The Filter^

A.S.J. Tessimond – Lost Voices

Lost Voices, Radio Four – Sunday 11th April 2010, 4:30pm

A few years ago, The Filter^ hosted a birthday party for the Birkenhead-born poet A.S.J. Tessimond. “Who?” people asked at the time, and that was part of the point in celebrating this extraordinary man’s birth. “I am the unnoticed, the unnoticeable man”, Tessimond wrote in one of his poems, and it seemed at that point that he had become such a thing – virtually invisible, impossible to know.
The posts I wrote at that time may be found by clicking the image below:

 

Some of the information contained in them probably needs a little updating – the work I have carried out since has proved some of those early assumptions to be incorrect – basic facts, such as where the family lived, are not quite what we thought we knew. Anything we know about this man is based on virtually nothing; the accounts of two friends and a handful of letters dispersed around university libraries and private collections about the country. That question “Who?” extends far beyond the fact that you have maybe not heard of A.S.J. Tessimond before; even if you have, at times it feels hard to pin down quite who this figure was.

 

[…] leave as your final legacy
A box double-locked by the spider
Packed with your unsolved problems

'The Children Look at the Parents'

The last three years has actually been a very exciting time for Tessimond. While I’ve been beavering away with the aim of producing a book on him by 2012, the rest of the world has made signs that it is beginning to notice the unnoticeable.

Faber have brought back into print with their excellent Faber Finds series, Hubert Nicholson’s posthumous selection of Tessimond’s verse Not Love Perhaps. At present, this is the only collection of the poet’s work in print, and provides alongside the poems a personal and illuminating introduction by the poet’s literary executor and friend.

In November, Bloodaxe will reissue the 1985 Collected Poems, and then the majority of Tessimond’s writing will available to read. I have turned up a handful of other pieces not included in this edition, mostly what Nicholson, quite fairly, discounts as “chaff and juvenilia” – but one or two probably are worth a bit more attention.

Before then though, Tessimond is available to enjoy on Radio Four next Sunday as the first in Brian Patten’s series of Lost Voices. The series itself needs applauding; it presents half-hour portraits of poets who on the whole you won’t have heard of, but if all were just and fair in the world, you would have done because they are writers deserving your attention. I was interviewed at Broadcasting House back in February for the Tessimond programme, and having seen just some of what goes into making one of these I’m really looking forward to the rest. Tracking down these lost figures of poetry, Brian Patten and Christine Hall the producer, are as much as a detective agency as programme makers – in the last series having discovered that one the poets, previously supposed to be dead, was still in fact alive.

The Tessimond programme will for the first time present interviews with people still living that knew the poet. It’s invaluable for that, but invaluable also for just letting people notice this remarkable man.

The final tragedies are,
Not the bright light dashed out,
Not the gold glory smashed
Like a lamp upon the floor,
But the guttering away,
The seep, the gradual grey,
The unnoticed, without-haste-
Or-protest, premature,
Unwept, unwritten waste.

 

‘The Unwept Waste’

Happy Birthday, Mr Tessimond

105 years ago today the poet A.S.J. Tessimond was born, and today marks the end of our celebration here of his work. It has been a curious process for me putting this together, a slow journey discovering how completely a life might disappear in less than fifty years. There is still very little known on the man himself; Hubert Nicholson’s introduction to the Collected Poems, and a tiny six page pamphlet by the artist Frances Richards (which coincidentally had a print run of 105) remain our only main sources on the poet’s life. In total there are less than twenty items of Tessimond’s correspondence held in library archives, and the Hubert Nicholson Archive in Hull (though at time of writing, inaccessible due to flooding) appears not to hold any materials either. What has become of the Tessimond’s personal papers is at present unknown, but I would be grateful to anyone who has any information on the poet getting in touch.

It is surprising that a poet who throughout the 1930s and 40s was such a regular name in the poetry presses, should slide from our consciousness so quickly. There is a short, touching poem that appears in the posthumous collection Morning Meeting about half forgotten women in hotel lounges:

The lonely women in hotel lounges

Pity us,
Us the unloved, unlovely and unloving,
Half-loving a cat, our morning tea, jewels in a trunk,
Warmth and a little ease.
Pity our too much peace;
Our absence of release;
Our long days falling without cease;
Us who have missed and still at moments know we miss
Life’s bonfire and his kiss.

