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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