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C. H. Sisson. In The Trojan Ditch. Carcanet Press 1974. 228 pp. £3.75.

FEW ENTRANCES could be so masterful, dramatically late, but timely, as C. H. Sisson’s in this Collected Poems. Born in England in 1914, Sisson was silent for forty years, obscure for twenty more. Not that even now he will attract much notice: his work is the sort that stands clearer as more fashionable stuff slides away.

     After a long career as a civil servant, indeed without abandoning it, Sisson almost instantly became a poet both willed and worthy to please some of the highest brows of the century: Pound, Eliot, T. E. Hulme. Yet the Sisson of The London Zoo (1961), Numbers (1965), and Metamorphoses (1968) was a more classic artist than any of these. The emotions he evoked, the situations he depicted, often seemed to exist independently of himself. An incisive analyst of human nature, he wrote like a curiously updated Latin epigrammatist, and in the mid twentieth century this was bold in proportion as it was reactionary — almost reprehensibly crisp and direct.

     The updating lay, at first, in brutal quickness. Sisson made his verse leap before his whip:

My first trick was to clutch
At my mother and suck
Soon there was nothing to catch
But darkness and a lack . . .

The poet capable of writing this, conventionally communicative though it is, is capable of writing anything, something terrible . . . Sisson emerged and until recently remained a classic poet with an insidious twist — brusque, remorseless, a survivor with a stripping gaze.

     He was to become more formally modernist, for once again the hawk let loose by Pound and Eliot, the ambitious compulsion to make it new, was to strike, with a flurry, in mid career, the somewhat conventional habits of a modern poet. The early poems, however, still make up the bulk, and much of the merit, of Sisson’s work. They stand as the clear-edged part of his poetic figure, the part not blurred by the rain of modernist obliquity.

     The force of the early work is the decisive way it shuts the lid of a dismissive view of existence. Despairing of love, even of lust, and sceptical of individual identity, Sisson has held to a drily entertained Christianity that seems to distance him from God and his neighbours rather than draw him near. He represents the extreme of that strangulated sense of possibility, that post-apocalyptic sourness and caution, which dominates postwar British poetry. He is like a Philip Larkin without the tenderness that is the social face of self-pity — a Larkin who has found at the bottom of the empty tin the hardened wafer of Christ.

     ‘. . . The bulk of the volume’, Sisson explains, is the work of a man going onwards from thirty-five — poems of the return journey, therefore.’ The self-assurance of that ‘therefore’ spells both the pinched perspective and the pitiless truth-telling of the early poems: their smallness and their strength. Here, on the return journey, everything looks shrunk back on itself. In fact, Sisson was still a youth, so he notes in Art and Action, when ‘struck down by an appalling adolescent grief, as is not uncommon. René Béhaine identifies the very moment when he left behind him “le sens du bonheur et le pouvoir d’être heureux”. It was something of that kind.’ By the time he was ready to write poems this metaphysical grief had long ago eaten away the soft coverings of the world. The grief spoke without sentimentality, without hesitation, plainly, tersely. There simply was in Sisson no other voice.

     Especially in his novel, Christopher Homm (1965), Sisson’s cynicism is so inured that it takes a mean comfort in itself. The novel makes the return journey from Christopher’s senility to his imminent birth, and ends with the neatness of a logical demonstration: ‘Christopher crouched in his blindness. He was about to set out on the road to Torrington Street, and if he had known how bitter the journey was to be he would not have come.’ This can hardly be true: Christopher is that average human material which can rationalize comfort out of almost anything. It is only Sisson who is devastatingly knowing. There is ‘nothing good enough, happy enough, delicate enough in the world of this novel to quicken the sympathy or anxiety of the reader. With his contemptuous, brilliant sentences Sisson drives all foolishness before him, into nihilism. ‘She was that hostile spirit of truth which every man who loves himself must seek to overcome’; ‘she was not yet at the moment of destroying her hope by realizing it’ — the writing has a stunning, dissective, joyless force that leaves nothing to prize. Great fiction is a struggle of contrary voices; Christopher Homm, a neglected masterpiece of a kind, is a volley of intelligent scorn.

