Hardy and Warner Haunting Graveyards

1

The Graveyard School was a loose gathering of mid-eighteenth-century poets who followed the lead of Robert Blair’s ‘The Grave’ (1743) and Edward Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’ (1742–5). They contributed to the cult of sensibility and rise of the neo-gothic by adding sublimely gloomy, picturesque landscape features to reflections on ubi sunt, carpe diem and memento mori themes inherited from the art and poetry of earlier centuries. Most well-known of their poems is Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751), whose celebrity Dr Johnson characterised at the close of his life of the poet: ‘The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo […] Had Gray written often thus, it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him.’¹ With its memorable lines now part of common poetic currency, Gray’s poem, in Johnson’s characterisation, sounds beyond criticism.

Yet not long after Sylvia Townsend Warner’s two early collections The Espalier (1925) and Time Importuned (1928) appeared, in the year she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, her friend William Empson published an account of Gray’s poem in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) which helped to establish the view that ‘By comparing the social arrangement to Nature he makes it seem inevitable, which it was not, and gives it a dignity which was undeserved.’ Empson quotes the stanza:

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.2

He then comments:

a gem does not mind being in a cave and a flower prefers not to be picked; we feel that the man is like the flower, as short-lived, natural, and valuable, and this tricks us into feeling that he is better off without opportunities. The sexual suggestion of blush brings in the Christian idea that virginity is good in itself, and so that any renunciation is good; this may trick us into feeling it is lucky for the poor man that society keeps him unspotted from the World. The tone of melancholy claims that the poet understands the considerations opposed to aristocracy, though he judges against them; the truism of the reflections in the churchyard, the universality and impersonality this gives to the style, claim as if by comparison that we ought to accept the injustice of society as we do the inevitability of death.³

The poet and critic further notes that ‘Many people, without being communists, have been irritated by the complacence in the massive calm of the poem, and this seems partly because they feel there is a cheat in the implied politics.’⁴ He sees that the poem’s stanzas about qualities hidden in rural obscurity (each ‘village Hampden’ or ‘mute inglorious Milton’) do question the social order’s squandering of its citizens’ potential talents. But Gray’s stanzas would reconcile readers to this waste by suggesting that for ‘Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood’ it’s a far, far better thing to die in obscurity. For ‘the paths of glory’ don’t only lead to the grave but would have you make your mark in history at the expense of others’ lives. Empson accepts, though, the poem’s sense that

it is only in degree that any improvement of society could prevent wastage of human powers; the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy.⁵

The irony here – that the poem simultaneously reveals and conceals society’s complicity in wasting the talents of its obscure members – helps to identify the unifying theme in Some Versions of Pastoral. It is of particular relevance here because its opening chapter on ‘Proletarian Art’ shares a concern for the fates of ‘village Hampdens, gathered in the tap’ with Warner’s long poem Opus 7 (1931).⁶

Just five years after the publication of Some Versions of Pastoral, reviewing a selection of Thomas Hardy’s verse, Empson expressed a nuanced dislike for this poet’s related ironies, complaining that their editor G. M. Young

does not bring out the flat contradictions which are the most irritating feature of Hardy’s philosophy; but then, some monism like Hardy’s seems to me probably true, so what irritates me must be in the treatment not in the belief. Probably it is the complacence of the man, which saw no need to reconcile the contradictions; the same complacence which could be satisfied with a clumsy piece of padding to make a lyric out of a twaddling reflection. No doubt he needed this quality to win through as he did. Most people who are admired for ‘unpretentious integrity’ have it.⁷

This 1940 review, published the year before Empson’s second and last collection of poems, The Gathering Storm, finds him ‘Plodding through the Collected Poems’ marking the good ones. Among Empson’s own good ones in that book, ‘Aubade’ finds him effortfully striving to hold a position between conflicting impulses, as when in the final stanza he notes: ‘But as to risings, I can tell you why. | It is on contradiction that they grow’.⁸ These ‘risings’, which might be political revolts of any colour, yet can also be reasons for going to bed or getting up, for escaping or standing and fighting, are exacerbated by that same word ‘contradiction’ he would deploy in the review of Hardy. It is also the key term in ‘Let it Go’, written during the war, which announces that ‘The contradictions cover such a range’.⁹ Michael Wood speculates thus about them: ‘You don’t know what they are, you can’t think coherently about them, yet you still know a contradiction when you see one, and they seem to be multiplying.’¹⁰ Is Empson justified in being so irritated by what in Hardy he thinks is ‘the complacence of the man’?

It is as if the many poems of variable quality Hardy wrote to ‘win through as he did’ are like the talk that ‘would talk and go so far aslant’ in ‘Let it Go’ – work such as Empson could not find it in him even to try and write. Yet the comment feels unjust to Hardy, because his sticking at his frequently convoluted poetic art doesn’t look like ‘complacence’; if he did not think it his task to reconcile or negotiate between the contradictions, he hardly used them intentionally in the manner that Wood, explicating his subject, deprecates:

Empson is not saying it is wrong to live with unexamined contradictions; we often have to. What’s wrong is to turn a contradiction into an alibi, a licence to abuse others or ignore their suffering or gloat over it – and feel virtuous while doing such things.¹¹

