“She do the bereaved in different voices”: Denise Riley’s Restless Elegy

Clothing and costume are among Denise Riley’s key metaphors, from the white ballet skirt and headdress of her “Liberty Belle” to the synthetic fabrics of poems like “Shantung”, “Rayon” and “Lurex.”[1] Riley’s sartorial metaphors are key to understanding the restless role-playing of Riley’s lyric “I”. Exploring the motif of “trying on” in Riley’s poems, I consider in particular how her sequence “A Part Song” performs a sort of elegiac fancy dress, “do[ing] the bereaved in different voices” and incorporating various fragments from the elegiac tradition, from Milton to Hill, Shakespeare to Plath.[2] “A Part Song” might be thought of as a record of what Riley has called her “search for any evidence of fellow feeling” in elegiac literature, insisting on this idea of shared feeling as a way to help us “do” our own bereavement.[3]

Denise Riley is a poet and philosopher whose work is often associated with various experimental currents in British poetry. Fiona Sampson, for instance, groups Riley with J.H. Prynne and Barry MacSweeney as the heirs of a “discrete set of radical traditions” making up what she calls the “Exploded Lyric.”[4] A recent book by Edward Allen, meanwhile, includes Riley’s work as an example of “late modernist lyric,” with late modernism offered as a form of “renovation work” that seeks to revive old forms and traditions.[5] Riley’s work does, after all, wear its modernist inheritance on its sleeve: “A Part Song” is full of Eliotic echoes, and the collection in which it was published, Say Something Back (2016), takes its title and epigraph from W.S. Graham’s 1977 sequence “Implements in their Places.”[6] But since “A Part Song” was first published, Riley has achieved a level of mainstream acknowledgement not normally enjoyed by poets associated with more experimental schools of poetics: she has won or been shortlisted for just about every major British poetry award there is.

But first, an earlier Riley poem: “The Castalian Spring,” included in her recent Selected Poems (111–115). This poem opens with a Narcissus moment, with the poem’s speaker staring into the Castalian Spring at Delphi, said to be the source of poetic inspiration. Drinking from this spring, the speaker metamorphoses into a toad, literalizing the protean shapeshifting of Riley’s lyric “I.” As the poem develops, it presents a tableau of poetic composition, with the speaker self-consciously trying out a variety of poetic styles, from the maximalism of Messiaen to the “spiky” assonance of “girlish hellenics” (Selected Poems, 112). This is explicitly a poem of stylistic experimentation: in Part 8, Riley’s speaker plays the role of contemporary sound poet (“Aaghoooh, I sloughed off raark, aaarrgh noises”) before trying out some fragmentary surrealism (114). Still later, the speaker asks herself: “Could I try on that song of my sociologised self?” (115) Riley’s work constantly returns to this idea of “trying on” different styles of song. In her poem “Wherever you are, be somewhere else,” for example, poetic style is physicalized as clothing: “I can try on these gothic riffs, they do make / a black twitchy cloak” (69). A way of speaking, here, becomes a mode of dress.

Self-consciously drawing attention to the poet’s arsenal of vocal styles, “The Castalian Spring” takes us backstage, so to speak, into the lyric dressing room, where the speaker’s trying on of different voices works to undermine the illusion of lyric voice as a sort of personal signature: instead, each “voice” is just something tried out then exchanged for something else. And we need not assume that there is necessarily some coherent “I” beneath all these vocal costumes. At the end of “The Castalian Spring,” the speaker is transformed back into her original self, but even that original self is mere clothing: “By then I’d reflated, abandoned my toadhood, had pulled on / My usual skin like old nylons” (115). This is a repeated motif in Riley’s work: that identity is a costume we wear, and that there’s no true self beneath the mask we show the world.

