Tom Paulin - The Secret Life of Poems

Tom Paulin, The Secret Life of Poems (Faber)

Tom Paulin goes too far, by his own admission. These 'close readings' go beyond what is strictly necessary, finding things that are evoked possibly only for Tom Paulin, that would evade almost all other readers, so secret are the lives of the poems that he reveals.

His method suggests that from Wyatt to Jamie McKendrick, not much has changed in the way poetry functions through linguistic effects, which is reassuring, but not all poems have been lucky enough to have been so scrutinized to by Paulin's attentive ear. In the last word of Larkin's Cut Grass, for example, (and it is 'pace') Paulin hears a 'faraway cricket match' which is all a part of his ongoing insistence that Larkin's poems are all about the loss of the British empire. The cricket match is there for Paulin but whether it was there for Larkin, or even if it needs to have been, is one of the tantalising questions in this engrossing set of readings.

Although claiming to 'jettison all explication of the text' in favour of concentrating on 'sound, cadence, metre, rhyme, form', several of the accounts make a quantum leap from these purely verbal and linguistic features into political and cultural issues with Paulin inevitably and repeatedly sympathizing with proletarian and Catholic victims of a ruling class, Protestant hegemony.

Gerard Manley Hopkins' That Life is a Heraclitean Fire is imbued with even more than one might have realized its glorious broad sweep might have included while Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 (with the 'bare, ruined choirs') 'reflects the dilemma of the Catholic artist in a harshly Protestant state'. So while Paulin sometimes extends poems to greater effect, he sometimes reduces them. And he certainly reduces Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts (a Favourite Poem elsewhere on this website) by noting its 'glossy, metroploitan, intellectually inflected language'. I suspect that where I find a philosophical acceptance and benign resignation to the inevitable, Paulin's political commitment sees complacency, a lack of commitment and possibly even a turncoat.

But Paulin is never less than a stimulating guide and one can only admire what secrets he finds in many of these poems. If you listen hard enough, the echoes can seem to go on forever.