Chimaeric David Campbell

This is the text of the first Axel Clark Memorial Literary Oration, which Alan Gould delivered to an audience at the National Library in Canberra on July 24.

 

Axel Clark was a literary scholar, accustomed to distinguish scrupulously the life of his subject from the works. Being myself an author of books of make-believe, I take a more divining, less reputable approach to this rigour. For I know how, in composing novel or poem, there can be no disclosure of character without action. Furthermore, action in human lives consists more of utterance than the odd romp or fisticuffs. It is my wish this evening to present an actual character, one known for his occasional romp and affray, but who also, in the living he did among us, was intriguing, watchful, elusive, sometimes mischievous, sometimes blackly downcast, but before all, dedicated to poetry as a practice, as a source of integrity. Here was a living that emerged from both the life and the works. I speak of the poet David Campbell.

I was fortunate to know and like the man during the last seven years of his life, so my story will include scintilla I learned at first-hand. In addition, in the thirty-five years since David’s death, I have returned to the contents of his Collected Poems, finding there a good deal of the most enchanted poetry I know. I take these poems in singularity with the life, hand-prints on the cave wall, to use an image from Aboriginal cave-painting David himself might have chosen. They present the nuance of his being because they are the places where a particular imagination has alighted in its progress through a lifetime. Of course this is true of any artist, and I will not claim an author’s complete works yield an x-ray of the life. However, I will claim that all utterance contributes to particular personal presence, that a ground exists where casual flippancy and well-wrought poems may illumine equally that singularity we call character. So in what follows I’ll treat the poems as a part of the action …

… But I will begin outside the text by recalling one wintry night some forty years ago. There had been an AGM of the old Fellowship of Australian Writers (Canberra Branch) at the ANU Staff Centre. Present in that dim light were poets, historians and critics, publishers, bookshop owners and journal editors, men and women, young and old. The meeting had been long, the discussion airless, at times ill-natured, somehow small. With a willingness suggesting fatigue, an old-guard of office-bearers had passed on their positions to a younger group of us. In fact that old Fellowship was moribund, but I was too green to recognise this, found myself voted the new president and thereupon had delivered a conspicuously gauche speech on what I might do to enliven the office. The meeting broke up, you might say my morale was low and, as we filed out, I found myself behind the bearish figure of David Campbell. For he was a burly fellow, wearing his characteristic moleskins and tweed jacket. And beside him, scarcely half his height, was that sharpest of critics, the wren-like Dorothy Green.

“Come on, Dorothy,” David put his arm around those small shoulders. “We’re going on a pub-crawl.” And this was declared as something more imminent than invited.

“I sincerely hope not,” retorted Dorothy, and there may have been a shudder through those shoulders.

Now why, after forty years, do I recollect this casual vignette of manners and self-possession? Well, in that dim-lit precinct, what an impish skirmish between two styles it was. Vernacular hell-raising versus Anglican-proper, might one call it? And after the longueurs of our meeting, what a lightness-of-being was here, what a humorous trust between these two eminent authors from their long writerly acquaintance in this, our odd, intractably peripheral capital city. I overheard it and can say I was uplifted. It was a moment of such fragility, these manners so effaceable in the scheme of things, as might be a dust-mote passing through a shaft of sun. It was evanescent.

David died in 1979, Dorothy in 1991. In a conversation about twenty years ago, I heard Geoffrey Lehmann make the remark that “David Campbell was the poet of the mirage; his poems describe the thing both present and un-present in the same instant.” And as soon as I heard this, I seized upon that idea of chimaera as a means to better know the Campbell poetry.

For knowing had been my problem. As I say, I was attracted to the poems but had found some elusive quality in them that left me perplexed about my knowing. So my response was unhappily approximate and mapless. The very restiveness of David’s energy and interests—in ceramics, painting, cross-disciplinary studies, Chinese and Japanese poetry, translation of Russian poets with Rosemary Dobson, these activities as we had observed them round town and campus in the 1970s, together with the sheer range and improvising of his lyric composition evident from the fresh poems he delivered at each of the many readings we organised, all this had disabled me from seeing the poetry in any integrated way as I thought I could see an armature of concerns in other poets whose work I favoured. I had looked for the poetry that existed as much between the poems as within any one or other of them, and now this idea of the chimaeric became my epistemological key for that. I found I could come to David’s poems anew and take in, along with their wide-ranging subject matter, a characteristic predisposition in the way this particular imagination had watched the world during his sixty-four years.