“The Castalian Spring” and “A Part Song” are, in many ways, incredibly dissimilar poems. The former is driven not so much by emotion as by certain theoretical questions regarding lyrical self-presentation. “A Part Song”, on the other hand, is a deeply moving sequence inspired by the sudden death of the poet’s adult son. But the two poems showcase Riley’s dressing-room poetics, whereby lyric becomes a space for “trying on” different styles. While “The Castalian Spring” experiments with different types of lyric self-telling, “A Part Song” experiments with various possibilities for elegiac lyric. The latter is a poem which, despite its intense autobiographical impetus, nonetheless engages in a sort of morbid masquerade performance.

“A Part Song” has many voices, from the “fierce cicadas” of the speaker’s self-critical thoughts to the imagined voice of the dead son (Say Something Back, 3, 14). But it is also a poem which asks, explicitly, what role a bereaved mother can perform: “Yet might there still be some part for me / To play upon this lovely earth?” (4) The whole poem charts the speaker’s search for a “part” to play, including of course the role of mourner: “A wardrobe gapes, a mourner tries / Her several styles of howling-guise . . .” (5) What these lines seem to be foregrounding is the performative aspects of mourning, complete with costumes and guises that the mourner must choose from. But I also read this as a description of the poem’s polyvocal approach: Riley’s poem is trying different styles of elegy. The “howling” that elegy might perform – far from being uniquely expressive – is an item off the clothing rack with “several styles” to choose from: pre-existing styles through which grief can be voiced (5). Indeed, the singsong quality of these rhyming tetrameter couplets draws attention to the necessary stylization involved in public mourning: “It suits you as you are so pale. / Still, do not get that saffron veil” (5). This is less raw expression, these couplets suggest, than carefully curated performance.

The stylistic range of the sequence is palpable, from the nursery rhyme jingles of Part XV to the explosive speech rhythms of Part VII. Some styles are rejected outright as self-deceptive “[a]nodyne”: “I can’t get sold on reincarnating you / As those bloody gentle showers of rain . . . ” (8). Clare Harner’s “Do Not Stand by My Grave and Weep” is cited here as the exemplar of the sort of false consolation sometimes indulged by traditional elegy, consolation which Riley’s poem explicitly rejects. But other styles are entertained for longer. There’s the metaphysical conceit of the “[a]rdent bee”, for instance, or the “studied joy in natural separateness” of Part XIII, in which the speaker – echoing the figure of Herman Melville in Hart Crane’s elegy “At Melville’s Tomb” – “scrutinise[s] the chopped-up sea” and describes in deeply alliterative language the “spikes / And papery calyx frills of fading thrift” (9, 11). Likewise, the speaker tries on different pronouns (“I”, “you”, and “she”) and sounds out various modes of address, from imperative commands (“Come home I tell you”) and moving appeals (“do let it as I’m waiting”) to what resembles suicidal despair: “I so want to join you” (6, 7, 11).

The parts of “A Part Song” are not just songs, Peter Riley argues, but various different vocal performances: “wild monologues, invocations, one-sided dialogues, imaginings and imagings”.[7] The model for lyric in this poem, however, is no trained actor, but Sloppy from Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, the orphan boy who, according to Betty Higden, “is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.”[8] Reading the newspaper aloud, for Sloppy, is a polyvocal performance, and Riley gives this polyvocality an explicitly elegiac context:

She do the bereaved in different voices

For the point of this address is to prod

And shepherd you back within range

Of my strained ears…  (Say Something Back, 14)

The allusion here is an allusion to an allusion, referring also to T.S. Eliot’s draft title for The Waste Land: “He Do the Police in Different Voices”. With this citation, Riley associates “A Part Song” with the modernist polyvocality of Eliot’s 1922 poem, a poem which is itself deeply concerned with elegy, both public and private. In fact, the two poems share several references, most notably to Ariel’s song in The Tempest. Riley’s poem, like Eliot’s, shores up the fragments of various dead poets. In the image of “shepherd[ing]” (14) her son back towards her ears, for instance, we might hear an echo of Milton’s “loss to [s]hepherd[’]s ear”.[9] And in Riley’s image of “prod[ding]” (14) the dead back to life, we might catch an echo of Geoffrey Hill’s “Of Commerce and Society”: “Artistic men prod dead men from their stone”.[10] The elegiac echolalia of “A Part Song” seems to confirm Riley’s arguments in The Words of Selves regarding authorial displacement: that we are “spoken across by words” and “by their echoing of others’ speech.”[11] And in “A Part Song”, these echoes become part of the poem’s polyvocal performance, each allusion like a subtle accessory or trinket to embellish the poem’s vocal costumes.

