Kathleen Raine

The Autobiography or the Inner Journey of the Poet

This first volume of Raine’s autobiography, Farewell Happy Fields, whose subtitle is ‘Memories of Childhood’, is a tour de force when it comes to writing: indeed, it does not merely tell the story of a little girl born on 14 June 1908 in Ilford, in the bleak suburbs of London, but recounts the mythical journey of every incarnated soul, according to the Platonic myth. And the little village of Bavington in Northumberland is thus set up as an offshoot of paradise, the matriarchal paradise embodied by Great Scotland beyond Hadrian’s Wall, the country of origin of the poet’s mother, Jessie Wilkie. All of Raine’s poetry is imbued with a sense of the wilderness – stone and flower – she experienced in this place and the feeling of belonging to a great indivisible whole. The figures of Demeter and Persephone, Psyche and wandering Isis which she summons in her work represent the loss of the primordial unity.

The second volume, The Land Unknown, deals with Raine’s formative years at Cambridge, where she attended Girton College on a scholarship and rubbed shoulders with the Marxist intelligentsia of the time. There she was to lose the bearings she had built up as a child through her love of nature and extensive reading. Yet her choice to study natural sciences instead of English literature can be viewed as a way of preserving the knowledge and wisdom she had acquired so far. It also enabled her to discover the mystery of the minute as an image of the infinitely great, which was in keeping with her poetic imagination. Raine concedes that her decision not to study English literature at university was due solely to her own arrogance and ignorance.² However, in doing so, she escaped the influence of the New Criticism that prevailed in Cambridge at the time. More precisely, the concept of ‘practical criticism’,³ introduced by I. A. Richards, whose guiding principle consisted in applying scientific principles to the study of literature, including poetry, wiped clean the slate of previous approaches. The poets she had always loved – John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and the other English Romantics – were also discarded. She eventually graduated in botany after only two years and started to study psychology but obtained only a pass. This period is described by Raine as a wandering from her true self, a form of somnambulism during which she first married and divorced a fellow student, Hugh Sykes Davies, then fell into depression and ended up marrying Charles Madge, the poet of Mass Observation, who helped her out of Cambridge. She then gave birth to two children, Anna in 1934 and James in 1936. But in the end, it was only after her breakup with Charles Madge and her escape to the Lake District, where she had a brief love affair with a Scotsman called Alastair, that she was brought back into close contact with nature near her ‘native’ Northumberland, came to her senses and recovered her genuine identity. The final chapters tell the story of a woman’s struggle to earn a living in the midst of wartime London, during the blitz. In this particularly dark period – more specifically in 1943 – she published her first book of poetry, Stone and Flower, that ‘honey-dew’⁴ gathered from toil and tears.

The third volume of her autobiography, The Lion’s Mouth, revolves around her meeting with Gavin Maxwell, the future author of the bestseller Ring of Bright Water⁵, a title borrowed from a poem by Raine.⁶ Maxwell and Raine met through her publisher Tambimuttu⁷ after a visit to Bavington during which she had felt like a stranger. Her former schoolfellows were now ‘intermarried’ and occupying the farms she had known. In her autobiography she makes the following comment: ‘Their lives, I felt, had kept faith; and I was not even a prodigal, for I could never return.’⁸ And then she adds: ‘What I did not find at Bavington I found awaiting me on my return to London.’⁹ It was an extraordinary encounter that literally ushered her into Eden. Indeed, on her return to London, Raine dreamt of a rowan tree which she construed as the tree of life. At the foot of that tree was a little boy dreaming. In the boy’s dream the tree unfolded to the summit where the prophetic blackbird – that is, the poet – sang. Following this dream within a dream, Raine wrote a long poem, ‘Northumbrian Sequence’, the fifth section of which translates her vision. She showed the sequence to Gavin, who had also written a poem with the same images. Thus, in addition to their meeting in ordinary life, their encounter also occurred in the world of imagination and poetry. Passion was born but an impossible one since Maxwell was homosexual. However, when she discovered his cottage on the island of Sandaig in the Inner Hebrides, she saw a rowan tree growing nearby at the top of which a bird was singing. The encounter in the real world, then in the world of the imagination, was followed by a third encounter in the paradisiacal universe of the northern islands, where the sky and the sea mingle, where everything is imbued with light and lightness. This insular Eden, this ethereal island, is reminiscent of Shelley’s ‘Epipsychidion’:

It is an isle under Ionian skies,

Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise,

[...]