The key lay in this acute insight: that mirage was innate to the very fabric of consciousness. Mirage introduced to the moment of perception an awareness of its instability, of the precarious durance of fact, but also how readily the strange or the mythic might attach to any object in view as no lesser part of its actuality. These were considerations that, for the speaker of any given Campbell poem, entered the process of knowing at the instant of perceiving. Keats’s negative capability, Wyatt’s or Shakespeare’s preoccupation with mutability, are naturalised equally into this outlook. And that word mirage must qualify as the most frequent noun in the David Campbell Collected Poems.

To his readers, perhaps, this word mirage’s presence creates an odd tension between the life and the work. For there was the largeness and cheer of the man who, if inadvertently you offended some trust he placed in you, might deliver a boisterous cuff or mussing of your hair. Had he not, barn-dancing with historian Don Baker, stamped his foot through the floorboards of the Manning Clark kitchen? Had he not turned up at the same address one midnight asking to borrow a jemmy with which to force entry into a nearby gallery and nab a large painting so that he might win a bet with its demoralised artist who had wagered that no one would even bother to steal it? The jemmy was borrowed, the theft carried out, the bet presumably won. I cite these shenanigans to catch the texture of an outward life, the exuberant presence of the Australian countryman come-to-town. Yet here, on the other hand, were these poems appearing steadily across the years with their concise, finely intelligent evocations of how fugitive was the nature of presence; fugitive but not phantasmal. This was the status with which David Campbell endowed his people, his fauna and flora, these subjects of his restive lyric impulse.

 

In 1935 David went from pastoral Australia to Jesus College in Cambridge. Here his tutor was the eminent Elizabethan scholar E.M.W. Tillyard, author of The Elizabethan World Picture and other works on Shakespeare and Milton. While David would have brought with him a familiarity with Australian balladry, it was at Cambridge that he wrote his own first poetry, which duly appeared in the Jesus College journal, Chaunticlere. By 1937 he had attained his degree, a Cambridge rugby blue, as well as some national profile when he played two rugby tests for England against Ireland and against Wales. But in the face of the sporting triumphs, it is the continuing relationship with Tillyard that intrigues me, for the two men exchanged letters until Tillyard’s death in 1962. The tutor’s share in the correspondence is held here at the NLA and reveals a respectful, practical set of exchanges, Tillyard proving helpful in directing David’s first book of poetry—Speak with the Sun—to his own British publisher, Chatto & Windus, from whom it appeared in 1949.

There is one exchange between the tutor and his Australian student I would like to highlight because it casts light on the younger man’s most intimate—I’m tempted to say most sacred—aspirations, and for this exchange I am grateful to David’s biographer, Jonathan Persse, who drew my attention to it. The disclosure comes from a letter where David is writing back to his mother in Australia during the Michaelmas term of 1936. Included in his news he reports the blue he has won for the rugby match, Cambridge-versus-Oxford at Twickenham, in which he has described for her the tumultuous crowds watching that contest. But beside this account he mentions the assessment Dr Tillyard has made on his academic progress that term. The progress has been judged good, he tells his mother … He has improved a lot … His literary ability is definitely up to the standard of the honours class … It is a pity about his dreadful handwriting … But then, Dr Tillyard goes on, and I must quote … “You have what is more important, a genuine response to literature …” And this judgment on his sensibility prompts the son to confide to his mother, “How is that! Whoopee—I am more bucked about that than everything else put together.”

Was ever a ground of value in a young man’s head more clearly illumined? There was the rugby and awareness of his own prowess. There were, one assumes, the styles and pranks of undergraduate life in which he took (we cannot doubt) a robust and personable role. And more secretly, yet profoundly more satisfying to him, there was this recognition from his tutor, the eminent Dr Tillyard, that he had a genuine response to literature. Literature! That resource down the ages where humans spoke with wholeness of mind. And the approval bucks him more than everything else put together. As I say, I am a novelist; I look for where story might reside. And I cannot help suspecting Dr Tillyard’s encouragement was an ignition of morale waiting to happen. Poeta nascitur non fit. Poets are born, not made.

So my interest must probe what time will not so easily disclose to us from the documentary archive, namely the formative associations in worldview that may have begun in those Jesus College tutorials. Tutorials were one-to-one at Oxford and Cambridge in those days. So we have the rambustious undergraduate from an Australian pastoral background who, if he conjured his far-off home, is likely to have seen those hallucinatory images “hock-deep in mirage”, as he would describe them twenty years later in the poem “Song for the Cattle”. And we have the scholar, formidably erudite in the Elizabethan outlook and pathos, that Ptolemaic Great Chain of Being, the nine enfolded spheres, the ether and the sublunary, the Correspondences between macrocosm and microcosm, the Wheel of Fortune, and that Elizabethan sense of the precariousness of Being that one detects from the rigidity of posture and alertness of eye in the Nicholas Hillyard portraits, or from Macbeth’s last, deeply composed judgment on existence—“Life is but a walking shadow.” Here perhaps was that vital connection in the mind of the emergent poet, where presence-and-evanescence fuse as a mental construct in an outlook at once emotional, intellectual and founded on the sensual experience he brings from his homeland, the “hock-deep in mirage” as it were, fusing with, “Life is but a walking shadow”.

 

To illumine my guesswork on that long-ago tuition, let me counterpoint a passage from Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture with a poem from quite late in David’s career. Prior to the passage, Tillyard has described how the Elizabethans inherited from medieval times the reflex to identify and order the correspondences of things and events throughout the Cosmos as part of the quest to establish Cosmic unity. Thus, just as the king sits at the top of the commonwealth, so the mind sits at the top of the body. A disorder in the heavens will portend a discord in the state. And so on, in an elaborate but integrating multitude of resemblances. For all that this construction of reality was being challenged in Elizabethan times by the Copernican astronomy, its currency persisted, as did our human habituation, our natural agility in making such fusions. And it is this aptitude that interests Tillyard, for he goes on:

 

This Elizabethan hovering between equivalence and metaphor may become clearer in an example. Modern astronomers, hating the asteroids for being so many and so obstructive, have named them the vermin of the sky. To us this is no more than a metaphor with an emotional content. To the Middle Ages the observation would have been a highly significant fact, a new piece of evidence for the unity of creation; the asteroids would hold in the celestial scale of being the position of fleas and lice on the earthly. The Elizabethans could take the matter either or both ways.

 

Tillyard’s book was published in 1942, so its substance was almost certainly being aired in his tutorials of the mid-1930s. And it is precisely that naturalness and agility to hover between equivalence and metaphor that intrigues me in the Campbell poetry. Here is the first poem of his sequence “Starting from Central Station”, written in the early 1970s:

 

A moon hangs in the air

Its hands at ten past ten:

My father leaps alive

And I shrink to his son.

 

My father strides ahead

And stops to have a word

With men in caps who laugh.

He slips them a reward.

 

The trolley rolls behind

With boxes stacked like bricks:

Smoke and a whistle blow

And I am fifty-six.

 

Houses move through the parks,

Streets run with greens and reds:

Night conjures up the same

Old promises and dreads.

 

The train is on its way

And daylight gets to work,

Puts father in a box

And shoves him in the dark.

 

What I notice in this scene of locomotion is David’s seizing upon the idea that the lyric impulse has its natural genesis at that tension in imagining where that-which-corresponds encounters that-which-cannot-be-stayed. So here, as trolley and railstock roll, the moon and the clock have equivalence, the self-as-boy and the self-as-middle-aged-man have equivalence, the present train and the train-remembered elide to provide the one vehicle for bearing these correspondent lives that are presented to us. These lives inhabit, not so much a distinct present and a distinct past. Rather, here is an actual now infiltrated by a virtual now where this vibrancy in correlation is taken as native to human living, howsoever “the dark” is an ultimatum. So the father looms, his presence acutely, if sparely delineated. The son, as boy, as mature man, watches from their carriage window how, rather than the train, it seems to be the very fixtures of the world, houses, parks, streets, colours, that are a-stream. And as he watches the world, he also watches his watching, night proceeding towards day, his father and himself towards the dark’s finality.

Poets reach for metaphor, and metaphor must, of course, deal in the convenient but transient correspondence of things. But David Campbell’s sense of metaphor reaches, I think, for a more searching expectation from such correspondences than local highlighting. “Thought leaps alive, and all that lives is thought,” he writes in a verse letter to his trout-fishing companion, the poet Douglas Stewart, continuing:

 

That broader river where the mind’s at work

     Evolving in the dark

Slow metaphors and metamorphoses

And platypus glide like Noah in his Ark.

