How Beautiful They Stand – or Not

British and Irish country houses have long been seductive and fruitful sources of literary inspiration, functioning variously as realisations of an earthly paradise, or of a corrupted paradise lost (either presenting a glittering surface or an appropriately dilapidated one), or used as a picturesque, spacious, but conveniently confined setting for a group of characters. A specific literary manifestation was the English country house poem of the seventeenth century, being typically verse written in praise of the country estate of the poet’s patron and in praise of that patron’s virtues, usually expanding into more general philosophical reflections. Two of the most famous of these are Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” and Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House”. (It is from Marvell’s poem that Gardner and Greening take the title of their collection.)

In the wider world, country houses have often been the focus of controversy, whether on moral, aesthetic, political or other grounds, so that they have been both celebrated and excoriated. In 1879, the American novelist Henry James famously praised the English for having created “the well-appointed, well-administered, well-filled country house”, while in 1944, in a speech to the Irish Parliament, politician Sean Moylan was scathing in his contempt:

the majority of these Big Houses that I know … are not structurally sound, have no artistic value and no historic interest. From my unregenerate point of view, I choose to regard them as tombstones of a departed ascendancy and the sooner they go down the better. They are no use.

This view appears also to have been widely held in Great Britain at the time, judging by the extensive demolition of country houses in the years following the Second World War, especially in the 1950s. K.B. McBride in Country House Discourse in Early Modern England sums up the mass destruction as “a fit of cultural dementia that still beggars description”.

In Great Britain, country houses remain a topical and contentious issue. For instance, a National Trust report released in September 2020 listed ninety-three of its over three hundred historic buildings as having links to colonialism and slavery, although it was conceded that some of the buildings cited were indeed connected to abolitionists, not colonists or slave-owners. The issues arising from the report are still being dealt with by the Trust, which declares that it is their responsibility “to tell inclusive, honest histories about our places and collections”. Needless to say, these issues need to be addressed, but this is the material of continuing culture wars.

So, it is a distinct relief that Kevin Gardner and John Greening’s Hollow Palaces offers such a brilliant, multi-faceted, humane characterisation of the country house as seen through the eyes of over 160 poets, born anywhere between 1865 (W.B. Yeats) and 1987 (Scottish poet Penny Boxall) in a collection of over 230 poems in diverse forms. Much thought and care has clearly gone into the choice of poems, and their arrangement, and into the supplementary matter offered. The poet John Greening’s brief introduction is both inviting and humorous: “Kevin and I are offering this anthology in the spirit of the Heritage Open Days scheme. Poetry’s doors are open.” And academic Kevin Gardner’s “Brief Historical Tour” provides a substantial background to country house poetry. In addition, there are somewhat idiosyncratic notes on the poets, a brief guide to the houses featured in the poems, and evocative black-and-white sketches by Rosie Greening. The poems have been grouped into sections based on predominant themes, such as “Ghosts & Echoes”, “Fixtures & Fittings” and “Arrivals & Departures”, and within those sections, poems with similar resonances have been placed on facing pages.

While it is undoubtedly a pleasure to become reacquainted with familiar and even famous poems in this anthology, such as those by Yeats or Thomas Hardy or John Betjeman, it is possibly an even greater pleasure to meet with work not previously encountered, especially those poems offering complex and sometimes contradictory responses to the stimulus of the country house. Amongst these is George Barker’s “Stanzas on a Visit to Longleat House in Wiltshire, October 1953”, where the poet responds both wittily and viscerally to the assault on the senses and the emotions prompted by the spectacle of day-trippers enjoying the splendours of commercialised Longleat. The poem opens with a swipe at deceased aristocrats—“Dead pomp sneering underground”—but by the third stanza, there is already a hint of something like sympathy for the departed souls of the great house, in the indignant imprecation:

O rare rain of disinterest

Descend on this fouled public nest

And root out all vulgarities

That, crowding through its majesties,

Gut to bare shell and bone

The grandeur of the dead and gone.

The poet shifts perspective literally and figuratively when his “proud and sulking friend” takes him up to the nearby national forest of Heaven’s Gate, where he can view Longleat from above. And in the penultimate stanza, the tone of the poem becomes sweetly elegiac:

And from that aerial sweep of height

The valley fell through depths of pine

Down through green distances until

From glimmering water rising bright

Longleat, bird’s eyed in sunshine,

Smiled up from its own funeral.

Unsurprisingly, given the topic of country houses, many of the poems included in the anthology explore themes of time, memory and mortality, none more charmingly than Louis MacNeice’s “Soap Suds”. The vanished world of the poet’s childhood visits to Seapark in Carrickfergus is summoned up by the smell of the soap he is using to wash his hands, the same smell as the soap used in the big house so long ago:

                                … the walls of the bathroom open

To reveal a lawn where a great yellow ball rolls back through a hoop

To rest at the head of a mallet held in the hands of a child.

With the poet, we travel back in time to the house and its many delights and treasures, the most vivid of which is the game on the croquet lawn, but the vision fades like a dream, as the hoops dissolve:

But the ball is lost and the mallet slipped long since from the hands

Under the running tap that are not the hands of a child.

The fragility and evanescence of time, memory and of life itself are perfectly evoked in this poem, even by its appropriate title.

An enormous variety of objects associated with country houses appears in many of the poems of this anthology, whether the objects are works of art or utilitarian items, whether they are seen to signify permanence or transience, and not only in those poems in the section, “Fixtures & Fittings”. In “Knole” (on the house of that name in Kent), Neil Powell reflects dismissively on that place as “‘a grand repository’ / oppressive clutter, more like”. In a poem also titled “Knole”, Roy Fuller muses on the irritating appearance of permanence in a Sackville portrait:

He stares and will stare pointlessly, stiff in his mint brocades,

Hair reddish, bearded, white of hand, until our living fades.

