Once out of Nature I shall never take
My body form from any natural thing
The rise of secular materialism, and the ascendancy of reason since the Enlightenment, caused poets to react with apocalyptic fervour to the crisis in culture. It is no coincidence that the greatest poets of the two and a half centuries following the Enlightenment eschewed reason, and are celebrated by the almost cultic Romanticism which was the emotional reaction to an over-cerebral philosophy.
It would be a mistake to think that they abandoned the philosophic project of the study of the mind, however, since the bearers of the apocalyptic vision sought both to re-establish and re-make those processes of those minds whose greatest achievement is the creation of poetry. In fact, what the great proponents of Romanticism undertook was not to ignore the mind, but to establish more securely the role of the mind and imagination in the materialist culture surrounding them: to this end, they remade and recreated in their works the symbolic order of the ancients which has been the origin and vehicle of what is recognised as great poetry since the earliest times
In the modern era, Yeats, in keeping with the new accelerated developments and inventions, found new juxtapositions, incorporating the imagistic traditions of Romanticism and he can be classed therefore, as Bloom and other critics have done, as a late Romantic.
Yeats, who saw, qua Brown , in mere Nature a cold and alien otherness could depend for his faith in transformative possibilities for consciousness on the complex doctrines and practices of magic, which in turn depend on symbolism.
Kathleen Raine in her essay on “Poetry and Traditional Wisdom” makes a useful distinction between symbol and image. She describes the symbol as forming a bridge from one order of things to another. A simile and sign is merely, she states, words which are alike and belong to the same order of being, in this case, a materialist order. A word, and another word, can describe things which are perfectly similar, and therefore no faculty of the imagination needs to possess or understand them.
Yeats perhaps more than any other poet has written extensively of symbols and images – images are that which are present only to the mind. The mind, or imagination, is for Yeats, the greatest, and at times, the only reality .

Plato was his exemplar here. Plato, in the Timaeus, wrote:

When, therefore, an artificer, in the fabrication of any work, looks to that which always subsists according to the same, and employing a paradigm of this kind, expresses the idea and power in his work, it is then necessary that the whole of his production should be beautiful.

Plato contrasted this with Nature, the physical world was of secondary importance to his philosophy:
But when he beholds that which is in generation, and uses the generated paradigm, it is alike necessary that his work should be far from beautiful .

Throughout his work, from the beginning, Yeats accepted this antimony, and saw as the poet’s function to find those images, which must be remembered in every generation. This takes on the appearance and aspect of a beautiful artefact. The power of the image in Yeats’ work is to create a new meaning out of decayed or forgotten symbols of the past, because like Plato, he believed that we forget the language of archetypes and our soul, and his dedication as a poet was to give them a new energy and authenticity. Those created images function as symbols, that is, as a pathway or door to the mind, which, with the soul, is eternal.
Very early on, Yeats chose the idea of the antithesis of the self, or antithecal self as both the creator and vehicle for poetry. This was opposed to the Primary, the word he used for Nature. The poetic mind, or imagination, had to be constructed through the images that played on it, however, in nearly all these images, he preferred those of artifice and artefact to any word describing nature – for example, the words Yeats chooses for the sea are wrought in artifice, such as the “enamelled sea” in The Indian to his Love in his first volume.
Therefore, in constructing the antithecal self, Yeats, like Plato, undervalued nature. Many of his poems, which contain the signs and symbols of nature, are scored to an emotional note and tone far removed from nature, that is, to artifice itself. This was the means by which civilisations were born and were nurtured, in the images of the poetry that celebrated the imagination as primary. In this way, the imagination was the precursor and forerunner of mighty deeds and noble sentiments, which might make a nation such as Ireland a great one.
However, despite Yeats’ dedication to the task of recreating mythology for a nation and its people, he himself was aware, living in what he called the filthy tide of modernism, that apocalyptic revelation was the proper response to the conditions of life surrounding him. In spite of his desire to recreate a vital past into a new civilisation, what prevailed in Yeats’ mind was that we were coming to the end of civilisation, that we were cast on the blood-dimmed tide. His most famous apocalyptic poem is “The Second Coming”, and in this his fears, at their most grotesque, are realised. As Harold Bloom points out in his study of Yeats there is a certain wilful misattribution to the title of the poem, since it is in fact about a second rebirth, which being entirely physical, is takes on a materialist character. This gives the poem a certain horror, which vindicates but does not explain the first verse, that the falcon and the falconer are torn apart, that anarchy is loose upon the world. Indeed, qua Bloom, the first image of a bird that came to Yeats’ mind was that of the eagle, but in the succeeding drafts he chose the falcon, as it belonged to a more arcane tradition, Egypt, the falconer loosing that mastery of Nature in the revolutions that were to come. Yeats’ fear of anarchy is in a sense more prophetic that either Blake’s or Shelley’s in that he foresaw in the rise of science the mastery of nature which was to crumble and take all in the dissolution of its power. The means he chose to do so was through a highly symbolic, intellectual, apocalyptic poetry, in which fear of the physical self was prefigured.
Yeats’ language is that of the “adept.” To talk about the “ceremony of innocence” has provoked much commentary – can we ask if the nature of innocence is to do without ceremony? With the power of apocalypse, the poem with its dreadful concluding image creates more than anything, a horror and fear of animal nature, particular in its symbolic form is Egyptian, which is far removed from the redemptive apocalypse foretold in Christianity. It is this physical dread, which haunts the reader and has made the poem one of the best known of modern poems.
In privileging the mind above all else, particularly over Nature, a certain distance from physicality is necessary. This distance is not the reductionism of the secular materialists which found its apogee in the Oxford philosophy of the mid-twentieth century: rather it is a form of animism, of nature inhabited by a demonic spirit, which the mind fears and tries to overcome.
In Yeats’ pursuit of the antithecal self he abjured Nature, hoping to erect more permanent symbols than those provided for in an endless flux and rebirth and reconstitution, to provide “monuments of un-ageing intellect,” perhaps forgetting that physical monuments of wood and stone, do, in time, perish. However, by aligning the physical with gnomic properties, by not elucidating our dependence on nature for survival, the cost of this imagination is high, when it comes to terms and times of survival like the age we live in at present.
Yeats, like Plato, finds no ideallic beauty in Nature, writing:
Nature has no outline, but imagination has, Nature has no tune, but imagination has. Nature has no supernatural, and dissolves. Imagination is eternity:
while Kathleen Raine writes:
Whatever beauty we see in Nature is the reflected image of the soul.
It is true that the mind, soul and intellect seek order, but that this order exists beyond mind is more difficult to prove, since modern philosophy denies the reality of anything outside the mind, to the point that even the mind itself cannot be verified, or its contents. In the Johnsonian sense, of kicking a stone so that you can feel it, the outer world of nature does exist. One way we can experience this is through observation, creation and recreation of art.
In quoting Plato, that Nature has no tune, we might counter with what we hear in bird-song, and perhaps note its harmonic perfection. We can listen to the sound of rain falling on earth and stone, and note how it affects us. It may ultimately be foolish not to name these sounds as sweet, pleasing and harmonious.
Has Yeats, in positing mind as the only reality, undervalued nature? A
reading of the “The Song of Wandering Aengus”, an early example of the brilliance of Yeats’ technique, might guide us here.

The poem can be read as an intermediary between the world of imagination, and the natural world which is beginning to take its toll on his physical nature, ten years after he had met his true love, Maud Gonne, and before he had spent his life for a “barren passion’s sake.” The love poems show that it was not a barren passion: yet looking at the unfulfilled love, and its cost to Yeats, we detect how early on Yeats’ privileging of the imagination and denial of the physical had a heavy emotional cost.
I will posit a reader who is innocent of Yeats’ later tormented project and abjuration of the physical, and will attempt a literal reading of the symbols in the poem to discover the nature behind the words, and whether what lies behind that order remains occluded.
I went out to a hazel wood
Because a fire was in my head

The hazel wood is the seat of the Druids, of magic, and the poet went there in the persona of Aengus to quell a fire in his head – usually interpreted as anger, an emotion, usually against a person who has frustrated the poet.
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread

The hazel wand was used for divining, and is noted for its beautiful pale green sheen, so why would the poet want to peel it, save in an act of destruction? Is he saying that he wanted to destroy what was both beautiful and magical?
Hooking a berry to a thread is an old method of catching a fish, but through poisoning it. A poisoned fish would not be of use to anyone – or perhaps reading it purely as a symbol, the fish as Christianity, is Yeats going to poison that faith which has so entrapped his countrymen, denying the reality of sexual love?

And when white moths were on the wing
And Moth like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout

Now, his anger spent, he laid the fish on the floor, and went to blow the fire aflame, presumably cooking it, or giving full vent to his anger, when
Something rustled on the floor
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air

The final verse of the poem envisages the poet as “old with wandering”,
but having fulfilled his love, kissing her lips and taking her hands, walking, perhaps more serenely, among long dappled grass
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon
The golden apples of the sun.

Once again, Yeats has chosen an artifice over the natural – it would be natural to feast on the apples, just as it was to consummate love for the girl. Instead, using alchemical symbolism, Yeats takes us to a higher, more secret order, where the final meaning is elusive. The promise of artifice over nature has been preferred, and stated, and his neglect here of the physical nourishing apple is a foretaste of what will haunt him in years to come, the frail paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick that a dying body becomes.
This is most explicit in his first Byzantium poem, “Sailing to Byzantium”, where he addresses the sages in “God’s holy fire”
To consume his heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is, and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

This extraordinary phrase, the artifice of eternity, is nascent in his work from the very beginning. His choice of mind, and its images, have more reality for him than any reality of the natural world. When words alone are certain good we can recognise the opportunities for transcendence, for they are a metaphysical means to a world beyond the senses, beyond nature. But they also deny the reality of nature at root, and in the end, actually reverse the order of creation, by placing the artefacts of humankind before that in which they have their birth and being: the timeless, the eternity, which cannot be portrayed as an artifice since it precedes all life and creation.
So, the symbolic order, founded on magic, on a system of correspondences may be constructed partly through the abstract powers of the mind, rather than be a true and epistemological book of Nature. In a time of apocalypse, poetry becomes, for Yeats a means of jolting us awake.
The job of environmental ethics is to find a path where a bridge can be built, a springboard to action. Yeats’ imprisonment of the self in a hieratic and hierarchical structure, may lead us to a stasis of metallic sublimation, a stage in alchemy which corresponds to the power of the soul. Even those most sceptical of Yeats’ intentions and methods cannot deny that he was a master of metre: that in his work, both the exigencies of rhyme and syntax are in complete harmony: however there are times when the meaning eludes us, or beckons us on to further readings and further contemplations which do not yield up any particular signification. And to read Yeats’ poetry in this light, is to be at times, frustrated. However, in the reflective mind, this refusal of the physical, and its imprisonment in a stasis of metallic sublimation, may cost us access to Nature, in that in seeking art and artifice, we have failed to respect Nature’s laws, with a huge cost to earth itself, and perhaps to the future of humanity.
That is not to say that the symbolic order does not exist, and from the correspondences of high art and beauty it does, but that since we are creatures of nature, we have an imperfect mind and body that has to be answered in human and natural terms, particularly in times of moral agency and urgency. In our present ecological and existential crisis, perhaps such a reading is necessary: we could ask if his apocalyptic vision is sufficient for us now, as we contemplate the destruction of Nature herself?
REFERENCES
W.B. Yeats: Sailing to Byzantium, The Tower 1928 The Song of the Happy Shepherd, Crossways, 1889 Collected Poems, Arena Books, 1990 ISBN 0 09 972350 – 6
Terence Brown: The Life of W.B. Yeats, Gill and Macmillan, , ISBN-7171-3248-X 1991,2001
ibid
Kathleen Raine: Lecture delivered to the Guild of Pastoral Psychology in July 1957, and reprinted in Temenos Academy Review, 2007. ISSN 1461-779x
Harold Bloom: Yeats, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-501603-3 reprinted 1972
Plato: Timaeus, translated by Desmond Lee, Penguin Classics, 1965, reprinted 1983
ibid

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by Rosemarie Rowley

Quotations are from “Patrick Kavanagh: Complete Poems” edited by Peter Kavanagh (Ireland: Goldsmith Press, 1972, reprinted 1992) – see also below for up to date sources and resources.

