lifelong commitment of marriage – but making her life a ‘round’ means
her grave is continuous with that childhood, and nothing has really
changed. ‘A Dream or No’ wonders about the reality of ‘the woman I
thought a long housemate with me’, quietly picking up on Ecclesiastes’
description of the grave as man’s ‘long home’ ( 12 : 5 ) to imply their
marriage and her death were very much of a piece. Such an uninterrupted
transition between the two smoothes over the shock of parting, but at the
price of making her unresponsiveness in death always part of the life they
shared.
But revealing the emotional charge within such indifference has an
impact on the awkwardness of the poems’ form as well, for the more the
diction feels inappropriate or the rhythm clumsy, the more it would
testify to the strain between the couple while alive, and the estrangement
that continues afterwards. Sometimes the complex alliterations and re-
petitive rhymes seem too willingly to enforce a shape on loss, as in
‘Lament’:
But
She is shut, she is shut
From friendship’s spell
In the jailing shell
Of her tiny cell.The triple rhymes and two-beat line determinedly make the stanza’s
end something of a tiny cell itself, but then, what choice do mourners
have but to lavish attention on the heedless? This manipulated, unavoid-
able superfluity is also audible in ‘After a Journey’:
Hereto I come to view a voiceless ghost;
Whither, O whither will its whim now draw me?Its repetitions and echoes are conspicuously noisy in the ghost’s silence,
as extrinsic as the stanza pattern proves to be. It is very difficult to tell, for
example, if the penultimate line of each stanza has two or three beats; ‘With
your nut-coloured hair’ might be either; ‘with us twain, you tell’ is very
awkward if it is not two; ‘I am just the same as when’ is difficult to squeeze
into two without gabbling. The effect is an odd combination of formal
coerciveness and uncertainty which mirrors the way the speaker alternates
between being led on by the ghost and holding her to account; indeed, the
metre itself keeps changing gear between iambic and trochaic/dactylic,
spurring itself on and then lapsing as if not sure whether to lead or be
led, a question which reappears in the argument itself:
178 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism