review
Colin Clout’s Come Home Againe: The Poetry of Toby Martinez de las Rivas
The pastoral has surely traveled a great distance from its name. Go and find me a true shepherd anywhere in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”; and there is scarcely a sheepcote noticed anywhere in Geoffrey Hill’s searing, exquisitely tender reproaches. And yet pastoral purposes have (almost) never faltered. The pastoral is a projection beyond masquerade. It is a convention scorching conventions. It must have been the “dictionary” Samuel Johnson who condemned “Lycidas” as “disgusting”; the poet would have honored Milton’s visionary extremism. Johnson must somehow have lost the name of action by insisting upon a name and so, unwittingly, kept company with just those tyrannies the pastoral was first, so long ago in Sicily, imagined to reprove.
The pastoral is ever—and especially now that the planet more and more ferociously shuns us and our devices and designs—a rusticated serenity. And how serenity rages! It rages against the ignorant vendettas that pretend to govern us. It rages against fictions of progress that lead precisely nowhere, yet always in increasingly vicious circles. It praises too. It praises the human instinct towards proper station and proper regard. It praises the elements and seasons whose limits free the imagination to envision Beauty as the efflorescence of the Good. Most importantly of all, it praises the supernatural foundation of the Good: a recurring, persistent and ever green vertu.
Vertu was Chaucer’s central mystery, and it is with notice of the lamentable debasement of that mystery that the pastoral, in English, began: in Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender, where Colin Clout, Spenser’s pattern of himself, mourned for “The God of shepheards” (i.e. Chaucer) and for the dispossession of vertu. From Colin’s moment to our own, it is with the strange, exilic fortunes of vertu that the pastoral has concerned itself. From Colin’s moment to our own, poems written in the true pastoral mode (which admits of no courtesies but courage) have raged at the edge of our hearing and of the critics’ reach from their several Arcadias, raising the banners of vertu above the borderlands. Just now, the pastoral seems most safely and surely entrusted to a younger British poet—Toby Martinez de las Rivas. In his two published collections—Terror (2014) and Black Sun (2018)—de las Rivas claims kin with those poets whose rusticated witness against the beast (we and all our weakling accommodations are the beast) constitute the pastoral tradition, furthering the energies of that tradition into our present idiom and peril.
Nearly every poem by de las Rivas is an adventure of faith, a leap from the margin into spacious declaration. And the rhythm of his declarations amplifies the pastoral spaces and moments of each poem. History accompanies the creaturely; doctrine glistens upon the branch of a tree. Here is the opening of “Crede”:
Judas as a secret Messiah forgoing the garden of the nihilists for the branch of the tree.
The body as miniaturized image of the state, inviolate.
Tyler’s vision of the commons, burned before the king at Smithfield, to his satisfaction.
On the road to Northumberland, John Ball’s envois, little admonishments in code.
I have pled I might not always be a shaking reed.
The suicide of Judas rebukes the canons and makes a second crucifix of the hanging tree. Always, if we consider rightly (si recte calculum ponas, as Petronius put it) the pastoral voice, in exilic secrecy, seconds Messiah. And de las Rivas moves on from the unacknowledged martyrdom of Iscariot to the martyrs of the Peasant Revolt in the time of Richard II—Chaucer’s time. Wat Tyler (the name of action) and John Ball (the faith of action) died into a bewildernessed commons from which wild ground they continue to admonish the powers of this world. And, as de las Rivas beautifully avers, also to admonish the poet now, even as he prays for the strength to keep faith with the martyrs and not to remain “a shaking reed”. Suitably chastened, “Crede” goes on to take up the pastoral task in explicit terms and, in crisis, with a renewed urgency.
The bleat, desperate.
Tumbled stells, the razed sheepfold that is our northern image of the body of Christ.
One bitter season before two
sweet.
Fluorspar, correlative to purging fire.
Furthermore, bright fields of rape, the trampled nests above the thistleheads, alleluia.
The hungry sheep look up and are set ablaze. But the fires are purgative and not annihilating. Bitterness is somehow redoubled in sweetness. It is as though, for de las Rivas, the pastoral now serves in itself as a redemptive form of memory and restored attentiveness. The visionary commons flower into “bright fields”. The “trampled nests” arise in praise of resurrection. The martyrs in “Crede”, both the despised and the acknowledged, are amplified and then justified here.
There is an Ur-pastoral, and de las Rivas carries it forward as well. The foundational songs of Syracusan Theocritus and Bion had, albeit unknowingly, antecedents in the Psalms. Before pastoral poets ever adopted “the homely slighted shepherd’s trade”, there was David. In “Shiggaion”, de las Rivas amplifies the Shiggaion of David, Psalm 7, a frantic lament that takes its title from the Hebrew “shagah”, meaning “to transgress morally” and, by extension, “to reel about wildly.” In the Psalm, it is a stabbing sense of universal iniquity that leads David to pray for extinction: “Let the enemy persecute my soul and take it; yea, let him tread down my life upon the earth, and lay mine honor in the dust.” In de las Rivas’ amplification, iniquity is imaged out of allegory as “ignorance”, as “blight”, as “black stinking potatoes”. And the contemporary psalmist imagines himself likewise driven to the brink.
another day rising, a man teetering
on the edge of a desk on tiptoes, feet
scrabbling, his neck in a noose,
such is thy part, crowned wyth reytes,
bere mee to the leatherall tyde, bear
me, if you can and if he back straight
as a buttercup stalk permits you, if
it is allowed & approved by communal
delete all reference to such, sinful,
man is alone, so scuttle back & forth
across my patriotic Brunel Clifton
bridge of a riveted back, the rest sold,
here in the sink of my, my stinking
vulgate body.
