Staying at Balisodare

This poem, now published in a thoroughly attractive pale green pamphlet (the colour suits perhaps its Irish theme) appeared first in the pages of Landfall. It belongs to a special genre: the poem which has a centre of tension in poetry itself, albeit the poetry of another man. There are fairly obvious dangers in this type of poem. It is a mirror held up to a mirror. Mr Wilson’s verses could have been, in dubious humility, just a parasitic growth on the body of Yeats’s thought; or, short of this extreme, the internal argument of the poem might have lacked the necessary scaffolding of sense impressions hewn from Mr Wilson’s private plantation. By using Yeats’s imagery, he could have neglected fatally the need to use his own axe and saw. The analogy is apt enough; for Mr Wilson’s poems are the work of an expert bush-carpenter. He uses what he knows, nothing else, and often anything he knows.

I must confess that when I first read the poem, cursorily, in Landfall, it seemed unduly private, untidy and oblique. Since then I have gained a better appreciation of Mr Wilson’s methods. A strong, back-breaking effort to avoid the inflated phrase; a use of small coins when the fiver and the tenner are suspect (there are forgers among us, gentlemen); a romantic imagination governed and reversed by patient intellectual irony. These habits of thought and method link Mr Wilson with the younger Englishmen – D.J. Enright, for example. They suppose, by implication, an audience acquainted with the decay of rhetoric. At their worst they lead to the construction of birdcages with no birds inside; at their best they cut deep enough to draw blood. Mr Wilson does not lack depth. Perhaps the deepest irony of the poem can be found in its dedication to Alistair Campbell, the one undeviating Romantic of New Zealand poetry, and the use of anti-rhetorical language in praise of Yeats, the man who cleaned and re-loaded the gun of rhetoric for modern handling.

In the course of this six-hundred-line poem Mr Wilson describes in thorough detail a pilgrimage he made from England to Dublin to Sligo to Drumcliff and Ballylee, in order to visit two shrines: the grave of Yeats and the Tower he lived in. To make effective pilgrimages one has to be a believer. A belief in the world-transforming power of a great poet’s mind – that may serve, at least, as an approximate formula of the piety which subtly sustains the poem, and fills its crevices like honey in the comb. But Mr Wilson has put it much better –

page 445

Could words prove true, twelve thousand miles from home?
Would Drumcliff, Rosses Point and Knocknarea,
Ben Bulben and the Tower prove to be
What he had sworn they were, or made them seem
In that great book of words we had at home? . . .

There surged up from the trance which held my heart
All my old, fearful love, for I’d as soon
Have found those rhymes not true as I’d have found
Poetry itself a bag of wind
And I and all at home mere bags of wind,
Balloons! behind that great ballooning mind
Of his, for Yeats and Poetry at home,
And Poetry and Friends, all meant the same.

It is clear that the informing spirit of Yeats’s poetry had become for Mr Wilson, in New Zealand, more than a gift to be grateful for; rather the spirit of a cult, in the best sense of that doubtful word. Yeats was the banyan tree under which Mr Wilson and his friends could converse, act or meditate in spiritual security. New Zealanders may have a special need of such protection, in a culture that fluctuates between intellectual and animal crudity. And how powerfully Mr Wilson expresses the strength of the bond! But the final tenor of the poem is tragic. He finds the mansion of Coole a wreck, where Lady Gregory held court for the Irish intelligentsia, and no comfort at Yeats’s grave. After nightmare wanderings and misdirections he arrives at the Tower itself, the hub in time and space of the mythic universe Yeats inhabited. It too is a ruin –

Stand up there,
See what it used to be: it’s nothing now
For you nor me. Then go back down the stair
And stumble through the debris, seeing how
The generated soul has cared for Yeats,
The cottage down, everywhere blue-green slates,
The garden wild: two gooseberry bushes, one flower;
Two men, one soul – or whatever tale you prefer.
A monstrous octopus-spawn of marrow vines
Or some mock-marrow weed, through the fruit trees twines.

If the climax of the poem is a disillusioned piety, an expulsion from some chamber of knowledge where heroic words had meaning, its secondary power lies in the blow-by-blow description of a circuitous journey through the Irish countryside. A most effective quiet realism supplies the scaffoldingpage 446 and ropes it together. Mr Wilson has a gift for narrative poetry, and that is rare enough.

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