 

That is, metaphor and metamorphoses are immanent in the very texture of our watch upon experience. Here a fisherman’s plein air riverside encounter with a platypus is inalienable from the biblical story because any object in focus is inalienable from its associations. This is the consequence whenever the full-presence of a thing is pursued in thought and imagining rather than through material analysis. I once asked my scientist father-in-law, a man of liberal education with a limpid prose style whose lifetime had been dedicated to meticulous research, “Can you, in your science-writing, ever allow yourself a simile or metaphor?” He grasped immediately the challenge of my question, took his pipe from his mouth and answered, perhaps shyly, in the negative.

For those not bound by such empirical rigour, this native instability in how meaning may be approached has made poetry the proper human instrument by which a presence that implies its own uncertainty can be most effectively meditated. And David’s poems over four decades are polarised towards this recognition. So presence and mirage merge in the moving image; Central Station’s clockface is a moon in the same moment the moon is a clockface. There’s no taxonomising of clock and moons here; meaning lies in the immanence of associations. As with his fellow poet Judith Wright, whose first book was indeed entitled The Moving Image, I detect Platonic rather than Aristotelian provenance in David’s work, natural enough from that Tillyard tuition. Inherently the object will lack self-sufficiency, but will reach instead towards an idea of its ampler presence, albeit silhouettishly across Plato’s cave wall.

 

Then how does one plot the trail of the chimaera in the Campbell Collected Poems? Often the argument is clear though the brushstrokes are no less allusive and delicate for that clarity; Harry Pearce walks “on air” out of hallucination into more resilient presence in Australian landscape and idiom. The fresh troops depicted in “Men in Green” are compelled to watchful silence as they meet their spectral counterparts at the Dobadura airstrip during the nightmare Kokoda fighting. As counterparts too, one generation of women appraise another in that jewel-like epigram, “Mothers and Daughters”, where time suspends itself for the children to “mock their anxious mothers / With their mothers’ eyes”. Twelve years later, in the poem “Snake”, simile is the instrument that glides us through the poem, lifting its subject from taxonomy to the serpent’s ampler vibrancy in human thought:

 

The tiger snake moves

Like slow lightning. Like

A yard of creek water …

 

Where have you gone,

Long fellow, cold brother,

Like a lopped limb or

Truth that we shy from … ?

 

Snakes are like a line

Of poetry: a chill

Wind in the noon,

A slalom in the spine

Setting ears back, hair on end …

 

There is a later, equally spare poem called “Lizard and Stone” where, in his arranging of simple, charmed observations—a Campbell trademark—we are shown behind the apparent inertia of lizard and stone, the invisible but reciprocal quickening of atoms in both. Around this, we’re told, “the cosmos dances”. Chaucer, Donne and particularly Blake would have immediately recognised this correspondence from microcosm to macrocosm. The physics David distilled into this simple scene is modern. But the mindfulness of those correspondences seeking out the signature of cosmic unity across the various planes of existence, this was in common for the four poets I name here and gives David’s late poem a provenance in Dr Tillyard’s insights into Elizabethan poetic mind.

David’s physics contribute one unity behind his work. Inspired partly by Einstein, by Heisenberg’s wave/particle chimaera, they also draw from Blake’s divinations, and are naturalised in the Arcadian landscape of David’s work. “What is matter but a hardening of the light”, is his refrain in the exquisite “Hear the Bird of Day”, while the lyric that follows it in the Collected Poems transfigures science into the concise, luminous argument of poetry, and must be quoted in full:

 

Plodding physicists agree

That matter equals energy;

Energy is sweet delight,

Says Blake, and puts the matter right.

 

Stars and singing birds rejoice

In their courses with one voice

And from the dreaming atom grows

The chain-reaction of the rose.

 

Matter would take fire without

The channelling restraints of Thought

That lock wild ardours up in stone

To lend his concepts flesh and bone.

 

Stars and singing birds rejoice

In their courses with one voice

And from the dangerous atom grows

The thorny passion of the rose.

 

And I observe how the third stanza of this poem from his mid-career foreshadows the physics of “Lizard and Stone” written at the end of it, one element showing the unitary compass of the Campbell poetic mind.

