The gardener poet: Vita Sackville-West

Not yet September and already the garden is strewn with fallen leaves. It has not been quite the summer I had envisioned (long hours reading poetry in the partial shade, sipping chilled chardonnay, listening to water drip endlessly from stone into pool). Too many demands on my time: I work two jobs, seven days a week– am slowly painting our house, a large American foursquare–  and am struggling to meet a publisher’s deadline on a book.

Still, I rise early enough that on most mornings, and occasionally in the evening, I can steal a half hour or so, sitting in my chair in the crook of the house beneath the limbs of this venerable maple, Mr Chumbles snoring quietly on my lap, and watch the young catbirds frolic in the mossy pool – all the while reading from a book of poems, a few contemplative lines at a time.

My favorite poet for the garden is usually Vita Sackville-West, whose knowledge of gardening and agriculture is profound and whose felicities of language are an endless source of pleasure. In particular I love her book-length georgic, The Land, which is pure distilled Hardy. It was very widely admired in its own day (1930s), and its quiet expertise in country matters was attested to both by seasoned old countrymen in her own district (some of whom were once overheard discussing it at the local Maidstone market, admitting grudgingly that she knew as much of their way of life as they themselves did), and by a professor of agriculture at Reading University,  who made it required reading for his students. My own copy, taken from its place in the library most mornings on my way out to the garden, is a small reddish-brown hardcover that sits lightly in the hand, printed in London in 1929, with the author’s signature in ink on the front flyleaf.

Much of the language of the poem is peculiar to its time and place, and is appropriately rooted in earlier periods. In England, between the wars, there were enough readers who possessed both a broad knowledge of rural matters and a sophistication of literary taste that The Land sold over 100,000 copies, as well as winning the prestigious Hawthornden Prize. These days, in America, I doubt that the book is read at all, even (or especially) in university English departments. (It may be that I am mistaken on this point, though I doubt it. If there are graduate seminars on Sackville-West anywhere in America that concentrate on something other than her lesbianism, I hope someone will tell me about them).

Vita Sackville-West’s importance in the history of garden design is well-established and unassailable. Her garden at Sissinghurst is rightfully world-famous. Her poetry is of comparable importance, in my opinion, both because it stands well outside the Modernist mainstream– constituting a significant critique of Modernism– and for the depth of its engagement with– and re-imagining of– English and Classical pastoral traditions.

Sackville-West was associated with the Georgian poets, who were Modernists in their way, and stood in counter-point to the far more influential Modernism of Eliot & Pound. The Georgians have been thoroughly underestimated and misrepresented over the decades, but recent years have seen stirrings of a significant reassessment, and this is a subject I will take up more fully in a future post. The Georgian circle– whose number included Edward Thomas, Robert Frost, DH Lawrence and all the major WWI poets– established a primary current of Modernism which built upon earlier literary traditions without having to trash them first. In today’s parlance, they were a “green” movement, rural and proletarian, as opposed to the unabashed urbanism and elitism of Eliot and Pound.

One would prefer a conception of Modernism spacious enough to contain both Eliot & Pound’s modernism, and the less flamboyant modernism of the Georgians. It is tiresome always to have to champion one at the expense of the other, but the concerted and continual attacks on the reputation of the Georgian movement by several generations of Modernist critics and literary historians make the language of opposition all but impossible to avoid.

But I will postpone that discussion for a later posting. It is getting on toward evening now, with swifts gathering above the chimneys and robins chirruping their evening songs, and I would prefer to end on a less contentious note. Here is a passage from the late summer section in The Land:

Now pasture’s low; the moidered cattle-men
Drive their poor stock by unaccustomed paths
To forage on the richer aftermaths,
Old hay-fields, billowy with dip and stetch.
Now by the hedgerows and along the lane
The berried cuckoo-pint and yellow vetch
Herald the autumn, and the squirrels rob
Windfalls of hazel and the Kentish cob,
(Plumping their kernels white as children’s teeth,)
With acorns, provender for the winter drey,
That little larder, safely tucked beneath
Leaves, roots, old tree-stumps, for a milder day
Of winter, when the sleeping muscles stretch
And there’s a stirring in the sodden wood
As woken squirrel reaches after food.