SOURCE: "Tomlinson, Ruskin, and Moore: Facts and Fir Trees," in Twentieth-Century Literature, Vol. 35, No. 2, Summer, 1989, pp. 183-94.

Charles Tomlinson is undoubtedly one of England's most distinguished living poets and critics. The accumulated work of four decades—his Collected Poems published by Oxford in 1985, his many translations (from Vallejo, Tyutchev, Machado, and Paz, to name only a few), his large body of criticism and memoirs, his exhibitions of graphic work and the three resulting volumes of reproductions—has been accompanied by honors, prizes, and invitations to read and lecture in many countries. As a poet and artist deeply rooted in his native England, and at the same time an internationalist and multilinguist, he lays claim to our closest attention.

Tomlinson has frequently cited John Ruskin, that most English of seers, as a key precursor. Although he was attracted to modern American poets—Williams, Stevens, and Moore among others—well before they were generally known in England, it was only under Ruskin's auspices, a few years later, that he began to integrate their voices into his own. At the back of his reading was always "the sheet anchor of having read Ruskin." Recalling his early response to Marianne Moore [in an interview in The Poet Speaks, edited by Peter Orr, 1966] he said, "she has this Ruskinian openness to the creative universe in looking at the surfaces it offers one." Wallace Stevens' poetry, on the other hand, had to be resisted despite its allure: "I was arguing for a kind of exactness in face of the object, which meant an exactness of feeling in the writer. It meant that you must enter into a relationship with things, that you must use your eyes…. I learned this lesson from Ruskin—chiefly from the evocations of leaves, clouds, water in Modern Painters" [London Magazine, 1981]. That Tomlinson continues to find Ruskin's prose of inexhaustible interest is witnessed by a recent poem of 1987 entitled "Ruskin Remembered."

A study of the affinities between Ruskin and Tomlinson would have to begin with the eye. Tomlinson has quoted Ruskin's memorable description of the eye as possessing an "intellectual lens and moral retina," and it is clear that for both writers their delicate, rigorously objective descriptions of cloud, stone, and water arise from the profound conviction that the visual imagination is intimately and inseparably allied to the intellectual and moral faculties. There are strong divergences between them as well. Whereas Ruskin almost always judged art in terms of verisimilitude, and nature in terms of its revelations of divine purpose, Tomlinson is an heir of the early modernist movement, with its concern with collage, discontinuity, and indeterminacy. Tomlinson looks back at Ruskin through the lens of Cézanne.

Though the assimilations and repudiations of Ruskin in Tomlinson's work are complex, in this essay I wish to turn from these larger questions in order to make a study of intertextual minutiae. My focus will be on a cluster of anecdotes and images arising from and centering on two passages of Ruskin's prose, both of them descriptions of fir trees. Over the years traces of these images reappear in Tomlinson's poetry, criticism, reading, and discussions with friends—often, oddly enough, in an American connection. In their intertextual and transatlantic combinations they offer significant insights into the workings of Tomlinson's imagination.

We pick up the trail by going back to November 1956, when Hugh Kenner paid a visit to the Tomlinsons in their (then) home in Somerset. Knowing of Kenner's delight in imaginative factuality, Tomlinson read him a passage from Ruskin:

There is, perhaps, no tree which has baffled the landscape painter more than the common black spruce fir. It is rare that we see any representation of it other than caricature. It is conceived as if it grew in one plane, or as a section of a tree, with a set of boughs symmetrically dependent on opposite sides. It is thought formal, unmanageable, and ugly. It would be so, if it grew as it is drawn. But the Power of the tree is not in that chandelier-like section. It is in the dark, flat, solid tables of leafage, which it holds out on its strong arms, curved slightly over them like shields, and spreading towards the extremity like a hand. It is vain to endeavour to paint the sharp, grassy, intricate leafage, until this ruling form has been secured; and in the boughs that approach the spectator, the foreshortening of it is like that of a wide hill country, ridge just rising over ridge in successive distances; and the finger-like extremities, foreshortened to absolute bluntness, require a delicacy in the rendering of them.