Though Empson might be accusing himself of haplessly misusing them for such reasons in ‘Aubade’, does Hardy’s poetry deserve so blanket an accusation? Mark Ford’s Woman Much Missed (2023)¹² amply illustrates the thread of barely relieved self-accusation and torment in the repetitive compulsive rigours of his verse writing in the aftermath of his first wife Emma’s death – as when in the dramatic lyric ‘My Spirit Will Not Haunt the Mound’ a recently dead speaker announces, foreshadowing the visits Hardy will make to Cornwall in the aftermath of his wife’s death, that ‘there you’ll find me, if a jot | you still should care’, but if ‘otherwise, then I shall not, | For you, be there’.¹³

Empson had worse to say about what he calls ‘Thomas Hardy’s nasty fancy, in The Dynasts, of the Spirit Ironical’:

To believe in a spirit who only jeers at you is superstitious without having any of the advantages of superstition; besides, it has a sort of petty wilfulness, it comes of trying to think of something nasty to say. If this is the atheist view of tragedy it is as disagreeable as the Christian one.¹⁴

This aspect of ‘some monism like Hardy’s’ is ‘disagreeable’ to Empson because it retains popular folk ways of thinking from his background in a universe understood to be without God, but one in which both Christian and other superstitions abound. Yet these supposed contradictions in Hardy are more expressions of the human situation and its cultures in his time than Empson’s advanced free-thinking. The critic is suggesting that if you believe what Hardy appeared to believe, then you should abandon all those trappings of exploded views. Yet I doubt that ‘complacence’ is the word for continuing to deploy them as the dramatic machinery for your critical vision. After all, as with Pope’s sylphs in ‘The Rape of the Lock’, those who admire Hardy’s art surely don’t take literally his many occasionings for direct speech from beyond the grave.

Still, Empson’s comments on Hardy’s poetry are neither unhelpful nor entirely unsympathetic. They suggest that what attracted the critic to Gray’s ‘Elegy’ was its ability to combine both sides of the contradiction about society and wasted talent in a soothing style, allowing Empson to admire what he also suspects, and hold a position between those two responses, while Hardy, for all his engagement with Dorset life, was not a pastoral writer as understood by Empson’s capacious definition, for he presents his ironies as unaccommodating, indifferent or mechanically malign. They don’t allow such critical reconciliations with the social order that are at the heart of Empson’s questioning thesis. If Hardy subscribed to a form of meliorism that ‘exacts a full look at the Worst’,¹⁵ the way to improvement did not lead through the intellectual structuring or artistic reconciliation of the contradictions, nor their stylistic acceptance by means of placatory tonal skill – not Hardy’s way with cadence and diction – but through ameliorations in the social order.

There was, then, more melancholy, fatalism and pessimism lurking in Gray’s country churchyard than that poem might appear openly to admit.¹⁶ It has, of course, contributed several set phrases to the language (the ‘curfew tolls the knell of parting day’, ‘short and simple annals of the poor’) and furnished at least two titles for later works: Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), based on a novel of the same name by Humphry Cobb, which keys its anti-war message to that very line: the ‘paths of glory lead but to the grave’; and, of course, Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel Far from the Madding Crowd, whose entitling foreshadows Empson’s critique by diverging in its plot and evocations of farming life from Gray’s operative assumption that ‘Their sober wishes never learned to stray’ and ‘Along the cool sequestered vale of life | They kept the noiseless tenor of their way’. In haunting churchyards, poets and writers provide themselves with opportunities to reflect on love, power, fame, beauty, disappointment, obscurity, what stays and what passes, all thrown into relief by the fact of death presented in the form of engraved pieces of stone. These opportunities, in turn, find themselves inflected with political implication through reflection on ways of life and how they are represented, both in the material written on gravestones and in the poems produced out of those same hauntings.

2

Writing to Oliver Warner on 19 February 1935, Sylvia reports on a lunch at Max Gate with Florence, the ‘present Mrs T. H.’, noting that there

is a nice Hardyesque garden, too, very green, with a decided flavour of churchyard (though there is a good practical kitchen garden tucked away at the back). There is a long narrow walk, with conifers on either side, which he paced over for hours. It is exactly right, melancholy, respectable (what more respectable than conifers?) grim and genteel. The conifers wag their heads and sigh.¹⁷

Pacing his garden, with its pets’ cemetery where Wessex, the dog, is buried, Warner anthropomorphises his tree-planting in homage to the writer’s own idiom. There Hardy could be haunted by his hauntings. The Poetical Matter notebook records him pondering a poem or poems set in Puddletown churchyard during 1898, the year of his first poetry collection. On 31 January: ‘P. Town ch. yd. “Remember us!” …. People buried there address me thus. “We knew Weatherbury”, &c –’ while two weeks later, on 13 February: ‘also: All things speak incessantly; will keep on addressing; cannot escape them.’ On 5 November he sketches a poem scenario:

Man in churchyard, or elsewhere, calls up spirits of local people, whom nobody else remembers. They might argue that the great are so continually called that they are always alive; but themselves only now & then. He might have said, ‘I am a museum of dead men’s souls’. When he relinquishes them they ask him to wake them up again.¹⁸

The editors of the notebook associate these jottings with ‘Voices from Things Growing in a Churchyard’, first published in The London Mercury in December 1921 and collected in Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), almost a quarter of a century after the note and just three years before Warner’s The Espalier. Much has evolved in the poem since Hardy’s scenario, because now each verse is addressed to anyone (‘Sir or Madam’) who happens to pause in the churchyard, and these dead aren’t envious of the famous who are forever being disturbed.

They do, however, ‘speak incessantly’ as expressed in the refrain to each of the seven stanzas (‘All day cheerily, | All night eerily!’):

These flowers are I, poor Fanny Hurd,
    Sir or Madam,
A little girl here sepultured.
Once I flit-fluttered like a bird
Above the grass, as now I wave
In daisy shapes above my grave,
    All day cheerily,
    All night eerily!19

Wordsworth is a source for the thought that she who ‘seemed a thing that could not feel | The touch of earthly years’ should be ‘Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course | With rocks and stones and trees!’²⁰ Hardy nods to it in ‘While Drawing in a Churchyard’ where a tree speaks to him:

‘It is sad that so many of worth,
Still in the flesh,’ soughed the yew,
‘Misjudge their lot whom kindly earth
    Secludes from view.
    ‘They ride their diurnal round
    Each day-span’s sum of hours
In peerless ease, without jolt or bound
    Or ache like ours.

What the yew then soughs, though, is a highly metered and articulated view of the dead saying they don’t want to be stirred on any Last Judgement day: ‘That no God trumpet us to rise | We truly hope’. The striking difference between Hardy’s poem and Wordsworth’s is not the lack of ambition Donald Davie finds there, but its attributing to nature and the long dead this fully articulated desire that there be no God to raise them. For Hardy, who writes that he ‘grew to accept as the day wore pale | That show of things’,²¹ the processes of nature, which include our mortality, have an argument to pick with the conventional religious beliefs of his day and, even if hedging at the close with the ambiguities in the word ‘show’, the poet ramifies the argument his poem picks by means of its five highly wrought regular stanzas.²²

In ‘Voices of Things Growing in a Churchyard’, those buried manifest themselves through the natural world above their graves and thus speak incessantly in what Ford has called ‘the Darwinian immortality’ dramatized in this poem.²³ The Poetical Matter notebook also records Hardy’s ideas for a ‘“God” poem or poems’, some ‘hymns’ which won’t be ‘asking help, but sympathizing with G. – the pathos of nature – her strivings &c (partly written already)’, in which ‘God deplores that men invent excuses for him, when he is inexcusably to blame’ or ‘God suffers from self-inflicted wounds’ and, via a reference to Eduard von Hartmann, Hardy then notes: ‘Cf. Spinoza, where God is Nature’.²⁴ Musing thus on the terms of ‘some monism’, by ‘wistful wanderings through old wastes of thought’ in what another poem calls ‘The Graveyard of Dead Creeds’,²⁵ Hardy points back behind Darwin to the great contradicter of Descartes.²⁶ His ‘Voices of Things Growing in a Churchyard’ then afford ‘an interpreter much to teach’ in its final stanza:

– And so these maskers breathe to each
    Sir or Madam
Who lingers there, and their lively speech
Affords an interpreter much to teach,
As their murmurous accents seem to come
Thence hitheraround in a radiant hum,
    All day cheerily,
    All night eerily!27

Shifting the vocative second line to an indirect object, Hardy’s posthumous voices distinguish this neo-gothic ballad lyricism from Wordsworth’s ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’, whose quatrains barely imply their sense of human mortality’s transcendence in natural renewal.

‘Voices of Things Growing in a Churchyard’ reveals that its dead preserve a living characteristic in transformed guise, as if Ovid had contributed more to their metamorphoses than Darwin, perhaps. Fanny once ‘flit-fluttered’ and now she waves in ‘daisy shapes’; Bachelor Bowring performs ‘my feat of change from a coffin-thrall | To a dancer in green as leaves on a wall’; Thomas Voss, who may have been a drinker, turns into yew berries ‘ruddy of view’; Lady Gertrude has become laurel leaves that ‘shine, | As did my satins superfine’; Eve Greensleeves, who a note tells us was ‘the handsome mother of two or three illegitimate children’ used to be embraced ‘by men from many a clime’ and is now kissed ‘by glowworms and by bees’; while Squire Audeley Grey is relieved by death of his Weltschmerz and has now ‘clambered up anew | As ivy-green, when my ache was stayed’. Posthumous survival in natural renewal can both ease the pains of life and preserve lived characteristics. It’s as if they were saying that there’s nothing to fear, as you were in life so shall ye be after death. Yet the poem’s mock-gothic grotesquery suggests in its effortful striving something fatalistically more like joyous indifference than calm acceptance here.

Donald Davie, writing some 50 years ago, used ‘Voices of Things Growing in a Churchyard’, which he notes displays ‘Hardy’s at once playful and mournful serenity’, to strike a final note in his Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1973):

Facing (and out-facing) death is as necessary in socialist Britain as in capitalist America or communist Russia; and there, in the fact of death and the term it sets to all our exertions, is the place where we escape at last the attentions of the bureaucrats, the philanthropists, and the moulders of opinion, and need the hard rigidity which only monumental art can give us.²⁸

Published in the year Edward Heath’s Conservative government took the United Kingdom into the European Common Market, Davie’s reference to ‘socialist Britain’ sounded as odd then as it might now. But if, as he puts it, ‘the fact of death’ is the great leveller, how we come to die is not by any means a level playing field, and those three big political isms, socialist, capitalist and communist, with their roots in sociality, the accumulation of money and the common-to-all, involve levelling up or down just as much now as when conflict between those large abstractions dominated people’s minds.