Like Spenser, de las Rivas roves throughout his entire English, finding only, to his horror, iniquitous roots struck deep into a “stinking/vulgate body.” The psalmist’s death-wish signals futurity as a poet “teetering…in a noose”. And yet, in the pastoral, brinksmanship becomes an Arcady and not an end. David makes a turn and an outcry, each of which signals the farther transgressions, i.e. Faith and Repair. “My defense is of God, which saveth the upright heart.” For de las Rivas, faith takes the form of creation itself, natur naturans, and repair the ruin of human grammars on behalf of God’s original and orginating impropriety:
Does the goshawk, its
Wingtip pivoting around the inward
arc of its turning circle as the finch
break cover from beneath the tarred
bird table, authentic rural design,
the serried fir trees as dead in the land
as their tenders care a shite for the
for the proper grammar? It is grammar,
the purity of design, the framework
shaking, never collapsing until finally
permitted to do so.
At the brink of extinction, the pastoral discovers its wild permissions: permission to survive; permission to gather a new grammar from the air, a hunting grammar whose self-evident authenticity, as of a “wingtip pivoting”, is, in each and every particular, a song of praise. And praise, in despite of iniquity, is the triumph of vertu and its timeless vindications.
“Crede” and “Shiggaion” both appear in de las Rivas’ debut collection, Terror. The poems of his second book, Black Sun, continue his pastoral projections, but with this difference: having voiced his sorrowing faith and his rage at iniquity, de las Rivas now mounts a steadfast watch. There is, after all, such a thing as pastoral patience. Milton’s shepherd took note of, and courage from a sunset. The attentions of patience are thus rewarded now and again, with new pleasures and new purposes. A gorgeous instance of this is “Hunting Kestrel, Danebury”, here quoted in full,
Here is the ghost of a child I once knew
still playing among the withering harebells
& the gorgeous moue of the fairy flax.
I look beyond his bare golden head
to the kestrel that quarters the ramparts
& see a semblance of absolute love,
absolute mercy—at least a baffling, wild
joy—that, at least—in the watchfully poised
javelin of the head, the rapidity
of her stoop & strike, her failure, her re-
lofting, the gaze that hungers into the spindle
without end: whose flowers are blood red,
whose roots dive down among the lost chieftains.
A lonely god waits for us in the earth.
Again, a new and hunting grammar is gathered from the air. But here it is a grammar beyond cases and tenses, a grammar of endlessness and continuity, prompted by mercy and sustained by joy. The kestrel’s stoop strikes down not only into prey but into the bloodline maintaining all of creation. Air and earth conjoin in a simultaneous act of kinetic worship; the pastoral action models the patience of “lost chieftains” and of their “lonely god”. As did Hopkins before him, de las Rivas images in a hunting bird the durable patience and perdurable joy of reproof. Time itself reproves the follies of inattention. In the pastoral, memory schools patience and patience soars, ready to strike. Remember Milton’s “two-handed engine”. Black Sun clearly remembers, and these newer poems convert both sorrow and rage into acuity. With one beautiful participle—“relofting”—de las Rivas restores the pastoral to its tireless vigilance and certain reward.
One of the qualities I admire most in these poems is the way in which acuity (and what is sometimes a genuine knife’s edge of acuity) never mars, never misdirects filial piety or fierce compassion. It as though critical insight itself were a feature of love. And of course it is, and of course this is the very heart of the pastoral: to outrage lovingly; to reprove tearfully; to mend, in the accents of the wilderness, the idiom of a beloved civitas. In his poem “England” (how Blake would have approved so brash a title!), de las Rivas takes his stand upon the selvage of home, there to reprove the present day in the name of eternity.
I have come to stand at your border
in the darkness where invisible things suffer
& the golden windows of the last estate
cast proprietary glances on the earth.
Where the bailiff parks up with his sandwich
and the burnt-out car is mercifully at rest.
Hermosa, let me try a final
octave turning south into a wind that stubbornly
flitters through torn pennants of sacking,
purrs in the steel tubes of the gate;
that drives each ponderous & docile cloud
slowly out across the State that is only
an image of the body inviolate,
the nation that extends through all time & space.
The nation, which is eternal, reproves the rubbish of the temporal State. Margins assert the primacy and right of the invisible over the false, tatterdemalion claims of materiality. And so it is that the final, self-declared octave of the poem conjures the image of a spiritual England---the England of Spenser and Blake and of Palmer’s golden landscapes—over which “ponderous & docile” clouds unfold the extensive vertu of “all time & space.” Toby Martinez de las Rivas keeps good company, and in so doing, keeps faith with the pastoral’s eternal moment and motives.
Donald Revell is the author of sixteen collections of poetry and six volumes of translation from the French, including works by Apollinaire, Laforgue, Rimbaud and Verlaine. A former Fellow of the Ingram-Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations, he has also been twice awarded fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. Having taught at the universities of Alabama, Denver, Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee, and Utah, he is currently Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.