essay
The River of English
1.
Listen,
Listen this is not the ordinary surface river
This is not river at all this is something
Like a huge repeating mechanism
Banging and banging the jetty
Very hard to define, most close in kind
To the mighty angels of purgatory
Who come solar-powered into darkness
Using no other sails than their shining wings.
Listen, Alice Oswald's A Sleepwalk on the Severn is like the night mail, important for how it moves, how it gestures a nightscape it moves through, how it refers both to itself and what it carries, how it arrives awash with deposits of sound and orthography. It's a piece of nightwriting, it's what English does at night, and the river. Oswald armors the poem with both a prologue and a forenote, each well-riveted with nots: "this is not the ordinary surface river"; "This is not a play." But this negative method achieves a kind of reversed current, a charm, a poison that sinks in the ear, floods the ears' crazy channels and finds the brain, volts its electrostatic fluids like notional wings that beat in closed vaults.
The kind of nightwriting that carries night in its thick wings. That can only be read in the dark.
Such a battery of paradox, pluses and minuses, things that are, things that are not. This is the dynamo that keeps poetry going, and the heart, and thought, inside the skull's locked theater, its permanent illusory night. There darkness might be translated to light, and, ok, vice versa. Au quai. A dark channel where dead girls and sailors ride like leukocytes. The whiteness of the page stands in for the darkness of the night. The blackness of the type stands in for something written in light: counterlight or insight. Maybe all poetry is (night)writ on water, made from and for death. Maybe all written poetry is nightwriting, the seen standing in for sound, cerement of an oral form, ready to be breathed back to life.
This river is not
This poem is not
Easy to forget that our ears are locked with fluid, riven with canals like the Greek Underworld, like Victorians thought bound the Moon and Venus, planetary, erotic, immediate and remote, rushy canals where the dead arrive to stroll beneath locked skies. Easy to forget, before its crudescent screens, under the upturned bowl of its sky, that English is a language of jetsam, its erratic orthographies a record of more and less violent clashes and declines.
I think Alice Oswald, dream secretary, wants to fish her poem up out of the river of English, or fish English up out of the river of poetry, livid, sticky, ragged, gagging.
[This poem] aims to record what happens when the moon moves over us-- its effect on water and its effect on voices.
For 'the Moon' read English. And Death.
2. Darklight, darklight
It starts one night
With a little sleepless smallness
A few stars creep out like cress.
Per its forenote, A Sleepwalk on the Severn sets out to accompany the Moon on her phases, and this opening quatrain from the first chorus isolates the new moon's rise. Being quatrain-shaped, the chorus depends on pairs of rhyme, both fullrhyme and near-rhyme. This momentum is not epic but depends on the singsong momentum of nursery rhyme. Nursery rhyme is interesting because it is thought of as oral and pre-literate but plays a role in print culture, introducing children to the object of the book. Nursery rhyme has its own temporality: one reads it to get to its end, but then one often reads it again, reads it to a child until that child can recite. Keep going. The nursery rhyme is an earworm, but it also worms the eye. In the evocatively limited vocabulary Oswald has chosen, we keep falling back into those occult English orthographies that vex all learners: light, light, night.
Night after night
The same night, I am always
trying to lift my body off its hook
But it's like searchlights out here
I keep being followed by a strip of light
I keep seeing the moon
Mother of all grasses
In this sing-song, intuitive patterning, the sound that repeats and makes the chorus singable is also unpronounceable, the 'gh' in night and light. This silent gh, this little knuckle in the eye where sound blinks, little Middle English lagniappe, keeps interrupting the simplicity of the sound's transcription, a bone in the throat of the eye of sound. In the next chorus, Oswald reverses the technique, and the eye is met with eyerhymes that don't sonically rhyme:
And things half seen wax and wane in the wind
Their leaves grow sharp and almost blue than blind
This night I'm half resigned the grasses only half sleep
Here the words that appear to rhyme (wind, blind) do not, wind never receives a rhyme, and the rhyme with blind surfaces where it visually should not, in the middle of the following line, tucked against that vexing silent g: resigned. Snag where History lays her finger: that signature: that unvoiced g: that ligature
fishbone in the throat of (written) English
that blight
that makes the throat and vowel long
as if for the Moon.
3. Full Moon
When the Moon comes into her fullness she is romanced by the drowned sailor: nightscape, riverscape, poemscape, earscape become congealed and commingled as in a flooded grave. The stage direction reads:
This is several nights later. A lonely place where the Severn runs along lawns and lights that speak ship language in bright colours float past. There's the Wind on your ears like a hood. Two sleepwalkers struggling along, one huge with eyes closed, the other staring (that's me) being followed by a cloud. Keep going...
Here the signature element of vision (light) becomes sonic and speaks. When it speaks it speaks a 'ship language', some fluid effusion in the space of normally pneumatic speech. Wind (is this the double of the unrhymed 'wind' discussed above?) is not 'in' the ears as is idiomatically usual but 'on your ears like a hood.' This hood could be the hood of a protective garment, or a carceral one; I think the latter. I think the hood prevents sight, because vision doesn't seem to be working normally in this passage. One is either close-eyed or 'staring', and to stare is not to see. It is to be agog. Meanwhile the phantom 'g' with its detectible/undetectable ghost orthography moves all over this passage, going soft, hard, silent, continuous, going...
The scene elapses in the submerged flooded theater of the skull. We never feel the sky is an open space the Moon could pass through but a lid, ceiling, cave flank, coverlet. "Sailor kisses the Moon. Poor thing. She enters her cloud. This is strange. Frozen fog look of the air. Dead hands of trees stroking the sky's fur." When the Moon speaks she both speaks in and acknowledges this agglutinated scene, using 'g'-ridden, eely English: "Eels etc. [...]There's that horrible sucking sound. The glug glug of the tide."
The chorus this time is given over to the dead-handed trees who also speak glottally and seemingly from inside the skull-theater. They relate a dream of being the full moon: Good God!
It was like this: my face misted up from inside
And I came and went at will through a little peephole
I had no voice no mouth nothing to express my trouble
[...]
This moment is arguably the apex of this lunar-structured piece, yet it is not *exactly* the full moon that rises here, but rather, the relation of a moon-dream which has risen in the collective non-moon mind of the chorus of trees. In other words, we are at at least two removes from the Moon herself, depending how you count-- within the relation of a dream of non-moon beings, who dream of being the moon. Yet, interestingly, this mis-en-abyme of representation does not distance or reduce the moon-i-ness of this moment-- instead it seems to amplify it. As the moon-dream rises in the eel-y English, the multiplication of material effects entails its own kind of luster:
Something needs to be said to describe my moonlight
Almost frost but softer almost ash bust wholer
Made of water which has strictly speaking
No feature but a kind of counterlight call it insight
Like in woods when they jostle their hooded shapes
Their heads congealed together having murdered each other
Here's that strange word 'hooded' again-- occult, concealed, indistinct, a prisoner, victim, sacrifice, or criminal hiding his face. The accretion of magic -ight words "counterlight call it insight" would at first seem to break the spell of Mooniness by breaking the stanza and delivering us back to the terrestrial level, a cluster of murderer-trees. I would argue this ultimate moment of moon-iness is the ultimate moment of suffusion. Moon is revealed to be simultaneously a celestial and a terrestrial being, entering English as the 'gh' in light. At the apex or crisis of the piece, the Moon comes into a presence so high and full that it is also its opposite-- a clustered collapsed copse of trees.
There are moon-beings sound-beings such as deer and half deer
Passing through there whose eyes can pierce through things
I was like that: visible invisible visible invisible
Moon is revealed to be simultaneously a celestial and a terrestrial being, entering English as the 'gh' in light. She entails of confusing, ecstatic sublime pulse of opposites: apex and nadir, plus and minus, erased and exposed, suffusing and being suffused. She becomes a kind of super material, a kind of super-presence that cannot be described in a single phrase but in a gluey, eely agglutination--the eely congealment that is English. In this catchment, nothing is gone, because everything that seemingly itself actually suffuses the whole, sticks around in nightwriting, rises in the throat or on the page like a sailor or dead girl in the river. The Moon is the Moon but also a kind of fluid with hydrostatic properties, that goes down and rises like a river. An English river. Gh gh. The river of English.
Sometimes the moon is less and
Sometimes she moves behind and sometimes she's gone.
Sometimes it's the moon. Sometimes it's the rain.
Joyelle McSweeney is the author, most recently, of Toxicon and Arachne, poems, and The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, a work of goth ecopoetics.