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Collected Poems
This volume gathers together the finest of Ruth Pitter’s poems, which in Kathleen Raine’s judgement ‘will survive as long as the English language, with whose expressiveness in image and idea she has kept faith, remains’. In the introduction Elizabeth Jennings – who was herself among the most distinguished of contemporary poets – pays tribute to Pitter’s ‘acute sensibility and deep integrity’ and refers to her precision in observing Nature, her skill with verse forms and the frequency with which she achieves a ‘beautifully communicated vision’.
- GenresPoetry
214 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1990
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February 11, 2023
Ruth Pitter has been my new poetic fascination all year, and making my way through her Collected Poems has been a long, slow joy. Pitter received the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry in 1955, the first woman ever to do so. Elizabeth II gave the medal to Pitter herself, which is highly unusual, to mark the honor. However, that was only the midpoint of Pitter’s career, as Pitter kept writing and publishing for decades.
Pitter’s voice reads like the traditional English poets she loved, the ones she read first. Outside the stream of modernist poetry, she does not disguise her meanings or glower upon the masses as Eliot and other modernists did. My favorite poems, which I’ve quoted below since most of her poems are hard to find anywhere online, are the “serious” ones, but Pitter had several collections of humorous poems. From their placement in her publishing, I think she used humor to find her poetic voice again after fallow periods. Collected Poems doesn’t draw from her earliest poems, but begins with selections from A Mad Lady’s Garland (1934). Such titles as “Maternal Love Triumphant: Or, Song of the Virtuous Female Spider,” “The Earwig’s Complaint, Being the History of His Doleful Case Miserably Constrained to Write Elegy That Would Fain Sing Epithalamion,” and “Resurgam: Or, the Glorious and Pitiful History of the Heretical Caterpillar” open the volume to no end of delight. Here, I think, Pitter was exploring with early modern styles of poetry, knowing she could not authentically write in a time period not her own, but still exercising that skill with humor. The Rude Potato (1941) contains some humorous garden poems, and Pitter on Cats (1947) has much feline poetic delight. However, most of the poems in this collection are serious, though Pitter’s humor still comes through in many of them.
The poems quoted below are presented in the order they are printed, which is chronological. Even in this small sampling, we can see how Pitter’s voice maintains a traditional feel though she brings her verbiage into her own century. Her attention to nature, facility with rhyme and meter, and ability to capture universal emotion in a particular setting are what make me admire her work so deeply.
“Gentle Joy” (57)
Sing, gentle joy, naught can betray thee;
Neither our sinning nor our sorrow
Can in thy sprightly going stay thee;
Our day is darkness, and our morrow
Is death; yet still the note thou ringest
Lifts up the spirit as thou singest.
Tears are no majesty, and sighing
Like an east wind, a blight unholy;
Death has no crown, for all are dying,
None is admired for melancholy;
Yet single as the daystar burneth
The heart to which its Joy returneth!
We rise and pass, but still thou stayest,
And like the sun returnest ever:
Thou canst not die, and never mayest
From Paradise thyself dissever:
Thou risest; all is cured, forgiven:
Joy is on earth, and earth is heaven.
“For Sleep, or Death” (58)
Cure me with quietness,
Bless me with peace;
Comfort my heaviness,
Stay me with ease.
Stillness in solitude
Send down like dew;
Mine armour of fortitude
Piece and make new:
That when I rise again
I may shine bright
As the sky after rain,
Day after night.
“O Where Is the Dwelling” (75)
O where is the dwelling I love the most,
And what but the one poor place can please,
Where the penny I lost and the faith I lost
Lie buried beneath enchanted trees?
O there is the dwelling I love the most,
And thither for ever my feet are bound,
Where the youth I lost and the love I lost
Lie buried, lie buried in holy ground!
“The Spring” (118)
Where is the spring of my delight,
Now every spring is dry?
