Diary

Letters

Vol. 21 No. 20 · 14 October 1999

From John Torrance

In Tom Paulin's bewitching diary of his Donegal holiday (LRB, 16 September), he describes how putting up snipe in a saltmarsh reminded him of John Clare's 'To the Snipe', which he calls 'one of the most subtle and profound nature poems in the language'. This reminded me of his discussion of the poem in Writing to the Moment. Just as Donegal makes him 'feel like the freebooter in the poem whose Cromwellian tread disturbs the pudgy marsh' and that he'll 'never see these snipe again', so in Writing to the Moment he wrote: 'Into this paradisal place of "little sinky" fosses come "free booters" who are more than simply hunters, they are symbols of enclosure, plundering free-marketeers, who have come to steal the common land and destroy the delicate ecological balance there. They have entered a marshy open-air church with its "hassock tufts of sedge" in order to kill the spirit of the place.' But when I went back to the poem I found it saying something rather different.

Paulin assumes that the poem describes a single environment, a marsh, but with 'a paradoxal sense that such sacral places are both somehow heavenly and hellish. So Clare's marshes have "trembling grass", an "old sallow stump", "rancid streams", "a gelid mass". This is a sulphurous terrain, a warm "desolate and spungy lap", whose "tepid springs" echo the line "startle with cracking guns the trepid air".' So this marshy paradise also threatens the snipe with betrayal, inviting violation by sportsmen. Hence the poem's 'final bleak ironic passive vision'.

But the poem could be read as describing two different environments: the marsh and the surrounding moorland. The marsh is indeed a paradise for snipe, where 'security pervades' because the ground 'Nor bears the weight of man to let him pass/ Where thou alone and mute/Sittest at rest/ In safety'. Danger faces the snipe only when they leave the marsh for moorland streams. 'Yet instinct knows/Not safetys bounds – to shun/The firmer ground where sculking fowler goes/With searching dogs and gun.' Clare reserves his 'hellish' description for this moorland environment. The 'tepid springs' are in 'The moores rude desolate and spungy lap', and here, too, is 'The little sinky foss/Streaking the moores whence spa-red water spews/From pudges fringed with moss'. It is only on the moor, where the streams are 'scarcely one stride across' that the freebooters can enjoy their sport.

On this reading, the poem is less subtle, and the conclusion – 'That in the dreariest places peace will be/A dweller and a joy' – is scarcely ironic. Clare's vision must indeed have been shaped by the impact of capitalist agriculture on the countryside, but 'To the Snipe' does not refer directly to this desecration. It celebrates the security offered by retreat into the solitude of the poetic imagination from the pain and hostility of the surrounding social world 'where pride and folly taunts'.

John Torrance
Poole, Dorset

From Carol Rumens

Tom Paulin's suggestion that Philip Larkin was inspired by Fifties Ulster, which must, he says, have felt 'fiercely British … almost campily over-the-top British', is not borne out, either by the Belfast poems or the letters. That Ulster felt, and sounded, Irish to him, is not only evident in the poem, 'The Importance of Elsewhere', but in letters in which he refers, not entirely in jest, to 'the mad Irish'. Larkin was excited by the difference, not the similarity – and, of course, he was in love, a condition well known for inspiring attachments to unlikely places. As for Paulin's colouring-in of the 'bunting-dressed/Coach-party annexes', this strikes me as presumptuous. Bunting is not necessarily red, white and blue. In England in the Fifties, as now, festivities could be announced in bunting of all different colours – even green.

Carol Rumens
London W12

Vol. 21 No. 21 · 28 October 1999

From Tom Paulin

Apropos of my recent Donegal Diary, I'm grateful to John Torrance for his close reading of Clare's poem 'To the Snipe' (Letters, 14 October), but I disagree with Carol Rumens's letter in the same issue, in which she says that my view of Larkin's response to Ulster is not borne out by the poems or the letters. I recollect that somewhere he made a passing joke about being a Unionist, and I think his uncollected poem 'The March Past', which he wrote in Belfast in 1951, wraps itself ecstatically in the Union Jack. In that poem Larkin listens to loud martial music and this produces:

a sudden flock of visions:

Honeycombs of heroic separations,
Pure marchings, pure apparitions.

The poet is then overcome by a 'blind':

Astonishing remorse for things now ended:
That of themselves were also rich and
splendid
(But unsupported broke, and were not
mended) -

Rather like Molly Bloom in Gibraltar, Larkin would seem to have warmed to the sight of marching soldiers in Ulster.

Tom Paulin
Hertford College, Oxford