Mixing metaphors

How strange for the world to have turned
and be facing the other way again.
Why do we sleep through these great rotations?
The night sky sometimes likes a good conversation,
and gives me plenty of time to speak before thinking.

from Syzygy by Rachael Boast

Have I slept through the great rotation? It does not feel that way to me. For I have been busy and attentive, watchful below the surface. During winter months the soil is not half so dead as we might believe. It may not yield to boot or hoof but dig an inch below the iron clods and life is teeming in miniature. Likewise under insulating pond ice and in the clenched buds of the hedgerow. Relative warmth lingers. It is a veneer of sleep, skin deep.

Not so much a hibernation then as biding time, trusting to be patient and not forcing things. Words do not respond well to being forced, at least mine don't. There are no blowsy hothouse flowers in my lexicon. Faced with the skinning winds of winter my words are rockery alpines, hunkered down in tight whorls of botanical geometry. I have heard tales in bad years of small songbirds setting aside their territorial rivalries and bundling together to stave off the cold, as Antarctic penguins do. There is a slowing, yes, but no chance of sleep. To sleep is surely to die.

Sometimes words are obedient and come when I whistle. Other times not. Other times they are away somewhere in the long grass, lying low, waiting for their moment to spring a surprise. When the game is up they come lolloping home, all ears and muddy paws and playful slobber. Then they can make me laugh and cross in equal measure. And every once in a while the words come in gluts; big windy blocks of verbs and tenses and clauses that set the flags snapping and the hallyards rattling. There is nothing to be done but let out all the reefs and surf home on a long reach. Those are the rare days.

Interviewed recently on the publication of her first collection of poems, Sidereal, Rachael Boast quotes from Joseph Brodsky: 'Being the supreme form of human locution, poetry is not only the most concise, the most condensed way of conveying the human experience, it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation.'  Boast rails against the verbosity, the profligacy with words with which our spin-driven, vox-pop world is raddled. Poetry offers an antidote, a stripping back.  'When poems seem clean and neat, that's because there's been enough preparation' she says.

Winter is a time of preparing. There is nothing wasteful about the season of economy. So when the words don't come it is not a cause for worry. I hold off whistling for a while, until the grass is grown long enough to hide in. I make fast and wait for the first riffles of breeze to lift the burgee, for the soil to soften and the wrens and robins to shake snow from their feathers and remember to sing their old quarrels. And then when the buds swell and the words come, I hope they will be clean and neat.

Season of mists

'Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too -'

from To Autumn  by John Keats

English poets have always been bewitched by autumn. Shakespeare, Keats, Browning and Blake, Clare and Rossetti, dozens of others - they have all turned their pens to sonnets and odes in honour of this most poetic of seasons. They have personified it, as Keats does above: 'Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;' They have found deep melancholy in its declining days, beneficence in its harvests, gothic frisson in its festivals and rituals. And, of course, they have mined it for countless metaphors of death.

Autumn is a long season and an extravagant one. It begins in abundance, the swelling coffers of the crop. It is fat and wealthy and dripping with gold. Keats' bees are duped into thinking warm days will never cease because 'Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells.' But plenty begets excess. Excess begets wastefulness which, in its turn, begets decay. By way of this profligate sequence Nature re-stocks the pot for a repeat showing. There is eternity in rottenness, the indestructibility of elemental matter.

Autumn is ripe for poetry because of the way it assaults our senses. Keats knew it and reaped it in some of the most concrete poetic lines he ever wrote. He makes us taste the plump hazel shells 'with a sweet kernel'; we watch with him the long autumn sunsets that 'touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue'; we hear the 'wailful choir' of gnats and the bleat of full-grown lambs, and we are there with him by the cider-press, patiently watching 'the last oozings hour by hour'.  It is a rich pudding of a poem, every line as o'er-brimmed as the cells of his bees.

To Autumn is not a long poem by the standards of the romantic poets but, over a reading of its three stanzas, months have gone by. We are not told directly of the passing of time, it is more subtle than that. With each verse the temperature of the adjectives becomes colder. The industrious bees of the opening verse have, by the poem's close, given way to the gathering swallows, twittering in the skies. And there Keats breaks off, on the brink of the birds' departure. It is a master stroke on which to leave us. The laden apple trees under a 'maturing sun' have been harvested and in their place a winnowing wind stirs the chaff on the stubble fields.

I sat reading To Autumn on the waterfront in Dundee the other day. The sky was distinctly autumnal and a ragged mist snagged in the trees on the opposite shore. I know there are brambles and blackthorn bushes heavy with ripening sloes on that shore. As I read a sudden breeze brought a skittering of crisp sycamore leaves along the path, blotched yellow and black. They passed, the breeze vanished and the sun was once more warm. It was a little taste of what is to come. We are on the cusp.

Poppies in July

'You flicker. I cannot touch you.
I put my hand among the flames. Nothing burns.
And it exhausts me to watch you
Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.'

Sylvia Plath wrote two mature poems on the theme of poppies, both dating from 1962 and bearing in their title the month of their composition. Both appeared in the posthumously published Ariel although it is not certain that would have been her intention, had she lived to assemble the final manuscript herself. But they surely belong together, disconcerting twins born a few months apart but progeny of the same stock.

Like most of her late poems Poppies in July (quoted above) and Poppies in October are written in free verse. The language is sparse and urgent, pruned of the superfluous words that filled and sometimes flawed her earlier style. They share an imagery too, of skirts, mouths, blood and noxious vapours; the flowers represent splashes of vibrant, pumping life addressed by a protagonist who is pale and listless and passive by comparison.

Poppies are startling flowers, often gaudily sumptuous in a landscape of muted shades. Seeing them scattered red and black among fields of summer wheat and barley it is easy to understand why they were favourites of the impressionist and pointillist painters. The flowers in Claude Monet's Poppies, Near Argenteuil (1873) almost seem to flicker in the way Plath describes them.

Their association with euphoria and painlessness ('your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule, Dulling and stilling.') and the sinister payback of dependency, decline and death were not lost on Plath either. 'There are fumes that I cannot reach. Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?' she asks in July, while the allusion to carbon monoxide in October is, of course, agonisingly prescient.

Sylvia Plath had a genius for taking everyday things, especially things to which we more usually ascribe benign romantic associations  - candles, mirrors, the moon, flowers and so on - and injecting them with new significances, subverting them into things charged and edgy and dangerous. I can gasp at poppies, but I can never quite look at them without recalling these poems, Sylvia Plath's 'little hell flames.'