Prynne in Prospect

In his editorial opening to the winter 1960 issue of the Cambridge magazine Prospect Tony Ward comments upon writing in terms of climbing:

A writer is in the same relation to his material as a climber is to the cliff he is trying to scale. The cliff exists in its own right and is accessible only in a limited number of ways. Before the climber has taken the first decision and put his foot in a particular place he has had to search about, looking for the opportunities the cliff gives him. There are some places on the cliff which are not footholds. If the climber tries to use them to support himself on he will slip down and fail to climb the cliff. The climber must therefore respect the cliff. He cannot do anything else. If he really wants to get up the thing he must accept with gratitude the opportunities offered.

This image of the poet as a climber echoes that used by Gary Snyder in ‘Riprap’, published by Origin Press the year before the publication of Prospect. In Snyder’s terms words are linked to the careful path-making he was involved with in the Yosemite mountains:

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
                  placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
                  in space and time:

Cobble of milky way,
                  straying planets,
These poems, people,
                  lost ponies with
Dragging saddles —
                  and rocky sure-foot trails.

Ward’s editorial emphasises the sure-footed sense of exploration for the poet as ‘the footholds he builds his climb with are the words on the page as he puts them down.’ Paul Valéry’s observation is central in this context:

Everything which we can define distinguishes itself from the mind which produced it and goes into opposition. In the same moment it becomes, for the mind, the equivalent of a material on which the mind can operate, or an instrument by which it can operate.

(’Cours Poétique’ in Variété V)

The editor’s conclusion is that the writers in this issue of the magazine share in common a concern ‘with the expression of the fine truth of their relation to the world outside them.’

That issue of Prospect closed with a review of Charles Tomlinson’s volume Seeing is Believing written by John Rathmell who was at the time engaged upon writing a thesis on John Ruskin. The volume being reviewed was published by Oxford University Press and was an enlarged version of the one published under the same title in the summer of 1958 by Macdowell, Obolensky, a recently established firm in New York. Tomlinson had had his manuscript refused by a number of British publishers before it was taken up across the pond and Tomlinson was to record that in the late fifties the poems were ‘certainly unpublishable in England.’ The relationship between the self and the other which Tony Ward had referred to is taken up by Rathmell:

The scrupulous rendering of visual, tactile, and auditory effects is for him a process of self-discovery, an empirical enquiry into the exact nature of the outside world stripped of a priori assumptions.

Quoting from the poem ‘A Meditation on John Constable’, ‘ for what he saw/Discovered what he was’, Rathmell connects Tomlinson’s apprehensions with those of Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Similarly, Hopkins seeking inscape in natural phenomena strove to apprehend in them structures which were apart from himself, objectively there, and not narcissistic reflections of his own intelligence. Tomlinson is at one with his predecessors in attempting to present the explored beauty of nature immediately rather than descriptively, so that the reader may participate to some extent in the process of apprehension.

In a letter to Tomlinson in May 1961 Jeremy Prynne, a Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard who had graduated from Jesus College, Cambridge, took up this issue of ‘immediacy’ in relation to the work of Adrian Stokes:

Immediacy for Stokes is the simultaneous apprehension of a two-dimensional surface in space: this seems to me to be his primary concern. Elements of recession and protuberance, texture and contrast, are allowed to articulate our awareness, but not to violate its separateness and lucidity. Music and the dimension of succession generally is an arrière-pensée, draining the impact of this confrontation by insisting on the context of a linear dimension through time. Stokes manages in spite of this arbitrary self-impoverishment (he has lost, after all, effective use of two out of four dimensions), both to see with accuracy and to feel the full emotional relevance of what we see-the Cortile d’Onore at Urbino (seen almost completely through his eyes) was an extraordinary experience, and one in which I felt a full deployment of my entire capacities for response. According to generally held points of view about the experience of art, the most subtle and complex of these are of a moral nature, which commonly though loosely implies the experience of ethical differences inter-acting within a given duration-so that dimensions like hoping, fearing, loving, regretting, despairing and so on, with their attendant dramatic structures, can deploy themselves through time. Moral intensity can be achieved, from this point of view, only by means of moral crescendo, the enactment of developing conflict on all levels of experience.

