RICHARD HAWTREE

Richard Hawtree: Why I Write

When Beowulf and his men arrive in Denmark to help Hrothgar defeat the murderous monster Grendel we read: ‘Stræt wæs stanfah,   stig wisode / gumum ætgædere.’ (ll. 320–21a). This sentence from the great early medieval poem Beowulf can be translated: ‘The road was paved, the path guided the men together.’ These words are not celebrated lines from the Anglo-Saxon epic, but they encapsulate what I admire when I read poetry and what I aim for when I write it. They possess a rhythmic balance and linguistic economy reflecting the confidence and purposefulness of those warriors. The men do not simply march along the road, the mysterious stone path itself guides them.
           
To my mind, writing a poem can feel very like walking that road in Beowulf: a path that is absolutely practical and yet somehow magical too. When I write, I’m keen to engage with the literary traditions and languages of the past (those ancient paving stones) but I also want to arrive somewhere new and to take readers or listeners there with me. I don’t expect to reach the radical clarity of George Herbert’s summation of prayer as: ‘The land of spices; something understood’ or the precise simplicity of Sylvia Plath’s opening line in ‘Morning Song’: ‘Love set you going like a fat gold watch.’ Yet the more I read the greater nourishment there will be for the journey.
 
As well as hunting for linguistic clarity in my reading, I try to relish the sheer difficulty of the writing process. I find the act of translating poetry from Latin especially helpful in this struggle. In a wonderful poem by Catullus (68) we hear the sound of a long-awaited lover’s sandal (her ‘arguta … solea’) squeaking on the threshold in language that powerfully combines wit and eroticism. Literary moments like this motivate me to read and write poetry.
 
And now I must return to that stone road. In Beowulf it leads to the hall of Heorot, the poem’s great symbol of light and hope in the face of overwhelming violence and evil. At line 311 the Beowulf-poet says of this hall: ‘lixte se leoma   ofer landa fela.’ (‘Its light shone over many lands.’) This is what necessary poetry sounds like. I’m off to read some more.  

Richard Hawtree is the author of The Night I Spoke Irish in Surrey