Donald Davie's new sequence of poems, 'Three for Water-Music' [in the volume of the same title] …, refers not only to pleasant 18th-century entertainments by water, but to something like Yeats's 'words for music, perhaps': or like Eliot's Four Quartets, to which the sequence declares some relationship. For Davie's three poems lie somewhere between late Symbolist poetry and a more quietly literal tradition of English topography; they are a species of modern half-abstract landscape poem, which locate in the real certain transparencies of thought. They show concept both created and creating, as a fountain might be heard to rise and fall again. And indeed of the poet's three locations which have given rise to epiphanies, the first and last are, in fact, Sicilian 'fountains' or pools, each named after an Ovidian legend of loss of love; the second is a brown pool in a torrential stream between steep English hillsides. The sequence, recording 'Epiphanies all around us / Always perhaps', in a sense finds no answer to its opening question: 'And what's to be made of that?' Any sense of answer or reconciliation is confined to the expressive forms of the poems themselves, which always—like music—imply the silence behind them….
Donald Davie is on occasion a superlative poet, and [Three for Water-Music] is one of the occasions. Reticence and a love of the theoretical often combine to make his communications a triumph of style. Even the unegoistic Eliot allows ghosts and Furies to move through his Quartets, possessing and obsessing them and directing an imperious control over the reader: there are no such ghosts in 'Three for Water-Music', which in fact insists on the absence of any such presences…. This absence of the explainable beyond the renewal of the self-containedness of the image … gives the sequence its beautiful and tough purity, as of those 'clear-glassed windows / The clear day looking in' which the poet remembers from early Dissenting chapels. But it produces an art always close enough to the tacit to make a reader grateful for the relative 'impurities' (what Davie has called elsewhere, in connection with Wordsworth, 'the smell of the human') in the latter part of this book, which consists of 'The Shires'.
This is a free excerpt of 366 words. There are 874 words (approx.
3 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Davie, Donald (Alfred) 1922–: Critical Essay by Barbara Everett Access Pass.
