Sudden Heaven: The Collected Poems of Ruth Pitter, A Critical Edition

Sudden Heaven

Ruth Pitter, c. 1925. Photo by Win Murrell.

Sudden Heaven

The Collected Poems of Ruth Pitter

A CRITICAL EDITION

Edited by Don W. King

Kent, Ohio

Publication of this volume is made possible in part through the generous

support of Cameron La Follette, Mary Susan Fulgum, and The Friends of

Montreat College Library.

© 2018 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242

Poems and prose by Ruth Pitter are copyright © 2018 by Mark Pitter and are

reprinted with permission.

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-60635-345-5

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cataloging information for this title is available at the Library of Congress.

22  21  20  19  18       5  4  3  2  1

To Alyssa, Corrie, Emily, and Mary Willis

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chronology of Ruth Pitter’s Life (1897–1992)

First Poems

First and Second Poems

Persephone in Hades

A Mad Lady’s Garland

A Trophy of Arms

The Spirit Watches

The Rude Potato

The Bridge

On Cats

The Ermine

Still by Choice

End of Drought

A Heaven to Find

Other Poems

Appendix 1: A Return to Poetic Law

Appendix 2: Hunting the Unicorn

Appendix 3: There Is a Spirit

Notes

Chronological Bibliography of Ruth Pitter’s Poetry

Critical Bibliography

Index of Titles

Index of First Lines

Acknowledgments

I have many persons to thank for assistance in writing Sudden Heaven: The Collected Poems of Ruth Pitter, A Critical Edition. Dr. Judith Priestman, curator of the Bodleian Library’s literary manuscripts, has been a faithful supporter in all my efforts, as has her colleague, Colin Harris, superintendent of the Special Collections Reading Rooms. Elizabeth Pearson, the library director at Montreat College, together with her staff, especially Nathan King and Rebecca Shaw, have been endlessly patient and helpful in securing materials. I am grateful as well to Jeff Walden of the BBC Written Archives Centre. I thank Mark Pitter, Ruth Pitter’s nephew and literary executor; Mark has been ever helpful and encouraging, and I have fond memories of many visits to his home in Ludlow. I am grateful to the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society for inviting me to speak on Pitter and for their helpful criticism, and I thank also the C. S. Lewis Foundation for permitting me to lead a week-long seminar at the Kilns during the summers of 2004 and 2009, where I introduced participants to Pitter through her letters and poems.

I owe debts of gratitude to Paul Maurer, president of Montreat College; the Faculty Scholarship Committee of Montreat College, for awarding me several summer research grants; and the Appalachian College Association, for awarding me two additional summer research grants. I also thank Cameron La Follette, Mary Susan Fulgum, and The Friends of Montreat College Library for their support. Thanks are due as well to my student research assistants: Emily Baker, Margaret Coe, Laura Davidson, Mary Willis Fife, Molly-Kate Garner, Corrie Greene, Mordecai Howard, Alyssa Klaus, and MacKenzie May. In addition, I have been encouraged to write this book by many of Pitter’s admirers, including Thomas McKean, Peter Dickinson, Helena Nelson, Morar Randolph, Ann Soutter, Walter Hooper, John Adams, Salwa Koddham, and Laura Cecil. Many thanks are also due to Joe Christopher and Diana Glyer, who read early versions of the manuscript and offered insightful comments and suggestions. I am most appreciative of the excellent editorial advice of Kent State University Press, especially Joyce Harrison, Marian Buda, and Will Underwood. Finally, I owe my wife, Jeanine, a great debt for her patience and understanding regarding the many hours spent away from her while working on this book.

All poems and prose by Ruth Pitter are used by permission of Mark Pitter. Pitter’s essay Hunting the Unicorn was delivered on February 17, 1961; it is used by permission of BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham Park, Reading, England. Pitter’s manuscript notebooks, letters, essays, and other materials are held in thirty-nine boxes of uncatalogued papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, hereafter referred to as Pitter’s Papers.