So perhaps the wardrobe from which Riley’s speaker selects her “howling-guise” is a wardrobe of voices: different styles and echoes from elegiac history which the poem tries on in order to “do the bereaved” (Say Something Back, 5, 14). The poem, in its elegizing, offers a sort of historical overview of elegiac writing, weaving together echoes of Milton, Crane, Hill and so on. “A Part Song” thus performs what Riley calls, in Time Lived, the mourner’s restless “search for any evidence of fellow feeling” (111). In its restless groping through the annals of elegy and its incorporations of fragments and echoes, Riley’s poem is a moving testament to what she later calls, in Lurex, our “billions-fold democracy of distress” (Lurex, 57). Indeed, in Part VIII of “A Part Song”, she identifies explicitly with Demeter, whose daughter Persephone was abducted by Hades and taken to the underworld. Reversing the usual platitude, “I can’t imagine what you’re going through”, Riley emphasizes instead the necessity of such empathetic acts of identification: “Not so hard / To imagine what her mother had gone through . . .” (Say Something Back, 6).

As well as trying on different voices in a search for “fellow feeling” (Time Lived, 111), there is also an explicitly ritualistic element to this poem’s vocal performances, with the speaker presenting herself as the “piping” shepherd of pastoral elegy trying, through music, to bring her son back to life (Say Something Back, 14). The various stylistic experiments performed by the poem are presented as attempts to summon the dead son through song. True, the poem mocks the “[a]nodyne” consolation of the dead being immortalized in “showers of rain”, but the speaker actually professes a hope for something significantly more substantial: that if only the elegy can be “got right”, the dead might stroll back into our lives as if they never left (8, 13).

What Jahan Ramazani has called the “elegiac hope for resurrection” is therefore at the centre of “A Part Song.”[12] But it is also repeatedly undermined. As if to admit the futility of its attempts, Part XIX self-consciously mocks the mawkishness of its own stylistic restlessness:

Won’t you be summoned up once more

By my prancing and writhing in a dozen 

Mawkish modes of reedy piping to you

– Still no? Then let me rest, my dear. (Say Something Back, 14)

Elegy, here, is styled as a sort of shamanistic dance, so that “writing” becomes its near-homograph “writhing.” After the poem’s restless prancing through different “modes” of elegiac address, the speaker finally asks her son to “let [her] rest”. But this rest is also refused, because despite this penultimate part admitting the poem’s failure to summon the son through its vocal experiments, Part XX offers us the voice of the son himself. Rather than “do[ing] the bereaved”, the poem’s final performance is a ventriloquial one that gives voice to the formerly unresponsive son (14). Here is the second of the two quatrains:

O let me be, my mother

In no unquiet grave

My bone-dust is faint coral

Under the fretful wave (Say Something Back, 14)

These short three-beat lines are, like all of the voices Riley tries on, deeply allusive, the most apparent allusion being to the “unquiet grave” of Child Ballad 78, itself a song that ventriloquizes the dead. The roles, here, have suddenly reversed: the mother’s desire for “rest” becomes the dead son’s desire for quiet, captured neatly in the mirrored syntax of “Then let me rest, my dear” and “O let me be, my mother.”