There is no blossom in my sight,
No sun is in the sky:
The birds are still and love is past,
And danger whistles shrill,
And life itself now looks aghast
And birth becomes an ill:
And yet the spring of my delight
Leaps up beyond belief,
As if it sprang from very spite --
In very spite of grief:
And yet the secret stream of grace
Flows on, and swells the same,
As if from out another place
Where sorrow has no name.
“The Bat” (172)
Lightless, unholy, eldritch thing,
Whose murky and erratic wing
Swoops so sickeningly, and whose
Aspect to the female Muse
Is a demon’s, made of stuff
Like tattered, sooty waterproof,
Looking dirty, clammy, cold.
Wicked, poisonous, and old:
I have maligned thee! …for the Cat
Lately caught a little bat,
Seized it softly, bore it in.
On the carpet, dark as sin
In the lamplight, painfully
It limped about, and could not fly.
Even fear must yield to love,
And pity makes the depths to move.
Though sick with horror, I must stoop
Grasp it gently, take it up,
And carry it, and place it where
It could resume the twilight air.
Strange revelation! warm as milk,
Clean as a flower, smooth as silk!
O what a piteous face appears,
What great fine thin translucent ears!
What chestnut down and crapy wings
Finter than any lady’s things --
And O a little one that clings!
Warm, clean, and lovely, though not fair,
And burdened with a mother’s care:
Go hunt the hurtful fly, and bear
My blessing to your kind in air.
“To a Lady, in a Wartime Queue” (262)
Fourteen months old, she said you were;
And half an hour in bitter cold --
In freezing slush we waited there --
Is surely very hard to bear,
At but one year and two months old.
Your tea-rose cheek grew chill and pale,
The black silk lashes hid your eye:
I thought “She cannot choose but wail”;
I erred, for you were not so frail.
You were determined not to cry.
I saw the lifelong war begin,
One mortal struggle rage, and pass.
I saw the garrison within
Man the frail citadel, and win
One battle at the least, my lass.
You rose to conquer. In command,
Your warrior spirit struck its blow,
Young as the hyacinth in your hand.
No, younger, for I understand
A good one takes three years to grow.
Pitter’s voice reads like the traditional English poets she loved, the ones she read first. Outside the stream of modernist poetry, she does not disguise her meanings or glower upon the masses as Eliot and other modernists did. My favorite poems, which I’ve quoted below since most of her poems are hard to find anywhere online, are the “serious” ones, but Pitter had several collections of humorous poems. From their placement in her publishing, I think she used humor to find her poetic voice again after fallow periods. Collected Poems doesn’t draw from her earliest poems, but begins with selections from A Mad Lady’s Garland (1934). Such titles as “Maternal Love Triumphant: Or, Song of the Virtuous Female Spider,” “The Earwig’s Complaint, Being the History of His Doleful Case Miserably Constrained to Write Elegy That Would Fain Sing Epithalamion,” and “Resurgam: Or, the Glorious and Pitiful History of the Heretical Caterpillar” open the volume to no end of delight. Here, I think, Pitter was exploring with early modern styles of poetry, knowing she could not authentically write in a time period not her own, but still exercising that skill with humor. The Rude Potato (1941) contains some humorous garden poems, and Pitter on Cats (1947) has much feline poetic delight. However, most of the poems in this collection are serious, though Pitter’s humor still comes through in many of them.
The poems quoted below are presented in the order they are printed, which is chronological. Even in this small sampling, we can see how Pitter’s voice maintains a traditional feel though she brings her verbiage into her own century. Her attention to nature, facility with rhyme and meter, and ability to capture universal emotion in a particular setting are what make me admire her work so deeply.
“Gentle Joy” (57)
Sing, gentle joy, naught can betray thee;
Neither our sinning nor our sorrow
Can in thy sprightly going stay thee;
Our day is darkness, and our morrow
Is death; yet still the note thou ringest
Lifts up the spirit as thou singest.
Tears are no majesty, and sighing
Like an east wind, a blight unholy;
Death has no crown, for all are dying,
None is admired for melancholy;
Yet single as the daystar burneth
The heart to which its Joy returneth!
