The World Dimension of Inwardness,

or
There is Nothing Mysterious about Poetry
Didier Coste
Michel de Montaigne University, Bordeaux
and University of Sfax (Tunisia)

"Poetry is not mysterious and yet it is a mystery," retorts Hope to himself in the last essay
of his New Cratylus.
Many years ago a young woman very dear to my heart had left open on a wicker armchair
where she should have sat in our lovers' nest in Chippendale, Sydney, a first edition of The
Wandering Islands for me to read "Pygmalion" and try to make sense of her missing our 4 p.m.
rendezvous. I did understand something, which soon took the shape of fear and the sense of
always imminent loss. Ever since I have tried to understand better and I have sought the special,
unique form that would suit and produce such comprehension of the real, of what, in the real,
escapes to another real, further away. The scene was not only absolutely intimate, and motivated,
as I was told a day later, by a most private story line, it was also entirely local: its meaning and
meaninglessness, its tragic beauty and the desperate joy of sharing all of it, belonged to a unique
here and now. And yet, the uniqueness of this scene, just as the singularity of the poem that was
read there by a hurt and bewildered stranger instantly turned him into a no-longer-stranger, into
someone who would from now on belong to that place and time as a necessary part of the whole
world, and belong to the whole world insofar as it included this place and time from where my
beloved had gone missing and the poem was sitting instead, not being her but saying the world
which had made both her existence and her absence possible and actual. The grand dilapidated
terrace house has since been pulled down and a concrete building housing biology labs for the
University of Sydney stands on the site where we spent dazzled afternoons in the shade of the
silver foliage painted over the brown wallpaper; the Tin Shed Gallery is no longer a tin shed and
postmodern installations can be visited there instead of her exhibition of unframed paintings
inspired by The Return from the Freudian Islands, Imperial Adam or The Martyrdom of
Saint Teresa; The Flower Poem has turned into a paper poem, and yet the roots that had begun
to drive their lives into the rock bed of this world cannot stop growing, pushing their demand
for organic intellectual nutrients through additional strata of indifference.
As the outside world has turned more global and Empire more illiterate, Alec Hopes
poetry would appear to many as a local vestigial phenomenon now covered by the historical dust
that has settled over the era of Old Parliament House, Classics Departments, the shearing shed
education controversy, and yet something is stirring again where the seed of political eroticism
was sown, the poets voice has not been silenced, his cheeky remarks, his provocative use of
obsolete forms, his avant-gardiste, often grotesque perlabouring of the most clichd Australian
dream have worked their way into many minds that ignore his existence and are not informed by
the reading of his work.
There is nothing contradictory or paradoxical in that perception any
more than in the two statements quoted at the beginning of this talk. Let us rewrite them as
follows: "There is nothing cosmic about poetry. Poetry is not cosmic and yet it is a world."

