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COMPLICITIES
British Poetry 1945‐2007

edited by
ROBIN PURVES
&
SAM LADKIN

þ
Litteraria Pragensia
Prague 2007
Copyright © Robin Purves & Sam Ladkin, 2007
Copyright © of individual works remains with the authors

Published 2007 by Litteraria Pragensia

an imprint of Charles University

Faculty of Philosophy,
Náměstí Jana Palacha 2, 116 38 Praha 1
Czech Republic
www.litterariapragensia.com

All rights reserved. This book is copyright under international copyright

conventions. Except for provisions made under “fair use,” no part of this book
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior
written permission from the copyright holders. Requests to publish work from
this book should be directed to the publishers.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the British Academy in

the funding of this project.

Cataloguing in Publication Data

Complicities: British Poetry 1945‐2007, edited by Robin Purves and Sam

Ladkin.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978‐80‐7308‐194‐2 (pb)
1. British Poetry. 2. Contemporary Poetics. 3. Literary Studies.
I. Purves, Robin. II. Ladkin, Sam. III. Title

Printed in the Czech Republic by PB Tisk

Typesetting, cover & design by lazarus
Contents

Introduction
Robin Purves and Sam Ladkin 1

Robin Purves
W.S. Graham and the Heidegger Question 4

Thomas Day
“This Foolish Body”: Comedy and Contexture in
Geoffrey Hill’s Scenes from Comus 30

Keston Sutherland
XL Prynne 43

Alizon Brunning
“The mere and cunning front”: The Sovereignty of Man in
J.H. Prynne’s “Crown” 74

Robin Purves
The Hymen Song: A Note on Iphigenia and J.H. Prynne’s
“Letter To John Wilkinson” 91

J.H. Prynne
Letter to John Wilkinson 97

Bruce Stewart
Quincunx: Seamus Heaney and the Ulster Regionalists 102

D.S. Marriott
Veil, No.2 145
Stephen Thomson
The Forlorn Ear of Jeff Hilson 153

Craig Dworkin
Poetry Without Organs 168

Sophie Read
“say Smile”: Peter Manson’s Faces 194

Sara Crangle
The Art of Exhalation in Poetry: Chris Goode’s Bathos 201

Malcolm Phillips
“Loss Format”: Liminality and Incorporation in
Chris Goode’s Poetry 222

Tom Jones
Andrea Brady’S Elections 238

Josh Robinson
“Abject self on patrol”: Immaterial Labour, Affect,
and Subjectivity in Andrea Brady’s Cold Calling 253

Sam Ladkin
Problems for Lyric Poetry 271

Jennifer Cooke
The Laughter of Narcissism: Loving Hot White Andy
and the Troubling Chain of Equivalence 323

Ian Patterson
Born Again, Born Better: Text Generation and Reading
Strategies in Michael Kindellan and Reitha Pattison,
Word is Born 341

Notes on Contributors 352

Introduction

This book aims at combining a set of various but compatible

approaches to the work of poets writing in Britain (and Ireland
too, we suppose, given Bruce Stewart’s essay on Seamus
Heaney, though it focuses mainly on work written while the
poet was resident in Belfast). One of its tasks is to cause very
different poets and different approaches to the work of those
poets to come into association socially, though the proportions
in this combination are somewhat contingent on our own
enthusiasms as well as a host of other considerations, some
pragmatic and some relatively idealistic.
The mix, therefore, is not arrived at in a spirit, say, of
modish inclusiveness or polemical ‘subversion’; we do not
think of ourselves as permitting the socially marginal to co‐exist
in a monitored space with more established or popularly
disputed reputations such as those of W.S. Graham, Geoffrey
Hill, J.H. Prynne and Seamus Heaney. Discussion of the poetry
of Chris Goode or Jeff Hilson or Peter Manson is not being
included here as part of a new conservatory, bolted on to the
main building of a recognised canon: the ‘non‐mainstream’ as
new category in and of the ‘mainstream.’ This is partly because
there is not much sense that some of the younger or less well‐
known writers whose poems are analysed in these pages are
deliberately writing themselves out of a margin of deprivation.
There are reasons, noble as well as self‐serving, for considering
particular kinds of margin as a privileged vantage point from
which to look out on the world, and the notion of the avant
garde as a shelter for poets of all ages who, for example, disrupt