In 1939, Patrick Kavanagh left his native Inniskeen for the capital, Dublin, “where arts, music, letters are the real things.” (“Temptation in Harvest”, 156).

However, the countryside still had a firm grip on his imagination, and for his first five years in the capital he wrestled with the complexities of his inheritance as a countryman and a Catholic Irishman, as against the harsh reality of the city – the old tussle between Innocence and Experience.

He wrote three long poems in this period, which appeared together for the first time in the volume of Complete Poems edited by his brother Peter and published by Goldsmith Press in Kildare, in 1972. “A Wreath for Tom Moore’s Statue”, (148) from which the title of this essay is taken, followed immediately in 1944.

In “Why Sorrow?” (187) he saw the fertility of the spirit, being threatened by ponderous philosophy, driving joy into a “wet weedy onion-row ” and this poem was based on the life of a local priest who was tempted to break his vows. In “The Great Hunger” (79) which according to his brother Peter, he wrote very quickly, Kavanagh dealt with the complexities of body and clay against the history of oppression and the inheritance of the famine; while in “Lough Derg”, (104) a long poem entirely unpublished during his lifetime, there was serious reflection on the Catholic faith, as to how he found himself, as pilgrim and artist, in the new republic of Ireland, of small shop-keepers and wily peasants.

Kavanagh had learned since leaving Inniskeen, that the venal and the material were part of the new Ireland.. He had spent five years unraveling the personae at the heart of his own drama of matter and spirit, encapsulated as the conflict between religious observance and sexual fulfillment, in “The Great Hunger”, whose protagonist, Paddy Maguire leads a life unfulfilled because of the lie believed in by his mother – and mother Church.

She reached five bony crooks under the tick -
Five pounds for Masses – won’t you say them quick. (99)

So the Ireland where Christ and Caesar go hand in glove, as James Joyce had observed, was still extant in Kavanagh’s time. This is where the tabernacle is seen as fertile, but not the human being, who is eternally hoping for Easter and regeneration, but who dies in the macabre comical graveyard, an echo perhaps of “Finnegans Wake” or Martin O Cadhain’s later “Cre ne Coille” – an Irish language novel written at the same time and whose action all takes place in a graveyard.

In the long unpublished poem “Why Sorrow?” (167) the contradictions at the heart of Christianity seemed to reduce the sacrifice on Calvary to being a waste. After all, Christ had said, “I came not only to bring life, but to bring it more abundantly” what happened in rural Ireland was that the sense of sin surrounding fertility impeded the spirit even more than the flesh, and, imbued with failure, it rotted away through inanition and inertia. There were parishes in Ireland with nine out of every ten household were bereft of a child, according to the Irish Times census of 1936 when depopulation became a serious problem. Kavanagh was unable to reconcile during his lifetime the pagan aspects of fertility and the Church’s emphasis on sacrifice, particularly on sacrifice of the body.

Having written these long poems, Kavanagh began his mature work as a public poet and satirist. In “A Wreath for Tom Moore’s Statue” the poet’s anger at the Irish state is uppermost, it is a valediction to the wasted years of his youth, when he was in his physical prime, and he looks morbidly at the fate of poets and poetry. Here the poet speaks of “the terrible peace that follows the annihilation of the flesh-rotted word”. (148) The word flesh has come to us from the Anglo Saxon, and holds closely to its meaning as meat as in German “fleisch”. Hence it is nearly always used as in being of the essence of the material, opposed to the spirit, as in Hamlet’s “the ills that the flesh is heir to”, and Samuel Butler’s the “Way of all Flesh”, in our own day Eithne Strong’s “Flesh, the greatest sin” (published 1980). In Kavanagh’s work, there is an entirely ambiguous meaning built around the word, as it inherits all the prejudices from the Christian religion, the defective Christianity he was brought up with, along with the latent and obvious ambiguities, as being the only means that fertility is achieved, and therefore was held to be the only route to earthly fulfillment and happiness. All paradises on earth begin with the longing for the flesh to be redeemed from its fallen state, so it is no surprise those philosophies which sought to change the world relied heavily on a materialist construction to bring about wellbeing through the supremacy of the flesh.

In “The Great Hunger” (79), clay and flesh identified and sometimes at war with each other. Clay is both dead flesh and yet transmitter of life itself. Because flesh is an avenue to love and has been interpreted as heavy and clay-like, it suffers through misuse and misapplication in the same way the depredations of life take their toll on the flesh, making it useless, worn, and at times incapable of regeneration. By the middle stanzas of the poem the word has become associated with the virtually un-sayable: for instance that flesh is a thought more spiritual than music.(Section VII, “The Great Hunger”, 79). It is the poet’s assertiveness to turn the centuries-old contradictions around in order to reclaim their original meaning.

“The Great Hunger” is resonant with memory of the famine and the withholding of nourishment to the flesh. The Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century was also the catalyst that projected awareness of being deprived as a people, and fostered their sense of nationalism in that it focused the blame on the Ascendancy and colonialist classes who had stood idly by while food, in the form of corn, was being shipped out of the country. The famine was a deliberate attempt to starve the people of Ireland into submission – in no way was it caused by God or by natural forces. However the withholding of food and corn by the authorities and the hunger that results, is symbolized by the power Mother nature has to wreck us into submission, by materialist concerns. Because of the collusion of the authorities, its meaning becomes conflated with lies and deprivation. So Kavanagh writes of a generation that has come into being mistrustful of love and of Mother Earth, and mistrustful of women in general, while some like Kavanagh were holding them in high esteem, personally, an attitude not common in the Ireland of the time.

“Flesh-rotted” gives a picture of a potato rotting with potato blight in the clay, as happened in the Famine. The earth, made of clay, deprived the people of nourishment, just as now they were denied fertility through misinterpretation of the Word of the gospels. The Church robbed the people of fertility, of manhood and fulfilled motherhood, while the people live with the hope of the tabernacle, that at Easter Christ will come like green leaves from the sealed and guarded tomb. (Section III “The Great Hunger”, 79)

In the intervening hundred years, the nation had come into being, but the spiritual wound was still manifest in the injured self-confidence of the Irish people, including the poet. As a colonized people they were the first to gain independence from their oppressors, and were the focus of the new nations coming into being, after works such as “Das Kapital” had been written by Marx which gave a voice to the disinherited and abused of the earth. But Marxism was a top-down religion itself written on the proceeds of capital. It projected materialist philosophies such as the determinism of the class concept where solutions are found to industrial problems by organizing society along rational grounds. Therefore the Marxist categories of materialist and scientific elements where thesis meets antithesis, to make a material reality have no place in Kavanagh’s vocabulary, in what he called “the social lie”. (BBC Broadcast, 1960). Having found materialism of any kind suspect, he was not about to buy into the idea that he could be saved by any kind of materialism.

“Flesh-rotted” not only described withering fruits of the earth, but also described the word as used in a material sense by these doctrines which came into being in the great new democratic age of progress and socialism, matched also by the cheap use of communication methods to create mass feeling and emotions, identities created and fed by the new popular press. Since the debunking of religion in the Enlightenment, no social reformer waited for utopia in the afterlife, because the doctrines of the day encouraged men to hope for a better world here on earth, being buoyed up by others saying there was a lack of sure proof that there even was such an entity as spirit or soul, since they had not been to any extent demonstrated irrefutably by the history of human life.

So, the history of mankind was not auspicious even in the hope there would be paradise in the next world. Enlightenment also meant that people were distrustful of tradition, and of the worn categories of thought around love, which had been allowed to become contaminated and an unsure vehicle for any kind of emotion – this marked the poet’s first rebellion. Kavanagh was to make his own path, an entirely original one, but one which looked upon the commonplace as visionary. He did not have the portentous philosophy of the common man as Wordsworth did, but rather interrogated the idea of the common man or peasant in the poems he wrote in the 1930s, and which constitute his first volume “Ploughman and Other Poems”, Macmillan, 1936.

The definition of what constituted the common man was the subject of intellectual discourse in the ‘thirties when Kavanagh began to publish. For this reason much of his early poetry from “Ploughman” is taken up with what being a peasant means to a person to whom the spiritual and druidic aspects of the poet’s vocation are uppermost. To my mind insufficient attention has been paid to these poems, but for the purposes of this paper I will concentrate on how Kavanagh saw the word being made materialistic by social utopians and his choice was to go against their received wisdom. The word made flesh, or Christ, also signified to him that Christ’s mission had failed, in view of the infertility of his people and their spiritual inheritance of deprivation. In post-Famine Ireland there seemed to be little evidence of Christ’s promise of life abundant.

The first act of Kavanagh as a poet was to rebel against the materialization of the word. The new disciplines of sociology where his meaning would lie in a social category were rejected by him as the ground which gave way before him as he tried to straddle the Scylla of being defined from the outside and the Charybdis as an undefined spiritual being in the poetic order. Kavanagh’s position would indicate a struggle between paganism signifying spirituality, and the words around his situation in society. He does not find nourishment in myth, as Yeats did to great acclaim, and neither did he adopt the mantle of Celtic Twilight which ill-fitted Yeats’ successors like F. R. Higgins whom Kavanagh was at pains to deride.

In Kavanagh’s eyes, The Celtic Twilight came to be seen as hermetic and with no grasp on the real world – also in the 1930s the great ideological movements in full swing battered the poet with sociological summations, some harking back to the glories of the past. For all its aesthetic beauty, the poetry of Yeats was seen by some as lacking in content, leaving no clear poetic inheritance for his successors.