We rise and pass, but still thou stayest,
And like the sun returnest ever:
Thou canst not die, and never mayest
From Paradise thyself dissever:
Thou risest; all is cured, forgiven:
Joy is on earth, and earth is heaven.
“For Sleep, or Death” (58)
Cure me with quietness,
Bless me with peace;
Comfort my heaviness,
Stay me with ease.
Stillness in solitude
Send down like dew;
Mine armour of fortitude
Piece and make new:
That when I rise again
I may shine bright
As the sky after rain,
Day after night.
“O Where Is the Dwelling” (75)
O where is the dwelling I love the most,
And what but the one poor place can please,
Where the penny I lost and the faith I lost
Lie buried beneath enchanted trees?
O there is the dwelling I love the most,
And thither for ever my feet are bound,
Where the youth I lost and the love I lost
Lie buried, lie buried in holy ground!
“The Spring” (118)
Where is the spring of my delight,
Now every spring is dry?
There is no blossom in my sight,
No sun is in the sky:
The birds are still and love is past,
And danger whistles shrill,
And life itself now looks aghast
And birth becomes an ill:
And yet the spring of my delight
Leaps up beyond belief,
As if it sprang from very spite --
In very spite of grief:
And yet the secret stream of grace
Flows on, and swells the same,
As if from out another place
Where sorrow has no name.
“The Bat” (172)
Lightless, unholy, eldritch thing,
Whose murky and erratic wing
Swoops so sickeningly, and whose
Aspect to the female Muse
Is a demon’s, made of stuff
Like tattered, sooty waterproof,
Looking dirty, clammy, cold.
Wicked, poisonous, and old:
I have maligned thee! …for the Cat
Lately caught a little bat,
Seized it softly, bore it in.
On the carpet, dark as sin
In the lamplight, painfully
It limped about, and could not fly.
Even fear must yield to love,
And pity makes the depths to move.
Though sick with horror, I must stoop
Grasp it gently, take it up,
And carry it, and place it where
It could resume the twilight air.
Strange revelation! warm as milk,
Clean as a flower, smooth as silk!
O what a piteous face appears,
What great fine thin translucent ears!
What chestnut down and crapy wings
Finter than any lady’s things --
And O a little one that clings!
Warm, clean, and lovely, though not fair,
And burdened with a mother’s care:
Go hunt the hurtful fly, and bear
My blessing to your kind in air.
“To a Lady, in a Wartime Queue” (262)
Fourteen months old, she said you were;
And half an hour in bitter cold --
In freezing slush we waited there --
Is surely very hard to bear,
At but one year and two months old.
Your tea-rose cheek grew chill and pale,
The black silk lashes hid your eye:
I thought “She cannot choose but wail”;
I erred, for you were not so frail.
You were determined not to cry.
I saw the lifelong war begin,
One mortal struggle rage, and pass.
I saw the garrison within
Man the frail citadel, and win
One battle at the least, my lass.
You rose to conquer. In command,
Your warrior spirit struck its blow,
Young as the hyacinth in your hand.
No, younger, for I understand
A good one takes three years to grow.
August 28, 2011
Ruth Pitter lived in the twentieth century (1897-1992), but her poetry lives in an earlier century. It refuses to acknowledge Matthew Arnold's "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of faith, but struggles in isolation with religious doubt and meaning. As such, it is, on occasion, a powerfully individual poetry, but it is also radically cut off from the most significant movements of her time. The refusal to engage with Modernism and its aftermath stunts the poetry. The slightly archaic diction and windy abstractions persist into the late poems. The use of traditional verse forms (including the heroic couplet) evinces individual skill but makes no larger argument, unlike the work of Eliot, Auden and Larkin. A few late poems grapple with modern science, but the main thematic development in the Collected Poems is from the observation of nature to the description of dreams-visions, a movement backwards in time, from Romanticism to medievalism.
