The vacillations of literary reputation and fashion, especially among poets and poetry, are a curiosity of history, and those of the final quarter of the 20th Century will no doubt seem as strange to posterity—provided, of course, that there is to be a posterity, and that it will be a literate one—as any of the evaluative oddities of the past. Looking back at what seem now to be the misjudgements of the critics of former times—the high estimate for example, of the poetry of Nicholas Rowe, whose translation of Lucan (1718) was, according to Johnson, ‘one of the greatest productions of English poetry,’ the admiration expressed by Coleridge and Wordsworth for the sonnets of William Lisle Bowles, the immense popularity of Sir Lewis Morris, the office of Poet Laureate awarded to Alfred Austin and William Watson's knighthood, to mention only a few—what appears to be at fault was less a matter of perverted or imprecise critical principles as a failure properly to apply criteria which were, in themselves, perfectly sound. What seems to be to be wrong with a great deal of contemporary criticism is that the very bases from which judgements proceed are either set in shifting quicksands of uncertainty or upon more solid but narrow and lopsided foundations. The critics of the past, many, if not most, of whom were themselves fine poets, knew what it was that they valued in poetry: the anonymous admirer of Chaucer who wrote the following lines set down a simple list of desiderata for poetic excellence which could serve as a foundation for all future criticism until the post-modernist 20th Century:

Redith his werkis ful of plesaunce
Clere in sentence in langage excellent
Briefly to write suche was his suffysance
Whatever to saye he toke in his entente
His langage was so fayr and pertynente
It seemeth unto mannys heerynge
Not only the worde but verely the thynge.

There we have the demands for clarity and economy of expression, compression and the ability to present the thing itself, the image; but before these comes the primary requirement, that the work should be ‘ful of pleasauance,’ the power to give pleasure, and it is this first principle that has been either ignored or subverted by so much of the more influential criticism of the past half-century.

The pleasure that a reader will receive from poetry is dependent on those qualities of ‘fayr and pertinente’ language which has the power to present ‘verely the thynge.’ Pleasure, of course, is a private experience and one which we have no way of quantifying. It is its elusively subjective nature which has led the quasi-scientific puritans of Structuralism and Deconstructionism to dismiss it as a sentimental irrelevance in any discussion of literary values, but in fact it is the only practical guide to artistic excellence; if we receive no initial pleasure or promise of future pleasure from a work of art it will have nothing else to offer us. Poetry, Dr. Johnson said, is the ‘art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the aid of reason’ and it is the poetry which most effectively fulfills this definition which I value above other, more pretentious kinds of writing.

Among the highly regarded poetic reputations of today some seem to me well-deserved, others less so but established for reasons which can be discerned and understood, if not endorsed, while the rest appear to be either quite inexplicable or achieved by means that have little to do with the art of literature. That there are some untalented scribblers enjoying fame and perhaps even a little material gain from their undeserved reputations as poets does not worry me nearly as much as the fact that there are a few truly gifted poets writing admirable and enjoyable work which receives comparatively small critical recognition and, among those is one who, while being given respectful notices in the literary press, has never been awarded the deeply considered evaluation warranted by the seriousness and consistently high quality of his poetry. This is Dannie Abse, a poet who has been publishing verse since the late 1940s and the publication of whose Collected Poems in 1977 should have provided the occasion for such thorough consideration.

A first reading of the Collected Poems yields an overriding impression of consistency: from the earliest poems to the last there are very few occasions when the primary expectations of pleasurable readability, formal accomplishment, honesty and clarity of expression are disappointed. The personality which emerges from these poems is an unusual and engaging one which shows a deep humanistic concern for suffering and injustice allied to a religious instinct which is counterbalanced by a shrewdness and a comic sense that steer Abse away from the pitfalls of sentimentality. His religious sense seems to be not specifically Jewish or Christian but draws nourishment from both faiths, finding sustenance in the mythopoeic or allegorical rather than in the doctrinal features of each: it functions in a searching, heuristic way rather than in liturgical or devotional forms, in a determination to seek and find beneath the shifting surfaces of quotidian existence the permanent and truly valuable.

In a short, early poem called ‘The Moment’ from Tenants of the House (1957). Abse depicts one of those tiny domestic episodes, that everyone can recognize and identify with, and he probes beneath the ordinariness to find the mystery and the significance.

