geoffrey hill
One notices in this list the frequent occurrence of the word ‘Lament’: it is the
equivalentof Pound’s ‘poignancy’. In his foreword toEight Oxford Poets, Keyes
wrote of himself and his fellow authors:
We seem to share...the feeling that we cannot save ourselves without some kind of spiritual
readjustment, though the nature of that readjustment may take widely differing forms. In
technique there is also some similarity between us; we are all...Romanticwriters, though I
mean little more than that our greatest fault is a tendency to floridity; and that we have, on
the whole, little sympathy with the Audenian school of poets.^81
Let us consider first the phrase ‘some kind of spiritual readjustment’. In 1987 the
military historian James Lucas, who as Private Lucas was Keyes’s runner in the battle
for Oued Zarga, contributed invaluable details to our knowledge of the poet’s last
hours. Lucas concluded his memoir with the valediction ‘he was a gallant Christian
gentleman who sacrificed himself for the men under his command.’^82 IthinkKeyes
would have shrugged off the title ‘Christian gentleman’. It is true that two of his
poetic mentors—Eliot and Williams—were devout High Churchmen, and that
Keyes was ‘immensely impressed’ by Williams’sTheDescentoftheDove;buthealso
read with interest Maud Bodkin’s JungianArchetypal Patterns in Poetry.^83 My sense
is that Christianity was for him a richly available myth on a par withThe Golden
Boughor the mystical cosmos of Jung or Yeats. He read Jung,^84 and he might,
had he lived, have become in middle age a familiar kind of Jungian Christian; but
the point he had reached at the time of his death could better be described as
stoic:
We walked together through the gloom of the brief twilight, the smoke of the explosions
and the dust. He pointed at something on the ground and told me that it was the German
sign marking a mine field. We were, therefore, crossing one.^85
We might look next at the suggestion of ‘a tendency to floridity’. Keyes’s poetry
sometimes suggests floridity (for example, ‘Lament for Harpsichord: The Flowering
Orchards’, a vigil under the aegis of Couperin); that is to say, in one case he equates
his imagery with the flowers of nature and of rhetoric as they were conceived by
late seventeenth-century French harpsichordists. It is a style of extended troping.
However, when Keyes uses the term ‘Romantic’ as if it is inevitably the source
merely of ‘floridity’, he does his own work less than justice. The tradition in
which he writes, the quality to which he aspires, is that of the self-sufficiency of
the achieved poem. His criteria, knowingly or not, derive from the crucial tenets
of Romanticism and Romantic Modernism—from Schiller, through the heavily
indebted Coleridge, to Riding and Graves:
(^81) Keyes, quoted in Herbert Read, ‘Preface’, in Keyes,Collected Poems(New York: Henry Holt,
1947), p. ix. 82
Lucas, ‘Memoir’, 127.^83 See Heath-Stubbs,Hindsights,86–7.
(^84) See Guenther,Sidney Keyes, 153. (^85) Lucas, ‘Memoir’, in Keyes, 126.