Concluding Part II of The Quattro Cento Stokes comments on the surfaces of Quattro Cento marble relief as being ‘smooth, continuous, swelling: for they reveal a growth’:

Such reliefs attain the maximum of spatial objectivization in a primary form. But whereas sculptors of low relief express a directional force out of, or into the marble, the ensuing Quattro Cento architects and painters did not concern themselves with movement. Though contemplating the ebullient life that sculptors had lured to the surface of the stone, they desired to fix-not to perpetuate, since the word suggests a time-element-to fix that revelation as an outwardness, complete, unalterable. For the science of perspective had given a miraculous command over disposition in space, and thence at least two painters and one architect conceived the fantasy of a world of space alone in which, unlike among spiritual spheres, all relations were graduated, fixed, a world entirely immediate and revealed, a solid manifestation.

This ‘solid manifestation’ is an expression of personal faith and Stokes continues by referring to Francesco Laurana’s sculpture:

His busts, conceived geometrically, express an imprint of Quattro Cento finality put upon Quattro Cento emergence-effect. Measurement of bare geometric space, mathematical formulae, became supremely emblematic; and when used in the treatment of human forms, transmitters of full emotion. So objective a treatment, objective as science itself, could be possible only in an age whose aim, newly discovered, immensely inspired, was to turn subjective matter outwards, to concrete upon the surface of the stone an inner ferment.

Writing about the creation of Luciano Laurana’s courtyard at Urbino, that which had struck Prynne as ‘an extraordinary experience’ when he read it, Stokes draws the reader into a world of magical proportions:

But Luciano did not stucco his brick. He left it rough. In the second place his stone is white; pilasters are thin, plain, unfluted, immeasurably straight and smooth. Archivolts have a few deep lines. The stone, then, lies on the brick in low relief, yet stands out simple, distinct, a white magic, nitidezza. The unpassable space between window-frame and pilaster along the storey, or the exact framing of a window that lies back on the wall-for the colonnade beneath is broad-give so supreme an individuality to each stone shape (though every pilaster, for example, except for his place, is the same as the next), that one appears to witness a miraculous concurrence of masterpieces of sculpture, each designed to show the beauties of his neighbour as unique. There is no other traffic among them. Their positions are untraversable, and no hand shall dare to touch two stone forms at a time. They flower from the brick, a Whole made up of Ones each as single as the Whole. What could be more different from Brunellesque running lines, than this sublime fixture of the manifest?

To Adrian Stokes the highest achievements of visual art ‘ not only absorb, but transform, time into terms of space’:

It is obvious both why the effect arouses emotion and why that emotion became so conscious as to be projected into the art of the even-lighted South. Objects perceived simply as related in space, encourage the ambition of every man for complete self-expression, for an existence completely externalized. Our love of space is our love of expression. When we complain of lack of light in England, beside the need for the sun’s rays we express a lack of spatial effect. Our spaces drift musical, composite. Even the brightest day has abundant ‘atmosphere-effects’. We console ourselves for the lapse of the immediacy image as for our own resulting lack of entire expression, with the various rhythm of music, literature and, alas, of the bastard products of the visual arts; since sense of space is well nigh lost, and small the art in which time is turned to space.

Prynne had written his own poem titled ‘Before Urbino’ which was published in the 1962 volume Force of Circumstance and Other Poems:

House next to house; tree next to tree; a wall
Tokens a winding road. The air across
The distant slope is palpable with light,
A clarid flood of silence. The heavy fruit
That weighs upon the olives can’t be seen
But must be there. There must be people too
Perhaps beneath the olives in the shade,
Calling to one inside the nearby house
And sending golden ripples through the air.

Such tokens are a ready currency:
And we are thus too liberal in their use
Who read a landscape so between the lines,
And take what is before us as a sign
Of what is mere conjecture. Still the light
Graces the house, and tree, and winding wall
With tranquil presence; lights upon the stone,
Shades the recumbent posture of the tree,
And leaves us silent in the singing air.

The opening line here echoes Tomlinson’s 1958 poem ‘Winter Encounters’:

House and hollow; village and valley-side:
                  The ceaseless pairings, the interchange
In which the properties are constant
                  Resumes its winter starkness.

