Frost's Cruel Chemistry

Frost’s Cruel Chemistry

Alistair Heys

(Coleridge Bulletin, New Series 20, Winter 2002, pp 114-121)

R. S. THOMAS was temperamentally in awe of miraculous fits of poetic inspiration and yet could write: ‘We have a certain amount of what might be called automatic writing, like Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, but on the whole I do not think that there is so very much of this sort of canalising – this idea of letting poetry run through a person without the person leaving much stain or imprint on it at all.’[1] In ‘Words and the Poet’ he speculated that: ‘The idea of the poet’s eye “in a fine frenzy rolling” and of the words flowing ready mixed with the ink of the tip of his pen is, of course, a fiction. Yet here again most poets could tell of periods of inspiration’.[2] Thomas’s obsession with that invisible thing, the calling of a poetic voice, was such that his central statement in aesthetics, the 1976 Eisteddfodd address, explicitly turns upon the matrix of inspiration:

The fact that we go to the Machynlleth area to look for the site of Abercuawg, saying ‘No this isn’t it’ means nothing. Here is no cause for disappointment and despair, but rather a way to come to know better, through its absence, the nature of the place we seek. How else does a poet create a poem other than by searching for the word which is already in his mind but which has not yet reached his tongue? And only after through trying word after word does he finally discover the right one.[3]

Thomas’s search for a Hidden God was coterminous with his quest for Abercuawg, his secret place of the muse where the cuckoos sing. However, the unintended irony of this address was that the English language had laid a cuckoo’s egg in Thomas’s mouth, such that instead of turning to Llywarch Hen as a Welsh language precursor (from whose poetry the nominative Abercuawg is borrowed) the hub of Thomas’s Eisteddfodd address is the figure of Coleridge in dejection.

Thomas’s understanding of inspiration may be contrasted with that of the inherited romantic model by comparing the two following passages, in the first of which Coleridge is writing about what Southey once said to him:

You are nosing every nettle along the Hedge, while the Greyhound (meaning himself, I presume) wants only to get sight of the Hare, & FLASH!—strait as a line!—he has it in his mouth!… But the fact is—I

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do not care twopence for the Hare; but I value most highly the excellencies of scent, patience, discrimination, free Activity; and find a Hare in every Nettle, I make myself acquainted with. (CL V 98)

Coleridge is myriad-minded, an epithet that he applied to Shakespeare, and in responding to Southey, Coleridge subverts the idea that ends are more important than means and suggests that a cornucopia of sensuously apprehended parts must be willed into a deep unison, the many understood as an all-encompassing One. Thomas searches for analogous language or what Coleridge defined as a thing, power, or a principle in a higher dignity expressed by the same thing, power, or principle in a lower but more known form:

I am always looking for these analogies. And when I do -and I do quite often- come upon a hare’s form. Sometimes a hare has just left and I put my hand in and it is warm. Of course you don’t leave it there, this is not just a naturalistic experience, you don’t come back and tell people I’ve found a hare’s form. Your mind links it up with something more.[4]

Coleridge deliberated that the understanding splits hairs whereas the reason discovers the One in every nettle. Whilst for Thomas ignorance is untouchable and his analogy intends that, just as the hare starts, God waits a hair’s breadth from the reach of the senses. This touching naturalism is adumbrated by ‘Via Negativa’ (Collected Poems 220):

Why no! I never thought other than

That God is the great absence

In our lives, the empty silence

Within, the place where we go

Seeking, not in hope to

Arrive or find. He finds the interstices

In our knowledge, the darkness

Between stars. His are the echoes

We follow, the footprints he has just

Left. We put our hands in

His side hoping to find it warm.

Thomas’s usage of negative theology is often interpreted in the light of the pseudo-Dionysius’s apophatic theology, but this discussion adheres to Johnson’s dictum that: ‘The ideas of Christian theology are too simple for eloquence, too sacred for fiction, and too majestic for ornament; to recommend them by tropes and figures is to magnify by a concave mirror the

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sidereal hemisphere.’[5] As such the sidereal stigmata of ‘Via Negativa’ are here related not to Meister Eckhart or the Areopagite but to Coleridge and the last sentence of Biographia Literaria:

It is Night, sacred Night! the upraised Eye views only the starry Heaven which manifests itself alone: and the outward Beholding is fixed on the sparks twinkling in the aweful depth, though Suns of other Worlds, only to preserve the Soul steady and collected in its pure Act of inward adoration to the great I AM, and to the filial WORD that re-affirmeth it from Eternity to Eternity, whose choral Echo is the universe (BL II 247)

