In search of Nancy Cunard 2021
Literature accesses souls speaking out loud. Wordsworth is the example in English par excellence. Others of great merit for me were Blake, Keats, Shelley, W B Yeats, G M Hopkins, T S Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Theodore Roethke. Tagore, Rumi, and Rilke (unfortunately in translation) approach spiritual borderlands and report some of their glimpses.
I came across Nancy Cunard (1896-1965) by chance and ordered her Selected Poems through inter-library loan. Google her and be amazed. I agree with those who compare her Parallax (1925) favorably with TS Eliot's Waste Land. The poem ends with a mid-life confrontation with the double. Waste Land indeed if you stop there.
The great poet William Carlos Williams called Nancy "one of the major phenomena of history"; another friend said that "to be in the presence of Nancy was more like coming to grips with a force of nature. . . . It was impossible for her to work quietly for the rights of man; Nancy functioned best in a state of fury in which, in order to defend, she attacked every windmill in a landscape of windmills."
Nancy Cunard (1896-1965) photo portrait by Barbara Ker-Seymer
Last lines of Parallax (1925) by Nancy Cunard
…Only the statement, the unalterable deed only
Stands, and is no more than a halt on the track –
– And at last, before me
In fierce rise and fall of impetuous seasons,
The articulate skeleton
In clothes grown one with the frame,
At the finger-post waiting, aureoled with lamentations.
‘Hail partner, that went as I
In towns, in wastes – I, shadow,
Meet with you – I that have walked with recording eyes
Through a rich bitter world, and seen
The heart close with the brain, the brain crossed with the heart –
I that have made, seeing all,
Nothing, and nothing kept, nor understood
Of the empty hands, the hands impotent through
time that lift and fall
Along a question –
Nor of passing and re-passing
By the twin affirmations of never and forever,
In doubt, in shame, in silence.’
