geoffrey hill
What I propose to call ‘the Rilke connection’ is of the utmost significance in
ourconsideration of Keyes’s poetic craft and of its place in the development of
twentieth-century British poetry. It is a connection that I am by no means the first
to have noticed.^52 And when Keyes reviewed, very favourably,Beauty for Ashes,a
book-length poem by Morwenna Donnelly, for the wartime periodicalKingdom
Come, he wrote that, despite certain flaws, her poem succeeds in Rilkean terms:
‘like Rilke, she is finally answered, and accepts the revelation. That is the important
fact.’^53 Here, it is the Rilkean ontology that is paramount; throughout Keyes’s work,
however, one is also conscious of a Rilkean note to the language itself. What he takes
from the German poet, and from other Germans such as Holderlin and Schiller, ̈
is a sense that poetry is to be conceived of and confirmed in its quality as heroic
elegy. Keith Douglas also admired Rilke, whom he read both in German and in
English.^54 The difference is that Keyes grounded himself in Rilke—it is the source
of his strength and of his vulnerability to later British critics—and that Douglas did
not. Keyes’s recurrent note is the cry that opens theDuinosequence: ‘Wer, wenn
ich schriee...?’^55 No style of modern or postmodern poetry in English is now more
out of fashion.
Keyes’s ‘The Foreign Gate’, which takes up twelve of the thirty-nine pages of
verse inThe Iron Laurel, is headed by a quotation from Rilke’s sixthDuino Elegy,
which he leaves in the original, but which Leishman and Spender translate: ‘Yes,
the Hero’s strangely akin to the youthfully dead. /...Fate,...enraptured all of a
sudden,|sings him into the storm of her roaring world.’^56 The style of this long
poem is a twentieth-century heroic style: suppose that Yeats had uncharacteristically
translated Rilke into a form of loose Pindaric and that a nineteen-year-old Oxford
undergraduate had modified this with the rhetoric of a poem by the locally
celebrated Charles Williams. Keyes writes:
Once a man cried and the great Orders heard him:
Pacing upon a windy wall at night
A pale unlearned poet out of Europe’s
Erraticheartcriedandwasfilledwithspeech.
Were I to cry, who in that proud hierarchy
Of the illustrious would pity me?
What should I cry, how should I learn their language?
Thecoldwindtakesmywords.^57The measure of this is overwhelmingly Rilkean, though ‘What should I cry...?’ also
echoes the King James Bible.^58 The ‘man’ and the ‘windy wall’ are Rilke at Duino;
(^52) See e.g. Heath-Stubbs,Hindsights, 69 and 76; Michael Hamburger,String of Beginnings(London:
Skoob Books, 1991), 97.
(^53) Keyes, review of Morwenna Donnelly’sBeauty for Ashes,Kingdom Come, 3/12 (Autumn 1943),
44–5. By the time this review appeared, Keyes was already dead. 54
See Graham,Keith Douglas 1920–1944, 222 n. 1.^55 Rilke,Duino Elegies, 24.
(^56) Ibid. 64–7. (^57) Keyes, ‘The Foreign Gate’, inCollected Poems, 64. (^58) Isa. 40: 6.