It is a poem as good as any for expressing a sense of what Tessimond is about. A sad, poignant portrait of a way of life; observed with the precision of good satire, but ultimately not mocking. There is humour here; ‘Half-loving a cat, our morning tea’ seem trivial things for a person to love – love in the sense suggested in the line before, perhaps – but the feeling of having missed out in life is moving. It is the same thing felt in ‘The Man in the Bowler Hat’; the desire and fear of rising up and making something of a life. I love the phrase ‘our too much peace’, it is that simple yet weighty kind of expression that stirs you when you read his poetry, and perhaps ‘too much peace’ is what has befallen Tessimond himself these days.

But he remains loved, lovely and loving. His view on life is beautifully human, he has warmth for transgression and failiure:

Heaven

In the heaven of the god I hope for (call him X)
There is marriage and giving in marriage and transient sex
For those who will cast the body’s vest aside
Soon, but are not yet wholly rarefied
And still embrace. For X is never annoyed
Or shocked; has read his Jung and knows his Freud,
He gives you time in heaven to do as you please,
To climb love’s gradual ladder by slow degrees,
Gently to rise from sense to soul, to ascend
To a world of timeless joy, world without end.

Here on the gates of pearl there hangs no sign
Limiting cakes and ale, forbidding wine.
No weakness here is hidden, no vice unknown.
Sin is a sickness to be cured, outgrown.
With the help of a god who can laugh, an unsolemn god
Who smiles at old wives’ tales of iron rod
And fiery hell, a god who’s more at ease
With bawds and Falstaffs than with Pharisees.

Here the lame learn to leap, the blind to see.
Tyrants are taught to be humble, slaves to be free.
Fools become wise, and wise men cease to be bores,
Here bishops learn from lips of back-street whores,
And white men follow black-faced angel’s feet
Through fields of orient and immortal wheat.

Villon, Lautrec and Baudelaire are here.
Here Swift forgets his anger, Poe his fear.
Napoleon rests. Columbus, journey done,
Has reached his new Atlantis, found his sun.
Verlaine and Dylan Thomas drink together.
Marx talks to Plato. Byron wonders whether
There’s some mistake. Wordsworth has found a hill
That’s home. Here Chopin plays the piano still.
Wren plans ethereal domes; and Renoir paints
young girls as ripe as fruit but not yet saints.

An X, of whom no coward is afraid,
Who’s friend consulted, not fierce king obeyed;
Who hears the unspoken thought, the prayer unprayed;
Who expects not even the learned to understand
His universe, extends a prodigal hand,
Full of forgiveness, over his promised land.

It is an intensely kind voice that runs throughout his work, frequently sad but also with playful wit and irreverence. It is a shame for us all he is not more read. It’s a Victorian idea, but I suspect Tessimond is an ‘improving poet’ (a notion he would probably have hated). The Collected Poems, though out of print, is still obtainable through second-hand bookshops and libraries. I’d like to thank Anthony for giving over a fortnight of The Filter^ to a long and obscure reflection, and to those who have read and commented on these posts. Finally: Happy birthday, Mr. Tessimond.

On the death of a great man

He goes. You, world, are poorer for his going;
And poorer yet again, world, for not knowing
Your loss … ‘Tis well, world. You deserved to lose
That which you neither sought, nor cared to use!

Pets

Pets

An indoor elephant
Seems irrelevant.
Keeping a seagull
Is not legal.

Armadillos
Nest in pillows.
Hungry llamas
Eat pyjamas.

Hippo and rhino
Damage the lino.
Crocodiles stay
In the bath all day.

Women are flustered
If a large bustard,
Eagle or lion
Watches them iron.

Such birds as grouse
Flap through the house
And polar bears
Block up the stairs.

Sheep are loafers
On chairs and sofas
And few sane men
Can love a hen.

Most people therefore
Prefer to care for
A dog or cat;
And that is that.

