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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

George Barker in an Irish Hat

page 208

George Barker in an Irish Hat

I had a dove and the sweet dove died
And I thought that it died of grieving . . .

Since Keats a good many poets have died earlier than seemed inevitable; the latest being Dylan Thomas in New York. But more disturbing for his always limited public is the spectacle of a poet going on writing after his gift has died. How does it come about? Those who regard the writing of poetry as the activity of a kind of somnambulist ape prefer to speak of the ‘departure of the Muse’ – as if it were all just a matter of bad luck. But the true picture has been put plainly in a story of Irish origin.

A man walking along a boggy, Irish country road saw a hat gyrating in a puddle by itself. He lifted it. Underneath was a man’s face, set grim and surly.

‘Are you in trouble?’ asked the traveller. ‘No,’ replied the head.

‘But you’re bogged up to the neck, man.’

‘I’m going to the fair at Connemara, and there’s a good fine horse under me to carry me there.’

I suggest that Mr Barker is in the situation of the Irish horseman. For some years he has celebrated in vigorous and strident poetry the death of the heart. But the dying swan must at length indeed die: she is committed to that occasion by her own persistent elegy. In this his latest volume Mr Barker examines further his own state of sinfulness, in the light of Manichean cosmology. The brass band of self-accusation has played already to considerable effect in ‘The True Confession of George Barker’:

Star-fingered shepherdess of sleep,
Come pacify regret, remorse;
And let the suffering black sheep
Weep on the bed it made . . .

But he thumps now on an empty drum. The failure of this volume (redeemed by a couple of magnificent necropolitan laments) seems due to his no longer writing from a core of existential knowledge. In the dialogue of the Angel and Goodman Jacksin, the optimism of the latter rings a little hollow:

‘I’ll tell you, Angel, that gods die,
Princes and gross empires pass,
But the bright stars of heaven shall
Rotate for ever in my arse . . .’

page 209

The ‘revelation of verities’ in terms of which Goodman Jacksin preaches his negative sermon is inappropriate to the actual spiritual condition which Mr Barker cultivates as his personal territory. One feels that a more convenient allegory would be that of an ageing drunk wakening in the cold middle of a vast, white-tiled public urinal. We know (or should know) that pain, grief, remorse, a giddiness of heart and mind, are common to each man living. But frankly, Mr Barker’s treatment of these features of our environment does not convince. He falls too readily into bathos:

The dead bridges shriek across the seas
As the floor bangs like a bed . . .

In a lesser degree the same ossification of verbal structures has gripped his poetry which is so glaringly apparent in Stephen Spender’s last book of verse, The Edge of Being, also, alas, in Auden’s Nones. True, Mr Barker has never yet written of two lovers as those who ‘physically inter-penetrate.’ His gloomy ‘Epithalamium for Two Friends’ –

Two who erect their house of love
On the dark spot where Adam wept –

does not rouse in the reader the same fascination as Mr Spender’s poem on a similar subject, the fascination which one feels on seeing a half-frozen maggot climbing laboriously over the rim of a gravy-dish; but Mr Barker has almost ceased to display that genuine concern for the misery of the human race which lay like a swollen pein at the heart of all his earlier cogitations. It was perhaps the result of English slum housing, with which Mr Barker was closely acquainted in childhood and youth. His attention has since been directed instead to the erection of a Manichean myth above the tomb of certain private calamities. For the vision of a heart demonstrably human has been substituted a vision of beasts and gods. The Spirit has won a sterile and destructive victory over the Natural Man, planting (in the words of Baudelaire) the black flag of pain in a human skull. Mr Barker will no doubt eventually sit like Mr Spender, though with less of a gentle zombie smile, upon the stool of the Professor of Poetry at Minnesota. Yet as a genuine poet with some elements of greatness, he has not even in this book relinquished wholly his own ironic wit and negative passion; especially these are evident in that superbly lucid and energetic poem, ‘Channel Crossing’:

The horror of the questionmark
I looked back and saw stand over
The white and open page of Dover
Huge as the horn of the scapegoat. Dark
page 210 It stood up in the English day
Interrogating Destiny
With the old lip of the sea:
‘What can a dead nation say?’

A question relevant to this country as to an older one. The head is still to be seen under the Irish hat.

1954 (98)