It is nearly twenty years since Dannie Abse's first book of poems was accepted by a London publisher….

Twenty years is a long time and Dannie is now forty-three. On his last two books in particular he has left an individual and master mark. Of Tenants of the House, published in 1957, The Listener's critic wrote that 'while the rest of us have been spending our time being smart or angry or whatever, [Dannie Abse] has quietly consolidated his position as one of the most satisfying and genuine of contemporary poets, with things to say that matter and the power to say them forcefully and originally.' To this general encomium I would add the more specific claim that he has made himself one of the few successful contemporary poets of the extended symbolic concept, a point as far from his beginnings in a natural, discursive eloquence as he could well reach. His poetic journey is much more than a canter round the home meadows: it may indeed take some following. (p. 107)

The poems in [Abse's first book, After Every Green Thing (1946)] make little overt reference to his initiatory unpoetic self. XI ('A man with no roots is lost') is plainly a comment on his Jewish heritage: XVII (The Journey), despite its vague symbolism, is recognisably about leaving home for London. There are four other poems, XX, XXV, XXXII and XXXIV, which suggest some personal emotion or dilemma. But it is plain that the poet was not primarily self-absorbed: he had been inoculated with his family's socialist principles, he was moved, if not directly by politics, at least by the desolate prospect of society as it was, and he wrote, by intention, publicly—not solely by the use of rhetoric any longer, but nevertheless from a platform whose existence only the frequent resonances reveal.

This 'public' import, this conception of poetry as a form of generalisation, which Abse gave his work in After Every Green Thing (and which it is far from having lost now) was of less significance than might appear because much of it was obscure enough to be ignored by all but inveterate verse-tasters. This obscurity need surprise nobody: in 1946 and earlier it was still the mode: Surrealism had had most of its day, but Dylanism was barely into afternoon. Dannie Abse's work in this book, though revealing scarcely any sign of unsuppressed juvenilia, is nevertheless apprentice-work partly for this reason, that it is gregarious and overly imitative. Rarely lacking in the force and craft of words (though sometimes in an adequate sense of grammatical structure), Abse did not at first aim them successfully at either taste or truth. His apprenticeship indeed was never, in his published work, to the acquirement of verbal resource. It was an apprenticeship to the discovery of what, in the tones of a public yet individual voice, was worth saying and saying clearly.

Echoes of Dylan Thomas are frequent though not pervasive…. It is unfortunately true that Abse's infrequent reversions to Wales, before he became the independent he has been these last ten or twelve years, tended to bring on an attack of Dylanism, with sometimes excruciating results. One has to learn, perhaps slowly, to recognise and trust one's own true voice.

Possibly the same sort of apprentice uncertainty caused the frequent and facile introduction of religious symbols. It is difficult for an outside observer to know how much of this was due to the heritage of the synagogue; but my guess is that the main basis for it was not so much religiosity as the feeling that here, within the poet's familiar region, was at least half of that metaphysical potion which Dylan, dashing to and from the cupboard labelled 'Sex and Life-Mystery,' had already made the strong drink of the reading public. I say this because there is an air of flamboyance and daring about some of the early references which argue a lack of personal involvement…. It is, I hope, no reflection on the genuineness of his religious urge to say that most of his early ventures into theological country must be written off as either brashly opportunist or sentimental…. [It] may well be again that what we are really conscious of is a difference of background and upbringing. Here indeed may be one sign of Abse's Jewish heritage.

Another, far more distinctive, is a fondness for repetition, almost an incantatory quality in the writing. One might dismiss it as natural rhetoric: other poets show it from time to time, but few, if any, as often as Abse. One might guess it to be liturgical in origin—and again, without inside knowledge, one could easily be wrong. But I am inclined to let the guess stand…. [Frequently] Abse uses some 'I' statement (and it must not be inferred from this that his 'generalised' approach to poetry is deeply invaded by identifiable personal feeling) as the basis for a declamatory sequence. This was often his answer at that time, it appears, to problems of structure. The Yellow Bird, which in sum is not without cumulative power, begins

       I do not want it
       the incantations, o many times the incantations

and moves from 'I do not want it' to 'I do not deny it,' 'I do not hear it,' 'Yet I do not move it,' 'O I do not ask it' and a prolonged sequence in which the thought is urged on, stanza by stanza, by the variation in the incantatory first line (in itself a curious commentary on the lines quoted above). There are indeed several occasions in After Every Green Thing where one is left with a declamatory ego and not much else.