Introduction

Sudden Heaven: The Collected Poems of Ruth Pitter culminates for me more than twenty years of research on Ruth Pitter. I had not heard of Pitter until the mid-1990s when I was researching and writing C. S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse.¹ I had already spent many hours in the Bodleian Library working on C. S. Lewis, Poet, when one day, during discussions with Judith Priestman, I learned that a biography of Pitter was long overdue. Judith urged me to begin researching Pitter’s life and work, and to my delight I found much to admire and appreciate. What followed was Hunting the Unicorn: A Critical Biography of Ruth Pitter (2008).² While not hagiography, Hunting the Unicorn was a genuine labor of love. Six years later, I followed with The Letters of Ruth Pitter: Silent Music (2014).³ These two books set the stage for Sudden Heaven, the final book in what has become an unplanned trilogy.

Although Ruth Pitter (1897–1992) is not well known, her credentials as a poet are extensive, and in England from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s she maintained a modest yet loyal readership. In total she produced seventeen volumes of new and collected verse. In 1937, her A Trophy of Arms (1936) was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Poetry, and in 1954 she won the William E. Heinemann Award for The Ermine (1953). Most notably, perhaps, in 1955 she became the first woman to receive the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry; this unprecedented event merited a personal audience with the Queen. Furthermore, from 1946 to 1972 she was often a guest on BBC radio programs, and from 1956 to 1960 she appeared regularly on the BBC’s The Brains Trust, one of the first television talk programs. In 1974, the Royal Society of Literature elected her a Companion of Literature, its highest honor, and in 1979 she received her last national award when she was appointed a Commander of the British Empire.⁴

Critical evaluations of her poetry have always been favorable. In his preface to Pitter’s First and Second Poems, Hilaire Belloc praises her poetry as an exceptional reappearance of the classical spirit amongst us. He likens her verse to a strong stone building and argues that really good verse, "contrasted with the general run of that in the midst of which it appears, seems to me to have a certain quality of hardness; so that, in the long run, it will be discovered, as a gem is discovered in mud. In her poetry, he finds beauty and right order."⁵ Belloc also writes in his preface to Pitter’s A Mad Lady’s Garland that she has two peculiar poetic gifts: A perfect ear and exact epithet. How those two ever get combined is incomprehensible—one would think it was never possible—but when the combination does appear then you have verse of that classic sort which is founded and secure of its own future.⁶ Rudolph Gilbert calls Pitter the poet of purity and notes what the poetry reader values most in Pitter’s poems is her eloquence … In Pitter one almost looks through the language, as through air, discerning the exact form of the objects which stand there, and every part and shade of meaning is brought out by the sunny light resting upon them. Later he adds: She has a first-rate intuitive gift of observation, a control of poetic language and magical perception that is always to be found in great poetry.⁷ C. S. Lewis, who carried on an extensive correspondence with Pitter about poetry, often lavished praise on her verse. Regarding her Trophy of Arms (1936), for example, he writes that it "is enough for one letter for it has most deeply delighted me. I was prepared for the more definitely mystical poems, but not for this cool, classical quality. You do it time after time—create a silence and vacancy and awe all round the poem. If the Lady in Comus had written poetry one imagines it wd. have been rather like this."⁸

Pitter’s literary admirers eventually published the festschrift, Ruth Pitter: Homage to a Poet. There David Cecil—also one of her longtime correspondents—described her as the most moving of living English poets, and one of the most original.⁹ John Arlott referred to her as a poet’s poet, while Thom Gunn noted that she is the most modest of poets, slipping us her riches as if they were everyday currency.¹⁰ Kathleen Raine was even more generous in her praise: I now see her as one of the poets whose best work will survive as long as the English language, with whose expressiveness in image and idea she has kept faith, remains.¹¹ Other writers who praised Pitter in this festschrift included Edmund Blunden, Andrew Young, John Betjeman, Richard Church, Roy Fuller, Elizabeth Jennings, Carolyn Kizer, Ngaio Marsh, Robin Skelton, Hallam Tennyson, John Wain, and John Hall Wheelock. Furthermore, Philip Larkin, who edited the Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse, included four of her poems, noting that her poetry was rather good.¹² Larkin’s praise is noteworthy since he, like Pitter, wrote poetry in the vein of other traditional English poets, such as Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman. Even after her death, critical praise continued. In her introduction to Pitter’s Collected Poems, Elizabeth Jennings, noting Pitter’s acute sensibility and deep integrity, describes her poems as informed with a sweetness which is also bracing, and a generosity which is blind to nothing, neither the sufferings in this world nor the quirky behavior of human beings.¹³

