Sonnets III and V from In Vinculis

III.
Honoured I lived erewhile with honoured men
In opulent state. My table nightly spread
Found guests of worth, peer, priest and citizen,
And poet crowned, and beauty garlanded.
Nor these alone, for hunger too I fed.
And many a lean tramp and sad Magdalen
Passed from my doors less hard for sake of bread.
Whom grudged I ever purse or hand or pen ?

To-night, unwelcomed at these gates of woe
I stand with churls, and there is none to greet
My weariness with smile or courtly show
Nor, though I hunger long, to bring me meat.
God! what a little accident of gold
Fences our weakness from the wolves of old.

V.
A prison is a convent without God.
Poverty, Chastity, Obedience
Its precepts are. In this austere abode
None gather wealth of pleasure or of pence.
Woman’s light wit, the heart’s concupiscence
Are banished here. At the least warder’s nod
Thy neck shall bend in mute subservience.
Nor yet for virtue – rather for the rod.

Here a base turnkey novice-master is,
Teaching humility. The matin bell
Calls thee to toil, but little comforteth.
None heed thy prayers or give the kiss of peace.
Nathless, my soul, be valiant. Even in Hell
Wisdom shall preach to thee of life and death.

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840- 1922) composed the poems of In Vinculis while serving the first part of a two-month sentence in Galway Gaol in 1888. A passionate advocate of Irish home rule, Blunt had witnessed on his two visits to Ireland distressing scenes of the evictions of tenant farmers. He recorded: “The sight made me so angry that I was positively ill, my heart hurting me.” Challenging the British chief secretary for Ireland, Arthur Balfour, at a public meeting, he got into a scuffle, was arrested and charged with intimidation and breach of the peace”.

In his politics, Blunt was a radical. As a poet, although his career spans an era of burgeoning poetic radicalism, modernist principles left him largely untouched. In the picture accompanying Lucy McDiarmid’s entertaining Irish Times article, he is the bewhiskered grandee (aged 73) standing somewhat aloof between Yeats and Pound. Both of them, particularly the latter, responded to his work with comments that seem warmer than mere politeness. Pound in Canto 81 recalled: “To have, with decency, knocked / That a Blunt should open / To have gathered from the air a live tradition / or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame / This is not vanity.” Blunt, however, had been unimpressed by the young men’s admiration, since he could scarcely believe their own work deserved to be called poetry. In poetic diction and form, he remained incurably Victorian.

Blunt was a philanderer, a waverer between Catholicism and atheism, the supporter of nationalist movements in Egypt and India, an informed admirer of Islam, a horse-breeder and sometime bullfighter. He seems to have pursued intensity of experience, the life rather than the paperwork. He wrote a great number of sonnets (at speed, one imagines), some of which are impressive. Despite the formally conventional structures, words and ideas creep in at the edges and seem to unsettle Blunt’s more obvious intentions.

The title of his 1889 collection In Vinculis (from the Latin “in chains”) declares his view of the Irish nation – while not excluding a degree of self-pity. He wrote more about Ireland in three longer poems included in the collection. In the sonnets, his own misery dominates and yet, as he claims at the end of Sonnet V, knowledge of life and death can be learned in Hell.

In Sonnet III, the octave portrays a happy time of opulence and virtue combined. The depiction of hospitality probably owes something to the Islamic culture he experienced and valued, as well as to the biblical figures of the “lean tramp” and “sad Magdalen”. Those two adjectives are well chosen here, and when he writes that “they passed from my door less hard”, the unexpected “hard” is evocative. Physically, the word suggests the boniness of hunger: it resonates also as the psychological hardness associated with surviving on the edge, and the hostility a rich man’s hospitality might have provoked. Blunt portrays himself as the generous host of a range of people who, whatever their status, are equally valued as guests, the better to reveal the bleak shock of arrival in gaol. Fellow prisoners are mere “churls” but the final couplet, if the plural pronoun “our” is to be taken seriously, may reveal second thoughts: “God! what a little accident of gold / Fences our weakness from the wolves of old.”

Sonnet V was singled out by Oscar Wilde in an enthusiastic review in the Pall Mall Gazette. Wilde remarked of Balfour that he had at least succeeded in converting “a clever rhymer into an earnest and deep-thinking poet”. The octave in Sonnet V is strong and memorable. Blunt associates the God lacking from this extra-harsh kind of convent with both feminine and masculine forms of behaviour (“Woman’s light wit, the heart’s concupiscence”). There’s a suggestion that prison without mercy fails as a corrective: brutality teaches “subservience” but not “humility”.

Blunt later pressed Winston Churchill towards prison reform: we’re still waiting for that particular light to dawn. From both literary and social perspectives, Wilde’s poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol might be considered the best result of In Vinculis.