[1]
syntax as a substitute for having an idea, or as an excuse for not
having one, is a corkscrew to the watchful hearts of the most
syntactically disruptive poets in these pages.
It is on the whole the editors’ ideas of utility and interest
which govern the issues of inclusion and exclusion and which
conspire to make the book what it is. This extends as much to
the approaches of the authors of individual essays as it does to
the poets whose work they interpret. Attention is paid
throughout to the importance of intractable details in the
particulars of a poem as well as the social conditions from
which the poems emerge.
The editor, publisher and important poet, Andrew Crozier
(see D.S. Marriott’s essay on Crozier’s “The Veil Poem” in this
volume), in his introduction to the poetry anthology A Various
Art edited with Tim Longville, warned against reading their
selection as an attempt at national representation, “as though
the prestige of national origin constituted a claim on the
world’s attention”:

[In such anthologies] inclusiveness of national poetry, in the

possessive embrace of a sectional view of change and
difference, takes on the exclusivity of fashion. The longer this
show runs the less it exhibits the organicism implicit in the
notion of a national poetry (however complex and dividedly
other the nation has become) and the more it bespeaks new
Imperial suitings. Pre‐war anthologies, for some reason, had no
need of such clothes, and maintained a less complacent style of
polemic, as though some cultural positions still remained to be
stormed.

This collection of essays does not seek to fashion a bespoke

Albion from the remnants of Britain’s various poetic traditions.
The poetry considered here, and its criticism too, is by and large
critical of the “new Imperial suitings” beneath which the old
and new networks of power run. Much of the work gathered
here knows language, consciousness and culture to be
profoundly complicit across the board in the extension of acts of

[2]
domination, from the preparation for and execution of war to
the composition of the suicide note, from the overt corruption
of the democratic franchise to cold calling’s interpellation of the
human subject as consumer‐in‐waiting. The label most likely to
be fashionable for the next little while, used to capture and
devalue the poetry of the second half of the twentieth century is
the “British Poetry Revival.” Watch it creep across the internet
and into the book‐stacks. The sad negativity of that title
performs what it was designed to resist, treating poetry like a
giant in the woods, out there, back then, down on its luck,
struggling for breath.
All of the work examined in the course of this book is
representative of other networks not represented here, and is
partly defined by those relations; so the book does not aim at
the exhaustive portrayal of British Poetry 1945‐2007; no book
realistically could.

Robin Purves
Sam Ladkin

The editors would like to thank Professor Michael Parker of the

University of Central Lancashire for his invaluable help in the
realization of this project.

[3]
 Robin Purves

W.S. Graham and the Heidegger

Question

A discrepancy exists between the two existing monographs on

Sidney Graham’s poetry. Each straightforwardly contradicts the
other concerning the relevance or otherwise of Heidegger’s
philosophical writings for the poet and for a properly attentive
reading of his poems.
Tony Lopez’s The Poetry of W.S. Graham,1 published in 1989,
makes the claim that “Heidegger’s entire project, the strategies
of his composition, the examples that he uses to explain
himself, and the extreme reflexive mode of expression, are all
very relevant to Graham’s work”2 and he goes on to
demonstrate, as he sees it, the special affinity of some of these
ingredients for Graham’s late poem “Implements In Their
Places.” His argument proposes that there is a substantial
thematic overlap between Graham’s poems and certain
passages in Heidegger’s Being and Time, as well as some of the
philosopher’s later essays on Hölderlin, and it marshals another
kind of evidence when it cites a reading list of philosophy titles,
in Graham’s hand‐writing, which includes Being and Time and a
volume by Martha King called Heidegger’s Philosophy. Even if

1 Tony Lopez, The Poetry of W.S. Graham (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1989).
2 Lopez, W.S. Graham, 106.

[4]
 no‐one can prove definitively that Graham ever got round to
reading both or either of these two books, Lopez concludes that
“Heidegger is clearly a source of certain lay ideas”3 in
“Implements In Their Places,” which the poem “takes up and
develops” since it has been assembled “to realise and prove the
formula which Heidegger developed in his writings on
Hölderlin.”4
It appears to be possible that the title of “Implements In
Their Places,” and not just some of its themes, was derived
from early sections of Being and Time. As Lopez points out, John
Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, the English translators of
Being and Time, provide a footnote which gives the word
‘implement’ as one possible translation of the German ‘das
Zeug,’5 although they also communicate a preference to
interpret the word in terms of ‘gear,’ ‘paraphernalia’ or
‘equipment.’ After his mention of the footnote, Lopez gives an
account of Heidegger’s concept of ‘Being‐in‐the‐world’ in two
sentences which introduce longer quotations from Heidegger
himself. These quotations receive no further exposition but
appear to have been chosen because they declare the
significance of ‘equipment’ (which Lopez reads as
“Implements”) for the experience of ‘Being‐in‐the‐world,’
especially in terms of how our active making‐use of
‘equipment’ and, in particular, our awareness at particular
moments of its ‘unusability,’ makes us newly aware of ‘places.’