In spite of this high regard, Pitter lived most of her life in relative obscurity, since she did not found a new school or participate in the modernist movement heralded by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Instead, she worked at her craft in a quiet, consistent, and deliberate fashion. She writes about this in There is a Spirit, the preface to Poems 1926–1966:

My purpose [as a poet] has never varied.… It has been simply to capture and express some of the secret meanings which haunt life and language: the silent music, the dance in stillness, the hints and echoes and messages of which everything is full; the smile on the face of the tiger, or of the Bernini seraph. The silent music is within oneself too, or it would not be detected elsewhere. In the face of mundane joy it says … but all the same! and in the face of horror … but all the same! As though the normal targets of consciousness were somehow unreal; life, bursting with its secret, sits hugging itself until we have read the riddle.¹⁴

Sudden Heaven brings together the most comprehensive collection of Pitter’s poetry yet to appear and offers readers easy access to one of the most important female poets of mid-twentieth-century British verse. This collection arranges Pitter’s poems in chronological order, allowing readers to gauge Pitter’s maturation as a poet. And maturation they will certainly see. Indeed, Pitter’s early verse—especially the poetry appearing in the New Age (1911–23), First Poems (1920), and First and Second Poems (1927)—is not her best.¹⁵ She writes competent verse, but rarely produces a powerful poem. Overly influenced by the popular Georgian poetry of that era, most of Pitter’s early poems are vapid, abstract, detached, and impersonal. Among their weaknesses are archaic spellings—as in these lines from Fairy-Gold: I have a brother clepëd Fairy-Gold, / Who dwelleth not in housen nor with men¹⁶—frequent use of the archaic second person—thou, thee, thine, ye—and archaic verbal inflections such as eth and est. Moreover, Pitter’s early poetry reveals a fascination with fairies and elves; later in life, she critiqued herself for this obsession, claiming that she believed in fairies until she was eighteen.

In addition, many early poems employ abstract rather than concrete description; it is as if she is describing images she has observed covering the outside of an inexpensive piece of pottery rather a direct visual experience. However, perhaps the greatest weakness of her early work is that she fails to convey human experiences with convincing imaginative intensity. For example, almost never do we hear a voice that is self-reflective, informed, or contemplative. Instead, we hear a detached, impersonal voice—affected rather than natural, artificial rather than genuine, distant rather than personal—suggesting Pitter’s inability to integrate her emotional life into her poetry. Rather than plumb the depths of her emotions, she blocks access to her inner life. Accordingly, she repeatedly relies on a familiar, tired, Georgian persona, skating on the surface of things, content with shallow, unconvincing musings. In the very modest selection of her poems from the New Age, First Poems, and First and Second Poems that I have included, readers will find the weaknesses noted, but also evidence that Pitter pursued her muse tirelessly, if not in an inspired fashion. Perhaps the best way to think of these early efforts is as those of an apprentice poet.

As I have argued in Hunting the Unicorn, I believe the key moment in Pitter’s poetic maturation occurred as a result of a near-catastrophic accident. In mid-August 1930, a small can of cellulose paint exploded while she was opening it, and the lid flew up, severely injuring her left eye—not only lacerating it but also coating it with amyl acetate and pieces of hard pigment. For two months, Pitter feared she had permanently lost the use of her eye. Although the physical disability was only short-term and her sight gradually returned, the terrible injury became a catalyst for the maturation of her imaginative life. Reduced to invalid status and unable to maintain her frenetic work schedule as an artisan, Pitter took advantage of her physical inactivity to explore, profoundly and deeply, the hitherto untapped wells of her poetic imagination. This is most evident in Pitter’s poem Stormcock in Elder.¹⁷ Pitter’s own gloss on the poem connects it to her eye injury: This poem is very singular to me because it was composed when I had temporarily quite lost my sight as the result of an accident. I’d seen the bird many years before, but it was only then, when I was blind, that its image came back to me in the most minute detail. … The small details … would not have been seen consciously while the eye was in action. But the image from the unconscious mind came back more complete than anything directly seen.¹⁸

