One of poetry’s goals is to hold up a mirror so we can see ourselves for who we really are, stripped of titles and worldly vanities, that we are ultimately insignificant creatures in the great tide of history. But seldom do we come across this level of honesty in poetry as in the work of the British poet, A.S. J Tessimond (1902-1962).
Born in 1902 in Birkenhead near Liverpool, A.S.J. Tessimond was one of the most individual, versatile and approachable voices in the 20th century. His poetry is remarkable for its lucidity, wit and formal exactness. Out of step with his contemporaries like Ezra Pound and T.S. Elliot, Tessimond was always a marginalized figure, and he knew it. He published only three collections of poems, each largely forgotten even by lovers of poetry. Yet, I think he deserves better, for the courage to hold up the mirror, and write poems that are unflinchingly honest depictions of the loneliness of urban life.
THE MAN IN THE BOWLER HAT
By A.S.J. Tessimond
I am the unnoticed, the unnoticeable man:
the man who sat on your right in the
morning train;
the man who looked through like a
windowpane;
the man who was the color of the
carriage,
the color of the mounting
morning pike smoke.
I am the man too busy with a living
to live, too hurried and worried
to see and smell and touch;
the man who is patient too long
and obeys too much,
and wishes too softly and seldom.
I am the man they call the
nation’s backbone,
who am boneless – playable
catgut, pliable clay,
the man they label little lest one day
I dare to grow.
I am the rails on which the moment passes,
the megaphone for many words and voices.
I am the graph diagram, composite faces.
I am the led, the easily-fed,
the tool, the not-quite fool,
the would-be-safe-and-sound,
the uncompromising, bound,
the dust fine-ground, stone for
statute, wave worn, pebble round.
Further Reading
Tessimond died in 1962, two months shy of this 60th birthday. It would fall to Hubert Nicholson, his friend and executor, to make a posthumous selection of his work, including a number of uncollected and unpublished poems. The collected volume Not Love Perhaps (1978) is a good place to savor the spirit of Tessimond’s poetry. It has at its heart, the memorable title piece which contrasts the idea of romantic love that “many waters cannot quench” with the notion of a mutual companionship that enables two people to “walk more firmly through dark narrow places.”