 

If David had a conventional religious faith I am unaware of it. But Christ makes occasional though significant appearances in his poems, in the early “Fisherman’s Song” and the later “Trawlers”, for instance. These visitations are enough to suggest to me a prolonged quest for grace occupying David’s mind, but a quest pursued with the radical openness to experience that was a mark of his living.

I recall him telling me once, after he had spent a short spell in hospital, how a priest had chatted at his bedside, then, upon leaving, had asked if he might pronounce over him a blessing. More intrigued than from a sense of need, David had assented. The blessing had included the phrase, “the peace that passeth all understanding”, and in his subsequent exchange with me he had remarked how unfathomably numinous he had found this phrase to be. I fear I responded crudely, for I was full of Nietzsche’s anti-Christ at that time, and wish now I could have been aware of the vein of premonition as to his own fate that ran through his books of the 1970s from Devil’s Rock and this, the first of its rock carvings, “Kangaroo and Ship”:

 

The boomerangs hit home, yet the kangaroo,

     Shy sandstone beast,

Is already vanishing, a sailing ship

Tattooed like a cancer on his chest.

 

Indeed, do we catch a glimpse of David’s idea of grace in that “Fisherman’s Song” from his 1962 book Poems, one that is serene, strange, beautiful, revitalising?

 

I would follow the swan

To the reach of her mind—

Till rock and mirage break

And stars double and float

Upon the quiet lake …

 

… Watching the dawnlight kindle

Christ’s fire on the lake shore.

 

I should make one thing clear. Chimaera may give to appearance its instability. But this is not identical with saying that appearance, as depicted by Campbell, is vague. There is a countervailing precision of imagery throughout David’s work. Take from “Mottoes on Sundials” the cauterising image of these two absinth drinkers migrating from their Degas painting to a contemporary Parisian street:

 

Early Picassos,

Sunlight ate at their outlines

Like acid in copper.

 

And it is a novelist’s quick eye for manners and society that animates, say, Bella and Skene in the seven sonnets of “Visions of Life and Death”, or his own forebears in the seven sonnets of “Deaths and Pretty Cousins”. In each case, character arises, vibrant but fleeting, in presences countercharged as it were, with evanescence, through these two sonnet-mosaics that catch the tilt of attitude, idiom and domestic colour in the households of a former patrician Australia.

More deliberate than in the work of his coevals, Hope, Wright, Webb, Harwood, I detect a painterliness in the Campbell oeuvre, the effect of which is to intensify this tension between the fragility and the vibrancy of existence. What is this painter­liness? In a poem like “Such Early Hills”, one enters a landscape that is not so much a composed scene as an arrangement of elementals. It is a counterpart of Eden, we learn, except snowgum, moon, stone, everlasting daisy, bird, and beloved, exist as though primordially. Here is verbal equivalence to the placing of imagery in a painting by, say, Boyd or Nolan, where objects isolate themselves from each other, stark in outline but as though suspended between particular and universal. “When I got in from the paddock,” David told me in a 1978 interview, “I was too tired to read so sat and stared at pictures.”

 

My appraisal here does scant justice to the scope of the Collected Poems or resource of the artist. I should note from his first book his watch on world affairs, the experiments in surrealism and defamiliarising he took from reading modern European poets in the early 1970s. “Bad poets borrow, good poets steal,” he would cheerfully repeat the old adage to us younger poets. And of course pervasively there twinkles the Campbell humour, sly when recounting the ruse of “Tiny O’Keefe”, courteous in its irreverence when offering HMQ and family emergency beds for the night in his justly celebrated “The Australian Dream”. His world includes his own formidable mother who “loves birds so shoots cats” and an Arcadia where swagman and coolibah tree hold eloquent discourse in an Australian deadpan as ridiculous as it is civilising in the early poem, “Humping a Bluey”:

 

“They click their tongue or split their side,”

Sang a swaggie to his blue,

“But I am steadfast in the pride

That of all mortals I am blest—

I dance with the lyrebird in her nest:”

And the coolibah tree said “True.” …

 

“At sight of me young babies cry,”

Sang a swaggie to his blue,

“With mouths as wide as the open sky:

But what care I when by this tree

The fox and the rabbit lie down with me:”

And the coolibah tree said “True.”