Yet ‘Voices from Things Growing in a Churchyard’ makes a point of mixing persons of distinctly different ranks, whose social bearing is both underlined and made light of by their equivalent post-mortem flora. For Davie, death outflanks the fracturings of macro-political difference, providing opportunities for such seemingly, though not actually (as Empson showed), depoliticised monumental memorialising as Gray’s ‘Elegy’ attempted, a poem from which Hardy both drew and marked his distance. His own poem shows, however joyous, that those social distinctions are inescapable. In being posthumously adjacent, his rural characters suggest a nettled egalitarian politics in the equal stanzaic deployment of each local dead person through their attributed natural phenomena.

3

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s first collection, The Espalier, was published when Hardy was 85 and could be thought of, in words that grace the dedication page of an anthology from that time, as ‘Greatest of the Moderns’.²⁹ The reprinting of that anthology four times between May and October 1921 is commented on by Florence Hardy in Vere H. Collins’s Talks with Thomas Hardy at Max Gate, underlining the writer’s prominence in British poetry written by ‘the Moderns’.³⁰ Warner’s follow-up, Time Importuned, appeared in the year of Hardy’s passing, a public event featuring in three of her diary entries from 1928. They remark on whether a non-believer like him should be buried in Poets’ Corner, and then on the mock-gothic fate of his corpse. First: ‘Thomas Hardy has died. Dorset will mourn – a more rare and antique state of things than England mourning.’ Then: ‘Hardy is to be buried in Westminster Abbey. I have no objection, he won’t mind what the Dean says over him.’ And decisively: ‘Hardy’s heart is to be buried at Mel[l]stock (Stinsford). This is becoming ludicrous.’³¹ Which mound would his spirit haunt, the one where England celebrates his fame or the one where Dorset mourns?

In her biography Claire Harman cites a 1929 passage from Warner’s diaries, not included in her edition, where the poet declares herself prejudiced ‘against poems that are in vers libre’ and ‘in favour of poems that are formally tight in thought and construction | evoke frames of mind, mention death | contain conceits, and intellectual stresses | look neat | use few images, especially visual | contain references to christian faith and mythology | end cynically | appear very self-controlled’ and ‘state’.³² Such jostling prejudices hardly aspire to smooth out contradictions either, and echoes of Hardy are everywhere in Warner’s two volumes, which contain, for instance, a dialogue between a ‘he’ and a ‘she’, ballad-like poems such as ‘Nelly Trim’ and ‘Ghosts at Chaldon Herring’ about country people, and the graveyard verses I concentrate on here because they readily compare with similarly located poems of Hardy’s.

When Warner and Empson had dinner together at his Marchmont Street digs in Bloomsbury on 11 April 1930, the conversation turned to whether poets should have a message:

The argument was that I complained W. L. [Wyndham Lewis] had A Message. He was of the opinion that poets should have a message, should be in touch with real life. I didn’t see then, but I do know [now] that they should be so much in touch etc. that they don’t want to alter it. It is a drawing-room or study contact with real life which wants to move the groundsel off the landscape.³³

Harman’s extract in her edition of the diaries ends here, where the topic of conversation changes. John Haffenden cites more in his biography of Empson, including a question mark in the editorial parenthesis: ‘[?now]’.³⁴ Rather than making a contrast between what she didn’t understand then but does now, Warner may be contrasting what came out at the dinner with what she knows perfectly well and is expressing in the diary write-up. Her view of poetry at the start of the Auden decade is carefully nuanced and qualifies young Empson’s, for being ‘in touch with real life’ is a ‘drawing-room or study contact’, not dissimilar to Orwell’s disparagement of engagé poets in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and her contrastive view is that they should not ‘want to alter’ real life, the task of poetry being to render the world as it is. Yet that metaphorical aim to move ‘the groundsel off the landscape’ is ambiguous between prettifying it and weeding it, that is to say, expressing the need for improvement.

Warner’s graveyard compositions suggest, recalling Empson’s words, that ‘the injustice of society’ is, if anything, intensified by ‘the inevitability of death’, as in a 1927 poem, uncollected at the time of her early publications, called ‘East London Cemetery’. It shows that she did know when dining with Empson that poems need to be ‘in touch with real life’ and while not expressing a message, it does imply a criticism of things as they are:

Death keeps – an indifferent host –
this house of call,
whose sign-board wears no boast
save Beds for All.

Narrow the bed, and bare,
and none too sweet.
No need, says Death, to air
the single sheet.

Warner’s poem, by contrast with Gray’s and in greater sympathy with Hardy’s, aligns the levelling force of death with relief from the inequality of life, identified here by means of the social geography of early twentieth-century London, but not to soften the existence and indignity of those inequalities. The corporation cemetery, neither a churchyard nor a boarding house with ‘no vacancies’ in the window, accepts everyone, as Death notes:

Comfort, says he, with shrug,
is but degree,
and London clay a rug
like luxury,

to him who wrapped his bones
in the threadbare hood
blood wove from weft of stones
under warp of foot.35

Death knows that comfort ‘is but degree’ and ‘East London Cemetery’ allows death to play with the language of class difference, to remember those differences in life, even at the point of annulling them. For those buried here, the London clay covering them is soft, receptive, and warming like a rug, in comparison to the person without shelter in life who walked the stones of the London streets. Though there is the trace of pastoral-like contrast between the natural and the man-made here, the clay and the stone too is a bare opposition which preserves the difference in their combination. ‘East London Cemetery’ is about urban homelessness, and the irony is that the metropolitan authorities, and the society in which they function, will provide lodgings for the destitute when they are dead, but not before.

