Collected Poems: with translations from Jacques Prévert

By A. S. J. Tessimond

A.S.J. Tessimond (1902-1962) was one of the most individual, versatile and approachable voices in 20th century poetry. Influenced at first by the Imagists, his poetry is remarkable for its lucidity and formal exactness and for its witty, humane depiction of life in the modern city. Out of step with his contemporaries - both Pound and Eliot as well as Auden and his followers - Tessimond was always a marginalised figure, publishing only three collections in his lifetime, one in each decade from 1934 to 1958. Yet his work has been popular enough to be included in numerous anthologies and has been a perennial favourite with listeners of radio programmes such as Poetry Please. This edition is a reissue of the posthumous Collected Poems edited by his friend the writer Hubert Nicholson, who characterised his poems as 'beautiful, shapely, well wrought and elegant, whether in public of private mode', penetrating the heart of both London and England: 'His hallmark, his unique contribution to the body poetic, is to be found in those poems encapsulating urban types'and the institutions that shape and demarcate their lives, the popular press and radio, films, money, advertising, houses, tube stations, the implacable streets... He wrote a good deal about love, its hopes and etasies and its frustrations and sadness.' As Nicholson has pointed out, Tessimond wrote many poems in the first person, 'but they are not in the least egotistical. They are imaginative projections of himself into types, places, generalised Man, even God or Fate.' He was 'entirely a man of the city', his 'landscape' pieces depicting Hyde Park Corner, Chelsea Embankment, a Paris cafe and even an overcrowded bus in Jamaica. 'He loved the life around him and was a meditative as well as an observant man. He reflected, and reflected on, the passing show, kindly, honestly, and with wit and wisdom.' Tessimond has been described as an eccentric, a night-lifer, loner and flaneur. He loved women, was always falling in love, but never married. He suffered from frequent bouts of depression, alleviated neither by a succession of psychiatrists nor by electric shock therapy. The fact that he was plagued by self-doubt and was fiercely critical of his own work must have contributed to his work being too little published and too much neglected, despite being championed by an extraordinary variety of admirers, from Michael Roberts, John Lehmann and Ceri Richards to Bernard Levin, Maggie Smith, Bill Deedes and Trevor McDonald. Maggie Smith read his poem 'Heaven' at the funeral of Bernard Levin, for whom Tessimond was 'a quiet voice, which makes it easy to miss the resonances, but they are there, and although I doubt if he will achieve a widespread fame, I am sure that any future anthology of twentieth-century English verse that does not include a sample of his work will be less complete, less representative and less valuable than it might have been.' In an obituary for The Times, Tessimond's friend, the critic George Rostrevor Hamilton, said he was 'modest about his poetry, and sometimes thought it too small to be worthwhile. But over and above a dry wit and fancy, he had an exquisite feeling for words, meticulous but, like himself, without affectation. In his own way he was unrivalled.'

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780371375

Book preview

A.S.J. TESSIMOND

COLLECTED POEMS

A.S.J. Tessimond was one of the most individual, versatile and approachable voices in 20th century poetry, Influenced at first by the Imagists, his poetry is remarkable for its lucidity and formal exactness and for its witty, humane depiction, of life in the modern city.

Out of step with his contemporaries – both Pound and Eliot as well as Auden and his followers – Tessimond was always a marginalised figure, publishing only three collections in his lifetime, one in each decade from 1934 to 1958. Yet his work has been popular enough to be included in numerous anthologies and has been a perennial favourite with listeners of radio programmes such as Poetry Please. He was the subject of a recent Radio 4 Lost Poets programme.

The fact that he was plagued by self-doubt and depression – and was fiercely critical of his own work – must have contributed to his work being too little published and too much neglected, despite being championed by an extraordinary variety of admirers, including Bernard Levin, Maggie Smith and Bill Deedes.