At this same meeting Kenner gave Tomlinson a gift he had brought along from New York—a copy of Marianne Moore's most recent book of poems, Like a Bulwark. It was an appropriate gift, for Tomlinson had been interested in Moore since his undergraduate days, and it was all the more appealing for having been inscribed to Tomlinson in her own hand.

The account of this meeting is in Tomlinson's charming memoir of his transatlantic friendships, Some Americans. With a bit of unaccented humor, he adds that the spruce tree must have stuck in Kenner's mind, for it reappeared almost twenty years later in A Homemade World (1975), still associated with Marianne Moore. What Kenner claims in this later citation is not that Moore quoted or even knew the passage, but rather that it demonstrates a relation of eye and language that her poems share. The metaphors in Ruskin's description—the arms, shields, hands—are neither personification of the tree nor some sort of recipe for a painter. What we have is "a tree of language, not of nature or of painting: it exists only on Ruskin's printed page. It got there by an effort of attention, commanding the resources of the whole being, that devised and traversed a half-dozen analogies, analogies not for a stolid tree but for a tree's fancied kinetic act, and the eye's act responding." Tomlinson's Ruskin passage prompted Kenner to reflect on the transmutations of visual perception and language and the morality of self-forgetfulness necessary for this accomplishment. It is not surprising, then, that Kenner's comments on Ruskin and Moore should be unintentionally but acutely relevant to Tomlinson as well.

Tomlinson and Kenner were not the first to have given this passage an effort of attention. Another was Graham Hough, whose introduction to Ruskin in The Last Romantics (1949) Tomlinson would certainly have read in the early days of his interest in Ruskin. Hough quotes this same "patient and minute study" of the spruce, his purpose being to show how Ruskin trains the eye to overcome perceptual conventions and discover the exquisite repetitiveness of natural form, in this case the way the curves of the foreshortened boughs are echoed in the distant hills. In the following passage from Tomlinson's poetry, the observing eye has assimilated the lessons of Ruskin's common black spruce, though it has carried them to a continent Ruskin never knew and applied them to a different kind of fir:

The discipline of sight, as exercised in Ruskin's description, becomes according to Hough "a morally and metaphysically important occupation." What Ruskin is striving to bring about is nothing less than a "psychological revolution," one that will release the sense of sight "from the bondage to utility and convention and … set it free to operate in its own way; he is vindicating the rights of the senses." Behind all of Tomlinson's work, both graphic and verbal, lies the same conviction.

The spruce passage had struck someone else to different effect many years earlier. The unnamed "student of Ruskin" who wrote the introduction to the 1907 edition of The Elements of Drawing (a work that Tomlinson has read, and very likely in this popular Everyman edition) also quotes it. He considers it essential to understanding the clearing of the artist's "working vision" which was Ruskin's purpose in The Elements of Drawing. But he expands its significance by juxtaposing it with another, apparently contradictory passage. In this second passage Ruskin exhorts his disciple to draw exactly what he sees; but be sure this is what you are doing, Ruskin urges, "for otherwise you will find yourself continually drawing, not what you see, but what you know." Try drawing the appearance of something a few feet away, books on your bookcase perhaps, or a bit of patterned muslin, or a bank of grass with all its blades, "and you will soon begin to understand under what a universal law of obscurity we live, and perceive that all distinct drawing must be bad drawing, and that nothing can be right, till it is unintelligible."

Juxtaposing Ruskin's law of obscurity with the careful visual distinctions of the spruce-tree passage is not willful paradox, according to the "student": for clearing the vision means, precisely, recognizing "the illusions and the veracities and the innocences of the eye." Seeing the fir tree means clearing away what you know, or thought you knew, about the fir tree—that Christmas-card fir in one plane, with its "set of boughs symmetrically dependent on opposite sides." In the end, as the reader is bound to infer, the clearer the vision, the more it comes up against mystery, not mystical or symbolic or transcendental mystery, but a practical one—one that resides in the limitations of our optical equipment. It marks a point, as Ruskin elaborates elsewhere, at which the painter must abandon the deceptions of mere verisimilitude for the even more difficult tasks of suggesting the optical mysteries of space, mist, design, motion, and infinity.