Siegfried Sassoon, in “Cleaning the Candel­abrum”, ruminates on its past, especially its human associations, including those people who polished it long ago, and “the Queen Anne country squire” who would have used it to light guests from room to room, and “the man who made it / With long apprenticed, unpresuming skill”. For Sassoon, it is an almost 300-year-old survival which “has illuminated … / Much vista’d history, many vanished lives …” In contrast, other poets focus on the fate of hopelessly outmoded things. In “The Washstand”, a poem with something of the quality of a still life, Elisabeth Sennitt Clough considers its dilapidated beauty: “now a wood-wormed marker to guests / of a time before wall-mounted sinks” and tenanted by “the common moth in the corner, little weightless leaf” and “the crane fly, its folded limbs and wings / woven into their tapestry of lifelessness”. And Irish poet Eavan Boland ends her poem, “The Break-up of a Library in an Anglo-Irish House in Wexford: 1964”, with the melancholy reflection that when the identity and significance of an object is lost, then that loss can indicate the death of an era:

the end of empire is and will always be

not sedition nor the whisper

of conspiracy but that

slipper chair in the hallway

that has lost the name

no one will call it by again.

And, of course, the chair is out of place, proof that its function has been forgotten: slipper chairs don’t belong in a hallway, but in a Victorian lady’s bedroom.

Several of the poems in the collection are characterised by varying shades of satirical amusement, deliberate disrespect and, occasionally, contempt and hostility towards the country house and its owners, and sometimes, its modern-day visitors. Such a critical attitude is nothing new in country house literature in general. One need only think of the architect Vanbrugh’s suggested epitaph: “Lie heavy on him, Earth! for he / Laid many heavy loads on thee!” Or of Marvell’s question: “Why should of all things man unrul’d / Such unproportion’d dwellings build?” In “Stately Home”, Geoffrey Grigson is restrained, but explicit, in his disapproval of those country house owners who paid their workers badly, and “continue condescending” even after death:

We walk, for a fee, their alleys still.

Bees cruise their linden trees, arrows

Point tastefully to what was only theirs.

The car park is too full.

On an even harsher, take-no-prisoners note, the presumed egoism, greed and even criminality of rich country house owners is castigated in Alan Jenkins’s “Two Versions of Pastoral”:

Time to take stock, don’t you think?

Of the family portraits in the roped-off corridors,

Of the plundered acres and the restless silence

In mile on mile of rape, of the generals and JPs,

The shotgun-cradling imbeciles, double-barrelled bores

And all that England has to show for centuries

Of robbery with violence …

And in “The Two of Us”, the current Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, resorts to expletives to express his indignation, tempered by humour, at the material differences between the owner of a country seat and the poet himself, who resembles the owner in appearance: “I’m all for saying that you’re fucking loaded, you.” He suggests that this privileged person should have himself buried, like Tutankhamen, with grave goods, “bits and bobs”:

That way, on the day they dig us out

They’ll know that you were something really fucking fine

And I was nowt.

Keep that in mind,

Because the worm won’t know your make of bone from mine.

Various manifestations of nature figure largely in the poems, whatever the poets’ social or political viewpoints on country houses. One comes away from reading the anthology with a strong sense of the natural beauty and richness of the settings of country houses, even when in a state of neglect, and we are reminded that the seventeenth-century tradition of country house poetry owed much to the classical theme of the locus amoenus, an ideal or pleasant place. In many of the poems, it is the vividness of the landscape surrounding the country house that is of most significance. Trees feature strongly, sometimes incidentally, sometimes at the centre of a poem: yew trees, oak trees, lime trees, beech trees, spruce trees, cedars. The last poem in the book, for instance, is Agatha Christie’s “To a Cedar Tree”. Sweeping lawns, hedges, arbours, groves, meadows, coverts, ponds, lakes, waterfalls, fountains, all appear in the poems, but more often than not, the season happens to be autumn, the grounds are overgrown, there are copious nettles. All this is somehow unsurprising, given the elegiac mood of many of the poems. Cecil Day Lewis’s poem “Landscape” is an example:

This autumn park, the sequin glitter of leaves

Upon its withering bosom, the lake a moonstone …

These unkempt groves, blind vistas, mark the defeat

Of men who imposed on Nature a private elegance

And died of dropsy.

Edmund Blunden, in “At Mapledurham”, offers a contrasting view of the timelessness of the landscape:

Refuse all theories of time, their only time is now.

Forever fly the woodpeckers through a bright eternal glade,

And in the pond the basking pike thinks the world was quite well made.

This most worthwhile collection of modern poetry presents a range of humane and nuanced perspectives—in diverse styles and, unavoidably, of differing quality—on country houses and their settings, and on the people who owned them or worked in them, or even casually encountered them. And why is it that country houses continue to be objects of such fascination to poets and, indeed, to people in general? Most obviously, Downton Abbey and the so-called “Downton Effect” comes to mind.  On this subject, the American academic Oliver Cox has commented: “The veil between past and present is at its most permeable in a place where families lived and loved, thrived and died, often over multiple generations.” And the last word on this issue is given to another poet represented in the collection, Robert Conquest, in “Houghton House”:

The whole great building seems, in stone and space,

A huge machine to generate emotion.

Hollow Palaces: An Anthology of Modern Country House Poems
edited by Kevin Gardner & John Greening
Liverpool University Press, 2021, 407 pages, £19.99

Lyn Ashcroft has taught English language and literature at tertiary institutions in Australia, England and France. Her interests include literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and humour studies