That I admit undeftness

In Genesis chapter 11, God sees the people of the earth unified, and building a tower in order to reach heaven. He responds by scattering them across the face of the earth, confounding their language so they may not speak to one another. The tower of Babel looms large in the poetry of A.S.J. Tessimond. As we saw yesterday, there is that instinctive mistrust of statuary – why should man think himself important enough to build a tower up to heaven? – but also there is a scar running through his thought; the painful experience of that separation that followed. In his poetry, as well as in his life, there is a searching; a desire to reconnect across the divide, to finally, hopefully understand the speech and meaning of another human being. This is perhaps felt most strongly in his poem ‘Any Man Speaks’:

Any Man Speaks

I, after difficult entry through my mother’s blood
And stumbling childhood (hitting my head against the world);
I, intricate, easily unshipped, untracked, unaligned;
Cut off in my communications; stammering; speaking
A dialect shared by you, but not you and you;
I, strangely undeft, bereft; I searching always
For my lost rib (clothed in laughter yet understanding)
To come round the corner of Wardour Street into the Square
Or to signal across the Park and share my bed;
I, focus in night for star-sent beams of light,
I, fulcrum of levers whose ends I cannot see …
Have this one deftness – that I admit undeftness:
Know that the stars are far, the levers long:
Can understand my unstrength.

The poem is filled with separations. We have the separation of the child from its mother at birth, a line that perhaps hints at Tessimond’s feelings of isolation as a child, that birth may have been the last time he felt connected to his mother. The severance of speech: ‘Cut off in my communications; stammering; speaking / A dialect shared by you, but not you and you’; an image drawn directly from God’s scattering of language at Babel. Also we have Adam’s separation from Eve; ‘I searching always / For my lost rib’ and again it feels a very personal image, especially as it descends into the specifics of the modern world: ‘To come round the corner of Wardour Street into the Square / Or to signal across the Park and share my bed’. There is a sense of this separation and subsequent searching in Tessimond’s own life; whilst at university he became engaged to be married but this was broken off in his mid-twenties. There followed a series of seemingly unhappy relationships with women; perhaps a searching for his own ‘lost rib’.

This sense of division, the possibility that we might not understand the words of those even closest to us, is profound in the poem. A free-verse sonnet, it is itself a form that feels somehow broken or ‘unaligned’. The opening verb phrase ‘I have’ is torn apart by so many other clauses that we only discover what the opening word relates to in the twelfth line. The separation is taken personally, as his own inability to connect; a clumsiness in his ‘stumbling childhood’, an awkwardness in his ‘undeft’ adult life.

The places mentioned, Wardour Street and [Soho] Square, marked the heart of London’s area of prostitution, and the ‘signal across the Park’ is a undoubtedly streetwalker’s furtive invitation to him for trade. It is a painfully lonely poem, and a recurrent theme elsewhere in his verse, as here in the poem ‘Speech’:

I am dumb, you deaf. I try in vain to fashion
A convention of common speech,
A password. Babel reigns still: each is unable
To understand each…

But there is also strength in ‘Any Man Speaks’. Do not simply pity the narrator in his misdirected search for his rib with prostitutes (even when in the poem ‘The Prostitute’, the acknowledgement is made that it is the punter who is ultimately tricked), for here is perhaps the greatest strength that any character can have:

I, focus in night for star-sent beams of light,
I, fulcrum of levers whose ends I cannot see …
Have this one deftness – that I admit undeftness:
Know that the stars are far, the levers long:
Can understand my unstrength.

He may be stammering, speechless, bereft; but the figure here has an astounding humility in knowing himself. Though he might understand nobody else, he ‘Can understand my unstrength’.

Comments

[Andrew Mellor]

It's interesting that so often in today's climate of competition and success, people who 'understand their unstrength', so to speak, are castigated - whereas I've always found it an endearing and likeable quality in a human being. Society rather encourages you to know a false strength: 'I can achieve whatever I want to achieve'. Actually, sadly, you quite often can't.

[Jim Clark poetryanimations at youtube]

Thankyou for all your researches and this fascinating this blog I have been curious about ASJ Tessimond since making a virtual movie of him reading his wonderful "Cats" poem at my poetryanimations channel at youtube heres the link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G_hv8OzmNE

I had a notion Tessimond must be of possibly Huguenot French protestant origin,but this is just my pure guess it definitely has a French ring to it to my mind,but perhaps you are correct and its a derivation of Tessymam,anyway I hope you can find out more about this poet who I am intrigued to find out that so little information about him seems to exist.

If I could find a reasonable rswolution photo of him I would have a go at redoing his virtual movie,though somehow that Victorian photo I have used for his image is rather how I imagine he may have looked.

Kind Regards

Jim Clark..London..England
poetryanimations at youtube

[Peter Dean]

There is a poem by Tessimond which begins "This intricate machine is neatly planned". It appeared in an anthology in the 30s. I can find no trace of it. Perhaps you know.

Thank you.