In effect, then, the eye injury led to the emergence of a genuine poetic voice as Pitter began to write poems crafted less while the eye was in action and more from the insights of her unconscious mind. Her enforced blindness caused her to turn within to see. As a result, she attended to her inner poetic voice in new and dramatically transforming ways. Where once she had embraced nature visually, like the young Wordsworth, her blindness forced her to explore her memories of nature and natural objects in a more deliberate, reflective, and intuitive manner, recalling the work of the older Wordsworth in poems such as Tintern Abbey and Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. Although before her accident, Pitter wrote about the surface of human existence in a flat, unconvincing, ethereal tone, this pause, this inner exploration, gave her the time to penetrate the mysteries of life. The retreat within, perhaps combined with the fear of never seeing again, drove her to a closer examination of her own poetic vision. Whereas once she had maintained a detached, impersonal relationship with her poetry, now she made intimate connections with the subjects of her verse, often with startling insights about the human condition—its joys, doubts, loves, fears, commitments, uncertainties, convictions, and longings.

Driven into the fulsome well of her imagination, Pitter learned how to draw on past memories as the controlling foci of a vast poetic reservoir. Indeed, over the next twenty-five years, the period of her most memorable and powerful work, she drew deeply from this pool of memory. In poem after poem, the blind poet retreats back to her forest of memories, delighting in the sights, sounds, smells, and touch of the paths, trees, birds, flowers, meadows, brooks, and inhabitants of her beloved Hainault Forest.¹⁹ Her years of living in a cottage her parents had rented in Hainault Forest inadvertently developed into a wellhead of stored memories; the poetic energy that had only trickled out in her poetry up to her thirtieth year began to gush out into a flowing stream through the mid-1950s. Had she not suffered the eye injury and the enforced idleness it precipitated, she might never have made the imaginative descent into this poetic spring. In effect, Pitter’s eye injury was the key event that unlocked her voice as a poet. Out of a potential disaster, she reaped a benefit she could never have anticipated.

The first expression of this new poetic voice occurs in her only narrative poem, Persephone in Hades (1931).²⁰ In Persephone, Pitter explores the possibilities of narrative verse, experimenting with the pathetic fallacy, epic similes, sustained blank verse, and the canto. The narrative quality of the verse is competent enough, but the poem’s dearth of dialogue makes the story tedious at times. Still, she handles the pace and rhythm of blank verse easily, and her enthusiasm for the Persephone myth is one she held from her youth. Pitter’s interest in the relationship between death and life, as well as in the spiritual motifs of resurrection, suffering, doubt, and renewal, find first expression here, before she explores them more deeply in her lyric poetry. In brief, Persephone is an unexpected yet skillful composition helping to mark Pitter’s movement away from her ineffective and immature early poetry and toward her controlled and mature verse.

After Persephone, Pitter refocused her imaginative life and began a series of poems that heralded the shift from her heretofore ineffective poetic voice to a newer, more powerful one. The result was A Mad Lady’s Garland (1934)—a group of poems offered through the lens of odd, grotesque points of view, including those of insects and animals.²¹ It is not a volume reflecting an angry or insane voice; rather, in spite of the obvious bad pun, it is a madcap volume—a comic garland, a poet’s laurel wreath given in good fun to herself and others. Nevertheless, we should be careful not to dismiss it for that reason; in fact, some of its poems are actually more serious than a first glance suggests. So while there is genuine laughter and gentle satire in the Garland, the volume also chronicles Pitter’s maturing poetic voice, especially the authorial distance she realizes by adopting the various animal and insect personas. Such distancing allows her to explore the human condition with a voice that is honest, incisive, sympathetic, intuitive, and winsome. She moves from being a poet writing thinly veiled poems about herself, and thus, ironically, coming across as impersonal and flat, to being a poet writing poems touching on many of the most important of human experiences—love, longing, loss, death, beauty, aspiration, religious faith, the desire for a sense of place, nature’s appeal, friendship, isolation, and intellectual exploration. In the process, she transforms her verse into poetry that disturbs and affirms, that challenges and comforts, that confronts and reconciles. By distancing herself, Pitter paradoxically learns how to enter into relationship with her readers.

