The Silent Heavens

Here I wander about, and here I mournfully ponder:
Weary to me is the sun, weary the coming of night:
Here is captivity still, there would be captivity yonder:
Like to myself are the rest, smitten is all with a blight.

Much I complain of my state to my own heart heavily beating:
Much to the stars I complain: much to the universe cold;
The stars that of old were fixed, in spheres their courses repeating;
Solidly once were they fixed, and with them their spheres were rolled.

Then through the space of the spheres to the steadfast empyrean
Echo on echo to Earth answered her manifold cries:
Earth was the centre of things, and the threne of all, or the paean,
Bearing hell in her heart, on her bosom all life that dies.

If they were fixed, as of old, in their firmament solid and vaulted,
Then might the echo of woe or of laughter reverberate thence:
Nor my voice alone, but to them all voices exalted,
Should with due answer be met, murmuring sweet to the sense.

But they roll on their way through the void, the inane unretentive:
Past them all voices stream into the echoless space.
Where is the pitying grace, that once was prayer’s incentive,
Where is the ear that heard, and the face that once answered to face?

In forgotten-poet-recovery mood this week, I was tempted to choose Richard Watson Dixon’s autumnal lyric, Song – the one that, melodiously and vividly, begins: “The feathers of the willow / Are half of them turned yellow …” But Song is not only Dixon’s least-forgotten poem: it’s usually the only representation of his work in the traditional anthologies. It’s wise to be cautious about perpetuating such choices – even the seemingly good ones. The reduction of a highly productive and verbally inventive Victorian poet to a one-trick pony may be a kindness, of course, but it needs examination. It might be a curse, entrenching the writer beyond hope of fuller rereading and possible reassessment.

Apart from Song, Dixon is known for his exchange of correspondence with Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins was an admirer, though not an uncritical one: he found Dixon’s vocabulary so obscure at times he claimed to need the services of a Dixonary. But he was alert to the senior poet’s achievements and dismayed by their neglect. I was curious to find more poems that might be interesting and accessible to a contemporary reader, and which, like Song, would hint at the qualities Hopkins admired.

The Silent Heavens appeared in 1905, in Dixon’s last published collection, edited by Robert Bridges, five years after his friend’s death. It’s an autumnal poem in macrocosm, responding to the larger effects of time and evolving knowledge.

Mourning the cosmology of celestial spheres, Dixon is looking a long way over his shoulder. Perhaps, for a classicist and clergyman, such cosmologies remain stupendously engrained and unforgettable and their failure of credibility seems recent. But it might also be assumed that Dixon’s despair has been reinforced by Darwinism and other scientific developments nearer his own time.

That cosmology and theology, man and God, no longer meet in the harmonious structure of the universe might even connect with the disorientations of old age. In that particular autumn, points of fixity become essential, not only as the source of intellectual reassurance, but as physical markers.

At the heart of the poem, and energising its linguistic procedure, is the concept of echo. This is not the echo as natural phenomenon. It’s perhaps closer to the “echo” device, as used in such poems as George Herbert’s Heaven, in which the echo forms a new word, and therefore suggests an answer. Psalm-like in the use of parallelism, Dixon’s “song” is much concerned with the lost communality of voices. The sense of human belonging depended on the now-inaccessible fixed stars and their spheres, seen in stanza four as receptive to all the Earth’s voices.

The search in Dixon’s poem is for a response that would be a reflection of selfhood, as the last quatrain memorably pleads: “Where is the ear that heard, and the face that once answered to face?” This primary need seems to account for the melodic impulse, the incantatory pitch whose origins are strong personal feeling. The roll of the hexameter line is steady and fluent. Originally, lines two and four of each quatrain were indented, an apparently visual effect that heightens the linear music. The ghost of a mid-line caesura doesn’t destroy the vitality. It gives Dixon an extra little structure around which to bounce those gentle volleys of internal rhyme (wander, ponder; here, weary; old, rolled; space, grace, etc).

In the third line, second hemistich, a stress falls on “would” – an iambic emphasis that seems to heighten the shocked surprise of the thought that “captivity” and “weariness” will be duplicated in the heavens: “Here is captivity still, there would be captivity yonder …” The longing for an echo becomes central to stanza three, but the sounds of echo are continuously deployed throughout the poem.

Looking inwards becomes as hopeless a quest as searching outwards, “to the universe cold”. The self-directed first line of stanza two suggests the Hopkins sonnet beginning: “My own heart let me more have pity on.”

“Much I complain of my state to my own heart heavily beating,” Dixon laments, the line’s regularity demonstrating temporal entrapment. A heart “heavily beating” is beset by heavy grief. It’s also a relentlessly audible pump, working perhaps at the edge of its limits. This is a kind of “leaden echo” of the body listening to itself.

Poetry itself is wired to Earth, and the loss of power is brought about by the loss of the waves of echoes which “answered her manifold cries.” Earth was “the threne of all, and the paean” – the songs of lament and celebration. The last two lines of this stanza have an enraged accuracy: “Bearing hell in her heart, on her bosom all life that dies.”

In the last stanza, too, anger is palpable (“the inane unretentive”). This quatrain never loses power. If, sometimes, Dixon has closed a stanza on a phrase that suggests easy access to an unsurprising rhyme, he does the opposite here. The loss of the attentive ear and face, brilliantly simple and physical images of human connection, creates a psychological desert. It would be a mistake to read this as loss of faith. It’s partly an old man’s lament for silenced friends (including ideas that were friends), but, above all, it seems to express a poet’s despair at his lack of attentive readers.