THE RUGGED BLACK OF ANGER
The rugged black of anger
Has an uncertain smile-border.
The transition from one kind to another
May be love between neighbour and neighbour;
Or natural death; or discontinuance
Because so small is space
The extent of kind must be expressed otherwise;
Or loss of kind when proof of no uniqueness
Strikes the broadening edge and discourages.
Therefore and therefore all things have experience
Of ending and of meeting,
And of ending, that much being
As grows faint of self and withers
When more is the intenser self
That is another or nothing.
And therefore smiles when least smiling—
The gift of nature to necessity
When relenting grows involuntary.
This is the account of peace,
Why the rugged black of anger
Has an uncertain smile-border.
Why crashing glass does not announce
The monstrous petal-advance of flowers,
Why singleness of heart endures
The mind coupled with other creatures.
Room for no more than love in such dim passages
Where between kinds lie only
Their own uncertain edges.
A too precise division of space
Leaves nothing for walls, nothing but
Weakening of place, gentleness.
The blacker anger, blacker the less
As anger greater, angrier grows;
And least where most,
Where anger and anger meet as two
And share one uncertain smile-border
To remain so.
The following analysis comes from Jack Blackmore’s introduction to a new edition of Laura Riding’s 1928 collection of poems, Love as Love, Death as Death (Trent Editions, 2018), 24, 34-40.[i]
At the heart of Love as Love, Death as Death are two very different poems, each magnificent in its own way. ‘The Tiger’ and ‘The Rugged Black of Anger’ were linked together in the same sequence not just here but also in Poems: A Joking Word and then in Collected Poems, where they conclude the first section, ‘Poems of Mythical Occasion’ and inaugurate the second, ‘Poems of Immediate Occasion’ [….]
‘The Tiger’ concludes, in Love as Love, Death as Death, without a full stop, inviting us to move straight on to the next poem, which is ‘The Rugged Black of Anger’. The roaring of the tiger is still in our minds as the next poem opens. While the subject of the poem, anger, could be felt to arise out of contemplation of the experiences of women in ‘The Tiger’, it is a very different kind of poem. I cannot think of a precedent for its combination of analytical dissection and controlled emotional intensity, unless perhaps it is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, ‘Th’expense of Spirit in a waste of shame’, the subject of the celebrated analysis by Riding and Graves in A Survey of Modernist Poetry.[ii]
The first two lines of the poem seem unexceptional, even commonplace:
The rugged black of anger
Has an uncertain smile-border.
The first notable word here is ‘rugged’, with its connotations of rugged individualism and severe frowning features. From other remarks Riding makes about her character one can recognize the poet-person from those lines. The following seven lines take us into unfamiliar territory. They move from the particular (the case of anger, rugged black) on to a general statement about how all things end and meet:
The transition from one kind to another
May be love between neighbour and neighbour;
Or natural death; or discontinuance
Because, so small is space,
The extent of kind must be expressed otherwise;
Or loss of kind when proof of no uniqueness
Strikes the broadening edge and discourages.
This reads like an exegesis, or taxonomy, of the various ways things relate to each other, as the following lines confirm, summing up before moving on again:
Therefore and therefore all things have experience
Of ending and of meeting […]
In a way the poem can be read as an example of fulfilment of the promise made in Riding’s manifesto poem, ‘As Well as Any Other’:
For in peculiar earth alone can I
Construe the word and let the meaning lie
That rarely may be found. (CP version, 43)
In ‘The Rugged Black of Anger’ the first two lines are in a sense the ‘peculiar earth’, the intense and owned experience of an emotion (and its border), through which arises the seemingly dispassionate, didactic even, analysis that follows.
A key word in the opening section of the poem is the unfamiliar use of the plain word ‘kind’. The use of ‘kind’ here can be illuminated by reference to the magisterial opening passage of Contemporaries and Snobs, from the section entitled ‘Shame of the Person’:
There is a sense of life so real that it becomes the sense of something more real than life. Spatial and temporal sequences can only partially express it. It introduces a principle of selection into the undifferentiating quantitative appetite and thus changes accidental emotional forms into deliberate intellectual forms; animal experiences related by time and space into human experiences related in infinite degrees of kind. It is the meaning at work in what has no meaning; it is, at its clearest, poetry. (Italics added)[iii]
Credit should be accorded to Wexler for her early recognition that: ‘This definition is a key that unlocks the most perplexing barriers to the understanding of her poems.’[iv]
Further help with understanding the poems is offered in A Survey of Modernist Poetry. That the author was both proud of ‘The Rugged Black of Anger’ and conscious of the difficulty readers might experience is evident from the fact that an explication of the first eighteen lines is given in Chapter VI, ‘The Making of the Poem’. After attacking the idea that a poem can or should be an expression of ideas that could otherwise be described in prose (giving as an example of such a ‘poem’ Ezra Pound’s ‘The Ballad of the Goodly Fere’) they ask:
What are we to do, then, since the poem seems to mean what it says? All we can do is let it interpret itself, without introducing any new associations or, if possible, any new words.[v]
The illustration they give is as follows:
The rugged black of anger
Has an uncertain smile-border.