Ruskin's sense of the artist's double obligation—to see clearly and therefore to see where clarity fails and becomes unintelligible—is undoubtedly one of Tomlinson's major themes. What Tomlinson calls the "double mystery" of sight arises in that "daily experience" of not being able to "make out what precisely it is that one is looking at." It is the subject, to take only one example, of his prose poem called "Skullshapes":

Shadow explores them. It sockets the eye-holes with black. It reaches like fingers into the places one cannot see. Skulls are a keen instance of this duality of the visible: it borders what the eye cannot make out, it transcends itself with the suggestion of all that is there beside what lies within the eyes' possession: it cannot be possessed.

There are indications throughout this meditation that Tomlinson is transforming his precursor's work to his own ends. Not least of the clues is its reference to "Ruskin's blind man struck suddenly by vision," a parable in The Elements of Drawing about the necessity of innocent vision, uncluttered by learned preconceptions. Tomlinson asserts his revisionary rights by quarreling with Ruskin's interpretation. The eye is never innocent, he says. It is always swayed by memory and conception, for "it is what the mind sees."

On the border of what the eye possesses is what the eye cannot possess. In a remarkable poem entitled "The Impalpabilities," Tomlinson explores this border area:

The two opposing meanings of "sense"—intuitional and physical—expose the difference between what the senses possess and what they fail to possess, between palpabilities and impalpabilities. As the poem demonstrates, however, the poet does not banish the visible or palpable in order to reach the invisible or impalpable; he traces it watchfully, meticulously, to its very edge, waiting till it dissolves in the twilight, metamorphoses into something more metaphorical:

The ghost of Ruskin's spruce lingers here. It is not just that there are branches like arms and fingers. A reader who searches for the spruce-tree passage in the original will find it in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, in the chapter entitled "The Lamp of Power"; and will find, moreover, that the Lamp of Power has to do with nobility, majesty, mystery—in a word, sublimity. The Ruskinian context brings us to the surprising realization that the gathering darkness of the wood in Tomlinson's poem, the "cool immensity," the numinous "strength / in the arms we no longer see" constitute a modern version of the sublime.

When Tomlinson first started reading Ruskin, in 1949 or 1950, it was a little volume called Frondes agrestes, a selection of passages from Modern Painters put together in 1875 by a Coniston friend of Ruskin's. In a rueful footnote added to his friend's selection, Ruskin said: "Almost the only pleasure I have, myself, in re-reading my old books, is my sense of having at least done justice to the pine." The example he pointed to was the following:

Magnificent! nay, sometimes almost terrible. Other trees, tufting crag or hill, yield to the form and sway of the ground, clothe it with soft compliance, are partly its subjects, partly its flatterers, partly its comforters. But the pine rises in serene resistance, self-contained; nor can I ever without awe stay long under a great Alpine cliff, far from all house or work of men, looking up to its companies of pines, as they stand on the inaccessible juts and perilous ledges of the enormous wall, in quiet multitudes, each like the shadow of the one beside it—upright, fixed, spectral, as troops of ghosts standing on the walls of Hades, not knowing each other, dumb for ever. You cannot reach them, cannot cry to them: those trees never heard human voice; they are far above all sound but of the winds. No foot ever stirred fallen leaf of theirs: all comfortless they stand, between the two eternities of the Vacancy and the Rock; yet with such iron will, that the rock itself looks bent and shattered beside them,—fragile, weak, inconsistent, compared to their dark energy of delicate life, and monotony of enchanted pride—unnumbered, unconquerable.

Then note farther their perfectness. The impression on most people's minds must have been received more from pictures than reality, so far as I can judge, so ragged they think the pine; whereas its chief character in health is green and full roundness. It stands compact, like one of its own cones, slightly curved on its sides, finished and quaint as a carved tree in some Elizabethan garden; and instead of being wild in expression, forms the softest of all forest scenery, for other trees show their trunks and twisting boughs; but the pine, growing either in luxuriant mass, or in happy isolation, allows no branch to be seen. Summit behind summit rise its pyramidal ranges, or down to the very grass sweep the circlets of its boughs; so that there is nothing but green cone, and green carpet. Nor is it only softer, but in one sense more cheerful than other foliage, for it casts only a pyramidal shadow.