But the real criticism of the poems in this book does not lie there. Indeed, it has hardly been begun yet. Most of the points so far mentioned may be means of identification, but they are not of necessity limiting poetically. The bad or indifferent poems here are bad or indifferent because of their obscurity, but they are obscure in a persistent and particular way. They contain, almost all of them, too quick a spatter of images, whose relationship one to another is unclear. On occasion, too, the image is far too wildly and heavily thrown. (pp. 108-11)

And yet [After Every Green Thing] is not the uninteresting failure that so many criticisms may seem to suggest. Much of the work in it has fluency, an unashamed fertility of word and thought. Although there is not much concern demonstrated for regular forms, the verse very often has the sort of natural rhythm that emerges in reading even when the eye does not pick it up. (p. 112)

Above all, After Every Green Thing is a declamatory book, full of the eloquent 'I.' The poems in it, successes or not, are voluble and distinctive. It is a book I go back to with the affection one feels for enthusiasm and vulnerability.

Walking Under Water (1952) provides an immediate and startling contrast. Dannie Abse has become conscious of naiveté, has put on the poetic preoccupations of his age, and, technically, is concerned for the first time with the problems of form. This is the book of a new apprenticeship—not … in eloquence or the provision of the raw material of poetry, but in the judgment which determines what needs saying and how. Because of this apprenticeship I find it in sum the least interesting of Abse's four books of verse.

And yet, having said this, I feel a precipitate urge to take it back. There are so many points of continuity with After Every Green Thing: a few developments, too, which hindsight discerns as the basis of the achievement of Tenants of the House (though in them the scope of that achievement is pencilled in only very faintly)…. [Most] of the early poems in Walking Under Water make obvious one important change in the use of repetition: it is no longer a rough declamatory impulse, its variations no more than a general guide to the direction of the poem's thought (as in The Yellow Bird): it has become, while serving the same general purpose, a means to the imposition of stanza form. In so doing, it has cast its wild, prophetic rags into the bushes and emerged as a suave, suburban force whose pressures are more precise and delicate. (pp. 113-14)

Dannie Abse's preoccupation with the formal organisation of a poem has begun to include, at the stage of Walking Under Water, far more than the use of a refrain. Symbols are disciplined too: they begin to appear in a logically determined order, and their variations are intended to indicate the next stage in the theme or argument. The Clock, for instance, is a poem whose repetitive modes are so organised that the whole is no more than an intricate movement, or dance, of symbols.

There is no disguising the fact that in too many instances this achievement of a greater strictness of form is accompanied by a loss of that simple recognition of a common humanity which was present in his earlier work. The 'feel' of life is in some way diminished. As Dannie Abse experiments (and I have not mentioned so far the use of both internal and external rhyme in Two Portraits) he cuts down the number of his symbols, less, I believe, in the interests of clarification for the reader than of his own organisation of them. Most of the symbols he retains are dominant throughout his later work: clock and clocks (a curiously literal way of treating the concept of time), doll (representative of the inert and powerless body), wounds, skin, soldier and ghost (all of them standing in some relation to mortality) appear and reappear with disconcerting frequency. Many of them, one feels, are the compulsive images which must confront a practitioner of medicine and in this respect I am not reassured by his later poems in which mask and gloves, obvious enough comments on the various identities of man, bully the reader by their incessant attendance.

In Walking Under Water the initial effect of this reliance upon formal organisation, both of line and symbol, is to make the writing artificial in a way quite foreign to the earlier poems. (p. 115)

It is equally evident that Walking Under Water contains more bad poems—bad in the sense that Abse appeared to be trying to write, and writing either outside his field or with insufficient motivation—than are to be found among his former naivetés. These are the inevitable casualties the poetic force suffers as it moves onto new ground. (p. 116)

For the first time, too, the limitations of the poet's sensibility become noticeable. They are, naturally enough, urban limitations. In his first book Abse was overwhelmed by the city and its many faces: in his second, where he begins the process of disciplining his images towards the formation of consistent ideas, his choice of symbols from nature is superficial and imperceptive. Trees are the main exception…. Trees can be personalised, like lamp-posts and railway engines: they are part of the manshaped scene. A much later poem like Tree emphasises the point. Nevertheless, although Spring's ballet of daffodils and tulips in The Occupation, a pitiful counterpoise to the grim stand of the winter city, creates an intentional unbalance, I am bound to point to Abse's awkwardness when left alone, so to speak, in the fields to stare. (p. 117)

I want to end this first article by treating in greater detail four poems from Walking Under Water, all of them embodying one or more of the different forms of development visible in this interim stage of Abse's progress.

