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by Peter Russell

It is customary to say that the world has progressed materially in the past two centuries and then to deny that the mind of Western European man has evolved. In the collective we have moved from Royalist autocracies to constitutional democracies in which the democratic elements had to be squeezed out of the rulers only by dint of a century of harsh struggle and then were yielded, drop by drop, only very grudgingly – (alas, only to be exploited by unscrupulous pseudo-democratic politicians for their own benefit). In my own lifetime we have seen unprincipled Fascist, Nazi and Marxist demagogic dictatorships exploiting nationalism and boasting of their democratic principles. These now have collapsed but the same invisible powers really control every aspect of our lives, and what's more continue to employ as their henchmen, the same mindless and heartless bureaucracy to dehumanise every aspect of our lives including the Arts.

As individuals growing up in their families and familial circles people living today have been brutally weaned away from the high moral ideals of the XIX century (however hypocritical), and progressively indoctrinated with the concept of work solely for the twin purposes of mindless consumerism and even more mindless leisure and entertainment. A vast social machine which functions solely in order to bring more money into the coffers of the State (where it is appropriated largely for the benefit of the bureaucracy) and into the ever growing holdings of the banks, multinationals, insurance companies, arms dealers and organised international crime.

If life for the ordinary people, up to the end of the XIX century, was a matter of survival, now it has become almost exclusively an economic exercise. Imperialism and the progress of technology and manufacturing industries combined with the material philosophies resulting from Darwin and Freud, swept away like gossamer what was left of aristocratic culture, values and sensibility, of idealism in the religious domain, and of the intellect in the higher philosophical sense – that is, what used to be called "the spirit".

Certainly I have painted a one-sided, even luridly pessimistic picture of our living conditions. There are some positive elements in this material progress – never before has a large community been so unified, never before has there been such a long life expectancy and such a low rate of infant mortality, never before has man lived in such overall physical comfort. But however crude my picture is, few people will disagree if I say that in negative compensation, never before has society felt the absence of any purpose in life (save money and pleasure) so profoundly. We live

and that surely is a most unsatisfying state.

But my purpose here has not been to preach a sermon on the world's ills but simply to delineate however crudely the background against which I came to meet Pier-Franco Donovan in May 1990, – for it is not only the background to Mr. Donovan's life, but equally the background to my own.

The tale is worth telling, I think, and may yield some food for thought. In May 1990, at almost seventy years old, I was riving as I still am now, in a solitary house in an isolated valley in the Tuscan hills, devoting myself almost exclusively to poetry. A neighbour of mine from the next valley had just opened an art gallery, forty kilometres away, in Florence. He invited me to visit the first exhibition of paintings there and baited his invitation by telling me that I would meet a young American poet who himself would like to meet me.

I travelled in to Florence and duly I met the young man, who was pleasant, modest, infinitely attentive, and serious but in no way pompous, yet seemingly without any knowledge whatever of poetry either in English or Italian.

The "young American" turned out to be neither really American nor really Italian, and certainly not typically Italo-American. Born in Italy of an Italian mother and Irish-American father, Donovan has done his elementary schooling in Italy, his High School studies partly in U.S.A. and partly in Italy. He had studied physics and computer science at the University of Rome, and at twenty-five had got a B.A. in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. When I met him he had only recently returned from U.S.A. and was uncertain what career to pursue. His family tradition, that of land owners, businessmen and lawyers, demanded that he now attend Business School, but the young PierFranco – though far from being a rebellious spirit – really wanted to write poetry and was very dubious about studying Business Administration. What amazed, and at first nonplussed me, was the fact that Pier-Franco, who at 25 had written nothing but a modest and unpretentious B.A. thesis (on a local folklore theme pertaining to a small village in southern Tuscany), wanted above all to write poetry. He had written only one slight poem up to then. There seemed to be no way this young man with nothing but an American B.A., could launch himself as a writer. It seemed to me that there was no way that an aspirant to the writing profession could start except through either a career in journalism (absolutely abhorrent to my new friend) or through an academic post (which I don't think ever crossed his mind).