     Sisson’s presence in the poems is sometimes more intimate and vulnerable. As a result, they admit the attractions of folly. Consider the opening and close of ‘Eros’

One must be blind if there shall be love.
The grey-haired woman running with a small child
Feeds on a hope she can no longer enjoy:
The lunacy makes her straggling hair wild.
I expect no hope but what comes from without
If there were not a blind god I should be in doubt.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Now I seek daily for my own blindness
In the assertion reason cannot mitigate
And now an impotent old man comes running:
It is him I go to meet.
Will you not cut me one tress for tenderness,
Eros, because I acknowledge the blind?

To ask for a little pity — how humanizing it is. And how poignant that echoic train, ‘tress’, ‘tenderness’, ‘Eros’ — as if there were promise in a rhyme. No effect comparable to this, dependent as it is on complicity in blindness, softens Christopher Homm. Even so, how little, and how ambiguous, this complicity is. What does it mean to ‘acknowledge the blind’? It is hard for Sisson to earn his folly honestly. He stoops to it.

     Too patrician even to count as indulgence, his occasional self-exceptions are mostly a kind of allowance. He cannot help himself, he veers toward zero. Life is first delusion, then disgust. This is the skewer of existence and the only hope is that God may draw one off.

     What makes Sisson noteworthy is that his verse-making runs counter to his thought. The latter is — in his own phrase — a ‘reactionary bucketful’, the former progressive. As a home-made philosopher Sisson stops with the seventeenth century — after the death of Charles I, he has said, ‘the intelligence of England deteriorated’. A monarchist devoted to Charles Maurras, an Anglican who maintains that ‘No voluntary act of man can create a right: all rights are from a source independent of his will’, a classicist whose Weltanshauung was ‘adjusted’ by T. E. Hulme, Sisson must yet be a poet, a ‘man who has carefully avoided forming an hypothesis’, a man who ‘does not know what [he] wants to discover’.

     Bound, however, to what lies deeper than hypotheses — bound, as it were, to conclusions in his bones — how can he help but repeat the past? Only as a maker of original objects. ‘The poem exists as a natural object exists, so that you can look at it, smell it, as you can wind, waves or trees, without asking why you are doing so.’ By making his knowledge break out anew from original sources, the poet experiences disclosure, regains his soul. ‘Our lives are passed’, Whitehead notes, ‘in the experience of disclosure. As we lose this sense of disclosure, we are shedding that mode of functioning which is the soul.’ The knowledge that has already soaked into Sisson is largely the negation of soul: it would be better, so it whispers, not to be; in its finality it shuts out further knowledge. Transliterated, however, into apprehensible objects, it is restored to its original wildness.

     So it is that Sisson’s conservatism commits him to an aesthetic of apprehension—to immediate, startled knowledge of truths. As a poet, he must ‘keep what he is saying within the limits of the perceptible’ — all his ‘technical’ problems come to that. He must make ‘a poem which will not be the same as the last one,’ for ‘what, through its familiarity, can no longer be attended to’ is of no use for his purpose. His poetry must be the artful dodge of the nihilistic blades of his knowledge.

     Until recently, Sisson’s dodges and makings lay in minute but telling inventions against ‘a background of expectedness’. He was not out to shock, only to surprise — surprise like a twinge of pain. Here is a typical poem, ‘The Art of Living’:

The child can grow
Only by being blind
He owes his greatness
To his fumbling.

The mind askew
From the appetite that drives him
The youth gives reasons
And has destinations.

The old man’s waltzing nerves
Misdirect his hand
Aphasia, medicine, hope
Obscure his end.

The syntactical similarity of the first and last stanzas, linking fumbling with fumbling and contrasting with the confident forward motion and reasoned divisions of the middle stanza, the rightness of ‘askew’ in its end position, the hopeful rhyme of ‘reasons’ and ‘destinations’, the elegant cruelty of ‘waltzing’, the epigrammatic economy of the whole — all this is delightful, but chiefly it is the rhythm, so patternless yet so incisive and assured, that gives freshness to the poem. Curious the effect, in the first and third stanzas, of the missing full stop at the end of the second line: after a slight catch, the third line almost hastens on, as if surprised into motion too soon — impelled much as we are, child, youth, then old man, to the end. Unpredictable, without stability, short-breathed, distracted, the rhythm of the poem is the perceptible complement of the argument, the dance of its bones. The tone asks no quarter from life, the rhythm gives none. The incipient panic of ‘Only by being’, the similarly falling ‘fumbling’, which is just balanced by its echoic dependency on the poise and majesty of ‘greatness’ — in these and other instances the rhythms are finely flexible and sensitive, in spite of the all but brutal chopped and quartered impression left by the poem as a whole. Metre, here, has been misdirected for an effect that could not be more direct. The rhythm is a happily fumbled expectancy. ‘The real proof of originality’, Sisson states in English Poetry 1900-1950, is always to be looked for ‘in the rhythm’. Perhaps rhythm is only one of several proofs, but together with conceptual abruptness, it is where the early Sisson is most original.

