SOURCE: Steele, Peter. “Peregrinations of A. D. Hope.” In The Double Looking Glass: New and Classic Essays on the Poetry of A. D. Hope, edited by David Brooks, pp. 170-80. St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 2000.

[In the following essay, which was originally published in 1988, Steele examines the theme of voyage in Hope's poetry, focusing on “the character of his quest.”]

Bad luck to The Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary (1st Edition) for leaving “peregrination” out of its record, when it runs to “percoid”—“resembling a perch”—and “perihelion”—“point in planet's orbit nearest the sun”. Perhaps they are mute witnesses to its absence, both having to do with rovers as they do. But peregrination too richly constellates meanings to be easily spared. And if anything can naturally be a place of lodgement for Hope, this may be it.

In the old days you could not be peregrine unless you were both a quester and on the move: pilgrim blood was the only type that counted. Spurred or stung by it, you might make tracks towards the classic goals of pilgrimage—Rome or Compostela or Jerusalem. The cockleshell or the palm might boast your accomplishment, but more importantly they were mnemonics for the journeyings themselves. More drastically, there were the courses adopted by those who, with devotion, in penitence, or out of more obscure motives, went lifelong on pilgrimage. The sea's shell or the land's tree could not symbolise that for them, for they had already in prospect left behind any place they might reach. As the first Christians called themselves “followers of the Way”, these latter-day pursuivants were, through and through, wayfarers.

They were themselves book-begotten, bibled into being. Behind their trailings lay accounts of exodus and exile, things mimed liturgically in annual cycles, incorporated in homily or in mystical bricolage, teased out in patristic speculation. Themselves mainly illiterate, they had the day's slog counterpointed by the lyricism of that small library which tradition had put between two covers. In turn, they engendered accounts, metaphors of life as motion, in all the motley of travels fortunate and unfortunate. And from a complementary tradition, Odyssean types learned new forms of tricksiness, new destinations, new obsessions, exhilarations and angers. Out of this peculiar stable, eventually, Rosinante ambled, a thoroughly unappeasable figure on her back.

Later in the day, it is no surprise then that the work of a poet of Hope's educated temper and unresting imagination should show the trope of travel. The eye running down the contents of the Collected Poems or of other work is taken repeatedly by revealing titles—“The End of a Journey”, “Ascent into Hell”, “The Return of Persephone”, “A Letter from Rome”, “Crossing the Frontier”, “A Visit to the Ruins”. If this sort of thing is not unusual nowadays, it is worth reflecting that Hope's own ways have helped to habituate us to the possibilities of the gambit. And my interest here is not in codifying the travels which, to the casual attention, are Hope's preoccupation, but in the character of his quest. For peregrination, sunlit or shadowed as it may be like the cheaper or more expensive seats in the bullring, always trembles on disclosing something beyond itself. Whenever the mind, whenever the imagination, is much in use, there is an undeclared war between reductive and inductive forces. We want things to add up, and we do not: the iconoclast wants his portrait painted, the classicist dreams romantically, the hero of asepsis longs for some honest dirt. The peregrinating mind, legitimated on the face of it by some admirable goal, but stirred by more comprehensive impulses which it can neither entirely delineate or deny, “about must and about must go”, vaguely but urgently hopeful of change beyond the calculable. Hope's titles, like the ones noted above, designate—usually ironically, be it noted—outcomes within the poems, but trail their coats into other transformations.