Frankly, I saw little hope of a successful literary career for this young man but I also saw that a business career would be a disaster and a blight for him. If I hadn't liked him personally so much – he is a person who makes no demands on anyone and whose ego is strictly under decorous control – I would probably have ditched him then and there. But in spite of my really minimal literary reputation, especially in Italy, he attached himself to me quite seriously and determinedly as a sort of apprentice, and undertook the most humble services to me as a practical means to learning the trade. He set up in computerised type many of my works—a task that after all was little more than copy-typing, yet infinitely useful to me. But he also researched the Italian market and by judicious letters to the Kings of publicity, got me on to television and into other public activities. This led to the acceptance on quite a wide scale of my work in Italian – after a few months of our friendship he became an indefatigable translator of my work, and also a tactful and efficient editor of my own original writings in Italian. To put it very bluntly he became useful to me – more than useful, infinitely helpful in every practical sense. For me, he was extraordinarily generous and patient of my quite impractical quirks. Consciously, or in any organised sense, I gave nothing in return. Pier-Franco is not the sort of person who wants schematised lessons in Creative Writing: I gather that it was the general spirit of my often rather maudlin, or at least wandering, animadversions, on what serious writing demands and is, rather than any specific prescriptions, that were useful to him. We moved swiftly into a state of productive symbiosis. But more important than mutual utility was that intangible element of pure friendship and sheer pleasure in each other's company.

A mere five months after our first meeting, a Rome publisher invited me to submit a substantial collection of poems to him for immediate publication. I made the necessary selection and in three weeks Pier-Franco translated the whole book and in another week we finalised the texts. I learned a lot of Italian from this, but so did Pier-Franco. His versions were literal and precise, but often they failed to take into account the references implicit in the text, and the general historic and literary background. His Italian is better than mine, but is largely based on contemporary spoken Italian. I was able to modify his language so as to give it a historical dimension and a literary or philosophical depth. He would correct trivial grammatical errors in my Italian (especially prepositions and tenses of the verbs) but I would often have to modify his excellent Italian to include echoes of Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso and Leopardi. I think we learned equally from each other. What above all impressed me was that we never had the least quarrel or even nervous tension over making changes in the Italian text. In a few cases we even altered the original English for the better. In particular we had to take into account very many English homophones, which whether spelt identically or differently, held meanings and associations which all contributed to a greater or lesser extent to the context. This was no easy task as anyone who reads the philological Notes to Theories and Other Lyrical Poems (bilingual edition, Rome, Mancosu Editore, 1990) will quickly see.

On 30th November 1990 the book was ready. It put me on the map in Italy, and it was a starting-point for our young author. From then on we have never looked back. It's still a struggle to live (for both of us) but we both have even more literary commissions than we can handle. Donovan is now the personal assistant of Mario Luzi and of other important authors, and a collaborator of several publishing houses and various university professors.

But all this is rather incidental to the presentation of even a modest first book of poems. My first criticism of Donovan's earlier efforts in poetry were based primarily on the lack of concrete images, of cosmological, historical and geographical reference, of philosophical, psychological and linguistic suggestions and elaborations, and also on the sparse use of simile, metaphor and metonymy, and the almost total absence of symbolism, without which the poet can never create the myths of his own world. There was little more at first than a mimesis of events coloured by a certain aspiration to moral improvement. The poet has to ask himself "Who am I? What is the purpose of my life?" and in doing this create his own world, his own context, not so much a myth of himself nor a myth of the world he lives in as his own mythical world. He was doing little more than relate the world as it seemed to be for him and how he would like it to be different.

My friend Donovan has grown up in a world dominated by the media, film, TV, video, (newspapers and reviews are only auxiliaries, subsidiaries), and the view of life this evokes is essentially pessimistic, negative, even vacuous. The world has gone imagistic as opposed to imagiste. After the French Revolution (the bourgeois triumph) no one took seriously "Te deum laudamus" or "Jubilate agno" (least of all the Church). Perhaps only people who really suffer in this life can ever know real joy? Maybe Primo Levi knew fugitive moments of real joy, but have any contemporary poets ever known it?

