Kathleen Raine on poetry and life

Kathleen Raine

                                                     

Kathleen Raine's Autobiographies (1991) is made up of her three earlier autobiographical books published in the mid-1970s. I always underline passages in books that I am reading and I underlined passages--single words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs--in Raine's book; later, it occurred to me to compile some of these passages on this blog, these are passages that deal with poetry and being a poet. But typing out these passages today I was surprised at Raine's prescient references to the dark age in which we now live. This is even more pertinent today when the world of order and stability seems to be unraveling; the old order is passing away and the new order seems barbaric and chaotic, anarchic in its worst sense, and everywhere we see the disintegration of values, order, and stability. The barbarians are entering the city and we, the inhabitants, know they have no good intentions for us, they want to destroy us and everything we represent. At least, that is how it seems in the days post October 7th when terrorists invaded Israel intent on killing, mutilating, and raping women, and then celebrating and advertising their violence. But I digress from Kathleen Raine’s Autobiographies; it is a beautifully written book and it should be of interest to those who want to know more about Raine's life, poetry, and ideas about life.

                                      29 December 2023

Kathleen Raine on poetry and life:

My mother did not send me to school until I was six years old; and if I have been a poet I owe it to my mother's protection of my sanctuary of solitude in those years of early childhood when three small fields between the advancing fringe of London's East-End suburbs, and the wooden fence of Dr. Bernardo's Homes was space enough for earthly Paradise. (p. 50)

Conversely, in order to escape the silent demands of dignified and beautiful proportions, barbarians must desecrate and violate, smash the stained glass and deface the statues and paint defiant slogans on walls that tell us too clearly, in their beauty and harmony of proportion, that we might be better than we are. (p, 120)

Strange (so it seems to me, writing in 1974 of my youth nearly fifty years ago) that the very premises of civilization should stand in need of defense. (p. 123)

Let me say here, since I use the term the 'soul' very often, that I am perfectly aware of the possible alternatives, such as psyche, brain, drive, complex, ego, and the behaviousistic terms . . . I believed in the soul as that specifically human life in us of which the body is the vehicle. It seemed then self-evident that this represents our 'higher' nature, and no less self-evident that what passes in that living consciousness--that being in us which we immediately feel to be our 'I am"--is of greater import than our physical functions. The experiences of the soul, for good or ill, I still supposed made up the matter of poetry; and indeed of all the arts, these being the expression and the record of the soul's knowledge. (p. 138-139)

But I have been able to speak from my heart only in my poems. (p. 325)

...--and I do not enjoy that dropping of barriers of the world where 'poets' (usually very minor ones, for any serious artist must live a life in some sense disciplined) move to a kind of promiscuous gregariousness. ... The poet must protect his wildness as best he may, with whatever, camouflage he can create; a principle inherited from the shy animal world from a millennial past. And for a poet whose theme was the city, the city, also must be his protective disguise. (p. 329)

Art is the city of the soul. (p. 339)

I can now myself say that I have learned nothing from experience, from my mistakes, from trial and error, or from the mere passage of time: only through rifts in these clouds, as if from another order of knowledge altogether. Tragedies, after all, however nobly enacted and grandly endured, are, as seen by wisdom, the storms of illusion, the webs woven in ignorance and passion by those who 'do but slenderly know themselves'. In tragedy we can finally admire only the grandeur of humanity's never abandoned struggle to attain the moment of transcendence; without which there can be no catharsis, no liberation. (p. 344)

Of all the teachers of my generation I am perhaps most indebted to Jung. ... for Jung points the way to a living access to the originals of which myths and symbols of religion are formulations. (p. 351)

In the generation before my own, T.S. Eliot remained within the tradition he would have wished to see continue; he, and David Jones, were perhaps the last poets of that tradition. Yeats saw the darkness approaching, the tide rising; but his hope lay not in any turning or stemming of the tide, but in that which lies beyond civilization, the mystery of the gyres, the Indian Brahman whose outbreathings create worlds and whose inbreathings withdraw them from existence. But Yeats too was still among the artificers of Byzantium, the Graeco-Christian civilization, preserved in Ireland beyond its time elsewhere. It is my generation which has seen the end. (p. 356)

