Can you hear me? My name is Ross Pallister. And I'm chair of the English Faculty Board.
It's my privilege to invite Alice Oswald to deliver her inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of poetry,
Professor Oswald is the 46th professor of poetry and the first woman to hold the post in its 300 year history.
I'm not I'm not going to delay you with the long introduction because you're here to hear Ali's talk.
We're looking for with keen interest to hear this first lecture and as we'll be delivering a lecture once term for the next four years.
Can I just mention that at the end of this lecture, please do stay and join us for a drink downstairs in room six?
Can I remind you to turn your phones to silent and ask you not to film and photograph so that you can give your full attention to this lecture?
The art of Evasion. Welcome. Thank you, and can you hear me?
Please do let me know if you stop being able to hear me and I'm very pleased to be here,
and I hope to use this slot mostly to adjust the balance between the living, this and the last illness of poetry.
Both of those qualities are important,
but it's my strong belief that the invention of writing has given a little bit too much power to the lasting ness of poetry.
We tend to assume that the good poems are the ones that last.
But of course, poems also need to live. And one of the requirements of living is dying, I vanishing.
For that reason, I shan't follow the convention of projecting written poems onto the whiteboard.
I'd like you to trust your ears and your memories. And your Imagination's antitrust, in fact, that a poem isn't always what happens in the words,
but is the trace that the words leave inside you as it vanishes?
It is very hypocritical of me to make that demand of you and then proceed to read my lecture from the page.
But bear with me. I am in the early stages of an evolutionary process and I hope over the next four years to evolve into a performing lecturer.
I haven't got there yet. So today I am going to be a lecturer from the page and please forgive me for that.
But. The art of erosion.
I was once driven in a taxi by a man who had no room for a piano in his house and had moved it under an apple tree.
He told me he liked to hear the rain falling on the keys or sometimes fruit.
And often the wind would arrive at night and bank branches on the broken LED.
That was 10 years ago. I imagine it is worn down now to a skeleton of wires.
I imagine on windless nights, the moon moves over the wires, playing silence.
There are wonderful tunes composed of a piano.
But if, like me, you are interested in the edge where the mind gives up and matter begins to describe itself.
Then these weather tunes, these erosions, unpredictably composed by time itself, are worth celebrating.
Perhaps, as Bergsten said, there is a mathematical order inherent in matter.
And we have only to stop speaking. We have only to stop composing and performing and singing and thinking.
To hear it. Beckett, inspired by Beethoven's music, which he described as a tonal surface eaten into by large black pauses,
tried to make something similar to a weathered piano. He used to sit whole days in his cottage with no paper before him and no intent
to write taking pleasure in following the course of the Sun across the sky.
The experience of my reader, he said, shall be between the phrases in the silence communicated by the intervals and not the terms of the statement.
It's as if he was working to where his mind a way to build for himself.
Not a voice. But an ear with which to hear something in a world beyond him.
And once or twice he heard it. It seems as if an invisible accordion were playing a materially, he said.
And then in a rehearsal of Waiting for Godot, he asked his actors to repeat their lines.
But this time to speak them with moonlight in their voices.
Amongst those who write poetry, there are some who believe that poems have to be built up thought by thought.
And there are others who believe that poems like Beckett's Moonlight.
Or implicit in the air and need only be uncovered.
I'm going to speak today about the second kind of poet.
I call those poets. Poets of erosion because their task is not so much to fortify or decorate the language as to where some holes in it.
Process of time work, it's such wonder that water, which is of kind so soft, doth pierce the marble stone asunder by little drops falling from a loft.
Process of time work, it's such wonder.
That water, which is a kind so soft. Doth pierce the marble stone asunder by little drops falling from a loft.
Those four lines by it fall on the listener with a lovely weakness.
The vowels get shorter. The beats get softer. The image breaks up into little drops.
Process of time work, it's such wonder that water, which is of kind, so soft Duff Pierce the marble stone asunder by little drops falling from a loft.
If it had stopped there, defeated by time or pierced by water.
He would have left us the perfect example of what I call the art of erosion,
in which speech gives itself so listening to its subject that it is dented or destroyed by it.
Why its subject, unlike Becket, is not really time but love.
And for that reason, he turns his initial act of erosion into an act of reflection, driving the thought through five more verses.
And yet, in heart, that seems so tender received no drop of the still in tears that always still caused
me to render the vain claimed that sounds not in her ears and so on and so on.
To draw attention to time passing. To make a little structure like a moon dial or a water clock by means of which
time is visible but not arrested is often a matter not of great art history.
But of giving up. Of quieting down,
of moving oneself out of the way so that light or water or wind or some other agent of erosion can fall on the poem without obstruction.