A frayed but silver rope

Gordon had a big job on hand at the moment. The Queen of Sheba Toilet Requisites Co. were sweeping the country with a monster campaign for their deodorant, April Dew. They had decided that BO and halitosis were worked out, or nearly, and had been racking their brains for a long time past to think of some new way of scaring the public. Then some bright spark had suggested, What about smelling feet? That field had never been exploited and had immense possibilities. The Queen of Sheba had turned the idea over to the New Albion. What they asked for was a really telling slogan; something in the class of ‘Night Starvation’ – something that would rankle the public consciousness like a poisoned arrow.
        George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, p.271

The similarities in the situations of Tessimond and the character of Gordon Comstock in George Orwell’s novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying are surprisingly close. Both worked in bookshops, and then as advertising copywriters, both struggled with becoming published poets. The joke of Orwell’s novel is that Comstock is a much better copywriter than he is a poet, but the similarities are still striking. Tessimond’s poem ‘Money’ could stand as a preface to the book: ‘I am your master and your master’s master, / I am the dragon’s teeth which you have shown’, and both Tessimond and Orwell take a similarly grim view of advertising:

Advertising

You, without gleam or glint or fire,
You cannot know your own desire.
But I will tell you. I will look through your eyes. Now listen!
Here are the toys that please, the almost-gems that glisten! …
I am your wish and I its answer.
I am the drum and you the dancer.
I am the trumpet-voice, the Stentor.
I am temptation, I the Mentor
Who tells you that ten million men have long
Called a stone bread – and can ten million men be wrong?
I am the voice that bids you spend to save and save to spend,
But always spend that wheels may never end
Their turning and by turning let you spend to save
And save to spend, world without end, cradle to grave.

The Ad-Man

This trumpeter of nothingness, employed
To keep our reason full and null and void.
This man of wind and froth and flux will sell
The wares of any who reward him well.
Praising whatever he is paid to praise,
He hunts for ever-newer, smarter ways
To make the gilt seem gold; the shoddy, silk;
To cheat us legally; to bluff and bilk
By methods which no jury can prevent
Because the law's not broken, only bent.

This mind for hire, this mental prostitute
Can tell the half-lie hardest to refute;
Knows how to hide an inconvenient fact
And when to leave a doubtful claim unbacked;
Manipulates the truth, but not too much,
And if his patter needs the Human Touch
Then aptly artless, artlessly naive,
He wears his fickle heart upon his sleeve.

He takes ideas and trains them to engage
In the long little wars big combines wage.
He keeps his logic loose, his feelings flimsy;
Turns eloquence to cant and wit to whimsy;
Trims language till it fits his client's pattern,
And style's a glossy tart or limping slattern.

He uses words that once were strong and fine.
Primal as sun and moon and bread and wine,
True, honourable, honoured, clear and clean,
And leaves them shabby, worn, diminished, mean.

Where our defence is weakest, he attacks.
Encircling reason's fort, he finds the cracks,
He knows the hopes and fears on which to play.
We who at first rebel, at last obey.
We who have tried to choose accept his choice.
Tired, we succumb to his untiring voice.
The drip-drip-drip makes even granite soften.
We trust the brand-name we have heard so often
And join the queue of sheep that flock to buy;
We fools who know our folly, you and I.

A slightly more sympathetic view is put across in this later poem, not published during the poet’s lifetime:

Defence of the ad-man

He brings us aims and dreams and drugs; he tells
Us fairy-tales that half come true or might.
The patent panaceas that he sells
May be placebos, but placebos can
Act like elixirs; syrups have their spells,
And coloured water sometimes can assuage
A thirst for draughts from unattainable wells.

He binds us with a frayed but silver rope.
He peddles jewels false perhaps but bright.
He kindles flares that beckon eyes that grope.
His ‘you, you, you’ consoles the lonely man
And humble woman. With permitted dope
He medicines the sickness of our age;
Offers the ugly, glamour; the hopeless, hope.

Before the inept lips open.

Meeting

Dogs take new friends abruptly and by smell.
Cats’ meetings are neat, tactual, caressive.
Monkeys exchange their fleas before they speak.
Snakes, no doubt, coil by coil reach mutual knowledge.