Therefore, the importance of Kavanagh’s work, I suggest, lies in him bringing a respite from 20th materialist philosophies, first as a straightforward poet, of the countryside and Nature, or as John Ryan termed him– the last great pastoral poet in Europe, (“Remembering How We Stood”, published 1976) and then as reflector on the questions of the day concerning people, faith and cities.. Pre- industrial society, Ireland’s unique situation in the West European complex of developing nations had found a voice.

It is interesting that Kavanagh who seemingly lacked the intellectual equipment of Austin Clarke or the easy fluency of McNeice, has outlasted them in the public mind, particularly in Ireland, and now with the advent of the Penguin edition of his poems, he looks about to enter into his own in England, too. This is surely because the century he lived in, the 20th became a century of demagogues, ideologues, after the industrial revolution and the decadence followed on Yeats and Wilde, people were in search of what is authentic. Kavanagh is one of the few since that time to withstand the mass cultures being promoted, pre-eminently a writer of plain speech, which is a virtue in an age trammeled by complex philosophical ideals which impacted on the everyday in the form of a despotic politics or evangelical and narrow crusading of religious bigots. Many people took an opposite path and ended up as secular humanists. Kavanagh was neither – though coming from an impoverished background as were the majority of Irish people at the time, there is no sign that neither was he tempted.

Through poverty, the poet was linked to innocence and a pre-lapsarian state – an Eden which is still accessible to him growing up and as a poet of rural Ireland. He was, he said, the first person to have written about rural Ireland from the inside, and was therefore participating in its legacy of a living faith. He wrote out of his place as a poet of rural Ireland secure in the emerging Irish identity as they grew towards self realization and education, but independent from the mainstream.

Kavanagh sets himself in opposition therefore to the obsessively materialist and flesh-rotted doctrines, while up-casting against the church its role in promoting infertility of spirit and body. His is a two-pronged attack. First he opposes the socialist doctrines of the day as man, as commentator, beginning his own exile first from Inniskeen, then later, as he gained experience of the city, he returns to his original source in the green of a rus in urbe, but in a more purely visionary way. It is as if the development of his character, his self definition after the laying bare of “The Great Hunger” and his distancing from it found articulation in its complexity, he then went on when he went on to describe what he termed a journey “from simplicity back to simplicity”. (Self Portrait, broadcasted RTE 1964). In a broadcast in the BBC in 1960, he stated that in. The Great Hunger he had exaggerated the material, it was, as he said himself “far too strong for honesty”.

It is as if the long poems had shown him the way home. These were all break-through poems written at the height of his creative powers. Then, having finished this trilogy of long poems “The Great Hunger”, “Why Sorrow?” and “Lough Derg” (104) where he had written of an energetic visit to the penitential island, where he finds in the numbing ritual a release for the spirit, he casts off the materialist and sociological concerns with a period of satire. Then follows the return to mysticism. He had endured censorship, and had failed to entirely resolve the contradictions of flesh, so he shelved the two other long poems. “The Great Hunger” had resulted in a visit from the police, and neither “Why Sorrow?”in its entirety, nor “Lough Derg “were published during his lifetime.

A year or so later after the censorship of “The Great Hunger” and his decision not to publish the other long poems, Kavanagh is in a more detached frame of mind writing “A Wreath for Tom Moore’s Statue” which makes him write the extraordinary phrase – “the annihilation of the flesh rotted word”. As he says, after 40 years of age “the role is to be prophet and saviour”, and the time for regretting his own unhappy state is over, partially resolved through the writing of the long poems. There is a cold anger at work in the poem, still struggling with the concept that a man is what is written on the label (“The Great Hunger” 79). This is a thought he would juggle with for most of his life, resulting in his fine poem “Having Confessed” (256) where he rebukes himself for having viewed his soul from outside, which he describes as the real sin against the Holy Ghost, or spiritual self. In this way he veered away from the constructions of the social scientist which the age had defined people of his class and temperament. The religious tone of the poem and its supremacy of the spiritual leads him to rejecting the Great Hunger as he dismisses it finally because it had a touch of “left-wingery” about it and therefore of so called objective reality. For Kavanagh truth lay in the subjective and personal, his final position as a poet, to be prophet and saviour, and to smelt the commonplaces of life as a god in his own fashion. (206). He is quite conscious In this poem “After 40 Years of Age” (206) “part of him is exiled from the I” and he has a responsibility has a poet to find his wholeness and integrity.

As prophet, he is honing his meaning to a finer one than mere decay. It is interesting that the word sterile is not in Kavanagh’s vocabulary, rather he chooses to believe in flesh as potential, which has been wasted. As he wrote, wealth is potential and his own potential was dwindling, his own flesh he saw as wasted fertility

Even then flesh is not without its ambiguities, as in the sonnet Pygmalion (26) when he celebrates stoicism and mysticism in the unyielding mystery of clay. The poem Pygmalion encapsulates these ambiguities, that they lie outside of him, and tease him with their power just as the woman only smiles at him when he promises her that at dawn she will be “clay-sensuous”.

While wrestling with the antimonies of flesh and the spirit in an age of materialism, such as the 20th century, Kavanagh at times allowed the material to obscure the spiritual, arriving at a position at one stage where he stands creation on its head, by asserting that life itself, the spiritual life, even the Divinity, God itself or himself, is born out of clay. The fertility of clay brings forth creation, while the spirit struggles with the way it is abused. God is therefore not only the word, but clay itself and it is the fountain-head of Creation having its beginnings in a muddy pool.

the angel while
God was unstirred mud in a shallow pool (Remembered Country, 49)

Kavanagh recognized that matter was the antithesis of spirit, and that the apotheosis of clay was present in the idea of creation. Therefore, whilst he felt that Christ’s mission had failed. Kavanagh, chose to write from the point of view of a different spiritual journey, casting himself as a druid priest of Nature while simultaneously, at an existentialist level, proving his own social history to be inadequate for his purposes as a creative thinker and poet. However, his contradictory stance, and his often belligerent attitude towards almost everyone shows just how strong his engagement was with the social doctrines of the time, and how strongly he resisted them.

Therefore by his self definition, by rejecting the common wisdom that he can be defined from outside, he wrote his best poems. However, in not receiving any recognition from his contemporaries after they were written and entering into a period of satire after the mid-forties, he trod a path which at times was vacillating and at times unworthy of him.

Kavanagh, often depicted as an outsider, made those choices earlier on – not to have his own personal destiny and his work as a poet confused and confounded by modernist structures. Neither would he borrow from myth, all were worn before him and he – while standing outside his own local history and his own people – did not want to fall into the trap of being merely decorative and of no consequence in his own day and times. Like Cocteau, he believed that all that was not believed in was decorative and therefore could not be poetry of the first order(Lectures given in University College, Dublin, 1956)

“A Wreath for Tom Moore’s Statue” (published in the Irish Times in March, 1944, is a panegyric to Ireland’s great bard, himself a poet who crossed the divide between Ireland and England, but in Kavanagh’s eyes, Ireland had demeaned him. The full cost of Yeats’s Paudeen dipping into the till is seen or as Kavanagh puts it

No poet is honoured when they wreath this stone
An old shopkeeper who has dealt in the marrow bone
Of his neighbours looks at you.

which indeed is classic materialism and the waste of the spirit.

Faced with the poet’s death, Kavanagh writes

Some clay the lice has stirred
Falls now for ever into hell’s lousy hollows
The terrible peace is that follows
The annihilation of the flesh rotted word.

That terrible peace just after the war, where quietism took hold nationally and internationally is foreseen by him.

From then on, Kavanagh entered into the phase of his life when writing satire eased the wound, until later he discovers that “satire is unfruitful prayer” (“Prelude”, 274). Satire was his main modus vivendi until his rebirth by the canal in the mid l950s. But his rebirth though much vaunted is not entirely successful as a poetic achievement, as he is a bit wobbly on the stilts he has to climb on to keep this lofty position of not caring.

Between l944 and l964 he resisted, taking refuge in drink. But then he realized, that in the modern world, the experience of self as object, or the reification of the self, was made far worse by the person consuming that self identity that had been fabricated from outside. The self is the ultimate consumer in modern society because it is consumed by itself, buying its own artifacts, and ending up buying into market preconceptions and pre-occupations of the ego self. Because he lacked the resources of endless time and suitable companions, he took the position of direct dialogue with God, and at times became a shaman in a society where religion was more observed as a puritanical and iron convention destroying love and sexual desire in people, his own tattered clothes often reducing him to an impoverished and pitiable, often acerbic, clown. However, the comic spirit finally overtook him, as he wrote, “tragedy is under-developed comedy”. (“Collected Pruse”)

Kavanagh wrote later of being a man without a myth, (“Winter in Leeds”, (335) but unsure of his trappings, he assumed at times the false aggrandizement of being a poet. However, having no secure reputation, the moments when he glimpsed the self are precarious, and for that reason, he appears to be on stilts, the subject of one of his most successful poems, “Come Dance with Kitty Stobling” (290) where his very fragility makes him worthy material of what must be one of his finest sonnets. In that poem also there is the sensation of being so precariously balanced he is bound to fall into the lousy hollows of hell, as so many déclassé artists have done, like Baudelaire. Kavanagh does eventually embrace the odd shards of society in a kind of Bohemianism, but again his position is one of opposition rather than embracing its values, rather as in Derek Mahon’s exquisite vignette “The Poets Lie Where They Fell”.

Even when he concurs and for the sake of a venal few quid joins the troupe of fallen poets, it is with a sense that he is lesser as a man and has somehow failed in his mission when he does stoop to their particular mores. But the Lilliputians fail to pin him to the ground like Gulliver. He is still alive and kicking to the end, when he writes living in the country as a form of exile, and Literary Adventures ruefully reflects on the changing modern world and mentions John Lennon as the new kind of artist, named oddly enough, The Beatles.

There is a connection in Kavanagh’s work between insects and clay which strangely enough is often found in classical myth, such as the Egyptian scarab or beetle rolling his ball of dung, or the conception of Etain from a fly as in the Irish legend (242) has relinquished the possibility of having children and is now a showman and shaman to the public who “may steer by his star as he knocks back whiskies in a smoky bar”.(“The Same Again”) (349)

However there is a sharp line between consuming one’s own experience and being subject of his own poems about his experiences, and it is this rivulet of inspiration he seeks in his later poems, adopting everyday occurrence, or what could be termed the banal, as a weather vane to his interior processes. It takes two forms, the interiorisation of his surroundings with the exteriorising of the inner spiritual love, like in the “The Hospital”(279)

But nothing whatever is by love debarred,
The common and the banal her heat can know

and, through love, the contemplation of

the inexhaustible adventure of a graveled yard.

This contemplation becomes with steady acuity his vision of beauty, as in “Common Beauty” (originally untitled, and now available in the School of English website), this is is a wonderfully achieved poem about the beauty of the commonplace. (205) This is a marvelous poem, when he once again declares his aesthetic lies in the commonplace.