The first is Journeys and Faces. In this piece the poet gives us a comparatively early glimpse of one of his later pre-occupations, socio/psychological man: he is concerned not so much with the interaction of the individual mind with the things of its environment as to draw from human experience the various guises or identities of the individual—the 'faces' (to appear so many times subsequently as 'masks' and to enjoy their most recent confusion in The Mask-maker). That this is a logical development both from the generalised 'public manner' of his poetry so far and from the more specific 'commentary on the condition of man' with which, in common with other poets, he began to be concerned in the late Forties and early Fifties cannot be denied; in this poem he gives the 'commentary' the particular socio-psychological emphasis which becomes almost the dominant feature of his later work. (p. 118)

Journeys and Faces is a pioneer of its kind, but it is not a success. The third stanza is full of exhortation and declamation, meaning little. The poem is not organic but fabricated: its relationship to a 'felt' existence depends entirely on some of the journey evocations. I end by recognising a pattern of intention, and that is all.

The second of my four poems is Soho Saturday Night…. In it the poet presents Cain, Esau, Joseph, Samson, Ruth—all of them characters dispossessed or exiled—as natural inhabitants of Soho. (p. 119)

The self-delineation as Daniel D.P.M., interpreter of dreams, included, this poem concertinas time and personality effectively. It grows out of and goes back into the poet's Jewish background organically: it is, indeed, the poem he was always threatening to write in After Every Green Thing and could not, the poem too that increasing sophistication and temporal distance from the bedrock of childhood would prevent for the future….

I am led inevitably on to Love Story, Dannie Abse's second attempt at the tragedy of Samson and Delilah. Here there is nothing but gain. Samson and Delilah, as the poem in After Every Green Thing was called, was tense and 'jazzed up': it deserted the essential and universally understood tragedy in favour of obscure accretions…. (p. 120)

Love Story is notably calmer. It uses a longer and more regular line, maintaining the natural impetus of the poem towards the end of the long first stanza (when the reader might otherwise begin to falter and lose interest) with a number of feminine endings. Above all, it uses the third person throughout and, instead of trying to tear the heart out of Samson (or Delilah, for that matter), stands off objectively, giving the subject distance and perspective…. [The] gain in simple lyric power is the plus sign of possibility: it heralds the creation of later very successful poems in the same genre like Victim in Aulis.

My last choice for discussion is Epithalamion, the poem of all those in his first two books that Dannie Abse believes stands up well with his later work…. It is no less than truth that my first response was unenthusiastic. The poem seemed so obviously constructed rather than felt. Not even the barley field was visual, remembered. The variable refrain, as so often elsewhere, seemed a limitation whose usefulness in providing an ultimate and contrasting climax was insufficient justification.

But re-reading makes me feel differently. From the middle of the third stanza onwards the triumphant acceptance, the invocation of life in all its forms, is irresistible. (pp. 120-22)

I find it difficult to recapture belief in my own earlier criticisms. [Epithalamion] grows with re-reading: its climax carries back into the earlier stanzas: it is the celebration, the acceptance, the joy, that in the end remain. And those two powerfully tender lines

             give my love to the loveless world
             and all that is ours and gently good

state something in Abse that few other modern poets have or dare. In a breast-beating and masochistic generation he believes in the power of human love, in the faithfulness of good as well as evil's insidiousness, and in the possible validity of religious experience. To read his work carefully is to be guided not through a one-coloured gloom but through a pattern of recognisable days. And this alone is worth some small thanks. (p. 123)

..…

Tenants of the House, which contains poems written between 1951 and 1956, is, to my mind, the high plateau of Abse's achievement. The organisation of the contents under five headings, Metaphysical Ironies, Social Ironies, The Identity of Love, The Identity of Place and The Identity of the Word, warns one against the attempt to draw any inferences about the chronological order of composition; but it is interesting, if not significant, that the fourth group includes, in Field and Port of Call, two of the weakest and most ineffective poems to come from Dannie Abse's pen at any time. Another poem in the same group, Postcard from Cornwall, a late, last outburst of Dylanism, is not very much better. But the term 'plateau' justifies itself for the remainder. Of some thirty poems there is scarcely one which is not more successful than all but the very best in Walking Under Water, his volume immediately previous, and perhaps half of the thirty reach for higher ground yet.

