geoffrey hill
bright|Leavesof the fire’; ‘Or when the summer flashed and rocketed|Between
green sedges like a kingfisher’; ‘the wild thyme splayed against the paving stones’;
‘the talk|Of rain among the gutters, or at dawn|The sentry’s feet striking the chilly
yard’; ‘At the field’s border, where the cricket chafes|His brittle wings among the
yellow weed,|I pause to hear the sea unendingly sifted|Between the granite fingers
of the cape’; ‘Among their horses’ big-eyed skulls in the meadow’; ‘The yellow
charlock scratches at her door’; ‘I note the greenfly working on the rose’; ‘the may
was knobbed with chilly buds’.^17
As previously stated, my purpose, at this point in my argument, is to present as
full a case as I can for the agrarian nature of Keyes’s imagery and arguments, while
holding back from the conclusion that he is to be read throughout as a pastoralist or
apastoralpoetmanqu ́e. It is true that he frequently highlighted the affinity between
himself and Clare. In a letter of 29 December 1941, he wrote: ‘This morning I went
for a walk by the stream; there was a hard frost and bits of ice were hanging on
twigs by the water—‘‘Like fishes’ eyes’’ as John Clare said.’^18
And in the beautiful early poem ‘A Garland for John Clare’ he recalls:
Mad John Clare, the single timeless poet.
We have forgotten that. But sometimes I remember
The time that I was Clare, and you unborn.^19
John Heath-Stubbs has also written, however, that ‘Sidney Keyes had a strong
belief in the philosophical or metaphysical mission of the poet.’^20 David Wright’s
contrasting opinion was that Keyes’s ‘best poems are about living creatures he had
observed’—for example, ‘Pheasant’ and ‘The Buzzard’.^21 One needs to try to find
some way of explaining why Keyes’s work is not split down the middle, into ‘philo-
sophical or metaphysical’ writings on one side and poems of nature observation on
the other. The observation of natureisthe metaphysics; and it is so, again, by means
of word placing that is neither language at the bidding of concept nor language
subservient to the natural phenomenon. Take the sonnet—Keyes conceived it as
one of a number of proposed ‘Rilkean’ sonnets^22 —‘William Wordsworth’:
No room for mourning: he’s gone out
Into the noisy glen, or stands between the stones(^17) Keyes,Collected Poems, 9, 10 (‘The Buzzard’); 13, 14 (‘Sour Land’); 19 (‘Poem for May the
First’); 19 (‘Poem for Milein Cosman’); 23 (‘Ploughman’); 25 (‘A Garland for John Clare’); 26
(‘Neutrality’); 29 (‘Extracts from ‘‘AJourney through Limbo’’ ’); 31–2 (‘The Glass Tower in Galway’);
41 (‘The Bards’); 59 (‘The Foreign Gate’); 69 (‘Lament for Harpsichord: The Flowering Orchards’); 74
(‘Images of Distress’); 75 (‘The Uncreated Images’); 76 (‘Two Offices of a Sentry, I’); 77 (‘Design for a
Monument’); 78 (‘The Gardener’); 81 (‘The Kestrels’).
(^18) Keyes to Milein Cosman, 29 Dec. 1941, inMinos of Crete: Plays and Stories, ed. Michael Meyer
(London: Routledge, 1948), 171.
(^19) Keyes, ‘A Garland for John Clare’, inCollected Poems, 25. (^20) Heath-Stubbs,Hindsights, 69.
(^21) David Wright, ‘Keyes’s Poetry’,London Magazine, new series, 7 (Nov. 1967), 162.
(^22) See Keyes,Collected Poems, 131: Meyer’s notes to ‘William Wordsworth’ and ‘All Souls: A
Dialogue’.