This week's poem, The Book, is by the South African poet, FT (Frank Templeton) Prince, who died 11 years ago on 7 August at the age of 90.
His undeserved obscurity reminds us of the randomness of poetic canonisation. TS Eliot picked up Prince's first collection, Poems (1938) for Faber, but rejected subsequent work, and the next collection, Soldiers Bathing (1954), where this week's poem first appeared, was brought out by Fortune Press. As so often, readers should be grateful to the restorative efforts of Carcanet, which brings together all Prince's publications, and some new late work, in the Collected Poems 1935-1992 (2012).
It seems probable that The Book, like the more famous title poem, Soldiers Bathing, was written during the second world war – perhaps around the time of the poet's marriage to Elizabeth Bush in 1943. A metaphysical love poem resembling the Italian canzone, it opens with an array of both primordial and contemporary images of violence. Over four lines of rich, dark, at times percussive sounds, the belligerent forces accumulate, only to be almost repealed: all "seem to have laboured but to fetch us love". Presented in tender, post-coital repose, the lovers, unlike Prufrock, have "disturb (ed) the universe". Prince's erotic idealisation here is one example of the way his imagination works against the grain of the age: he's closer to Yeats (and Donne) than to Eliot. The deployment of an elaborate strophic rhyme scheme (ABAABCCDCEEDD) is another. Syllabic contrasts ("distraught cosmogonies", "bad old baffled fairies") add further intricacy to the fluid three-five beat line.
The "book of the day" being gently closed, the second stanza begins with a strange command to the body, to "be deep". Depth might be experienced physically, during intercourse, and also as a spiritual, soul-intuiting dimension. Three allegorical texts are named, at least two of which pertain to women. Mirror of the Sinful Soul is a verse meditation by Marguerite de Navarre and The Abbey of the Holy Ghost, a medieval prose work advising women how to live a holy life without taking orders. I couldn't find any information about the third title, The Keep of Spiritual Valour. It may be a particularly obscure text, but it's possible that Prince invented it, perhaps for the pleasure of the rime riche and the pun on "keep". The metaphor of the body as "worn hornbook" includes another, rather bawdier, pun. Contradictory commands are issued to this contradictory object: it's told to remain whole and legible, and then, in the stanza's last four lines, encouraged to be "torn and tattered, interleaved". Young or old, pristine or stained with use, the body poses the same problem, and a metaphysics beyond dualism must resolve the conflict: "Until we read by touch as well as sight,/ And learn to turn the pages, kiss and write" (my italics).
The investigation of antithesis and paradox sharpens in the third stanza. Its enclosing circle broken, "you" (the body) "would be nothing then" – a nothing which might signal the battlefield, where men are reduced to nothing in a flash, but more likely, through the agency "of hand or lip", a return to the lovers enfolded in their "little death". The "dark kingdom" though, evokes actual death and the fine understatement of the last couplet makes the darkness visible.
Now the speaker addresses another kind of book (O Encheiridion) and the "saving host" of the Eucharist (O Salutaris Hostia) in an ecstatic marriage not only of human and sacred bodies but of languages. The handbook (Encheiridion) is not specified but might be that of St Augustine of Hippo, alternatively titled Faith, Hope and Love. It's useful to know that Prince was a Catholic convert. These lines may suggest an experience of the mass which is far from routine, and almost unbearably transformative. But there is no loss of control over the material, and the metaphor-making, paradox-delighted verbal play is cunningly sustained: "Be shadow to our double sun, / But single … " And the qualifying "in this kind" in the second line of the stanza suggests that the sacrament is also that of human love.
The grammar of the last stanza is puzzling. "Mean" seems to be used intransitively, so the following infinitive "To seek and find a go-between" appears literally to be suspended in a grammatical infinity. But compressed in that space is a developmental arc that extends from body to soul, from the "incunabula" to the "new light beyond decay". The Book is itself a book of ideas, and of harmonies and timbres that reveal a master of orchestration. It's no surprise to learn that this marvellous poet was also a significant Milton scholar.
The Book
Now wars and waters, stars
And wires, the dead hand in the iron glove;
The bolted winds that ride death's cars;
Guns, gallows, barracks, poles and bars;
Seem to have laboured but to fetch us love.
Planets that burn and freeze
Now wring their hands, or forced to please,
Must twine them to a dance instead:
Distraught cosmogonies
Like bad old baffled fairies stand,
Where we, your head upon my hand,
Or sleeping hand in hand, or head by head
Have closed the book of the day and gone to bed.
But body, now be deep:
Worn hornbook, Mirror of the Sinful Soul,
Or Abbey of the Holy Ghost, The Keep
Of Spiritual Valour, keep
Your foxed and wormed and rusty pages whole,
That we may read our way.
Like an old lantern by whose ray
We hope to find a better light,
Glow feebly as you may;
Be torn and tattered, interleaved,
Our chapter will not be achieved,
Until we read by touch as well as sight,
And learn to turn the pages, kiss and write.
You are periphery;
And we would be the centre, if we could
But break your circle, or could be
Without you, inconceivably
Ourselves our multitude and solitude.
You would be nothing then,
As now all other things and men
Are turned to nothing at a touch
Of hand or lip; again,
We'd seek the soul, and having passed
Through you and through ourselves, at last
Find the dark kingdom which denies that such
As selves, and thoughts and bodies, matter much.
O Encheiridion,
O Salutaris Hostia in this kind:
Until that darkness comes, be all-in-one,
Be shadow to our double sun,
But single, as the purpose of our mind.
For if by love we mean,
To seek and find a go-between
Spelt from your incunabula,
And see at length what can be seen
By some new light beyond decay:
Through you we must burn time away,
And wither with the force of our idea
The world of visible phenomena.