Even more reflective of her maturation and new voice is A Trophy of Arms (1936).²² Unlike A Mad Lady’s Garland, which is unified by its use of animal and insect personas, its beast fables, and its pervading comic tone, A Trophy of Arms explores the melancholic reality of the human condition, yet it is neither depressing nor despairing. Instead, it is a clarion call to embrace sorrow, loss, and loneliness either through the lens of nature or through a veiled, transcendent power. Technically, A Trophy of Arms illustrates Pitter’s reliance on rhyming couplets (most often tetrameter but in one case heroics), alternate rhyme, tercets, terza rima, sonnets, modified Sapphics, and blank verse. Throughout the collection, we see Pitter expanding the range of her poetic voice; she does this primarily by creating a persona that offers her the opportunity to write about deeply felt personal experiences while at the same time providing her with a useful distancing device. The poems can be easily grouped according to four dominant themes: the cottage in Hainault Forest, romantic love, joy versus pain, and spiritual themes—including God, the soul, the meaning of human existence, and death. Both A Mad Lady’s Garland and A Trophy of Arms demonstrate that Pitter has shed the flat, impersonal voice of her early efforts; instead she reaches out to her readers in these volumes: in the first collection drawing them into her comic verse via the unusual narrators, and in the second, inviting them into her serious verse via simple, direct diction and compelling themes that speak to the underlying realities of the human condition.

This sober, life-seasoned voice also marks two subsequent volumes, both World War II collections: The Spirit Watches (1939) and The Bridge (1945).²³ Given the historical setting of a Europe entering a cataclysmic spiral, it is telling that the title of the first collection, The Spirit Watches, offers assurance that human events are part of a larger story. Familiar themes shape the volume, including the cottage and Hainault Forest, life and death, and the spiritual life—particularly the question of God’s existence and his involvement in human existence. The Spirit Watches is a natural extension of A Trophy of Arms, and the thematic similarities between the two volumes are easy to see. The one notable difference between the two is the preponderance of references to heavenly bodies—stars, moon, sun, planets—in The Spirit Watches. Urania, the muse of astronomy, music, dance, and poetry, appears in several poems, and the sun is often invoked as well. Collectively these heavenly references convey a sense of humanity’s place under the stars, our story as not greater than the universal one but intimately connected to, and perhaps even guided by, the cosmic confluence of stars, moon, sun, and planets. While Pitter never explicitly states in The Spirit Watches whether or not a benign but distant God is above these heavenly bodies, directing them and mankind, she hints that this is so.

The Bridge: Poems 1939–1944 is an introspective collection of poems influenced by Pitter’s wartime experiences.²⁴ The Bridge continues the pattern established in A Trophy of Arms and The Spirit Watches, in which small clusters of poems have clear thematic connections; in addition, this volume is characterized by recurring images and symbols, particularly of water, birds, and flowers. Not surprisingly, several of its poems reflect Pitter’s wartime experiences, while others return to the cottage and Hainault Forest, the natural world, romantic love, and human discord. Also Pitter does not entirely lose sight of the possibility of a benign, distant God that she hints at in The Spirit Watches; although his presence in The Bridge is not as pervasive as in The Spirit Watches, her conception of God is moving in the direction of orthodox Christianity. In the few poems she writes about God, we sense that she is on the verge of a spiritual conversion. The melancholic tone of the poems marks The Bridge as profoundly influenced by Pitter’s wartime experiences, yet, characteristically, she never gives in to despair.

A third World War II volume, The Rude Potato (1941), returns to the humorous tone of A Mad Lady’s Garland.²⁵ While Pitter enjoyed writing these comic poems, they should be seen as diversions, not as her central concern. The Rude Potato reveals that Pitter did not take herself too seriously, particularly as she aged. While angst, melancholy, worry, and fear were consistent aspects of her personality, Pitter was not given to despair, despite the very real challenges she would face in the remaining years of the war.