When Randall Jarrell writes, “Twice you have been around the world / And once around your life”, his ruminating speaker is addressing a dead woman who awaits burial. She has been an original, cutting a figure among those who knew her: now, “today you look regularly erratic / In your great lead-lined cloak / Of ferns and flowers, / … As you lie here about not to leave / On the trip after the last”.¹ The body which was one of her ways of being has now become her only way of being. It is not the mediatorial thing, fleshing itself out in nothing less than the travelled world, and converting that world into nothing less than intelligibility, but just a body, a residuum. It is a blank, which has the speaker saying after a while, “I feel like the first men who read Wordsworth. / It's so simple I can't understand it”. And there is the poetical clue, as surely as it is the human rub. Faced with a vacuity, an unselving in the world, the speaker is carried into the terra nova of a wholly original imagination, that of Wordsworth, the world-breaker and world-donor. He is in effect embarked on that quest of mind and sensibility which has as many stations and monuments as there are distinctive lines of poetry, but which is not reducible to them. He is trying to find out how to be poetical.

That last expression may have a quaint look about it—“out of Aristotle, by Rilke”, perhaps. But the reality is not quaint. It is in the end the thing that keeps the poet at his infuriating occupation, long after he has seen that many of the activities which once gave his art point are no longer required, or are better pursued by other means. Thinking that the sea-shanty is no place to take a Muse, or that lisping in numbers is good for addition but doubtful for transmutation, or that any world well-jingled into coherence is a world well-lost, the vexed dreamer has no resort but to keep worrying away at his art. Ultimately, that is what refuses to go away, however often it is dismissed by ideologues of the real or of the unreal. If the poetic word were merely a wheelbarrow for religious or scientific or sociological orthodoxies, tipped forward on the reader's demand and then trundled back for more of the same: or if it were nothing but a lamentation over its own frangibility, an instrument of unrealisation, it would not be worth more than a moment's attention, since to be the first is so intellectually clumsy and to be the second so intellectually perverse. No, we experience for experience's own sweet sake, think thoughtfully, see feelingly. Poetry is the evidence for this, as it is also its earnest. But what is being evidenced, and offered in earnest, is the shape-changing character of the poetical intelligence. Every canto is a Mutability Canto, every move a shift. Going poetically, we are always finding out—or finding denied us—where and how to go.

Let us come to cases. In the Collected Poems 1930-1970 it happens that “The Wandering Islands” (26) follows immediately after “The Gateway” (25). They are antipodal in claim or insight, the second in effect supplying a retort upon the first: to “Here I come home: in this unexpected country / They know my name and speak it with delight” there answers, “… The shipwrecked sailor senses / His own despair in a retreating face. / Around him he hears in the huge monotonous voices / Of wave and wind: ‘The Rescue will not take place.’” Fair enough: it is not only upon lapidary inscriptions that one is not upon oath: makers of poems have forgotten, if they ever knew, how to take oaths. In any case, the peregrine writer may be interested less in what divides the poems than in what they share. One thing they share is their habit of leaving things behind.

We should not take that for granted, though we do. The principal feature of most speech, and of much writing, is simply its inertia. If the mind were not habitually slatternly and slobbish, not only could we not entertain the possibility of most advertisement, we could not pick up the newspaper, waggle fingers at the postman, give verdicts on the weather, betoken our love's hatreds, and bewilderments in boardroom or bar. Talk, as we ordinarily take it and want it taken, goes over the surface of our lives, leaving a smudge or a sheen, but in either case to let the substance of affairs be as it was before. Even the dramatic, performative, moments are as often as not the tickings in a column beside a narrative not to be changed. The general receiving the surrender of his foe is getting no new word, but merely a confirmation that he has had the last word: increasingly, given the fragility of the institutions within which the words are uttered, the marital “I do” or the forensic “I will” is dissolved into a deterministic “it does”. Darwin, Marx and Freud gave us metaphors for mutation: but unfortunately each of them told us that it was an iron hand that was beckoning or impelling us forward. Well before them, the word passed on to the citizens of the West, and surely of the East as well, was principally one of stasis. The Bible begins with a starburst of creativity, but one could hardly be blamed for being caught in a lockstep of expectation, or of disconcertment, before many pages are turned. Later, philosophically, the bent of almost any thinker one can name from around the Mediterranean and its purlieus is towards the conclusive and, in large measure, the concluded. The virtuosi of the dead-end in our own intellectual season are perhaps the late, rank growth seeded thousands of years ago.

