Sunday/MacBeth

The poet and novelist George MacBeth (1932–92) explored the tension in pastoral poetry between the sharp particularity of “the kernels of what we know and can see and touch” and the imaginative use to which poets are apt to put them. In the early 1960s, MacBeth played an influential part in “The Group”, whose members – Philip Hobsbaum, Edward Lucie-Smith, Alan Brownjohn, Peter Porter and, for a while, Ted Hughes – rejected what they regarded as the Augustan decorum of “Movement” poets such as Philip Larkin and insisted instead on “real toads”. MacBeth’s readiness to experiment (Porter called him “the most inventive poet of his generation”) is reflected in his various and prolific output – he published no fewer than thirty-one volumes of verse, fiction and autobiography, and seven anthologies. In her review of MacBeth’s second Collected Poems (1989), Carol Ann Duffy said he had “waltzed with traditional form and partied with the avant-garde with equal gusto”.
MacBeth’s Group sympathies are not much in evidence in his distinctly Larkinesque poem “The Hornet” (first published in the TLS in 1981 and then appearing in Poems from Oby, a collection from 1982 set in the remote Norfolk idyll he moved to with his second wife, the novelist Lisa St. Aubin de Terán), which swells from a finely caught domestic detail (“drowned in a jug, with cardboard slid across / To keep it under”) into gathering thoughts of death (“somewhere to grow cold / And die in, when the time comes”). But we can hear Hughes, too, in MacBeth’s respect for the dead insect (“its warrior’s head bent sideways like a bow”) which, refusing to serve simply as a metaphor for human fears, bobs threateningly to the surface of the poem in its own “scoop of terror”. (lts)

The Hornet
October brought the last one of the year
And laid it sleeping on your window-frame.
It stood for winter, and the failing game,
The end of something, and death coming near.


Drowned in a jug, with cardboard slid across
To keep it under, it sleeps always now,
Its warrior’s head bent sideways, like a bow
Made to an enemy, for the mortal loss.


I see its body, simple as a cone
Of pine or douglas fir, cypress or spruce.
It has no meaning, scarcely any use
Except to make more precious all we own,


The last of life, and living in this place,
Year in, year out, with what we have and hold,
Great barns, and trees, and somewhere to grow cold
And die in, when the time comes, with some grace


In folded honour, free from bitterness
Or rancour, and not losing elegance
At the last, as this dead hornet’s final chance
Left it a scoop of terror. That, O yes. 
                                                             
GEORGE MACBETH (1981)