But in Poems, Golders Green the altitude falls. Not by many feet, perhaps, but, for the climber who has come so far, enough for significance. With the exception of that magnificent poem, Return to Cardiff, and perhaps The Water Diviner …, the first part of the book contains few, if any, pieces which are not in some way flawed. To this extent there is a rough correspondence between Dannie Abse's own feeling about his poetic condition at that time and the contour which I am drawing now. But it was not inspiration he then lacked (inspiration, that is, in the sense of the provision of an idea, an angle, an incident for the poem's forming) so much as the energy and the discernment to cut the secondary material away and carry through the intended theme unobscured to its conclusion. In the second half of the book, however, (and I bear in mind that this again may have no basis in a real chronology of composition) there appears a spinney of poems on high ground which perhaps overtops the little-varying levels of the volume previous. In the centre of the spinney I have for markers One Spring Day, Jew, Surprise! Surprise! (despite the title), After a Departure, Postmark, and The French Master. On the edge, and more doubtfully, stand The Magician, The Grand View and two of the Three Voices. It is noticeable that these poems, like Return to Cardiff, are all (with the exception of The Magician) more personal in their genesis than the Metaphysical Ironies and Social Ironies with which I would wish to compare them. Whether this says anything at all about the nature and development of Abse's inspiration could only be argued against much more biographical information than I possess. But it is at least interesting that he seems latterly to have moved away from the public poetry and the hortatory tone formerly so characteristic of him.

If we accept that Tenants of the House and Poems, Golders Green both contain poems in number which overtop all but a very few in Abse's two earlier volumes, our next task must be to identify as far as possible the characteristics of this later period of writing, especially those characteristics which, being newly developed, may be held to be the cause or basis of the new success. And here the first to be mentioned must be the poet's continual search for new poetic experience. This, though not the most fundamental, was the most continuous factor involved and one which played second and stoutly in two different phases of Dannie Abse's development. History, evangelical religion, psychology, spiritualism, politics, the Bomb, the Ancient World, social revolution, athletics, football, mountaineering, the circus, the music hall, the railway, otherness—Abse's two later volumes are remarkable for their diversity and versatility. There is no timid lurking behind the facades of well-worn poetic themes. And while this determination to measure poetry against the utmost of modern life is common to many poets writing since the War … Dannie Abse manages to make of his books not frenetic scrabblings together of novelties but architecturally unified compositions. This achievement is supported, in Tenants of the House and to a much smaller extent in the volume following, by the second characteristic to which I must now draw attention, a characteristic whose pressure towards structural unification was of the most marked kind.

During the years 1951 to 1956 in particular the poet began to provide a symbolic concept or structure which supported the entire poem and was the poem in everything but the human and apposite moral the reader was intended to draw. Not that such provision was an entirely new thing. (pp. 84-6)

But the poems in Tenants of the House reveal such an increase in the ability to maintain and clarify this symbolic structure that even the pieces that are relatively unsuccessful remain clear in the memory. (p. 86)

I want to emphasise the importance of the symbolic concept, when presented clearly, in unifying the poem [The Meeting], acting as a vehicle for the message which so hortatory a poet as Dannie Abse was then always anxious to give, and in presenting a surface of immediately assimilable detail which the reader associates naturally with the concept (which in its literal aspect is often familiar enough to him). The first and last of these considerations, successfully weighed, give the poem a first level which the reader can accept without difficulty, a guise of easy acquaintance behind which the message can fructify. (p. 87)

Not merely is [the single-symbol concept] much less frequently used in Poems, Golders Green: it is also true that where it is used, as in, say, The Abandoned and The Mask-Maker, the resulting poems are not amongst the most successful. It is evident that this method commended itself to Dannie Abse at a particular period of his development as a poet, that period during which the poems in Tenants of the House were written, and that its efficacy for his purposes began to diminish thereafter. In discussing the best poems in his last volume I shall have to find other reasons for his success.

