Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

Tacita Dean’s superb 2007 film on Michael Hamburger features no dialogue until the last ten minutes or so, when Hamburger, at a wooden table, discusses the different varieties of apples which he has grown in the garden of his Middleton home. He mentions some apple seeds which Ted Hughes sent him and then reads the elegy, available here, that he wrote hard upon Hughes’s death. It’s the only poem in the film, and is consequently all the more intrinsic to the film’s power. I found the poem, especially its last stanza, very moving indeed; as I still find it when I read it on page 56 of his accessible but somewhat patchy collection, Intersections (Anvil, 2000):

Uneaten this day of his death
In either light the dark Devonshire apples lie
That from seed I raised on a harsher coast
In remembrance of him and his garden.
Difference filled out the trees,
Hardened, mellowed the fruit to outlast our days.

The last two lines seal the poignancy. Hamburger died shortly after Dean filmed him.

For all its flaws, Intersections also includes one of Hamburger’s finest poems ‘The Lean-to Greenhouse’, a masterpiece of English wabi-sabi, which opens thus:

Lightly it seems to wear its eighty years
By being there still, leaning
On a bracket of bricks that alone are sound
And at its apex depending
On a cottage wall four centuries old.

I love old greenhouses, and poems about them.

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Temperamentally, as expressed in poetry at least, one would have considered Hughes’s unflinching view of nature to be more extreme than Hamburger’s gentler, more meditative approach. Hamburger’s words on Hughes in his survey of ‘tensions in modern poetry from Baudelaire to the 1960s’, The Truth of Poetry (Pelican, 1972), did nothing but state the obvious, with eccentric repetition of his full name:

In the work of Ted Hughes, [. . .] historical experience is inseparable from a new concern with the ferocity of predatory animals. Ted Hughes did not need to draw elaborate analogies between his hawk, whose ‘manners are tearing off heads’, and the human proclivities that have given him his peculiar power to identify with hawks, pike, thrushes, otters or water-lilies; the single word ‘manners’ is enough to make the connection. Even Ted Hughes’s snowdrop is ‘brutal’ in the pursuit ‘of her ends’.

By comparison, Heaney’s verdict on Hughes, as articulated to Dennis O’Driscoll in Stepping Stones, was more insightful and lyrical: ‘There’s Blakean recklessness in Hughes, the poetry of the living present, the shimmer of the gene pool and the galaxies.’ (He also calls Hughes ‘a poet of genius’.) But then Heaney’s criticism and his writings on the process of poetry, like his poetry itself, were peerless among his English-language contemporaries, so maybe the comparison isn’t really fair.