The Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti claimed that “extreme turbulence” was best expressed with “extreme precision”. What time of human life appears more turbulent than that of adolescence?
Perhaps much modern strife can be explained by the deliberate colonisation of adulthood by adolescence.
We know little about the teenage years of Elizabeth Jennings, the most notable Catholic British poet since Gerard Manley-Hopkins, who was born in Lincolnshire on this day in 1926. Yet it is this time of life I illogically associate her with, given that I first happened upon her 1958 poem Absence, shortly after my own16th birthday. I had deliberately been seeking literary consolation.
“I visited the place where we last met.
Nothing was changed, the gardens were well-tended,
The fountains sprayed their usual steady jet;
There was no sign that anything had ended
And nothing to instruct me to forget.”
Jennings’ words are succinct but stomach churning. She contrasts the complex inner turmoil of loss with an Eden-like exterior. Anyone who has lost anything, and that is to say anyone, can visualise themself seated beside that bubbling fountain and birdsong, thinking along similar lines.
“It was because the place was just the same/ That made your absence seem a savage force,” she continues, constructing a universe indifferent to transitory loss. However jarring this seems initially, one comes to acknowledge the fixed and constant order of the universe as comforting. Others would suggest the narrator is mourning the titular absence of God himself, but the direct address throughout implies a belief in him unswayed by her pain. In the much later “In Praise of Creation” (1987) Jennings’ assertion of God through nature plods triumphant through her euphonous verse, through “a bird, a star and the flash of a tiger’s eye”. In “The Annunciation”, “The Visitation” and “Teresa of Avila” she openly and skilfully approaches overtly religious episodes.
A lesser-known among her works, possibly judged too dark to feature in school anthologies, is one of her most moving. , “For a Child Born Dead” (1967) rawly probes the most shocking form of grief one might encounter, that for a child.
“If you had come
Out of a warm and noisy room
To this, there’d be an opposite
For us to know you by…
But we have never seen you stride
Ambitiously the world we know.
You could not come and yet you go.”
Echoing the solidity of the wider world which surrounds her narrator in “Absence”, here Jennings too alludes to a greater, unseen whole. “…all our consolation is/ That grief can be as pure as this.”
Jennings’ voice offers no hope of an earthly resolution to this tragedy, but “pure grief” implies “pure love”, and thus a pure good that must govern us. That a life has been cut short before even a “stride” can take place has forged a vacuum in which one wonders how differently such a loss would have felt if just some of the joys of childhood had been permitted. That the child has been born “dead” also insists that they had already been alive inside their mother.
Her work far exceeded Ungaretti’s fondness for the precise. Her wielding of the ancient tools: metre and rhyme, rebelled against the contemporary fondness for radical innovation and free verse, as well as the preceding era’s lavish romanticism. “Only one thing must be cast out, and that is the vague. Only true clarity reaches to the heights and the depths of human, and more than human, understanding,” she mused in 1976. No wonder she never took up novel writing.
Jennings’ poems were compulsory reading on A-level syllabi until the late 1990s before the exam boards levelled her in favour of newer poets. I am sure that, Like Hannah More and Anne Brontë before her, the modern failure to understand transcendent faith, especially Christianity, has played its part in diminishing her work’s reputation.
Her life also lacked the personal drama of conversion which defined the careers of a slew of English Catholic artists from Evelyn Waugh to Graham Greene and Edith Sitwell. In a similarly off-brand fashion to other successful writers, any romances she had remained private. She never married, admitting to the Oxford Mail in 1998: “I was engaged once but it was a good job I didn’t marry him because I’m always getting up in the night to write”.
In “Delay” (1956) she compared interpersonal attraction to the cumbersome and confusing journey of starlight as it ploughs through galaxies to reach Earth, its sparkly exterior representing something that may well already have expired.
“The radiance of the star that leans on me
Was shining years ago. The light that now
Glitters up there my eyes may never see,
And so the time lag teases me with how
Love that loves now may not reach me until
Its first desire is spent…
The star’s impulse
Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful
And love arrived may find us somewhere else.”
Just like a light beam, human desire might linger on another thing but remain unnoticed if circumstances do not collude in its favour. Like two ships that pass in the night, the subject and objects of affection may realise the situation at completely separate times, making any union impossible.
Jennings’ work routinely confronted such intimacy, but she rejected being lumped in with the “Confessional” clique, which included Catholic convert Robert Lowell and his ex-Protestant peers Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. While their work consciously interrogated their real-life traumas, Jennings stressed that her work was not purely autobiographical. Any conscious dialogue between her “Mirrors” (1967) and Plath’s bone-chilling “Mirror” (1961) is uncertain but interesting to imagine.
Jennings’ fame was that of a vanishingly modest and distinctly English kind. Students who visited her for advice found her warm and accommodating, no doubt a reflection of her sincere faith and passion for her field. She told various interviewers that she sometimes pottered about Yates Wine Lodge and would often attend to her various work papers across Oxford coffee shop tables. Much of today’s great and good are encountered only through heavily doctored Instagram posts and occupy polished compounds for purposes of both status and safety. Indeed, Jennings’ genius, penned in the alien universe of mid-20th century England now finds us resident in the “somewhere else” of missed opportunities.
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