The Easter edition of Sofia carried the dying Sebastian Barker’s poignant ‘The Ballad of True Regret’. This substantial collection of Barker’s last poetry comprises four sections of verse, including the title sequence from which that poem was taken, concluding with the 2012 volume A Monastery of Light as coda. Whilst the land of the title is physically the sun-drenched landscape of southern France, the transcendental significance is obvious from its David Jones epigraph: “‘Golden” betokens what is not patient of tarnish’.
The poetry explores endurance amid the evidence of inevitable death.
Sebastian Barker was born into a bohemian literary environment, his father George, a prolific poet, his mother Elizabeth Smart, author of the celebrated extended prose-poem By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. A natural scientist by education, he wrote on philosophy and theology but was, above all, a champion for poetry. Chair of the Poetry Society, Editor of the London Magazine and Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature. By his death aged 68, he had produced fourteen volumes of verse and the consensus is that the last was best.
This book brings together powerful themes: nature, place, love and loss. Its deep spirituality reflects the faith Barker embraced in his mid-life conversion to Catholicism but there is nothing pious or otherworldly about it. His is a religion of celebration, of God’s immanence in creation, and these poems refute secularists who suggest religious belief is a denial of pleasure in this life.
The first two sequences of the volume are characterised by lyric simplicity in rhythm, rhyme and diction, with a fine balance between a kind of holy innocence and a monotony in its rather obvious chiming. The case for such apparent spontaneity and artlessness is explored in the poem ‘The Critical Faculty of the Poet’. Barker can be compared thematically and stylistically with the Romantics, most obviously Blake, and George Herbert also comes to mind in the more overtly meditative of these lyrics; in ‘Treading Tiles of Sunlight’, for instance, where a forest becomes a cathedral of God’s presence and the imperative to praise:
Down the aisle, between the trees I go Treading tiles of sunlight on the grassy road.
Hopkins, too, is recalled by this lyric mysticism and the Greek Nobel laureate Odysseus Elytis is an evident influence on the poems set in Barker’s adopted home of the Peloponnese, in The Tablets of Bread and The Monastery of Light.
Here the longer lines are both psalmlike and colloquial.
Girls on the beach, for instance, ‘laze around me looking/like a million dollars’ and ‘every one is fairer to me than the ink-blue line of the sea in the sketches of the artist’. Under the oak tree in spring is ‘a place to die for’, since here God has ‘extended his hand to help us on our way’ through the ‘vast orogenies, the millions of buttercups’ to ‘see things more through his eyes’. The arresting diction and prosaic understatement here are also suggestive of the late religious poems of Auden, which are equally grounded in daily life, its mundane rituals and its speech.
Love, friendship and death permeate this collection in equal measure. ‘So sad to be going,’ says the poet lightly in a piece for the editor, Patricia Oxley. He ‘cannot imagine’ a life without poetry and as he faces death, poetry itself becomes the sign of having lived and loved fully, being ‘blind drunk on God’. The difference between life and death is both fundamental and blurred in this liminal state embraced by Barker, in lines suggestive of the ‘The Garden’ by the metaphysical poet Marvell:
I do not aspire To anything anymore.
Except being invaded by The roses in our garden.
The most overt meditation on death is in The Tablets of the Dead section of the volume. In this credo, Barker suggests that the idea of death punctures our sense of our own worth: it ‘littles’ us because ‘Nothing undoes us so efficiently, nor unweaves us so effectively’. This is the source of his faith in God: there is no reason for life if death is the only reality. Death ‘cannot create a simple buttercup’, unlike the creator (God or poet).
Kathryn Southworth is the former Vice-Principal of Newman University College, Birmingham. Now reƟred, she lives in Camden Town, London. reviews Preface This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.