Until you crashed into the kitchen, slamming the door against the wall with that enthusiasm of yours… followed by a rather half-hearted apology, I was quite content. Happy in a pipe and slippers sort of way with the familiarity of Keats’s odes, with Shelley and Wordsworth, even Thomas Gray if it was raining and Charlotte Smith as a special treat. But then you upset the equilibrium with that ridiculously unsettling poetry, which you thrust before my eyes without a hint of warning. That apology by the way was insincere I can tell, I’m a psychologist. The comment ‘I’ll have to sit down my knees are like cow pats’ was also a diversionary tactic. Don’t think I didn’t notice your snaffling of the last tea biscuit, there were crumbs all over your lips. How you can crunch with a Northamptonshire drawl is beyond me – it’s no use looking at me with those dreamy eyes for they are too deep, and that sardonic smile no longer works. I have seen it too often in your poetry as a prelude to that storm of words which you advertise as the simple workings of a woman of the lower orders, but which I have learned, from bitter experience is no such thing. Those puzzles and enigma’s you call poems look this way and that and wink and hide until I question my own literary pretensions. Perhaps the puncturing of expectations is a deliberate ploy. Perhaps the rattle bag of thinking you inspire is a projection of your agitated seeking of the muse.
Take for example, An Essay on Woman. This is the first I discovered, like a needle in a haystack of unmitigated drivel produced by some of your contemporaries. You really must be mindful of the company you keep, it does nothing for your reputation.
My first impression was ‘here is a poem that can look after itself’. I read it a second time. Then copied it out word for word with a fountain pen my father carried with him all through Italy when he served with the Sherwood Foresters. It kept me awake at night. Especially the opening lines which shouldered both anger and resignation.
WOMAN – a pleasing, but short-liv’d Flow’r,
Too soft for Business, and too weak for pow’r.
A wife in Bondage, or neglected Maid;
Despis’d, if ugly; if she’s fair – betray’d.
Tis wealth alone inspires ev’ry Grace,,
And calls the Raptures of her plenteous Face.
I can quite see how feminists might react to this (I’ll explain the term later) but like everything else about you it is not quite so simple. Correct me if I’m wrong but throughout this poem and the others I detect irony of course, but also resignation and ambivalence.
The imitation of Pope is understandable and I’m sure if you lived in my time you would have a poster of him blazoned on your bedroom wall. After all, heroic couplets are the only form for serious poetry and I know you wish to be taken seriously. But it works for it enables the links of a conversation to be strung together while still allowing for your usual ambivalence and sense of the irresolvable.
Would you like another cup of tea?
Dorinda at her Glass picks up the motifs of transience and decay of which you are so fond. The consequences of growing old for women, the function of the female form being merely to satisfy the male gaze melts like candle wax across the page. I particularly enjoyed the lines
‘All scar’d with Furrows, and defac’d with Tears’ and Dorinda’s warning ‘And thou…thou must shortly feel / The sad Effect of Time’s revolving wheel’. It is so you. Time and again
there is a mixture of the feisty and the sad but always mitigated by a kind of impish humour. The stare and the shrug are used quite liberally. I perceive occasions when a double voice speaks out – these lines are written not for the workers in the fields but the eyes and minds of the refined – yet there is a reminder that the ravages of time are a leveller both for those who dine with silver spoons and those who dine with horn. Could you be the alienated insider? Now Mary I do not mean anything by this comment but merely pose the question.
Finally, for now at least let me mention Crumble Hall. There is a suggestion of gleeful decay in the title and the life of a country house from the viewpoint of the servants and animals who inhabit its spaces adds a new perspective to the genre. That ‘Unwieldly Roger’ gets his just desserts! Well I can only concur.
My, how the hours and centuries fly. I’m afraid it is time for you to return to the eighteenth now. Don’t worry about the mud and straw we have modern contrivances to deal with that now. Thank you for letting me read your poetry. It has been a genuine pleasure and I look forward to studying it in greater detail.
Now Mary, and I’m serious here. You must take care of yourself. You look tired and flushed, perhaps a temperature. That headache of yours is a concern too. Go home and rest and we will meet again when next I turn a page.