In both poems there is a sense of Stokes’s ‘whole made up of ones’ and the inner ferment  that becomes concreted upon surface. The monosyllabic first line of ‘Before Urbino’& lays out a stone-like riprap of ‘thereness’ and the sense of what lies beneath is given the reader as a ‘token’. That word itself is one which will became increasingly important as Prynne’s poetry develops and the definition of ‘a stamped piece of metal, issued as a medium of exchange by a private person or company, who engage to take it back at its nominal value, giving goods or legal currency for it’ (O.E.D.) links not only to what can or cannot be taken on trust but also to that shift from stone to metal referred to in the 1968 Ferry Press publication, Aristeas:

The early Bronze Age would, I suppose, locate the beginnings of Western alchemy, the theory of quality as essential. The emergence of metal technologies (smelting & beating, followed by knowledge of alloys) was clearly a new way with the magical forms through which property resided in substance. Until this stage, weight was the most specific carrier for the inherence of power, and weight was and is a mixed condition, related locally to exertion. The focus of this condition is typically stone; and though this seems most obviously to insist on the compact outer surface, in fact it provides the most important  practical & cultic inside: the cave. The privilege of that ambiguity about surface gives the painted rock-shelter and the megalithic chamber-tomb the power of formal change, and in this way substance can be extended, by incorporation, to allow the magical and political/social presences their due place.

(A Note on Metal)

The palpable nature of the light in ‘Before Urbino’ combines a concreteness with the following image of liquidity in ‘flood of silence’. The presence of substantial value lying beyond the surface is taken on trust here as something that ‘must be there’ and the conversation of those whose lives are closely connected to each other in this landscape sends ‘golden ripples’ through this palpability. In Tomlinson’s ‘Winter Encounters’ he notes ‘a riding-forth, a voyage impending/In this ruffled air, where all moves/Towards encounter’:

                                    Inanimate or human,
The distinction fails in these brisk exchanges —
             Say, merely, that the roof greets the cloud,
Or by the wall, sheltering its knot of talkers,
             Encounter enacts itself in the conversation
On customary subjects, where the mind
             May lean at ease, weighing the prospect
Of another’& s presence. Rain
             And the probability of rain, tares
And their progress through a field of wheat —
             These, though of moment in themselves,
Serve rather to articulate the sense
             That having met, one meets with more
Than the words can witness. One feels behind
             Into the intensity that bodies through them
Calmness within the wind, the warmth in cold.

Prynne’s awareness of the conversation, golden words, between the people has a more sceptical tone to it as he repeats the word ‘tokens’ and links it so explicitly with the movement of ‘currency’. The process of devaluation with its temptation to sentimentalize the lives of other people is brought home to us with that too great liberality with which we presume to know what is, after all, ‘mere conjecture’. What the poem leaves us with is a stone-like presence as the light is both ‘still’ in time and place.

In the winter of 1961 Prospect 5 appeared and it included poems by both Tomlinson and Prynne as well as the latter’s article ‘Resistance and Difficulty’ in which he contemplates the connections between subject and object:

All human action, Hartmann suggests, including physical movement and emotional activities such as expecting, hoping, desiring, valuing and so on, intend outward from the subject. They are directed towards some object or person, and this object or person conditions their exact nature. It is for Hartmann the resistance that these activities, radiating from the subject, encounter in the external world that is the chief source of our awareness of the world’s independent reality. The world becomes intelligible to us-that is to say, we can discriminate between different aspects of its existence-by virtue of the fact that it resists our activities in various ways. This is what Hartmann means by his phrase ‘the hardness of what is real’…

Tomlinson’s opening poem in Prospect 5 is ‘Return to Hinton’, initially written in August 1960 and revised in May 1961. The bracketed note beneath the poem’s title tells us that it was ‘Written on the author’s return to Hinton Blewett after six months in the United States’ and it deals with those ‘tokens of an order’ which are in the process of being devalued. For Tomlinson the seemingly unbroken continuity between people and their land is threatened and in June 1960 he wrote to William Carlos Williams about a motorway that was being planned for the Cotswolds:

One cannot drive an immense highway across these lovely intimacies of steep green hills and deep, recessed valleys.