At the moment the petty dictators of the literary world are dreary, self-deprecating, passionless. It is the official world of Academe, the Ministries, financial puppets (film and theatre directors), Arts Councils and Arts "officers'' (that is, commissars), and bureaucrats in general (who hand out grants and prizes etc.) who control the cultural and artistic world. They see in an opportunistic light every artistic initiative as a potential stimulus to financial gain and social anodyne. They are the contemptible slaves or skivvies of the State or high finance (itself so much "higher" than them).

Without really formulating this Donovan has understood it and for this reason he is very dear to me. He is authentic, and human, in away that our clever post-modern professoroids are not.

Single words, before articulation with other words, are arbitrary, equivocal. The "dove" may be the pest that eats my corn-cobs as they are ripening or it may be the dove that descends from Heaven at the baptism of Jesus. The image can present the outer form and its censorial qualities or it can function merely as a sign. The Dove equals the Holy Spirit. In Imagist poetry (or sub-imagistic contaminations like the poetry published by The Review in the 1960's) I expect to know immediately if the dove is a ring dove, a stock dove, a turtle dove or a fantail or a pouter pigeon. If the dove is merely a sign for the Holy Spirit it will be conventionalised in accordance with iconographical tradition and innocent of ornithology. The Red Cross Knight is Courage in the abstract, a counter, or one-for-one sign, which, articulated organically with other similar signs, gives rise to an Allegory, which in a non-dogmatic period like our own, has little appeal. The symbol reifies the meaningful image in the inner consciousness, suggests origins, general and universal principles (arcai) or causes, while word music expresses the ultimate essence or the feeling of the Presence of something that transcends our usual consciousness.

Sooner or later a poet, like any other man worth to name, has to ask himself: "Who am I? What is the purpose of my life?". He may conclude that he is an immortal soul or that he is a chance coagulation of molecules. Either view can give rise to poetry. But the poet must think about this, even if he arrives at no definite conclusions. It is perhaps the tension or the more sober dialectic between these extreme views that, above all, will be productive of this mysterious substance we call poetry. It is a general alertness rather than a systematic learning that enables the poet to trigger off in the reader with a single or only a few images, vast areas of significant reference, so quickening the reader's mind into "excited reverie". At a certain point of enrichment, image begins to function as symbol. The image presents the outer appearance of things. Many poets are content to go no further. "No poetry but in things" – Red Wheelbarrow mentality. But as Brancusi remarked: "reality is not the outer form but the inner essence". But how to express or represent anything so seemingly abstract as an essence? The image functions through the external modes of sensation, particular experiences, an idiolect. The symbol is a more complex image which activates the reflective mind or individual soul, and so functions through feeling or psychic emotion. The Red Wheelbarrow appeals delightfully to the faculty of sight and the sense of touch, but we have to confess that it is limited in its range of influence and experience. "The Dove Descending" or the image of St. Sebastian pierced by arrows suggests an infinitely wider area of experience or consciousness, and yet both symbols are in the main still limited by being almost exclusively Christian symbols – one of individual salvation, the other of individual suffering or sacrifice.

In a very broad sense, and I intend no dogmatic rule here, the "realistic" image, censorial and corporeal, corresponds to that concreteness so much admired by Eliot in Dante, but mainly in Dante's Inferno. The more complex symbol, the consciousness of the general, the emotions corresponding to the soul and its motions, is more typical of Purgatorio. But there is a more profound and universal type of symbol which wakes the sense of origins and ends ("ends" are both finalities and purposes or "meanings"), and this is typical of Paradiso, the metaphysical domain, the Empyrean, which is beyond space and time, and which is concerned with universal intuition, the making whole (i.e. healing) of the spirit by total ecstatic assimilation to the One. This of course is undisguisably mystical and is ignored by almost all the academics and pooh-poohed by almost all the poets. But it is of the essence.