We then, at first encounter, should be silent;
Not court the cortex but the epidermis;
Not work from inside out but outside in;
Discover each other’s flesh, its scent and texture;
Familiarize the sinews and the nerve-ends,
The hands, the hair – before the inept lips open.

Instead of which we are resonant, explicit.
Our words like windows intercept our meaning.
Our four eyes fence and flinch and awkwardly
Wince into shadow, slide oblique to ambush.
Hands stir, retract. The pulse is insulated.
Blood is turned inwards, lonely, skin unhappy…
While always under all, but interrupted,
Antennæ stretch … waver … and almost … touch.

Polyphony in a Cathedral

Polyphony in a Cathedral

Music curls
In the stone shells
Of the arches, and rings
Their stone bells.

Music lips
Each cold groove
Of parabolas’ laced
Warp and woof,
And lingers round nodes
Of the ribbed roof.

Chords open
Their flowers among
The stone flowers; blossom;
Stalkless hang.

Another chanced-upon scrap of biography:

The local Organists and Choirmasters’ Association, whose president is Mr Lloyd Moore, announces a series of lectures by Mr. H. W. Griffiths (‘The Gramaphone’), Mr. G. A. Tessimond (‘The influence of poetry on the development of modern music’), Mr. Walter Bridson (‘Liszt’), and Mr. W. A. Roberts (‘Modern French Organ Music’).

                   The Musical Times, October 1st 1921

This mention of the poet’s father in a round-up of musical events from Liverpool offers an intriguing insight into the poet’s background. George Tessimond worked as honorary treasurer for the Liverpool Church Choir Association until its close in April 1930. Founded in 1900 by Ralph H. Baker, the Association held a series of fifteen festivals of Church music in the city’s St. George’s Hall and by 1924, once building work had progressed enough, continued them within the unfinished Liverpool Cathedral. The role that this organisation must have played within the city’s musical life at this time cannot be underestimated; it provided the choir when Edward VII laid the foundation stone for the new Cathedral in 1904, and again when George V opened the Gladstone Dock in 1913. The Association ceased work between 1914 and 1921 due to the war and its aftermath, but its highpoint seems to have been the transition of the festivals between the secular St. George’s Hall and the Cathedral:

The experiences of the first Choral Festival in the new Cathedral should hold an incentive to improve on the next occasion. The organ accompaniments, played by Mr. H. Goss Custard, were models of restraint. Of course he was not able to use the Great organ diapasons, which are not yet sounding; but at the next Festival we shall no doubt hear them, as well as the heavy-pressure tubas which are to excel in tone anything previously associated with the master-hand of Willis. To the conductor, Mr. Branscombe, and to the choirmasters concerned, due acknowledgement should be rendered, as also to the Cathedral authorities for the arrangements made for the carrying out of the most imposing and notable choral service yet held at Liverpool.

                   The Musical Times, November 1st 1924

It must have seemed an exciting time for the Association. Within the city grew a huge building which was to be their home, with an impressive organ at their disposal. As it turned out, Harry Goss Custard was to play at only three more such festivals. It seems somewhat sad that as the Cathedral grew, interest in the Church Choir Association seems to have waned. The 1928 festival was to be their last; cancelled at a late stage after the music books had been printed and learned by the choirs involved. It appears that the Association never really recovered from the toll that the war had taken on it, and the increased burden involved in building the new cathedral meant that the Church could not offer them as much financial support.

That Tessimond's father was actively involved in this world is an interesting fact. That his lecture in 1921 should be titled: ‘The influence of poetry on the development of modern music’, is even more so.