The devaluing of a token is felt as

a surer death
               creeps after me
                           out of that generous
rich and nervous land
               where, buried by
                           the soft oppression of prosperity
locality’s mere grist
               to build
                           the even bed
of roads that will not rest
               until they lead
                           into a common future
rational
               and secure
                           that we must speed
by means that are not either.

‘Over Here’, one of the two Prynne poems published in this issue, is significantly different from Tomlinson’s and it looks forward to a different connection with the American scene:

And still that further
Light, not far out
But there, across
Our lost spaces.

Fare forth with
Sightings, then; set
Over what still remains,
Limits. Only now

Will light kindle
There, and no further:
Just beyond our
Taut admissions.

Here is where there
Is, this shaft
Of light, seen
Through open limits.

The connections between the perceiver and the perceived dominate this poem as the eye searches the ‘light’ that appears ‘across/Our lost spaces’. The opening line’s reference to ‘still’ suggests a link to ‘Before Urbino’ as stasis and time are held together and the gap between the self and the other is emphasised in terms of its nearness and its total separateness. Perhaps there is an echo here of Charles Olson’s 1959 poem ‘The Distances’ which contemplates the enormous gap between ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘ now’ and ‘then’. In Olson’s poem ‘we cannot bide’, with its implication of remaining, and we cannot avoid the awareness of distance ‘by greedy life’. However great the desire for the unchanging may be it is powerless against the movement of dissolution. This urge to hold the ‘there’ with the ‘ here’ leads in the poem to the grotesque but moving situation of the German inventor in Key West ‘who had a Cuban girl, and kept her after her death/in his bed’. Because love is so intense and alive in its feelings it ‘ knows no distance, no place/is that far away’. That said the dissolution of the body changes everything and only words and feelings  can

yield
                  to this man
                                    that the impossible distance
be healed,
                  that young Augustus
                  and old Zeus
be enclosed
                  "I wake you,
stone. Love this man."

It is worth comparing these poems with Thomas Hardy’s elegiac register of ‘lost spaces’ in the opening stanza of ‘ The Going’ where he places Emma’s death as the closure of a term and the single word ‘gone’ on line five has a musical resonance of bell-like clarity. The ensuing image of the swallow, associated with migratory flights over great distances, emphasises the impossibility of bridging the distance between the ‘now’ and the ‘then’. In ‘The Voice’ Hardy’s attempt to realise the presence of his dead wife reaches its maximum point of closeness with the image of the ‘original air-blue gown’ where the colour of the dress worn by Emma when she and Hardy were courting is not quite definite enough to distinguish it from the emptiness of the sky. Interestingly in Victorian Studies 5 (1961-2) Prynne reviewed Samuel Hynes’s book, The Pattern of Hardy’s Poetry and highlighted what he found the most satisfactory part of the study:

In the discussion of Hardy’s "assertively unmusical" style, this book is at its most satisfactory; the deliberate identification of "style" with "tone", as a means of substantiating the poet’s self-effacement in favour of the particular world, is well pointed up. Though again the author insists on the primary dramatic structure without making as clear as one would like Hardy’s use of devices like meeting, quarrelling, and remembering the past as stereotypes  to support a certain kind of meditation…

In Prynne’s ‘Over Here’ the second stanza opens with the journeying forth of expectation as the perceiver searches, like the lookout on a whaling ship, for ‘Sightings’ of an objective reality, only the ‘still remains’ of which can be brought to the here and now. It is the subject who brings to life the object as ‘now’ will ‘kindle’ light ‘There’ and the poem’s conclusion is

Here is where there
Is, this shaft
Of light, seen
Through open limits.