It would be folly to think that Hope is not attracted by all this. If you give him a wall, he may stand with his back to it, or attempt to scale it, or criticise its crumbling, or give it a certain amount of battering, but he knows that walls are walls, and that they are not going to go away, and that they have much to be said for them. Yet, to come back to “The Gateway” and “The Wandering Islands”, although the hastiest of readings of either would give us its theme, no such reading, and not many a more leisurely reading, would give us a live sense of Hope's metaphorical vivacity, the moving out which is also a moving-on. The lyricism of “The Gateway” can easily magick or musick the reader away from the metaphoric energies of these twelve lines—lines no one of which lacks direct reference to adaptation, issue, and emergence. The “gateway” of the title, without having that physical and emotional identity which is everywhere saluted in the poem, looks in practice as well to imaginative entree and exodus. In the same fashion, “The Wandering Islands”, often remembered as if it said in toto, “The Rescue will not take place”, is a tissue of originated insights, kept under the famous Hopean discipline, but pacing out rhythmically towards further understanding. The fact is that Hope is both evocative and provocative—evoking those solidarities of human intellectual and emotional experience which he has articulated otherwise in his books of essays, and provoking new addresses to old appraisals. “Investing no fear in ultimate forgiveness” has, shadowing it, and however Hope came by it, the clouds of a hundred Reformation disputations: “a bursting mountain of spray” gives us a chill Vesuvius.

Is this, then, “how to be poetical”? It is and it is not. It is in that the heart leaps at the liveliness, the liveness, of the language. This is why we all hang around Shakespeare's grave, wondering why they should have put him seventeen feet down, yet oddly glad that it is so: we need to know where the body was buried, but can not afford to have so prepotent a figure looming. If the comparison between Hope and Auden has not often been made, it should have been, in that they are both inheritors and transmuters of the magistral touch—grateful and unscrupling when it comes to taking tips as to giving old matters new senses, pulling down the mighty from their thrones, clapping crowns of some cultural distinction on larrikin brows—and then, in the midst of it all, sweetening life's sourness as if hunger were made for nothing but song. That is how to be poetical, is it not?

It is and it is not. I go back to “The One Who Was Different”. William H. Gass says, “If language is like consciousness in always urging objects on us, it is also always an emissary of the mind”.² It was Jarrell's peculiar gift to be, even less than most of us, neither angel nor beast, and to be correspondingly more puzzled—puzzled in such a way that the language kept trying to do the sorting-out, trying to urge the objects on us, trying to be the mind's emissaries. It is almost the definition of critical ineptitude that the critic, or interpreter, or reader, quits on one of these tasks—as it is almost the definition of a bad poet that he encourages his reader to behave in this way. Hope, when he is not about frolic or objurgation—and even sometimes when he is—will not take that path. It is as if, to Wittgenstein's “The world is all that is the case,” he counterposes, “All that is the case is the world,” meaning that the true aspires to englobe itself, to have its palpable and telling identity, to be its own say-so. But the fact is that, as Wittgenstein also suspected, most of the time we know what we may have either in seeing it fall behind us or having it loom in prospect. This, if recognised as commonplace by satirists and other moral commentators for more hundreds of years than we like to remember, has increasingly come to consciousness when we think about our very identity. The bitter-sweet gift made us by philosophical anthropology, as by other rueful benefactors, is that we are at best the pioneers of human appraisal. Hope, one of whose tastes is and always has been for the estimation of human (and supra-human, and inhuman) identity, has at least the mercurial consolation of being able to be troubled by language itself into instructive stabilities and vindicated instabilities. Jarrell's dead woman—haunting, charming, other, mortal—has both circled the world and been of the world, is of her own life and is no longer of her own life: on both accounts she belongs in the company of the “worldly” and “unworldly” speaker. Hope, I think, is of her company. Of his diurnal affairs I know little and say nothing; but of that psychic affair in which he customarily awards, dissolves, and re-renders the affairs of the world, the poems are all we know or need to know.