3 Lopez, W.S. Graham, 107.

4 Lopez, W.S. Graham, 101.
5 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) 97, n.1. “‘das Zeug.’ The word ‘Zeug’ has no
precise English equivalent. While it may mean any implement, instrument, or
tool, Heidegger uses it for the most part as a collective noun which is analogous
to our relatively specific ‘gear’ (as in ‘gear for fishing’) or the more elaborate
‘paraphernalia,’ or the still more general ‘equipment,’ which we shall employ
throughout this translation.” It should be noted that Lopez’s quotation of this
passage contains a small but potentially misleading typographical error: the ‘i’
in ‘implement’ is rendered in upper case, which may give the unfortunate
impression that this particular word is given a special significance in (this
translation of) Being and Time.

[5]
 These ‘places’ must therefore be defined according to
Heidegger “as the place of this equipment.” Once the
juxtaposition of ‘implements,’ as a synonym for equipment,
with the word ‘places’ has been achieved, Lopez concentrates
on establishing a connection between Heidegger’s engagement
with the Pre‐Socratics, and with Heraclitus in particular, and
what looks to him like Graham’s use of similar materials in
Implements 68 and 70.6
For the record, I find Lopez’s account of Heidegger’s
influence on Graham almost convincing; that is, I find the
readings that result both useful and interesting but not so
persuasive as finally to persuade me that Graham was as
straightforwardly, programmatically Heideggerian as Lopez
claims. The nature of the Heidegger question, and the quality of
the evidence as it pertains to Graham’s writings, means that a
serious critical assessment of the plausibility of Lopez’s case,
made in an analysis of only two short poems, will not be able to
provide a definitive answer. It would be reasonably easy to
demonstrate that, working outwards from the same point as
Lopez, a similar procedure to his could be followed, to produce
a different set of connections between the poet and the
philosopher, connections which might strike the reader as
plausible but which do not necessarily prove that an important
encounter did occur which had significant consequences for the
direction of Graham’s poetry.
Being and Time opens with the announcement that it
eventually will aim at “the Interpretation of time as the possible
horizon for any understanding whatsoever of Being”7 but
begins with its analysis of equipment in order to distinguish
various reputedly minor or secondary modes of ‘Being’ from
Dasein, the privileged and prior mode that discloses a ‘world’
in which the other modes take a place of significance.
Equipment’s mode of being is named Being‐present‐at‐hand,
and equipment, Heidegger says, “always is in terms of [aus] its

6 Lopez, W.S. Graham, 106‐8.

7 Heidegger, Being and Time, 1.

[6]
 belonging to other equipment: ink‐stand, pen, ink, paper,
blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room.”8
Though Heidegger lists these specific things as mere examples
and of no particular significance at this stage in themselves,
these modest furnishings and the dwelling‐space that they open
and divide are also the familiar mise‐en‐scène for many of
Graham’s poems: their special significance for the poet inheres
in their being encountered as objects which together amount to
being equipment‐in‐order‐to‐write. Heidegger goes on to claim
that what he calls a “concernful absorption in using ink in a pen
to write on paper, seated in a chair, at a table illuminated by a
lamp, in a room”—the act of writing, in other words—is a
primordial and unveiled encounter with equipment as
equipment. The unselfconscious sitting and grasping of the pen,
and its movement across the page, constitutes a true encounter
with those things as just that which they are. On the other hand
and in Heidegger’s terms, Graham’s late‐night dramas dwell in
those moments when equipment is conspicuous, when the
human subject meets the presentation of what is ready‐to‐hand
as a certain unreadiness‐to‐hand. The pen and the page, the
table; the proximity of the lamp‐light which makes the rest of
the room more dark; the room and its window, intrude into the
poem when they ought to be elided from it, that is, when they
ought to be being made use of without explicitly being noticed.
It is only the normative “concernful absorption” which can be
brought up short by the unreadiness‐to‐hand when “the
constitutive assignment of the “in‐order‐to” to a “towards‐this”
has been disturbed.”9 This moment is just that point, Heidegger
claims, when the “context of equipment is lit up, not as
something never seen before, but as a totality constantly sighted
beforehand in circumspection. With this totality, however, the
world announces itself.”10