In the living room of the houses of the Scheinman peasants, I'm quoting here from a book by Nielsen and filled in called Primitive Time Reckoning,
a study in the origins and first development of the art of counting amongst the primitive
and early culture peoples in the living room of the houses of the Sakineh and peasants,
which were always built according to the Sun, i.e. facing east and west.
There was in the southern windowsill beside the middle shaft of the frame, a line which was called the noon line.
When the shadow of the shaft fell parallel with this line, it was noon.
I'm always searching for such a son marked room, and I find it once or twice.
And the poems of Robert Herrick. So good luck came and on my roof did light.
Like Noiseless Snow. Or as the do of night.
Not all at once, but gently.
As the trees, all by the sunbeams tickled by degrees.
So good luck came and on my roof did light. Like Noiseless Snow or as the dew of night.
Not all at once. But gently, as the trees are by the sunbeams tickled by degrees.
Now, that is what what might more accurately call a process of time working one of its wonders.
The voice begins in darkness with only a dream sense of something different.
The word light in the first line gives off a glimmer of double meaning over the course of four
lines moving through the weird interior shine of night snow and it's imagined transition into dew.
The pun rotates and shows its other side.
It is suddenly, Dawn, the voice ends abruptly, with real light still moving over the trees towards its new line.
So good luck came and on my roof did light like noiseless snow or as the dew of night.
Not all at once, but gently, as the trees are by the sunbeams tickled by the greens.
Well, I was writing those words, I noticed a grey triangle of window shadow shift across my paper and I began to plot the movement with dots.
And I passed the diagram to an engineer who was sitting nearby and he said, yes,
the whole table with all my books and pens was sliding round at nought point one centimetres to the minus one per second.
And the Sun was visibly saying, Sir, if I had been using photographic paper, which responds to light by the erosion of its dyes,
then I might today be standing here reading a direct transcription of sunlight.
These serotypes, types of seaweed are from the history of Science Museum, about 100 yards from here,
and they're actually much more beautiful if you go and look at them in the research room of the Science Museum.
Nobody should photograph them because they are. That's not allowed.
But the real things are a five size in a little blue exercise book, and the background is deep Prussian blue, and they're incredibly finely detailed.
Here they look a little bit blurred.
They were made in the 19th century by Anna Atkins, who placed specimens on to light sensitive paper to create a series of silhouettes.
The process is an erosive one.
Sunlight eats the iron salts and leaves behind a blueprint just as a coat put down on the grass will leave its image there.
Robert Hunt, another early photographer, thought the process so easy it was almost a sign of weakness to use it.
They are so exceedingly simple, the results, he said, are so certain,
the delineation so perfect and the general character so interesting that they recommend themselves,
particularly to ladies and to those travellers who will though not able to bestow much attention or time on the subject.
Desire to obtain accurate representations of the botany of a district.
We have seen specimens of the British alga executed by a lady.
This is this lady by the CIA,
a type process that are remarkable for the extreme fidelity with which even the most attenuated tendrils of the marine plants are copied.
On behalf of the ladies he disparages and the travellers.
I do not think there is anything harder for an artist to achieve or at least to wish to achieve than simplicity,
speed of execution and fidelity to detail.
A number of contemporary artists have come back to photographs, which is what these are in pursuit of these or similar aims.
Susan Dirges, for example, leaves photographic paper in rivers on moonlit nights to make a visual version of speaking with Moonlight in Your Voice.
Gary Fabian Miller shines electric light through flasks of coloured liquid to make pictures of the pictures in his mind.
I think of Harriet as a pioneer photographer. Working like Beckett to get a light print in his voice.
When I read his poem, a shutter opens and then another and another, and the dawn in four slides moves physically over me.
By contrast, when I read Wordsworth's intimations of immortality, which is a constructed, not an eroded poem,
I stand a little lesser and lower down and behind the poet, and his prevision falls like a shadow between me and the Sun.
There was a time when Meadow Grove and Stream the Earth and every common site to me did seem a parallel in celestial light.
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it has been, if your turn where say where I may buy night or day, the things which I have seen, I now can see no more.
The rainbow comes and goes and loveliest the rose, the moon doth with delight.
Look around her when the heavens are bare, water's on a starry night, a beautiful and for the sunshine is a glorious birth.
But yet I know wherever I go that there has passed away a glory from the Earth.
T.S. Eliot called her a minor poet. Careful to articulate what he meant by that.
Not that Herrick was a lesser poet, but that he didn't have the singleness of purpose of the major poets.
Herbert Donne Milton and I might add Wordsworth.
And strictly speaking, he is right about her. The poems are minor.
They might even be slight. But what interests me is that they are sometimes quiet enough to have sunlight in their voices.
And I can't help asking, is that because he is a minor poet?
Is it because the trajectory of his life considered as a performance piece is one of the best examples of the art of erosion?
Herrick was born in London in 1891,
and he wrote what critics have called his major poems in the company of other urban poets like Ben Johnson and Thomas Carruth,
although it's hard to date his work, according to John Creta's chronology.
Poems like Karina's going amazing and to his friend Wickes complex pieces with some singleness of purpose all date from those early London years.
At the age of 39, Herrick was made vicar of Dean Pryor on the edge of Dartmoor.
And something of that place began to seep into him and damage his concentration.
His poems dwindled to Eight Lions, Four Lions, Three Lions two.
He took to writing epitaphs, many of them addressed to himself, and he noticed and regretted his decline and blamed it on his whereabouts.
Call me no more as heretofore the music of a feast since now, alas, the mirth that was in me is dead or ceased.
Before I went to banishment into the loaded west, I could rehearse a lyric verse and speak it with the best.
But time I mean, has lead, I see my organ fast asleep and turned my voice into the noise of those that sit and weep.
But time Amy has laid. I see my organ fast asleep and turned my voice into the noise of those that sit and weep.
Now, that is a very good chronometer, time has turned his voice into the noise of those that sit and weep a sniffing,
hissing, sighing, dripping breath, broken noise similar to the sound of Wyatt's water, which is of kinds of soft.
I can hear it again in that two line poem, she by the river sat and sitting there.
She weeping, made it deeper by a tear. She by the river, sat and sitting there, she weeping, made it deeper by a tear.
What exactly is the sound of a TIA entering water, if you can imagine it, then you are listening to the true note of Herrick,
a tiny plotting unsound as quiet as the quarter rain between weeping and deeper.
It is the same sound as Beckett's immaterial, according.
It is the merging melting sound of one transparency sliding into another like two ghosts meeting in the underworld or like this.
And as a vapour or a drop of rain once lost, can never be found again.
That is a strange self-raising thought, imagine a man shining a searchlight on the sea looking for a raindrop that has disappeared.
Will this the mellow touch of music, most doth wound the soul when it doth rather sigh than sound?
The mellow touch of music, most doth wound the soul when it doth rather sigh than sound.
These micro sonic poems are inadvertent self-portraits.
It's Herrick himself who is vanishing. And in the brokenness and silence of his later work, I can hear the rainy interference of.
In case you don't know, Dalton, it is what they call a granite upland between north and South Devon.
And you enter it over a threshold of categories.
As soon as you hear the clunk of cattle grid under your wheels, you open the car windows and you smell erosions.
Please pause for five minutes and imagine the weather carving the great granite lamp of Dartmoor while I play you cattle grids,
a section from a symphony by John Driver, who is in the audience based on his recordings of dark horse cattle grids.
That's put you on. I don't think that what categories in her day.
Instead, there was the clattering of Dean Bourne, whose waters rise on Dartmoor, to me, swimming in it in the 21st century.
It is a well mannered Blackstone stream with an almost human voice.
But to herrick, it was a symbol of all the blurring and transgressions for which he hated Devon.
Rock it out and rock, we discovered Iron Man and rock, are they ways all over?
He said. Herrick was frightened of losing his human coherence.
And you can understand his fear if you look at contemporary accounts of Devon.
In the 17th century, it took eight days to ride from London to Exeter and beyond Exeter.
The roads were often no more than grassy tracks liable to flooding.
Tristram Risdon, in his choreographic account of Devon, completed a couple of years after her arrival, described the inhabitants as very laborious,
thorough and unpleasant to strangers travelling those ways which are cumbersome and uneven amongst rocks and stones,
painful for man and horse as they can best witness who may have trail their old.
Imagine Herrick transplanted from Cheapside into that foggy, haunted county.
If he had been a major poet, he might have kept his eyes on God and suffered no change of style.
But her great strength is his weakness.
He let the police filter into him like a piano under an apple tree, the structure of his poems began to break, eaten away by the weather.
And here in there, the clink of a dead note interfered with his thinking.
Lost to the world, lost to myself alone here, now I rest under this marble stone index of silence, heard and seen of none.
Lost to the world, lost to myself alone.
Here now, I rest under this marble stone. In depth of silence, heard and seen of none.
In 16 47, during the Civil War,
the parishioners of North Devon delivered a petition to the government complaining that the whole county had suffered more than any other.
The effects of fire or plague in free quarter plunder payments and loss of stock and trade by sea and land.
That same year, Herrick was expelled from Dean prior to his royalist sympathies.
He professed to be delighted. Dean Bourne farewell. He said, I never wish to see Dean or they warty incivility.
But a dozen years later, after the restoration, he pleaded to be sent back.
Devon had softened him. His attitude had shifted or to use his own invented word.
It had trans shifted. I sing of times trans shifting, he says in his opening poem.
And the word itself trans shifts as he speaks it, starting in Latin and then melting into old English, a hybrid word for a mutable poet.
I'm very taken with this words, trends shifting to shift is to move predictably to trans shift is to be buffeted beyond your knowledge,
to shift and then be shifted by that shift.
To become trans human trans morphic,
the way du trans shifts into mist or the way a piano trans shifts from a civilised instrument into a meteorological one.
To sing of trans shifting demands, great feats of erosion.
You need to see through matter to the durations that are wearing it away.
Lovers, how they come and part. A gauges ring they bear about and still to be and not seen when and where they will.
They tread on clouds, and though they sometimes fall, they fall like do.
But make no noise at all. So silently, they want the other come.
As cannons steel into the pair or plum and air like leave, no pressure to be seen wherever they met or parting place has been.
A gauges ring they bear about them still. To be and not seen when and where they will.
They tread on clouds, and though they sometimes fall.
They fall like do but make no noise at all.
So silently, they one to the other come.
As colours steel into the pear or plum and air like leave no pressure to be seen wherever they met or parting place has been.
There you have it, another weathered poem, a poem about unknowable, inaudible transitions.
Is it a love poem or is it really a gardening poem?
A poem about the erotic movement of colour over fruit.
Is it a cavalier poem or is it really a silent type or realist poem looking not at the fruit, but at the rays of light moving towards it?
So silently, they one to the other come. As colours steel into the pear or plum and air like leave no pressure to be seen.
I can imagine Herrick in his prior garden, getting up early to inspect his fruit trees.
I have done the same myself last summer, I recorded the movement of colour over a Victoria plum throughout the course of a week.
Day one, the smallest of 45 green plums, has just a rash of pink around the stalk.
Data, the rash is still there, five mm wide and circular.
The green flash is going yellow. Day three, all the plums on that branch have a whitish look.
The small plum is suffering a kind of sunrise and spots of crimson and yellow of bursting up through its surface.
The ripening seems to be happening cell by cell. Day four, Yellow Haze all around the branch, the pink has let fall a plume of move down one side.
Day five, it looks like a spreading fire.
The I can't quite believe it keeps jumping back to the thought of green, but all kinds of colours now seem to be gathering under the skin.
Day six. Sadly, on day six, while turning the fruit to inspect its underneath, I snapped the twig.
A good example of the way our observations interfere with our experiments.
But anyway, there was something forlorn about the whole endeavour.
It was like the story of Kitty Jay, who is buried on Dartmoor every morning.
There are fresh flowers on her grave, but nobody has ever seen them delivered.
Every morning out of nowhere and leaving no trace in the air,
more purple had arrived in my plum tree and the process of recording this made me aware all week of radiations rather than solidity.
And yet the notes I made in Blue Biro on the wall calendar each day, more elaborate could not begin to describe what was happening.
For all my close inspection, I never once saw the actual movement of the colour.
There remained a mystery inside each shade shift so that I failed morning after morning to catch the actual living ness of that plum performance.
What was required was not more detail, but less. Her eight lines of which only to describe the fruit somehow allow the process its mystery.
As colours steel into the or plum and air like leave no pressure to be seen.
There is another fruit watcher. In a hotter orchard.
At an even earlier hour. Homer in book 24 of the Odyssey notices not the colour of his grapes, but they're gradually increasing weight.
You gave me and named for me one Divine Rose. All kinds of grapes growing right in succession.
Whenever the hours of God weigh down on them from the air.
You gave me and named for me, 50 Vine rose, all kinds of grapes growing ripe in succession whenever the hours of God weigh down on them from the air.
It's a wonderful scene when Odysseus has come home and is trying to prove to his father
that he is who he is and he's doing it by means of talking about the the fine rose.
If Herrick has the gift of weakness like a net curtain, letting the light shine through his language.
Then Homer has the greater gift of absence.
He is simply not there. And nothing is known about him, not even whether he was one poet or several.
And just as her ex unsteadiness tuned his voice to trends shifting.
So home is hidden, this, which is really just his embeddedness in other voices, gives him access to things unseen.
And puts no mediating obstacle between the unseen and the audience.
All kinds of grapes growing ripe in succession. Whenever the hours of God weigh down on them from the air.
Great flowers as they fill up with water turned upside down and sink closer and closer to the Earth.
Homa invites us to read that movement as a downward pressure from the air, and the verb he uses is the same he uses elsewhere of both snow and rain.
As a winter swollen river smashes down the walkways with its current and the flowering vineyards can't hold it back with their fences.
Whenever the rainstorm of God weighs down on that river.
Like on a winter's day, the snowflakes fall slightly and everything gets covered from above whenever the snowstorm of God weighs down on the world.
All three images compressed together inside the memory of the performer rub off on each other so that the falling hours is a half snow,
half rain and the air itself is made visible.
The lines last no more than two moments designed to be heard out loud, not read from the page.
Their language is winged. Passing gone?
And yet in that flash glimpse, they see further than Herrick. They see the actual oppression in the air, which Herrick missed.
And they see time itself, not in its mechanical, but in its natural seasonal form.
The hours or seasons of variable characters based on the variable divisions of daylight, they are the original trends shifters.
In May 2020, the Cornermen Museum in London is employing a hermit who will live for a month in the clock tower.
His task is to stop time. And even now, he is preparing all kinds of erosions, inscriptions if operations,
musical interludes and excavations and straightforward acts of demolition to fulfil that commission.
Luckily for him, no one is going to find out whether or not he is successful, it will be like the Yugoslavian wedding procession,
which froze for 100 years on the way to church, then thawed out and carried on regardless.
I have spoken to this hermit,
and he told me that his vision of time is inspired by the Buddhist concept of an in the word for it is culper and this is what a culper is.
The Buddha described the mountain even bigger than Mount Everest. Once every 100 years, someone wipes the mountain with a small piece of silk.
The mountain will be worn away before the kalpa ends. I don't know how you would stop that kind of time.
It is so material, so it is home as time is different.
It's a series of 12 characters who are devoted to dancing.
It's the hour when a woman eats his lunch or the season when flies gather in sheds or it is the pre Olympian goddess of night,
or it's dawn who wears yellow clothes and has a liking for young men whom she snatches up and sleeps with.
It's relatively easy to stop that sort of time.
Even inside the meticulous clockwork of the Odyssey with its 20-Year divisions and its turning phases of
the Moon with its chronic metrical numbers of fruit trees and symbolic quantities of arrows and axes.
Even after all that careful counting. Athena manages to stop time in Book Twenty Three so that Penelope and Odysseus can enjoy a long night together.
Now, Dawn, with her pink hands, would have risen on that weeping had not the great Eid goddess Athena thought differently.
She held the long night back at the Outwood Edge.
She detained Dawn on her golden cushions by the ocean and would not let her harness her forfeited horses who bring the daylight to people.
The Iliad, set in the ninth year of the Trojan War, has 218 similes.
And each similarly operates on the narrative like Athena interrupting the flow with an image of the present moment.
Notice the change of tents when, for example, automaton is killed,
so he fell like when Oak Falls or white poplar or Tall Pine, which carpenters in hills cut with axes to make ships.
Or Sesto? Standing close, he speared him in the right jaw, breaking through his teeth and pulled him over the rail as a man on a jutting rock hooks.
A vigorous fish from sea to land with lion and shining bronze.
So he hooked or gaping with his spear.
It is part of every storyteller's art to look up out of the story and re-engage the audience with a contemporary reference.
At these times, shifts would surely have been marked by changes of gesture and to.
To hear the Iliad in performance,
moving in and out of past and present must have been a bit like Beckett's experience of a tonal surface eaten into by large black pauses.
Except that in Homer, the poses are not blank. They are unspeakably bright.
Like when the wind dies down, the stars stand out, glittering around a shining moon, each steep headland, every crag and cliffs can be seen.
The sky breaks open to its very depths, showing every star and the shepherds heart is glad.
All the silver of that simply comes pouring out of the phrase you run off and whoop every aspect of either the sky breaks open to its very depths,
endless brighter spells from the heavens, down from bright heaven bursts.
The boundless, brighter from heaven above the boundless brighter is wrenched with light out of the sky, slides a deeper, unspeakable sky.
The night sky opens and the real secret sky bursts downwards.
Asbestos, which means unsayable describes Aether, which is the immaterial far away a reggae means under split and it all happens.
Uranus end with a downward heaven sent movement. The angles are exactly the same as in that passing informational line about the
greats in which the living hours leave Earth woods from deals the sky god.
Every phrase of Homer follows the same ecstatic line from nothingness into being and then back again.
It is like the opening of a camera shutter letting light fall suddenly onto the language.
And that is, I think, what Beckett meant by speaking with Moonlight in your voice.
Thank you.