These things he has said, and said better, at the culmination of “An Epistle: Edward Sackville to Venetia Digby” (CP [Collected Poems, 1930-1970] 165):

Nature, who makes each member to one end,
                    May give it powers which transcend
Its first and fruitful purpose. When she made
                    The Tongue for taste, who in the shade
Of summer vines, what speechless manlike brute,
          Biting sharp rind or sweeter fruit,
Could have conceived the improbable tale, the long
          Strange fable of the Speaking Tongue?
So Love, which Nature's craft at first designed
          For comfort and increase of kind,
Puts on another nature, grows to be
          The language of the mystery;
The heart resolves its chaos then, the soul
          Lucidly contemplates the whole
Just order of the random world; and through
                    That dance she moves, and dances too.

The verse betokens ceremony, of course, Yeatsian word attended with Yeatsian plangencies; the bow is towards metaphysical coherences, teleologies, confections and resolutions. Momentarily, we have a world without waste and without loose ends; there are no Maenads to be rending at this dance. Yet Sackville's imagined finery of talk nowhere quite charms away the grave exordium of the poem: “First, last and always dearest, closest, best, / Source of my travail and my rest, / The letter which I shall not send, I write / To cheer my more than arctic night”. The outreaching and overreaching of Nature, whether, as here, seen as ingeniously benign, or as elsewhere, where that natural oddity Man is concerned, as quizzical at best and disabling at worst, also lifts the stakes in the game of human comprehension, and of those feelings which aptly attend understanding. Designingly, or with flourish, or both at once, Hope's characteristic move is to move the mind on, not only from its lassitudes, but from its apparently legitimate settlements. When one is seized by this sense of his imagination and of his intellectual project, the temptation, a good one, is to cite it wherever it is to be found. So, at the conclusion of “The Return of Persephone” (CP 89), of Dis,

                                        Insuperable disdain
Foreknowing all bounds of passion, of power, of art,
Mastered but could not mask his deep despair.
Even as she turned with Hermes to depart,
Looking her last on her grim ravisher
For the first time she loved him from her heart

as the second and last stanza of “E Questo il nido in che la mia Fenice?” (CP 166),

But were I not that palm, and were the peasant
To fell and faggot me for winter fuel,
Still in the seasoned timber would be present
Such passion, such desire for that renewal,
That in my glowing embers he might see
The burning bird and tree.

These are characteristic—and, better than that, free-standing. But Hope is not Shelley, nor was meant to be. The correlative note is there at the end of “On an Engraving by Casserius” (CP 226) where, the engraved dead woman contemplated in all her vulnerability, and the acknowledgement made that “The universals we thought to conjure with / Pass: there remain the mother and the child”, the page is allowed to yield the words.

The birth you cannot haste and cannot stay
Nears its appointed time; turn now and rest
Till that new nature ripens, till the deep
Dawns with that unimaginable day.

Hope has no wide blue yonder—territory which, notoriously, one cannot tread. As peregrination always signals some circuitousness, the travail within travel, it is Hope's custom to be a way-maker as well as a way-taker. Twice around the world does not count without once around his life.