You raise your eyes from the level book
as if deeply listening. You are further than I call.
Like Eurydice you wear a hurt and absent look,
but I'm gentle for the silence into which you fall
          so sadly.
What are you thinking? Do you love me?
Suddenly you are not you at all but a ghost
dreaming of a castle to haunt or a heavy garden;
some place eerie, and far from me. But now a door
is banging outside, so you turn your head surprised.
You speak my name and someone else has died.

The first sentence is very simple and direct and its truthfulness is crucial to the poem. That superficially off-hand simile, ‘as if deeply listening,’ is very effective both visually and semantically. The reader at once sees the woman held in that posture of still, almost breathless attentiveness, looking up from the book, gazing into space. But ‘deeply listening’ contains the possibility that she might indeed be listening for some distant sound or voice. The exactness and authenticity of the opening image invest all that follows with the same persuasiveness: the truth of the physical is carried over into the metaphysical. The poem is a celebration of the extraordinariness of the commonplace. The ‘moment’ of the title is one which all of us have experienced, that unnerving realisation that each of us is the lonely inhabitant of a world closed to all others, even those nearest to us in the bonds of love and familial circumstance. The ‘someone else’ that has died as the woman speaks is the unreachable, unknowable someone she had, for the rapt, dangerous moment become.

The form of the poem shows the unobtrusive craftsmanship which distinguished Abse's work almost from the start. The rhythmic movement of his lines is always very close to the natural cadences of common speech yet it is usually founded on a patterning which may at any moment be sharpened to accommodate a muted lyricism. In ‘The Moment’ the lines vary between four and five stresses of sprung rhythm and the rhymes, slant rhymes and assonances are placed irregularly so that the chimes are often unexpected and teasingly effective. In the first four lines, for example, the ear is both satisfied yet surprised by the rhyme for call occurring on the penultimate stress of fall which is followed by the feminine sadly, echoed at the end of the next line in love me. Then, in the sixth line that call and fall rhyme is gently chimed again in ‘you are not you at all’; from then, until the final couplet, end-rhyme is not used and this avoidance of the predictability of conventional rhyming not only helps to give the poem its feeling of authentic experience but the pattern of echoes reflects the teasing, half-familiar nature of the event itself.

‘The Moment’ is one of Abse's relatively slight poems but it shows the same care, the same thoughtful structuring of the verbal pattern to mirror as closely as possible the shape of the experience as is exhibited in his more ambitious pieces. And it shows, too, that even with this poet's slighter works the reader is never short-changed, he is always given the real thing. At a time when so many pieces of writing possessing the rhythmic vitality and verbal radiance of the instructions for a puncture repair-kit are solemnly applauded as major poetry it is unusually refreshing to encounter the work of a poet who seems never to commit words to the page unless he is truly compelled, whose every poem possesses at least the interest of a splinter of recognizable human experience being minutely, deeply and honestly examined and mirrored in language the texture, sense and sound of which are calculated to surprise and delight.

Dannie Abse is an urban poet, one might almost say ‘metropolitan’ since the action and furnishings of many of his poems are set in London, but his use of locus and imagery is always more than purely topographical: certainly he is sensitive to and very much concerned with communicating that oddly exciting and haunting poetry of the great city, its streets, pubs, cafes, suburbs and assorted denizens, but the objects and creatures, while retaining their own sharply observed distinctiveness, lead to deeper and more mysterious areas and presences, towards ‘… a vision of the street / As the street hardly understands.’ A simple instance of this is to be found in his ‘Three Street Musicians’ (Funland and Other Poems, 1973) where the sharply realised picture of the buskers progresses first to a meditation on the power of old popular tunes to stir memories and raise phantoms from the past and finally to an extraordinary conflation of images of the city street and the risen ghosts of memory.