In November 1968 Prynne wrote a collection of notes for students ‘On the Outlook and Procedures of the Post-Romantic Mind’ in which he brought the mind to bear upon an extract from John Ruskin’s autobiography, Praeterita:

The flat cross-country between Chartres and Fontainbleau, with an oppressive sense of Paris to the north, fretted me wickedly; when we got to the Fountain of Fair Water I lay feverishly wakeful through the night, and was so heavy and ill in the morning that I could not safely travel, and fancied some bad sickness was coming on. However, towards twelve o’clock the inn people brought me a little basket of wild strawberries; and they refreshed me, and I put my sketch-book in pocket and tottered out, though still in an extremely languid and woe-begone condition; and getting into a cart-road among some young trees, where there was nothing to see but the blue sky through tin branches, lay down on the bank by the roadside to see if I could sleep. But I couldn’t, and the branches against the blue sky began to interest me, motionless as the branches of a tree of Jesse on a painted window.

Feeling gradually somewhat livelier, and that I wasn’t going to die this time, and be buried in the sand, though I couldn’t for the present walk any farther, I took out my book, and began to draw a little aspen tree, on the other side of the cart-road, carefully…

How I had managed to get into that utterly dull cart-road, when there were sandstone rocks to be sought for, the Fates, as I have so often to observe, only know…And to-day, I missed rocks, palace, and fountain all alike, and found myself lying on a bank of a cart-road in the sand, with no prospect whatever but that small aspen tree against the blue sky.

Languidly, but not idly, I began to draw it; and as I drew, the languor passed away: the beautiful lines insisted on being traced,--without weariness. More and more beautiful they became, as each rose out of the rest, and took its place in the air. With wonder increasing every instant, I saw that they "composed" themselves, by finer laws than any known of men. At last, the tree was there, and everything that I had thought before about trees, nowhere…This was indeed an end to all former thoughts with me, an insight into a new silvan world.

Not silvan only. The woods, which I had only looked on as wilderness, fulfilled I then saw, in their beauty, the same laws which guided the clouds, divided the light, and balanced the wave. "He hath made everything beautiful, in his time" became for me thenceforward the interpretation of the bond between the human mind and all visible things; and I returned along the wood-road feeling that it had led me far,-Farther than ever fancy had reached, or theodolite measured.

The incident described by Ruskin took place in the summer of 1842 although it was not written about until June 1886. Prynne directs his readers to ‘an acutely intelligent discussion of Ruskin’s Fontainbleau experience’ in Adrian Stokes’s 1961 publication, ‘Three Essays on the Painting of Our Time’. Writing about the connexions and differences between ‘Visionary and Aesthetic Experience’ Stokes  attempts ‘to indicate the gamut of object-relationship, that is, the distance between the relationship that entails an envelopment with the object and the relationship that preserves intact an independent and separated object.’ His essay suggests the central position held by Melanie Klein’s theories with their insistence upon our experience of objects, of palpable entities in space, having a primary importance in the full and healthy development of personality. The maternal breast as an object-image of satisfaction, nourishment received from tangible shape, furnishes an image of profound emotional value that is immediate and simultaneous. In that 1961 letter to Tomlinson Prynne had expanded on these thoughts by adding:

The heightened awareness of architecture and painting, as revealed in a finely articulated objectivity, is thus underpinned by such a theory of our earliest emotional life, and shown to be capable of a complex emotional relevance    which can be controlled and subtilized by the formal resources of art. It is an oral theory in origin, which I am profoundly convinced was at the root of Ruskin’s urgent perceptiveness…The tensile equilibrium between the projection of our inner needs and the resistance to our awareness of the palpable external world (the recurring theme of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’) forms the context of a full range of appetencies and satisfactions which thus articulate the experience and render it luminous, without separating it from the perceptual immediacy that Stokes values so highly.

Prynne’s notes on the ‘Post-Romantic Mind’ go on to compare Ruskin’s experience with that of the painter Ford Madox Brown:

Brown, that morning in a disgusted and depressed state, is relieved by fine weather; and "one field of turnips against the afternoon sky did surprise us into exclamation". When he later passes the charred ruins of a burnt-out house, the family dispossessed and only two chimneys left standing, he is reminded of having recently broken a tooth, and of the gap caused by this loss. His own loss of spirits having been relieved, a kind of ambiguous remorse leads him to internalise the sense of guilt at another’s loss. The turnips later form the shadowy but luminous foreground of a small landscape, which though ostensibly concerned with a harvest-scene is by 16^th December still being called "the landscape of the turnip-field". [The finished canvas now hangs in the Tate Gallery, with the title " Carrying Corn".]