8 Heidegger, Being and Time, 97.

9 Heidegger, Being and Time, 105.
10 Heidegger, Being and Time, 105.

[7]
 Illumination of the poet’s equipment opens a world for
Graham, just above or below or to the side of this one: a world
of language, with all of its illusory freedoms and liberating
constraints. This, however, is as much, if not more, a
Heideggerian interpretation of what Graham does as it is a
speculative attempt to gauge how much Graham might owe to
Heidegger in terms of what he conceivably borrows for his
poems.
Matthew Francis’s monograph on W.S. Graham11 casts a
much more sceptical eye than that of Lopez over the anecdotal
evidence for Graham’s engagement with the thought of
Heidegger. Although he mentions at the beginning of the book
that “some of [Graham’s] friends have told me that he used to
speak at times of Heidegger and the pre‐Socratic
philosophers”12, Francis proposes, for example, that Graham’s
jotted‐down titles of Heideggeriana are likely to be a dutiful
memo to himself of books Graham will never have got round to
reading, in which case, an important part of Lopez’s evidence
that Graham probably did read Heidegger is used in Francis’s
case as evidence that he probably never did.13 When Francis says
that “the poems do not feel—to me, at any rate—like the
products of a trained philosophical mind”14 the cautious
articulation of his admittedly indistinct conviction nevertheless
rules out the possibility that, even if Graham did not have the
systematic education of the professional philosopher or perhaps
even of the serious student of philosophy, he could have read
Heidegger with interest and picked up elements of his work
which fed into the poetry in unsystematic and productively
delinquent ways. The rebuttal of Lopez’s Heideggerian

11 Matthew Francis, Where the People Are: Language and Community in the Poetry of
W.S. Graham (Cambridge: Salt, 2004).
12 Francis, Where the People Are, 2.
13 Francis, Where the People Are, 2‐3: “Graham’s notes on philosophy are largely
lists of texts and authors for future reading, and they seem to me like the
fantasies of a man day dreaming about a systematic education he is never likely
to get round to.”
14 Francis, Where the People Are, 2.

[8]
 interpretation of parts of “Implements In Their Places,” the
demonstration, based on internal evidence provided by the
poems, that might clinch Francis’s case does not make an
appearance in his book and the poem itself, perhaps
symptomatically, is not given much critical attention. Francis
tends only to quote from the poem in support of his own over‐
arching thesis concerning Graham’s supposed logocentrism:
namely the privileging in his poetry of certain perceived
qualities of speech (immediacy, presence, life) over opposed
(supposed) characteristics of writing (alienation, absence,
death), and Graham’s efforts to overcome the debilitating
features inherent in writing in order to reconstitute something
like a community.
One important strand of Francis’s argument stems from the
analysis of what he calls, borrowing from Michael J. Reddy and
Lakoff and Johnson, the “conduit” metaphor, which is
summarised thus:

IDEAS (or MEANINGS) ARE OBJECTS.

LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS ARE CONTAINERS.

COMMUNICATION IS SENDING.

The speaker puts ideas (objects) into words (containers) and

sends them (along a conduit) to a hearer who takes the
ideas/objects out of the word/containers.15

The conduit metaphor is described as overwhelmingly

pervasive throughout literate cultures and also as having a
special significance in Graham’s poetry. Graham is said to be
stubbornly attached to the metaphor, despite the fact that

the idea is a strange one. Clearly words are not receptacles with
an outside and an inside, even though we habitually speak of
them as if they were. Nor are thoughts themselves passed

15 Lakoff and Johnson, cited in Francis, Where the People Are, 4.

[9]
 across space, ‘since these are locked within the skull and life
process of each of us.’16