The nature poems, from the start, are keenly observant. What makes a few of them memorable is the addition of black humor. "Maternal Love Triumphant," which opens the Collected Poems so promisingly, speaks in the voice of a "Virtuous Female Spider," who eats her mate to keep her strength up for her unborn babies. After their birth, she feeds them by killing two bluebottle-lovers and a host of silly butterflies. Convinced that a mother's love "bears no blame," she looks forward to her heavenly reward when she dies. The complacent self-justification is developed through ten ballad octaves rhyming ababcaca, the first a and the last a using the same word. The poem is virtuosic in a very attractive manner.
Another memorable method is the complete and convincing transmutation of nature to meaning. In "Stormcock in Elder," the cock perching on the broken roof of the speaker's hermitage is described with gorgeous detail:
The large eye, ringed with many a ray
Of minion feathers, finely laid,
The feet that grasped the elder-spray:
How strongly used, how subtly made
The scale, the sinew, and the claw,
Plain through the broken roof I saw;
The flight-feathers in tail and wing,
The shorter coverts, and the white
Merged into russet, marrying
The bright breast to the pinions bright,
Gold sequins, spots of chestnut, shower
Of silver, like a brindled flower.
The language owes a great deal to Hopkins (minion, bright breast, brindled) but is made over into the speaker's own acute observation of her bird. The splendor described here earns Pitter the right to compare the brightness of the stormcock to the glory of the angel Gabriel at the end of the poem.
The felicitous use of the technical terms "flight-feathers" and "coverts" indicates how possible it was for Pitter to go the way of Marianne Moore. But she did not, perhaps because she was finally seeking not a way to live on earth, but a way to transcend nature. Moore's favorite critter is land-based and armored--the pangolin is functional, adaptable, paradoxical. Pitter's favorite creature is ornithological--nightingale, bird of paradise, phoenix, sparrow, stockdove, lark, swan, cygnet, sandmartin, cuckoo, crow, robin, chaffinch, owl, goose, swift--figures for song, flight and transcendence.
One of her best poems, an allegorical lyric, "The Bird in the Tree," says it best. Looking at "that tree" and its "haunting bird," the loves of her heart, the speaker asks, "where is the word, the word,/ O where is the art?" Desirous and unsatisfied, the poem prays:
O give me before I die
The grace to see
With eternal, ultimate eye,
The Bird and the Tree.
The song in the living green,
The Tree and the Bird--
O have they ever been seen,
Ever been heard?
The poem has the jewel-like clarity of a medieval illuminated manuscript.
The "living green" is evoked in many poems about plants and trees, another of Pitter's favorite subjects. The best of these green poems is "Morning Glory," which achieves the Blakean aim of seeing the universe in a grain of sand. But more interesting to me is the path not chosen, the moving post-war poem "Funeral Wreaths," in which plant life is already dead. It begins with uncharacteristic directness:
In the black bitter drizzle, in rain and dirt,
The wreaths are stacked in the factory entrance-yard.
People gather about them. Nobody's hurt
At the rank allusion to death. Down on the hard
Cobblestones go the painted girls on their knees
To read what the foot-ball club has put on the card.
There is interest, and delight, and a sense of ease.
The matter-of-fact tone is all the moving for being so matter-of-fact. The wreaths are "stacked." We are not at a shepherd's hut or autumnal grove, but at the entrance-yard of a factory. The wry speaker of "Nobody's hurt" sees the ironies in the all-too-human behavior of the "painted girls." The music of the verse is so subtle and personal that we may not notice the end-rhymes at first. These opening lines strike a "modern" note not heard elsewhere in Riiter's work. But the poem continues with one of her favorite devices, the asking of rhetorical questions:
Is it only that flowers smell sweet, and are pretty and right,
Or because of the senseless waste of so many pounds,
Or because in that dreadful place the unwonted sight
Of a heap of blossom is balm to unconscious wounds--
The mortal wounds that benumb, not the sharp raw pains
Of the daily misery, but the fatal bleeding inside?
These questions upset the balance in the earlier lines between observation and attitude. They are undigested ideas. They reveal other faults in Pitter's style too: the archaism of "unwonted," "balm" and "benumb"; the cliches of "senseless waste," "mortal wounds" and "daily misery"; the over-modification. Then, after a transitional thought, also untransformed--"Here is the supernatural to be bought with the gains/ Of the spectral torment," Pitter hits upon the surprising image of the hearse as a luxury sedan. And she is off, combining description and allegory in her inimitable manner:
The soul can go for a ride with the rich young dead.
