Amongst the poems of the late (and much-missed) John Heath-Stubbs is one called “Ars Poetica” (my quotation from it is taken from the Collected Poems, 1943-1987 published by Carcanet in 1988). The poem — full of reflections on the writing of poetry — closes thus (the “you” doubtless includes Heath-Stubbs himself):
So through patience, perseverance, luck and that sort of thing
(I can only wish you luck)
You may arrive at an actual poem —
An interjected remark
At a party which has been going on
For quite a time (and will, we trust, continue);
A party at which you are not
A specially favoured guest
And which you will have to leave before it is over.
Let us hope the others will occasionally recall it.
The delineation of a successful poem (“an actual poem”) as “an interjected remark / At a party which has been going on / For quite a time (and will, we trust, continue” says more about the nature of such academically vexed topics as intertextuality and allusion than all but a few of the scholarly pages devoted to them have ever achieved. For a start it makes the connection between the new poem and the poems that have gone before it sound like fun, as having, at its best, the wit of a timely interjection in a conversation at a good party; it illustrates, very attractively, the way in which even a successful poem is not an act or moment of closure, but merely a point along a continuum.
The passage from “Ars Poetica” offers means of thinking about some of the ways in which particular poems by Ann Drysdale relate to their (more or less) acknowledged predecessors. One significant poem — significant enough to give its title to the collection Peterloo published in 2005 — does more than this; it considers (with characteristic humour) the poet’s place in the tradition; it reflects, indeed, on the difficulty of finding a place in that tradition. The poem is “Between Dryden and Duffy”. Heath-Stubbs wrote of “an interjected remark”; Drysdale uses the trope of what one might call an “interjected book”:
Between Dryden and Duffy
That’s where I look in every one of them —
Ottakar’s, Hammick’s, Hatchard’s, Waterstone’s.
Finding my books displayed in none of them
Do I descend to star-defeated moans?
Not I! With an assumed shortsighted stoop on,
I check the coast is clear to right and left.
Then, with a Waitrose bag held slightly open
As if in readiness for petty theft,
I make my hand into a living axe
Which parts the volumes at a single stroke.
Then, with my fingers, I enlarge the cracks
And slip one in, like an unscripted joke.
Booksellers do not view this with delight;
I wrecks their paperwork. And serves them right.
The insertion, the “interjection”, here is not, of course, simply a matter of the physical action of putting the book (in its correct alphabetical slot) on the shelves. It relates, too, to the notion of an accepted tradition (accepted enough to govern the policy of a bookshop chain when it comes to the stocking of its shelves) which runs from accepted, safely-dead male figures such as Dryden to a female poet who — endorsed as she is by her presence on school examination syllabuses (and of course by greater “honours” of late) — has been granted permission to enter the canon. Drysdale’s sense is that she can only find such a place by a kind of inverted theft, by a subterfuge — the key to which is the wit of her self-awareness.
Elsewhere it is not the tradition of “English poetry” in general (at least as represented on bookshop shelves) into which Drysdale seeks to “interject” her work; rather it is the kind of more specific tradition, the party-conversation, as it were, which a single poem can generate that interests Drysdale. Once again, the poem’s title makes clear what one might call the point of interjection (to continue Heath-Stubbs’ metaphor): “The Dover Bitch Criticises Her Life”. A sub-title adds a further gloss: “After Hecht, after Arnold”. The ur-text here — the source of the conversation at this particular party — is, obviously enough, Mathew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”. And another aspect of Drysdale’s title sends us back to Arnold too, to a famous phrase in an essay on Byron: “Truth and seriousness of substance and matter, felicity and perfection of diction and manner, as these are exhibited in the best poets, are what constitute a criticism of life made in conformity with the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty”.
There have been more than a few poems which have taken “Dover Beach” as a starting point, more than a few poets who have offered their own “remarks” in response to Arnold’s text. There are, for instance, poems by Tom Clark (I don’t have a text to hand and all I can remember is that the “French coast” in Arnold’s poem becomes “french toast” in Clark’s). There’s John Brehm’s “Sea of Faith” and there’s Mark Levine’s outstanding “About Face: (A Poem called ‘Dover Beach’)”, a text studded with phrases from Arnold, as in its opening lines:
It’s dead out here. The sea is calm tonight.
Just me, the sea, the sand-like
things, wriggling like wet pockets.
I cover my eyes with some fingers; I have fingers
to spare. I open my mouth and hear the medicine
splashing on my tongue. The cliffs of England stand.
Behind enemy lines? Yes. Toujours.
Or consider the way the poem is used as a point of reference in Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) — or, for that matter, in the Alan Cummings’ film The Anniversary Party (2001). There has, in short, been no shortage of “conversation” prompted by the poem. Drysdale, however, doesn’t set out to simply add one more poem to the heap. Much more interestingly, she integrates her poem into the ongoing conversation. More specifically, she relates her own poem not just to Arnold’s but also — as her subtitle suggests — to Anthony Hecht’s “The Dover Bitch” (first collected in The Hard Hours (1948); I quote from the text in Hecht’s Collected Earlier Poems (1990)). It should be noted, by the way, that Hecht’s poem has a subtitle too: “The Dover Bitch: A Criticism of Life”.