     As noted earlier, Sisson’s mind moves with an aphorist’s speed, and this itself, like a pushing wind, helps keep his work perceptible. Poetry tends to retard: it seeks the plenty of its moods. But Sisson flies on with what looks like disenchantment not only with his subject but with the poetic medium itself. He will not be deceived by rhythms, throaty sounds. He will be severely brisk. Yet he tells because he sends us directly to the question, What is it possible or necessary to feel about the conditions of life? He is always at his assays, weighing the irreducible. All the same, his subjects and moments can be poignantly particular. Here is ‘Christmas at the Greyhound’:

‘All strangers now: there is nobody that I know.’
Draw near to the hearth; there is one nature of fire.

As a conception this could not be further pared, it is the core. The poem is over in an instant, yet how much it contains: a revisit to the past, disappointment, anonymity, loneliness, dialogue, a chance intimacy, goodwill, solace, a specific setting, metaphysical depth. The poem develops simply by turning the anonymous so as to see it in a different light, as the One. This change is enacted by the rhythms. Slack, ‘There is nobody that I know’ seems to look around, disconsolate. But ‘There is one nature of fire’, however similar, is roused by its central, climactic accents. These echo the firmness of ‘Draw near’ and conduct the ear toward comfort.

     As John Peale Bishop has said, ‘The classic poet is not himself. He assumes a mask in order to speak’, and again: ‘The classic poet does not suffer. Man suffers: only as a man can the poet suffer.’ The mask of ‘man’ gives the classic poet a strategic advantage: he makes us wonder at the secrets behind the mask and if he takes it off he has our full, almost shocked attention. So it is, for instance, with one of Sisson’s finest poems, ‘Loquitur Senex’:

I return to the horror of truth
After a life of business:
I was happy to be employed
But now my hunger is extreme.

The swans drift by and the bridge
Is pendulous over the profound stream:
The water is habitable by the mind
And the stationary fish are swimming against it.

Where were the fish when I,
Flurried by consultation,
Laboured to distinguish myself
In vanity and discursive reason?

Now, with the fish, nose pressed
Against reality,
I look through the watery glass
At weeds standing on the stone.

The age is lost that had
Laughter hidden under the hand
But in the peace that remains
There is still what lives in the eye.

Gracious God, when the tension gives
And I am swept below the weir
Do as Berkeley says
Hold this world in your mind.

Of course even this has Sisson’s characteristic mental swiftness and classic hardness. The mask is removed and the face beneath has the look of the mask. Still, it is a face, individual and vulnerable, and the reader is alone with the poet, not in the open theatre of man. The drama of the poem lies precisely in the poet’s hesitations about revealing himself. He is before us, then not, before us again, then not; finally he comes very near us in his touching plea to God, made personal by his frankly admitted need.

     For all that it removes the mask, ‘Loquitur Senex’ represents the early, classic Sisson at his best. There is nothing to fault in the poem except that it proves too great to demonstrate ‘the horror of truth’. Drawn though it is upon the diminished life of the present, it finds there a solacing interval, an utterness between the busy past and the threatened undoing of the future. The poem clarifies and intensifies, in William Carlos Williams’s words, ‘that eternal moment in which we alone live’. Indeed, the eternity for which the poet hungers is but the salvation of the ‘tension’ that,’nose pressed/ Against reality’, he now experiences as peace. If he wants more of the same, it is because what he has is, at bottom, insecure. Not the horror of truth but the poignant desire of the living for more life is the felt subject of the poem.

     The poem enacts the tension between the stationary and the flowing. It steams from topic to topic yet each quatrain is stopped as by a weir. In its enclosing stanzas the poem appeals by example to God. Even as the lack of rhyme and the irregular rhythms scatter it, it gathers itself by recurring to three and four beats. In all, it is subject to time, it holds time in a mind.

