Acceptable words by Jeffrey Wainwright

Author:Jeffrey Wainwright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2005-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

8 ‘Beauty is difficult’: Speech! Speech! (2000)

In a seminar discussion following a performance of Alban Berg, I recall a member of the Lindsay String Quartet saying that, unlike all that had gone before, modern music ‘is allowed to be ugly’.

‘Beauty’ might indeed be said to be a problem for many twentieth-century artists. In his essay on Ezra Pound’s ‘Envoi (1919)’ in The Enemy’s Country Geoffrey Hill quotes Pound’s assertion ‘Beauty is difficult’ (EC p. 96), a quotation from the first of the ‘Pisan Cantos’, LXXIV:

Beloved the hours βρoδoδκτυλoς

as against the half-light of the window

with the sea beyond making horizon

le contre-jour the line of the cameo

profile ‘to carve Achaia’

a dream passing over the face in the half-light

Venere, Cytherea ‘aut Rhodon’

vento ligure, veni

‘beauty is difficult’ sd / Mr Beardsley

beauty is difficult

in the days of the Berlin to Bagdad [sic] project1

and the phrase is reiterated as the passage proceeds. The image of the dawn, its half-light, ‘le contre-jour’, is an evocation of the beauty of the natural world and includes the slow drowsiness of the long cadence, ‘a dream passing over the face in the half-light’. But the ease of this sensuous pleasure is intermitted by stoppages in the rhythm and diction, and the reflexiveness that comes with, in the first instance, attributing the key phrase: ‘“beauty is difficult” sd / Mr Beardsley’. It is difficult moreover ‘in the days of the Berlin to Bagdad project’, that is under the pressure of political and economic events.

With these lines in mind I go to the bridge between two sections in Hill’s Speech! Speech!, sections 80 and 81:

Even today the light

is beautiful – you can hardly avoid

seeing thát: shadows – reflections – on reeds

and grasses | deepening visibility:

the mind’s invisible cold conflagration.

81

Again: the saltmarsh in winter. By dawn

drain-mouths grow yellow beards. Old man’s duty,

vigilance so engrained, shabby observance,

dirty habit, wavelets chinning the shore-line.

Rich in decrepit analogues | he sees:

archipelagos, collops of sewage,

wormed ribs jutting through rime.

This passage begins with one of those moments when Hill responds to our desire for naturalisation, and for ‘the poetic’: a clear, lyrical evocation of natural beauty. But then he moves into an equally perfectly observed ugliness as the waterscape resolves into the stains of pollution. The ‘collops of sewage’ are particularly repulsive. A ‘collop’ from its sound has the connotation of ‘dollop’, a ‘clumsy shapeless lump’ (OED), and the specific reference to a dish of fried egg on bacon.

Literary modernism had eschewed what Pound called ‘mellifluous archaism’,2 and Charles Olson dismissed as ‘the sweetness of meter and rime in a honey-head’ 3 of traditional cadences. At this point it is as well to recap the now familiar set of characteristics of modernism with regard to poetic style. First is the determination to disrupt the predominantly iambic traditional verse-line, ‘to break the pentameter, that was the first heave’ as Pound recalled in Canto LXXXI. Second was the effort to disrupt the lyric ‘I’ with its presumptions of unified consciousness and a single speaking voice. Hence the conception of impersonality as

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