Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Ruth Pitter lived in the twentieth century (1897-1992), but her poetry lives in an earlier time. It refuses to acknowledge Matthew Arnold's "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of faith, but struggles in isolation with religious doubt and meaning. As such, it is, on occasion, a powerfully individual poetry, but it is also radically cut off from the most significant movements of her time. The refusal to engage with Modernism and its aftermath stunts the poetry. The slightly archaic diction and windy abstractions persist into the late poems. The use of traditional verse forms (including the heroic couplet) evinces individual skill but makes no larger argument, unlike the work of Eliot, Auden and Larkin. A few late poems grapple with modern science, but the main thematic development in the Collected Poems is from the observation of nature to the description of dreams-visions, a movement backwards in time, from Romanticism to medievalism. The nature poems, from the start, a...

For Lust But for lust we could be friends —Ruth Pitter, “But for Lust” I want to call you back but do not think I should. I am in love now, you see, and love must exclude its look-alikes, its foreign gods, its counter proof. He is so good to me and when I am not good he gently planes away what in my soul is rough. Approve may rhyme with love, but so does disapprove. But oh the nights of passion you and I had shared, the baring of the places that we thought were bared, re-slotting what was present into what was past, no-holds-barred, no forbidden gestures, nothing spared. I will not call you back although I feel I must. Trust rhymes with lust, but, my desire, so does distrust.