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PARTISAN REVIEW
the poem which I have cited, in 'Andromeda and Perseus,' 'My Subtle
and Proclamant Song,' 'Cycle,' and three or four more- he speaks with
authority. 'My living lips rest
j
with the vision, utter nonsense and /
sucked platitude. I am dumb with the song,' is too harshly self-critical.
Some kinds of dumbness can be eloquent.
Mr. Norman Nicholson interests me very much. He is a West of
England man and a sturdy regionalist; a Blakean mystic, a landscape–
prophet with more than a drop of Wordsworth in his veins; and his
poetry is as rugged as the screes and becks and rowans and ghylls
that he celebrates.
It
is too rugged, at times, for my outland taste:
these same screes and ghylls-particularly the screes, which turn up
again and again in his pages, like the kestrels in the early Auden–
Spender-Lewis-Warner poetry-, get between me and the poem5. But
I shall not press the objection. What is important is that, screes or
no screes, Mr. Nicholson has written a respectable number of nature
lyrics that challenge the best of their kind. His Cumberland, at once
harsh and soft, wild and ordered, finds admirable expression in these
poems whose texture is so rough, whose depths so gentle. The method
is a familiar one, though it has gone out of fashion in our day: the
natural scene-the River Duddon, Eskmeals, S. Bees-is described in
terms that lead to what our fathers knew as the Moral, the Words–
worthian cognition of the meaning beneath
The forthy blossom on the rowan and the reddening of the berries,
The silt, the sand, the slagbanks and the shingle,
And the wild catastrophes of the breaking mountains-
an act of Natural Piety, alien to our impatient time, but one that we
should do well to recultivate for our souls' good. I am aware that what
I am saying raises up the glum classroom ghosts of
Thanatopsis
and
Tintern Abbey
(but
Tintern Abbey
should not be read in the classroom,
and
Thanatopsis
should not be read anywhere), and I certainly do not
mean to imply that Mr. Nicholson is stuffy. Only in his method does
he resemble the earlier connoisseurs of fringed gentians, chambered
nautiluses and corned cauliflowers; one must really go back as far as
Clare for a comparable power of simple irradiation. (He has none of the
Hopkins ecstasy.) Yet he is not reactionary: he is writing of our predica–
ment, he is addressing us. A typical example is the second strophe of
'Bombing Practice':
The fells are purple and blurred in the haze above the marshes;
The gulls float like bubbles.
Plovers band together with white bellies
Square into the wind;
A curlew flies crying along the gullies,:
A faint rainbow of oil is clogged in the thin rushes.
