‘IN THIS DEAD-DAWNING CENTURY’: FORD MADOX FORD’S EDWARDIAN POETRY

Abstract

?The night's somewhat grimmer and something is goneOut of the comforting quiet of things as they are.'Ford, ?Sidera Cadentia (On the Death of Queen Victoria)' (1904)1?Rivets. To get on with the work - to stop the hole.'Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902)2Kenneth Millard's Edwardian Poetry (1991) has as its epigraph a quotation from John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956):The old Edwardian brigade do make their brief little world look pretty tempting. All home-made cakes and croquet, bright ideas, bright uniforms. Always the same picture: high summer, the long days in the sun, slim volumes of verse, crisp linen, the smell of starch. What a romantic picture. Phoney too, of course. It must have rained sometimes.3Unlike Millard's monograph and Osborne's play, this essay is about early twentieth-century rain, darkness, disquiet, poverty, work, hunger, mud, holes, rivets, and Ford's overlooked poetry.4In The Heart of the Country (1906), which draws significantly on the years he lived on and around Romney Marsh in Kent,5 Ford recalls a ?countryman' nicknamed ?Linky' who started to go mad - ?to hear the grass growing' - because he had started to ask questions:What was the good of charlock? Why had God made bindweed and the turnipflea? Why was a man to feel as if he were overlooked - bewitched? [. . .] He turned on me: ?Now, I ask you, sir, what's the good of all this? What's the good?' [...]What did it all mean? If so be the weeds had a right to be there, they were of some account. God looked after them and the vermin. Then where did he come in - he, Linky? Perhaps he wasn't of no more account than weeds or vermin. Then what was the good of going on?6Throughout his writing life, Ford, like his friend and collaborator Conrad, was interested in mental disintegration and what the individual does (perhaps unconsciously) or can do to ?get on', whether with ?the work' or just being. Heart of Darkness and The Good Soldier (1915), for example, are partly about the metaphorical ?rivets' we can use to stop the self falling into the ?hole' of existential despair.7 To avoid such despair in the tum-of-the-century countryside, to keep the rivet of purpose in place, which Linky has removed, Ford says that:the survivors, the men who keep to the land, are precisely those who do not look around them, and who do not name the beasts and the plants [ ] You must have a very firm belief that the fields are made for crops, the pastures for grass, and yourself the instrument of God's administering the earth, or you will very soon slacken in your struggle.In The Face of the Night: A Second Series of Poems for Pictures (1904), versions of Linky narrate ?From the Soil (Two Monologues)', the first poem of which is a dramatic monologue. A field labourer questions his local parson about God, the Bible and particularly the quotation from Genesis, as the man puts it, ?Then the Lord made we / In His own image' {Selected Poems 26). The labourer, who does the hedging for Farmer Finn, has been pondering these issues because he works alone. As Ford says in The Heart of the Country : ?the mind of the man who is much employed along the hedgerows turns inwards very often and exhausts itself in metaphysical speculation' {EE 162). The labourer concludes that what he and the other ?men that's on the land' {Selected Poems 26) need is: ?Something told plain and something we gits a holt on', because ?life's a bitter scrimmage, / Livin' and stuggin' in the mud' (27). They need a simple narrative that keeps the self upheld, out of the metaphorical mud; an unquestionable story of ?origins and ends', which might not give ?meaning to lives'8 - the labourer knows that humankind is as nugatory as ?poor thrushes' (26) - but one that will at least quieten the murmuring mind.9Dramatic monologues centre on speaking, but also on silence: the reader hears the speaker, but is also aware of a mute (perhaps captive) listener. …