     Just as the poem does not dare recline on time, which can break, so it keeps aloof from Appearance, even while viewing it almost in wonder. The diction is characteristically detached, abstract. The Latinisms — pendulous, profound, habitable, stationary, etc. — create a learned, reflective distance between the poet and what he observes. Sisson’s ear and eye are alike elegiac; from his words and images things have already taken their individual farewell, been subsumed into class. ‘The age is lost that had/Laughter hidden under the hand’ — the laughter and the hand have become anonymous ghosts. Yet how deft Sisson is at making his generalized instances just specific enough to stab. Though immediate experience has long since dried out of his words, they are nonetheless made to evoke an immediate experience. A translator of Catullus, Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Sisson endows Latinisms with a new, if still subdued, sensitivity. In ‘On my Fifty-First Birthday’ he writes of gulls that have come inland: ‘It was waves and the surf running they heard before/And now the lark-song and the respiration of leaves.’ ‘Respiration’ could not be more unexpectedly beautiful. That the word itself breathes, and gently, suddenly swelling and subsiding, is given as the directest kind of knowledge.

     And so, until five or so years ago, Sisson was original by adding to what was old a newly balked rhythm and a protective, sad, withering rapidity of mind. At once anchronistic and novel, he perpetuated Christian and classic moral poetry, with it.s pessimism and disgust of life, beyond what had seemed its natural term. His is the most severe voice in English poetry of the twentieth century. With their bony fingers his early poems cannot fail to hold and disturb us. Their originality is of the subtlest order: a slight, insidious slipping away from what has already been said and done in traditional verse, the seeming first crumble toward dissolution and the grave.

     Most modern innovation has been more aggressive, go-for-broke, large and legible; and Sisson’s own aesthetic doctrine of unfamiliarity has now flared into originality of this kind. A poet who in undramatic ways was always ‘new’ is now so new in his manner of attacking subjects, crumpling syntax, erasing punctuation, changing direction, and structuring poems in tenuously related sections, that he has become formidable. His effort to ‘break through the surface facilities’ is presently bent to attenuating form and subjectivising discourse. His purpose in part is a deliberate and superior difficulty. Sisson has remarked that, after The Rock and Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot went back to ‘something which kept him ahead of the vulgar reader, as the earlier poems had done’. To the classic poet, the use of obscurity is elitist, a maintaining of standards of sensibility and intelligence. What puzzles us makes us humble; to feel our own unworthiness is, alike in Sisson and David Jones and T. S. Eliot, prompted by technique.

     Yet the classic Christian poet gains more than aloofness from difficulty, and so do we. He creates within the inexorable a subjective space of qualified freedom, asserting his own inventive powers, not necessarily mean, against the entrapping inventions of God. In bad faith, without faith, for his real faith is elsewhere, he becomes a demi-urge. No wonder avant-garde classical poems are so often flat of voice. Here is part of Sisson’s ‘Van Dieman’s Land’:

In retreat
From all the world, like a squid
Into the sand,
Law
Sub-burrowed by a conjunctive and

It is no more than that and
The conjunction is not firm it
Waits
To establish nothing is
Variable as wind, flitting
Between cliff pillars of if and when,
Itself less and more uncertain.

What the sea
Dictates it answers
Amiss, or comes softly home
To the west windows, home
But does not enter. No
Voice could. There are daughters also
Of sea-urchins and the moved weeds
Who exceed, they say, in all beauty

But the crabs walk by them indifferent.
I have kept
Several seasons without endeavour
And slept.

And here is the close of an early Sisson poem, ‘In a Dark Wood’:

Christians on earth may have their bodies mended
By premonition of a heavenly state
But I, by grosser flesh from Grace defended
Can never see, never communicate.

Though the subjects of the poems are the same, the new work is easily the more wonderful, because imaginatively the more unregenerate. Both poems subvert their subjects, but their strategies are opposed. The second proudly counters its attempted humility with a military mastery of form. The quatrain exhibits the capacity for discipline denied by its semantic burden. The first poem, by contrast, all but flaunts a wealth of subjective and oblique conception. This world in which a conjunction becomes animate, and the west windows are under the sea, is not God’s, but the poet’s, one of a kind. The attenuated form expresses both the confessed absence of spiritual ‘endeavour’ and precisely the spirit’s endeavour — recalcitrant and doomed — to elude and rival the great iron world with its own seductive conceptions.

     If still despairing, the new Sisson is somewhat bolder and more passionate — he has torn off the classic mask, and though he disguises himself, casting himself in imaginary roles, he seems to want his verse to answer to more of his own anguish. His poetry has become a reckoning — though often in situations so obscure that both problem and solution seem foundered in fantasy:

Do not walk with her, winds are blown that way

A storm of leaves and all may disappear
And yet below the circle of my mind
Playing in spring-time there is Proserpine.