What first occurs to me as the substitute quality is not substitute at all, for it was also present in the period 1951–6. I refer to a determined fidelity to experience and a close observation of the nature of that experience, especially experience of the self, of personal relationships and of love. Even as I write this, however, I realise how impossible it is to begin a discussion of it without some indication of Dannie Abse's disposition and cast of mind. Not for him the smart stuff about bizarre and occasional meetings, sardonic narratives of seduction, or bitter and ironic commentaries on the mutual re-charge of isolated egos in temporary collision. He offers instead the nuances of a continuing affection, a fundamental belief in man's spiritual potential, and a willingness to look at a happy relationship or a pleasant possibility at least as carefully as others explore the counterbalancing glooms. (pp. 88-9)

I have space to refer to Dannie Abse's technical abilities as a poet … in two contexts only: first, it is noticeable that, particularly in Poems, Golders Green, his natural rhetoric has been tamed, has been made subservient to the demands of his later poetic approach … and that he now essays a complicated balance between conversational stop-go and the tightened rhythms of a poetic requirement: second, I wish to describe one extension of his rhythmic powers. The use of a refrain as the linking structure of a poem which was so frequently noticeable in After Every Green Thing and Walking Under Water does not entirely disappear: it survives in such pieces as the revised version of Song (retitled Song of a Hebrew) and Emperors of the Island: something of the same sort again appears in the antithetical structure of Odd. But these poems seem to me to depend almost entirely on the impact made by their content when they are read aloud: all, and especially the last, have shed their literary value with the incursion of this emphasis. There are others, more successful, like Duality, where variations on a refrain, with frequent and repeated antithesis, create a close and individual structure. But what I am concerned with now is a related, but different, development, the use of a nursery-rhyme jingle (which necessarily involves repetition and echoes of previous lines as well as a refrain) to carry an allegorical theme. This is exploited with partial success in The Red Balloon, complete success in The Trial…. (p. 92)

I have tried to set out as clearly as I understand them the real achievements of Abse's poetry. It may help to define them further if I now offer some criticisms of his work at this later and successful stage, the more particularly because some of the defects noticeable are the obverse of, or are inevitably associated with, the methods which have created that success.

I notice first the occasions on which the symbolic concept, used so often in Tenants of the House, does not in fact unify the poem because it has not been sealed off, has not been limited to such development as arises naturally from the concept's own premise. The commonest type of breach is produced by the intrusive commentary. That potentially admirable poem, Social Revolution in England, which even in its wounded form I greatly admire, is an example of this. The last two lines of stanza 5

        Why ask why, from exactly where they came
        when ergatocracies too, in time must fall?

together with the first line of stanza 6

      Who'd query such common, anonymous powers?

are knowing interlocutory intrusions into the mesmerised unknowing of the aristocrats whose house has been stripped—a splendid, symbolic simplification, this, of the theme of social revolution. Ergatocracies, too, is an additional weakness. How could these bemused wretches have found the right dictionary for this, let alone brought it out in their thought-processes? (Olid and jargonelle, in the same poem, are stronger only because their sound-inference fits the theme, whether the reader knows what they mean or not.) But the poem's last few lines … are so brilliant that the concept is almost saved. Almost, not quite.

Then there are other kinds of inconsistency which may be detected, either in the concepts of poems themselves or in the details which deck them out. The Mountaineers, which proves to be an allegory of the poet's struggle to reach the rarified atmosphere which he must breathe to climb higher and from which he can never (as a poet) return, sends off the climbers in company (which seems contrary to experience). (p. 94)

The Game, which many readers would rank as one of Abse's best poems, has me uneasy because the symbolism is intermittent. The satanic identities of the visiting team are discovered and pointed at only during the periods of the actual play: the waiting before the game, half-time, and the moments when the stadium empties are treated with a mixture of realism and nostalgia. The plan, then, is plain enough: but the result if Betjemanesque and not as well integrated as Betjeman's best poems are. But my uneasiness remains. Dannie Abse's best work has been done when the concept is whole and unbreached. (p. 95)

Undoubtedly Dannie Abse has a corpus of poems in his last two volumes which satisfies the most exacting standards, and the individuality (which is also the technical skill) of, say, The French Master, a poem I have not dealt with in detail, is matched by that of a couple of dozen others. How and why he made such an advance between Walking Under Water and Tenants of the House is something which the poems themselves demonstrate but do not fully explain (after all, to have the idea of using a single symbolic picture as the entire structure of a poem is not at all the same thing as contriving to create it in detail with skill and invention), but that he arrived as a significant poet in 1950 or 1951 cannot seriously be doubted. Since his achievement, far from being static, has been marked by continuous development, there is every justification for looking forward, with something like avidity, to the volume which is to follow Poems, Golders Green. (p. 98)

Roland Mathias, "The Poetry of Dannie Abse: The Head Stuffed with Feathers" and "The Poetry of Dannie Abse: 'The One Voice That Is Mine'," in Anglo-Welsh Review, Vol. 15, No. 36, Summer, 1966 and Vol. 16, No. 38, Winter, 1967, pp. 107-23; 84-98.