I asked how does one express the "essence". Partly I suppose by the judicious but also spontaneous use of this universal type of symbol, but – since one is employing language as one's medium – by the texture and rhythm of language itself, which are themselves just as symbolic as the universal symbol, and obviously make poetry akin to sacred music like Monteverdi's Selva morale, Bach's Chorales or Beethoven's A minor Quartet. One doesn't have to be a Christian to feel the absolute beauty and truth of Paradiso

or even of Petrarch's

to feel that one is in some transcending Presence when one submits oneself simply and totally to these sublime words. In the last analysis it is the music of the words, always in combination with the accepted universal symbols, which achieves this miraculous effect:

as A.D. Hope put it.

This is not the place to present an excursus on what I understood by symbolism. Enough to quote Captain Ahab's words at the end of Chapter 70 of Moby Dick, just after he has addressed a long invocation to the would-be oracular head of the sperm-whale:

This of course is in complete contrast with the theory and practice of the dominant schools of poetry of the last thirty years, which have been concerned with merely the ludic (as they describe it) and with effects. Perhaps Donovan and I are dissidents and the poets of The Review, the TLS, the Martians and the so-called "new poets" (1993) are Establishment conformists. So be it.

* * *

Helen Dunmore, in the Summer 1993 issue of Poetry Review (London) introducing the new Bloodaxe Anthology The New Poets, which presents poets of the British Isles and Ireland born in or after 1940, describes poetry in Britain today as one great drunken party in which all barriers are down and everything is togetherness and celebration, though of what she does not say. There's lashings of food and drink, everyone is happy, and nobody minds the couples copulating in corners or the seas of vomit on the floor. It's a pretty sickening description, but I suppose that from a utopian or Establishment point of view it's all good for business – Po Biz, that is. I doubt that any real poet ever goes to that party. It's a terrain for hangers-on of the Arts, the pseudos and the exploiters and publicists.

Donovan's collection also starts with a party ("The Party's Over"), and though it was not a gathering of slobs and drunks and there was no public sex or vomiting (Italy is very backward), Donovan was disillusioned just the same. Like Socrates, he was still on his feet when everyone else had fallen asleep under the table, but he was disillusioned by the sheer vapidity of the whole thing. And Donovan is no puritan. He enjoys a good party as much as I do and has as good an eye as I do for the pretty girls. But if the morning after, there's nothing of the conversation to remember, he is, as I am, frustrated. From the "togetherness" he expects worthwhile memory to persist, and the release of a spirit of freedom, which in ordinary life is always necessarily limited, – a freedom to expand oneself and find new layers of experience and potentialities for development. He is an optimist as I am, and believes in the infinite possibilities of improvement, not in a false scepticism which believes that nothing is worth of belief, and that everything should not only be questioned, but should be disbelieved. Scepticism is one thing (Shelley was an eminent sceptic); nihilism is quite another matter.

Donovan sees the absolute vacuity of the views of recent generations:

Everything has been taken away from the soul, even space and time, by money, conventions, vacuous entertainment and chitter-chatter. All that comforting and sentimental togetherness at the party, and the morning after the same people return to their offices to continue in the same empty-headed career of money-grabbing and power-snatching. It may be a law of "society", but is it a law of the Universe? Is it a law of the Spirit?

For me, Donovan's poem is correct in its analysis of the situation (here we must be pragmatical not theoretic), but diffuse in its expression, and weak in its communication of concomitant emotion. There is little attempt to pare down the words to a reasonable minimum and to find the forceful image which can speak more effectively than any expressed opinion.

In the next poem "Rebirth", already we are on much more concrete ground.

and

"Bury" is at once a precise concrete verb, it represents a convention and a ritual, both of which are meaningful for us. "Oak" as opposed to ash or elm or willow is correct in as far as the "oak" symbolically is the King of the vegetable world, as the lion is of the animal world and the eagle that of the world of birds. All very simple, and no theories or gimmicks required. If Mrs. Dunmore's party sounds like the last gasps of the Fishes, Pier-Franco's is more like the first weak notes of an Aquarian rebirth.

In "Courtyards" the human soul is felt as a part of the whole universe, something cosmic. Dunmore's party welcomes the community of Grub Street, the Arts Council's and publishers' representatives and the minorities in U. K., – the whole Po Biz world, but it's provincial. The galaxies and the atoms are present in Pier-Franco's world, and the animals and vegetables and minerals.

Mrs. Dunmore's is a drunken party keeping up our spirits in a London ambience, Pier-Franco's an ancient courtyard open to everything in the Universe. I'd rather be in that courtyard than in Dunmore's nightmare party. I feel at home under the stars, but alienated among all those journalists and publicists. The stare are a great mystery, the journalists bits of familiar and ugly furniture all too well-known to me. Imagination reacts to a challenge, not to contingencies or clichés.

The poets now fashionable in Britain, and in Italy too, are largely concerned with the common things and events, that is, contingencies of ordinary urban life. Images from TV and films, science fiction, pop songs and items in the news are as "real" (or more so) to them as the things and perpetually recurring events of nature. Metaphysical speculation or vision is out. Trivialities and the grotesque are in.

Donovan in "The Dot" starts off from the image of the dot on the page from which the letters of the alphabet are formed by the computer. The words and thoughts and dreams represented on the page are transitory but the universal dot, equivalent in his mind with the geometrical point or the centre of the circle, is always there. Itself nothing, yet everything, "all possible intellects" come out of it. A thousand years ago Sufi mystics introduced the idea that the dot under the first letter of the Qurân "contained" or subsumed the whole of the Holy Book, which itself contained all knowledge and wisdom. Fifteen hundred years before that Plato wrote his dialogue Parmenides, an examination of the question "Either the One (that is the Divine, the Unmoved Mover – P.R.) is or is not". Plato has Parmenides prove that if the absolute Unity does not exist then the phenomenal world could not exist. This Unity was the origin of everything yet had no attributes – no form or shape, no size, no weight, no position in time or space, no name, no colour, and even no being. It was at once everything and no thing. Centuries before Plato the author of the Chandogya Upanishad had formulated the same thought in virtually the same words as Plato. Although a child of the electronic age and of modern urban culture Donovan is able to invoke this age-old tradition, in which he is by no means learned, simply by intuition and creative imagination.

Donovan observes effects and looks for causes. I recall a very angry letter I received back in 1970 from H.M. McLuhan in which he said he was concerned with effects, not causes. William Blake on the other hand, in line with Plato of course, held that "Every corporeal effect has a spiritual cause". People who are concerned solely with effects, (and I'm thinking of the TLS and Sunday Tirnes choice of poets), have lost touch with the Intellect and deliberately let their souls atrophy.

Of course, to take up this position in the contemporary world, contaminated as it is with superficial and fashionable philosophies, is to take a big risk. To produce bizarre effects is to play safe, as one can see from the Bloodaxe "New Poets" anthology. Donovan's poem "Love Song" expresses this more serious type of risk taking with an extended metaphor more ambitious than anything he had done before in his first year's poetising. Our younger contemporaries will risk a word (generally a risquée one) or an image (often bizarre) but rarely do they risk a thought, or a whole way of life.

The poem "Domus" is something like an extension of this. Building a house is a risk certainly. But one which, even in these days of Mammonian interest rates (usura), people have to take. But more important still is the quality of what you put in that house and of how you live in it.

This brings up the question of the religious dimension, a dimension conspicuously absent from today's poets. It has always been strong in the older poets – Kathleen Raine, R.S. Thomas, Elizabeth Jennings, to cite but three. It is at least present in Heaney. But after Heaney I can't offhand think of a poet who is in any way religiously oriented, and certainly the religious orthodoxies have given us no poetry. We do seem to have got to a point where we can no longer believe in any of the orthodoxies or denominational or sectarian "creeds" which all seem as empty as the slogans of the long-since discredited political parties. Pound's idea of a religion without dogmas could appeal far more deeply. There is, I think, a residue of religious need in almost all of us. If it doesn't appear in the Bloodaxe book (a very dubious exception is Michèle Roberts) it is probably because the editors phased out anything with any hint of religion in it. By their own assertion their concerns are "social and realist", whatever those blanket terms may mean, if anything.

