Elizabeth Jennings started out as a Movement poet: Philip Larkin praised her “steady, calm, precise voice” and “skill at marrying metre to natural word-order”, while Kingsley Amis admired her “spareness of style” and “coolness of tone” and even described her as “the star of the show”. This may come as a surprise to those familiar only with the devotional nature of her subsequent work. Dana Gioa called her “England’s best Catholic poet since Gerard Manley Hopkins”, but in fact, until the mid-1950s, Jennings wrote no overtly religious poetry. The turning point was the three months she spent in Italy in 1957 after winning the Somerset Maugham award. The more explicitly spiritual poems she wrote there, published in A Sense of the World (1958), the volume in which “Letter from Assisi” was collected, sat awkwardly alongside the predominantly secular and sceptical poems of the rest of the group. As Larkin wrote, “these poems … may be the signposts to the road Miss Jennings is taking next”.
Jennings’s title is from Thomas Traherne (“It becometh you to retain a glorious sense of the world”) and points back to a quality in her work, admired by Larkin and Amis, which she in turn admired in Edwin Muir: “however abstract the ideas, the expression of them is always concrete … the vision is not complete till it is embodied in sensuous language”. It is this sensuousness Jennings misses in “Letter from Assisi”, first published in the TLS in 1957. The poem records the impact of Italian Catholicism on her very English sensibility: “Here you will find peace, they said … where every church you enter is a kind / Continuing of thought”. But what she finds, instead of peace, is a kind of dispassionate devotion. The place “looks severe and seems to say / There is no softness here, no sensual joy”. Bells “wound the air”, reminding her of someone who “long ago confided how such ringing / Brought … tears to their eyes”. This is closer to the way she feels: “I think I understand a mood like that”.
Letter from Assisi
Here you will find peace, they said,
Here where silence is so wide you can hear it,
Where every church you enter is a kind
Continuing of thought,
Here there is ease.
Now on this road, looking up to the hill
Where the town looks severe and seems to say
There is no softness here, no sensual joy,
Close by the flowers that fling me back to England –
The bleeding poppy and the dusty vetch
And all blue flowers reflecting back the sky –
It is not peace I feel but some nostalgia,
So that a hand which draws a shutter back,
An eye which warms as it observes a child,
Hurt me with homesickness. Peace pales and withers.
The doves demur, an English voice divides
The distances. It is the afternoon,
But here siesta has no place because
All of the day is strung with silences.
Bells wound the air and I remember one
Who long ago confided how such ringing
Brought salt into their mouth, tears to their eyes.
I think I understand a mood like that:
Doves, bells, the silent hills, O all the trappings
We dress our plans of peace in, fail me now.
I search some shadow wider than my own,
Some apprehension which requires no mood
Of local silence or a sense of prayer –
An open glance that looks from some high window
And illustrates a need I wish to share.
ELIZABETH JENNINGS (1957)
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