Michael Hughes – 27/02/2008

“Caedmon” (Denise Levertov, 1987)

All others talked as iftalk were a dance.Clodhopper I, with clumsy feetwould break the gliding ring.

5 Early I learned tohunch myselfclose by the door:then when talk beganI’d wipe my

10 mouth and wendunnoticed back to the barnto be with the warm beasts,dumb among body soundsof the simple ones.

15 I’d see by a twistof lit rush the motesof gold movingfrom shadow to shadowslow in the wake

20 of deep untroubled sighs.The cowsmunched or stirred or were still. Iwas at home and lonely,both in good measure. Until

25 the sudden angel affrighted me––light effacingmy feeble beam,a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying:but the cows as beforewere calm, and nothing was burning,

30 nothing but I, as that hand of firetouched my lips and scorched my tongueand pulled my voice

into the ring of the dance.

1

In his seminal work The Well Wrought Urn, Cleanth Brooks warns other critics of poetry

that

By taking the paraphrase as our point of stance, we misconceive the function of metaphor and meter. We demand logical coherences where they are sometimes irrelevant, and we fail frequently to see imaginative coherences on levels where they are highly relevant.

[…]

The characteristic unity of a poem (even of those poems which may accidentally possess a logical unity as well as this poetic unity) lies in the unification of attitudes into a hierarchy subordinated to a total and governing attitude. In the unified poem, the poet has “come to terms” with his experience.1

The following reading of Denise Levertov’s “Caedmon” will elucidate such “imaginative

coherences” in her metaphor and metre, and will demonstrate how, for the majority of the

poem, she unites conflicting attitudes in a far more liberal agreement than the “hierarchy”

suggested by Brooks. It will be suggested that Levertov’s “imaginative coherences” might

sometimes be better described as ‘logical incoherences’: To the extent that “Caedmon” can

be seen as a treatment of tensions between different poetic conventions (from the original,

medieval herdsman Caedmon’s “Hymn” to modernism),2 for a long time Levertov seems to

propose a tolerant alternative to modernism’s indifferent rejection of rigid metre. In ll.1-4,

for example, her use of different metres is largely equivocal (logically promoting an

indifferent attitude towards these conventions, like modernism, but not rejecting them

either), and is followed by an increasingly open (and equally logically incoherent) form:

/ u u | / u uAll others talked as if

/ u u | / || talk were a dance.

/ u u | / || u / | u /Clodhopper I, with clumsy feet

u / | u / | u / ||would break the gliding ring. (ll.1-4)3

1 Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (1947), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (hereafter referred to as ‘NATC’) p.1359-61.2 “Caedmon’s Hymn” and a comprehensive outline of his story (first told by the seventh-century scholar Bede) can be found in The Norton Anthology of Poetry (hereafter referred to as ‘NAP’), p.1.

2

The dactyls in ll.1-2 seem to imitate the dance-like rhythm of others’ talk. Continuing this

metaphor, the unambiguous pun on Caedmon’s clumsy “feet” is represented by the

awkward switch to iambs halfway through l.34 – an echoism compounded by the sentence’s

unwieldy syntactic inversion. By jarringly grafting two (independently regular) metres

together in this way, Levertov acknowledges simultaneously both conventional accentual-

syllabic traditions and modernist discordance. And there is a third side to this metrical

tension: the alliteration of “clodhopper” and “clumsy”, besides adding further

onomatopoeic clout, reminds us of Caedmon’s (medieval) accentual roots. Isolated, l.3 is a

near perfect model of medieval accentual metre, pairs of stressed syllables falling either

side of a pivotal caesura.5

Insofar that this metrical tension corresponds to the clumsiness Caedmon describes,

ll.1-4 could be described as an example of “imaginative coherence”.6 By the same token, as

it is a state of discord being treated – no single metre taking precedence – it is logical that

they should be incoherent. Levertov further augments this incoherence with irony: while

her Caedmon is made clumsy because he does use accentual metre, the ‘original’ Caedmon

only mastered this metre when he found his poetic tongue7 – the “dance” which alienates

Levertov’s Caedmon is distinctly dactylic (ll.1-2). Levertov’s indiscriminate eclecticism

implies that no one poetic metre is more important than the next: while Caedmon fails here

to reproduce the dactyls of the first two lines, we can only admire the rich artifice and

allusion that Levertov achieves in l.3.

This ambivalence, is complemented by the open form in which Levertov continues.

Indeed, the only generalisation I will venture to make of the poem’s main body – that is, of

ll.5-24 – is that line length tends to fall between 4 and 6 syllables. Other features seem only

to tease us in our search for the coherence of a dominant form; for instance, occasional

3 These lines refer to the part of Caedmon’s story telling how “at feasts where farmhands took turns singing and playing the harp, Caedmon would withdraw to his bed in the stable whenever the harp was passed his way” (NAP, p.1).4 The pun implies clumsiness both in his movement and in his speech. We might also notice that the “gliding” ring is literally broken between iambs in l.4.5 Compare, for instance, l.2 of “Caedmon’s Hymn”: “Meotodes meahte || and his modgeþanc” (NAP, p.1).6 Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (1947), NATC p.1359.7 That is, when it was divinely gifted to him, as we shall see later in ll.25-33 (see also NAP, p.1).

