Books

The author of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ was an incorrigible poet. A new collection of his verse sheds light on his major preoccupations

by Henry Oliver

From Shakespeare’s sonnets and Donne’s songs (“Tell me where all past times are”) to Wordsworth and Eliot (“All time is unredeemable”), poets have gone in search of lost time. It was this theme—one of the great sorrows of human life—that struck the young JRR Tolkien in Lichfield during the First World War, and which became the making of him as ayoung poet. He recollected the moment, in a letter written 50 years later.

I said, outside Lichfield Cathedral, to a friend of my youth —long since dead of gasgangrene (God rest his soul: I grieve still) — ‘Why is that cloud so beautiful?’ He said:

‘Because you have begun to write poetry, John Ronald.’ He was wrong. It was because Death was near, and all was intolerably fair, lost ere grasped. That was why I began to write poetry.

“And all was intolerably fair, lost ere grasped” is a nice poetic phrase: unbearable, too, like an inversion of Shakespeare’s “When I consider everything that grows/ Holds in perfection but a little moment”. This is Tolkien’s familiar grand theme from The Lord of the Rings—the time of Middle-earth being, to mankind, almost lost ere grasped. Notice, too, the Wordsworthian note in this letter: “Why is that cloud so beautiful?” We think of Tolkien as a writer inspired by the lost civilisations of the north, a man of myth and saga. In his poetry we can see more clearly the late romanticism that pervades his work. He shares those poets’ sentimental sorrow of the world. This is often the great animating force of much of the work in the new Collected Poems of JRR Tolkien, edited by Christina Scull and Wayne GHammond.