But this homogeneity, this great conversation, could only happen if there was something in the language that made it possible. This is a much more elusive matter. Of course, one could come up with very broad generalisations; for example, two geniuses – Chaucer and Shakespeare – moulded the language decisively into poetry: they made English poetic. Or one could point to the unique flexibility of English that makes it equally suited to the epic, dramatic or lyric moods. Both observations are demonstrably true. Yet there are further things that may be said about the themes that run through poetic English which cut deep into our sense of who we are. Here is just one, a famous lyric from the 16th Century.

O WESTERN wind, when wilt thou blow That the small rain down can rain? Christ, that my love were in my arms And I in my bed again!

This is the clearest expression of the disjunction between the world and the soul that is sometimes defined as ‘pathetic fallacy’. The contingency of the weather is heartbreaking –it springs the lines open to expose a whole inner landscape of pain and longing. This heartbreak is an effect of the failed metaphor, for the weather does not reflect our feelings; the sun does not shine because you are happy –it does so because, as Samuel Beckett pointed out, it has “no alternative”. The failed metaphor arises from poetry itself. It is this link that connects Wordsworth and Wallace Stevens, both poets attempting to unite the poem and the world and, necessarily, failing. But the failed metaphor is also a crucial aspect of the English character. We are – or used to be – ironic, stoical, gloomy but always funny. We revel in defeat and adversity. Jack Dee, Eric Morecambe and Tommy Cooper are all about failed metaphors. They are made by and of poetry. There are countless other examples of poetic themes that are also English character traits – our tradition of radical dissent from received narratives is manifest in William Blake; our penchant for fantasy was made by Shakespeare, Edward Lear and Lord Tennyson; our sense of the comedy of the banal runs from Chaucer through Pope to The Royle Family and The Office; and the lively irony of our death was hammered into us by Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Keats and Hardy. And what about these lovely, silvery lines from Browning’s ‘Andrea del Sarto’ as an expression of the Englishman coming to terms with his fate in a deck chair in the late summer sun? Notice how the word ‘still’ seems to make the words pirouette away from banality.

I am grown peaceful as old age to-night. I regret little, I would change still less.

This correlation between who we are and what we have

THE GREAT DIVIDE

She looked at me and saw the bitter streets where I was born, the valley floor that offered no escape, the Chartist cobbles hard rain glistened on, and everywhere a sense of failing light

streaking the uplands, making a theatre of them as it did – the unrelenting grimness of the north, its chapels, pit-heads, slag heaps, union halls, processions through the darkness, millstone grit,

one great red furnace blazing from the Humber to the Sheaf – fought over, misbegotten, stratified. She looked straight through me to my father’s eyes black-rimmed and smiling after a long shift.

And as she gazed across the great divide, I let the balance of the landscape strain and give as if the world itself were undermined and felt – not pity at the thought of it – but anger first, then pride.

Ian Parks

written is, I believe, unique in the world. “Poetry”, wrote Auden, “makes nothing happen” –but, he added, “It survives, / A way of happening, a mouth”. Poetry is England’s way of happening. And yet few now know this. Poetry is barely taught and, when it is, the emphasis is always on the ‘accessible’. What on earth does this mean? That the poem should wallow only in the familiar? Children exposed to such supposed difficulty at an early age have no trouble with real poetry. My daughter understood Stevens’ ‘The Rabbit as King of the Ghosts’ better at ten than I did at 45. Nobody can understand England without some sense of her poetry. That means, of course, that very few now understand England. Perhaps that is the way it must be: “The roar of time plunging unchecked through the sluices / Of the days” (Ashbery) must sweep all away. But, though the signs are not good, English poetry is buried too deep in English soil ever to be quite eradicated; and so, like Hamlet, we must defy augury and send the brats home to learn at least a sonnet a night.

Bryan Appleyard’s How to Live Forever or Die Trying is published by Simon & Schuster. www.bryanappleyard.com

Autumn 2007 | The Liberal | 51