Pitter’s first postwar collection, On Cats (1946), is comic in the tradition of A Mad Lady’s Garland and The Rude Potato.²⁶ In it, Pitter, sometimes with her tongue in her cheek, surveys the melancholy life of cats. Her cat poems explore the hard daily challenges cats face; accordingly, in the midst of the comic, a dark undercurrent runs throughout On Cats that reflects in part Pitter’s own daily challenge of earning a living. Its poems explore, for example, cat covens that give caterwauling a Latin dignity; orphaned but street-savvy cats; the dangers facing new kitten litters; the final glorification of a neutered tomcat; the excessive human petting of cats; and cats’s endurance of the ways of humans.

The crowning achievement of Pitter’s poetic maturation is The Ermine: Poems 1942–1952 (1953), which marks a noticeable turn in Pitter’s poetic and spiritual life.²⁷ Of special note is the fact that none of its poems focus on Hainault Forest or the cottage; in addition, none of them deal with romantic love, either yearning for it or lamenting its loss. The Ermine chronicles the culmination of Pitter’s spiritual search and contains her most mature poems—well-crafted, thought-provoking, emotionally powerful, and aesthetically pleasing. The poems in this volume are so far from the early verse of The New Age, First Poems, and First and Second Poems that the uninformed might imagine they could not have been written by the same person. Indeed, The Ermine illustrates how Pitter grew as a poet over the years—often working in snatches of time, worn weary by the demands of trade, but ever true to her muse, ever seeking ways to share through poetry the longings of her heart, the fears of her mind, and the convictions of her soul.

Thirteen years passed before the publication of Pitter’s next collection, Still by Choice (1966).²⁸ That Pitter was approaching seventy when Still by Choice appeared is remarkable; that the poems are as good as they are is even more remarkable. While she was slowing down in terms of producing poems, the ones she wrote were as effective as ever. Although she continued to rely on established meter (iambic trimeter, tetrameter, and pentameter) and rhyme schemes (rhyming couplets or alternate line rhyme), this was no fault, given the precision and expertise of her lines. She was not stifled by tried and tested poetic forms; instead, they liberated her to peer deeply into the human condition and write poems of penetrating mystical exploration. And while her religious faith undergirded her vision of the world, she explored issues of faith obliquely and indirectly. She was not about to turn preacher; clubbing her readers with a spiritual cudgel would have been anathema to her. Perhaps the greatest irony regarding Still by Choice is that for many readers it was the first volume of Pitter’s verse they read; that is, her public prominence as broadcaster, television personality, magazine writer, and lecturer drew readers to her poetry, rather than the converse.

In Pitter’s final two volumes, End of Drought (1975) and A Heaven to Find (1987), there is an appreciable dropping off.²⁹ End of Drought is primarily composed of independent poems culled from old manuscripts or from previously published but uncollected pieces; there is no unifying theme or focus. A Heaven to Find comprises Pitter’s last harvest of verse. With the exception of Cricket Match, 1908, Close, Mortal Eyes (an expanded version of the same poem first published in A Trophy of Arms), and Lewis Appears (which Pitter had sent C. S. Lewis in August 1955), the poems it contains were written in the 1970s or early 1980s. In the concluding section of Sudden Heaven, I gather a small group of poems that either are published here for the first time or appeared previously in other anthologies or collections.

More than anything else, I believe the key to understanding Pitter’s life and work is found in her essay, We Cannot Take Less, which aired as a BBC radio address entitled by Pitter Hunting the Unicorn,³⁰ in which she reflects:

I was sitting in front of a cottage door one day in spring, long ago; a few bushes and flowers round me, a bird gathering nesting material, the trees of the forest at a little distance. A poor place—nothing glamorous about it. … [when s]uddenly everything assumed a different aspect—no, its true aspect. For a moment, it seemed to me, the truth appeared in its overwhelming splendour. The secret was out, the explanation given. Something that had seemed like total freedom, total power, total bliss—a good with no bad as its opposite—an absolute that had no opposite—this thing, so unlike our feeble nature, had suddenly cut across one’s life—and vanished … What is this thing? … Is it—could it be, after all—a hint of something more real than this life—a message from reality—perhaps a particle of reality itself? If so, no wonder we hunt it so unceasingly, and never stop desiring and pining for it. (Feb. 17, 1961; Pitter’s emphasis)