In direct opposition to the effervescent Coleridge, the terse Thomas deliberately elides the I from the predicate of God’s eternal I AM in the word H’m, which would otherwise spell ‘Him’ the heavenly power. In ‘The Minister’ Thomas notes that ‘God is in the flowers/ Sprung at the feet of Olwen, and Mellengell/ Felt his heart beating in the wild hare.’ (CP 42) Iago Prytherch exists beneath the curiously wrought stars and in ‘Once’ (CP 208) which is the first poem of the watershed H’m volume, the frighteningly vacant microcosm of his mind has expanded to become the God gap and within its creation narrative Thomas records: ‘There were no footprints on the beaches’. Religion and nationalism are nourished from the same root and Thomas’s patriotic muse implies a connection between the untenanted status of the cross at Calvary and the depopulated Welsh hills. (F II 306) H’m is an expression that denotes pondering but also pleased discovery and the progression envisaged takes us from vagueness to exfoliation; it opposes exsiccation and an untroped blank whether this is deemed to be nature or a leaf of foolscap.

In ‘Green Categories’ (CP 77) Thomas writes of Kant: ‘You never heard of Kant, did you, Prytherch?/ A strange man! What would he have said/ Of your life here, free from the remote/ War of antinomies; free also/ From mind’s uncertainty faced with a world/ Of its own making?’ Prytherch, on the other hand, is much closer to Schelling: ‘Space and time/ Are not the mathematics that your will/ Imposes, but a green calendar/ Your heart observes’. However, in ‘Pietà’ (CP 159): ‘The tall Cross,/ Sombre, untenanted,/ Aches for the Body/ That is back in the cradle/ Of a maid’s arms.’ C. B. Cox is rapt by ‘the extraordinary idea that the Cross ‘aches’ for the lost body’ and ‘that all creation…longs for the absent Christ.’[6] The Prytherch figure is often portrayed as Christ-like and a good example is provided by ‘The Gap in the Hedge’ (SYT 53) where the peasant has ‘eyes/ Bright as thorns’. In answer to the question ‘How do you view Christ?’ Thomas answered: ‘I dislike labels. I suppose theist is the term you are after. The bogey of Unitarianism is

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always round the corner. I find difficulty with Christology’.[7] The central tenet of Unitarianism is anti-Trinitarian; meaning that God is neither Triune nor incarnated as a mere man, a humble carpenter’s son. To the Unitarian, God may become immanent or present in every aspect of nature or as Coleridge puts it in ‘The Destiny of Nations’: ‘All-conscious PRESENCE of the Universe!/ Nature’s vast Ever-acting ENERGY!/ In WilL in Deed, IMPULSE of All to All!’ (PW I 282, lines 460-2) In the ‘Probings’ interview Thomas confessed: ‘…the Trinitarian doctrine seems best to do justice to the mystery of personality or the divine economy. But what I reject is deism, understood as the belief in a God who once made the world, and then left it to run by itself, like a self-correcting machine, a pioneer of negative feedback.’ The Prytherch figure of ‘The Mill’(CP 144) grinds Thomas’s mind and this is because his Deity is effectively that of the deists, a ‘lifeless Machine whirled about by the dust of its own grinding’. (Aids 400-1) He is analogous to the capitalized Machine-God of ‘Once’ where akin to the rationalistic lower hell described by Keats in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ ‘no birds sing.’ Thomas writes of Abercywarth that it was a marvellous place, ‘surrounded by mountains, its bright crystal streams singing like birds. But it was not Abercuawg.’[8] Thomas’s quest for Abercuawg assumes the form of a process of becoming, his creative antidote for the inexorable passing of time and the growth of the modern conurbation. As a Unitarian, if not a Deist, it was Coleridge’s stated aim to expose the folly and the legerdemain of those who have thus abused the blessed organ/machine of language.(CN I 1623/ F I 108) In ‘Religious Musings’ Coleridge writes of the ‘GREAT/ INVISIBLE (by symbols only seen)’ (PW I 174, lines 9-10) and in ‘The Destiny of Nations’ this is symbolically apprehended by ‘Bodily sense’ as ‘one mighty alphabet…in this low world/ Placed with our backs to Bright Reality’. (PW I 282, lines 19-21) But for materialists the fall is greater and the sensuality of vain wisdom and false philosophy becomes the atheistic butt of these Miltonic lines from ‘The Destiny of Nations’:

Those blind Omniscients, those Almighty Slaves,

Untenanting creation of its God. (34-35)

This might be compared to ‘Frost at Midnight’ where the poet advises his babe to see and hear the ‘lovely shapes and sounds intelligible/ Of that eternal language, which thy God/ Utters’. ‘The Reason’ (Mass for Hard Times, 27), which in The Page’s Drift is entitled ‘The One’, has the line: ‘Our sentences/ are but as footprints arrested/ indefinitely on its threshold.’ Thomas’s poem does not analyse the ‘it is’ of the object world understood as an intricate heap of letters that spell the hidden name of God as much as interpret language’s relative uselessness to know what is then described as ‘snow turn to

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feathers…warmth and a heart beating.’ But very like Coleridge he does rail against the soul-less and godless who abuse language therefore destroying the means to formulate his vision of Abercuawg. When Thomas’s poems lose their Christ-like Other, in the form of the Prytherch figure, the priest’s position becomes akin to that of Coleridge the Unitarian insofar as God is apprehended as immanent in nature if only the fallen organs of perception could perceive the presence of ultimate reality.