We can see that Tessimond’s poetry is influenced by music in the titles alone: ‘Polyphony in a Cathedral’, ‘Music’, ‘Quickstep’, ‘Song in a Saloon Bar’, ‘Dance Band’, ‘Black Monday Lovesong’, ‘Invitation to the Dance’, ‘Skaters Waltz’, ‘Two Men in a Dance Hall’, ‘Symphony in Red’, ‘The Conductor (Concert Study)’, and so on. The range of this influence is vast, stretching from the popular (poems about the Charleston and Edith Piaf), to sacred and classical works. He is said to have introduced the painter Ceri Richards to Debussy, Ravel and other modern French composers*; and music appears to have been as much a part of the son’s life as it was for his father:

On listening to a piece of music by Purcell

I cast no slur upon the worth
Of modern men and modern ways,
And our no whit declining days –
On modern heaven and modern earth;
Yet in your muse I seem to find
Something our later muse has lost –
A note more sure, less trouble-tossed,
A carelessness and ease of mind –

Relic of times when History’s ink
Had scrawled less wantonly the page,
When man had had less time to think,
Less circumspectly flowed his blood:
Trace of a prelapsarian age,
Echo of days before the flood.

‘Less circumspectly flowed his blood’ is a great line; it echoes what seems to be Tessimond’s belief that once there was a time when life was easier for Mankind, but here temporary hope is offered through music’s ability to transport the listener back to that point. In his poetry, music is something that transcends time and that it brings about dance – ‘rituals as old as springtime’ (from the poem ‘Dancing’) – is proof of this. As we will see more closely tomorrow, it is perhaps language that prevents human communication, but music ‘This shape without space, / This pattern without stuff,’ (‘Music’) allows it to happen.

*Ceri Richards Exhibition Catalogue, (London, Tate: 1981) p.23

Spittle, slaughterhouses, double pneumonia

I suspect there to be few places on earth quite as depressing than a wet park seat above Luton’s Gasworks. I promised Andrew flippancy at one point last week, and have not yet delivered, so here we are:

Letter from Luton

Dear Hubert,
                    Bored, malevolent and mute on
A wet park seat, I look at life and Luton
And think of spittle, slaughterhouses, double
Pneumonia, schizophrenia, kidney trouble,
Piles, paranoia, gallstones in the bladder,
Manic depressive madness growing madder,
Cretins with hideous tropical diseases
And red-eyed necrophiles – while on the breezes
From Luton Gasworks comes a stench that closes
Like a damp frigid hand on my neuroses;
And Time (arthritic deaf-mute) stumbles on
And on and on and on.
                                 Yours glumly,
                                                     John

It’s a poem which I think shares a tone with Betjeman’s poem ‘Slough’, though the majority of the complaints here are directed at the narrator himself (or what he perceives to be directed at himself), the setting of the ‘wet park seat’ in Luton confirms the utter awfulness of the world.

Epistolary poems are a long-standing poetic tradition but this poem, which was not published during Tessimond’s lifetime, perhaps originated as an actual correspondence between the poet (John, as he was known in adult life) and his friend Hubert Nicholson. It is in part the doggerel nature of the rhymes that bring the humour here; ‘mute on / Luton’, ‘closes / neuroses’ and the repeated internal rhyme of ‘on and on and on and on […] John’. The rhymes themselves are pathetic, but comically so, as are the poet’s concerns upon the park bench.

It’s a black humour. Tessimond was suffering from manic depression in his own life, and even the most ridiculous of his concerns, the ‘red-eyed necrophiles’, carries some sort of resonance as an image of the most hopeless kind of unreciprocated love.

But it’s ultimately a fun poem, the spirit of Eeyore rather than a truly sad voice; and it’s the fact that it’s set in Luton that makes it depressing, not the other problems of the world.

To Man alone

Last week I wrote about Tessimond’s mistrust of man seeking permanence through building. Today’s poem informs that view, but suggests something more complex:

In Canterbury Cathedral

Trees, but straighter than birches, rise to the sky
Of stone. Their branches meet in the sky of stone.
Stone fountains leap and meet: their traceries are
As light as lace. These prayers of stone were prayed
To a God I can’t believe in, but were made
By Man, men almost gods, in whom I can
Believe: were made as strong, to last as long
As time. I stare and pray to Man alone.

It is a small poem, but the weight of that final sentence: ‘I stare and pray to Man alone’, is nonetheless very forceful. Here, we are concerned with the separation of the sacred and profane in church architecture, and beyond that, the sense of atheistic belief in man.

