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Complex Crosses is a collection
of sixty miniature essays on single poems or extracts from poems, sometimes
only one or two lines. All the essays are preceded by quotation of the
relevant passage; some are followed by a footnote usually citing recent
academic studies. The poems are arranged chronologically by date of first
publication or accepted time of composition. The majority are Anglophone but
some Classical and Romance works are also included - the linguistic and
chronological sweep of this book is impressively broad, from Homer and Horace
through to the Late Classical, followed by a refreshingly generous stretch of
the 'Middle Ages' before we arrive in the more familiar reaches of the
Renaissance and on to the modern and contemporary with Denise Riley and Derek
Walcott as the most recent exemplars. I'm puzzled that the first two
subjects, passages from the Odyssey and Horace's Ode 1.4, are
designated 'Beginning I' and 'Beginning II', suggesting that the essays will
offer a largely historical perspective tracing lines of development and
influence. Nothing of the kind is attempted; Edmund Hardy's focus is always
on immediate aspects of the text, sometimes a single word, letter or phrase
and on three occasions a punctuation mark. The chronology seems simply a
matter of arrangement.
The book reads to me as a very welcome Ars Poetica, not only a consideration
of how poems work and what distinguishes them as poems but also a quietly
understated demonstration that the techniques poets use are to a large extent
constant, surviving the vagaries of time or, as we're so fond of thinking,
'periods' and 'movements'. Hardy's 'complex crosses' are as it were a poem's
pressure points, sometimes a word where two or more meanings coalesce,
sometimes one freshly and unexpectedly empowered by the force of rhythm or
rhyme, alliterative pattern or similar device, a twist of syntax, a shift of
context. It is these moments which instill that compression of language which
is peculiar to poetry, simultaneously creating an inner density and a
radiance of signification extending far beyond the poem's specific occasion.
It scarcely needs saying that the grandmaster of it all was Shakespeare, most
concentratedly in his sonnets; Hardy gives us Sonnet 133 which happens to
include the line 'A torment thrice three-fold thus to be crossed.' His
commentary carefully unravels the 'thrice three-fold' crossing of the
force-field binding dark lady, the speaker and his 'sweet'st friend'. It is
too long to quote in full but Hardy's closing remarks will give some flavour
of his exposition: ''A torment thrice three-fold' is also crossed back over
the preceding line-ending and onto the previous line ['And my next self thou
harder hast ingrossed:'] - an appositional relationship between the two
lines, restating the dissolution of 'my self' in the thornier alliteration of
'thrice three-fold'. This phonetic alliteration can then be seen to carry the
repeated 't' which bars the line, at which point 'all that is in me' [the
sonnet's final phrase] is also all that I can see or speak, as the hard
engrossing and its pain reduces language to these crosses.' I must enter a
quibble about 'reduces'; although 'thrice three-fold crosses' can certainly
reduce personal and private communication to 'hard engrossing and its pain'
they are a poem's condition of expansion, the very reason that poems written
centuries ago continue to enthrall and accumulate meaning.
Poets often employ 'complex crosses' which would have carried specific
reference to their contemporary readers but are now largely forgotten. Some
of Hardy's essays are acts of recovery for which I feel grateful. I was
unaware, for example, of the multiple contemporary associations the letter
'A' would have held for Chaucer; in the course of teasing them out Hardy also
offers his reflections on Chaucer's use of that by no means simple word
'now'. Similarly but more briefly he reminds us of the scholastic doctrines
underpinning Donne's 'The Good-Morrow'. There are of course poets who
resolutely refuse to engage with the contemporary; Charles M. Doughty is a
conspicuous example, represented here by a passage from The Dawn in
Britain Book 2. Hardy is as usual enlightening about the threads and
undercurrents governing the passage, even if this tends to demonstrate that
Doughty is unlikely to achieve widespread popularity.
You may be wondering by now whether Complex Crosses is a densely
scholarly affair. It is and it isn't. Hardy's scholarship is always evident
but exercised with good humour and wit. His choice of extracts alone can
amuse - from John Gay's Trivia he offers no more than
'Pip-Pip-Pip' and then proceeds to wipe the smile from our faces with its
deadly repercussions. He can be engagingly tendentious, particularly in his
discussions of punctuation - the comma, for example, in Keats' line 'But to
her heart, her heart was voluble', concluding that it presents 'a revelatory
flash [É] between hearts - it emerges as the speck of writing, available to
be traced from the speed of hot cognition within the body's pulse.' This
reading would have been strengthened by manuscript evidence for the comma and
allowance made for the irregularities of punctuation in early 19th century
printed texts. It's certainly arguable that the line would be more powerful
with the comma omitted. I'm doubtful too about one of Hardy's remarks
on four lines extracted from E.J.Blandford's 'A Real Dream', a poem urging
radical protesters to convert iron railings into street-fighting pikes - the
suggestion that the em-dash in 'They'd from their stations start, - their
yokes they'd break' represents the pike itself seems no more than a pleasing
fancy. I feel more convinced about Charlotte Smith's use of the semi-colon as
a point of pause in her description of Beachy Head and its bird-traps, partly
because it seems more than incidental and more thoroughly embedded in the
text.
I don't suppose many people will read Complex Crosses from cover to
cover in one sitting. Its ideas come thick and fast and I needed to read some
entries several times for anything approaching full understanding. (The
patchy inking in my copy didn't help, an unusually poor print job from
Lightning Source. Perhaps they don't much care for Baskerville.) It might be
more cherished as a compendium and good companion. Here I've mainly attended
to some of the more famously appreciated poets but you'll also find extracts
from Otfrid von Weissenberg, an Exeter Riddle, a metrical version of
Mandeville's Travels, some trademark raunchy Aretino, a canting rhyme by
Dekker, one of the liveliest Robin Hood ballads, a jolly song about the music
hall star Lottie Collins, a computer-programmed poem by Alison Knowles from
1967 and much more besides.
© Alan Halsey
2015
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