It is an isle ‘twixt Heaven, Air, Earth and Sea,

Cradled and hung in clear tranquillity;¹⁰

Eventually, however, the mortal self, hampered by the corporeal nature of its incarnation, catches up with the woman who aspires to absolute love, and the third volume, The Lion’s Mouth, deals with guilt and possible disillusionment, even if the values that underpin the poet’s entire life are reaffirmed.

The fourth volume of the autobiography, India Seen Afar, addresses her trips to India and does not play the same role in Raine’s work. In the introduction to The Lion’s Mouth, written on 9 February 1977, she comes to this conclusion: ‘In 1966 I wrote what I then thought was a concluding section; but Gavin’s death in 1971 showed that ending also not to have been the end. Now nothing more can, in this life, ever be added.’¹¹

Thus, Raine’s trajectory as a writer and her personal life and spiritual journey are related in her autobiography. The first three volumes respond to the desire to ‘write [her] story, to retrace [her] life’ in an attempt to ‘discover some meaning in it’:¹² ‘Above all I wanted to discover when, and why, I had lost the thread, and what the pattern was that I broke and, even, some possibility of finding the lost clue again.’¹³ In contrast, India Seen Afar is more of a travelogue steeped in philosophy, which bears witness to a personality that, far from striving to find itself, asserts itself powerfully in its observations, reflections and convictions. The fourth volume clearly differs from the first three, which have a particularly striking writing style, relying on the dynamism of the creative imagination that relates events simultaneously on several planes of reality. For example, fetching water from the little spring at the bottom of the farmyard is linked to the Book of Kings in the Bible and also to Greek mythology. This everyday gesture becomes associated with a sacred reality, as if in this place ‘a mystery were perpetually enacted’.¹⁴

The three-volume autobiography displays three planes of reality as is sometimes the case in the Bayeux Tapestry: at the bottom stands the frieze, picturing the labour of the fields and the simple gestures of everyday life; at the top the celestial frieze, the realm of the Divine with its chimeras and fabulous animals; and in the middle the heroic story representing the battle of Hastings, which took place in 1066. In the case of Raine, the level of everyday life is raised to the level of mystery and the sacred via the writing of the imagination which gives birth to poetry – and which corresponds to the ‘heroic’ level. Written out of pure personal necessity, the autobiography not only sheds light on Raine’s life journey but also, thereby, illuminates the readers’ lives which resonate with the same universal myths. As such, the autobiographical pen is essentially exegetical in the sense that it construes a life story as a sacred text. Furthermore, it provides a powerful analytical grid for her poetic work: What sort of poet was Raine? How did she design her poetic universe?

The Collected Poems as a Poetic Monument

Raine defined herself as a poet, which means, in Platonic terms, that this fate befell her at the moment of the incarnation of souls in accordance with the myth of Er the Pamphylian in Book X of the Republic. Poetry is indeed at the heart of her writing. It is the voice of her spirit or soul that remembers her happy, immortal condition. In a sense, Raine’s poetic work can be seen as the expression of her soul’s ‘magnificence’, to use Yeats’s image in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’: ‘Nor is there any singing school / but monuments of its own magnificence.’¹⁵ This use of the term ‘monument’, which conjures up the image of an edifice, seems to fit perfectly in a presentation of Raine’s poetic work. Indeed, it is an apt image of how her strong attraction for the natural world is raised to a paradisiacal vision of the oneness of mind and body, of flesh and stone, and how the various collections constitute in fact a single work.

Raine’s first Collected Poems was published in 1956. Dedicated to Gavin Maxwell, Collected Poems included four previous volumes of poetry: Stone and Flower (forty-seven poems), Living in Time (thirteen), The Pythoness (thirty-five) and The Year One (twenty-eight). In the introduction, Raine emphasizes the distinction between ‘secular’ and ‘regular’ poetry, between the skill and craftsmanship of the artisan and the inspiration of the genuine artist:

No poet will ever see reason for admiring even the most skilled imitator of the external form. However bright may be the finish of such work, what Blake said of it remains true: ‘these things that you call finished are not even begun – how then can they be finished?’¹⁶

