Fortnight Publications Ltd.

The Poet's ShadowAuthor(s): Terence BrownSource: Fortnight, No. 275, Supplement: Hewitt (Jul. - Aug., 1989), p. VIIPublished by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25552039 .

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Mount Charles?Jung 'dominated the Hewitt household'

UJ CO 3 cz LU

The poet's shadow

Terence Brown IN A RECENT rem iniscence, Roy McFad

den touched on John

Hewitt's interest in the

psychoanalytic thought of Carl Gustav Jung.

McFadden recalled the

Hewitts' flat in

Mountcharles:

The teaching of C G Jung dominated the Hewitt

household during the Forties. In a letter written in

1945, complimenting me on my second book, Flowers for a Lady?"Quite honestly no recent book of verse by any of the younger moderns has so delighted me or interested me so immediately. Indeed most of what I want to say is in the sonnet I enclose: the verses occurred tonight after I had

spent most of the evening reading and talking about your book"?he concludes: "Ruby joins me in my enthusiasm. Together we have agreed that in Jung's phraseology you are a fine 'feeling'

poet?you know the quartering?sensation/feel ing/intellect/intuition. I am satisfied that I can

praise you objectively, as I am a 'sensation' type. After an evening at Mountcharles, when

Jungian allusions pervaded the room like the

persistent aroma of herbal tobacco, Oliver Ed

wards, undressing for bed, paraded around the

bedroom, sock in hand, intoning: "Alt, Alt, Alt."

Hewitt the Jungian seems improbable. His

secular rationalism, his studied objectivity about

nature, society and art, his Marxist inclinations

all seem the antithesis of Jungian concerns. Yet

much in the poet's sensibility is illuminated by this attraction to psychoanalytic self-scrutiny, and to Jungian categories in particular.

For Hewitt often seems the kind of writer

who lacks great insight into human personality (there is nothing of the novelist in him whatso

ever). He seems the kind of person who would

welcome a map to guide his studies of human

types, who would find in Jung's theories of

introverted and extroverted identities?with their

quartering into sub-groups, his theories about

the persona and the process of individuation?

intriguing charts of much he found difficult to understand about his own and others' natures.

One remembers too, alerted to Hewitt as

some-time Jungian, how much of his career

involved a rather ponderous, sometimes tedi

ous, always earnest self-examination. Family,

region, nation, archipelago were scrupulously

interrogated as constituents of selfhood. Psy

chological condition was a preoccupation?life

imagined as inevitable stages, studiously ex

plored. The Hewitt who wrote this was a poet whose self-understanding had been conditioned

by physiognomy as mirror ofthe soul:

I nod assent, no dusty pioneer Complaining that the road has come too near, But one who needs the comfortable pace of safe tradition. Reckon from my face and its smooth lazy cheeks, the close set eyes, the tight shut mouth aggressive that belies a hand that scarce dare push a latchless gate, and you will gauge me hero in debate who funks decisions nor will shift his hams save to applause for savage epigrams

which skim a laugh and leave mistrust behind that one so harsh insists he still is kind ...

Conacre (\943)

It is however Hewitt's recurrent poetic specul ation on the idea ofthe image that most precisely reflects his debt to the Swiss theorist. And knowl

edge of Hewitt's interest in Jungian notions of

symbol and archetype can illumine some of his

more obscure poems. For Hewitt's imagination was one which readily reckoned the human

world as composed of types and the natural

world as emblematic, even allegorical.

Jung's theories of archetypes, ofthe collect

ive unconscious, on the language of dreams

would naturally have appealed to such a poet, even if the wilder reaches of the Swiss mage's

thought would have offended his sceptical intel

ligence. Accordingly, many of Hewitt's poems,

throughout his career, reflect on the relationship of images to reality, pondering the human im

plications of man's mythopoeic faculty. Hewitt seems to agree with Jung that man is

a creature of symbols, or 'images' as he more

frequently describes them. Religion and art are

part of the symbolic imagining of the human soul. Even Catholicism?about which Hewitt is

often less than gracious?is a repository of

necessary images. So in Freehold (1946), armed

with the knowledge of Jungian archetypes, the

collective unconscious and the significance of

VII

dream, Hewitt could write of Roman piety:

For now I scorn no man's or child's belief in any symbol that may succour grief if we remember whence life first arose

and how within us yet that river flows; and how the fable shapes in dream's deep sea

still evidence our continuity with being's seamless garment, web and thread.

It is in the long poem Those Swans Remem

ber which Hewitt printed privately in 1956 that he most fully explored the ways in which the collective imagining of humankind in myth and dream have supplied modern civilisation and its

various ills with a repository of consolatory and

enabling images. The work is painstaking, ledger like, mythological accountancy, weighing and

measuring a symbolic legacy. And it is this

curious note of objective, discursive rationality which makes Hewitt's incorporation of Jungian

concepts into his poetic so unconvincing. For as

poet he writes of dreams but seems not to dream, invokes the collective unconscious but seems

always wholly conscious, ponders man as sym bol maker but offers us only self-consciously

composed emblematic occasions.

Yet there is a hint of the poet Hewitt might have been had he allowed freer expression to

that side of his nature which was so drawn in the

1940s to theories of archetype and collective

mind. In his poem Swan?wild birds of various

kind seem to have been an essential part of

Hewitt's private heraldic symbology, as Those

Swans Remember evidences?we momentarily

step into the world of myth and personal dream:

This is no kin of any swan you see; this is the swan that comes before sleep.

And in one of the most obscure works in his

oeuvre, Man Fish and Bird (published in Col lected Poems, 1968) the poet produced a near

surreal, dream-like poem which brings the

symbols not out ofthe pages of a Jungian treatise

but from the depths of the unconscious itself. It

makes them seem the numinous presence they must be if they are to escape that air of bookish

abstraction which so vitiates Hewitt's more

customary encounters with the symbolic. Man Fish And Bird explores the nature of

creativity?the poem invokes the seven days of

the Genesis myth?as a process of correlating

archetypical images with the experience of life

as the individual lives it personally and socially. The tone of careful, quiet analysis so character

istic of so much of Hewitt's verse is certainly

present, but it is complicated by a wonder, a

calm, unintimidated acceptance of mysteries. John Hewitt is a minor poet by reason of the

fact that he scarcely ever really surprises the

reader. He established a certain range of tones

and poetic manners early on and although his

work accumlated impressively it did not seem to

deepen or change in any fundamental way. But

in Man Fish And Bird one senses another di

mension to this poet's imagination, his shadow:

When my mind can no longer because of age or mishap clench within itself the circumambience and the man and the fish and the bird I shall lie down in the shadow which will deepen

into darkness and the man will sit in the chair and be in his mind and the green man of split sod and the yellow fish will turn and turn in swift

curves in the globe of his skull

peering out of his eyes in passing and the red bird will fly shouting out his mouth.

This is the seventh day Man Fish and Bird.

Terence Brown is professor of English at

Trinity College, Dublin

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