3

alliteration reminds us of its original use as an accentual device in l.3, but we don’t see

fully formed accentual metre again until l.25.8

At this point we reach the climax of Caedmon’s story, in what is also – in my

opinion for slightly different reasons – the climax Levertov’s poem. Ll.25-33 describe

Caedmon’s reception of the ‘gift from God’ of poetic speech, which he could then use to

praise the lord:9

u / u | / u u | / u u || / u | / u25 the sudden angel affrighted me––light effacing

u / | u / ||my feeble beam,

u / u | u / u || / u | u / || / u | / u ||a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying:

u u / | u u /but the cows as before

u / || u | / u u | / u ||were calm, and nothing was burning,

/ u u | / || u / | / u | / u30 nothing but I, as that hand of fire

/ | u / | u / | u / touched my lips and scorched my tongue

u / | u / and pulled my voice

/ u u | / u u | / ||into the ring of the dance.

The assumption that these lines constitute the poem’s climax leads me to place great

importance in the meaning I derive from them, which, it will be seen, finally – ironically –

compromises Levertov’s tolerant compromise between conflicting poetic metres. But first

we see the final throes of her more liberal aspirations, in a return to the ambivalence of ll.1-

4: it has already been mentioned that l.25 finds Levertov again using the accentual line;

alliterative, in “angel”, “affrighted” and “effacing”, and turning on the caesura produced by

the dash. And like l.3, this instance of medieval form can be seen as one aspect of a rich

8 Alliteration between l.5 and l.24 occurs in ll.11-12 (“back to the barn / to be with the warm beasts”), and l.22 (“munched or stirred or were still”).9 NAP, p.1.

4

web of poetical allusions. The theme of divine poetic inspiration, for instance, was

originally a classical topos (in the form of the Olympian muses), which was most popularly

imitated in English poetry in the Renaissance period. Meanwhile, “effacing” (l. 25) forms

the first half of a pararhyme with “upflying” (l. 27). This technique, first used consistently

by modernist poet Wilfred Owen,10 serves well to remind us of the dissonance created by

such multifarious and equivocal allusion, and at this point it seems that Levertov is

intending to sustain the logical incoherence of her positive modernist ambivalence right to

the end of her poem.

However, while ll.1-4 scan at a relatively moderate pace; a comparatively calm

clumsiness, if you will, ll.25-27, in the drama of the “sudden” angel’s manifestation (which

resembles an assault), are frantic and “affrighted”. This effect is enhanced by the extension

of the alliteration in l.25, into a more offensive sounding ‘f’: “affrighted”, “effacing”,

“feeble”, “forest”, “feathers”, “flame” and “upflying”, combined with the asyndeton of the

relentless conjunctional commas, seem to me to instil a sense of panic which reflects the

idea that this assault is to overturn the indiscriminate variety of metres condoned by

Levertov up to this point.

How so? This claim may well seem improbable: ostensibly, no single poetic foot

dominates the final lines, and Caedmon’s divine encounter is traditionally viewed in a

positive light; an epiphany rather than an assault or forced compromise.11 But crucially this

part of the story concerns a resolution, forced or not; the unambiguous adoption of an

accepted poetic form. Ultimately, Levertov’s Caedmon is turned away from the metrical

liberty she/he has promoted over the course of the poem through logical incoherence,

“pulled” into and bound by the dactylic “ring[s] of the dance” (ll.32-33).12 Seemingly

against her will, Levertov acknowledges ironically the difficulty of sustaining liberal

indifference when faced by popular conformity, finally submitting to a “unification of

attitudes into a hierarchy subordinated to a total and governing attitude”: “In th[is] unified

poem, the poet has [bitterly] “come to terms” with h[er] experience.”13

10 (And therefore associated with that period), NAP, p.2038.11 NAP, p.1.12 The iambs of ll.30-32 recall Caedmon’s “clumsy feet” in l.3: here (ll.30-33) we see an inversion of the dactylic-iambic transition at the start of the poem, this time notably more resolute and final.13 Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (1947), NATC, p.1361.

5

Bibliography

Levertov, Denise, “Caedmon” (1987), in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. By Ferguson, Salter and Stallworthy (New York: Norton, 2005), pp.1680-81.

Brooks, Cleanth, “The Heresy of Paraphrase” from The Well Wrought Urn (1947), in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. by Leitch, Vincent (New York: Norton, 2001), pp.1353-65.

Brooks, Cleanth, “Formalist Critics” (1951), in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. by Leitch, Vincent (New York: Norton, 2001), pp.1366-71.

Ferguson, Margaret, “Poetic Syntax”, in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. By Ferguson, Salter and Stallworthy (New York: Norton, 2005), pp.2053-74.

Kinnahan, Linda, “Denise Levertov: The Daughter’s Voice”, in Poetics of the Feminine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.125-182.

Lennard, John, “Metre”, in The Poetry Handbook (2005), pp.1-32.

OED, Oxford English Dictionary, ed. by Judy Pearsall, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

Stallworthy, Jon, “Versification”, in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. By Ferguson, Salter and Stallworthy (New York: Norton, 2005), pp.2027-52.

6