I recently discovered in my local Oxfam bookshop Keith Douglas’s Complete Poems. On a first drifting through the pages, letting my eye fall where it might, my attention was caught and held by the 1943 poem titled ‘Behaviour of Fish in an Egyptian Tea Garden’, and in particular by the poem’s second line, which fixed like a hook in my mind. The poem begins:As a white stone draws down the fish
she on the seafloor of the afternoon
draws down men’s glances and their cruel wish
for love. Her red lip on the spoon
slips-in a morsel of ice-cream…Douglas goes on to depict the behaviour of the various predatory ‘fish’ circling
the prey until they tire of the game:But now the ice-cream is finished, ispaid for. The fish swim off on businessand she sits alone at the table, a white stoneuseless except to a collector, a rich man. |
Carcanet publishes the
Letters of Keith Douglas |
The image in the second line, ‘the seafloor of the afternoon’, is the tonic note of the poem, which builds itself upon it and as it were circles around it as the fish circle their prey. It seems to me a perfect line of poetry (which explains why it fastened itself in my mind and went on repeating itself there, so that it became the entire poem for me, its distillation or essence). If the function of poetry is to
hold an experience for us, then it does so by means of all the devices of language – rhythm, sound-patterning, image. Douglas’s line is shaped by its metre, the pentameter the perfect length for the holding of a thought-image, the rhythm tying it in to our somatic ways of processing and retaining information (more simply, the line has the rhythm of walking or of breathing). It is held together by the patterns woven into its sounds: she/sea, sea-floor/af-ter, floor/noon; it forms circles within itself, mimicking again the behaviour of the fish and metonymic for the poem as a whole (which circles from white stone to white stone via the ‘gallants in shoals … / circling and passing near the main attraction’).
The image itself, the seafloor of the afternoon, puts out feelers and draws in various cognates. No doubt because of the dominant link in my mind between Douglas and war poetry, one of the first things that came to mind was Owen’s lines from ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, ‘Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, / as under a green sea, I saw him drowning’. Vision – an apparently impersonal, forensic vision – is central to Douglas’s work, most brutally in his famous poem ‘How to Kill’, which not only gives us the soldier’s perspective as he targets his victim (‘Now in my dial of glass appears / the soldier who is going to die’) but very clearly implicates us, the readers, in this seeing: ‘I cry / NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears // and look, has made a man of dust / of a man of flesh’.
‘Behaviour of Fish…’ is a wryer, less visceral poem, but deploys the same forensic tactics of seeing, or seeing-as. The line also made me think of Rilke’s line from ‘Vor Sommerregen’, ‘das ungewisse Licht von Nachmittagen’, ‘the uncertain light of afternoons’: the shady, swimming, greenish light of a long hot afternoon becomes the warm, flickering, shallow waters of a reef. Douglas expresses a temporal concept (the afternoon) in terms of a spatial one (the seafloor) and thereby makes us feel the essentially melded nature of our experience: for us, an ‘afternoon’ must always be both a time and a space, a space in which time unfolds, a time that is the time of this particular space or place – the Egyptian tea-garden which is also the shallow, predatory waters of the reef. In just one line he holds for us all this.Helen Tookey lives in Liverpool. A selection of her poems appeared in the Carcanet anthology New Poetries V (2011) and she is working on her first collection.
