Blake, D.H. Lawrence, Ted Hughes — our strongest poets make immediate experience present for us. They make language that makes the world right now, as we feel it and see it, alive in what Lawrence called its quivering momentaneity.

UD thought of this threesome while watching, with Mr. UD, from 5:30 to 6:30 this morning, a sunrise that started with blue rays over a dark sea and then proceeded to total cosmic pink.

Watching its changes, UD recalled this little Blake poem:

He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

(John Tavener put this to music.)

It’s one of your nice neat paradoxes – try to stop the world and you’ll kill it; live life on the fly and you’ll live forever.

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In a great essay about Hughes, Alice Oswald describes her discovery of him at a time in her life when she had a job as a gardener at the Royal Horticultural Society:

… I’d been up at dawn that morning, pruning apples all day. I was fed up with people floating past me using the word “idyllic” and I was fed up with reading about nature at one remove. I thought I’d rather hear a gardener’s or a farmer’s account of the landscape than any poet’s. Then I opened The Hawk in the Rain (Hughes’s first collection) and there was my worked-in world alive in all its freshness.

She mentions in particular a sunrise poem by Hughes, “The Horses.”

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird –
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline – blackening dregs of the brightening grey –
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey – ten together –
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

with draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments

Of a grey silent world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew’s tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging –
I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys in the red levelling rays –

In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing the curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.

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Oswald comments:

This non-nostalgic way of writing is, to my mind, the only way of getting through to the animate part of nature, the soft growing tip. Hughes called it “the vital somewhat terrible spirit of natural life which is new in every second”. DH Lawrence, whose poems Hughes admired, called it “quivering momentaneity”. He spoke of the need for an “unrestful, ungraspable poetry of the sheer present”, which is a pretty good prediction of what Hughes was to write 50 or so years later.

It’s very strange to me, the way poems like this one by Hughes are in fact nostalgic, if you like — maybe very nostalgic. After all, the poem is remembering a transcendent moment in the speaker’s past, and remembering it not all that differently from the way Wordsworth, or Yeats – a later Romantic – would remember and render it … He tells it in the past tense, while a lot of contemporary poets would tell it in the present; and he ends his misty narrative with a prayer, for goodness sake:

May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place…

Or call it a hope, or whatever, but my point is that for a momentaneous poem, this one spends its time either in the past or anticipating the future.

And, I mean, a sunrise. What could be more Romantic? Romantic to the point – this poem being written in the twentieth century – of kitsch?

Well, but language matters. A world cast in frost. Every word snapped shut with a d or a t: world, cast, frost. Short shut lines. Frigid, tapping on the page like a frosty twig tapping on a window. Icy shivery words and lines that makes us feel, and shudder.

And this is no Romantic sunrise, with its blackening dregs of the brightening grey.

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Megalith.

Breathe.

The sounds take us from the cold shut-in world to the exhaling horses — the world begins to make noise. Not language, but noise. The poet’s breath, the horses’ breath — breaths that conjure tortuous statues now coming to life in the sunlight. I listened in emptiness; and may I – he writes at the very end of the poem, continue hearing the horizons endure.

Sensory funny business here: You can’t listen in emptiness, and you can’t hear horizons. You listen in silence and you see horizons. Or so tightass literalist Scathing Online Schoolmarm would insist. Yet it’s precisely the weird momentous momentary sense of merging with the physical and metaphysical world, the experience of transcending your senses, that the poet recalls, brings back — by writing the poem, by explicitly asking in the poem that it be brought back, and by, perhaps, if you’re the right reader, like Alice Oswald, somehow conjuring it back — your version of it back — for you.