The directness of Warner’s broken pentameters, lines of three then two stresses, and ballad-stanza rhymes, may show affinity with the plainness and directness in poems such as Hardy’s ‘A January Night’ or ‘Nobody Comes’,³⁶ but her allusion to Christina Rossetti’s ‘Up-Hill’ (‘Will there be beds for me and all who seek? | Yea, beds for all who come’)³⁷ pointedly disputes its after-death Christian consolation, for the resting place in Warner’s poem is not a promise of eternal life for any weary climber, but lodgings for a worn-out corpse. Her stanza too performs a fatalistic determinism regarding the social order and its trajectories, its sense protesting the sound patterning while compelled, by the workings of social injustice, to be at one with it. The ‘warp’ and ‘weft’ of the poem’s text are obliged to collude with the texture of the person’s life, even as they cry out against it.

‘East London Cemetery’, uncollected at the time, chimes with several poems in Warner’s first two volumes. The second and third in The Espalier are called ‘London Churchyard’ and ‘Country Churchyard’. The former, written in looser variations of the stanza used for ‘East London Cemetery’, deploys a first-person narrator echoing William Blake’s similarly attentive pedestrian: ‘As I walked through London | To ease my care, | I snuffed amid the houses | A greener air’. There she encounters a woman who ‘seemed lorn and witless | As seaweed on a beach’, a woman crazed by grief for a deceiving lover and a child who has died:

‘Falsely have you dealt with me,
Falsely have you beguiled.
Dead and buried with you
Lies my child.’

Piteously, piteously,
Thus did she rave,
And wrung her hands
And scratched on the grave.38

Warner presents the lineaments of the glimpsed tragedy in a stark form, and without attempted consolations of the Gray’s ‘Elegy’ variety. ‘Lenten Offering’ deploys its Christian symbolism to associate armaments manufacturers with Jesus’s tormenting executioners:

Christ, here’s a thorn
More poison-fanged than any that you knew:
On the side of the churchyard it grew,
Where lie the suicides and babes chance-born.39

The nails, the second stanza informs, are ‘Forged by Krupp’s, Creusot’s, Vickers’, and ‘tipped with gold | Pen-nibs that signed the Treaty of Versailles’, showing by means of the off-rhyme (‘nails’ with ‘Versailles’) that Warner was as aware as John Maynard Keynes in 1919 that the military-industrial complex would be well served by so persecutory a peace settlement. This is close to Hardy’s ‘Channel Firing’ for instance, dated April 1914, where once more the buried protest at what they imagine might be the disturbance of a Last Judgement, only to find God informing them that it is the British Navy at gunnery practice. Hardy’s poem gets behind what this deity has to say: ‘All nations striving strong to make | Red war yet redder’. To the question from one in his coffin, ‘Will the world ever saner be’, Hardy pictures how ‘many a skeleton shook his head’.⁴⁰ The ghoulishness has as articulate and pointed a message as ‘Christmas: 1924’ where ‘After two thousand years of mass | We’ve got as far as poison-gas’.⁴¹

There are similarly Hardyesque ironies in Warner’s ‘Epitaphs’ from both The Espalier and Time Importuned. Some, presented as if copied from headstones, have circumstantial satirical turns, like the first of the 1925 set, which reverses the emotional poles presented in ‘London Churchyard’:

Here lies Melissa Mary Thorn
Together with her son, still-born;
Whose loss her husband doth lament.
He has a large estate in Kent.

The last of these reformulate tensions animating ‘East London Cemetery’:

John Bird, a labourer, lies here,
Who served the earth for sixty years
With spade and mattock, drill and plough;
But never found it kind till now.42

Time Importuned collects ‘Allegra’, Byron’s child by Claire Claremont, who, dead at five and sent home from Italy by the poet to be buried in Harrow church, was interred outside in an unmarked grave by the then parson, where ‘Cold airs creep out of the churchyard clay’:

Thus steadfast still to the same wild story clung she:
‘I am always alone, for he,
The Boy who comes here, can’t join in my game.
Look, yonder is where he comes, to the stone by the tree.
I pity him much, poor boy! because he is lame.

‘There with a book lies he, or else he will raise
His handsome head, and gaze
Out over the plain with a look made free
At the westering sun, and the elm-tops afloat in the haze
Like shadowy islands remote in a golden sea.43

The poem was presumably prompted by Byron’s 26 May 1822 letter to John Murray concerning the burial of his daughter (which Warner cites in a footnote) in a spot familiar to the poet from her 1890s childhood in its vicinity, her father having been a master at Harrow School. This is Hardyesque in finding a present landscape haunted by the memory of a Romantic poet, just as his own ‘At Lulworth Cove a Century Back’, dated September 1920, does when it imagines going by ‘Warmwell Cross on to a Cove I know’ and seeing a young man of ‘an idling town-sort’, who ‘looks up at a star’ and finds it vivid enough to write – contrary to the conclusions of recent scholarship which places it in 1818 or 1819 – his ‘Bright Star’ sonnet. Hardy’s poem concludes when its pestered interlocutor has admitted that ‘yes, that man I see!’

