited by Robert Fraser
Faber, £27.50
Ahuge tome, full of poems so huge they sometimes topple over but manage to get back on their feet because alive and kicking, is here to testify that George Barker is at once the most remarkable and unremarked of the major poets of our time. For all his gift of the gab, genius for rhetoric, and Tennysonian ear for verse and cadence — none of them currently fashionable attributes — he has escaped celebrity. Were it not for the pleasure his poems can give to the ordinary reader, one might conclude that Barker is a poet's poet, if the regard in which his work has been held for over half a century by his peers from Yeats and Eliot on is to count for anything — especially when buttressed by total neglect on the part of those professional reputation-makers of our day, whom Robert Fraser, editor of the volume under review, tartly refers to as 'legions of time-serving academicians ,who have by now annotated the work of his (Barker's) contemporaries almost out of existence'.
Barker's Collected (but far from com- plete) Poems runs to well over 800 pages a great thick unhandy book but well worth the off-putting price the publishers ask for it. As one who has admired, enjoyed, and been as often exasperated as ravished by Barker's poetry since first encountering it around 1940 in the pages of Horizon and Poetry London, I find myself a bit critical of some of the editor's omissions, though agreeing with him and Barker that much of the very early work is wildly uneven. I regret losing 'Poems from the Mon- tenegran' (c.1942) — not translations from the Slavonic but verses written in a New York hotel of that name (a typical Barker- ian joke) if only for the sake of one lyric stanza which I quote from memory:
Time will divide us, and the sea Wring its sad hands all day between, The autumn brings a change of scene, But always and 0 forever he At night will sleep and keep by me.
Among the later, maturer poems let me mourn the exclusion of that real frightener, the subdued verses about a phantom dog in Sloane Street — too long, alas, to quote here — from 'In Memoriam David Archer' (1973).
Enough cavilling — the editor has done a good job, and one must be particularly grateful for the inclusion of the goliardic, Villonesque, witty, wickedly bawdy yet profoundly moralistic 'True Confession of George Barker' omitted from his 1957 Collected Poems because of its supposed obscenity (the BBC got castigated in Par- liament for broadcasting it; how times and mores change). The 'True Confession' is his magnum opus — in it for the first time Barker exploits the full range of his gifts; passion, wit, humour, rhetoric — Chauc- er's 'high style' — dovetailing with pas- sages of racy colloquial speech. It is a rumination over a broken marriage, and like most of Barker's poems autobiog- raphical: that is, its feet are on the ground no matter how high the flights of rhetoric or how metaphysical the imagery, as in these lines about his children:
Stand in your sad and golden-haired Accusation about me now, My sweet seven misled into life. O had the hot-headed seaman spared Those breast-baring ova on their bough, There'd be no aviary of my grief, No sweet seven standing up in sorrow Uttering songs of joy declared Of joy declared, as birds extol The principle of natural pleasure Not knowing why. Declare to all Who disbelieve it, that delight Naturally inhabits the soul.
As C. H. Sisson has remarked, 'it is difficult to understand why this has not become one of the best known poems of the century'. Barker is essentially a religious poet an anachronism these days, when sociology has taken the place of religion, has in fact been shown into its seat by the churches. Poems like 'Goodman Jacksin and the Angel' (1954) and especially the later ones explore the religious vision of evil. In this, as Patrick Swift has pointed out, Barker is unique. His poems ask Kierkegaard's ques- tion: 'Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world? And if I am compelled to take part in it, where is the director?' The last, apocalyptic, poem in the book 'Anno Domini' (1983) quotes Cardinal Newman's gloss on Original Sin: 'The human race is implicated in some aboriginal calamity'. That comment is the springboard of Bar- ker's inspiration, and leads him to lament `the Pyrrhic victories of the rational'.
The appendix includes a selection from Thirty Preliminary Poems (1933). The reader should begin with the last poem in the book, that is in fact the first of which the authentic Barkerian onomatopoeic thunder is sounded — 'On First Hearing Beethoven'. Then turn to the beginning and follow the poet's development from the chaotic energy of 'Calamiterror' (1937) to such public poems as 'Vision of England '38' and 'Elegy on Spain' — better but less celebrated, because less politically orien- tated, than Auden's famous one — and watch, or rather listen to, the gradual quietening and increasing subtlety of Bar- ker's handling of language, especially in poems like 'A Friend's Escape from Drowning' (1954) and 'Villa Stellar' (1978). Much of the unconsidered history of our times is to be found in his elegies to dead friends — Eliot,. MacNeice, the pain- ters John Minton, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, to say nothing of the sharp-toothed comic flyting verses 'Circular from America' (1960), 'Ode on a Distant Prospect of Downing College' (1962), though 'Scottish Bards and an English Reviewer' (1962) is alas missing. The reader may be appalled by Barker's apparently frivolous punning — as Auden said, 'Good poets like bad puns' — but he will not be bored. As in the case of all good poets when presented chronologically, Barker's Collected Poems reads like a spiritual autobiography. And here is his credo:
There is no crisis of the word. There is a crisis of the intellect and of the intellectual.
It is the crisis that precedes the acknowledge- ment of the imperative of veneration. When speech ceases to be seen and heard and understood as holy it proceeds to invent its own deities, and these can be distinguished by their clay feet. The dictionary is the book of the intellect, and there is one thing wrong with it. it is not aware it is holy.
The intellect is the book of the man, and there is one thing wrong with it. It has forgotten that it is holy.
(`In Memoriam David Archer')
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