"When [Ruskin] describes the pine-tree," Tomlinson has commented [in the Sewanee Review, 1962], "we know that we have never yet looked at one. Poets have realized that this was where to follow Ruskin."

To see how some poets have indeed followed Ruskin we must return to 1949. That year, at about the same time he was reading Frondes agrestes, Tomlinson borrowed a copy of Marianne Moore's Selected Poems of 1935. It was not an insignificant acquisition, for the two or three Marianne Moore poems, or bits of poems, he had encountered during and since his Cambridge days had begun to act as what he called "talismans" in his imagination. With both books now on his bookshelf, he spotted a link. Two lines of Moore's poem "An Octopus," scrupulously enclosed in quotation marks and with a footnote simply saying "Ruskin," he would have recognized as a slightly revised snippet from the pine-tree passage in Frondes agrestes. Here are Moore's borrowed trees:

austere specimens of our American royal families,
"each like the shadow of the one beside it.
The rock seems frail compared with their dark
energy of life"

The Moore-Ruskin conjunction remained in Tomlinson's memory until 1969 when he was writing the introduction to a collection of critical essays on Moore. There he cites the lines from "An Octopus" as an instance of her discrimination, her capacity for making out the way a thing looks. She is, he adds, a poet "for whom fact has its proper plenitude." This is an oblique allusion to his own poem "The Farmer's Wife: at Fostons Ash," where, in a Ruskinian tribute to "fact," to the fecund geography of the farm's lofts, cellars, orchards, and all the blessings they hold and inherit, he says:

There are two camps then: the Ruskinian poets, such as Moore, for whom "fact" and "tact" are an aural and conceptual rhyme, and the symbolists, their representative here obviously Yeats.

Fourteen years later, in 1983, the shadowy ghost of the pine tree appears to Tomlinson again, this time while writing a review of Elizabeth Bishop's Complete Poems. Her poem "At the Fishhouses," contains the Ruskin particle in a different setting:

Tomlinson suggests that what is passed on from Moore to her younger friend Bishop is something more subtle than "influence"; what is betokened by the image of the fir is fidelity to visual appearances, economy of means, personal reticence—just those aesthetic and moral values that Tomlinson's readers know to be his as well.

In the 1983 review, however, he elaborates more freely on the "plenitude" of Ruskin's pine-tree passage. It suggested to Moore, he speculates, that

if only Ruskin's wit could be rescued from his eloquence, the twentieth-century poet could write of nature free of the egotistical sublime. Ruskin witty? Take his pine trees—"each like the shadow of the one beside it—upright, fixed, spectral, as troops of ghosts standing on the walls of Hades, not knowing each other…. The rock itself looks bent and shattered beside them,—fragile, weak, inconsistent, compared to their dark energy of delicate life, and monotony of enchanted pride—unnumbered, unconquerable." The shadow at the beginning of this passage, that fantasy of the ghosts, the pre-Lawrentian "dark energy of delicate life" all pull against the miscalculated organ notes of "unnumbered, unconquerable."

Moore "sheers away at all this" in "An Octopus," seizing only what to her seems essential—the shadows, the frail rocks, the dark energy of life. Tomlinson sees Bishop, too, as having her own revisionary purposes—making of the image something "darker, post-imagist," with a "suggestion of threat in it," giving "a hint of the darkness about to fall, a margin of the sad and the inexplicable that refuses to be exorcized by her brave wit."

Tomlinson's remarks are as unexpectedly revealing about his own sensibility as they are about Ruskin, Moore, and Bishop. The emphasis on wit is odd, especially as the original Ruskin comparison of the pine trees to troops of ghosts seems more gothic than witty. But by "wit" he means the placing of one sharp edge against another as in collage, with that effect of discontinuity, incalculableness, and often humor that he himself achieves in many poems, his Mexican and American pieces being preeminent examples. Equally interesting is his observation on the marginal shadow and darkness in Bishop's poem, for it arises from his own awareness of shadows, reflections, and doubleness, the obscurity at the margins of the visible, and "the darkness about to fall."