The composition of the poem is fundamental to the expression of this view. ‘Trees’, the poem states, ‘rise to the sky / Of stone’. Not ‘Tree-like pillars’, but ‘Trees’. Whereas the idea of gothic architecture mimicking plant forms is not new (it builds upon the thoughts of Ruskin in The Stones of Venice), here the metaphor is absolute. The pillars do not resemble trees, but are trees; a transfiguration has taken place – stone has become tree, stone has become sky.

This repetition of the word ‘stone’ is sombre in the poem. In such a short piece it is carried out to a huge degree, to the point of repeating the phrase ‘sky of stone’ twice over within two sentences, and placing the word next to itself between lines 2 and 3. The effect is to ground the poem. The description of the architecture’s transfiguration is fanciful, it is ‘fountains leap’[ing] and ‘light as lace’; but the repetition of ‘stone’, reminds us of the true quality of this material. It is earthly, heavy. It suggests the near miracle that this structure should hold up at all.

This is very much the nature of the poem’s argument about the cathedral’s architecture. Though it might appear that these pillars are trees, the fact is that they remain as stone. Just as there might be an appearance of a God, the poem suggests that ultimately man is all there is. This is picked up in the rhyme of the final word of the poem. Resonance is given to the word ‘alone’ because we have read the word ‘stone’ so many times over before it. The poem’s prayer does not simply go out to Man’s achievements with the exclusion of a God, but to ‘Man alone’ as in ‘Man on his own’ – without a God above him.

Yet there is a respect for belief in this poem. The poem stands in awe of the cathedral, and acknowledges that it came about through ‘prayers of stone [...] prayed / To a God’, and to a large extent it seems to trust this building more than man’s personal desire for statuary, because it isn’t created to edify man himself. It is ‘a God I can’t believe in’; again an almost personal assumption of deficiency on the narrator’s part. It is the narrator who cannot believe, not necessarily the God that doesn’t exist. The indefinite nature of ‘a God’ implies a sense of this, and the notion of men being ‘almost gods’ evokes a terrific faith in mankind, a distinct sense of humanism in the poem. Man has created this amazing building, and if there is a God, then Man has achieved just as much as him: Man’s trees are ‘straighter than birches’ and they will ‘last as long / As time’.

32, Devonshire Road

32, Devonshire Road, Claughton, Birkenhead: the childhood home of A.S.J. Tessimond.

Tessimond's parents, George and Amy, married in West Derby, Liverpool in 1885. Though the unfamiliar family name perhaps suggests some foreign origin, it seems most likely that it is a derivation of the English surname Tesseyman.They were a local couple; George was the son of an iron foundry owner who in 1871 was employing a staff of 20 men and 10 boys. George then worked as a bank branch inspector, and by 1901 the couple had moved to the solid, elegant, semi-detatched villa in Devonshire Road, Birkenhead. Though Hubert Nicholson states that he was an only child, the 1901 census records that the couple had a daughter before him: Lillian C. Tessimond, who would have been 15 when the poet was born. The relative grandeur of the house indicates that the family at this time were materially comfortable, indeed in 1938 his mother must have had sufficient wealth to have made a generous donation of £5 to the 'Lord Baldwin Appeal on behalf of the victims of religious, racial and political persecution'.* They lived in the house with George’s sister Elizabeth employing two members of staff. Nicholson mentions that as a child the poet ‘relied for human warmth on a kindly old aunt. (She lived to ninety, and left him some money.)’ and it is possible that this was Elizabeth.

Houses

People who are afraid of themselves
Multiply themselves into families
And so divide themselves
And so become less afraid.

People who might have to go out
Into clanging strangers’ laughter,
Crowd under roofs, make compacts
To no more than smile at each other.

People who might meet their own faces
Or surprise their own voices in doorways
Build themselves rooms without mirrors
And live between walls without echoes.

People who might meet other faces
And unknown voices round corners
Build themselves rooms all mirrors
And live between walls all echoes.

People who are afraid to go naked
Clothe themselves in families, houses,
But are still afraid of death
Because death one day will undress them.

*Times, Thursday, Dec 15, 1938.

 

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’.