Last Hope
After Verlaine

Bustled about in this sputtering breeze
the graveyard’s oak seems wild and free,
as if it weren’t crowded with heavy
stones or the millpond’s dying gleam.

Still, it offers up that faithful song
of a blackbird perched in the wings.
Again it gives a bittersweet tune
to the highway’s roar of engines.

I could almost see you as that bird,
myself as the lumbering tree.
Or almost dream our love again –

some dressed-up, perfect memory.
Instead, of course, stuff falls apart …
But what to say? Hell – where to start?

The poems in Ben Wilkinson’s second collection, Same Difference, work close to the traditions of Simon Armitage and Philip Larkin in their emphasis on craft, and an Englishness that can be defined roughly as northern. Wilkinson successfully challenges Larkin in poems such as You Can See How It Was, which counters Larkin’s Home Is So Sad with “Home is just odd”. It proceeds to trace, understatedly, some of the tactile surprises of “home”, takes in the grimness of the antithesis (homelessness) and ends: “But look at the place. A mock / museum, curated by its one strange specimen.”

Such poems are immediately appealing. I was drawn more gradually into the series of loose translations of Paul Verlaine’s poetry that interlace the collection. This week’s choice is one of these, Last Hope, a rendition (to borrow a useful term from the American poet Reginald Gibbons) of Verlaine’s Dernier Espoir.

A long-time admirer of Verlaine’s under-recognised capacity for hard thinking, Wilkinson is candid about his technique. In a short afterword, denying expertise in the French language, he writes that his intention was never “to faithfully translate” the poems. His quest was to capture the musicality of the language, and find an echo of “Verlaine himself … in his distinct yet often adaptable poetic style”.

Wilkinson’s treatment of Last Hope emphasises the drama of great and small, hope and hope relinquished. The oak tree in the graveyard is a life force, seemingly full of rebellious energy but in fact “crowded with heavy / stones or the millpond’s dying gleam”. In that it “offers up” the blackbird’s song, a trope of Catholic oratory is evoked (suffering should be “offered up” in prayer). The oak may well symbolise the “turbulent” poet Verlaine, and his fraught relationships. Meanwhile, the little pun about the bird being “perched in the wings” is a pleasant lift to the generally sombre tone. I also particularly like the idea that the bird’s song “gives a bittersweet tune / to the highway roar of the engines”. The song and the roar intersect as one soundscape. They’re not heard as opposing, mutually chastising sounds.

“Again”, the time-taming word that opens the phrase, is picked up at the end of the ensuing tercet, alerting us to the emotional drive of the sonnet: it’s a retrospective love poem, addressed to the lover, who seems to be present in Verlaine’s original (addressed as “ma belle”) but appears only as “you” in Wilkinson’s rendition. That beautiful tercet with its image of lovers as opposites – the songbird and “the lumbering tree” – is almost put in its place in the opening line of the next, “some dressed-up, perfect memory”. If the memory has been “dressed up” it’s not wholly a memory. And so the poem executes a final, catastrophic turn, with an echo of WB Yeats, perhaps, in “stuff falls apart” but an un-Yeatsian confusion about the wording of what went wrong. The exclamatory “Hell” suggests the break-up was exactly that.

Wilkinson deromanticises the longing but increases the emotional pressure. Withheld information becomes a burden of implications. The lovers could start again. The necessary unravelling of what happened could start, and a lot more could be said. But the sonnet has finished, and the rest is silence.

I began this piece by treating the translations “after Verlaine” and the original poems as separate entities, but that may be an oversimplification. Verlaine’s poetics inform more than Wilkinson’s translations. It’s true that Verlaine declares in his Ars Poetica ( translated here by Norman R Shapiro), that music comes “first and foremost” – and no contemporary English poet can be entirely governed by that aesthetic: the texture of living, life-stained language works against the melodic. But Wilkinson follows Verlaine’s recommendations of mixing subtlety with directness: he, too, can go in for agile treatment of form and meter, and seems not entirely to disagree that, while precision is important, a poem sometimes succeeds through a mysterious coupling of “the Precise with Imprecision”. There’s no doubt that, in a shared propensity to “take vain Eloquence and wring its neck” both the poets are singing from the same oak tree.

Shapiro’s closer translation of Dernier Espoir can be compared here.