geoffrey hill
And Yeats is also here, in the clockwork bird.^93 Secondly,among the felicities of
detail, the fact that the angel is of ‘whitestone’: there is a full ambience evoked by
that epithet, whether of Chartres or the graveyard of St Peter’s in the East, Oxford,
where Keyes walked and talked with Milein Cosman.^94 Equally well tuned is the
pitch of ‘And there were lives perversely otherwise|Than ours’, where ‘perversely’
is both a specification for obtrusive circumstance so much an Other that it appears
malign, and also the voicing of a kind of solipsistic petulance that resents the
presence of others at all. And ‘irrefutably’ is both the nature of the obstruction and
the saving obduracy of the ‘poem’, the irrefutable nature of the ‘peace’ arrived at
only because this particular poem is its vehicle.
Judging by the work that survives, I believe the following conclusion has to
be drawn: that Keyes is a minor poet but with a potential for greatness, whereas
Douglas is a major poet though on a small scale. To say this is not to dispute
the validity of Jeffrey Wainwright’s own summing up: that Keyes’s poems ‘written
through the summer of 1942...are a great achievement. Their mythological and
historical sweep befits a time of world war, and along with this external awareness is
psychological insight into the tortuous interactions of love and destructiveness.’^95
A final word on historical perspective. I have known Keyes’s poetry for almost
sixty years, since I discovered his 1945Collected Poemsat the age of 16 or 17 in a
Scarborough bookshop. During all that time he has never ceased to move, delight,
and instruct me. I owe him an immense debt that I cannot repay, except, most
inadequately, in this present tribute.
(^93) See Yeats, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, inThe Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Dent, 1990),
239–40.
(^94) See Milein Cosman, ‘Memoir’, in Keyes,Collected Poems(2002), 115.
(^95) Jeffrey Wainwright, ‘Introduction’, ibid. p. xiv.