Didier Coste
The Australianness or un-Australianness of A.D. Hope has been much debated, on the
very same superficial basis as his supposed male chauvinist, conservative and anti-modern
attitudes, by critics who have never bothered to look seriously into either the texture of his poetry
or the deeper claims of his own essays, his poetics and his mimetics, his theory of action and his
theory of (worded) perception. This is why it would be misleading to invoke another last essay,
'How it looks to an Australian" to either defend him against accusations of alien metaphysical and
egotistic pretensions or accuse him of some ingrained parochialism. What Hope blames the
author of Kangaroo for is his lack of observation of Australian people and the sloppiness of his
craft in this novel, what he marvels at is his sensitivity to the landscape and the presence effect of
his dreamlike rendering of this landscape. Hope's implicit and explicit artes poeticae (in his
poetry itself and in the essays in poetics) as well as many of his critical pieces dedicated to
modern and pre-modern writers, are full of converging clues that point at the remarkable
coherence and consistency, without rigidity, of his art and his philosophy of art. Similarly his
many alternately erudite and popular references to baroque musicians, neo-classical critics and
potes maudits can all be brought under a "one world" umbrella to which the uniqueness of
historically and geographically located experience, insular but not isolated, is central.
In a longer essay, I would attempt to show, through candid, new close readings of a good
handful of Hope's poems, how the world dimension of Hope's poetry, his world stature as a poet
results not from some sort of "magic" but from a self-reflexive inwardness which harnesses the
craft of poetry along with the not so random labour of the poet's "dream-workers", as he calls
them. This inwardness is not the abstract gesture of a great wanderer of the imaginary, but one
deeply rooted in the realistic perception of the world sample that it was given to the poet to know
first hand. It is also this empirical and self-conscious historicity that makes A.D. Hope a modern
materialist poet for the next century, away from the regressive complacency in mysterious
workings of the mind and the world that he denounced in Surrealism or the Imagists alike, while
putting to the fore all the same material they used. Although my readings will be informed to a
certain extent by Hopes own highly conscious investigation of the genesis of the poem and its
dialogical power, I shall not indulge in a kind of impersonation of the poet-as-critic; it is too late
in the season to allow a self-reading of the poet by himself; moreover it would make a mockery
of the distance Hope was always wise enough to maintain between his poetic text and his critical
reading, it would push his narcissism well beyond the ironical limits he had proudly set to it. The
task of demonstrating the global worth of Hopes poetry could not be carried out exclusively
from within, even if such a position as from within could be adopted and stuck to by the
author himself. Contrary to what Bakhtin thought, poetry, more than any other discourse type
(including philosophical discourse, the modern realist novel or comedy) is a sounding board for
multiple voices, its intertextual production of meaning and its synaesthetic production of
sensations and associated feelings are enhanced, not reduced by rhythm and organic memory.
The melification of language and speech, with the arbitrary associations of signifiers involved in
musicality, the close collaboration of fixed verse and strophic forms with referential and mythical
memory to preserve a vast and complex cultural archive in moderately encrypted but highly
condensed textuality, and finally the repetitive nature of poetry reading itself (learnt, memorized,
recited, performed with many collective and individual variations), all these elements plead
against the priority or precedence of an intra-textual approach. The organic unity of the poem is a
structure necessitated by the diversity of its sources and the variety of discourses into which it
can radiate. When an internally consistent thematic and dramatic development is found in a
poem, it does not entail closure of the poem upon itself or self-sufficiency of the poetic moment,
scene, thought or whatever the poem evokes or seems to refer to, but it implies condensation, and

The World Dimension of Inwardness

rearticulation of associated experiences by means of an organizing metaphor or a similar
rhetorical device. This is precisely the key feature of the poetic text that will allow it to expand
again, in reading performance, from textual microcosm to experimental and/or mnemonic
microcosm.
In view of the inherent limitations of a conference paper, I have chosen to dedicate
considerable space to a thorough analysis and interpretation of one minor, lesser known text,
therefore freer of prejudice of all sorts, and I shall project the insights gained from this more
objective reading onto the most famous and controversial Australia, along with other
celebrated and much studied pieces that will be merely evoked.
The discursive development of Standardization (1938-1942) follows both an
argumentative and a descriptive line. Albeit not a narrative, it can be read, as a longer narrative
would, in the guise of an expansion of a single sentence, the difference with narrative being
simply (and crucially) that the base sentence is a proposition of an apodictic nature, it formulates
a law that can be demonstrated: Nature, not man, is the greatest standardizer. The domain of
reference of the whole poem alternately expands and retracts between a private, individual scene
and the widest scene of Natural History through Modern Age and the History of Man.
Referential, thematized space is equally concerned with this systole/diastole couple which
corresponds thematically to the fundamental heart and wave beat of all musical and poetic
rhythm.
When, darkly brooding on this Modern Age,
The journalist with his marketable woes
Fills up once more the inevitable page
Of fatuous, flatulent, Sunday-paper prose :

Stanza 1: Core represented time is initially limited to the moment of writing when the journalist
(a tiny and obscure figure, of low intelligence and moral stature), in limited time and space (one
page) produces his weekly share of marketable woes. Although the Modern Age could be
seen as embracing a long span of historical time and potentially covering the manners of the
entire known world, the examples of plaintive and nostalgic discourses against modernity
provided in the next three stanzas indicate that the scope of journalistic writing is probably of the
same order as that of the aesthete, the theosophist and the Nature poet; all these people are
petty-minded, they look at the world through the wrong end of the telescope. At the same time,
pretentious and pedantic as they are, they believe and want to make us believe that they speak out
to the masses from a dominating, overhanging position, their tone is loud, emphatic and
prophetic, and their action is both iterative (inevitable [every]Sunday, whenever, one more) and
similar to other actions across the social spectrum of commentators. The locus of speech to which
the satirical/philosophical poem opposes its voice is narrow and misplaced.
I see, stooping among her orchard trees,
The old, sound Earth, gathering her windfalls in,
Broad in the ham and stiffening at the knees,
Pause and I see her grave malicious grin.

Stanza 5: Stanzas 5 and 6, the middle ones, can be labelled turning points, they are the hinges
on which the poem window revolves and perspective is reversed. The poets persona asserts his
world view against the stance taken to be that of such public speakers as the journalist, the guru

Didier Coste
or the school-master. Nevertheless, the poetic I is not content with sharply contrasting opinions
on the mode of lists of pros and cons or thesis and antithesis which could launch a process of
dialectical debate: not considering that his many adversaries deserve to be placed on equal
footing with himself, he is not willing to discuss the issues at length, he will simply tell what he
sees, or even, retreating behind the figure of evidence, let his vision tell itself. They say but I
see. I see, not I can see. I see is meant to peremptorily silence all the erroneous sayings
enumerated in the first four stanzas. The authority trick of the speaker who relies on the data
offered by his senses in order to counter the illusions disseminated by the vain talk of others, may
be efficient in some cases, but it remains very crude and it does not befit the author behind the
voice, a still unknown poet in his early thirties, unless he is ready to play Arthur Rimbaud the
seer mark 2. A little ambition is welcome, too much ambition is counterproductive, it could be
judged a sign of madness: megalomania, paranoia, mythomania rather than mythopoiesis. So,
what can we do? The humorous stroke of genius consists in showing oneself in such a privileged
and heightened position, to boast so much of being familiar with Nature that nobody can take it at
face value: a heavily traditional allegory, an extended metaphor will come to the fore and perhaps
dazzle the reader somehow, a reader who will then be less inclined to question the strange, bold
metalepsis in stanza 5, quoted above. If you want to speak for Nature or the spirit of the world,
you usually have to grow a long white beard and walk the streets clad in ample white robes,
giving yourself the original aspect of a prophet, but this will not be necessary if the entity of
which the poetic I tries to become a mouthpiece, is depicted as smaller, less able, less articulate
than the poet; the voice of the poetic subject, being lent to an infans or tottering Nature, appears
charitable, helpful, naturally gentle and familiar, good-natured instead of pompous and
portentous.
Let us observe a few subtleties of enunciative technique, syntactic dispositio and the way
they combine with antithesis, irony and double-entente to focus the readers attention on the
agility of poetic license, not on the sophistry or the logical impossibilities of the argument.
I see, stooping [], the old , sound Earth, gathering [], broad [] and stiffening [] pause and I
see

Long expected in a poem, the pronoun I makes its appearance at last, taking charge of
what is going to be asserted from now on, while previous contents are retrospectively even more
discredited insofar as they lack a personal figure of enunciation to support them.
It would certainly be at least unusual if the apposed phrase stooping , placed as it is
after the main clause I see, adjectively referred to the subject I, but, since the reader is initially
at greater pains to figure Earth in an orchard as the human figure of an old peasant, than an
orchard on the surface of mother Earth a detail of her body, and also since two more gerunds
are located after the noun Earth, a slight hesitation can happen as to who (of the poet, who has
knees and haunches, or the Earth, which is round and has neither) is actually stooping in an
orchard. The anteposition of the adjective phrase presents some difficulty when, the reader is
expecting 1) the direct object of the verb see, and 2) some details to give content and identity to
the subject figure named I. It is easier to picture a poet in a garden than the old Earth, with
capital E: a certain confusion is aptly generated between the figure of the Poet and the figure of
the Earth. Finally, a number of explicit and implicit puns contribute to contrast the Earth with the
journalist and other verbose characters mentioned in earlier stanzas, making the Earth an ally of
the Poet: gathering her windfalls in is periphrastically antonymous of flatulent, the unnamed
4

The World Dimension of Inwardness

sound of farts returns with the adjective sound in the same line. The verb in the infinitive
pause is deferred so long that one is tempted to take it for the substantive instead, and it is
immediately followed by a second I see, reinforcing the assertion of truth regarding this scene:
a clear (and rare) complicity is established between I and the Earth, smiling is contagious. But
again a last deception has disturbed any linearity that could remain: I see her grave, supported
by the underscored age of the Earth (stiffening at the knees), will be at least temporarily read I
see her tomb.
In stanza 6, the Earth (alias Nature), engaging in mass production of things, not signs, would
again differ from the poet; poetry is a craft, not an industry, the poet is supposed to produce
singular, unique pieces and give fresh meanings to every word he uses. But many of the shapes
and things that Nature delivers by the million, such as butterfly wings, look much more like
those a poet is interested in than like synthetic stone; some of them, leading to the material
apotheosis of love in the form of semen, indifferently belong to Natural History curiosa, the
Freudian symbolism of dreams and Surrealist paraphernalia. It is hard to understand how an old
hag such as the one described in stanza 5 can at the same time develop the powerful genesiac
outflow that the poet attributes her.
In fact she has little creative work going now: by multiplying men from time immemorial,
she has delegated the mechanics of reproduction to man himself. We could wonder whether this
onslaught of repetition and anonymity would spare the realm of art and poetry at all. The answer
is no, and it is in the scenography of this answer that we can detect the stroke of genius and the
actual process by which Hopes poetry acquires its universal dimension:
And beauty standing motionless before
Her mirror sees behind her, mile on mile,
A long queue in an unknown corridor,
Anonymous faces plastered with her smile.

Stanza 10 is worth analysing in some detail. In the more general category of allegoresis, we are
dealing more specifically, with an emblem, the graphic part of which is the mental image
proposed by the ekphrasis of an absent still picture. The key difference of this passage with
hypotyposis or an allegorical tale is its stillness, dictated by or correlated to the frozen surface
of the mirror. Between the two terms that rime in an official position (ends of lines), before and
corridor, the internal rime mirror is the operator of both the threat of indifferentiation and the
multiplication which closes the poem and leaves it open-ended. Beauty is itself a mirror, looking
at itself in the mirror, it automatically produces the tunnel or corridor effect by which its image is
reproduced and embedded ad infinitum within itself, a prisoner of its own self-recognition: the
fourth, unexpressed term of this game of rimes is horror. The discovery of the self-contained,
absolutely lonely nature of beauty, makes it unchangeable, reducing to one and the same the
directionalities of before and behind, preventing time from passing, making being wait for itself,
queue for its own sterile contemplation. We should note how the enjambement and the very
special verse cut in the first distich exactly mirror this invariable scene of arrested meaning in the
undecidability of the syntactic flow: whether we read standing before her mirror, sees or
beauty standing before, her mirror sees, does not matter at all.
This last stanza is at one and the same time highly self-reflexive and intertextually
reminiscent of many sources and parallels, from Renaissance esoteric emblems such as those of
Francesco Colonna, and from the tell me, pretty mirror of the fairy tale to the hieratic,
immobile and unmoving notion of beauty, the fascination of death shared by many so-called

Didier Coste
symbolists and actual post-romantics (je hais le mouvement qui dplace les lignes). A shared
reference with the Dcadents and part of the later avant-gardes was the Preraphaelites. On the
other hand, Hopes rejection of Surrealist uncontrolled composition did not prevent him from
sharing with them many characteristic images. This particular scene is particularly similar to
Chiricos reification of human beings in conceptualised landscapes, and even more to the
unlimited but orderly and symmetric multiplication of identical female figures, either sitting or
standing in rows or simultaneously moving in opposite directions, in the paintings of Paul
Delvaux (1897-1994), such as Le village des sirnes, equally dated 1942. In better or worse
taste, later films by Cocteau and Levin, among others will recall on many occasions the dreadful
moment of hesitation between animate and inanimate perception of a figure that weds to death
the mechanical brides of modernity, art in the age of its mechanical reproduction. The very
Freudian dream of a mask for a face and a face for a mask, identity and alienation coming to be
the two faces of the same medal, would be enacted many years later by the ageing Louis Aragon.
We could pile up references, allusions and similarities ad libitum as does the stanza itself,
without moving from there: this will be my concluding and most important remark on this poem.
The poem first focuses on and through public figures who criticize the industrial impersonality
and
artificiality
of
a
glittering
contemporary
world,
fast consumerist, from a parochial short-term standpoint, then it moves out to the broad and deep
expanses of Natural History and General History, back in a sense to the spirit of the
Encyclopaedia, he French Revolution and early Romanticism. Eventually it settles,
metaphysically, in a confined scene of the unchanging where the tragedy of the infinite is
contained in the narrowest space of the self desperately facing its own solitary perfection. Yet
this poetic, philosophical and psychological site of intimacy is not out of history and is not
sentimentally acceptable to the subject constructed by the poem or gratifying to the reader who
makes sense of it at whatever level of intricacy and refinement. The reader, in his/her desire to
free him/herself from the shore where he has been stranded by the poem will help relaunch it,
return thought toward forward moving historical time, carrying with it the debris of past poetic
thought to try and recycle complex memories and techniques into new composite materials.
I have dwelt a long time on a piece that certainly does not represent the work of the poet
at its best: too didactic and contrived for our twentieth century taste, it also addresses the physics
of love as Remy de Gourmont would put it, or even its most mechanical aspects rather than the
humanized, aestheticized aspects of desire. Many have seen shamelessness or a cold heart in this
medical brutality or in the pornographic aspects of some poems that zoom in on sexual organs
and explicit reference to active sexuality; it would probably wiser to acknowledge that these
phenomena are heavily overdetermined and widely multifunctional, combining some prudishness
inherited from a Christian and provincial education, and some fear of censorship, to an artistic
urge for novelty of all kinds and a powerful hedonistic call. But in any case, the interest of such a
study does not rely on the intrinsic quality of the text studied or on the representativity of the
poets sexual parading, clowning or shying away from the crowd; it would bear on a model
structure often present in his poetic work in conjunction or not with particular thematic contents.
A structure such as the one I have outlined in Standardization would probably not be the
exclusive trademark of an author, or dominate all his work, unless the obsessional features of
his/her personality had a dangerously pathological character. We could see such patterns as
largely akin to Charles Maurons psychocritical notion of personal myth, except that, in
principle empty of specific biographical, libidinal and moral content, they can accommodate a
variety of such contents in the work of the same author as well as in several writers of the same

The World Dimension of Inwardness

period or in writers belonging to different places at different moments of cultural history.
Nevertheless they cannot be seen as totally neutral and innocuous, as a mere vehicle for whatever
contents and forces the circumstances could oblige them to integrate; they are meaning-forms that
signify by themselves in a minimal but forceful way, they are the backbone or the internal
architecture of the works they give shape to and, acting as filters to preserve the works unity,
identity and efficiency, they will bar entrance to certain suspicious textual behaviours or imports.
For lack of another category, these recurrent discursive configurations which pre-select and prearrange grand spatiotemporal patterns could be considered as pro-aesthetic or loose aesthetic
programmes, they will orient, shape, distort or reject the readers desire in certain ways. Their
combined demands and flexibility show that they are deep-rooted at a level of the psyche where
they do not have to compete with conscious or even readily accessible pre-conscious contents.
Describing the interaction of milieu (class, gender, ideology), intellectual predisposition and
personal story line in a particular writer, they provide a sound basis for comparison and for
drawing the most determinant features of a Zeitgeist.
Leaving aside the vexing national controversy which has marred in one way or another
most readings of the poem Australia, we shall now examine it under the angle of the proaesthetic discursive patterns, very similar to those of Standardization, that inform it at a deep
semiotic level, where a primary pact of reading can be drafted between the subject inscribed in
the text and the reading subject about to invest his desire in it along with the labour of reading,
entrusting to his interaction with the text some possible modifications of his personality.
Australia and Standardization share the same kind of title, titles that could serve as
dictionary or encyclopaedia entries. Such texts combine a formal or informal definition of the
term with descriptions of the object or objects it refers to, they may include a history of
terminology, synonyms and antonyms, examples of lexical uses, as well as a history of the object
itself, whether it be materialized in the real, empirical world, or a concept or idea that is used as a
tool for understanding and acting on human lives through representations and associated values.
Australia follows exactly this kind of development, mixing straight and metaphorical images of
the land and the nation with a critique of ideas of the land and the nation that are found
erroneous, irrelevant and distorted by political interests, blindness, complacency, undue optimism
and conformity with an official ideology of conquest, modernity, improved living conditions, etc.
The satirical mode is constant in the first five stanzas; the invective, on the tone of contempt and
hatred grows even more violent, if anything, as the text enfolds. At any rate it gains in strength in
the context of the relatively tight poetic form, when it shifts from archaeological metaphors (the
Sphinx) to bodily metaphors (the dry womb) to a direct indictment of the people (stupid, barely
able to survive) and the institutions (parasite robber-state). Departing from the expected rhetoric
of simile and metaphor to tackle what is supposed to be the real in pamphletary terms similar to
those found in heated political speech calling to action is a way of forcing the poem out of its
genre, it gives the reader a painful feeling of destruction and ugliness.
Then, as suddenly as it did in Standardization, the poetic I makes its appearance in the
text to make an abrupt turn around at the beginning of the second last stanza:
Yet there are some like me turn gladly home
From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find
The Arabian desert of the human mind,
Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come,
Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare

Didier Coste
Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes
The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes
Which is called civilization over there.

In Standardization, the debate took place on a purely intellectual scene, it did not involve any
action other than verbal on the part of the speaker, but in Australia it is not so, the speaker is no
longer simply a function, carrying acts of speech, he is homonymous with a referential being of
flesh and blood, the subject is also of an autobiographical nature. Still in a mocking mood, he
writes his name into the poem, signs it of sorts under the remaining ambiguity of the gerund
hoping. After attacking the majority of the population and calling the land of Australia all sorts
of names, he is wise enough not to come up alone against everybody else, he presents himself as
included in a group, a community of which he is an exemplary member (some like me). Then
the argument about the sense or meaninglessness of Australia and Australian living can be
completely displaced and reversed with the radical change of point of view involved in calling
home an environment which had been previously described as worthless, inhuman and hostile.
It is as if the heroic pioneering ideology which had been ridiculed and rejected so far was now
accepted and fought for by the subject; the mental event should be called a conversion, and the
actional event enrolment or commitment.
But, as usual in poetry, particularly with the poetry of Hope, things are not quite as
simple. First, there is room for doubt, for nothing proves that the prophets still come from the
deserts, that we live on biblical land, and there can be any continuity between Moses and Alec.
Secondly, the gesture of the subject is more one of rejection of the outside world (continental
culture) than one of subscription to local values and manners that remain absent; the subject turns
away from old world barbarians of the mind in order to develop by himself, perhaps with a few
friends and disciples, some ascetic culture of his own in Australia; what we are talking about, far
from an enthusiastic participation in the (deficient or inexistent) Australian social concert, is a
new territorial foundation, a new discovery and appropriation of the physical landscape, like the
one carried out by early explorers, but by the poet and thinker and for aesthetic and philosophical
purposes only.
Thirdly, as it happens from time to time in particularly tense moments of Hopes poetry,
we have a basic problem of syntax here, due partly to presumably erratic punctuation, but also to
the direct transitive use of the verb hope, to the either absolute or direct transitive use of the
verb dare, and to the place and function of the apposed adjectives savage and scarlet (do they
modify deserts or prophets? or yet are they used as substantives?). An impressive number of
semantic queries arise on the two and a half lines bridging the last two stanzas: should we read
hoping, [] savage and scarlet [,] some spirit ? or hoping [] springs in that waste, some
spirit? Whatever the answers we bring to these queries and their many combinations, none of
them is fully satisfactory, or, for that matter, entirely absurd; the various choices do not really
supplement or complement each other, nor are they mutually exclusive. So that the general effect
of this advocacy of home-coming remains somewhat uncertain, embarrassingly uneasy, as if
streams of meaning and streams of consciousness were still at risk to drown among inland
sands. Contrary to what happens with Mallarms complexity or with Brennans difficulty, the
semantic undecidability of the Hopian poem, coupled at times with a whole set of unsatisfactory
clarifications, does not carry with it the accretion of utter obscurity, the mystical benefits of
mystery, the esoteric prestige of secrecy and the ineffable, nor does it multiply and enrich the
global meaning and resonance of the poem with the many echoes of active polysemy accruing to
the total account of the poem.

The World Dimension of Inwardness

Hoping and doubting go hand in hand, as memory and oblivion do, these pairs of
opposites tear at each other, but being fettered together, they make up the self more than they
divide it. [see The Double Looking Glass] Ambiguity is necessary to Alec Hopes poetry but
more in the hellish manner of a huis clos (of what happens behind closed doors) than in the
awakening mode of many balconies opening out to a kaleidoscopic world. Many and variegated
images and souvenirs are brought back from an encyclopaedic world of reference (Ancient myth
and modern technology, Renaissance courts and suburban lawn mowing, Vivaldi and the
mocking bird, country rail and chariots of fire), but it is in the inner Elyseus haze surrounding this
vast catalogue of suggestive but always incomplete experience that a sense of place and a sense
of loss are both, inseparably, found. This is a recurrent feature of Hopes poetry, not only on a
thematic level but also, as I hope to have suggested it in the two analyses above, at the much
more persuasive level of the typical (obsessive) structural pattern of the poem.
For lack of time, I shall refrain from giving a large number of examples, but a few may
help. Comparing the coda of Standardization with Circe, The Return of Persephone, or
even some of the more sinister poems such as A Visit to the Ruins, we would see that similar
contrastive systems underlie the quest of meaning, that a non-dialectic reversal operates at a
certain point in the development, sometimes calling forth the illusion of an object a kinetic
Janus going in two opposite directions at once; but ultimate, ataraxic stillness is rarely the final
outcome for the subject of the quest; the subject, in the end, is either seen falling in the pit of its
own self or, better, about to fall, on the edge, on the brink. In fact, working on a small number of
structures of the kind I have outlined, just as he used quatrains and the pentameter, Hope resorts
to frames of perception and thought that he can then modulate and finely tune to embrace in one
intense but often amused gaze a scene that is neither that of origin nor that of total destruction
(effacement or judgment).
Ill make three brief concluding remarks.
1) With Hopes poetry we are not dealing with paradox (in the sense of unreason), let
alone contradiction. There is no possible contradiction or paradox in the confrontation of the page
and the margin, and it seems that, for Hope, poetic thought happens in the margin, in more than
one sense: it is incidental, it explores possibilities left out by conventional logic, it dis- and relocates its subject or subjects in such exotic places as a sui generis unconscious and an
Antipodean one at that. Having stalled dialectics, he is obliged to elaborate a technique and
define a field of action for something of a successful inconclusiveness, not quite an opera aperta
either but the shape of a room of the inner mind with a door ajar. The speaker, in his two
complementary personae of watcher and walker spares no effort to visit this room where he may
find himself absent, but not alone in his absence. There is definitely something stirring there, but
what was it again? And what will it be? In here, inwards is where I am not alone, for the absence
of the other (another) can be named as what makes me a subject of desire; the subject is not
undone by being orphaned but about to construct himself by meeting his other on the verge of
death.
2) Life and death are always seen as transit, as migration, and as a physical, measurable
relation to the material world, process, not abstraction. In this sense, we could almost say that
Hope has a dynamics but no ontology. If we are ready to have a last look at the Death of the
bird, we could note that the first three lines of the final stanza all begin with And, and the first
word of the lest line is receives. Even in its (ever so brief) death throe, the bird maintains a
reciprocal and accumulative relation to its total environment. Whether the migrant bird is a

Didier Coste
swallow or a wild duck does not really matter, a poets bird is always Philomela the nightingale, a
poets bird is the poet himself or herself, taken in by the knowledge acquired in transit, mapped
out by the shape of things seen from high, and moving even as its song falls to the tune of a
lasting music.
3) And finally, Hopes universal appeal it is there although circumstances have not
warranted it is modern in the sense that it is a project, not an homage. Nevertheless it is not
utopian in the sense that it does not fabricate a world with a new language, but it lets future states
of the world manifest themselves through inflexions and distortions imposed on language by its
inner appropriation and its resistance to the world as well as its fascination for it. Despite its
many common place ideological statements and other topo, Hopes quest and his strength are not
archetypal (his poems do not seek origin but they are a laboratory of individuation), hence the
advisability of a postcolonial re-reading that would respond to the swarming intertextuality of this
poem. The poem was lost and found at the same time; the room itself is not empty, not
uninhabited, but it is where she was, not long ago after all, and may still return and stay, in the
end and become, unlike herself, recognizable. (Going away she [was] also coming home)

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