Hecht’s “remark” on Arnold’s poem takes the form of a monologue by man who claims also to have known the woman addressed in Arnold’s poem. She was, he says, a girl who “had read / Sophocles in a fairly good translation” and thus might have been expected to catch Arnold’s (by “Arnold” I refer to the speaker of “Dover Beach”, not to Mathew Arnold himself) “bitter allusion to the sea”. But, Hecht’s speaker tells us, she had little interest in her partner’s ideas:
… all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck.
The protagonist of Hecht’s poem claims that
She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and felt really sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
Her treatment angered her: “to have been brought / All the way down from London, and then be addressed / As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort”. The speaker condescendingly observes that such treatment “is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty”. In her anger, “she said one or two unprintable things”. For all that, insists the speaker
She’s really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it’s a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d’Amour.
While Arnold may be the most obvious target of Hecht’s poem, Hecht’s speaker himself seems also to be under attack. While he claims a greater sympathy for, and understanding of, “this girl” (as the first line of “The Dover Bitch” refers to her), his own sense of her fails to grant her any kind of real personality, succeeds only in treating as her an occasional (bought) source of sexual satisfaction. The best that can be said of her is that she is “really all right”, that “she always treats me right”, that she is “dependable as they come”, even if she is “running to fat”. She has the dependability of a good dog — and it is irrelevant to think of the wordplay in the title of Hecht’s poem. The overall attitude is patronising and unimaginative — he says (presumably because she has told him so) that her relationship with Arnold made her “sad”. There is no indication that he has given any thought to what her feelings might be about her meetings with him; for him she conveniently provides a service and, since his own emotions are to all intents unengaged it doesn’t occur to him to wonder what her feelings might be.
In Arnold’s poem the woman is a wholly silent object of address; in Hecht’s she is still not allowed a voice of her own. The male voice still precludes direct female speech or self-expression, even if she is now “granted” the privilege of having (some) of her views expressed in reported speech (how accurately? with how much understanding?). In Drysdale’s poem the woman finally gets her own voice, and the “life” she criticises is her own (the text is quoted from Between Dryden and Duffy):
The Dover Bitch Criticises Her Life
After Hecht, after Arnold
I am waiting on the beach. Soon the car door will slam,
Then shingle will mutter grudgingly under his feet.
He will come. He will keep the old promise. I will not turn round.
We’ll meet with the light behind me; a year is a long time.
Here’s where we first met, in the far-off days
When I was a poet’s muse. How he laughed at me then;
Laughed till we fell serious, fell accidentally into bed,
Since when, again and again we have fallen together,
Though the fallings are growing further and further apart …
This is how it will be. A kiss. A meal somewhere decent.
A wine from across the water, for old times’ sake.
And afterwards, tipsy and sad, I will treat him right.
I will treat him to all the year’s longing in one great lay.
I will nurse him asleep on breasts that are not what they were;
Try not to consider the different levels of love.
Oh, my beloved, insensitive, cynical swine;
I want him here, sharing old jokes and taking the piss
Out of my “O” Level Greek. A year is a long time
But I am still Persephone, albeit gone to seed;
Six months remembering, then six anticipating.
Heaven knows, I was never a greedy woman
But I hope he remembers the bottle of Nuit d’Amour.
I’m almost out. And that’s what gets me through
Between times. The merest whiff on a tissue
Shushes the fears, tempers the imaginings,
Taking the raw edge off the gnawing knowing
That my long loss is someone else’s gain.
The silent, anonymous woman of Arnold’s poem, the patronised figure of Hecht’s variation — these are now superseded by a far more complex, self-aware woman well able to communicate her own emotions and her own understanding of her situation. The poem begins with echoes of Arnold’s text — in the very first “the beach” remembers lines from the first stanza of “Dover Beach”:
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the ebb meets the moon-blanch’d sand,
Listen! You hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves suck back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand …
Lines also alluded to, surely, in Drysdale’s mention of how the “shingle will mutter grudgingly under his feet” — part of a man-made sequence (unlike that in Arnold’s lines), following as it does upon the slamming of a car door and caused by the tread of feet rather than the movement of the sea (the car also, of course, alerts us to another of the ways in which the “conversation” has moved on, chronologically speaking). But “after” these echoes of Arnold it is mostly “after Hecht” that Drysdale’s poem operates. The woman remembers the time when she was “a poet’s muse” — a memory, presumably, of the relationship with the protagonist of “Dover Beach” and, more generally, a memory of a cultural era when women were more likely to be sentimentalised into muses for male writers than to be allowed voices of their own. It is a memory at which she and her later lover laughed.
