Sylvia Townsend Warner was a published poet before she ever succeeded as a novelist, her debut collection, L’Espalier, coming out in 1925. For about the next decade she interspersed fiction with verse, until the publication of Whether a Dove or a Seagull in 1933/4. Claire Harman explains in this fascinating article about STW’s poetry why this collaboration with her love, Valentine Ackland, effectively ended her career as a poet. STW continued to write poetry for the rest of her life, though not to publish much of it. Shortly before her death in 1978, a Collected Poems was mooted and she wrote excitedly to her prospective publisher, ‘I intend to be a posthumous poet!’ Although all her poetry is currently out of print (with the notable exception of some of her fantastical poems, which are collected along with work by Mary Coleridge and Charlotte Mew in Voices from Fairyland edited by Theodora Goss), some of it is on the internet and second-hand copies of the Collected Poems and Selected Poems can be readily found, so while it’s true that her fiction still overshadows her poetry, the latter is not entirely forgotten.
The poems in the Selected Poems display STW’s ability in a wide range of forms and genres. She was as versatile in her poetry as she was in her fiction. I can’t find an interesting way to write about the collection as a whole, so I have picked out some poems which appealed to me. Overall there is less evidence of her spiky wit in the poetry in this collection, more melancholy.
One of my favourite poems is ‘King Duffus’:
King Duffus
When all the witches were haled to the stake and burned;
When their least ashes were swept up and drowned,
King Duffus opened his eyes and looked round.For half a year they had trussed him in their spell:
Parching, scorching, roaring, he was blackened as a coal.
Now he wept like a freshet in April.Tears ran like quicksilver through his rocky beard.
Why have you wakened me, he said, with a clattering sword?
Why have you snatched me back from the green yard?There I sat feasting under the cool linden shade;
The beer in the silver cup was ever renewed,
I was at peace there, I was well-bestowed:My crown lay lightly on my brow as a clot of foam,
My wide mantle was yellow as the flower of the broom,
Hale and holy I was in mind and in limb.I sat among poets and among philosophers,
Carving fat bacon for the mother of Christ;
Sometimes we sang, sometimes we conversed.Why did you summon me back from the midst of that meal
To a vexed kingdom and a smoky hall?
Could I not stay at least until dewfall?
King Duffus’s awakening immediately follows on from the destruction of the witches; it is surely their power that has held him for six months in this wonderful dream world. The water of his ‘freshet’ tears contrasts with his ‘blackened’, coal-like physique and the ‘smoky hall’ of his responsibilities. These externals are further linked, through the metaphor of fire, with the burned witches and their ashes. King Duffus’s dream was of harmony and flowers, a crown light as ‘foam’, a feast under ‘linden’ trees in a ‘green yard’. There he was nourished as much by the song and conversation he had with poets, philosophers and Christ’s mother as by the ‘fat bacon’ he carved and the ‘cool beer’ he drank. The world to which he wakens is hard and sterile, a ‘vexed kingdom’ of clattering swords. He cries (petulantly?) that he wished to dream longer. But these dreams were also bonds, a ‘spell’ that ‘trussed’ him and perhaps the kingdom is vexed because he has been indulging himself too long in his beautiful fantasies and avoiding his responsibilities.
‘King Duffus’ is a poem containing a story, and another such is ‘Road 1940’. This poem is very different, however.
Road 1940
Why do I carry, she said,
This child that is no child of mine?
Through the heat of the day it did nothing but fidget and whine,
Now it snuffles under the dew and the cold star-shine,
And lies across my heart heavy as lead,
Heavy as the dead.Why did I lift it, she said,
Out of its cradle in the wheel-tracks?
On the dusty road burdens have melted like wax,
Soldiers have thrown down their rifles, misers slipped their packs:
Yes, and the woman who left it there has sped
With a lighter tread.Though I should save it, she said,
What have I saved for the world’s use?
If it grow to hero it will die or let loose
Death, or to hireling, nature already is too profuse
Of such, who hope and are disinherited,
Plough, and are not fed.But since I’ve carried it, she said,
So far I might as well carry it still.
If we ever should come to kindness someone will
Pity me perhaps as the mother of a child so ill,
Grant me even to lie down on a bed;
Give me at least bread.
Inspired I should think by the German invasion of France in May 1940, it’s a poem in which a woman laments picking up an abandoned baby on what is presumably her flight ahead of the invading troops. Her initial act of kindness has soured, as war sours the generous impulses in us. The child, already depersonalised as ‘it’, is nothing but a burden comparable to a soldier’s rifle or a miser’s pack. Its only use might be as a means to food or somewhere to sleep for the woman. The woman despairs that the child is just one of a multitude in an overpopulated world, destined either to be a hero who will ‘die or let loose / Death’ or a starveling, faceless worker. Yet she too is depersonalised, an anonymous woman on a road with thousands of other refugees. Why should she deserve succour and not the child? She knows that her best hope of charity is to make herself less anonymous by using the child to garner pity, otherwise she remains just another face in the crowd. Repenting of rescuing the child strips her of some of her humanity though it is sadly understandable in her desperate circumstances.
(Photograph of refugees in France, 1940, from here)
Everything should come in threes so the final poem that I’ve chosen the last poem in the book, ‘How fare my ash-trees now?’ Like many of the poems included in this collection, it is about death and about life continuing anyway, and seems to form a conversation between a ghost and someone still living who loved them:
‘How fare my ash-trees now?’
How fare my ash trees now?
Do my fruit-trees bear?
The gnarled apple and the stately pear –
How do they grow, and I not there, not there?Neither more nor less
Than when you walked below.
Apple and pear tree fruit, and ash-trees grow,
And the ripe fruit falls, and leaves begin to snow.Yes, I remember well
The plunge of apple and pear,
The whirled whisper of ash-elaves flocking down air –
But is it all as when I was there, was there?Yes and no.
Nettles and weeds grow tall
Muffle each fruit fall:
Unsought-for lie apple and pear, and rot one and all.
(Andrew Wyeth, In the Orchard, 1972; watercolour and pencil on paper; Adelson Galleries; from here)
(Picture of King Duffus from here, where you can read more about him and the witches)