Prynne then proceeds to direct his readers to Wordsworth’s poem ‘Resolution and Independence’ where the primary experience, the ‘flash of mild surprise’, ‘ presents itself with almost overwhelming authority.’

The last page of Prospect 5 closed on the note to subscribers that ‘The Editor for the next and future issues will be J.H. Prynne’ and that contributions should be sent to him in Cambridge. In fact the details of the production of Prospect 6 took considerably longer than might have been envisaged. A letter from Prynne dated 9^th January 1964 to Andrew Crozier states that he was ‘now definitely in process of re-starting Prospect, since I can now afford it, and shall want to have things for it’. One of Crozier’s poems which was to be included in the new venture was ‘Drill Poem’, later to be included in the 1968 volume Train Rides. In February Prynne wrote again to say that ‘ Prospect has gone off entire to my design expert, has come back three-quarters designed, and been returned with copious comment & counter-proposal.’ He added, in terms of promoting the publication of this magazine, that he was really not interested ‘in the casual reader & his hot little coin’-after all ‘This is a serious business’. The serious nature of this re-established magazine is immediately felt when one looks at the line-up of contributors to Prospect 6: Edward Dorn’s long poem ‘The Land Below’ and his ‘On the Debt My Mother Owed to Sears Roebuck’, Charles Olson’s ‘Going Right Out Of The Century’, a poem from 1961 which would be included in Maximus IV, V. VI, Robert Creeley’s story ‘The Grace’, work by Andrew Hoyem, Andrew Crozier, Donald Davie, the former editor Tony Ward and four of Prynne’s own poems, that were to remain uncollected, including ‘Salt Water, Fresh Water’:

At this time, where the tides
flow in silence into the past
the man of no great fortune
will also stand, on the shore.
To be known: the wash
and seething lift, the one certain
acrid presence. All that runs
out into the private width
scarfed for the known silent passing.

And thus the act of it, boldly to make
the affront, set
course by the slender stars
in jointure to the other shores.
With the wheatfields sounding freshly
in the ears, as of a light, resting
on the curvature of the earth.
All coastlines broach on the past
of the single mind; taking
to it the weight of shingle
and the lithe flowing to be withstood.
Here itself the fine recess
dissolving the deftness: ashes.

But the flame still seen, and re-lit
by trimming tightly towards it,
burning what’s most of value.
By insistence to come at it
in the held poise, the field of view.
Thus he draws it, out
from the mineral bearings below the tides
to the meadow, studded
at this one point:

The profile isolate but
matched in no private gesture.
His word against
the tide, and with it, also.

There is a detailed account of some aspects of this poem in Birgitta Johansson’s book, The Engineering of Being (Umeå University 1997) in which she sees the poem as an address to ‘the world from the position of the condition of being, represented by the mind, which perceives the ‘wash/and seething life’ of the sea’. Johansson relates this poem to Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ in that ‘its rhythms reflect the endless repetition of the waves in its stress pattern’ but also recognises that whereas Arnold discusses how the milieu reflects the mood of the speaker’s soul ‘Prynne addresses the dynamic structure of mind and of the landscape.’ More directly, perhaps, the poem addresses that distance between subject and object, the perceiver and the perceived, and places the Homeric figure of Elpenor communicating on these shores or strands as a figure from the dead. Pound’s rendering of the incident from Book 11 of The Odyssey stands at the fore of The Cantos as Elpenor asks for his inscription to be ‘A man of no fortune, and with a name to come’. In Prynne’s poem the second stanza opens with the words ‘To be known’, a desire for certainty, and it heralds the venture of the mind boldly making an affront on the outside, setting a ‘course by the slender stars’. The figure on the shore, held in the dissolution of ‘the fine recess’ which dissolves ‘the deftness’, still sees the flame in the distance which is ‘re-lit/by trimming tightly towards it’ like the lines in Ruskin’s drawing which insisted on being traced. Here ‘insistence’ brings ‘the held poise, the field of view.’

 Prospect 6 appeared in the second half of 1964 and, as it turned out, it was the last issue. However, the following year saw the publication of the first issue of Wivenhoe Park Review edited by Andrew Crozier and Tom Clark from the Department of Literature in the University of Essex. Although the first issue was in Crozier’s words ‘a disaster, inadequately perfect bound because the cover didn’t include a spine and copies quickly disintegrated’ it contained an astonishing collection of work by both American and British poets ranging from Olson and Dorn, Spicer and Wieners, Eigner and Robin Blaser to Tom Raworth and Jeremy Prynne. Perhaps most interestingly the Prynne poems which appeared there in 1966 were to all re-appear in The White Stones: ‘Airport Poem: Ethics of Survival’, ‘A Figure of Mercy, of Speech’, ‘The Stranger, Instantly’, ‘Living in History’, ‘On the Anvil’, ‘ The Holy City’, ‘How It’s Done’, ‘If There is a Stationmaster at Stamford S.D. Hardly So’, ‘Song in Sight of the World’. In a letter to Crozier from November 1965 Prynne contributed ‘another poem, which if you’ve room I would like to see in front of the others, i.e., the first in the group’ and the urgent importance of this request was highlighted in a further letter from December in which he emphasised ‘I do very much want Lashed to the Mast in with those other things, preferably to stand first in the order of them’. With the publication of Wivenhoe Park Review I in 1966 the new poems by Prynne, developed from those in Prospect but significantly different to them as well, appeared with ‘Lashed to the Mast’ standing firmly at their front. The enormous distance travelled between ‘Salt Water, Fresh Water’ and this new poetry is evident from the outset:

Lashed to the Mast

9th Nov 65:
                           Thus you have everything, at this
                           moment, that I could ever
                           command or (the quaint word)
                           dispose; rising now
                           in the east or wherever
                           damn well else
it’s yours but the old
weather must be (must still
be watched, thunder
is a natural phenomenon
                           the entire sequence
                           is holy, inviting no
                           sympathy; who should dare
                           let that out, towards
                           what there is
                           anyway
            love the set, tight, the life
            the land lie & fall, between
            also the teeth, love the
            forgetfulness of man which
            is our prime notion of praise
                           the whole need is a due thing
                           a light, I say this in
                           danger aboard our dauncing boat
                           hope is a stern purpose &
                           no play save the final lightness
the needful things are a sacral
convergence, the grove on
a hill we know too much of —
this with no name & place
is us/you, I, the whole other

                           image of man

 

The poem’s opening seems to suggest that it derives from a letter, possibly to Charles Olson, but it now exists in its own world and isn’t even addressed to him. The Odyssey reappears in the reference to the voyage past the island of the Sirens (Book 12) where Odysseus commands his men to lash him by ropes to the mast so that he can hear their song without being destroyed by it. Indeed from this position he can dare to ‘let that out towards/what there is’.  The reference to thunder and the sacred nature of the ‘entire sequence’ also brings into focus Hölderlin’s letter from the autumn of 1802 written to Casimir Ulrich Böhlendorff:

The contemplation of ancient statuary made an impression on me that brought me closer to an understanding not only of the Greeks, but of what is greatest in all art, which, even where movement is most intense, the conception most phenomenalized and the intention most serious, still preserves every detail intact and true to itself, so that assuredness, in this sense, is the supreme kind of representation.

After many shocks and disturbances of my mind it was necessary for me to settle down for a while, and for the time being I am living in my home town.

Nature in these parts moves me more powerfully, the more I study it. The thunderstorm, not only in its extreme manifestation, but precisely as a power and shape, among the other forms of the sky, light in its workings, nationally and as a principle that fashions a mode of fate, so that something is holy to us, its urgency in coming and going, what is characteristic in forests and the convergence in one region of different kinds of nature, so that all the holy places of the earth come together around one place, and the philosophic light around my window-these are now my joy; and may I bear in mind how I came here, as far as this place!

Any hope of bringing into focus an awareness of the self’s relation to the other will depend upon ‘a stern purpose’ which combines not only the seriousness of the attempt but the guiding hand on the rudder so that the perceiver may see in the words of Adrian Stokes ‘a Whole made up of Ones each as single as the Whole’.