Donovan's "Sciencism", an ugly word but needed to distinguish itself from "Scientism", treats this problem. Being myself of no particular religion (and yet in some ways of all of them), that is, of a broadly religious temperament, and Donovan himself absolutely uncommitted to any religion, I would invoke Aldous Huxley's friend Gerald Heard, who wrote way back in the 'thirties:

"Faith is the choice of the nobler hypothesis. It is the resolve
to place the highest meaning on the facts we observe."

In experimental science the most "economic" or "simple" formula is taken as a rule to be the most probable. In terms of religious belief why not take the "highest"? Bloodaxe's poets choose the lowest possible meaning, or no meaning at all. Their editors have opted for an absolute pluralism or an absolute relativism in which "highest" and "lowest" are variably relative, or even meaningless. In my mental world "highest" and "lowest", like North and South, are polar opposites. This is not a philosophical treatise – I use all these terms simply in a common sense interpretation. If the reader can't recognise their general import I can only conclude that he is being wilfully perverse, or has been made wilfully perverse by academic theorists and the proponents of an "absolute" scepticism.

If the above is beyond the intellection of the reader I can only supplement it by two other quotations, and hope some light may percolate into the brain and the human sensibility.

"...the product, I suppose, of a rationalist upbringing, I
remain an agnostic who aspired to be a gnostic – but a
gnostic only on the mystical level, a gnostic without
symbols, cosmologies or a pantheon…"

(Aldous Huxley, from a letter of 1962)

"Ultimate reality cannot be understood except
intuitively, through an act of will and the affections.
Plus diligitur quam intelligitur."

(Aldous Huxley, Grey Eminence)

Pier-Franco's poem "Aspirations" deserves some attention. But first let me help the reader by mentioning that in Italian "aspirazione" can not only mean "aspiration" as in English, but also to "breathe in" – and so to "inhale" of a cigarette, or even to "suck in", as of an egg.

If in the earlier poem the "Courtyard" was a rather generalised image, a little vague and not very strongly focused, both it and its various contents remained the various concrete things they are, – as Pound so rightly held "the natural image is always the adequate symbol" – and in "Aspirations" we have an image of the snake sucking an egg which is as concrete or as "natural" as anything in Pound. At last Donovan has found his "objective correlative" and needs no abstract words or ideas to explain what he is about. We are perhaps on the threshold of poetry.

There is a remarkable parallel between this poem and Guido Gozzano's sonnet "Parabola" (especially if you refer it back to Dante, Paradiso XXVIII, 106 ff.):

I've said nothing up to now about the translations. They are by conscious intention, almost word for word literal. The only alternative to this would have been to make radical transformations of the texts into entirely new English poems, that is creative reconstructions. This would not have helped here where our purpose is merely that of representing Donovan's Italian in English so that the reader who doesn't know Italian can savour them, In any case, I don't think Donovan's translations are any more "prosy" than very many contemporary original poems. Anthony Rudolf, twenty years or more ago, suggested that translators of poetry may choose between "moulding" and "carving". We have chosen humbly to mould, and the English text is a sort of plaster-cast of the original. This means at times that even the weak spots in Italian are carried over into the English. For instance, in "Florence", a poem that is coherently quite rhythmical with nine lines of roughly equivalent length, we find at the half-way point of the poem, one line consisting of only one short word – fermo, meaning "motionless". In a sense this might be thought to mime the concept of "motionlessness" and I suppose it does, if you rationalise the idea. But I don't think you "feel" the motionlessness. "Fermo" or "motionless" is no more than a sign for the deficiency of rhythm and movement the poem seeks to present. It doesn't give the emotion involved in the perception of motionlessness in the way that, for instance, Coleridge's famous lines from the "Ancient Mariner" do:

This gets the very essence of the feeling of everything fermo, at a stop. That is, it has entered the realm of symbolism rather than mere imagism, or worse, mere description. The isolation of the word "motionless" in a single line might be thought of as representing the "brought-to-a-stopness" quality, but really it only states it as a proposition. That's not really poetry.

