gareth reeves
with opacity. It is underspoken, stunning and stunned, a style befitting a civilization,
andfinally the poet-witness, silenced.
That style began to emerge in the early ‘Terminal Moraine’, which begins with a
bald declaration that the ensuing poem has to do with inscrutability: ‘It’s simple but
I find it hard to explain|Why I should wish to go from the moraine.’^21 If Auden’s
‘The Watershed’ hovers on the brink of turning its post-industrial terrain into a
psychological arena of frustrated anxiety and blockage, Fenton’s poem goes over
thebrink.Butitdoessowithanexplicitnessthatbeliesturbulentundercurrents:
‘every sudden breeze||Is amplified for my benefit. I listen and in the deep|Of the
night, when I am alone, I landscape my sleep.’ The poem does what it says, ‘give[s]
shape to thought’, rather than makes thought out of shapes. The poet ‘become[s]
athing|Of caves and hollows, mouths where the winds sing’, possessing the caves
and hollows and winds, rather than being possessed by them. The neat transposition
in the final couplet, where heart turns into car, says it all with a clarity of utterance
gainsaying the psychological opacity: ‘But when a car is on the road I hear|My
heart beat faster as it changes gear.’
A similar procedure is apparent inthe later, more sophisticatedly mysterious, ‘A
Vacant Possession’ with its ominously stark Audenesque diagnostic detail, though
diagnosing what is carefully obscured: ‘Look how you can scrape the weeds from
the paving stones|With a single motion of the foot,’^22 near the start of the poem,
sounds rather like Auden’s oft-quoted ‘look there|At cigarette-end smouldering on
a border’ near the start of ‘Consider this and in our time’,^23 an unspecified addressee
being commanded to look at a minute particular. But if Auden’s poem intimates
psychic ills amidst threatening landscape, Fenton’s gets there faster if more spookily.
In the third stanza, ‘she leans against|A mossy water-butt in which, could we see
them,|Innumerableformsoflifeareuncurving’:thepseudo-precise,pernicketyway
of putting it—‘could we see them’, ‘uncurving’—masks vaguely ominous depths.
The technique came into its own with Fenton’s experiences as a war correspond-
ent. His poem ‘Cambodia’ sounds as if written in defiant acknowledgement of the
‘voice without a face’ which ‘Proved by statistics that some cause was just’ in Auden’s
‘The Shield of Achilles’.^24 The voice of ‘Cambodia’ starkly declares the numbers
game in five end-stopped couplets, almost entirely composed of monosyllabic
words (there are five disyllabic words, but none longer). It is as if Hill’s sentence ‘As
estimated, you died’ has chillingly infected Fenton’s diction, for the poem sounds
calculated to convey the riddlingly incalculable incomprehension of both victim
(^21) James Fenton, ‘Terminal Moraine’, inThe Memory of War and Children in Exile: Poems 1968–1983
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 92. 22
23 Fenton, ‘A Vacant Possession’, ibid. 47.
W. H. Auden, ‘Consider this and in our time’, inThe English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic
Writings 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1977), 46.
(^24) Auden, ‘The Shield of Achilles’, inCollected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber,
1976), 597.