In his poem ‘Winter Starlings’ (Tares, 36) Thomas analyses the process by which a recollected impression, ‘an image out of the mind,’ that of starlings circling a wood, becomes imbued with the moral principles. The starlings fly round and around in an amorphous mass until these ‘dark ingredients’ become ‘delicate nodes of joy and fear’ as the mind weighs heavier things. When Coleridge notes the same chaotic phenomenon his shaping spirit of imagination dwells upon the adult geometry of the mind and how this chain of parts has an autonomous sense of its relation each to each and all to the greater flight pattern of the flock:

I saw Starlings in vast Flights, borne along like smoke, mist – like a body unindued with voluntary Power/—now it shaped itself into a circular area, inclined—now they formed a Square—now a Globe—now from complete Orb into an Ellipse—then oblongated into a Balloon with the Car suspended, now a concave Semicircle; still expanding, or contracting, thinning or condensing, now glimmering and shivering, now thickening, deepening, blackening! (CN I 1589)

The bubbling, whistling, clamorous starlings roost on the Celtic crosses in ‘Ynys Enlli’ and again Thomas’s theme, symbolised by dead eremites, is the death of God. When Thomas meditates upon the grave of a spry saint in ‘A Line from St. David’s’(CP 123) he insists that ‘the old currents are in the grass’ and in the same interview with Elaine Shepherd confessed: ‘when I see the grasses moving…they’re not just grasses moving…this is life, this is this extraordinary quality of the universe which is abroad like the breathings of Being itself’. Here the priest borders on Coleridge’s memorable after-thought to ‘The Eolian Harp’ included in the Sybilline Leaves, ‘the One Life within us and abroad’.(PW I 233, line 26) This is Thomas’s intellectual breeze and his vatic force of voices tells Mabonogionic tales of Rhiannon’s birds who were fabled to wake the dead and send the living to sleep and is opposed by the unnatural voices that torment Merlin in ‘Taliesin 1952’ (Song at the Year’s Turning, 105) and the cold winds of the world that blow in ‘Invasion on the Farm.’ (CP 60) These winds of negativity and creative sterility then knock in ‘Coleridge’ (SYT 100) and ‘A Person from Porlock’ (CP 103) and by unspoken proxy in ‘Lament for Prytherch’ (CP 58) where Thomas writes in the mode of Shakespeare’s bare, ruined choirs:

Your heart that is dry as a dead leaf

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Undone by frost’s cruel chemistry

Clings in vain to the bare bough

Where once in April a bird sang.

The ‘frost’s cruel chemistry’ has the rhythm of the ‘secret ministry of frost’ in ‘Frost at Midnight’ (PW I 456, line 72) whereas in ‘Invasion on the Farm’ Prytherch paddles much like the wild swans at Coole in the ‘Companionable streams’ and this in turn reminds of the ‘companionable form’ that presages the entrance of a stranger. Thomas reads the knocking of just such a stranger as analogous to the person from Porlock: ‘the casual caller, the chance cipher that jogs/ The poet’s elbow, spilling the cupped dream.’ ‘Lament for Prytherch’ begins with the refrain ‘When I was young, when I was young’ and this echoes the changing point of ‘Youth and Age’: ‘When I was young!/ When I was young? -Ah, woful when!/ Ah for the change ‘twixt Now and Then!’ (PW I 1012, lines 5-7). Thomas draws a parallelogram between the youthful Prytherch, Dorothy’s eye-rolling Coleridge, the elderly symbol for Wales that Prytherch becomes and the rheumy-eyed Sage of Highgate. It is difficult not to read ‘Lament for Prytherch’ as a cruel parody of the temporal scheme that underpins ‘Frost at Midnight’ since in ‘Youth and Age’ Coleridge wistfully remembers how as a young man he flashed along over ‘aery cliffs and glittering sands’ (10) whereas in ‘Frost at Midnight’ it is the infant Hartley that shall in the future ‘wander like a breeze/ By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags/ Of ancient mountain’.(55-56) Prytherch’s ambiguous status opposes the rich Keatsian farmer at the beginning of ‘Lament for Prytherch’ whose barns ooze corn like honey and returns us to the figure of the correspondent breeze, yet not the bottom wind which blows from God but instead the death-like torpor of a poet ‘stricken…with barreness’ and seeking inspiration to finish ‘Christabel’.(L I 643)