This is not the place to worry too much about the dubiety of
these assertions, and particularly the notion that ideas can enjoy
an apparently pre‐linguistic existence “locked within the skull”
before being embodied in their proxy words and concepts
which are “passed across” in their stead. From this perspective
Francis argues that Graham has a partly irrational attachment
to the conduit metaphor, an attachment which involves the
poetic effort to “remake” the metaphor by incorporating all of
the difficulties which interfere with and distort the possibility
of communication. These difficulties are represented by the
distance between speaker and hearer “symbolically identified
with wildernesses of various kinds,”17 and the presence of
threatening animals and physical impediments in that
intervening space. Because the poet only revises the conduit
metaphor and does not reject it completely, he is actually
engaged, therefore, in an incomplete or insincere rejection of its
characterisations of language, and this is said to cause
difficulties for the coherence of Graham’s project as a whole, or
at least for that part of it which takes language as its central
focus. The problems arise most clearly, says Francis, when
contradictions emerge in Graham’s metaphorical economy: “If
the poem is a space, how can it also be an ‘obstacle’—empty
and full at the same time? If it is a lifeless waste, why is it so full
of inhabitants?”18 There is, however, a good case for
considering that Graham’s contradictions are deliberate and
made for the best of reasons. The overtly distracting pile‐up of
identifications in the following passage from Graham’s early
prose statement of his poetics “Notes On A Poetry Of Release”
suggests as much:

16 Francis, Where the People Are, 4.

17 Francis, Where the People Are, 8.
18 Francis, Where the People Are, 10.

[10]
 All the poet’s knowledge and experience…is contained in the
language which is obstacle and vehicle at the same time. […]
For the language is a changing creature continually being
killed‐off, added‐to and changed like a river over its changing
speakers. The language changes along with all of us and is
headline litmus record wreckage pyramid shame and
accomplishment of all we do and have done and (through
Poetry) might do.19

These ‘problems,’ therefore, are, I would argue, largely of

Francis’s own making. For example, he states that

Graham constantly complains of the distance contained within

the poem; Malcolm Mooney’s Land is governed ‘by the laws of
distance,’ the reader is a ‘Dear Pen / Pal in the distance’ (the line
break emphasizes the spacing between them), and the words
contain ‘a great greedy space / Ready to engulf the traveller.’20

But an examination of the context for each of the fragments

from poems cited in this quotation complicates the thesis in
significant ways. The first quotation is from the last sentence in
the second part of “Malcolm Mooney’s Land,” which reads in
its entirety as follows:

I have reached the edge of earshot here

And by the laws of distance
My words go through the smoking air
Changing their tune on silence.21

The half‐rhymes here skilfully perform the sense of the passage

as echoes only faintly heard, but that sense to my ear invokes
“the laws of distance” as precondition and legislation for

19 W.S. Graham, “Notes on a Poetry of Release,” The Nightfisherman: Selected Letters

of W.S. Graham, ed. Michael and Margaret Snow (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999)
380.
20 Francis, Where the People Are, 8.
21 W.S. Graham, “Malcolm Mooney’s Land,” New Collected Poems (London: Faber
and Faber, 2004) 154.

[11]
 Graham’s utterance and any other. This means giving the word
‘by’ the sense of ‘via / because of’ and giving the line break after
“air” the force of a comma so that the words’ going and not just
their “Changing their tune” are the responsibility of those “laws
of distance.” With the extended quotation this reading seems at
least as plausible as the one given by Francis and further
examples from Graham’s poetry will show that my reading is
consistent across his work as a whole. Returning to those
provided by Francis, however, the quotation from “Yours
Truly” when re‐installed in its full sentence is

Dear Pen
Pal in the distance, beyond
My means, why do you bring
Your face down so near
To affront me here again
With a new expression out
Of not indifferent eyes?22

Francis suggests that this is a complaint against distance and his

parenthesis insists that “the line break emphasizes the spacing
between” poet and reader but another reading could quite
easily point out that one function of the line break here is to
bifurcate the address between a correspondent (the “Pen / Pal”)
and the pen held in the hand of the writing poet (his “Pal in the
distance”). Francis’s interpretation focuses only on the former
possibility and fails to explain just how the line break
transforms the recognition of distance into a complaint against
it; his reading compounds the error by not providing the rest of
the quotation which first of all works to shrink the distance
mentioned to an arm’s crooked length and turns quite rapidly
into a complaint against proximity. The speaker is offended or
confronted by both the transformation wrought by his
imagined reader’s imagined response (a common trope in
Graham) and the defiant stare back at him of ‘his’ ‘own’

