'Let Us Think That We Build Forever'

I’ve just learned that the English poet Clive Wilmer died on March 13 at age eighty. I knew of him first as a friend and champion of Edgar Bowers, Thom Gunn and Dick Davis, a co-translator of the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti, a serious reader of John Ruskin and a fine poet in his own right. He contacted me by email in 2011 to endorse my impression that Ruskin was a sort of proto-blogger, especially in Fors Clavigera. In 1986, Wilmer had edited Ruskin’s Unto This Last and Other Writings for Penguin Classics, and from 2009 until his death, he was master of the Guild of St. George, a charity “for arts, craft and the rural economy” founded by Ruskin in 1871. Wilmer wrote to me: “He is, as you have noticed, one of my guiding stars.” Ruskin shows up regularly in Wilmer’s poetry. From a three-poem sequence, “The Infinite Variety,” comes “Minerals from the Collection of John Ruskin”:

 

“The boy geologist who clove the rocks

Here on display grew up to be the great

Philosopher of colour into form

And, in the products of just workmanship,

Discerned the paradigm of the just state.

 

“It was the Lord’s design he made apparent—

These bands, and blocks of azure, umber, gilt,

Set in their flexing contours, solid flow

That has composed itself in its own frame:

Red garnet neighbouring mica, silver white;

A slice of agate like an inland sea . . .”

 

Cool urgency in language coupled with acuity of vision is rare. I see it is Ruskin and Wilmer. In my dealings with him, Wilmer had a grateful, celebrative spirit, without overdoing it. He didn’t seem like a complainer, begging for attention, nursing a grievance. He sent me a copy of New and Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2012). I remember telling him his last name reminded me of the first name of the gunsel in Dashiell Hammett’s novel and John Huston’s film adaptation of The Maltese Falcon. It was news to him and he was delighted. Wilmer takes his epigraph to New and Selected Poems from Ruskin’s 1849 volume The Seven Lamps of Architecture:

 

“When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, ‘See! This our father did for us.’”

 

This suggests Wilmer’s approach to poetry – an aversion to “planned obsolescence.” His poems acknowledge tradition with nearly every word he chooses, without being slavishly imitative. He titles a poem “To George Herbert”:

 

“Time and again I turn to you, to poems

In which you turn from vanity to God

Time and again, as I at the line’s turn

Turn through the blank space that modulates –

And so resolves – the something that you say.”

 

Wilmer’s placement of “the line’s turn” is witty and humble, as is “turn / Turn,” in which some of us hear a wayward allusion to Ecclesiastes. The word “conversation” has lately been debased, turned into a feel-good token, but Wilmer, like any good writer, carries on a conversation with the good writers who preceded him. “The something that you say”: All is vanity, not excluding pretensions to originality. The historian Victor Davis Hanson wrote in an essay, “So Why Read Anymore?”: “Nothing that we experience has not happened before; the truly ignorant miss that, hypnotized by sophisticated technology into believing that human nature has been reinvented in their own image.” Wilmer titles another poem “Shakespeare” (“In Memoriam: E.E.I.”):

 

“I must have been just eight – it was 1953 –

When in some parlour of my mind he pulled a chair out

Like a book from a packed shelf, then sat down and got going.

Fifty-eight years have passed and he hasn’t finished talking

Nor I listening. My father was already dead,

My mother’s now been dead for thirty years. Who else

Have I got to know like him, learnt more from, loved more freely?”