Charles Tomlinson

When Charles Tomlinson published his "Nine Variations in a Chinese Winter Setting" in The Necklace in 1955, an elated Donald Davie had this to say about the poem:

[The poem] is no piece of fashionable chinoiserie. Nor has it anything to do with translations from the Chinese by Arthur

Waley or Ezra Pound. It is an exercise in rendering the perceptions of one sense by vocabulary drawn from the other:

Pine-scent
In snow-clearness
Is not more exactly counterpointed
Than the creak of trodden snow
Against a flute.

Scent and sight and sound flow together. . . . What emerges from the stanza is not scent or sound or sight but a quality that is all of and none of them, that comes to life only when all of them, each in its own rich identity, comes into perception together.^[56]

Davie concludes by saying this is the elaboration of the symbolist "paysage interieur" and the suggestion by Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Tomlinson's own confession gives us a different impression. I offer it here not to refute Davie's most searching analysis but to complement and deepen it. In a letter to me, dated January 1, 1975, Charles Tomlinson says:

You asked about my poetic attitude. I think primarily it was getting the human being into a right relation with nature, where the individual ego was not a predator and where nature could speak for itself inside a relationship — not simply as background or symbolism. When I was a boy I saw a Chinese painting (in a book an aunt brought from Shanghai) entitled "Pine Scent in Snow-Clearness," it hit me at the time that the line was going to be "my attitude." I was fascinated by a title that said so much and yet was so free of the mere subjective. I couldn't have explained it that way then. But I clung to that line for years, feeling it as a kind of pure talisman, something proof against all sentimentality — all the slush the radio poured out in those days. Finally, I used it in The Necklace . I think now my "attitude," granting to nature its own being, had political extensions — basically, it was anti-fanatic (hence, my "Assassin" and "Prometheus" poems), anti-Promethean, suspicious of the merely excited, and yet sensuously aware, deep in colour, form, texture. And yet how much of it I owe to that single phrase, and how right it should have begun with a Chinese painting now that I find myself writing to you. I always thought that phrase "Pine scent, etc." a wonderful instance of sensibility responding to nature, without mere self-involvement, responsive and responsible.

It is fair to say that behind this "attitude" is a comment on the whole system of analogies that Robbe-Grillet criticizes, on the whole Platonic-Aristotelian as well as medieval burden discussed earlier, and on the egoistical sublime of Wordsworth and other Romantics. It is also clear that this "attitude" is not a surface echo of the Chinese title but one of deep resonance with the Chinese landscapists. Here are two of his landscape poems:

Look down. There is snow.
Where the snow ends
Sea and where the sea enters
Gray among capes
Like an unvaried sky, lapping
From finger to finger
Of a raised hand, travellers
Skirt between snow and sea.
Minute, furtive and exposed,
Their solitude is unchosen and will end
In comity, in talk
So seasoned by these extremes
It will recall stored fruits
Bitten by a winter fire.
The title, without disapprobation,
Says "Merchants."
             "On a Landscape by Li Ch'eng"

White, a shingled path
Climbs among dusted olives
To where at the hill-crest
Stare houses, whiter
Than either dust or shingle.
The view held from this vantage
Unsoftened by distance, because
Scoured by a full light,
Draws lucid across its depth
The willing eye: a beach,
A surf-line, broken
Where reefs meet it, into the heaving
Blanched rim of bay-arcs;
Above, piercing the empty blue,
A gull would convey whiteness
Through the sole space which lacks it
But, there, scanning the shore,

Hangs only the eagle, depth
Measured within its level gaze.
                                       "Icos"^[57]

In these poems, Tomlinson has achieved a good degree of freedom from the "mere subjective" and from "mere self-involvement" and brought back to the natural objects color, form, and texture with cinematic visuality. "Icos," in particular, is reminiscent of Wang Wei's "Crossing the River to Ch'ing-ho" in its cinematic handling of various images. Here is Wang Wei's poem:

Boating on wide river:
Confluent water reaches sky's end.
Sky-waves suddenly open up:
Towns: millions of houses.
Farther on: cities are visible.
Instantly, mulberries and hemp.
Backview of native country:
Teeming water merges with cloud-mist.

Both poems achieve unblurred visual immediacy while clear and unblocked images, like different phases of perception capturing changing gradations of color and light, unfold before the viewer. However, when put among Wang Wei's other poems, "Icos" will appear more consciously controlled in the way the camera is guided. Perception is consciously organized into shots. In this sense, Tomlinson, like Williams, from whom he learned this organization, maintains a certain degree of continuity with the tradition of linear movement in Western poetry, although there is this important difference: Both Williams and Tomlinson are careful in varying this movement with striking changes of perspective at key points as well as with sharp twists and turns to reflect the various shifts in perceptual activity. Tomlinson's discussion of Williams's rhythmical line structure is equally applicable to his own poetry. Following Pound's characterization of Williams's lines as full of "jerks, sulks, balks, outbursts and jump-overs," he describes Williams's art as one "where the attention is frequently turned upon outward things, the sound structure of the poems which embody that attention is an expression of strains, breath pauses, bodily constrictions and releases." He compares this to the act of walking: "The good walker should be able to change pace, stop, start, turn, step up and down, twist or stoop, easily and quickly, without losing balance or rhythm. . . . The Williams poem finds analogies for most of these movements."^[58] With this art of attention to

the changing speeds and tensions in the act of perceiving outward things as they disclose themselves, the garrulous ego and "the never-resting mind" are very much effaced. In this sense, Tomlinson's poems come close to the Chinese sense of allowing nature to "speak for itself."