I will forget all that was cultivated, all that was told
How to be beautiful. ………
……To me,
God’s truth was such a thing you could not mention
Without being ashamed of it’s commonness:
Ah, that lane, a short-cut to Clonsilla
Worn in the middle
Where a stream of dirty water ran
Its sloping banks grew broken bottles like glass
My God baptized me there by the hand of John.
There is a cart-pass in Drumnagrella –
I could cry, almost remembering its excitement in July
When moving with an old scythe the rushes that fringed the
rim of the ruts
I learned how not to die.

Here the vision is equal to the word, which are perfectly in tune together, something he had hit upon earlier, at times, in the lyric section “The Garden of the Golden Apples” (170) like a vivid shot of Eden in “Why Sorrow?”

Finally, because he worked on a smaller, local canvas he escapes from the lethargic inertia which gripped the wider industrial western world and gave substance to his faith that the parish was at the centre of culture, and not the capital of a former colonized country, where indeed, all things were provincial. It is this life at the centre of the parish that make him an acute social commentator but also prevented him from being taken up in a serious way by the public in England and in America during his lifetime, where indeed Ireland’s privileged position during World War II nurtured the local and personal rather than the vaster secular religions like a socialism based on reason which have as their artistic expression either a soulless comedy or a complex irony, even cynicism. For Kavanagh, those secular religions means that the Word is embedded in the materialism, and has to be threshed to get at their spiritual essence, just as he said in leaving Inniskeen that he was leaving for the capital in 1937 to thresh the stars of bright truth from the materialist husk, as Blake did. (The Irish Times, “The Corn Goddess”, Nov. 8 1939) These stars of bright truth are evident in the luminous lines towards the end of the poem. They also capture his true insouciance as a writer of unconventional and spirit-shocking words and as heir to the common speech of his people:

But hope! The poet comes again to build
A new city high above lust and logic
The trucks of language overflow and magic
At every turn of the living road is spilled.

(c) Rosemarie Rowley

Patrick Kavanagh’s Poetry can be found in/at:

Websites:

Trinity College School of English Patrick Kavanagh website: which includes uncollected poems

http://www.tcd.ie/English/patrickkavanagh/

The Patrick Kavanagh Centre website:

http://www.patrickkavanaghcountry.com/index.html

Some recent books of Kavanagh’s poetry are:

Kavanagh, Patrick, Collected Poems, ed. Quinn, Antoinette, Allen Lane, Penguin Books 2004, ISBN 0 713-99599-8
Kavanagh, Patrick Selected Poems ed. Quinn, Antoinette, Penguin Books 1996 ISBN 0 – 14- 018485-06
No Earthly Estate: The Religious Poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, by Tom Stack, Columba Press, 2002; Chester Springs PA: Dufour Editions, 2002

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ROSEMARIE ROWLEY, M.A., M.LITT. (TCD) Dip.Psych.(NUI)

IRISH BYRON SOCIETY

In a life celebrated for inexhaustible variety and noted for adventure, both the amorous and exploratory, there is one constant – Byron’s love of the sea, his abiding passion.

This one constant in his life and work was essentially a predisposition from birth, and a permanent feature of his changeable character. In a life celebrated for diversity, variety, amours varied in every possible way, the inexhaustible and infinite variety of the Byron legend was in a very real sense counterparted by his steady and constant adoration, to a natural feature which itself under the appearance of eternal flux was in essence and as simple of the concept of H2O.

Bryon was aware of his unusual attachment from the sea from a very early age. To the star and confidante of his life, his half-sister Augusta, who however was not a constant presence, (1816) Byron wrote:

“A strange doom is thy father’s son’s and past
Recalling, as it lies beyond redress;
Reversed for him our grandsire’s fate of yore
He had no rest at sea, nor I on shore.”

Since he and Augusta shared the same father, but not the same mother, it could be said she was the one person with whom he could truly and essentially be himself. From this epigraph I shall draw a connection between Byron’s love of the sea and his sense of doomed destiny, how it afforded a view of infinite nature as opposed to the limited and shallow human relations, (with certain exceptions including Augusta – his one true star ), and how, even at the end, a tranquil mind eluded him, and could be revived only by the dream of liberating Greece – and how significant it was that the adventures he loved so well were initiated by a series of voyages on ships. There are many witnesses of Byron’s poems having their first incarnation at sea, with Byron composing as he stood on deck,. Notably when the ship bore him away from shame and hostility and painful celebrity in London, and he commenced his great work “Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage.”

Predisposed through ancestry – the nature versus nurture debate finds in Byron an exemplary for the most dedicated researcher in the annals of mankind – he furnishes irrefutable material, it would seem, for the avid geneticist. Many of you here at the International Bryon Conference will be well-versed in the Byron genealogy, from the first mention of Ralph de Burun, who came over with William the Conquerer, the establishment of the family seat at Newstead, and the family’s extraordinary relationship with the sea. Ralph de Burun’s direct descendants, William |(5th Lord Byron born on 5 November l722; and John Byron, born 8 November l723, (sons of William 4th Lord Byron and Frances Berekley at Newstead) both had careers in the Royal Navy. William, known as the “Wicked Lord”, was appointed as a Lieutentant on the Falkland while his brother, later known as “Foul Weather Jack”, joined The Wager as midshipman where on l4 May l741 it was wrecked on the coast of Patagonia, north of the Strait of Magellan. Imprisoned for three years by the Spaniards, John Byron would later write of his experience in his Narrative, * published London l768) which his grandson the poet Byron used the incident to great effect in Don Juan.

There are further family connections with the sea. In l758, George Anson Byron, uncle of the poet and named for the First Lord of the Admiralty, was born. The Byron grandfather was promoted through various stages to Vice Admiral before retiring.

William resigned from the Royal Navy on reaching his majority, while “Foul Weather Jack” returned to England, was promoted to captain, and given command of the frigate Syren in l746. Two years later he married his first cousin, Sophia Trevanion. As any genealogist worth their salt with tell you, the union of cousins accentuates family traits and doubles the odds of their appearing in their progeny. If anything, if the saying “the sea ran in his blood” is to have any meaning, a study of the Byron line would provide rich evidence that in some way the Byron inheritance included a strong attachment and a predisposition for a life on the sea. We may not have found the gene yet, and I would be surprised if it could be pinned down to one gene, but there is no doubt of the richness of Byron’s genetic inheritance when it came to all matters relating to the sea.

The son of these cousins, the poet’s father, known as “Mad Jack Byron” was born on 7 February, l756.

. “Mad Jack” duly grew up, if it can be said he ever did that, and after a spell in the army, married a divorcee – close on the heels of a society scandal- Amelia.D’Arcy Barnoness Conyers.

In l784, on 26 January, Byron’s half-sister, Augusta was born. The same year her mother, Amelia died, and “Mad Jack” Byron married Catherine Gordon of Gight on l3 May l785 – whose father, George Gordon had drowned in a suspected suicide in the Bath Canal, his father, in turn, Byron’s great-grandfather, had also drowned himself – they were the 4th and 5th Lairds of Gight. – and would furnish more material for our geneticist. Catherine Gordon herself was descended from Annabella Stuart, daughter of James I of Scotland whose ancestral brief included five murders, two hangings, one excommunication, and a possible suicide.

But whereas the Byron ancestors led a life of extraordinary activity at sea, in some strange but interlinked genetic reverse dance, the only place where Byron found repose and quiet was at sea. It is almost as if the genetic dance had acquired different steps, much as the set dances of the time, (now extant in Irish “set dancing” originating in the army), had “advance and retire” in their choreography, Bryon’s genetic choreography was compounded by a double legacy which invented new steps and variations on the family theme of the sea.

Not only was Byron genetically superimposed with a blueprint for this audacious balancing act, but it seems every experience he encountered in his early years in some way furnished him with the materials to develop his personality into a unique mould and vision with the sea at its center. A recent book published on the Nature versus Nurture debate (Nature via Nurture, by Matt Ridley, reviewed by Stephen Rose in “The Guardian” of l9.4.03) has shown that genes interact with the environment, and the environment with genes, in a hitherto unsuspected way, so no one is as determined as the geneticists would have us believe.

If Byron’s bloodline furnishes us with a kind of determinism as to his provenance and life chart, his environment, or his experiences in the world from the time he was born, add a classic counterpart to a study on how environment can affect temperament. His abandonment at the age of two-and-a-half by his father, the angry rows between them, his mother’s recorded blackness of mood and changes of reaction, (the infamous taunt of his mother: “lame brat!” and her savage biting of the teacup) – “my springs of life were poisoned” he wrote in one of his desperate letters to his half-sister and the Pigots between l804- l807 – there he sought purer springs, and the source of incomparable purity, the sea, as it was then. It seems he associated the mountains with their voluminous overhanging power with his mother, and the sea with its openness and abandonment with his father. His overshadowing sorrow as a result of his mother’s cruelty to him, compounded by his nursemaid’s (Agnes Grey) gloomy Calvinistic religiosity, who taught him at his impressionable age that some people were sinners pre-destined to damnation, (a doctrine which darkened his life) his seduction by Agnes Grey’s sister, and his early rearing in an all-female household, give us a picture almost amounting to parody to account for the vacillating sensibility, the inability to form lasting attachment, the dysfunctional nature of his relationship with his wife, where he pronounced himself to be in hell on the night of his honeymoon – all these influences are by now a standard equipment of any zealous environmentalist anxious to prove that some temperaments are harmed by such vexatious incidents and such trespasses on a young child which later render him incapable of lasting intimacy or faithful and patient love of another person.

The abandonment by his father was exacerbated in that Byron was born, as everyone knows, with an apastic or club foot, and that in some way he would have regarded himself as unworthy of love by virtue of being abandoned:, that the physical deformity served as an index on his own supposed innate undesirability as a love object for a human, that his mother’s harsh words were imprinted in his brain at a crucial stage and were thus incorporated into his self-identity – all this is well-known and will confirm those positivists among us in pigeon-holing Byron as a poet who wrote in order to escape this definition of himself, to transcend his personal and physical limitations, that in some way his art was a way of healing his innate disorder physical, mental and spiritual. What is so remarkable about Byron is that none of these limitations became the subject of his poetry, on the contrary, they merely served as a springboard on which he could perform his graceful arabesques of rhyme and thought, of humour and philosophy, that he never gave in to self-pity in his verse – which is not to say he did not feel it from time to time. Rather his limitations for him were almost like an inverse mirror of his true capacities – in some way, he managed to attain the boundless, the inexhaustible adventures both of mind and body, and the sea furnished him with exactly the right backdrop for this inspired leap of the imagination, not only in the sense of being visible and present in the poetry as description, but also like an endlessly refracting mirror in some way lighting up in augmented and perfectly poised culmination the spirit of adventure which the human raced longed for but which, in spite of being perfectly equipped for adventure, somehow never came their way because they never really sought it. Or perhaps they never really wanted to break out of their bounds and bonds as much as Byron did.

Bernard Blackstone has written that Bryon is very much the poet of flight – of almost hysterical escape from life situations in which he found himself trapped, that his initial impulse was the ‘overmastering need to get away from his foolish mother.’

Blackstone has suggested that Byron’s poetry is not emotion recollected in tranquility, as Wordsworth pronounced, but rather recollection assessed in emotion.