This edition is a reissue of the posthumous Collected Poems edited by Hubert Nicholson, who characterised his poems as ‘beautiful, shapely, well wrought and elegant, whether in public of private mode’, penetrating the heart of both London and England: ‘His hallmark, his unique contribution to the body poetic, is to be found in those poems encapsulating urban types…and the institutions that shape and demarcate their lives, the popular press and radio, films, money, advertising, houses, tube stations, the implacable streets… He wrote a good deal about love, its hopes and ecstasies and its frustrations and sadness.’

A.S.J. Tessimond

COLLECTED POEMS

with translations from Jacques Prévert

EDITED BY HUBERT NICHOLSON

CONTENTS

Title Page

Note on sources

Introduction

The walls of glass

Any man speaks

Nursery-rhyme for a twenty-first birthday

Never

Houses

The children look at the parents

Meeting

Chaplin

Don Juan

One almost might

Last word to childhood

Epitaph for our children

Unlyric love song

Empty room

Cocoon for a skeleton

Betrayal

Or not perhaps mistaken

Epitaph on a disturber of his times

Earthfast

Cats: I

Cats: II

Cinema screen

Bells, pool and sleep

Polyphony in a cathedral

Music

O

To be blind

Discovery

Quickstep

June sick room

Seaport

Tube station

Wet city night

Black on black

Flight of stairs

Music-hall juggler

Birch tree

Sea

Night piece

Epilogue

Voices in a giant city

The man in the bowler hat

Song in a saloon bar

London

Money

Advertising

Hollywood

Dance band

Radio

Popular press

Love speaks to the lover

The psychiatrist’s song

The intellectuals

The prostitute

The occultist

Smart-boy

The lesser artists

The British

The neurotics

Epilogue

Daydream

The unwept waste

Not love perhaps

If men were not striped like tigers

England (Autumn 1938)

Where?

Saving grace

Jigsaw

Horoscope for Diane

Talk in the night

The same hour will not strike

The old witch said

Split world

Conversation for three

Acknowledgement

Song

After attempted escape from love

Postscript to a pettiness

Footnotes on happiness

Invitation to the dance

Money talks

Deaf animal

The firewalkers

The lesson

To a girl who would like to be a cynic

Masque of all men

Whisper of a thin ghost

Rock-edge

Paris café, 1938

Fate writes two epitaphs

Sleep: I

Age

Poems first collected in Selection (1947–57)

Portrait of a romantic

Middle-aged conversation

Black Monday lovesong

A hot day

Skaters’ Waltz

Jamaican bus ride

A man of culture

The psycho-analyst

She

The advisers

Conversation with myself

Lovers’ conversation

Two men in a dance hall

The implacable streets

Poems first collected in Not love perhaps …

The too much loved

The ad-man

The bargain

Heaven

In Canterbury cathedral

Master of hypochondria

Night-life

The psychiatrist speaks

Edith Piaf

Summer night at Hyde Park Corner

La marche des machines

Poems first collected in Morning meeting

Letter from Luton

The lonely women in hotel lounges

In a city

Epitaph on a scoundrel

Speech

Silent cinema

The fishmonger

What is this wind

Romantic

Sunweb

Genius rewarded

Autumn

Sunday at home

Nightfall

Winter evening

Misty morning on Chelsea Embankment

‘Œdipus’ at the New Theatre, 1945

The city: midday nocturne

Winter, 1939–40

Apologia

Steel April

To the world in the rare intervals between the unveiling of memorials

Thomas Hardy

On the death of a great man

Classics

X, while talking to a Professor, wonders whether he shall persuade his daughter to enter upon a University course

On listening to a piece of music by Purcell

Stars may fall in one’s hand

Pets

Warning to Gloria

First meeting

Morning meeting

Poems hitherto uncollected

Symphony in red

Monochrome

Charleston

Man mending telegraph wire

Soliloquy of the artists

Dancing

If the octopus …

Chelsea Embankment

Piccadilly

Spring in Hyde Park

The conductor (concert study)

Order

Conversation with a disembodied spirit

Now I shall sing to you …

Art-galleries

The train

The pathetic fallacy

Lines

In that cold land

Defence of the ad-man

Latterday oracles: Noise

To a lover of living

Portrait

A painting by Seurat (‘Un dimanche à la Grande Jatte’)