“THREE STREET MUSICIANS”

Three street musicians in mourning overcoats
worn too long, shake money boxes this morning,
then, afterwards, play their suicide notes.
The violinist in chic, black spectacles, blind,
the stout tenor with a fake Napoleon stance,
and the loony flautist following behind,
they try to importune us, the busy living,
who hear melodic snatches of music hall
above unceasing waterfalls of traffic.
Yet if anything can summon back the dead
it is the old-time sound, old obstinate tunes,
such as they achingly render and suspend:
‘The Minstrel Boy,’ ‘Roses of Picardy.’
No wonder cemeteries are full of silences
and stones keep down the dead that they defend.
Stones too light! Airs irresistible!
Even a dog listens, one paw raised, while the stout,
loud man amazes with nostalgic notes—though half boozed
and half clapped out. And, as breadcrumbs thrown
on the ground charm sparrows down from nowhere,
now suddenly, there are too many ghosts about.

As in ‘The Moment’ Abse deploys his rhymes cunningly, not only placing them before the end-line stress as in the third stanza—music hall and waterfall—but using them to sew stanzas together as suspend and defend link stanzas 4 and 5 and stout and about the final two. The poet signals at once, in the first sentence, that we are watching something other than a simple street scene: the overcoats are ‘mourning,’ they are black. They are melancholy but are they not, too, literally garments of grieving? The punning ‘suicide notes’ answers that question. The coats are ‘worn too long,’ they are of an unfashionable length, but we are aware of the other sense of the musicians having worn them for too long a period. In stanza three, the ‘busy living’ are contrasted with the musicians who themselves become unnervingly spectral. The whole poem is both lucid and mysterious and it is this quality of contrapuntal clarity and mystery that Abse develops so fruitfully throughout his work.

I should like to glance here at two shorter poems where this quality is, in different ways, shown at its most effective before attempting a brief examination of what must be one of his most ambitious and interesting single works, the longer poem, Funland.

‘Hunt the Thimble’ is one of a number of poems in A Small Desperation (1968) in which elusively vagrant perceptions, often sensory ones, are seized and investigated for the significance they so tantalizingly hint at. In ‘Olfactory Pursuits’ the poet deals with the smell of his own hand, in ‘Halls’ the smell in the halls of urban or suburban houses; in ‘Pathology of Colours’ various hues are invoked and seen manifest in, and emblematic of situations of pain and death. ‘Hunt the Thimble’ brilliantly takes the childhood game for an extended metaphor of search. Any attempt to provide a precise prose account of the meaning of this poem would be absurdly self-defeating. The mystery which is the poet's subject cannot be defined, it can only be invoked or enacted through images. It is the secret that we all want to know, the ultimate mystery of life and death and what lies beyond both.

The poem is a dialogue or catechism: one voice is of the questioning, limited human intelligence supported by brief flashes of imagination, the voice of the poet, and the other, answering voice is anonymous, omniscient perhaps, but not prepared to reveal all its owner understands. The poem begins with these words from the second voice:

‘Hush now. You cannot describe it’

But the questioner will not accept the ineffable. He insists on attempting to define, by comparison with the known, the unknowable and indefinable. The answering voice replies each time with the discouraging ‘Hunt the Thimble’ reply of ‘Cold.’ The comparisons invoked as first by the seeker are images of generalised melancholy.

Is it like heavy rain falling,
and lights going on, across the fields,
in the new housing estate?
… dark windowed street at night,
the houses uncurtained, the street deserted?
The brooding darkness then,
that breeds inside a cathedral
of a provincial town in Spain?

Then there is a brief upsurge of optimism, but the deliberate banality of the image betrays lack of conviction:

Aha—the blue sky over Ampourias,
The blue sky over Lancashire for that matter …

And then back to similes of a melancholy now more specifically generated by the fear of death. The omniscient voice is parentally and perfunctorily consoling but still offers no answer and after the wonderfully resonant and desolating image of the nothingness attendant on mortality—‘the darkness inside a dead man's mouth’—the ‘cold’ in the response become unequivocally the coldness of death.