But I am rather Cerberus than Dis
Neither receive nor yet pursue this child
Nor am I Orpheus who could bring her back.

I stand and roar and only shake my chain
The river passes and gives others sleep
I am the jaws nothing will pass between.

The writing is beautiful in its dry emphases, its harsh and defeated seriality. Reading the new poems, one has often a sense of powers loosed, made a little wild. The verse wants to get at something, it cannot always say what, though the more Christian the subject, the more fiercely clear the aim. I quote the first section of a superb poem, ‘The Usk’:

Such a fool as I am you had better ignore
Tongue twist, malevolent, fat mouthed
I have no language but that other one
His the Devil’s, no mouse I, creeping out of the cheese
With a peaked cap scanning the distance
Looking for truth.
Words when I have them, come out, the Devil
Encouraging, grinning from the other side of the street
And my tears
Streaming, a blubbered face, when I am not laughing
Where in all this
Is calm, measure,
Exactness
The Lord’s peace?

Speech for Sisson is more than ever the abscess of Christian necessity, miserable with self-will. ‘No /Voice could’ enter the supernatural, but Sisson speaks in almost a new way in each of his more ambitious poems, as if trying to find the one voice that might. In the asymmetry and unsettled rhythms of the poems one may detect an impatience with speech, a disbelief in its magic. By comparison, the early poems seem resigned to being ‘verse’. They take on less and believe in it more.

     Is this new poetry secure enough, in the main, to impose the illusion of its necessity? Though its striking power is seldom great, it yet catches one up on its keen strangeness, even as it holds one off or frustrates with its tentative limps. Indeed, the new poems that fail to fend off our scepticism are precisely those that, in his bold search for the sound of an utter reckoning, the poet patterns after strict, archaic forms. The couplets in ‘The Crucifix’ have, as it were, so much their own ear that their message is reduced to patter:

I go diminuendo all the time
     Towards a heap of dust or splash of slime.
All good is in the flesh, and what I see
     Answers to this description exactly . . .

‘Good Friday’ reads like Herbert put under a screw:

I, who hope little,
    Contrairy, find
         Mind
Today say that it will
Rather than sit still,

Rather than hear thud
    The bumping cross,
        Loss
Echo here, garden mud
Turn up here as blood . . .

The poet seems to aspire as much to a place in Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century as to a place in heaven. ‘The Crucifix’ and ‘Good Friday’ are poetic revenants, out of the natural order. Both invalidate their burden by calling attention to their form — forms that require an almost boastful performance and that, because familiar, seem independent of their import, formal machines.

     No, the more hesitant or drily stark or dauntingly go-about the new Sisson is, the greater is his authority. It is, indeed, all but true that he lacks a voice of his own: ‘Nothing is in my own voice because I have not /Any.’ Yet his very doubt of this gives him a voice — flat, scraped bare, joyless, edged with assertion. Whether writing ‘No word but weather, let me be like that’, or the lines of ‘Martigues’, mourning Maurras,

He took a flower
And gave it in a morning without hope.
Hand down the rose
Hand down the myrtle, stuff the air with thyme . . .

or being plain, as in ‘It is all I have, the bitten past, /Not all I came to’, or charming the powers-that-be through unpretentiousness,

Pallas Athene, my dear
Look kindly upon my plain endeavours.
Light spins over the Camargue.
Evening is here . . .

his notes are his own. Their common denominator is a hurt quality, pinched but not complaining — a tone prepared for self-cancellation:

The empty space is better than himself
But best of all when, certain winters past,
No one says: There he was. I knew him well.

     This new Sisson is still at the beginning, but how propitious that beginning is. It is also, as noted at the outset, timely, for Sisson joins the small number of English poets — W. S. Graham, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes — who, since the mid sixties, have been making English poetry over on non-Romantic avant-garde lines. He has changed direction in time to be a pioneer. What links him with the other poets, apart from talent and daring, is a weak arm’s-thrust salvation from nihilism. How curious that the major innovations in poetic form in this century have been divided between opposite pressures — the Romantic hunger for universal connections, the Modernist or Nihilist despair of them. Sisson follows Eliot as one who, despite his Christianity, has entered avant-garde poetry on its darker side.