The later lover — who roughly corresponds to the speaker in “The Dover Bitch” — is now the spoken-of rather than the speaker. The speaker’s emotions are richer and subtler than the two previous male voices might have led us to expect. This is a woman whose loneliness (unsuspected in either of the previous poems) is assuaged by an annual meeting with her “beloved, insensitive, cynical swine”. That he was insensitive and cynical we might have assumed on the evidence of the two predecessor poems; that he is also “beloved” we can know only from this text. “I treat him right”, she says, in words borrowed from “The Dover Bitch”, but her gloss on the words gives them a very different significance: “I will treat him to all the year’s longing in one great lay”. It is her “longing” which drives this poem, and it takes on a kind of poignancy in the light of the way she has viewed by the male speakers in the poems by Arnold and Hecht. On one level this is a woman conscious both of her own ageing (“I will nurse him asleep on breasts that are not what they were”) and of her emotional dependence, as in her reliance on the memory-prompt provided by the perfume her lover gives her (another detail taken over from Hecht’s poem):
… I hope he remembers the bottle of Nuit d’Amour.
I’m almost out. And that’s what gets me through
Between times. The merest whiff on a tissue
Shushes the fears, tempers the imaginings,
Taking the raw edge off the gnawing knowing
That my long loss is someone else’s gain.
The “fears”, the painfully untempered “imaginings” and the “raw” knowledge that another woman has what she wants — this is the emotional territory in which she lives, a territory mapped all the more precisely by the text’s allusions to Arnold and Hecht. But there is another level too. Arnold’s speaker perhaps mocks (how consciously?) his partner with his allusion to Sophocles Antigone; Hecht’s speaker concedes that “she had read / Sophocles in a fairly good translation / And caught that bitter allusion to the sea”, the nice irony of “fairly good” ensuring that the speaker’s superiority (as a man who reads the original) is insisted upon. Drysdale’s speaker (a little more modestly) tells us that she has “O” Level Greek” — as well as the fact that her annual lover “tak[es] the piss” out of it (though she seems happy enough to share the joke). But her own classical allusions suggest that she has, in some respects at least, a far better understanding of her own situation than either of the previous speakers could offer. She recognises — one might even say she affirms — her identity (like Webster”s Duchess insisting “I am Duchess of Malfi still”), and does so in terms of a classical archetype:
… I am still Persephone, albeit gone to seed;
Six months remembering, then six anticipating.
By identifying herself with Persephone the speaker gives meaning to her loneliness, shape to the pattern of her life. After Persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter, had been kidnapped by Hades, her mother’s despair led her to remove her protection from the world and its growing of food. Only the intervention of Zeus, who sent Iris to negotiate with Hades, obtained her release. Even then Hades tricked Persephone into eating pomegranate seeds — and the divine law said that anyone who ate the food of the underworld must live there thereafter. Zeus, by way of compromise, decreed that Persephone was to live six months of each year in the Upper World (bringing spring and summer to the earth) and spend the other six months of the year as Hades’ queen in the underworld. Persephone, thus (with her “six months remembering, then six anticipating”) becomes a myth of the seasonal cycle, of the archetypal antitheses — such as light and dark, birth and death — whose contrast is only superficial insofar as her story reconciles them in an image of a larger continuity. The lonely, neglected speaker of “The Dover Bitch Criticises Her Life” — let alone her preceding selves in the poems by Arnold and Hecht — is, it seems, a figure of little importance. But insofar as she is Persephone she is a figure who re-enacts a myth of supreme meaning — it is not only the female voice that Drysdale’s poem reclaims, but the importance of the feminine itself.
Drysdale’s poem — her remark interjected into the ongoing conversation between Arnold and Hecht — says things that neither of its predecessors says. But it can only say them, can only become “an actual poem” (to quote Heath-Stubbs once more) because it is a response to what they have said already. Something similar is true of a great many of Drysdale’s other poems too. To take but a few examples, there is her conversation with the Shakespeare of Love’s Labour’s Lost (“Winter Song”); her dialogue with Frances Cornford in “The Fat White Woman Considers Her Options” (responding to a poem which Chesterton and Housman had already “answered”); there’s her poetic “remark” on Belloc’s “Tarantella” (“No, I don’t remember an inn …”). The grand is deflated (as in the echoes of Herrick in her “To the Plasterers, to Make Much of Time”); when we meet a poem called “One Hundred Words (or a Welsh Incident)” we need have no doubts as to the relevance of Robert Graves. In the splendid sequence of poems “The Seven Ages of the She-Poet” the conversational partners include Larkin (“She Writes Her ‘Toad’ Poem”) and Plath (“She Writes her ‘Daddy’ Poem”).
There are, of course, a great many fine poems by Ann Drysdale in which no such relationship to a predecessor poem (or poems) is readily discernible. I am not — in case it needs stressing — suggesting that her work is in any way merely bookish. It is far from that — full of vitality and wit, as it is, intelligent and sensitive, emotionally complex as it often is. These brief thoughts have been offered merely to signal some of the ways in which her work has given me a good deal of pleasure over the years, and at the same time that my comments seek to recognise the seriousness (but never the solemnity) with which Ann Drysdale has sought a place for her work in the ongoing poetic tradition, they also hope to register that particular creativity, insight and humour with which she has made her remarks at that party which began long before she arrived at it and — to quote John Heath-Stubbs for a last time — made them so well that “others will occasionally recall” them.
