J: Elizabeth Jennings

Choices

Elizabeth Jennings is a poet whose work I admire but do not love. Sometimes when I return to her work, I start to suspect that may be my fault rather than hers – though maybe ‘fault’ is too strong a word. After five minutes of flicking through her work, I’m fighting off boredom, but after ten, she’s got under my skin in an unobtrusive way that I find impressive.

Her work is traditional, conservative – both formally in her use of meter and rhyme, and temperamentally, in that her messaging is very often overtly devotional and Christian. I used to teach her poem ‘One Flesh’ in an anthology, so I do know a bit about her, in that she was associated with Larkin and The Movement in the 1950s, which again I suppose reinforces that idea of traditional values and a very specifically defined turning toward artistic ordinariness. I think she’s better than Larkin, though: less showy, less tiresomely edgy, less gratingly sentimental, perhaps more complex and elusive, less obviously concerned with being ‘got’. (I don’t care for Larkin, in case that wasn’t clear). I did also read about her reputation in later life, where she struggled with poverty and mental illness, and how typically and needlessly cruel the press and the establishment were about her over that, so perhaps she’s due a more generous reappraisal on those grounds alone.

The poem I’ve chosen is from an old Carcanet “Selected Poems” – you can read it here: bourguignomicon.: "Choices" by Elizabeth Jennings

Choices

Inside the room I see the table laid,
Four chairs, a patch of light the lamp has made

And people there so deep in tenderness
They could not speak a word of happiness.

The title ‘Choices’ here is part of that Movement unobtrusiveness – it’s too ordinary and wide to really give us clues about anything at the start, but you would hope there would be a quiet way in which it becomes apt later in the poem. In the first two couplets here, we’re not hugely the wiser, since what’s being set up is a picture of simple domesticity. The Movement were all about the poetry of ordinary life and ordinary language and that’s what we have here, some delicately observed details of a dining room. I like that “patch of light” made by the lamp – it’s a really neat example of creating setting and mood through the observation of small detail.

There are also a couple of intriguing choices suggesting the observation of this quite flat scene, too. Firstly, “Inside the room I see” – that “inside” is subtly placing us outside of the room without really explicitly doing so yet – why not just “in” the room? There’s also the explicit “I see” that sets up a speaker that’s “in” the poem, not just a narrator, if that makes sense – the “I see” is redundant unless this “I” is going to prove to be an active agent. Most strikingly for me, there’s a kind of doubleness to the second couplet. On the one hand, this is a straightforward picture of contentment - “tenderness” is a nice rhyme with “happiness”. It’s a picture of a family (presumably of four, given the four chairs) sitting down to eat in companionable silence. They don’t need to explicitly state their happiness, because the company they are in already demonstrates it. But on a second look, doesn’t that “could not speak a word of happiness” introduce a slight hint of irony, something wry? These people are so ‘happy’ together that they are not *able* to say it to each other? Well, why not? Are we questioning whether they’re actually happy in this scene of domesticity?

Outside I stand and see my shadow drawn
Lengthening the clipped grass and cared-for lawn.

Above, their roof holds half the sky behind.
A dog barks bringing distances to mind.

I like this move because it confirms our suspicions about the narrator being a more active presence in the poem. “Outside I stand” – so now we have it confirmed that the “seeing” that the narrator is doing is not neutral. The narrator is on the lawn, looking at the family through the window? That’s a pretty big swerve from the first two stanzas! There’s something voyeuristic there that casts doubt on what went before – we’ve been looking at this happy family but we didn’t realise until now that what we’re doing is spying on them from their garden!

What a sinister image too – the narrator “sees” something else – their own shadow “lengthening the clipped grass”. This reminds me a bit of Louis MacNeice’s famous line about the “sunlight on the garden/Hardens and grows cold” as a metaphor for mortality – I don’t know, but Jennings Is of the right generation to have had MacNeice as a contemporary influence, maybe? If so, this makes the speaker of the poem some sort of Grim Reaper figure watching over the dining family. Either way, that “lengthening” of the speaker’s shadow is definitely altering the mood considerably. Is it some sort of a threat to the “clipped grass” and “cared-for lawn”?