Ruth Pitter’s poetry often takes us to hidden places—to the secret things of life, to the things just beyond the material, to the very meaning of life. A case in point is her poem, Sudden Heaven:

All was as it had ever been—

The worn familiar book,

The oak beyond the hawthorn seen,

The misty woodland’s look:

The starling perched upon the tree

With his long tress of straw—

When suddenly heaven blazed on me,

And suddenly I saw:

Saw all as it would ever be,

In bliss too great to tell;

Forever safe, forever free,

All bright with miracle:

Saw as in heaven the thorn arrayed,

The tree beside the door;

And I must die—but O my shade

Shall dwell there evermore.³¹

As Sudden Heaven illustrates, Pitter’s poems are often the result of a heightened sense of felt experience just beyond the margins of human perception—intuitive and evocative. In many of her poems, we experience sudden heaven or catch glimpses of the hidden treasure. If human life is lived behind a veil faintly obscuring reality, Pitter’s poems often lift the edge of the veil. In her hunt for the unicorn, many of us join the pursuit, because, like Pitter, we cannot take less.

I employed the following editorial principles while editing Sudden Heaven. First, as I have already noted, I arranged the poems chronologically as much as was possible. Accordingly, after each poem I give the date of its composition; in cases where I have not been able to establish that date with certainty, I note this with a question mark. Second, I have retained Pitter’s British spellings (for example, favourite rather than favorite) with one exception: I changed her for ever to forever. Third, on rare occasions I have made minor alterations to her punctuation. Fourth, throughout the editing process I consulted Pitter’s manuscript notebooks and her unpublished poems, available in the thirty-nine boxes (especially boxes 19–29) of her uncatalogued papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Fifth, in the appendixes, I have included three essays by Pitter regarding poetry: A Return to Poetic Law, Hunting the Unicorn, and There Is a Spirit. Finally, in glossing Pitter’s poems in the notes, all biblical references are to the King James Version.

Chronology of Ruth Pitter’s Life

(1897–1992)

1897, 7 November. Ruth Pitter (no middle name on birth certificate) is born to George and Louisa Pitter at 1 Meath Road, in Ilford, Essex, an East End London suburb.

1899. Ruth’s sister, Olive, is born.

1902. Ruth’s brother, Geoffrey, is born.

1903. Ruth attends the Downshall elementary school.

1909–15. Ruth attends the Coborn School for Girls.

1911. Ruth Pitter’s first poem, Field Grasses, is published by Alfred Richard Orage, in The New Age 9, no. 2 (May 11, 1911): 29. More than 150 of Ruth’s poems appear in The New Age over the next dozen years.

1914. Pitter’s parents rent an old cottage in Hainault Forest on Crabtree Hill in Essex; it becomes a favorite place for summer vacations, family walks, and picnics. The forest and the cottage become important catalysts for many of her later poems.

1915, 7 November. On her eighteenth birthday, Pitter becomes a temporary junior clerk in the income tax department of the War Office.

1917. Pitter moves to the Suffolk coastal village of Walberswick and begins to work for the Walberswick Peasant Pottery Company, a decorative furniture business.

1919. The Walberswick Peasant Pottery Company moves to the Chelsea section of London. Pitter meets Kathleen M. O’Hara, who becomes her business partner and housemate. Living in the Chelsea area of London, Pitter meets many other aspiring poets, artists, and writers, including Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell.

1920. First Poems is published by Cecil Palmer of London.

1923. Pitter is befriended and encouraged by the writer and journalist Hilaire Belloc.

1926. Ruth’s father, George Pitter, dies; her mother, Louisa Pitter, buys Oak Cottage, a little country house at the North End, near Dunmow, Essex, that becomes a favorite weekend and holiday retreat from London.