Here is the poem in its entirety:

“HUNT THE THIMBLE”

Hush now. You cannot describe it.
Is it like heavy rain falling,
and lights going on, across the fields,
in the new housing estate?
Cold, cold. Too domestic, too
temperate, too devoid of history.
Is it like a dark windowed street at night,
the houses uncurtained, the street deserted?
Colder. You are getting colder,
and too romantic, too dream-like.
You cannot describe it.
The brooding darkness then,
that breeds inside a cathedral
of a provincial town in Spain?
In Spain, also, but not Spanish.
In England, if you like, but not English.
It remains, even when obscure, perpetually.
Aged, but ageless, you cannot describe it.
No, you are cold, altogether too cold.
Aha—the blue sky over Ampourias,
the blue sky over Lancashire for that matter …
You cannot describe it.
… obscured by clouds?
I must know what you mean.
Hush, hush.
Like those old men in hospital dying,
who, unaware strangers stand around their bed,
stare obscurely, for a long moment,
at one of their own hands raised—
which perhaps is bigger than the moon again—
and then, drowsy, wandering, shout out, ‘Mama.’
Is it like that? Or hours after that even:
the darkness inside a dead man's mouth?
No, no, I have told you:
you are cold, and you cannot describe it.

The other short poem, ‘The Stethoscope,’ is less exploratory than ‘Hunt the Thimble,’ in other words I suspect that here the poet had a more definite notion of the conclusion to which the poem would lead him than in the inevitably irresolute enquiry of the poem we have just looked at. Nevertheless, it does offer that sense of mystery at the heart of its lucidity which characterises Abse's best work and it contains a similarly powerful rhetoric which paradoxically is achieved through a deliberate avoidance of the vocabulary of conventional rhetoric. A line like ‘the darkness inside a dead man's mouth’ pierces to the marrow, but it does not do so by the means that Wordsworth, for instance, employs in ‘Resolution and Independence,’ when he writes ‘And mighty Poets in their misery dead’ for here each key word, even in isolation, is charged with rich emotive associations and the music of the line is symphonic. Abse's line is rhythmically conversational and its power derives from the unexpected conjunction or dislocation of ordinary things: ‘darkness’ is not usually associated with the inside of the human mouth: once the connection is made the mouth becomes a cave, a thing of stone, stone-dead.

In ‘The Stethoscope’ Abse speaks of hearing ‘… in a dead man's chest, the silence / before creation began.’ Again the separate words are not—perhaps excepting ‘dead’ and ‘creation’—especially evocative through association or sound, and in fact that ‘dead man's chest’ might summon unwanted, risible, echoes of piratical yo-ho-hoing. But of course it does no such thing, counterpointed as it is against the image of the stirring of new life in the womb of a young woman and the rare frisson of poetic awe is powerfully transmitted. The poem uses the stethoscope as both physical object and emblem representing any instrument which enables man to investigate areas of knowledge from which he might otherwise be excluded, but the poet is well aware of the danger of attempting to establish science as a religion. He asks:

Should I
kneel before it, chant an apophthegm
from a small text? Mimic priest or rabbi,
the swaying noise of religious men?
Never! Yet I could praise it.

He would praise it; he goes on to explain, because he would ‘by doing so celebrate my own ears’; the poem which seemed to begin as a celebration of scientific achievement ends in lyrical affirmation of the human:

night cries
of injured creatures, wide-eyed or blind;
moonlight sonatas on a needle;
lovers with doves in their throats; the wind
travelling from where it began.

And, again, in that final image of the wind's source and the source of all creation we hear the strangely vibrant rhetoric of plain and reticent speech after the more fanciful conceits and verbal arabesques which precede it.

In ‘The Smile Was’ (A Small Desperation) Abse attempted a poem of some substance which would be a statement of affirmation and celebration, a work which would call upon his experience as a medical practitioner and while facing the inescapable truths of the human predicament, birth and death, hope and fear, suffering and ecstasy, be in its final effect resoundingly on the side of life. Despite its incidental felicities I cannot regard this poem as a complete success: it is, I feel, too schematic and too explicit in its conclusions. The smile of the title is that which, according to the poem, is seen upon the face of every new mother whether she be

Whore, beauty, or bitch
it makes no odds
illimitable chaste happiness
in that smile. …

Here I find a strident rhetoric unlike that of ‘Hunt the Thimble’ and ‘The Stethoscope,’ a conjunction of words—Whore, beauty, bitch, happiness—each of which separately carries too rich charge of association and meaning for their combination to work comfortably. The effect is excessive: the reader is more likely to be embarrassed than moved.