In "In the Maze" we enter into a world in which the insignificant figure of the individual poet is presented against a much more inclusive background, indeed truly a cosmic as well as a literary, historical and religious background. The poem is to do with the whole drama of the soul in the world, "Angel and Demon". Short as the poem is, it is a "big" poem, if not a "great" poem. We can compare it with the "Love Song" of six months earlier, which has a big theme like Empedokles throwing himself into the volcano, but perhaps is less achieved than the more recent poem. This latter is serious stuff. We may well ask whether the expression "walls of nothingness" is concrete or an abstract image. Pound's warning not to mix the two may seems to have been neglected here. His sarcastic example of the mixed type "dim lands of peace" showed clearly the danger of a dispersion of energies. But "walls of nothingness" seems to transcend this stricture and to achieve a conjunctio oppositorum just because we are no longer on the literal, realistic level, but in some spiritual (noetic) context. Are the "walls" concrete or abstract? Is the "nothingness" abstract or concrete? Irrelevant questions surely, for the two poles here are reconciled.

In "Tarots" we have a poem in narrative form adumbrating a universal and traditional system of symbolism. The range of the imagination is thus considerably extended, its meaningfulness greatly increased and deepened. The poet has come a long way from his simple, almost childlike reflections in "The Party's Over" just two years before. The symbols of the Tarots have brought out something from the deep consciousness which Pier-Franco could never have known at that abortive party.

In "A Useless Song" this theme is further elaborated, though in a more diffuse form. Symbolist vision weighed against opinion and convention.

If in Section I, line 2, Jupiter Pluvius is a mere metonymy for the rain, now in the second half of Section II mythological figures and real people and places are identified – concrete and living. The daily life of an aged poet, a slightly ludicrous hermit who might equally be Pan or Silenus, has been transformed by the poet on his visits to the wild man into a unique and visionary scene.

The reader may like to compare the vision of another poet, a generation older than Donovan, of a similar ancient who has opted out of the urban electronic McLuhanised "scene":

Peter Reading
(Sunday Times, 18th October 1992)

For me, the contrast between the two passages spells not so much the contrast between right and wrong, between clever and stupid, between competent and incompetent, as a contrast between the mind only concerned with the narrow circle of contingencies and the transient – a mind that excludes 99% of human experience and potentiality, and one that is virtually all-inclusive, even if hopelessly out of touch with the street-corner happenings of a brief and fugitive period.

"The Fool" says what I think most of us want to say and do really think, but by dictating its own values I feel that it pulls its punch. Mandelshtam in effect said the same thing, but in such a way that his poem is magnificently forceful:

The same may be said of "Reading Quasimodo" but there is a much greater richness of imagery there than in "The Fool". Here we have the exemplary thought, the passionate lament for man's stupidity and greed that makes this world a hell, and best of all, a profound moral and spiritual theme treated with childlike simplicity by a fully cognisant mind. Here, at least we have sanity.

A poem like "The Mountain Top" would, I suppose, seem completely irrelevant to the fashionable poets of today – they would laugh it out of court for its content. Be that as it may, it seems to me that a poet like Donovan who has a sense of the whole and the Oneness of things (as opposed to the fragmentariness and neutrality of all phenomena) at a certain point has to choose between the path of the poet, the saint, the mystic. The mystic is not primarily concerned with communicating his experience to others. The saint should be concerned with the service of divinity and the exhortation of his fellow men to a better practical life by his example. The poet is first and foremost concerned with the technique of words for the purpose of communicating to others the possibilities of sainthood and of the mystic vision. And it is in the technique of words that a younger poet like Donovan will find the way to a more effective expression. This can only come by "sedentary toil / and by the imitation of great masters". This requires a tremendous application of will, as we may read in "And I Shall Pray in Silence". Without will the poet will get nowhere.

Pian di Scò
24^th August 1993