Indeed, she considers true poetry as the expression of the Great Imagination, and the poet as an interpreter who acts as a mediator between the different planes of the real. She can thus be considered as a symbolist poet in the strongest sense of the term; in 1981, George Allen & Unwin published a second version of Collected Poems covering the period between 1935 and 1980, which was described as follows: ‘Not the achievement of a young poet but the juvenilia of an old one.’¹⁷ Raine was 73 years old at the time. The book included new collections: The Hollow Hill (thirty-five poems), The Lost Country (thirty), On a Deserted Shore (one hundred and thirty-two), The Oval Portrait (fifty), The Oracle in the Heart (seventy-six), Uncollected Poems (eight), Occasional Poems (ten), and The Cathedral in the Heart (one), but only a few of the older ones were retained – twelve poems from Stone and Flower, four from Living in Time and fourteen from The Pythoness; only The Year One was reprinted in full. Raine herself justified her selection: ‘Only with The Year One (1952) did I begin to find my range.’¹⁸

Indeed, the year when Raine blossomed as a poet was 1952, which corresponds to the time when she met Gavin Maxwell.¹⁹ The meeting acted as a revelation: she realized that love is the source of all life – individual and cosmic. Love allows the soul to return to paradise and the creative imagination to become genuinely active. Raine writes: ‘Love is important only in Plato’s sense, in so far as it gives wings to the imagination – whatever in love is personal and not imaginative matters not at all.’²⁰ This book of poems appears to be an architectural centre, the essential hub around which the whole poetic edifice revolves. It is this book that allows Raine to discard earlier poems, which she considered to be factitious, the product of craft rather than true art. It is also The Year One that establishes a poetic benchmark and sets the standard for the rest of her work, the standard for her creative imagination.

The books that followed lead the imagination upstream from oblivion towards the anamnesis of a true self and, through the channels of dreams, reveal the vistas of a secret knowledge that privileges other planes of the real – the realms of the spirit and of the Great Imagination. The poet develops three original forms in particular: the sequence, which first emerged in The Year One with ‘Northumbrian Sequence’ and was continued in works such as ‘The Hollow Hill’, ‘Eileann Chanaidh’ and ‘Soliloquies upon Love’; the spell, or charm, perhaps inspired by the bardic tradition or Scottish poetry, as Caroline Watson suggests in Chapter 10; and the short poem, reminiscent of a Japanese haiku, which characterizes On a Deserted Shore, and which resurfaces systematically in The Lost Country, The Oval Portrait and The Oracle in the Heart. Whatever the form chosen, one theme remains omnipresent: that of a nature both paradisiacal and grandiose, experienced during childhood, and the loss of paradise, followed by exile and the too brief returns to the lost kingdom. The spell poems typical of The Year One rely on an incantatory cadence as a form of restorative white magic:

By the travelling wind

By the restless clouds

By the space of the sky,

By the foam of the surf

By the curve of the wave

By the flowing of the tide,

By the way of the sun,

By the dazzle of light

By the path across the sea,

   Bring my lover.²¹

Among her poetry books, The Hollow Hill and Other Poems (1964) is the most mysterious. The very title evokes the sacred mountain – Mount Sgriol – overlooking Loch Hourn beyond the Isle of Skye, at the summit of which opens the cave of the incarnation, or perhaps the title also refers to the burial mound at Newgrange in Ireland where the burial chamber lets in a ray of sunlight for a few hours only on winter solstice. ‘Eudaimon’, ‘Night Sky’, ‘Kore in Hades’, ‘Bheinn Naomh’ (Sacred Mountain), ‘Lachesis’ and ‘Eileann Chanaid’ (the songs of the island) are all poems of initiation into the afterlife, which is seen as the liberation of the embodied soul.

As to The Lost Country, Raine seems to want to dedicate it to her mother, in an attempt to recover the maternal heritage of paradise inseparable from that of the fall and exile (‘For the Bride’, ‘Childhood’, ‘By the River Eden’ and ‘Heirloom’). The memory of lost Eden is then shifted to the archetypal island in ‘There Shall Be No More Sea’, ‘Oreads’ and ‘On an Ancient Isle’ where, through the power of imagination, the poet begins to wander along the shore deserted by love. The ‘Dreams’ reveal the same kind of fateful inspiration that shaped The Hollow Hill: a few poems among them were written in Italy or Greece and established once and for all the shore as a place of passage to the afterlife.