Thomas once admitted that: ‘There is a kind of life-denying part in one’s make-up, a kind of nihilistic approach to life’ [9] and nihilism is a word that Thomas associated with Coleridge:

Walking often besides the waves’

Endless embroidery of the bare sand,

Coleridge never could understand,

Dazed by the knocking of the wind

In the ear’s passage, the chorus

Of shrill voices from the sea

That mocked his vain philosophy

In salt accents. And at the tide’s retreat,

When the vexed ocean camping far

On the horizon filled the air

With dull thunder, ominous and low,

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He felt his theories break and go

In small clouds about the sky,

Whose nihilistic blue repelled

The vain probing of his eye.

The source text for ‘Coleridge’ (SYT 100) is Hazlitt’s essay upon his first acquaintance with poets: ‘A thunder-storm came while we were at the inn, and Coleridge was running out bare-headed to enjoy the commotion of the elements in the Valley of Rocks, but as if in spite, the clouds only muttered a few angry sounds, and let fall a few refreshing drops.’[10] Thomas speaks of the problem of finding Aberkuawg as one that persists in knocking on the door of the understanding and Coleridge is walking and hence in composition, although unable to echo the eternal I AM and therefore to interpret the sea’s chorus of salt accents. Thomas’s poem has the gift of simplicity but is ‘vexed’; the vital breeze has become a redundant energy, vexing its own creation, and like the false wisdom of the fallen angels this fruitless act of creativity results in vexation:

O said I as I looked on the blue, yellow, green, & purple green Sea, with all its hollows & swells, & cut-glass surfaces – O what an Ocean of lovely forms!—and I was vexed, teazed, that the sentence sounded like a play of Words. But it was not, the mind within me was struggling to express the marvellous distinctness & unconfounded personality, of each of the million millions of forms, & yet the undivided Unity in which they subsisted. (CN II 2344)

Thomas’s poem ‘Coleridge’ is an example of pathetic fallacy and it recapitulates the blank gaze of the poet in dejection and yet struggling to idealize and unify. Coleridge argued that poetry ought to ‘elevate the imagination & set the affections in right tune by the beauty of the inanimate impregnated, as with a living souL by the presence of Life’.(L I 397) Of his walking tour in Wales, Coleridge reminisced using the phrase ‘embryo dew’(L I 51) and yet his genius was hardly absolute in the sense that ‘Solitude and solitary Musings do of themselves impregnate our Thoughts perhaps with more Life & Sensation, than will leave the Balance quite even.’(L II 809) In ‘Memories of Yeats Whilst Travelling to Holyhead’ (CP 10) Thomas sustains the same organic analogy:

Who would have refrained from addressing him here, not discerning

The embryonic poem still coiled in the ivory skull?

Whereas in ‘A Person from Porlock’ (SYT 103) a less deferential stranger disdains to let the dream dwindle and reality begin:

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The encounter over, he came, seeking his room;

Seeking contact with his lost self;

Groping his way endlessly back

On the poem’s path, calling by name

The foetus stifling in the mind’s gloom.

If the embryo music too often dies in the throat then the opposite of this thought is resolved into a platonic dew in the phrase: ‘the cathedral’s bubble of stone’ which Thomas tells us ‘Is still unpricked by the mind’s needle’.(CP 123) Thomas echoes Coleridge when he argues that simplicity distinguishes poetry from the arduous processes of science. Furthermore, Thomas’s thoughts upon national renaissance are extremely similar to his precursor: ‘There is no instance in the World in which a Country has ever been regenerated which has had so large a proportion of it’s Inhabitants crowded into it’s metropolis, as we in G. Britain.’ (L II 718) Although, the dialectic in Thomas runs between the tarnished Welsh dew which is responsible for the element of bitterness in his work and the beauty and freshness of nature. Or as he wrote in his third person autobiography: ‘Unknown to him, his experience at this time was the same as that of Wordsworth and Coleridge. There was a dew on things. An odour came from off the wet earth that would remind him of Holyhead, when he was a boy there.’ [11] Prytherch’s dewy footprints owe much to ‘the catenating Faculty…the silk thread that ought to run through the Pearl-chain of Ratiocination’.(L I 111) These are the pearls of Aurora and if Iago wades through seas of dew then writing of Wordsworth, Coleridge felt able to praise:

above all the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew drops.

(BL I 59)

The child in the man remains untarnished by the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude and sees nature clad in a celestial light that in Thomas’s poetry conforms to the bright dew of Abercuawg. Thomas’s lines are paradoxically fresh when, bitter as the gems of morning, they fall into the English language like the mournful tears of eve.