1927. First and Second Poems is published, with Belloc’s help, by Sheed & Ward of London.

1929. Pitter and O’Hara purchase a decorative furniture business; on June 18, 1930, they officially register their business as Deane and Forester at 55, Church Street, Chelsea, S.W. 3.

1930, August. Pitter temporarily loses her eyesight as the result of an exploding can of paint; during a six-week convalescence, she composes Stormcock in Elder.

1931. Persephone in Hades is published, with Belloc’s help, by A. Sauriac of Gers, France. Throughout the 1930s, Pitter and O’Hara work sixty-hour weeks to establish Deane and Forester.

1934. A Mad Lady’s Garland is published to critical acclaim by Cresset Press of London.

1936. A Trophy of Arms: Poems 1926–1935 is published by Cresset Press of London. A Trophy of Arms wins the Hawthornden Prize in 1937.

1939. The Spirit Watches is published by Cresset Press of London. Because of World War II, Deane and Forester begins to fail.

1941. Louisa Pitter dies. The Rude Potato is published by Cresset Press of London.

1943. Pitter and O’Hara go to work in a wartime factory, the Morgan Crucible Factory, across the Battersea Bridge.

1945. The Bridge: Poems 1939–1944 is published by Cresset Press of London. Pitter stops working at the factory and begins working again on decorative furniture, this time out of her flat at 55, Old Church Street, Chelsea.

1946. On Cats is published by Cresset Press of London. Pitter begins a corresponding with C. S. Lewis, writing him more than sixty letters through 1963. She makes her first appearance on BBC radio.

1950. Urania is published by Cresset Press of London. This is a collection of her poems from A Trophy of Arms, The Spirit Watches, and The Bridge.

1953. The Ermine: Poems 1942–1952 is published by Cresset Press of London and wins the William Heinemann Award.

1953, 11 December. Pitter and O’Hara retire from Chelsea and move to Long Crendon, a village near Oxford.

1955. Pitter is awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and has a personal audience with Queen Elizabeth II on October 19, 1955.

1955–65. Pitter appears regularly on BBC radio; in addition, she is a frequent panelist on BBC TV’s The Brains Trust, one of the first talking heads broadcasts.

1966. Still by Choice is published by Cresset Press of London.

1968. Poems 1926–1966 is published by Barrie and Rockcliff/Cresset Press of London.

1969. The festschrift, Ruth Pitter: Homage to a Poet, edited by Arthur Russell, is published by Rapp and Whiting of London.

1974. Pitter is named a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.

1975. End of Drought is published by Barrie and Jenkins of London.

1979. Pitter is appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.

1987. A Heaven to Find is published by Enitharmon of London. Pitter is now effectively blind.

1990. Collected Poems is published by Enitharmon of Petersfield.

1992, 29 February. Ruth Pitter dies.

First Poems

As a young woman, Pitter exhibited a single-minded commitment to writing verse that culminated in First Poems. One of the favorable reviews of this collection appeared in the weekly magazine The New Age. Citing as strengths Pitter’s individual vocabulary, consisting almost of an anthology of ‘fairy’ words; a spiral or trailing rhythm like that of a vine; simple subtlety; and a never-failing sense of style, even in the most apparently incongruous passages, the reviewer also identifies her poems as revealing a pre-occupation, or, perhaps, a re-occupation with fairy morality, distant and distinct from human morality.¹ Yet rather than discuss how such an emphasis distances Pitter from her readers, the reviewer states: [In her poems] the pitch of the contemplation is not, as yet, very exalted, being rarely above such subjects as grief and death and change; it will in all probability rise. Pitter’s First Poems only hints at her later success as a poet. Although she frequently employs diction reminiscent of John Keats and William Blake, Pitter is hampered by her lack of a distinct voice, her reluctance to explore her emotional life, and her lapses into reveries about fairies, as well as by archaic diction and imprecise imagery. In the selection that follows, I have included poems I count among the best.²

THE SWAN

With his red beak and marble plume,

Uttering his wild, his pulsant cry,

The Swan into the wild did fly.

Into the fiery dawn rode he,

5 And many burning cherubim ³

That know the face of the Most High,