 

“Oh. Boys throw stones with tutored aim,”

Sang a swaggie to his blue,

“But though their learning may send me lame,

I know more of heaven and hell

Than fathers or schoolmasters tell:”

And the coolibah tree said “True.”

 

“And young girls titter behind their hand,”

Sang a swaggie to his blue.

“They sell their souls for a golden band:

And this is truth, upon my life—

I’d rather have you than the banker’s wife:”

And the coolibah tree said “True.”

 

“Though the banker has both wife and gold,”

Sang a swaggie to his blue,

“And walls to keep out sun and cold,

He’ll die alone: but when I’m done,

Then you and I and the tree are one:”

And the coolibah tree said “True.”

 

What delightful poise is here in this pastoral eclogue, its common sense as natural to the Australian scene as its formal tropes are to pastoral poetry from Marvell or Sidney back to Hesiod. Indeed, I take this as David’s particular contribution to the well-being of Australian poetry, this confident charm with which he naturalises the forms of an older British and Classical literature to Australian context. Instances of this abound in the Collected Poems, one I might choose being another early poem, “The Soldier and the Mermaid”, where border-ballad metre and refrain use hyperbolic and elemental substance in a poem about recovery from war that shrewdly seeks the relaxation of combat’s tension in an evocation of the boundlessness and strangeness of the broader world.

This confidence-of-the-text is worth noting. Sometimes, at readings or book launches, David might be in a black downcast. He was unsure of his latest offerings. He had written nothing for weeks, how chancy was the muse, how friable the practice of poetry. And yet … And yet it is the luminous self-possession of the poems in the Collected that impresses me each time I return to them, a sense of their natural ease in the correspondences they make, between one old literary culture and an emergent other, between old forms and new contexts, between what has presence and yet is hived with evanescence. What David brings to the writing of Australian poems, marvellously I think, is an insouciance whereby they can live both in their context and with their provenance.

 

At the outset I recalled a meeting of writers where I described the discussion as having been somehow small. I’ll return now to that smallness. For David received his share of disparagements. I recall some local critic dismissing him as “our own Whitman of the gumtrees”. More recently I quizzed the assessment of an eminent Australian Literature scholar when he requested my reaction to his paper, “Canberra as Literary Region”. I had noted his approvals, his care with their respective and (to my mind) mostly middling works. Then I arrived at a sentence that relegated David Campbell to the status of “local laureate” and took no further interest in the actual character of the poet’s canon. What education does it take for a culture to recognise when luminous art is in our midst? In this case, Oxford University had been no help, where this otherwise agreeable scholar had once studied.

Let me protest further. What quiet, but wideawake, self-respect as a literary culture must we find before our publishers, bookshops and local libraries take it as axiomatic that their duty-of-care to this culture includes to manufacture, disseminate and stock well-edited editions of the Collected Poems from that entire gifted generation of poets born in the first two decades of the last century, Slessor-to-Harwood, and embracing Campbell. I insist such editions be given solid Aristotelian presence—saddle-stitched folios, gauzed and taped between hardback covers, the paper-stock cream and pliable, the glue according to tried recipe … and pfui to the marketing manager’s sneer that such editions are not cost-effective. For it is simple; one needs resilient books if one hopes for a resilient literary culture. How else to show the future that a poetry has been valued sufficiently by those who received it than to send it on its way in a vehicle that displays some pride and painstaking? Dare I mention how, during the course of preparing this talk, my own 1989 paperback copy of the Campbell Collected Poems disintegrated, the inferior glue of its binding flaking like old biscuit, its pages dispersing like so many white sleepwalkers.

I’ll end like this. The man I followed out of that dismal AGM was one of impressive physical presence and charm, an ex-rugby player, decorated RAAF pilot, grazier, potter, trout fisherman, translator of Russian poetry, as the Who’s Who identifiers would list for him. Restive, resourceful poet, trying wherever the lyric impulse might catch a poem, this David’s readers will distil from the books he has left us. His friend Manning Clark, whose kitchen floor he had once tried in his barn-dancing so exuberantly to destroy, described him as “an enlarger of life, not a straitener”. I agree, but will pursue that tribute more searchingly. I think the evidence of the poems taken together with the life of the man discloses an intelligence deeply moved by the delicacy and amplitude of what it was to possess being, and the theme of his own living was never to be distracted from locating the verbal music that issued from that.