‘The Smile Was’ is written in four parts, the first a vivid account of the drama of natural human birth followed by a meditation on the mother's smile on hearing for the first time her baby's cry; the second, a curiously chatty, anecdotal strophe telling the story of an Indian patient of the poet-doctor who was convinced, despite all assurances to the contrary that he was dying: this ends with his fatalistic smile being contrasted with the archetypal smile of the new mother. In the third section the smile of a surgeon, described in terms which suggest that Abse accepts, at least in this case, the Freudian notion of the surgeon as a sublimated Ripper, provides the comparison and, finally, the poem ends with a rhetorical coda again celebrating the universal post-natal smile of woman.

Despite its failure properly to cohere into a unified structure and its occasional stridencies of tone ‘The Smile Was’ is important in that it served as a kind of bridge leading the poet from territory that he had most resourcefully and fruitfully explored into the more difficult terrain of the longer reflective, philosophical poem, towards in fact the almost unqualified success of ‘Funland.’ In this poem Abse adopts a strategy of obliquity, a strangely surrealist method of investigating, not the private grounds of subjective experience but no less than the predicament of mankind itself, or, rather, what is called ‘civilization,’ in the second half of the 20th Century. It is an audacious and remarkably successful attempt to project a vision of a disintegrating or terribly threatened world and it bears some resemblance to that earlier poetic vision of the modern Western world in decay, The Waste Land. There are, in fact, a few small genuflexions to the Master, as in section 3, ‘The Summer Conference’ in which the lines ‘Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?’ (Ash Wednesday) and the references to the superintendent in section 6, ‘Autumn in Funland,’ as a ‘ruined millionaire’ who ‘… will not dress a wound even’ echoes—equally deliberately I imagine—the fourth part of East Coker. But this is not to suggest that ‘Funland’ is in any sense derivative or imitative. I know of no other poem which offers quite the same strange but wholly effective mixture of the bizarre, dreamlike and comic, the speculative, lyrical and satirical.

The poem is constructed in nine interrelated sections in which an assortment of characters make their appearances, the superintendent, the narrator's atheist uncle, fat Blondie, the man nicknamed Pythagoras, and Mr. Poet. Each of these characters possesses an allegorical or symbolic significance just as Funland itself, institution for the deranged, surrealist nightmare and the world we inhabit, exists on various planes. But the poem as a whole resists a too precise interpretation of each element. Much of its power to please and disturb proceeds from the shimmering, slightly unfocused view presented, from the sense of the mysterious, the menacing and the absurd which is strengthened by the causes being only partially revealed. Mr. Poet's public reading in Section 4 consists of the repeated howling of a couple of obscene monosyllables: art, or what passes in this mad-house for art, can offer neither explanation nor consolation. Science, religion, human love are found to be insufficient. The Superintendent dies and the narrator's atheist uncle takes uncertain command, proclaiming that he is immortal. Towards the end Pythagoras, the gentle philosopher of numbers and silence, the legendary inventor of the lyre, has been executed and the narrator says:

And I? I write a letter to someone nameless
in white ink on white paper
to an address unknown.
Oh love I write
surely love was no less
because less uttered or more accepted?
My bowels are made of glass.
The western skies try to rouge the snow.
I goosestep across this junk of heaven
to post my blank envelope.
Slowly night begins in the corner
where two walls meet.
The cold is on the crocus.
Snows mush and melt
and small lights fall from twigs.
Bright argus-eyed the thornbush.
Approaching the pillar box
I hear its slit of darkness screaming.

Then in the ninth and final section we are given an apocalyptic glimpse of the ‘abyss,’ of the nothingness that has been threatening from the start to overwhelm Funland. The whole poem takes a decidedly bleak look at the Western world at the present time, and its only answer to, or possible remedy for, the engulfing horror that advances ever closer is itself, its wit, sprightliness, courage and vision, its faith in the imagination's power to move mountains.

Way Out in the Centre (1981), Dannie Abse's one collection since the publication of the Collected Poems, provides solid proof that his talent is still developing. It contains nothing so ambitious as ‘Funland’ but all of the poems are fashioned with a strength and delicacy that will last and some of the short moral tales carry a curiously timeless quality, a sense of hard-won wisdom, effortlessly and gracefully communicated, that will surely gain for them a place in any conservatory of the best and most enjoyable literature of our time.