We do apparently hear the son’s voice in these last two quatrains, but they do not offer any straightforward consolation: there is still deep “unquiet” in these lines, not least in the strained syntax and double negative of “no unquiet grave.” The disquiet is made all the more explicit with the poem’s penultimate word, “fretful”, a word in which, Daniel Hartley argues, “we detect the ineluctable stray notes of unreconciled loss.”[13] This is, Hartley suggests, a trace of the mother’s voice in her son’s valediction. But it is also a rejection of finality. In Time Lived, Riley considers the possibility of a “literature of consolation”, but that consolation is figured as a “recommencing” of life rather than an “imagined restoration or a smoothing-over of what is lost” (Time Lived, 116-17). Indeed, rather than quoting from Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia”, Time Lived instead quotes from a letter Freud wrote after the death of his daughter Sophie: “Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else.”[14]

At the end of “A Part Song”, Riley seems to fill the gap of her son’s silence with a ventriloquial performance of his voice which is also, in Freud’s words, “something else.” Though it is a single voice, this song also has a deeply collective or choral aspect to it, so that the poem’s “faint coral” is also a subtle pun on “choral” (Say Something Back, 14). Child Ballad 78 is, after all, an anonymous folk ballad, a song form emphatically associated with collective composition. And in its allusion to Ariel’s Song in The Tempest (“Of his bones are coral made”), [15] Riley’s poem evokes the voices of various other elegies, not just Eliot’s The Waste Land but also Sylvia Plath’s “Full Fathom Five” – an anti-elegy for her father who is imagined as “[o]ne labyrinthine tangle” under the sea.[16] Hence, this underwater song is sung not just by one voice but by a chorus of tangled voices reminiscent of the war dead in Riley’s “A gramophone on the subject” who “can’t disentangle [their] hymns” (Riley, Say Something Back, 66). The son’s voice has, to quote Ariel’s Song, “suffer[ed] a sea-change / Into something rich and strange” (Act I, Scene ii, ll. 401-2, p. 123), transformed into the “faint coral” of this choral song.

While Peter Riley reads this final part as an “answer to all this suspension and yearning” and a resolution to the sequence’s “quest for song”, I cannot help feeling that these final two quatrains, while gesturing towards the possibility of consolation, also refuse to offer closure – there is, notably, no full stop at the end of the second quatrain (Riley, “Denise . . .”). Even if mourning subsides, the poem suggests, “we shall remain inconsolable”, ending as it does with a sense not of rest but of fretfulness embodied in the waves (Freud to Binswanger, April 11, 1929). The reference to Ariel’s Song, too, creates its own uncertainty, because despite what Ariel says, Ferdinand’s father is not really dead. The pain of this echo, then, is to invoke the possibility that the speaker’s son, too, might not really be dead, or that death might just be another “part” being played.

In Riley’s hands, then, elegy is a space not of naive consolation, but of restlessness, both stylistic and affective. While “The Castalian Spring” is a poem defined by its playful experimentation, skipping through different styles of lyric self-telling, in “A Part Song” this “trying on” of voices takes place in the gaping wardrobe of elegy, complete with its various “styles of howling-guise” (Say Something Back, 5). The lyric dressing room of “The Castalian Spring” becomes, in “A Part Song”, a place fraught with feeling, ricocheting between affective detachment and entanglement, between one style and another.

One of the most moving things about reading “A Part Song” is, I think, its strained and reluctant recognition of poetry’s inability to transcend the reality of death. Even in that final part, where the dead are seemingly brought back to life in a song, the sorrows of actuality are still there in that “fretful wave” (14). Of course, if the sequence’s ambition is – as professed – the material resurrection of the dead, then it is doomed to failure from the start. But the sequence is also driven by a more modest hope, a hope embodied in its restlessness: that is, the restless search for “evidence of fellow feeling” (Riley, Time Lived, 111) that the poem seems to perform in its various citations and allusions. In fact, we might think of Riley’s poem as a subtle rejoinder to Samuel Johnson’s infamous critique of Milton’s “Lycidas”: “It is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion; for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions. . . . Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.”[17] Riley’s “A Part Song” is a poem that is full of passion, but it is one that also incorporates all sorts of “remote allusions” and echoes. Indeed, the passion of the poem is manifest precisely in its restless acts of allusion and stylistic experimentation, a restlessness that captures the desperation of a grieving parent wondering—to echo the opening line of the sequence—what song can be for now.