John Masefield Exercises the Prerogative of his Office

The Associated Press and British Movietone News have both recently uploaded, onto YouTube, more or less their entire film archive.  They had previously been available electronically via a more convoluted route, but this development makes them freely available.  (And they can now be embedded in blogs!).

It has certainly added a lot of fascinating material to the Internet.  For example, in a clip from a reel of (I think) 1930, here is John Masefield, then Poet Laureate, reciting from one of his poems (or, as the subtitle puts it, ‘exercising the prerogative of his office’).  The poem is one of his better-known lyrics, ‘The West Wind’.

The subtitle is not all that strikes me as unusual about this film.  I wonder if any reader is surprised by Masefield’s voice and diction?  I actually found it more difficult to enjoy than I had expected, for all that Masefield is probably my favourite poet, and I have not come across any recording of his voice before.  Marvellous though it was to hear him speak, there is no hint from this son of Ledbury of any Herefordshire accent, nor, really, the slow gentleness that I think dwells in most of his poems, even if surreptitiously.  He is declaiming, really, rather than speaking.  At the 1.20 mark, for instance, he might even have been singing.

Yet, if I struggle with this recitation, several factors enforce the conclusion that the problem lies with me and not with Masefield.  His highly readable biography describes his conviction that poetry is best met read aloud, a conviction that led him to involve himself in setting up and running the Oxford Recitations, competitions in verse-speaking held annually from 1923.  His keen ear is also borne out by the very ease with which his poems run off the tongue.  

Moreover, this way of speaking is precisely how poets and verse-lovers recited poetry.  For example, in this recording of Alfred, Lord Tennyson himself reading ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, the poet’s recitation takes almost no heed of the sense of the words.  (Incidentally, the original wax cylinder survived being left for a time next to a radiator… we are lucky to have it!).  That it has been something of a surprise to discover this is a reflection on the disappearance of poetry and verse-speaking from everyday life.

Even with gentler poems this declamatory approach was taken.  For instance, John Drinkwater’s dreamy Moonlit Apples is a poem I always imagine being read as if in the very attic described, and would have said that nobody could read the line ‘in the corridors under there is nothing but sleep’ any louder than a whisper!  Yet the poet himself declaims this poem like this:

Again I struggle to enjoy it, and yet again I must acknowledge that, as an actor and playwright it was John Drinkwater’s business, too, to know how to speak verse.  Indeed, there is a lecture by him, entitled ‘The Speaking of Verse’, uploaded by the same YouTube user (It is in two halves: one here; the other here).  What is the problem, then?  Why are my modern ears thus tone-deaf?  

A simple reason might be the disappearance of poetry from everyday life in England, and also from everyday speech.  Most of us, even poetry-lovers, are simply unused to words of this weight at all.  Masefield’s poetry was once read in pubs: these days it is almost inconceivable to use those two words in the same sentence.  Then, among the new poetry that is being written, there has been the abandonment of traditional metre and rhyme, which has lifted any musical quality from much modern poetry.  When it is read aloud, it is intoned, rather than declaimed.

Almost as significant, I think, is the development of the microphone, a revolutionary invention that is surprisingly seldom discussed in those terms.  It has completely transformed public speech and speaking, so that clear vowels and meticulous enunciation are no longer indispensable to make oneself heard.  Indeed, such things survive now only in a few places, such as in the loudspeakerless chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, where the modern ear is again surprised by unaccustomed speech like this (though I must say that I enjoy this reading tremendously):

How do I think poetry ought to be read, then, if I’m so clever?  The aim I would say is not really in question: to bring out the beauty the poet has put there.  And I don’t think my view about going about this, in theory, actually differs much from Masefield’s or Drinkwater’s.  For example, most of what Drinkwater says in his lecture above makes sense to me:

Nine-tenths of the great poetry of the world is perfectly clear in its meaning, and we do not want the speaker to explain it to us […] In speaking a poem, let us first get the rhythmic movement clearly fixed in our minds.  By following this, we shall give to each word the exact emphasis intended by the poet, and so avoid those inflections that are designed to brace up the nerveless speech of conversation.  The right pace of a poem will suggest itself quite readily to any sensitive mind […] Let us say the poem without feeling ourselves called upon to interpret it, and we shall do all that is necessary.

In other words, the speaker should be content to be a vessel through which a well-built and well-scanned poem — and thus indeed the poet — should literally speak for itself.  All I wish to add to Drinkwater’s view is that this ought to resemble more closely the playing of music. Composers count upon the musician’s skill to play their music beautifully, and not merely neutrally.  Likewise, there ought to be some room for intonation and shape in the speech.  I think the voice should sound somewhere between ease and effort, as if it is shouldering a light burden, just like a musician.  I also believe that in place of declamation (one voice speaks to a multitude) the impression ought to be given — and microphones can help with this — that in fact one heart speaks to another, as Cardinal Newman might say.  This lady’s rendition of ‘Moonlit Apples’ more or less hits the mark for me:

The idea that the poet still speaks when his verse is read also reminds me of another powerful aspect of poetry, and that is memory.  Poetry does not really work in the ear but in the heart, and often has its greatest beauty when words that have lingered there lighten up unexpectedly.  Just as ‘blue remembered hills’ are dearer than plain ordinary hills, old remembered words can overwhelm the heart.  Hence the above lady’s ‘treasury of remembered verse’.  Or, for instance, out on an autumn Sunday woodland walk, with undiminished aptness, into the mind might drop the words ‘And the Sabbath rang slowly / In the pebbles of the holy streams.’  This can also work, mysteriously, with new and unfamiliar poems: Robert Frost actually describes the delight of reading a poem and finding himself ‘remembering something I didn’t know I knew […] there is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows’ (The Figure a Poem Makes, 1939).  So, to paraphrase Robert Bridges, the audience’s impression, with time-hallowed poetry at least, will be that old words have come to them by the riches of time.  Verse-speaking cannot really respond to this, I don’t think: it all works in the heart, too mysteriously and too intimately to be for any pretentious blog-post to deal with!