Mining for Meaning

Some of the work I enjoy most in Exeter’s archives is this sort of excavation, finding the rougher forms of Jack Clemo’s polished poems. Occasionally there are four or five drafts, spanning thirty years or more, as Clemo returned to the crude ore of earlier work to dig out a shade – a theme, place or structure – to refine.

A good example might be ‘The Brownings at Vallombrosa’, a poem published in the 1971 collection The Echoing Tip but first drafted in 1946 as ‘Rebel Love’. The original poem was not about ‘The Brownings’ at all, but about the narrator (loosely, Clemo) and his loved one. The importance of the difference becomes clear when it is recalled that Clemo believed his personal life had some intimate parallel or connection with the lives and romance of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Without the reader knowing it, Clemo has laid the story of the Brownings over his own story, interweaving the two. He secretly draws the parallel tighter.

The Echoing Tip is rich in this sort of evolutionary material, and the following is a simpler example. The poem started out as ‘School of Clay’ in 1969, when it was printed in a local exhibition brochure for Kernow 70. Five years later it was revised into ‘The Harassed Preacher’ and then published in the 1975 Broad Autumn. To make comparison easier, I’ve placed the poems side by side:

School of Clay (May 1969)                            The Harassed Preacher (1974)

Now summer has come to the clay lands,           Now that summer has brimmed on the uplands

The dunes gleam white in the sun,                           White mine-crusts seed in the sun,

And over the slag and the outcast crag                And around each pit and its outcast grit

A tangle of green is spun.                                        A gabble of green is spun.

                                                                          Soon silenced by bomb and gun.

Bushes have burst into blossom,                          Bushes have bragged into blossom,

Flicked by the dancing sand;                                   Flicked by the teasing sand;

There are milk white brooks in the valley nooks   Milk-wan streams vein the valley’s dreams;

And larks in a lunar land.                                         Larks lilt where the tip-beams stand.

                                                                          Faith’s dream and song are banned.

Our forefathers dug in the field here,                    Our forefathers dug in the field here,

Built us a house of God,                                          Built us a preaching place,

So his truth might spread from the big clay bed    So that truth might spread from the ringing bed

Deep in the spirit’s sod.                                          Ruled by the Galilee base.

                                                                          Too distant now – no trace.

A hundred summers have ripened                        A hundred summers have panted

Around these village lanes                                       Along our zigzag lanes

Since that hungry gang of children sang                Since the first raw crowd of converts bowed

Inside our window panes.                                        Inside these window panes.

                                                                           But the analyst explains. . . .

The seats were clumsy benches;                           The seats were rough bare benches;

No piano struck the tunes;                                        No organ spun a tune;

The bare bleak room held a stuffy gloom               The squeaky hymns and unwashed limbs

Even in those boiling Junes.                                       Made a meagre mock of June.

                                                                            The new age mocks the boon.

But grains from the Holy Scriptures                       Grains from the towering scriptures

Were flicked by the winds of prayer;                         Were flicked by the winds of prayer:

In our sheltered nook these children took              In our grit-ringed nook those drab lives took

New shape in Christian air.                                        Fresh shape in Wesley’s air.

                                                                            Now shapeless atoms wear. . . .

Midsummer is the season                                      We toil in a fevered season;

When the clay shines white on the hill;                       Soul-crusts lie hard on the hill.

Our tools advance, but we catch the glance           Do our tools ring true? Don’t we signal through

Of that shining Potter still.                                          To a ruling Potter still?

                                                                            Our super-egos spill. . . .

                                                                            A plague on the heckling voices

                                                                                That would check my sermon’s flight!

                                                                            It’s eleven o’clock and here’s my flock –

                                                                                Five villagers, old and bright,

                                                                            Knowing their faith is right.

In the first instance, Clemo has written a ballad very much in the style of his good friend Charles Causley, who had been Best Man at his wedding only six months earlier. See, for example, Causley’s ‘Song of the Dying Gunner AA1’:

Oh ‘Cooks to the galley’ is sounded off

And the lads are down in the mess

But I lie done by the forrard gun

With a bullet in my breast.

Or even Causley’s ‘Homage to Jack Clemo’:

Turn, Cornwall, turn and tear him!

    Stamp him in the sod!

He will not fear your cry so clear –

    Only the cry of God.

Both poems are in Picador’s Collected Poems 1951-2000, where the ballad form is well represented. Causley is known for the stoical forms he uses for his tragedies, juxtaposing misery and tragedy against bouncy ballad rhymes. The Causley ballad form Clemo borrows is a contrast to his earlier Francis Thompson or Coventry Patmore sorts of odes, and the poem gaily marches along.

This is altered in the second version of 1974, where the tone is bleaker and the heaps of alliteration and lengthening of vowels slow the pace while giving a greater texture to the language and a little menace. The most obvious change, however, is the extra line Clemo has added to the end of each stanza, which he has italicized. The italicized line is the voice of modernity, further undermining the buoyant ballad. This simple idea deepens the piece, dramatizes it and allows for the final stanza’s triumph, where the form is reclaimed and the italics gone.

Where the idea for this came from is uncertain. Elsewhere in the same volume, Clemo has used italicized Latin, self-consciously playing with Ezra Pound, but it is more reminiscent here of the dramatic repetitious endlines of Poe or the metaphysical poets. What it does show is the difference a second draft makes. Blind and deaf at this point, Clemo composed and revised poems in his head before committing them to paper. He had an exceptional memory, and appears to have held this old draft sufficiently well over the five years that he could still play with it there five years later. The method is interesting, but the layers of significance the poem gains in the reworking, I think, are even more so.

(Both poems appear courtesy of University of Exeter's Special Collections Library.)