The great tree is at this time showering down its leaves in a process of death which cannot be arrested, and whose record is everywhere to be read in the nihilism of the arts, of social life, in a thousand images of disintegration, in the reversion of civilized society, it may be, to a state of barbarism. (p. 356)

But since it has been above all poetic truth I have followed, tried to discover always that good, that best Socrates never ceased to speak of, poetic justice it must have been (the only kind I have ever acknowledged) that brought me at last to stand my judgement in Greece itself. (p. 357)

The poets are always blamed, more or less, for the same thing: they are ruthless, or that which drives them is. (p. 363)

Raine, Kathleen. Autobiographies. San Rafael, Coracle Press, 1991.

"Story’s End" by Kathleen Raine

 

O, I would tell soul’s story to the end,
Psyche on bruised feet walking the hard ways,
The knives, the mountain of ice,
Seeking her beloved through all the world,
Remembering – until at last she knows
Only that long ago she set out to find –
But whom or in what place
No longer has a name.
So through life’s long years she stumbles on
From habit enduring all. Clouds
Disintegrate in sky’s emptiness.
She who once loved remembers only that once she loved:
Is it I who wrote this?

The Zeppelin Crash of Billericay, 24 Septemer 1916

 

My friend R.R. Skinner was born in June or July 1908. Reg grew up in Bethnal Green, UK, and one day he told me about the German Zeppelin that crashed at Billericay, in September 1916, during World War One. Reg said that he was appalled by the reaction of the crowd, they cheered when the Zeppelin caught on fire and crashed killing all on board; this event, he said, showed him man's inhumanity to man.

And now let us move up to the present moment and, reading Kathleen Raine's Autobiographies, published in the 1970s, in which she discusses this same event. She writes:

I saw, from the front window of West View, the Billericay Zeppelin pass, a great pencil-like shape, and then a jet of flame, then a blaze that lit up the windows of West View. 'Are there men in it?' I asked; and when I was told 'Yes'  I cried. My father told me afterwards that a dead German officer had been found by a farmer in a field, lying near his path. The man had beautiful teeth, and the farmer stamped on his face, breaking them. (p. 51)

And then Raine discusses seeing a second Zeppelin burn and crash near her home. This was a profound experience for the young Kathleen Raine, who, like my friend Reg Skinner, remembered the event many years later; both were born in June or July 1908. But could Kathleen Raine have seen a Zeppelin, a burning Zeppelin, at her home in Ilford? I suppose this is possible, her home was named West View and Billericay is west of Ilford. Could Reg have seen a burning Zeppelin at Bethnal Green; would citizens in Bethnal Green, perhaps looking up from the street, have cheered as the burning Zeppelin moved across the sky? Bethnal Green is 8.9 miles from Ilford and Billericay is 28.2 miles from Ilford; Bethnal Green to Billericay is 31.3 miles by road. Whatever the case the Zeppelin crash of Billericay was a significant wartime experience for both children.

I remember when a plane crashed near Montreal, in November 1963, and that some of the locals descended on the crash site and stole rings and other possessions from the victims whose body parts had not yet been collected by the authorities. I still remember with disgust that people could steal from these people who had died so violently. Here is a passage from a Toronto Star article published on 29 November 2013: 

Rodgers also said no intact body was found either, only parts. There were 111 passengers and seven crew aboard the flight. Authorities scrambled to get organized.

“In what was the parish of Ste- Thérèse -de-Blainville, there was one police officer, Mr. Aubertin, who somehow maintained security,” said Rodgers, who also oversees recreation for the town.

“But he was quick with people who tried to rob the dead and it’s said he even had to fire a few shots into the air to deter some people from making off with watches or wallets.”

Well, that's also man's inhumanity to man . . .