British Poetry

Restraint, whether in diction, image, theme, or meter can be used as expressively in poesy as bombastic meter or jarring images and complex diction. In virtu exclusivelyy cases, a muted approach toward the formal expression of a poetic theme allows a poet to convey a sense of magnitude and urgency which one might not expect from a subdued or highly-controlled technique. However, British poets of the post-war generation such as Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, and Derek Walcott exemplify the use of an aesthetic which makes effective use of a subdued and muted speech.Their example is illustrative if not determinate of this tendency as applies to much of British poetry composed after the world wars. One interesting questions as pertains to these four poets is whether the zest behind all(prenominal) of the poets delving into muted understatement is similar or whether each poet sought for disparate reasons a similar style. For Hughes, a quality of stillness and contemplative quietness perv ades most of his work, from his world-class published title Hawk in the Rain through his famous cycle of myth-driven songs Crow and beyond.In Crows First Lesson, Hughes drives a complex theme (the cosmic character of love and its role in the creation of the universe) against a linguistic pallette of utter simplicity. The words are delivered in the cadence of a childrens story or a school primerGod tried to teach Crow how to talk. /Love, said God. Say, Love. /Crow gaped, and the white shark crashed into the sea/And went rolling d ingestwards, discovering its own depth. here on that point is a conspicuous absence of complex word-construction or even complex thought associations.In addition to the sing-song cadence and the child-like sentence structure, the images of the poem are those of naive construction a god, a crow, a shark, a sea. No specific qualities are probed or explored for any of the poems elements there is no subjective reaction to the inner-elements of the poem by the poet, there is no overt confessional element. The muted, alter construction persists through out(a) the poem, even through the poems most complex (penultimate) stanzaAnd Crow retched again, before God could rub him. And womans vulva dropped over mans neck and tightened. The two struggled together on the grass. God struggled to part them, cursed, wept At this point the poem can be said to have progressed out of its childlike facade and into its more difficultly explicated themes regarding cosmic creation, sex, love, and the relationship between men and women, and alike men and women and God.The most obvious reason for Hughes use of a muted, simplified construction in Crows First Lesson is to forward the sense of new-beginnings. As though the subscriber is being instructed in the fundamentals of creation and (Creation) as he or she encounters the poems in Crow. The secondary reason for Hughes use of poetic restraint in Crow is to convey a sense of sacred respect and grief. Th ese latter qualities may emanate form his personal experience as Hughes biography, as is well known, is one which contains much personal suffering and grief.Hughes attains a nobility in the rebel of the poem which masks the faces of the grotesque which lie just beneath and are most accessible in the poems closing stanzas. In this way, the construction of the poem expresses Hughes cosmic imagery of a universe of laws and logic which masks, just beneath, a procession of myth and archetypal realities which to human conscious perception are often terrifying and grotesque. Similarly, in Derek Walcotts The Sea is History a muted and highly controlled technique lends the poem a dignified and sacred air.Walcotts desire in this poem is to present the reader with a poem which offers as many shifting images as the sea itself while simultaneously preserving the rhythmic ease of the seas sounds and motion and too preserving a note of entering greater and greater depth as if the reader is be ing led into the sea and its pacific, hypnotic procession of images. Unlike Hughes, whose main emotive liking in Crows First Lesson is one of cathartic grief, Walcotts poem flows with a sense of grandeur and history.It is a far less personal poem than Hughes in some shipway, but in a many ways it is withal more deeply personal as a confession of personal vision. Like Hughes, Walcott is at long last concerned in this poem with a Creation myth and in the salt chuckle of rocks with their sea pools, there was the sound like a hearsay without any echo of History, really beginning. However, Walcotts poem traces back from the modern to the ancient past of times beginning (leading the reader deeper and deeper) with little sense of grief or catastrophe. Instead, the pervading impulse of the poem is one of embracement.And it is necessary for the poem to mimic in sound and form its central image, the sea, in order for the thematic ideas of the poem, that history binds all time in a single flowing sea of being, to be expressed. Again, both Hughes and Walcott have nurtured a quiet and contemplative idiom in many ways as an homage to and symbol of their hoped-for connection with nature. The muted, contemplative qualities of these poems is an indication of the poets desire to enter into the same quiet creativity that is often displayed in nature, and also to show reverence for the restraint and contemplativeness in naturefireflies with bright ideas and bats like jetting ambassadors and the mantis, like khaki police, and the furred caterpillars of judges examining each case closely, and then in the dark ears of ferns It is worth mentioning that Walcott, in the closing lines of The Sea is History momentarily steps out side of the pervading feeling of contemplative discovery and descent into the pacific depths. In the following passage, the poem modulates to a much more complex and verbally agitated state the plangent repeat of the Babylonian bondage,/ as the white cowrie s clustered like manacles/on the drowned women.It is likely that Walcott intended this change in diction and pace to indicate an urgency in its historical and Biblical references. While Hughes and Walcott attain mythic stature by way of a restrained and muted poetic technique, Philip Larkins Faith Healing seems to regret the absence of a working, living myth in the everyday lives of the commonwealth of the poem. His vision is one of sadness and lost love By now, alls wrong. In everyone there sleeps A sense of life lived according to love. To some it means the difference they could make By loving others, but across most it sweeps As all they might have done had they been loved.That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache, Larkins emotional impetus seems to be one of empathy, providing in the poem what the faith-healer cannot rightly provide in the context of the poems narrative. The muted and restrained diction, rhyme and meter in this poems helps to impart to the poem a sense of the pedestrian, everyday setting that is the poems central concern. It is ordinary people with ordinary problems all who suffer who may be redeemed by love. So, Larkins quietude is in reverence for the redeeming quality of love and nature, but is also a respectful lament for the people who have been left out of loves redemption.This quiet poem masks a deep and rebellious sentiment which lies at the fancy of the poems themes. Larkin in lamenting the lack of redemptive love and tying this observation to a weak religious impulse is, in effect, criticizing the religious sincerity of his own society and questioning the value of religious faith as affectation, when the authentic redemptive quality is love, not religion. In conclusion, each of the poets examines made use of a restrained and contemplative voice for the expression of deeply emotional and spiritually profound themes.For Hughes and Walcott, the accessing of myth by way of a restrained and tempered idiom which drew from natu re its tone of creative quiet, led to the expression of mythically charged Creation stories. The expression of abiding grief and the recognition with elemental nature is also present in each of these poets. For Larkin, the muted and restrained idiom found effective use as a method for conveying his bitter observations of spiritual and religious hypocrisy. In each of the poems discussed both similar and dissimilar motivations for the poets use of a restrained technique were found.The connecting energy between these poets is one of grief and of identification with nature. The dissimilar aspects are those regarding personal versus collective expression, with Hughes closer to the at the end of subjective confession and Larkin moving toward the universal, and Walcott somewhere in between. The poets uses of a similar integrative technique and philosophy seems not to have occasioned a similar emotive and thematic range. Each poet chooses to use the muted and restrained idiom for a antit hetic purpose,, united in style if not in purpose.