Read Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) for Free Online Page A

Sophocles, then declares its central tidal metaphor before coming to its bleak conclusion with a Thucydidean allusion; while the diction by which it leads us there includes phrases such as ‘the moon-blanch’d land’, ‘the folds of a bright girdle furl’d’ and (famously) ‘a darkling plain’. It is stately, mournful and magnificent. At the same time, compare ‘darkling’ with ‘rubbishy’. Also, compare ‘The Latest Decalogue’, Clough’s own poem about religious belief and what has happened to it. This is cast as a sardonic parody of the Ten Commandments, and its freethinking (or blasphemy) precedes
Life of Brian
by over a century:
    Thou shalt have one God only; who
    Would be at the expense of two?
    No graven images may be
    Worshipped, except the currency …
     
    It is a poem which undermines both Church and State, and suspects the motives of every churchgoing Christian:
    Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive
    Officiously to keep alive:
    Do not adultery commit;
    Advantage rarely comes of it
.
     
    Mrs Thatcher famously urged us to rediscover ‘Victorian values’; Clough had already anatomised those values at the time:
    Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat
,
    When it’s so lucrative to cheat …
    Thou shalt not covet; but tradition
    Approves all forms of competition
.
     
    Victorian money-culture and money-worship, so successfully reintroduced into this country over the last thirty years, received further treatment from Clough in
Dipsychus
, the last of his three great long poems. Today’s City traders, driving up motorways in flame-red Ferraris, and driving up their bills in Gordon Ramsay restaurants with four-figure wines, have their precise Victorian counterparts:
    I drive through the street, and I care not a d–mn;
    The people they stare, and they ask who I am;
    And if I should chance to run over a cad
,
    I can pay for the damage if ever so bad
.
    So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
    So pleasant it is to have money …
     
    The best of the tables and best of the fare –
    And as for the others, the devil may care;
    It isn’t our fault if they dare not afford
    To sup like a prince and be drunk as a lord
.
    So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
    So pleasant it is to have money
.
     
    Amours de Voyage
is preceded by four epigraphs. The first three invoke the poem’s main themes – self-love, love, doubt, travel – while the fourth, from Horace, announces its manner: ‘Flevit amores / Non elaboratum ad pedem’ – ‘He lamented his loves / In unpolished metre’ (though Horace actually wrote ‘amorem’). Clough’s metre is ‘unpolished’ compared to Arnold’s; and in
Amours de Voyage –
as in his first long poem,
The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich –
he uses the rare hexameter.This has more of a thumping stress than the polished and popular pentameter; but it also helps provide the spontaneous, conversational, unposh tone. Clough’s rhythms are travelling, chuntering, stopping-and-starting; he needs to be able to switch direction and tone, move from cultural history to love-gossip in a line, from high analysis to a quick joke. When Clough was planning his first book of poems, Arnold had complained about ‘a deficiency of the beautiful’, and wrote to Clough: ‘I doubt your being an
artist
.’ When he published
The Bothie
, Arnold found it too flippant: ‘If I were to say the real truth as to your poems in general, as they impress me – it would be this – that they are not
natural
.’ (This from Matthew Arnold …) He asked Clough to consider ‘whether you attain the beautiful’ and reminds him on ‘how deeply
unpoetical
the age and all one’s surroundings are. Not unprofound, not ungrand, not unmoving: but unpoetical.’ Arnold’s solution was to transcend or transmute – or avoid – the unpoeticality, Clough’s to represent it: he is the ‘unpoetical’ poet.
    So
Amours de Voyage
is full of un-Arnoldian personnel – Mazzini, Garibaldi, General Oudinot