Poetry Notebook by Clive James

Author:Clive James [James, Clive]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447269151
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

Threatening always to give birth to Edith Sitwell like Venus in a seashell, even in its heyday such billowing foam-froth counted as high spirits at best, and in the long term a whole tradition was doomed by wordplay: you can hear why, a few decades down the line, the danger of making so much vapid noise should have driven the Prynne people to a Trappist vow of making no noise at all.

But on at least one occasion Turner wrote differently, and it was probably because he was in the grip of a real emotion. It was a case of the visione amorosa, in that especially painful version when the ageing man finds himself suddenly longing for the unattainable young woman. His title, ‘Hymn to Her Unknown’, betrays all his usual deafness (Hymn to Her Unknown What?), but the text itself, from the first line to the last, is fully judged, with no sign of automatism. He starts by setting the scene of a memory:

In despair at not being able to rival the creations of God

I thought on her

Whom I saw on the twenty-fourth of August nineteen thirty-four

Having tea in the fifth story of Swan and Edgar’s

In Piccadilly Circus.

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