I really like that fourth couplet because it’s the first part of the poem that seems to resist clear interpretation – “their roof holds half the sky behind”. What is happening there? The roof of their house is a kind of protection from the vast emptiness of the sky? Their roof is like Atlas, holding the sky up, keeping everything stable and in order? But why only “half” the sky? I don’t know. It’s an image of the domestic house and stereotypical family structure being a kind of pillar. But then “a dog barks bringing distances to mind”. Is that some sort of threat? We can’t tell if the dog’s bark is friendly or aggressive here, but it brings ‘distances’ which can’t be good, surely, if what’s being valued here is intimacy?

Comfort, I think, or safety then, or both?
I warm the cold air with my steady breath.

They have designed a way to live and I,
Clothed in confusion, set their choices by:

Jennings’ speaker seems to be asking the same questions we’re asking about what that roof signifies, which I like. She’s kind of confused by her own observations, and we see her working through them. Sometimes her poetry is kind of ‘wisdom’ poetry where her point is almost didactic, which there’s often a place for but I personally find less interesting. But here she’s working things out and we get to see her mind doing that.

Maybe this, too, is where the title of the poem comes in. This lone figure observing the family is mulling over *choices*. Why have this family chosen this life and this roof – the obvious reasons are given here: comfort and safety. It’s interesting that this is no longer about the happiness we assumed at the beginning, though – there’s a kind of cold calculation of choices here – they have “designed a way to live”.

I suppose what’s also happening is that reflecting on this family’s choices has also forced her to reflect on her own, and perhaps that “I warm the cold air with my steady breath” is an admission that this self-reflection is perhaps emotionally difficult? This speaker doesn’t know why she’s made the choice *not* to have this comfort or safety, she’s “clothed in confusion”, so can we interpret that reference to the steady breath as a deliberate self regulation, a way of remaining calm?

Though sometimes one looks up and sees me there,
Alerts his shadow, pushes back his chair

And, opening windows wide, looks out at me
And close past words we stare. It seems that he

Urges my darkness, dares it to be freed
Into that room. We need each other’s need.

So what’s happening here at the end of the poem? Well, I suppose the confrontation was inevitable, but it’s unclear what comes from it, to me. There’s a communication happening here through the mutual stare between the man inside and the speaker outside, or more accurately, there’s a communication between the man, his “shadow”, the speaker, and her “darkness”. Is this communication to do with the choices that the speaker was musing on earlier? If her darkness was perhaps her doubt about the life she had chosen outside of the safety of the nuclear family and home, is his shadow the same doubt for his choice in favour of those things?

It feels like with his tacit ‘dare’ for her darkness to come in, and that mutual ‘need’ at the end of the poem, that something is being posited about the choices we make. Is it that he *wants* something of the speaker’s freer life outside of the responsibilities of home and family? He’s daring the darkness to be freed into the room so it can free him? Or is the “dare” a kind of “I dare you” – he wants to face down her threatening outsider status so that he can defend and justify the comfort and safety of his choice?

I like that it also goes both ways with that final statement – perhaps there’s something too, for her, of his invitation ‘freeing’ her into the home from her outsider status. There is a ‘need’ for him to experience what she has, and a need for her to experience what he has, and that need must be acknowledged but not acted upon. So this final image of the poem is a strangely tense mutual understanding between the two different types of people and their different choices of lives led, but at the same time an acknowledgement of a simultaneous attraction and repulsion between those lives.

Here’s the poem in full again: bourguignomicon.: "Choices" by Elizabeth Jennings

In the comments:

Not sure I got anywhere with that very odd moment of connection at the ending? What’s the mutual ‘need’ she’s referring to?