It makes you feel like a wedding. The Gates Ajar,
The Broken Column, the Pillow with "Rest in Peace,"
The sham Harp with its tinsel string allusively bust,
The three-quid Cross made of flaring anemones,
The gibbetted carnations with steel wires thrust
Right through their ranking midriffs, the skewered roses,
Tulips turned inside-out for a bolder show,
Arum lilies stuck upright in tortured poses
Like little lavatory-basins.
It is a fantastic imagining of gain and loss, of life and death. Overwhelmed by its own vision, it vomits into those "little lavatory-basins." Alas, the poet feels the need to control the power of these lines by instructing the reader: "This is the efflorescence of godless toil," and by resorting to another favorite device, that of ventriloquism ("We are the lost, betrayed ones. We are the Crowd./ Think for you must do something to let us in."). Despite of its unevenness, or perhaps because of it, this poem shows how Pitter could have "modernized" herself while retaining her former strengths. The later dream poems have a certain eerie beauty, but nothing of the "intolerable wrestle with words and meaning" (T. S. Eliot) evinced in the strongest parts of this poem.
The nature poems, from the start, are keenly observant. What makes a few of them memorable is the addition of black humor. "Maternal Love Triumphant," which opens the Collected Poems so promisingly, speaks in the voice of a "Virtuous Female Spider," who eats her mate to keep her strength up for her unborn babies. After their birth, she feeds them by killing two bluebottle-lovers and a host of silly butterflies. Convinced that a mother's love "bears no blame," she looks forward to her heavenly reward when she dies. The complacent self-justification is developed through ten ballad octaves rhyming ababcaca, the first a and the last a using the same word. The poem is virtuosic in a very attractive manner.
Another memorable method is the complete and convincing transmutation of nature to meaning. In "Stormcock in Elder," the cock perching on the broken roof of the speaker's hermitage is described with gorgeous detail:
The large eye, ringed with many a ray
Of minion feathers, finely laid,
The feet that grasped the elder-spray:
How strongly used, how subtly made
The scale, the sinew, and the claw,
Plain through the broken roof I saw;
The flight-feathers in tail and wing,
The shorter coverts, and the white
Merged into russet, marrying
The bright breast to the pinions bright,
Gold sequins, spots of chestnut, shower
Of silver, like a brindled flower.
The language owes a great deal to Hopkins (minion, bright breast, brindled) but is made over into the speaker's own acute observation of her bird. The splendor described here earns Pitter the right to compare the brightness of the stormcock to the glory of the angel Gabriel at the end of the poem.
The felicitous use of the technical terms "flight-feathers" and "coverts" indicates how possible it was for Pitter to go the way of Marianne Moore. But she did not, perhaps because she was finally seeking not a way to live on earth, but a way to transcend nature. Moore's favorite critter is land-based and armored--the pangolin is functional, adaptable, paradoxical. Pitter's favorite creature is ornithological--nightingale, bird of paradise, phoenix, sparrow, stockdove, lark, swan, cygnet, sandmartin, cuckoo, crow, robin, chaffinch, owl, goose, swift--figures for song, flight and transcendence.
One of her best poems, an allegorical lyric, "The Bird in the Tree," says it best. Looking at "that tree" and its "haunting bird," the loves of her heart, the speaker asks, "where is the word, the word,/ O where is the art?" Desirous and unsatisfied, the poem prays:
O give me before I die
The grace to see
With eternal, ultimate eye,
The Bird and the Tree.
The song in the living green,
The Tree and the Bird--
O have they ever been seen,
Ever been heard?
The poem has the jewel-like clarity of a medieval illuminated manuscript.