Indeed modern sociology shows us that all the indices in Byron’s early development, his unpredictable mother and her black moods, and particularly his abandonment by his father, would suggest his sometimes anarchic disposition would have resulted from this, with the consequent inability to form lasting attachments, particularly to women – what seems to have happened to Byron is that he was very aware of these tendencies in his character and did not seem in the slightest inhibited by them. In other words, no matter what the sociologists would say, Byron was a child of nature, and nature herself was his template and his ideal, and all else was secondary.

The sea therefore was his perfect paradigm because of its irreducible reality, its beauty which did not need to be made up, but which never failed, and therefore a source of constant inspiration because being drawn to beauty it was a beauty that never disappointed him or bored him. We could also surmise it was a refuge from the constant chatter of women in his early environment. We could even say that the sea was his alter ego, if that were not in some way absurdly reductionist, because we are not talking here of ego, and the writer’s reflection, rather the abandonment of ego in favour of a higher sense of sublimity in which the self was dissolved, and therefore no longer in pain, terror, or fear, but in tranquility, peace and wonder.

Bryon experienced the loss of faith which had been brought about by the Enlightenment, without the compensation of the Enlightment’s social complacency. He was therefore uniquely placed as a Romantic poet to be a witness for both the past and the future, without the encumbrances of a fossilized faith or a need to respect merely social barriers. He found therefore that conditions at sea, with the camaraderie, the time for reflection, ideal for his particular temperament.

Byron moved from “paradise” to “paradise” – mostly by sea, in those days distance was an enhancing factor and allowed time to absorb different experiences – but each time he was aware that he was a witness to what had gone before him, and that he was uniquely placed in that history.

Looking out from the deck of the sailing “Spider” across the familiar, yet unfamiliar shore, Byron was moved to write ( “Stanzas Written in Passing the Ambracian Gulf”) on l4th November, 1809 when he was just twenty-one years old.

“Through cloudless skies in silvery sheen
Full beams the moon on Actiun’s coast
And on these waves, for Egypt’s queen,
The ancient world was won and lost.”

In a world of shifting values, which are eternal in their very transcience, Blackstone has commented on the magisterial note, the complete finality of this statement, the classical economy which came from a mind conscious of the human oxymoron.

The poem was written after swimming from Sestos to Abydos, – the flippancy of tone, the serious existential import from the historical recreation of the past to the mythological and poetical – show how Byron had already shown his genius. The occasion “Sestos to Abydos” is not, as Blackstone points out, a complete identification and does not approach the remarkable facsimile of past and present he achieved in the Olympeian, the Forum, and the Coliseum. Bryon is a ‘degenerate modern wretch”, not as, in the Forum, “a ruin among ruins.”

However, the lyric marks a hinge moment in Byron’s development.

Bryon’s poetry above all shows us that love is not what it seems, and he draws upon a wealth of disparate sources, novel reading, physical realities like glands, boredom, custom, social status, and personal insecurity, so when he swims across the Hellespont, just after his 21st birthday, he does not swim for love, like Leander did, but Byron swims for glory.

Leander swam for love, Byron for glory. Therefore Byron’s unique destiny was for the sea, in every possible way. His personal life was merely a variation and a shadow in comparison to the ineffable feelings of beauty, majesty, repose, excitement and adventure which the sea conjured up for him. It was a resource for him, over and over again, where he could be endlessly renewed and at the same time constantly bidden to reflection on the awe and majesty of nature, as compared to the fickle passions of mankind, his own short-lived amours resulting in a fatal boredom, and a balm to a spirit tried and vexated by human society in its vanity, greed, and pettiness when focussed on a man who simply challenged them to think differently. The iron laws of convention were for him the expression of vanity, hypocrisy, self-seeking and an impediment to the spirit’s journey to love, human development, an understanding of history and his own place in it at the point of its highest cultural achievements, and the eventual trajectory of civilization to which he was willing to give important, authentic, and disinterested witness.

There is no witness like Byron at that point in history where the possibilities for the future were endless, but uncharted, hopeful, because the past was called into question and repudiated in a spirit of resolute inquiry and adventure, while the spirit of love and adventure was as yet unpolluted by psychoanalytical discourse or linked to consumerist ends. Therefore when we speak of Byron and the sea, we are in some sense discoursing about what is a l9th century sea, and there is ample evidence from Byron’s writings that he was aware even at that time what dangers lay ahead for that sea – in other words, he was what he would now call an early environmentalist.

The fact that Byron said he wanted to hang himself while on shore may sound dramatic, but it does show us very clearly that Byron himself was not an unconscious artist in the Freudian sense, and the modern tendency to view biography as some sort of apologia for a character defect would be quite lost on him. He knew very well who he was. He knew he had very little tolerance for merely social boundaries, and while he respected the human capacity for love and friendship, he would never sacrifice love and friendship to social expediency or teleology. So in a way, he was loftier than the people around him, and was constantly frustrated by their narrower agenda. So he had to turn to the source of life itself, the sea, to refresh himself after these sometimes barren and time-wasting endeavours. It is to the deep self underneath which Byron returns to again and again to refresh himself after the limitations and ennui of social encounters. It is a kind of transcendence, but a transcendence which enhances the poet and draws a bigger picture of the world in which he found himself, and that world was the sea. A physical love “at homeness” and comfort, a spiritual love boundless, sublime, infinite, “trackless” as opposed to human relations and society, the nature of the sea reflecting his personality, what Lawrence Kromer has called “the oceanic experience”, where he considers the absorption of the psyche in the totality of being unique among the Romantics and post-Romantics.

Because Byron was a person of extraordinary and opposing dimensions, between freedom and a doomed fatality, between love and its imposter, lust, between boundlessness of the spirit and cramped incapacity present at birth, between reason and the ridiculous, in short a poet of contrarieties whose poetic destiny was to mirror in his work the dramatic opposition of these qualities with justly famous and bravura humour and verve. However, he was never confused, as geneticists were, but only confounded, as all great poets are, between the boundlessness of the spirit of nature and the folly and pettiness of human nature. He had written in a letter to Adair in Turkey in 1810, “I am never well adapted for or very happy in society”. Not only did he have to deal with his sense of his sense of a flawed heredity, son of “Mad Jack” with two suicided forebears on the Gordon’s, his mothers side, from his early environment, his cramped and vitriolic relations with his mother, and his absent father,Byron’s spirit embraced the vastness and adventure of the sea.

Whether it was dreaming about their exploits when he was a child with a physical handicap, his childhood in Aberdeen where he first learned to swim and where on long stretches of sand he had glimpses of an infinite and an absolute, in contrast to his very early years, Where the streets sped down to the shores, he found correlative for his own passionate nature. We know that his spirit must have been nourished by the beautiful scenes, for as he says himself, his early nature was affectionate, and only spoiled by his mother’s unpredictable and difficult personality. Later, in his adult life, the raw and natural beauty of the sea inspired him far more than his own lovers or his exploits with them. We can call this a romantic spirit, a hankering after the primal beauties and splendour of Nature, in which he could forget the petty encounters of his youth, their taunts, and immerse himself in the idea of something vast and wild, benign yet powerful, a visible echo of his own soul, in which he could encounter his spirit, so easily tortured and bored by human society. For the sea was his mirror image, as changeless and as changeable as himself, as inexhaustible as were his resources in the mind, for as Hopkins says “the mind has mountains”, we can also say it has seas, polished surfaces and fretful bubblings, shore-lapping waves which hug the sand tenderly and repeatedly like a lover, the advance and retreat of relationships, the huge cataclysms of thundering water and the deep hostile depths, the hidden dangers and lurking shadows of intimacy, the promise of stillness and the infinite beauty of its relationship with the sky above. and in that time never encounter a scene the same, never see any feature exactly the same, but still able to trust the tides and in that slow motion find the ease and lull of time.

My purpose in this paper is to trace the genesis of Bryon’s relationship with the sea, where he found himself, in the words of Wallace Stevens, more truly and more strange. Through a myriad of sexual conquests and relationships, the sea resisted him just as she supported him, was witness to his first gymnastic feats where before he had known failure and humiliation, was the connection between his forebears, his classical learning in which he re-enacted the heroic spirit of bygone eras, and his own undiminished universe where there was constancy and fidelity to a greater harmony, a testament of a harmonious world and a greater shaping spirit than any society he had experienced. The sea was also the means through which he overcame physical handicap, present at birth. The sea therefore was the only element in which he was comfortable, because of his gait, and where he obtained a respite from the taunts of childhood. Indeed as a student at Harrow, he had carried a boy on his back whilst swimming, showing his desire for physical supremacy allied with generosity of spirit. Even on land, when he rode nearly every day, his chief delight was to ride along the seashore, where from being a troubled biped, he could in quadruped majesty survey the scenes he felt most inspiring. A new world opened upon him in the Mediterranean Sea. Byron’s sense of release from the restrictions – maternal, social, political and personal comes through strongly in the “Good Night” song.

“Adieu, adieu, my native shore,
Fades o’er the waters blue,
The wight-winds sigh, the breakers roar,
And shrieks the wild sea-mew.”

He moved from the revulsion of home contacts to the solitude of the sea.

“And now I’m in the world alone,
Upon the wide, wide sea.”

Blackstone comments that the Coleridgean echo is unmistakeable, but that the Childe welcomes the desolation which fills the Mariner with dread. (stanza 10).

“Welcome, welcome, ye dark-blue wave!
And when you fail my sight,
Welcome, ye deserts, and ye caves
My native Land – Good Night!”

It is to the “deep and dark-blue ocean”, after all the deserts and caves, physical and spiritual, of Cantos II and III that Byron returns in his grand finale to “Childe Harold.”

Byron’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ stance struck the novelist John Galt, who was a fellow-passenger on the Townshend Packet which carried Byron from Gibraltar to Malta at a later stage in the tour.

“Bryon held himself aloof, and sat on the rail, leaning out to the mizzen shrouds, inhaling, as it were, poetical sympathy from the gloomy rock, the dark, the stern in the twilight. There was all about him that evening, sitting amidst the shrouds and rattlings, in the tranquility of the moonlight, churning an inarticulate melody, he seemed almost apparitional, suggesting dim reminiscences of him who shot the albatross.”

Blackstone points out that Byron, (with Blake) was the most aware of the Romantics of the problems of what we have come to call pollution.

Yet Byron had written about the Ocean, how it resisted pollution:

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean – roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the eqarth with ruin, – his control
Stops with the shore; – upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into they depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknell’d, uncoffin’d and unknown…

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee:-
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?
Thy waters wasted them while they were free,
And many a tyrant since; their shores obey
The stranger, slave or savage; their decay
Has dried up realjms to deserts: – not so thou;
Unchangeable, save to thy wild waves’ plain;
Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow;
Such as creation’s dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

Unfortunately, it is not true today that the ocean is as it was at the dawn of time. There are experts now writing that the ocean is in danger of being damaged beyond repair. In Byron’s time the sea was yet unpolluted, a source of renewal for the spirit of man.