22 Graham, New Collected Poems, 159.

[12]
 suddenly unfamiliar words. The last citation provided by
Francis is from “A Private Poem To Norman Macleod.” When it
is re‐instated in its own complete sentence it reads: “In the
words there is always / A great greedy space / Ready to engulf
the traveller.”23 Graham’s alleged “complaint” is based, by
Francis, on the idea that “it is language that must be moved
across”24 distant spaces, and Francis’s own complaint is that
Graham mixes his metaphors so that language is both “space
and object.”25 If, however, we sanction Graham’s alleged
“contradictions” on the grounds, perhaps, that there are
peculiar difficulties inherent in the problem of finding a figure
of speech for the linguistic manifold which encompasses speech
and writing; or that language just does both inhabit and
incorporate space and spacing and can also stand against the
traversal of its own reading‐space in ways which can be both
poetically indispensable and prosaically obstructive, then the
quotation from “A Private Poem To Norman Macleod” is, once
again, less a complaint than an honest registering of a fact about
language and about poetic language in particular. “A Private
Poem To Norman Macleod” is in fact the admission and
demonstration of the impossibility of a ‘private poem’: the
section quoted above concludes that “Norman, you were not
there.” The final section of the poem ends with the words

this poem
Is private with me speaking
to Norman Macleod, as private
as any poem is private
with spaces between the words.
The spaces in the poem are yours.
They are the place where you
Can enter as yourself alone
And think anything in.
Macleod. Macleod, say

23 Graham, New Collected Poems, 227.

24 Francis, Where the People Are, 8.
25 Francis, Where the People Are, 8.

[13]
 Hello before we both
Go down the manhole.26

The impossibility of confining that “yours” and “you” to the

specific personage of “Norman Macleod” admits the figure of
any reader whatsoever as addressee, and admits the necessity
of that admission. Both kinds of admission are not something
Graham has struggled to forbid; in fact, it is my contention,
contra Francis, that the spaces between words, as distance and
obstacle and opportunity, are just what constitutes poetry for
Graham, an assertion that can be supported by examples from
most periods of his career.
As a novel way into Graham’s notion of the origin of poetry,
I propose to look at, and take seriously, another habitually and
deliberately mixed metaphor in his work, the confusion of ‘ear’
with ‘mouth’ and ‘eye.’ This feature runs at least as far back as
his 2ND POEMS, published in 1945, and as far forward as his
“To My Wife At Midnight,” which was published in his first
Collected Poems in 1979, and includes both inherently trivial
usages as well as moments which count as important
statements of his idiosyncratic poetics. As an instance of the
former, the speaker in “The Name Like A River” offers the
overtly erotic encouragement to

Let the young of her tasted and tongued

Ear bite on the voice of her knuckled alarum
Making loud the wrecked lad on her rippling door
Making sure and sharing the lad I am.27

The ear of the beloved has been “tasted and tongued” as the
erogenous target of her lover’s mouth, and it also owns the
attributes of a mouth, a tongue and teeth to bite and,
apparently, the means to “[make] loud” her lad in the throes of
sexual passion. The agency of the ear is put specifically to

26 Graham, New Collected Poems, 227‐8.

27 Graham, New Collected Poems, 38.

[14]
 poetic good use in “Listen. Put On Morning” from The White
Threshold (1949):

Yes listen. It carries away

The second and the years
Till the heart’s in a jacket of snow
And the head’s in a helmet white
And the song sleeps to be wakened
By the morning ear bright.
Listen. Put on morning.
Waken into falling light.28

But the same collection’s “The Hill of Intrusion” goes further

than this acknowledgement of the dependence of the song for
its existence and renewal on attentive new listeners when it
asserts that

The ear says more

Than any tongue.
The ear sings better
Than any sound
It hears on earth
Or waters perfect.29

The measure of poetry, according to this passage, will be the

yield it can provide from interpretation of its semi‐autonomous
language by careful reading; it ought to, in other words, and in
the same words, give more than is given. As a demonstration, it
can be noted that the word ‘ear’ is embedded in the quotation
from “Listen. Put On Morning” in the words “years” and
“heart’s,” and in “hears” and “earth” in “The Hill of Intrusion.”
If the aural attention of composition and reading “carries away”

28 Graham, New Collected Poems, 60. “Listen. Put On Morning” was sent to John
Minton as part of a letter written on 24 April 1945, with the heading “THE EAR
SPEAKS MORE THAN THE TONGUE LISTEN—” See Graham,
Nightfisherman, 37.
29 Graham, New Collected Poems, 63.

[15]
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