The "living green" is evoked in many poems about plants and trees, another of Pitter's favorite subjects. The best of these green poems is "Morning Glory," which achieves the Blakean aim of seeing the universe in a grain of sand. But more interesting to me is the path not chosen, the moving post-war poem "Funeral Wreaths," in which plant life is already dead. It begins with uncharacteristic directness:
In the black bitter drizzle, in rain and dirt,
The wreaths are stacked in the factory entrance-yard.
People gather about them. Nobody's hurt
At the rank allusion to death. Down on the hard
Cobblestones go the painted girls on their knees
To read what the foot-ball club has put on the card.
There is interest, and delight, and a sense of ease.
The matter-of-fact tone is all the moving for being so matter-of-fact. The wreaths are "stacked." We are not at a shepherd's hut or autumnal grove, but at the entrance-yard of a factory. The wry speaker of "Nobody's hurt" sees the ironies in the all-too-human behavior of the "painted girls." The music of the verse is so subtle and personal that we may not notice the end-rhymes at first. These opening lines strike a "modern" note not heard elsewhere in Riiter's work. But the poem continues with one of her favorite devices, the asking of rhetorical questions:
Is it only that flowers smell sweet, and are pretty and right,
Or because of the senseless waste of so many pounds,
Or because in that dreadful place the unwonted sight
Of a heap of blossom is balm to unconscious wounds--
The mortal wounds that benumb, not the sharp raw pains
Of the daily misery, but the fatal bleeding inside?
These questions upset the balance in the earlier lines between observation and attitude. They are undigested ideas. They reveal other faults in Pitter's style too: the archaism of "unwonted," "balm" and "benumb"; the cliches of "senseless waste," "mortal wounds" and "daily misery"; the over-modification. Then, after a transitional thought, also untransformed--"Here is the supernatural to be bought with the gains/ Of the spectral torment," Pitter hits upon the surprising image of the hearse as a luxury sedan. And she is off, combining description and allegory in her inimitable manner:
The soul can go for a ride with the rich young dead.
It makes you feel like a wedding. The Gates Ajar,
The Broken Column, the Pillow with "Rest in Peace,"
The sham Harp with its tinsel string allusively bust,
The three-quid Cross made of flaring anemones,
The gibbetted carnations with steel wires thrust
Right through their ranking midriffs, the skewered roses,
Tulips turned inside-out for a bolder show,
Arum lilies stuck upright in tortured poses
Like little lavatory-basins.
It is a fantastic imagining of gain and loss, of life and death. Overwhelmed by its own vision, it vomits into those "little lavatory-basins." Alas, the poet feels the need to control the power of these lines by instructing the reader: "This is the efflorescence of godless toil," and by resorting to another favorite device, that of ventriloquism ("We are the lost, betrayed ones. We are the Crowd./ Think for you must do something to let us in."). Despite of its unevenness, or perhaps because of it, this poem shows how Pitter could have "modernized" herself while retaining her former strengths. The later dream poems have a certain eerie beauty, but nothing of the "intolerable wrestle with words and meaning" (T. S. Eliot) evinced in the strongest parts of this poem.
July 10, 2013
Five stars for the poems I like best: they are as fine as any that I know. Others are pleasing, or amusing, or puzzling, or barely tasted. I can't imagine the day when I will say I have "read" a book like this.
June 29, 2020
I have been discovering Ruth Pitter's work in the past several weeks with a variety of friends over several states. enjoyable
July 24, 2018
Ruth Pitter was one of the great poets of the twentieth century. She had an amazing virtuosity and range (approximately from Chaucer to Vaughan). Her nature poems are among the most vivid of the language, and her poems on cats leave Eliot in the dust. Why she isn't better known is one of the world's mysteries. Get this book -- you'll feel like you've entered a treasure cave.
October 31, 2021
This wasn't my favorite large volume of poetry to race through--it needed more time to be savored. (Drat these interlibrary loans! I need more time!) I was able to sit with some of the poems, but had to fly through others. I would gladly snatch up anything by Pitter in a used bookstore, just so I could take a little more time to find out whether I love her poetry or not.
December 26, 2024
One of the most delightful books of my acquaintance
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February 16, 2018821.912 P6889c 1996
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews