‘I’ve been in Spain on business sometimes,’ Borrit said. ‘A honeymoon couple would arrive at the hotel. Be shown up to their bedroom. Last you’d see of them. They wouldn’t leave that room for a fortnight — not for three weeks. You’d just get an occasional sight of a brassed-off chambermaid once in a way lugging off a slop-pail. They’ve got their own ways, the Spaniards. “With a beard, St Joseph; without, the Virgin Mary.” That’s a Spanish proverb. Never quite know what it means, but it makes you see what the Spaniards are like somehow.’
There were more prayers. A psalm. The Archbishop unenthrallingly preached. We rose to sing Jerusalem.
‘Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire;
Bring me my spear; O Clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!’
Was all that about sex too? If so, why were we singing it at the Victory Service? Blake was as impenetrable as Isaiah; in his way, more so. It was not quite such wonderful stuff as the Prophet rendered into Elizabethan English, yet wonderful enough. At the same time, so I always felt, never quite for me. Blake was a genius, but not one for the classical taste. He was too cranky. No doubt that was being ungrateful for undoubted marvels offered and accepted. One often felt ungrateful in literary matters, as in so many others. It would be interesting to know what the military attachés made of the poem. General Asbjornsen certainly enjoyed singing the words. He was quite flushed in the face, like a suddenly converted Viking, joining in with the monks instead of massacring them.
Reflections about poetry, its changes in form and fashion, persisted throughout further prayers. ‘Arrows of desire’, for example, made one think of Cowley. Cowley had been an outstanding success in his own time. He had been buried in Westminster Abbey. That was something which would never have happened to Blake. However, it was Blake who had come out on top in the end. Pope was characteristically direct on the subject
‘Who now reads Cowley? If he pleases yet,
His moral pleases, not his pointed wit;
Forgot his epic, nay Pindaric art,
But still I love the language of his heart’
But, admitting nobody read the Pindarique Odes, surely the pointed wit was just what did survive? In Cowley’s quite peculiar grasp of the contrasted tenderness and brutality of love, wit was just the quality he brought to bear with such remarkable effect:
‘Thou with strange adultery
Doest in each breast a brothel keep;
Awake, all men do lust for thee,
And some enjoy thee when they sleep.’
No poet deserved to be forgotten who could face facts like that, the blending of conscious and unconscious, Love’s free-for-all in dreams. You only had to compare the dream situation with that adumbrated by poor old Edgar Allan Poe — for whom, for some reason, I always had a weakness — when he trafficked in a similar vein:
‘Now all my days are trances
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy grey eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams –
In what ethereal dances
By what eternal streams.’
Ethereal dances would have been no good to Cowley, by eternal streams or anywhere else. He wanted substance. That verse used to run in my head when in love with Jean Duport — her grey eyes — though she laid no claims to being a dancer, and Poe’s open-air interpretive choreography sounded unimpressive. However, there were no limits when one was in that state. We rose once more for another hymn, ‘Now thank we all our God’, which was, I felt pretty sure, of German origin. Whoever was responsible for choosing had either forgotten that, or judged it peculiarly apposite for this reason. We had just prayed for the ‘United Nations’ and ‘our enemies in defeat’. In the same mood, deliberate selection of a German hymn might be intended to indicate public forgiveness and reconciliation. Quite soon, of course, people would, in any case, begin to say the war was pointless, particularly those, and their associates, moral and actual, who had chalked on walls, ‘Strike now in the West’ or ‘Bomb Rome’. Political activities of that kind might by now have brought together Mrs Andriadis and Gypsy Jones. The Te Deum. Then the National Anthem, all three verses:
‘God save our gracious King!
Long live our noble King!
God save the King!
Send him victorious,
Happy and glorious
Long to reign over us;
God save the King!
O Lord our God arise
Scatter his enemies,
And make them fall.
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On thee our hopes we fix;
God save us all.
Thy choicest gift in store
On him be pleased to pour;
Long may he reign!
May he defend our laws,
And ever give us cause
To sing with heart and voice,
God save the King I’
Repetitive, jerky, subjective in feeling, not much ornamented by imagination nor subtlety of thought and phraseology, the words possessed at the same time a kind of depth, an unpretentious expression of sentiments suited somehow to the moment. It would be interesting to know whether, at the period they were written, ‘reign’ had been considered an adequate rhyme to ‘king’; or whether the poet had simply not bothered to achieve identity of sound in the termination of the last verse. Language, pronunciation, sentiment, were always changing. There must have been advantages, moral and otherwise, in living at an outwardly less squeamish period, when the verbiage of high-thinking had not yet cloaked such petitions as those put forward in the second verse, incidentally much the best; when, in certain respects at least, hypocrisy had established less of a stranglehold on the public mind. Such a mental picture of the past was no doubt largely unhistorical, indeed totally illusory, freedom from one sort of humbug merely implying, with human beings of any epoch, thraldom to another. The past, just as the present, had to be accepted for what it thought and what it was.