Above all, the sea was itself, and remained long after the memory of great men were forgotten as we can see from Byron’s celebrated stanzas in Childe Harold Canto 4 (check Canto 3) – he had actually written the first two cantos on board ship, so it was also a good writing environment for him.

Open and sublime, it was the one element where human vagaries, or hypocrisy, or illusion did not dwell. It was answerable only to its own instincts, and guided by the lamp of night, the moon. It was here he had the most important moments of his life, from contemplation on his marriage to Annabella Millbanke when he walked along the shore at Seaham, to his arrival on ship for the Battle of Mussolinghi , moments of an almost malign fate in which his heroic spirit would fail in spite of his best intentions and his great destiny as a poet.

“O’er the dark waters of the deep blue sea
Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free,
Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam,
Survey our empire, and behold our home!”

– The Corsair – (continues, etc.)

So, the sea was his home – boundless, beautiful, physically challenging and ever-changing

The sea nourished his essential self, and gave him in nearly every poem the occasion for his poetry, whether as backdrop, witness, or spiritual journey. In Canto 1 we are crossing a peninsula, and after the introductory stanzas, there is no sign of the sea, but images of man-made suffering everywhere. However, all the great lines in Canto 1 are to do with the sea:

“And Mammon wins his way where
Seraphs might despair!

which is a hint of the spoliation to come – unfortunately. But Byron continues on with his praise of the ocean:

“and traverse Pagnian shores, and pass Earth’s central line..”

“and Tagus dashing onward to the Deep,
His fabled golden tribute bent to pay”

“Swept into wrecks anon. By
Time’s ungentle tide.”…

Canto 2, stanzas xvi – xix give us a well-realised bustling extravert view of life aboard ship.

The sea was there in all its moods – even in times of loss of hope – there are new dimensions of time which is also eternity, and signs of spiritual oppression:

“no breath of air breaks the wave”

In the famous Canto 4, we have the roll-call of ruined cities and civilizations to which the sea is both witness and survivor.

Then the marvelous ephiphany of the carnival, and the evocation of life in the present

“Loud was the lightsome tumult on the shore” which brings the reader to the wonder of how life continues as a vibrant spectacle and a source of wonder.

However, there was one occasion when Byron was not able to lift his spirits by contemplation of the magic remedy of the sea. On 18 July, when the bodies of Shelley and Vivian were washed ashore on the beach near Viareggio, Trelawney took over and managed a pagan cremation on two consecutive days, l5 and l6 August. When Byron saw Williams’ remains which had been washed up first on l5, Byron cried: “Are we all to resemble that? – why, it might be the carcase of a sheep!”

At all times it was an escape and a remedy, for example, after the immolation of Shelley’s body on the beach at Lerici, Bryon swam out to his yacht, but uncharacteristically, was unable to go for a sail in it.

But after a time, he did recover, and ended up spending most of his final years in Venice, where he could view daily the vastness of the sea, and sail in her canals.

His destiny was both for the sea, where he sought unity and peace. I would go further and say it was his alter ego, where he lost his sense of limitation and frustration of human behaviour, in the experience of boundlessness and infinity known as the oceanic experience.

As I noted earlier, some people have called this a nineteenth century sea, and a typically romantic landscape, and in a sense it is, in that it breaks with classical tradition and becomes the romantic abyss of fear and alienation. However, it still retained its unsullied nature, and is far removed from the sea of today, which we have polluted through allowing it to become a receptacle for waste and a dumping ground for radioactive and nuclear waste – so necessarily limited our horizons and depriving ourselves of a great and transcendent sense of being human – what Homer called our great grey mother and what James Joyce termed, while evoking Sandymount Strand in Dublin, the “ineluctable modality of the visible” – in other words, the sea was still accessible as a medieval concept, whose substance and attributes were proofs of the Divine.

So in a Romantic sense, the sea had aesthetic appeal – both as a wonderful backdrop and a source of adventurer – there are pirates Turks, especially in the earlier poems and drama as historical description (wreck in Don Juan inspired by Byron’s senior’s account) During the first few months of his banishment from England he travelled on every kind of boat imaginable, and moved from place to place in search of adventure and beauty. In England, he had become a source of malignant mockery, and from then until his death in l824 the sea was his home, his inspiration and his recourse..

However, the development of the relationship with Augusta and the scandal besmirching of their love and friendship meant that in some sense his capacity to contemplate beauty and to obtain a sense of tranquility in reflection were impaired. On his second visit to Europe in l8l6, when he left Dover under a cloud, even the wild beauties of Switzerland failed to console him.

“I was disposed to be pleased – I am a lover of Nature – and an Admirer of Beauty – I can bear fatigue – and welcome privation – and have seen some of the noblest views of the world – but in all this – the recollections of bitterness – and more especially of recent and more home desolation – which must accompany me through life (author’s emphasis) – having preyed upon me here – and neither the music of the shepherd – the crashing of the Avalanche – nor the torrent – the mountain – the Glacier – the Forest – nor the Cloud – have for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart – nor enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty and the power and the Glory – around – above and beneath me.”

This was written on 20 September, l8l6 a final entry in the journal he was keeping for Augusta. However, as Byron embarked on the course of his sexual life, the sea remained the only unpolluted source in which he could truly be himself . In the end, however, even that failed him. We first have an inkling of this from his stay in Venice, a place on land he felt quite happy to be in, particularly since it consisted of islands and he had to go everywhere by boat or horse, in other words, not on his cramped foot. Venice was the place where had had his most amours, and also the only example of his fidelity for a love for a woman, Teresa. It seems in this environment of islands, seas and canals, Byron’s imagination in some sense found a place he wanted to call home, but with this discovery, there also emerges his first conscious sense of confinement, and how male and female nature in some way at this particular place the exact locus of his psychological feeling of what home meant to him.

In the play “The Two Foscari” we have the long shadow of his broken relationship with his father. Again, the sea is his metaphor

“as the wave
Sweeps after that before it, alike whelming
The wreck that creaks to the wild winds, and wretch
Who shrieks within its riven ribs, as gush
The waters through them, but this son and sire
Might move the elements to pause…”

and later in the play there is a Freudian, if I may be reductionist for a moment, opposition of the male principle, (freedom and the sea) to that of the dungeon (female, and full of snakes)

“A cell so far below the water’s level,
Sending its pestilence through every crevice”

However, in Venice, he was still open to possibilities of beauty, love and friendship, as Venice looked out to the openness of the sea, and , at the time the masculine freedom of the sea.

“I could endure my dungeon, for ‘t was Venice;
I could support the torture, there was something
In my native air that buoy’d my spirits up
Like a ship on the ocean toss’d by storms,
But proudly still bestriding the high waves
And holding on its course;”

However, he continues on with the prophetic words which are also the bye word of sea-faring men:

“the wind may change.”

which is the nature of love itself. His love for Teresa changed – after three years he wanted to move on. We know from his lines to Augusta that his love for her, and for contemplation of Nature, was very much impaired after his relationship with her, and in some sense, that love had changed. For although she was his “star” and his true soul-mate, nevertheless their sexual union had engendered in him the kind of guilt which could not be assuaged by contemplation of beauty, since the source of love and beauty, Augusta herself, had been defiled through an incestuous union. Henceforward this great spiritual resource after his stay in Venice somehow became unavailable to him, as he believed himself to be beyond redemption, and it is this sense of futility and doom, reinforced by his conviction of his mad bad line, that he poisoned everything and everyone he touched, finally overwhelmed him and caused him to embark on his final adventure at Mussolinghi in the hope of rescuing his most idealist and noble ideals.

The period of constant voyaging had come to a temporary respite in Venice, while he appeared to be happy there, and had his greatest number of amours,. he could not finally accept love or Venice as his ultimate destination. – what ultimately the outcome was in Paradise did not become absolutely clear to him until his maturity and eventual destination at Mussolinghi.

The sea is then seen in a different light. Formerly the witness of mankind’s greatest achievements and civilizations, the survivor of history and the constant in the eternal nature of man, Venice seems to have given him the opportunity to view his relationship with the sea as something that temporarily gave him a place of rest, but in the end was as futile as his own nature. This nature could only be assuaged by contemplation and by constant voyaging, especially on the sea, the locus of his greatest imaginative efforts, the scene of his best parties and wittiest social encounters with friends and acquaintances, and the setting for the dramatic projection of himself as a poet, where he was often observed gazing out to sea with a manuscript and a pen in his hand. Often imperious, aloof, and absorbed, but nevertheless connected in some vital way with the elements and with the whole of humanity.

However, in an important and final sense, the sea is the ultimate nemesis or destiny for Byron – not only an anodyne from the pessimism about human nature and his own nature – fatality, injuring his spirits which can only be revived by further adventures, finally catastrophic doom. How much his sense of guilt – at times apparent when he chided Annabel about her delay in accepting his proposals, which might have altered the history of his personal life, and prevented him falling into temptation with Augusta, – ( I hear you say, typical of a man to blame the woman!) His ancestral guilt, and his actual guilt finally dovetailed in and despite his best efforts finally convinced him of what he had been fighting against all his life – his feeling of doom, of his off-said that he brought doom to everyone. He then wrote out his early experience of Calvinism as a form of punishment for sinful humanity, and found expression in the cataclysm of destruction by the sea in “Heaven and Earth”, where his musings on the fallen nature of man are more Old Testament, as in the story of Cain – he was drawn to primeval guilt and primeval nature, not only because of his Romantic impulse but because his own experience. This finally led him to a fatalistic irredeemable notion of man (and woman) as inherently corrupt and doomed to final oblivion, and which he had heroically overcome for most of his life.
As his sense of doom increased, Byron’s imagination was drawn to another sort of unlawful union, that of the sons of God with the daughters of men, as he states in the epigraph from Genesis. Here even the sea cannot overcome his morbidity. It is present in all its power as an agent of destruction and vengeance, of the return of the children of Cain,which Byron believed himself to be one, to dust and futility.

“Earth shall be ocean!
And no breath,
Save of the winds, be on the unbounded wave!
Angels shall tire their wings, but find no spot:
Not even a rock from out the liquid grave
Shall lift its point to save,
Or show the place where strong Despair hath died,
After long looking o’er the ocean wide
For the expected ebb which cometh not:
All shall be void,
Destroy’d!”
- Heaven and Earth

So finally the sea was the ultimate destroyer of hope, and the nemesis for the human race.

When he decided to join battle with the cause for the freedom of Greece, he lingered on with Teresa, but his mind was made up. He even wrote to friends, enquiring what were the prospects in Greece for women. But he went on his last voyage without her.

There was a dead calm that night, the thirteenth. Bryon slept on board – the omens for the l5th were still adverse. A sudden gale battered them all night forcing the unhappy “tub” back into port, with its flimsy partitions kicked down by terrified horses, and troublesome neighbours they were in blowy weather, as Byron wrote to Augusta. Trelawney superintended the repairs on l6th. Byron and Pietro revisited the empty Casa Salazzo before finally sailing.

“Where shall we be in a year”, Bryon said wistfully. On that very day, a year hence, Byron’s body would be committed to its tomb.

As the tub rolled slowly down the Italian coast Byron mostly sat alone on deck, brooding and studying the bitter japes of Voltaire, Swift and La Rochefoucauld. On the voyage, Trelawney reports Byron again talked of his wrongs, finally comparing himself and Shelley with the crucified Christ.

“If the Christ they profess to worship reappeared, they would again crucify him.”

He told ghost stories as he sailed at night past Stromboli, which he taught was erupting, but was shown to be the lights in cottage windows – an indication of his state of mind. They had intended to make Messina their final Italian port of call, but they were sailing so well at last that they continued on straight into the Ionian Sea.

“I am better now than I have been for years” said Byron, recalling that on shore he always felt inclined to hang himself on waking. He and Trelawney swam in the warm waters practicing pistol-shooting at bottles and sometimes at poultry hanging in baskets from the mast, or played practical jokes on each other.

So the sea is his love, his recourse, his elixir, his aphrodisiac, and his destiny, and his great purifier. It was the triumph of nature against the course of civilizations and the grand dreams of mankind. It was also the ultimate destroyer of men and flawed human nature to which his poetry was the only and immortal answer.

PAPER GIVEN AT INTERNATIONAL BYRON CONFERENCE, LIVERPOOL, 2003,
FROM A VERSION PUBLISHED IN THE JOURNAL OF THE FRENCH BYRON SOCIETY, edited by Christiane Vigouroux, 2004

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This essay is an effort to come to terms with poetry born of deep trauma. In my view, electric shock therapy (also known as ECT, or electro-convulsive therapy) had a fundamental role in Sylvia Plath’s life as it effected her personally, when such material became not only the theme of her work but its very expression. The truth of what happened to her mind, and her response and attitude showed a phenomenal capacity to confront her total devastation which has only been partly understood. Through this barbaric intrusion into her mind and through the strictures and mesh of great art she forced a universal truth.

George Steiner, in Janet Malcolm’s book, writes of Sylvia Plath’s “total communion with those tortured and massacred”, while Seamus Heaney takes the view in relation to her major poem Daddy that (it) “rampages so permissively in the history of other people’s sorrows that it simply overdraws its rights to our sympathy”. George Steiner says that Daddy is “one of the few poems in any language to come near the last horror.”

It is my purpose in this essay to argue that Sylvia Plath, in her life events, earned the right to write about suffering, not in a vicarious way as suggested by Heaney, who after all, happily has no knowledge of how such drastic therapies could affect a person, but that her traumas and calamities were so profound, that on the contrary, by identifying them with a history of public oppression, she achieved the integrity and understanding that true suffering brings.

It is her gift of language and her powers of naming in the face of desolation and indifference that have augmented her reputation:

This is the city where men are mended
I lie on a great anvil
The flat blue sky circle
Flew off like the hat of a doll
When I fell out of the light. I entered
The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard

The Birthday (The Stones)

The pity of the poetry is that it reached such a negative polarity in her suicide, but had she lived and recovered, it may have been a rebirth for her spiritually, artistically, and emotionally. However her call for help turned into her real life death by her own hand and such death of the self had already been experienced at the age of 20 when she underwent ECT for the first time. Her love affair with horror had begun

It is no accident that Sylvia Plath has ended up as the voice of dehumanization and suffering. From the beginning, almost, she is like a tourist guide to the inhumane in a landscape that is foreign to her and her readers, yet in some way, echoes their experience. It is the modern landscape but without love or identification.

The history of Sylvia Plath’s art begins as an act of isolation in the larger community, her own situation of being a very bright girl in a land which preferred mediocre and unquestioning minds in its women. The vacuum produced a high degree of social compliance and conventionality without an inner core of spiritual meaning. This isolation was mixed with the callous indifference which was part of the complacency of life in America. Her casual diction and slangy jabs belie her subject matter and increase their import through the effect of irony.

Her background was of importance in that way. Neither of Sylvia’s parents had English as a first language, hence it was natural for her to be, from the beginning, an outsider. In her novel The Bell Jar, from the first sentence we are in the presence of someone with the dispatch and dispassion of a news gatherer who knows what it is to be an alien. At the time the newspapers were full of the story of the Rosenbergs, a husband and wife who had acted as spies for Russia during the Eisenhower era. By setting her own personal story – for the novel is autobiographical – in the scandal and sense of betrayal the American public felt, she encapsulates both the quietism of the times with the shock of a post-bomb cold war culture. . Her use of “electrocuted” in the first sentence which hints at but does not reveal her own experience of electric shock is a kind of trademark of hers – the casual tone with the horrific fact is a kind of Plathism.

There is a clear difference, particularly in the prose, between her early style and the style that followed the electro-shock treatment. If we look at an early story A Day in June – written at the age of seventeen, her diction is clear, there is a lightness of touch without the later heavy deadly parody. In a later poem, written in 1956, two and a half years after her suicide attempt, consequent hospitalization and ECT treatment she writes a savage and threatening parody of adolescence, showing fear and horror in the bloom of youth:

Grim as gargoyles from years spent squatting at seas’ border
To wait amid snarled weed and wrack of wave
To trap this wayward girl at her first move of love
Now with stake and pitchfork they advance, flint eyes fixed on murder.
Dream with Clam Diggers, l956

Sylvia Plath is a classic case of Frost in May. The electro shock therapy arose out of a suicide attempt after she was denied entry to a creative writing class run by the Irish writer Frank O Connor. Her sense of failure was such she took an overdose and crept under the floor of the garage. What is ironic is that later on, having found fulfillment as a poet, wife and mother, she reverted to her original suicidal state because of fear.

If we look at her early background, we can see how it formed her. Her parents were both in their youth deviant from their own immediate culture and families, hence the feeling of being an outsider was there from the beginning. They were all strangers in a strange land. Otto Plath, Sylvia’s father, was besieged by doubts when he read Darwin, and left a future ministry, and his family never spoke to him again. Sylvia Plath’s mother, Aurelia Plath, moved from Catholicism to being a Methodist.

From the beginning at home, Sylvia was offered formulae for excellence, based on performance. Her father paid special attention to her accomplishments. It seems at times Sylvia was no more than the sum of her capabilities and accomplishments. It is probable that as a small child she imaged God in her omnipotent father so when he died, shortly after her eighth birthday in 1940, she may have lost any faith she had in a benign divinity or a benign world – the famous “I’11 never speak to God again.”

Furthermore, she was not allowed the natural mourning process. Sylvia Plath’s mother, Aurelia, believed it best not to grieve in front of the children. Sylvia did not see her father’s corpse or coffin, nor attend his funeral, nor did her mother appear to grieve, trying as she was to carry on as normal. Overnight, a god-like figure disappeared from Sylvia’s life; he was rendered absent, invisible, and unimportant, and what’s worse, mistaken. He died as a result of his own misdiagnosis.

Sylvia therefore was an adolescent at risk, who nevertheless continued to explore what was around her. Her habit was to probe matters to the uttermost and at the same time to win from them a superficial cynicism. She became a desperately anxious to please young woman, for all her capabilities. In her early adult life she had sought knowledge from every source, including the Ouija board, and to the end sought communion with the ghosts that inhabited her home, her last residence being once Yeats’ flat in London.

From the original loss of her father she had come to be too reliant on women in her early adulthood. But it is the women in her life who finally let her down, another woman of mid European origin, Assia Weevil, causing her marriage to break up. Her therapist, a woman doctor named Beutscher, prescribed ECT for her and administered ECT without an anesthetic thus permanently damaged her rapport with people, particularly women. The result was that hurt women like Assia Weevil – whose family were refugees from the mid European holocaust – were able to affect Sylvia Plath’s confidence unduly

Her nervous breakdown is an account many of us are familiar with on a reading of The Bell Jar and the time prior to her suicide has been well documented by her biographers. In the story told by Janet Macolm, Plath, on the eve of her self destruction – having gone back to live in London and take up a new life – appeared to change her mind without telling anyone her intentions. On the night before she died, she appealed to a neighbour for the loan of a stamp because she was afraid she was going to die, and she insisted on paying for it, as she did not want to confront God with any debts. It is odd that she should show a belief in or fear of God in a relatively trivial matter. Her neighbour describes her as being in a trance, the import of which would have struck a professional. Obviously she had abandoned immediate reality to another plane of consciousness. There was an almost involuntary aspect to her behaviour, that she was being overwhelmed by dark forces – fear of again experiencing ECT. She had vowed she would rather die than have the treatment again. After losing Ted, the father of her children, her whole future was bleak, and no doubt she re-experienced those emotions again when she had lost her father, and she like her mother would have to struggle as a single mother to survive in a post-bomb post-Holocaust alienating world. But it was actually the fear of herself going out of control in dealing with this grief that caused her greatest anxiety.

As Anne Stevenson wrote in Bitter Fame:

In fact, Electro-shock therapy may have substantially contributed to her core logically-arrived-at decision to do away with herself.

Linda Wagner Martin charts this fear in her biography of Sylvia Plath:

What Sylvia feared most was her loss of self. When mad, she explained, no person possesses a self. With her customary thoroughness, Sylvia read widely in sociology and psychology of identity. Whatever was known about the problem in the 1950s, Sylvia researched. One of the results she seldom talked about, however, probably because it was frightening, was the effect shock treatment
had on her long-term memory. When she did talk about it, it was like being in a dream, she never knew whether she was awake or asleep or dreaming. It was as if she lost events, people, years from her life.

Of the last years, Linda Wagner Martin writes:

Sylvia’s fear of electro-shock treatments made her unwilling to be
hospitalized. She had said repeatedly ten years before she would
not go through such treatment again.

Such fears are common to many who have undergone electro shock therapy, there are those who would face death rather than go through the treatment again. The total invasion of the mind and self, as if her will and spirit were handed over to brain destruction, are sufficient cause of despair. She has written eloquently of shock therapy in The Hanging Man:

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me
I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet

The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard’s eyelid
A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket

A vulturous boredom pinned me to this tree
If he were I, he would do what I did.

Electro shock therapy was in vogue in the l950s, even today it has its strong advocates. It is my contention that the treatment augmented her difficulties, and increased her isolation, her fear and her vulnerability. To my mind it is the largest strand in her poetry, the nerve centre of her destructive impulse and her extraordinary courage in the face of that impulse.

Perhaps the saddest moment in The Bell Jar is when Sylvia, in the persona of Esther, puts her trust in her therapist, a woman who has already betrayed her trust. Dr Beutscher had ordered electro shock therapy, and she also sought Plath’s compliance in this destructive act. In a dire way it mimics the competition for accomplishment at home. Sylvia wanted to be perfect at everything, even being the perfect patient. She accepted the treatment with the extraordinarily reverberant words “I wonder what it was I had done”

In the extraordinary story Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, written in 1957. Sylvia Plath writes of the treatment and her betrayal by a woman figure:

At the head of the cot is a table on which sits a metal box covered with dials and gauges…

The white cot is ready. With a terrible gentleness Miss Milleravage takes the watch from my wrist, the rings from my fingers, the hairpins from my hair. She begins to undress me. When I am bare, I am anointed on the temples and robed in sheets virginal as the first snow

The Only Thing to love is Fear itself
Love of Fear is the beginning of wisdom
The only thing to love is fear itself
May Fear and Fear and Fear be everywhere

Writing of the ECT as a ritual should not surprise us. It is a ritual, a modern one. The treatment is both profoundly humiliating, and barbaric, twin elements of torture. In a letter to the author of this essay, myself, Ted Hughes described it as an atrocity. He wrote to me that ECT was the crucial event in her writing

It took Ted’s attraction to the other woman, Assia Weevil, to knock Sylvia back to a state of psychosis which she had first experienced at the age of 20.

In The Bell Jar she details her first breakdown. Failure to be admitted to the writer’s workshop was very threatening to her fragile identity as a person of promise and accomplishment. She retreated to her bedroom, and found herself unable to sleep. After the pattern of insomnia had set in there was little she could do to avoid a breakdown.

Depression, according to Anthony Clare, often results from a single cause. In Sylvia Plath’s case, anxiety was almost a component of her personality, particularly the anxiety to achieve. After the initial loss of sleep, Plath’s anxiety increased until she could see failure staring her straight into the face:

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, another fig was a famous poet, and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these were other figs which I couldn’t quite make out..

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one, but choosing one meant loosing all the rest.

The Bell Jar

This high price, of losing all if she choose one, has been the central problem for women from time immemorial, and explains why Plath is such an icon. To make an unwanted sacrifice when she had already been sacrificed by a male workshop leader and a famous writer was at the onset of her emotional illness. The novel details her breakdown as her identity as a successful student came under savage attack from herself. The trigger was the dilemma of the fig tree, it called into question her whole being as a woman What followed was the hospital with its gross treatments in the form of bags of tricks like ECT. In the future these horrors would be attendant on any crisis that assailed her fragile sense of identity. As late as 1962 she is wrestling with the same problem as bruised identity. She writes of her fear in the bee poems, hoping the bees will not smell her fear.

They thought death was worth it
But I have a self to recover, a queen

Just when she had found security with Ted Hughes as a wife and mother, she is also engaged in recovery of memory and from trauma, something that she confines mostly to her writing, especially the extract below from Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams.:

The crown of wire, the wafer of forgetfulness on my tongue. The masked priests move to their posts and take hold: one of my left leg, one of my right, one of my right arm, one of my left. One behind my head at the metal box where I can’t see.

I am shaken like a leaf in the teeth of glory. His beard is lightening. Lightening is in his eye. His Word charges and illuminates the
Universe. The air cackles with his blue-tongued lightening-haloed angels.

His love is the twenty storey leap, the rope at the throat, the knife at the heart.

He forgets not his own.

The wafer communion is central to Christianity, but this is the very religion which sought to exterminate the Jewish people. The torture here is both symbolic and personal, and has a direct similarity with that carried out in World War II.

So Herr Doktor
So, Herr Enemy

I am your opus
I am your valuable

The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek

Lady Lazarus
The poles of identity – woman to man, her country to another country, resonates with those in extremis. Therefore at the heart of her work is an effort to recover memory that had been obliterated with ECT, the transposition is an attempt to take on the highest meaning, the suffering of humanity. That ECT was first administered to Sylvia Plath without an anesthetic was a piece of very bad luck indeed. It increased her fear that the universe itself was a deeply hostile place.

The Word itself becomes suspect, as the priests, or nurses, take on the role of torturers, wiping out her knowledge of the Word. As woman, deprived of the Word throughout the centuries, she is now robbed of her personal memory. It remains in the deep layers of her mind for reconstitution of the self. Plath’s self esteem was wounded irrevocably at Hughes’ betrayal. Fear took over, and with it the overwhelming anxiety that had capsized her before. However, it was her dread of ECT that caused her greatest fear, a fear that it would be repeated should she be admitted to hospital.

ECT, electro-convulsive therapy, or electro shock therapy, invented in the 1930s by Cerletti, following work on convulsions by Meduna, has been a controversial treatment from the start. The idea is to procure an epileptic fit in the brain, and reproduce conditions for starting up the psycho-emotional engines that have been slowed or inhibited by depression or mania.

What usually happens is that the patient, gagged or fasting, is given a general anesthetic, then a muscle relaxant (in order not to break the bones in the convulsion that follows) and then a string of high voltage pulses, about 60 or 70 pulses a second. The voltage can be delivered bi-laterally (on both sides of the head) or unilaterally (on one side of the head). Research has shown that bi-lateral ECT produces a stronger and longer, even permanent memory loss than ECT administered to one side of the head only. The shock produces a convulsion in the brain. The euphoria that follows ECT typically follows any kind of brain injury, and does not last. After the short-lived initial reaction of euphoria, depression occurs again and the patient has to face it again, this time with an impaired brain. The resultant fear can lead to a worsening of a mental illness, producing paranoia as well as the original psychosis.

The part of the brain hit by the shocks can be entirely random. Some have compared ECT to fixing an engine or a television set by hitting it with a hammer and hoping for the best.

Dr Peter Breggin whose book Toxic Psychiatry was published in 1991, outlines his objections to ECT, or EST, and describes several cases of brain dysfunction following ECT. While memory loss is the effect most written about, some writers such as J. Graham Beaumont have written of permanent damage caused when repeat seizure activity in the hippocampus leads to chronic changes in its structure which are pathologically unsound. With the number of ECT treatments averaging 60, and 100 or more not being uncommon, it becomes increasingly likely that not only memory but cognitive function is damaged, sometimes irreparably. Up to three years’ memory loss is a common finding, undisputed even by the profession. The time leading up to the treatment is hardly ever recovered.

It could be said that electro shock therapy is a classic case where the cure is worse than the disease. Most psychiatrists agree that it is a closed head wound that therefore cannot heal properly. One psychiatrist has admitted, where there is no brain damage, it is inefficacious. Since most of the research is carried out on in hospital patients who have little to gain by being honest, it is unsurprising that the full picture of ECT is largely unavailable and it remains at best a controversial treatment.

Trust is an important factor in recovery after mental illness. Perhaps it is the absence of trust that most marks ECT. The absence of trust in Sylvia Plath’s relationships is marked and has been noted by those who were in contact with her. Her close relatives admit her difficulty in sustaining good relations. Janet Malcolm refers to Plath’s difficulties with her in-laws. Everyday behaviour has to be re-learnt, but this time with deep suspicion of oneself and of people around one.

As Olwyn Hughes, Ted’s sister, wrote to Janet Malcolm:

The myth… was created by her paranoid mechanism, or whatever was wrong with her, perfected in small ways over the years. Towards the end, her remarks about others were little more than lies, designed to elicit maximum sympathy and approval towards herself.

The tell-tale phrase, “perfected in small ways over the years” would be resonant with a great many of the relatives of those who have had ECT. Sylvia was dealing with memory loss and was not understood by those who could not stand in her shoes.

That she was able to leave her children without a mother speaks volumes of her intrinsic inability to value herself as a mother, person, or any of the craved-for roles she first envisaged on the fig tree. From the beginning of the “Ariel” poems, “Morning Song” it is clear she had already distanced herself from motherhood. She writes:

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand

The wind stands for those major forces which had threatened her stability. She had valued her relationship as wife and mother until Ted Hughes abandoned her because of his infatuation with Assia Weevil. However much he should have been aware of her vulnerability, he cannot be held responsible for her suicide.

Writing to me of ECT later, Hughes said “she was suddenly exposed to the inner world, her family mythos, the primal internal things.” He described my essay as one of the most important essays he had read on Plath, as, in his view, this essay had dealt with the core problem. He also sent me the text of a poem he had written called The Tender Place which he subsequently published in Birthday Letters. Sylvia Plath had constant pain in her temples, where she had received the electric shocks.

Hughes’s poem begins:

Your temples, where the hair crowded in,
Were the tender place. Once to check
I dropped a file across the electrodes
Of a twelve-volt battery – it exploded
Like a grenade. Somebody wired you up.
Somebody pushed the lever. They crashed
The thunderbolt into your skull.
In their bleached coats, with blenched faces
They hovered again
To see how you were, in your straps.

Ted Hughes believed ECT was the nerve centre of her poems, the catastrophe which led to the extraordinary last poems. By using the words “your straps” instead of what might be reasonably called “their straps” he emphasizes the innate victim-hood of Plath, how she made even the most alien and inhuman condition her own.

From the beginning, when she lost her father, she created a world and universe without love or redemptive values. Later, she had been inspired to articulate the laboratory culture so resonant of modern life. She was drawn by smell to memory, and to her the laboratory was the template of modern life, with its smells and strange configurations speaking of normality. In Two Views of a Cadaver Room she writes of the snail nosed babies in their jars and the vinegary fumes of the death vats. – the smell of the oil preparations applied to her temples where the electric shocks would be received into the brain. Once Ted Hughes was gone, the cadaver room and the ECT room took a hold of her imagination, what they have in common is that the human being’s status there is for experimental purposes and all humane considerations are completely wiped out. These dark forces won over any of the positive love she had in her marriage and for her children. When Sylvia Plath was abandoned, the inner and outer worlds were reawakened to her original traumas. To lose all her craved-for choices when losing her husband put her back into the same situation when as a college girl she had viewed her mutually exclusive choices on the fig tree. Having had those choices, and seemingly solved the dilemma of being wife, poet and mother, she was, it seemed, to lose them all over again, and furthermore with the added dilemma of being a parent who would have to bring up her children alone in a world frequently hostile to women. There was also a new fear, fear of ECT, the thought of which, as her sanity slipped, seemed to rob her of everything, hence she was able to choose death by her own hand as being preferable.

Every morning she rose at 5 or 6, in extremis, to write the poems that made her reputation, and they were subsequently appeared in her second volume, Ariel, published posthumously later on that year. Electroshock therapy had made her see the world as a survivor and how strange and alienating it could be. Even family relationships held the terror of the Third Reich. Her authority came from the fact that she had been there, on the inside.

Suicide implies a spiritual will – in this case, to put an end to fear. She could not face ECT alone, especially without Ted. Recently there have been reports that Assia Weevil was pregnant, and this may have increased her sense of abandonment and fear.

In The Eye Mote she writes of how the small grain distorted her vision. However, the whole corpus of her later poetry shows a self that has been reduced to a feeling of being a cinder, with its ash and burning, again reminiscent of the horrors of World War II. This poem is both an illustration and an eloquent plea that she be understood – her vulnerability before the universe, and her reduction to a process she had undergone, yet which she mocked with her last vestige of freedom, are deserving of our profoundest respect

What I want back is what I was
Before the bed, before the knife
Before the brooch pin and the salve
Fixed me in this parenthesis
Horses fluent in the wind
A place, a time, gone out of mind

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