Marianne Moore features once more in the circuitry of fir-tree images. In April 1959, just two-and-a-half years after receiving Like a Bulwark and while in the United States on a writer's fellowship, Tomlinson was invited to meet Moore in her Brooklyn apartment. The conversation turned to Ruskin, and they talked about the Ruskinian elements in "An Octopus" and "The Steeple-Jack," about a portrait of Ruskin by Millais that Moore recalled having seen somewhere, and about a visit Moore had made as a girl to Ruskin's home in Coniston, where she remembered a peacock feather on display. The meeting recorded in Some Americans had been commemorated many years earlier in "Over Brooklyn Bridge":

They also discussed what Tomlinson in his Some Americans account calls his "Ruskin piece." In that very Ruskinian volume Seeing Is Believing, which owed its 1958 publication in the United States to Kenner and a copy of which either Kenner or Tomlinson would undoubtedly have sent to Moore, there are two poems actually about Ruskin: "Geneva Restored" and "Frondes Agrestes: On re-reading Ruskin." Almost certainly, the latter is meant. First published in late 1957, about a year after Tomlinson received the inscribed copy of Like a Bulwark, it is a collage—Moore-fashion—of quotations from Ruskin's Frondes agrestes:

A leaf, catching the sun, transmits it:
"First a Torch, then an emerald."

"Compact, like one of its own cones":
The round tree with the pyramid shadow.

First the felicities, then
The feelings to appraise them:

Light, being in its untempered state,
A rarity, we are (says the sage) meant
To enjoy "most probably" the effects of mist.

Nature's difficulties, her thought
Over dints and bosses, her attempts
To beautify with a leopard-skin of moss
The rocks she has already sculpted,
All disclose her purposes—the thrush's bill,
The shark's teeth, are not his story.

Sublimity is. One awaits its passing,
Organ voice dissolving among cloud wrack.
The climber returns. He brings
Sword-shaped, its narrowing strip
Fluted and green, the single grass-blade, or
Gathered up into its own translucence
Where there is no shade save colour, the unsymbolic rose.

The various snippets of the collage serve different purposes. Some pay homage to Ruskin's observant eye; some mock, with a Moore-like tartness, his lapses into sublimity and his effusiveness about Nature's grand purposes. The concluding image of the unsymbolic and shadeless rose is a transcription of the image which Tomlinson happened upon the first time he opened Frondes agrestes, and which, in its accuracy and beauty, convinced him that he must read further in Ruskin. The two lines on the fir tree are a tribute to Ruskin's observation of recurrences in natural forms (the shape of the tree echoed differently in its cone and in its shadow). And, given the available plenitude of images in Ruskin's lengthy description of the pine, it is significant that Tomlinson's eye should fall yet again on shadow.

The two lines on shadow are of course particles from the description of pine trees that Moore had rifled for "An Octopus." A tribute to and critique of Ruskin undoubtedly, the poem is by inference also a tribute to Moore's discriminating eye and mind, which she must have recognized when they talked about it in her Brooklyn apartment.

We have seen the fir trees reflected in and refracted through a number of texts by other writers, and have seen these texts themselves observed and reflected on by Tomlinson over five decades, from the late Forties to 1983. Like molecules entering new chemical combinations, they have combined with and drawn attention to several aspects of Tomlinson's imagination: the perception of design and recurrent form in nature, the shaping of visual perception by language, the submergence of the ego necessary to these perceptions, the concept of wit and disjunction, the sense of mystery in visual phenomena (optical at first, then edging toward metaphysical). A number of critics have noted Ruskin's presence in Tomlinson's discernment of detail and his fidelity to visual surfaces. But the fir-tree fragments have unexpectedly led us further, to an enterprise equally Ruskinian, though not part of the stock conception of Ruskin—that is, to Tomlinson's sense of the shadows and obscurity at the edge of the visual, and to an intimation of his profound critique of visual appearances.