Gass, once more, with an apropos word: “The creature we choose to be on Halloween says something about the creature we are. I have often gone to masquerades as myself, and in that guise no one knew I was there” (207). Nobody ever does, of course, not even ourselves. Unless we are tricked out in some comprehensible fashion—vestment, jeans and sloppy-joe, nakedness—no lines are to be had, no moves to be made. Take away my trappings and you leave me in the storm on the heath, as inaccessible to myself as either Lear or Poor Tom. The traditional pilgrim, wander however far he might, had pilgrim's kit, and could have food set before him or the dog set on him: happily or unhappily, he knew where he was. He also had a world about him which, however inadequately mapped, and however menacing at given points, had its adjacencies with the homeland. But as Hope says in “The Wandering Islands”, “The Mind has no neighbours”—something little alloyed by his scholarly judiciousness or pedagogical kindliness in other contexts. It is always a mistake to read his poetry as if, because invariably submitted to formal disciplines, it thereby makes common cause with the embourgeoisement of the imagination, the bitting of the mind. He says, dryly, in the ninth of the “Sonnets to Baudelaire”, “The voyage we do not take to the unknown / Becomes the poem that visits us instead” (CP 238), and the visitation is not sociable. It may too often be one of the most trivial pieces of psychobabble or socioprattle of our time to say that someone is looking for himself, but the locution is only waiting for an enabling imaginative touch to be wakened into vivid meaning. Hope's quest is for the apt verbal moment for the making of that move. He is, in the midst of storms of sensibility which he has himself heightened, still the pilgrim of the personal.

It is in that context that his manoeuvrings among the various personnel or personages of his poems should be seen. If you are playing the satirist, it not only pays to parade a derelict rabble past you—there is no other way of going about it. There is no such thing as a ludicrous solitary: bunchings give comedy, or nothing will. So Dunciad Minimus gives us the troubled ones at whose disarray we laugh, but over whom nobody could possibly lose any sleep; and so it goes with the rest of the rabblement out of whom Hope from time to time picks recruits for his satirical poems. But the rest of the time, whether it is Holofernes or Circe, Yeats or Totentanz, Susannah or Calliope, the figures chosen subtend a self in question, a self at quest. Somebody is blocking in the figure of A. D. Hope—always, in the Dantean fashion, “with the skill of the art, but a trembling hand.”

“This will never do”—or so they say. The critic's, the pedant's splutter is part of everyone's repertoire, whenever there is a suggestion that those named figures, mythic or historic but in the poem always metaphoric, may have traffic with whoever it is that voices them. It seems to me an over-austere agitation. Surely we lend ourselves to the parts of the others, in hopes that they will lend themselves to ours. It is difficult to know with what sentiments the literal pilgrims of the past made their way or greeted their destination. What we do know is that well before and well after their time the physical world which we all traverse has been caressed, appealed to, invoked and sacrificed for as if it had the authority of the divine and the dearness of the human—it is a way of going “twice around the world”. Similarly, more letters, lyrics, essays, paintings, sculptures and photographs than we can count betoken an impulsion to know the personal—loved or hated—as the world's unique configuration. We are always in a state of stand-off or trade-off with “the others”, those shadowy mirrors of ourselves, when we attempt to frame versions of the world. The price of self-knowledge is always emigration.

How to be poetical. … The preoccupation is not narcissistic, but one specification of the humane. Hope is a contemplative and a speculative poet, which is to say that he gazes both directly and obliquely at what interests him. The technical accomplishment, the being in a quiet way a maestro, gives him the resources for the second of these: it is a way of stealing up to what is to be known, a way of surprising and of being surprised—all the more so when the manner is faintly archaic: it is a poetry of patience. This is peregrination of a sort, a compliment to its object and, in its passage, a consolation to its exponent. For the first, for contemplation, there are perhaps no techniques: for, “Set on this bubble of dead stone and sand” (CP 222), or for, “All creatures seek their food, and ours is song” (CP 273), you simply wait and hope. Of course, as no reader of The Canterbury Tales will need to be reminded, there is plenty of room for the raffish and the roughcast in any extensive peregrination, and Hope has taken to those also with a will. But what he seems to have had from the first, and keeps still, is the spirit saluted in his poem for Akhmatova, “For a Grave at Komarovo”, “And did the Muse not smile at your reply: ‘Sister, I went alone—but it was I’” (A [Antechinus: Poems, 1975-1980] 104).

Notes

1. Randall Jarrell, The Complete Poems (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 316.

2. William H. Gass, Habitations of the Word (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1985), p. 83.