
Some time ago, most likely during the 1980s, I listened to an interview on the radio with an Englishwoman from Kent, who reported a visit by aliens. I don't recall the details, but I was impressed or otherwise affected, and right away wrote the following poem:
"The Kentish Woman is Visited by Aliens"
the ship came to me as in a dream
the men were green and their eyes
were stars
I rose from my chair like morning
but the night was amber
and the purple eye of the cat
roamed the sill
I tell you
sometimes I think I am the butterfly dreaming
but I shall never cease to turn
my dreams to coin
they were here
they beheld me
then receded like fire into the night
at morning, you know
there was ash in the hearth
and embers winking
For some reason I tend to remember the title of this poem opening with the indefinite article: "A Kentish Woman", rather than "The Kentish Woman". I chose to use the definite article when I wrote the poem to establish her singularity, but whenever I misremember the title I suspect that the difference might be significant but can't say why. No matter; that's not why I opened this post.
Instead, I want to set down a comparison of sorts with a poem by another writer, which strikes me as having an uncanny resemblance to my poem. I don't recall ever reading this other poem, and the likeness is probably more slope rather than plane. This other poem is by Denise Levertov.
Levertov's poem is titled "Caedmon", and is reprinted in Barbaric Vast and Wild, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and John Bloomberg-Rissman, the fifth volume in the "Poems for the Millenium" series. Here's the part that struck me as akin to my Kentish Woman poem:
The cows
munched or stirred or were still. I
was at home and lonely,
both in good measure. Until
the sudden angel affrighted me -- light effacing
my feeble beam,
a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying:
but the cows as before
were calm, and nothing was burning,
nothing but I, as that hand of fire
touched my lips and scorched my tongue
and pulled my voice
into the ring of the dance.
We know Caedmon (7th century CE) through Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (8th century CE), whence Caedmon, who according to Bede was a Northumbrian peasant gifted with poetic speech by God, is generally recognized as the first English language poet whose work has been preserved. Caedmon's Hymn appears in various documents and in varying dialects of Old English, which is largely unintelligible to the contemporary English reader. Levertov's poem is a reimagining of the Caedmon legend, as recorded by Bede.
In their Old English Grammar, Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson argue that Caedmon's significance may lie in his adaptation of the earlier heroic literature to an emergent Christian literary tradition:
Bede's account in his Ecclesiastical History of how the illiterate cattle-herd Caedmon suddenly began singing of Christian subjects in the old heroic measure seems to capture that moment in history when two cultures began to merge. To the Anglo-Saxons, Caedmon's miracle was his instantaneous acquisition of the power of poetic composition through the agency of a divinely inspired dream. Modern readers familiar with the widely documented folk-motif of people suddenly acquiring poetic powers through a dream may dismiss Bede's story as essentially fabulous, but the nine-line Hymn itself attests to a minor miracle of literary history that cannot be denied: in these polished verses Caedmon demonstrated that the ancient heroic style was not incompatible with Christian doctrine and hence was worthy or preservation. (A Guide to Old English, 7th Edition, p. 232)
Back to the future, our two poems, mine and Levertov's, differ in subject matter and details but I think share essential features: Levertov has cows; I have a cat. Caedmon is visited in the night/a dream by an angel; the Kentish Woman is visited in the night/a dream(?) by aliens. Caedmon symbolically joins "the ring of the dance"; the Kentish Woman (symbolically) witnesses the ashes "winking" (dancing). Levertov's poem has fire; my poem has stars. Both Caedmon and the Kentish Woman are alone when inspiration dawns. In Levertov's poem, Caedmon's poetic speech is liberated; the Kentish Woman's speech is broadcast.
In a recent podcast from The London Review of Books, Marina Warner speaking of Franz Kafka says,
Yes, this is why he's philosophically so much of our time, and so important to what turned out to be his future. Because the causality in his fantasy fictions or the causality of the strange occurrences in his fictions is never, as I've just said, never actually identified. Whereas in fairy tales, it's fairies, and in other forms, in religious fables, it's God. And the supernatural is explained in that way. Or it's in science fiction, speculative fantasy of science fiction, it's something scientific. So here we are in a world, an intermediate world, in which the causality is never, never ascribed.
I think this may reflect the hidden dimension of my Kentish Woman poem -- that causality will likely be ambiguous in poetry, and can't be ascribed. Still, both poems feature a subject depicted as aspirational, glorifying God in the one instance, "something scientific" (or supernatural) in the other. Each enmeshed in the seamless web of poetry.
I'll leave this post unfinished for now. But I might emphasize in closing that any resemblance of my poem to Levertov's poem is unintentional, and most likely serendipitous.