Man

Authorship

Sleep: II

Translations from the French of Jacques Prévert

Pater noster

Song of the snails who go to the funeral

First day

The broken mirror

The bunch of flowers

He circled round me

Paris by night

For you my love

The birds of sorrow

Quicksands

When children are in love

Song of the gaoler

Food for thought

This love

I am just what I am

The dunce

The garden

Osiris, or the flight into Egypt

To paint the portrait of a bird

Unrestricted area

I saw a good many of them …

The road-sweeper (a ballet)

Family group

Despair is sitting on a bench

It is inadvisable …

Index of first lines

About the Author

Copyright

NOTE ON SOURCES

This volume brings together all A.S.J. Tessimond’s work that has appeared in book form¹ and some twenty-seven original poems and twenty-five translations hitherto unpublished or uncollected.

Three volumes were published during the poet’s lifetime: The walls of glass (Methuen, 1934), Voices in a giant city (Heinemann, 1947), and Selection (Putnam, 1958). There have been two posthumous selections, both edited by Hubert Nicholson: Not love perhaps … (Autolycus Publications, 1978) and Morning meeting (Autolycus Publications, 1980).

Of the previously uncollected material in the present volume, four of the translations from the French of Jacques Prévert and some seventeen of his own poems were first published in periodicals during the poet’s lifetime, the earliest when he was twenty-four. Details are as follows:

The New Age: The pathetic fallacy (27 May, 1926); Symphony in red (25 November, 1926); Charleston (7 April, 1927); Soliloquy of the artists (22 March, 1928).

The New Coterie: The conductor (Summer-Autumn, 1927).

Poetry: Lines (vol. 32, no. 1, April 1928); Portrait (vol. 47, no. 4, January 1936).

This Quarter: Authorship; Man; A painting by Seurat (vol. 1, no. 3, 1928); Sleep; The train (vol. 1, no. 4, 1929).

The Fortnightly Review: Dancing (July, 1935).

Life and Letters: Latter-day oracles: Noise (vol. 14, no. 3, Spring 1936).

Twentieth Century Verse: In that cold land; To a lover of living (no. 1, January 1937).

Delta: Conversation with a disembodied spirit (no. 18, Summer 1959).

The London Magazine: Three Prévert translations: Quicksands; When children are in love; Song of the gaoler (September 1956).

Encounter: Prévert translation: Paris by night (June 1958).

Of the poems printed in the earlier collections, many appeared first in the pages of some of the above or in the following publications: Adelphi; Du (Zurich); European Caravan; Horizon; Listener; London Mercury; Modern Writing; New English Weekly; New Statesman; New Yorker; Orion; Penguin New Writing; Programme (Oxford); Seed; Spectator; Sunday Times; Tambour (Paris); Time and Tide; The Times; Times Literary Supplement; transition (Paris); Truth; Weekend Review.

Tessimond’s poems have been broadcast in England, Ireland, Australia, Canada and South Africa, as well as by BBC External Services. Some have been used as test-pieces at various festivals and contests, have appeared in numerous school textbooks, and are to be found in many well-known anthologies, including New signatures (Hogarth, 1932); New country (Hogarth, 1933); Poems of our time, 1900–42 (Everyman); Poems of the war years (Macmillan); The terrible rain (Methuen, 1966); The centuries’ poetry, 5 (Penguin, 1938); Poetry 1934–50 (Longmans Green, for the British Council); The Guinness book of poetry (1959–60, Putnam); the P.E.N. New poems, 1952 (Michael Joseph); and The Oxford book of twentieth-century English verse (1973).

The British Council tape-recorded Tessimond reading seventeen of his poems, and his work is still constantly broadcast and anthologised in Britain and abroad.

Grateful acknowledgement is tendered to all the above-named publishers and publications. The present editor also feels the warmest gratitude to Mr Jonathan Barker,