‘Good. That man goes to Rome – to death, despair;
And no one notes him now but you and I:
A hundred years, and the world will follow him there,
And bend with reverence where his ashes lie.’44

Here haunting graveyards turns on poetic fame and the way it can haunt living poets, as in Hardy’s own ‘At the Pyramid of Cestius: Near the Graves of Shelley and Keats’, from his 1887 visit to Italy, which concludes by remarking how Cestius ‘lived and died | That stones which bear his name | Should mark, through Time, where two immortal Shades abide: | It is an ample fame’.⁴⁵ Thus, Hardy and Warner are inclined to see Keats on his way to Rome or Byron when a boy as like a ‘mute inglorious Milton’ who has not been confined to Gray’s churchyard, but transformed, through time’s revenge, into writers who, whether before their death in Byron’s case or afterwards in Keats’s, would be counted, with Milton himself, among the English poets.

4

Warner’s 1931 tale in verse, Opus 7, about a village woman called Rebecca Random who grows flowers to feed a taste for gin, climaxes in a moonlit churchyard. Written in heroic, rhymed pentameter couplets, it contains as well as a florilegium of cottage garden blooms an anthology of allusions to the English poets. Introducing Rebecca’s cottage, which will be bought by blow-in townsfolk after her death, it begins with a couplet from the second stanza of Abraham Cowley’s ‘The Wish’: ‘“Ere I descend into the grave, | Let me a small house and large garden have”’.⁴⁶ An echo returned in her poem to Gray’s ‘Elegy’ is plain and pointed:

and village Hampdens, gathered in the tap,
forsook their themes of bawdry and mishap
to curse a government which could so fleece
on spirits under proof, and call it Peace.

These ‘village Hampdens’ are demobbed conscripts from the Great War who, taken out of their rural retreats to tread the ‘paths of glory’ and having survived that experience, now, in the austerity of the post-war, are nostalgic for the strength ‘of army rum’. This section of Warner’s poem laments on behalf of Love Green’s villagers the absence of cheap and undiluted alcohol. Rebecca had thought that peace would bring a ‘renewal of old times’ but ‘stumbling to the inn’ she finds ‘No reduction in the price of gin’.

The post-war floral theme is sustained by a recollection of stanzas 37–39 in Andrew Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House, To my Lord Fairfax’ where the Parliamentarian general’s profession and his retirement (he had declined to lead an army into Scotland) is figured in his garden layout:

See how the flowers, as at parade,
Under their colours stand displayed:
Each regiment in order grows,
That of the tulip, pink, and rose.47

In a recall of the Prussian military king, Rebecca is ‘no Fredrick, to teach | austerer discipline’ and her garden thrives, she says, ‘as children do, by mixing company’:

Here, when the lamb leaped gleaming in the sun,
was mustered such a garden garrison
as tale outnumbered, penny packet’s show
outshone; but not, like Marvell’s, ranked in row,
drilled under colours, marshalled for parade –
these a more unsophisticated fusillade
loosed off, hub-bub of shape and hue and scent,
a countrified militia, where intent
is to be foremost all, most willing each.

Thus, the poem alludes to the idea of a pastoral retreat from urbanity and the wars in seventeenth-century poetry. Yet in each case something is amiss: her blooms are not like Marvell’s flower beds, the arrival of the city folk to purchase and repurpose Rebecca’s cottage doesn’t perform a witty reversal of the pastoral trope in Cowley’s poem where he would be happy with his ‘one dear She’ to live and ‘embracing die’ – in at least two of the then available senses, who being ‘all the world’ can ‘exclude | In deserts solitude’. But nevertheless:

    I should have then this only fear,
Lest men, when they my pleasures see,
Should hither throng to live like me,
    And so make a city here.48

Rather, the ‘one dear She’ of Warner’s poem dies of alcoholism, having indulged in a Walpurgisnacht upon the grave of a mother of seven children, while Cowley’s fear is emblematically fulfilled by the subsequent inhabitants of Rebecca’s cottage, who because ‘these | newcomers did so badly with their teas’ have set up an orphanage ‘to house the well-dowered by-blows of the gentry’.

Warner’s climactic graveyard scene is Hardyesque in its dramatizing of a conversation between the intoxicated Rebecca and the dead woman, Mrs Bet Merley, who has been evoked in classical parody by pouring libations into the graveyard earth where ‘Over the sod with trickling pace’ the gin is then ‘mouthed by the greedy clay’. It appears to wake the sleeping dead mother, for then ‘loth and wearily a voice complained’ in a one-line-apiece dialogue of half a dozen exchanges which concludes:

‘Life grinds the axe, however we may end.’
‘Are all the dead doleful as you, my friend?’
‘How are the living? Look to your own heart.
Farewell.’

In the following reflections Rebecca’s self-destructive drinking, her pondering whether the mother of seven is better dead and the poet’s continuing allusiveness converge upon Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ whose ‘worms shall try | That long preserved virginity’:

Bet’s seven would rage on, though Bet lay quiet:
nor could she, mated to the earth, keep long
her long virginity, for worms would throng
the city of her corpse, and whatso their
capacity, its fill of living bear,
and the weak grass thrust from her mound to quail
before the anger of another gale.

The much-burdened mother, who has died from complications having her last child, is nevertheless figured as a virgin bride to Mother Earth. In this moonlit churchyard Warner’s ‘slut heroine’ expires with a Hogarthian flourish: ‘The dead in their neglect | would stir for doom, so shrill the bottle cracked’. And the coda, introduced with a triplet rhyme, returns us to the voice of sobriety: ‘The coroner summed up as you’d expect: | Drink is the failing which the state deplores. | If drink you must, then please to drink indoors’.

In his brief review of Warner’s poetry, Davie lights upon Opus 7 as the text by Warner where the issues he attempts to address ‘come to a head’:

Warner, already moving into her long dalliance with the Communist Party, had been at some pains to situate her narrative historically: her village is, as never before, firmly a post-1919 village. And yet this new found responsibility to the date on the calendar has the effect of high-lighting more than ever the incongruity between the manner and the matter, the impression of new wine in an old bottle. The interest of the case lies precisely in the fact that Opus 7 is from most points of view well-written: the author is in earnest and extremely intelligent, not just with the intelligence that sparkles in her story-telling but with the specifically verbal intelligence that distinguishes the poet.⁴⁹

Yet, curiously enough, the one reference to Communism in Opus 7 sets Stalin’s collectivisation of agriculture and his dispossessing the kulaks against Rebecca’s monetisation of her garden flowers:

                               How wanton and perverse!
Grow only flowers? – as well write only verse!
And in so good a soil? Were but this realm
an honest Soviet, judgement would o’erwhelm
her and her trumpery, and the freehold give
to brisker hands.

This officialese voicing of collectivist propaganda is hardly endorsed by the poem’s sympathies even in their uttering. Still, the ‘conclusion seems inescapable’, Davie adjudges, ‘all poetic genres have a limited time-span’ and ‘can outlive their usefulness – either when the socio-cultural context changes around them, or else when the masters of the genre have exhausted it simply by realizing every one of its potencies’. It seems the blokes have got there first and used up all the stock. Yet as Davie notes, these forms do ‘outlive’, surviving independently of such historical change as the critic uses to declare heroic couplet narrative past its sell-by date.⁵⁰

But Opus 7 is best seen as an instance of the fashion for a near-parodic neo-classicism in the art, literature and music of the post-war years, as exemplified by Picasso’s Ingres-like portraits, such as his one of Stravinsky, appropriately enough. It is a vogue which in English poetry involved evoking eighteenth-century styles, some of which Pound advised Eliot to cut from The Waste Land, though they survive in the echo of Goldsmith’s ‘lovely woman’ quatrain which rounds off the encounter between the clerk and typist originally composed in the quatrains of Gray’s ‘Elegy’. Warner contributes to the moment with her imitation of a rural tale by George Crabbe, foreshadowing her friend Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes opera. Far from being ‘dated’ in its use of pentameter couplets, Opus 7 is a modern hybrid, which addresses its own veneer of datedness at points and highlights a historical sense in its overt allusiveness. The usefulness of poetic forms, it follows, depends on what you want to use them for. And it may only be coincidence, but in the lead-up to her climactic night-time graveyard scene, Warner recalls Timon of Athens where the moon’s ‘an arrant thief’ because ‘her pale fire she snatches from the sun’:⁵¹

                  With a pale fire
it brimmed before her, stinging her desire
so that she laughed aloud, and hugged the freight
of her four bottles.

Similarly, when Vladimir Nabokov composed John Shade’s poem ‘Pale Fire’ which elegizes his daughter Hazel’s night-time suicide for his 1962 novel, he too chose heroic couplets.

As we have seen, Warner’s verse tale is only too aware of its dialogue with a poetic tradition at risk of moving out of earshot. She turns self-reflective at the close of her third section when the poet wakes from a long winter night’s unsettled sleep and finds her work ‘neither better nor much worse | than any other twentieth-century verse’:

Oh, must I be disillusioned, there’s
no need to wait for spring! Each day declares
yesterday’s currency a few dead leaves;
and through all the sly nets poor technique weaves
the wind blows on, whilst I – new nets design,
a sister soul to my slut heroine,
she to her dram enslaved, and I to mine.

Another practitioner of Tennyson’s sad mechanic exercise for numbing pain, Warner closes her section on another Dryden-like triplet rhyme, underlining the analogy between the flowers Rebecca grows in her garden, which furnish funds for her addiction, and the poetic reminiscences Warner weaves into her verses. It is she who highlights thus the aesthetic Davie notes with his ‘impression of new wine in an old bottle’⁵² – though what is coursing through the veins of Opus 7 might better have been described as freshly purchased gin.

5

Rather than roping her into his gathering of British poets under the colours of Thomas Hardy, Davie attempts to ‘place’ Warner and her work by proposing a contrast between Hardy’s realist commitment to rural materials and her supposed desire to use village life as an ideal to be contrasted with urban experience:

But whereas Edward Thomas and even Thomas Hardy seem to have declared that rustic England would persist indefinitely as a historical fact, others – Robert Graves by implication, Edmund Blunden sometimes, Sylvia Townsend Warner sometimes – seem to have suggested contrariwise that it would persist ideally, not as a fact but as a remembered paradigm by which quite different urban facts could be measured and set in order. That is how the pastoral convention had worked in the past; and at some points in Time Importuned that is how it seemed to work for Sylvia Townsend Warner […]⁵³

The precariousness of Davie’s struggle to regiment British poetry around the contrariwise contrast of countryside fact and ideal (underlined by his repeated use of ‘seem’ and ‘seemed’) might have been eased by recalling that the pastoral was never historical fact, always remembered paradigm, and that to use the term to refer simply to rural, countryside, or farming material is both to disarm it and collude with its workings, hiding thus the complex social politics that Empson reveals, something the gesturing phrase ‘set them in order’ notably evades. Interwar ruralism has received nuanced attention since Davie attempted this would-be rappel à l’ordre and his terms here are both inflexible and coercive.⁵⁴ Warner’s graveyard meditations, as I have attempted to show, don’t even try to contain assuaging deployments of pastoral conventions and unequal social reconciliations.

The evidence of her distinctly Hardyesque ‘Epitaphs’ would discourage the assumption of such neat contrasts as Davie attempts, which are evidently setting Warner up for a fall, just as his political parti-pris are identifiable when he refers to ‘her long dalliance with the Communist Party’⁵⁵ – inviting the thought that her association with it was no more than a superannuated extramarital flirtation (though Harman notes Warner may have paid her dues only until 1939). Yet the poet’s concern for the fortunes of the Left and one of its greatest figurehead martyrs is indicated ten years before her joining the party when in The Espalier a brief footnote indicates that the addressee of ‘I Bring Her a Flower’ is Rosa Luxemburg, the Spartacus leader murdered six years earlier, on 15 January 1919, by the Freikorps militia in Berlin, who when ‘rousing at the jar | Of weary foot in the rain | Pitied the wakeful sentry for his pain’.⁵⁶

Davie’s word ‘dalliance’ is by no means fair either to Warner or the many others who, independently of the subterfuges Stalin employed, supported the cause of the elected Republican government during the Spanish Civil War.⁵⁷ That war too was an opportunity for the mass filling of graveyards and Warner pauses momentarily on what might have been such a thought in sight of a European cemetery while ‘Waiting at Cerbère’:

And on the hillside
That is the colour of peasant’s bread,
Is the rectangular
White village of the dead.

No one stirs in those streets,
Out of those dark doorways no one comes,
At the tavern of the Black Cross
Only the cicada strums.

This border village in the eastern Pyrenees has a railway station where it’s necessary to change trains because the railway gauges in France and Spain are different. It was the place where half a million Republican refugees crossed the border northwards up on the fall of Barcelona in January 1939. Warner’s poem has a starkly articulated plainness. It rises to no polemical or partisan point but evokes the scene and follows its contours where ‘the road | Zigzagging tier on tier | Above the terraced vineyards, | Goes on to the frontier’.⁵⁸

Let me conclude with ‘Graveyard in Norfolk’, not collected in a separate volume until Twelve Poems (1980), though its first magazine publication was in July 1934:

With spruce asters and September roses
Replenished are jampots and vases,
From the breasts of the dead the dead blossoms are swept
And tossed over into the meadow.
Women wander from grave to grave inspecting the posies,
So tranquilly time passes
One might believe the scything greybeard slept
In the yew tree’s shadow.

The poem notes that ‘With boom and stumble, with cadence and patient cropper, | The organist practices the voluntary’ and the poet herself has found a form for precisely that mixture of confident lengthening followed by a shortened stumble or fall in her five octave stanzas, where the first four unrhymed lines are then reassuringly matched with rhymes at the same points in the second four lines. The casual details of ‘jampots and vases’ serve to indicate that though ‘in the countryside among the lowly’ where ‘Death is not out of fashion’ and Gray’s ‘Elegy’ still within hearing distance, she allows her widows to experience ‘Christ’s entertainment’ and its ‘securer staying’ consolations for mortal loss:

Here can the widow walk and the trembling mother
And hear with the organ blended
The swallows’ auguring twitter of a brief flight
To a securer staying;
Can foretaste that heavenly park where toil and pother,
Labour and sorrow ended,
They shall stroll with husband and children in blameless white,
In sunlight, with music playing.59

However much Warner’s graveyard, with her own organ-like ‘music playing’, allows its women haunters to glimpse a paradisal release from their ‘toil and pother, | Labour and sorrow’, her poem does not traffic in tacit justifications for them remaining ‘lowly’. Thus, as I have attempted to show, while Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Townsend Warner visiting graveyards after the heyday of the Romantic movement will be as engaged as anyone with that great leveller, death, they do not evoke those hauntings to buttress the social order as a state of nature or an escape from the stressed contradictions in political and social thought. Rather, they apply death’s levelling fact to the conditions of that very social order. Before it is too late, and with as much ironic indirection as can be mustered, they imply that ‘if way to the Better there be’,⁶⁰ it requires us to treat each other not only as equal in the eyes of God, but as equal in life as we will be in death.

Note on contributor

Peter Robinson is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. The author of aphorisms, short stories, fiction and literary criticism, he has been awarded the Cheltenham Prize, the John Florio Prize and two Poetry Book Society Recommendations for some of his poetry and translations. Recent publications include Retrieved Attachments (2023), the Collected Poems of Giorgio Bassani (2023), with Roberta Antognini, and a second bilingual Italian edition of his poems entitled Enigmi e Dintorni (2024).

Declarations and conflicts of interest