THREE GIRTON POETS
A couple of weeks ago I was invited to join an event at Girton College, Cambridge commemorating the poet and critic Veronica Forrest-Thomson. I decided to speak on three important poets who studied at Girton (where I was lucky enough to have a visiting Fellowship in 2018-19). The talks were short – each speaker had about 20 minutes. Here’s what I said.
‘THE WRONG MUSIC’? – POST-GIRTON POETICS IN KATHLEEN RAINE, OLIVE FRASER, AND VERONICA FORREST-THOMSON
Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947-75)
My title, taken from ‘The Unwanted Child’, by Olive Fraser, is not meant as a negative criticism but to suggest that all three poets wrote against expectations, not least at Girton when they studied here. The image that comes to mind is that of a spark thrown into a box of fireworks. The fireworks blazed, crackled and exploded in many different directions with no single trajectory. Sometimes one can identify a unifying trend, or even a ‘school’. From Girton, it came to seem to me, the tradition was to react, sometimes quite violently, and then to find one’s own way to a uniquely individual poetry. You could hardly find three poets less like one another than the three I have chosen, and yet they have much in common, in the things against which they reacted, developing their own post-Girton poetics. What does unify them is, in a phrase from Veronica Forrest-Thomson, the quest for ‘alternative imaginary orders’. 
Kathleen Raine (1908-2003)
Kathleen Raine came to Girton in 1925, reading Natural Sciences. She heard Virginias Woolf give the talk that became A Room of One’s Own at the college Literary Society. The lecture amazed her: ‘a room and a small unearned income’ were, she recalled, ‘luxuries unimaginable.’ She had been accustomed to write her poems ‘on the marble-topped table of a Lyons’ or an ABC tea-shop’, and though she now had a room of her own at Girton, she ‘did not expect it to last’. But she soon discovered that her own poetic enthusiasms (Keats and Shelley, Yeats, de la Mare and Hardy) were ‘not the thing at all’. Instead she was expected to enter a world dominated by ‘Wittgenstein’s and Russell’s new logical positivism’, and ‘the materialist science of the Cavendish Laboratory’. She faced the necessity of ‘discard[ing] my own intuitions in order to learn a more “intelligent” way of reading poetry’. She got to know William Empson, who remained a friend, and she read his poems. But, reading Emspon’s poem, ‘Camping Out’, she found it ‘strange that what appeared to be a love-poem should open with the line:
And now she cleans her teeth into the lake…
‘I was,’ she says, ‘naïve enough to be repelled by this image.’ But she recognised that ‘Empson’s tone of despair contained by intellectual stoicism expressed a more than personal predicament.’
She soon got to know Empson, who made an impression, she says, of ‘contained mental energy, as of a flame whose outline remains constant while it substance is undergoing continual transformation at a temperature at which only intellectual salamanders could hope to live.’ With him she visited Diaghilev’s ballet productions, and the British Museum, where ‘we walked together among the oriental gods’. They remained friends for many years after Cambridge, and she cherished his many eccentricities: turning up for a Lake District walk wearing two left shoes, or marking his place in a book with a kipper bone. But they never agreed about poetry and eventually Kathleen Raine found her inspiration in poetry directly opposed to everything Empson approved. It was, from his point of view, altogether ‘the wrong music’.
It was not until the Second World War, in Cumberland, after mystical experience and with the encouragement of two Christians, poet Norman Nicholson and patron Helen Sutherland, that she discovered her poetic voice:
NIGHT IN MARTINDALE
Not in the rustle of water, the air’s noise,
The roar of storm, the ominous birds, the cries –
The angel here speaks with a human voice.
Stone into man must grow, the human word
Carved by our whispers in the passing air
Is the authentic utterance of cloud,
The speech of flowing water, blowing wind,
Of silver moon and stunted juniper.
Words say, waters flow,
Rocks weather, ferns wither, winds blow, times go,
I write the sun’s Love, and the stars’ No.
Olive Fraser (1909-1977)
Olive Fraser entered Girton in 1933, some four years after Kathleen Raine left. But I can make a link because in 1988 eleven years after Olive Fraser’s death, when Fraser was entirely unknown, Kathleen Raine published five of her poems in her journal Temenos.
Olive Fraser (1901-77), had a life seared by tragedy. Abandoned by her divorced mother in infancy she lived through both world wars, suffering mental and physical ill-health, especially undiagnosed hypothyroidism. Much of her life was spent in mental hospitals, but her life was transformed for the last seven years when her complaint was finally diagnosed. Olive Fraser was at Girton from 1933 to 36 as a student of, I think, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. She won numerous poetry prizes, including being the first woman to win the Chancellor’s Medal for poetry. She developed into a remarkably individual lyric poet, but her poems are hardly known: once she was hospitalised she had no means of publication; she said, ‘When I send a poem to a publisher with ‘Royal Mental Hospital’ at the top they just grin. They don’t even send the script back.’ It was she who described – not her poetry, but herself! – as ‘The wrong music’ in a poem addressed to her mother – a poem called significantly ‘The Unwanted Child’: ‘I was the wrong music, / The wrong guest for you / When I came through the tundras / And through the dew.’ She wrote entirely independently of the intellectual currents Kathleen Raine describes.
Fraser’s poetry covers a huge range and much remains unpublished. I’m going to quote just two poems. The first, written during the Second World War, when she worked as a ‘Land Girl’, looks back wryly at Girton itself, playing off Thomas Gray’s ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’.
ON A DISTANT PROSPECT OF GIRTON COLLEGE
Here the snow beats her flowers of fate
On my soul’s gate.
Here the redbreast weeps again
For the world of men.
Here the child cries, cries wild
Ever for the lost child.
Here the maiden lays her down
Her shroud her wedding gown.
Here does heavenly Plato snore,
A cypher, no more.
Here Herodotus goes by
At many knots, silently.
Here sits Dante in the dim
With Freud watching him.
Here does blessed Mozart seem
Alas, a sensual dream.
Here I could curse the hearts that shred
The great roses of the dead.
Here does holy innocence crave
A convent or a grave.
Here does Love lose his wings
Where women are female things.
Here is virginity thought to be
A state of the flesh only.
Here, my blood, muffle thy drum
Lest the hangman come.
Here, my muse, as we had died,
Sleep or be crucified.
Here’s not thy Parnassus bright
But Hecla’s icy light
O here do never, never come
Pure spring, perfect autumn.
Olive Fraser went on to write in many different voices and forms, ranging from Scots dialect to lyrics in a Renaissance-sounding voice and ballads which seem to come quite naturally:
When I am all forgotten
With eel and ouzel and bee,
And the dark wood has thy buried breast
And some dark rock has me,
O shall we both inhabit
Some other almonry
As merry as when we loved here
The spring, the green pine tree? [To a Pheasant]
She never follow the styles common in her lifetime. Her poems were not collected until 1989. She is still shamefully little known.
Our third poet, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, was Scottish like Olive Fraser, and like her came to Girton for postgraduate study, completing a Ph D in 1971. There is an obvious link to Kathleen Raine in that William Empson was central to her experience of criticism. It seems that like Raine, she had to find a means of accommodating to his view of poetry, and unlike Raine, who left and developed an opposed path thereafter, Forrest-Thomson engaged directly with Empson as a theorist. Empson is everywhere in Poetic Artifice. He is in fact mentioned by name sixty-three times, and Forrest-Thomson begins her book by taking on Empson’s famous analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94, ‘They that have power to hurt and will do none’, in Some Versions of Pastoral.
Her object here seems to be to out-Empson Empson: to use an Empson-like method of close reading that goes beyond closeness to the microscopic and even the electron-microscopic levels, defeating Empson at his own game, so to speak, by intensifying his methods to the point of parody, creating a reductio ad absurdum of the Empsonian method. Of course structuralism and the influence of Wittgenstein are also important (Wittgenstein is mentioned only four times in the book), but its presiding genius, or antagonist perhaps, is Empson. Thus poems are taken apart or rewritten audaciously: the clearly untrue statement (she must have known it was untrue!) that ‘by convention the first and last words in a line are stressed’ enables her to trim Shakespeare’s first quatrain down to
They None
That show
Who stone
Unmoved slow
Her view that poetry is differentiated from everyday language by its “non-meaningful features” (whereas she must have known like every poet that there are NO non-meaningful features in poetry) allows her to ‘rewrite [it] on the level of formal pattern alone’:
Ay Oh mallah an ouch turumto foone
Ah Ah honhol layllay mallala Oh
Oooch muvsing uhvsing ah ten shelves ossone
Untooved vold ond to terumdum go.
– surely a tribute to Empson’s solemn treatment in his Pastoral book of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Notice that ‘ouch’ here comes at the point where Shakespeare has ‘hurt’; And where did those ‘ten shelves’ come from? One suspects a personal reference. Are there also perhaps echoes of Malay (she spent her first seven years in what was then called Malaya, where her father worked)?
I leave further discussion to abler critical theorists than I. Instead I will simply read one poem which I think expresses beautifully a quintessential experience of Girton – that of looking out of a window – and watching the rain.
A FORTIORI
their fractured grace: the wind
disintegrates raindrops: the raindrops
dissolve, a metal grid, that falls.
If all meaning is diacritical, one
will see dualism in anything intelligible.
The eye is like Aprile, that falleth, a priori,
on the flower, the grass, the bird, the
fire-escape – its frame shifted by drops
that glance, with their bright eye-balls
fractured in the wind: the blank world
which its whiteness defends.
All dualisms are not equivalent
nor do they imply one another.
Whiteness defends the grass, the bird, the
raindrops, a light that falls refracts
our fractured grace: our glance: the wind.