The transition from one kind to another,
As from anger, rugged black,
To what lies across its smile border,
May be love between neighbour and neighbour
(Love between neighbouring kind and kind);
Or natural death (death of one,
Though not of the other); or discontinuance
(Discontinuance of kind,
As anger no more anger)
Because so small is space
(So small the space for kind and kind and kind),
The extent of kind must be expressed otherwise
(The extent of kind beyond its border
Is end of kind, because space is so small
There is not room enough for all
Kinds: anger angrier has to be
Expressed otherwise than by anger,
So by an uncertain smile-border);
Anger may change into something else in four carefully described ways, but it is noteworthy that the most expansive exposition is given to the third alternative (quoted here from the poem itself, not as in A Survey’s exposition) of discontinuance
Because, so small is space,
The extent of kind must be expressed otherwise;
In this case angrier anger has to be expressed by an uncertain smile-border.
And therefore smiles come of least smiling—
The gift of nature to necessity
When relenting grows involuntary.
There are helpful clues in even this austere unfolding of the poem in its own terms. The emphasis on the word ‘kind’, and the phrase ‘space is so small’ helps clarify the author’s thinking, but overall the explication may not appear particularly satisfying, especially when compared with A Survey’s exciting and ground-breaking analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 in Chapter III, which has stimulated a whole school of criticism with reverberations still today.[vi] Perhaps the reason is that in the authors’ review of Riding’s poem no direct consideration is given to the subject of the poem, namely anger, whereas in the course of the analysis of the sonnet consideration is given to the nature of lust, and its relationship to love.
The choice of the particular sonnet by Shakespeare is interesting and relevant to our account of both ‘The Tiger’ and ‘The Rugged Black of Anger’ in particular and of Love as Love, Death as Death generally. Its subject is lust, and the language used is exceptionally direct and explicit. Elsewhere Riding wrote, approvingly ‘Shakespeare knew Lust by day,| With raw unsleeping eye.’[vii] A similarity between lust (in Shakespeare’s time) and anger (in Riding’s) is that they were (are) seen as socially troubling and dangerous emotions. In other poets the emotions are sublimated or demonised. By contrast Shakespeare and Riding enact and articulate a full experience of these emotions through language. They take them up to and look beyond their limits. The poems accommodate lust and anger as humanly essential emotions that do not have to be destructive.
To return to the analysis of Shakespeare’s sonnet in A Survey of Modernist Poetry:
Lust in the extreme goes beyond both bliss and woe; it goes beyond reality. It is no longer lust Has, having and in quest, it is lust face to face with love.
It is interesting that here the authors of A Survey depart somewhat in their analysis from the ‘rule’, adopted in respect of the Riding poem, of ‘letting the poem interpret itself without introducing any new associations or, if possible, any new words.’ The idea that lust in the extreme goes ‘beyond reality’ and is ‘face to face with love’ goes beyond the words of the sonnet which does not include the word ‘love’. Whilst it can be argued that it is implicit in Shakespeare the idea is very much, I think, Riding’s own, and is consistent with the concluding lines of her own poem:
The blacker anger, blacker the less
As anger greater, angrier grows;
And least where most,
Where anger and anger meet as two
And share one uncertain smile-border
To remain so.
And it is also consistent with the great climax to the poem which precedes those lines:
This is the account of peace,
Why the rugged black of anger
Has an uncertain smile-border.
Why crashing glass does not announce
The monstrous petal advance of flowers,
Why singleness of heart endures
The mind coupled with other creatures.
This is powerful imagery. We are familiar with Wilfrid Owen’s ‘monstrous anger of the guns’. The world would not exist if anger were to expand indefinitely in the destructive manner of war. The concept of flowers engaged in monstrous petal advance is startling, but of course monstrous is what flowers are really not, they expand in order to be themselves and then stop. ‘Flowers’ in Riding’s decidedly unnaturalistic poetics are associated with personhood, womanhood particularly (as elsewhere in ‘Postponement of Self’, ‘The Nightmare’, and ‘Doom in Bloom’). Beneath the apparently impersonal and ungendered surface of the poem we can also detect a humorous reminiscence of the misogynistic phrase ‘monstrous regiment of women’. The poem is as much about woman as is ‘The Tiger’, woman whose feeling is so intensely personal that it transcends the personal.
The lines create the image of monstrous petal-advance crashing glass only, typically, to negate it by ‘not’. The unheard but imagined sound of crashing glass echoes the lines in ‘The Tiger’:
Their cages cage me on three sides.
The fourth is glass.
Not to be image of the beast in me,
I press the tiger forward.
I crash through.
Now we are two.
One rides.
[i] Adapted from an analysis of the same poem (in its Collected Poems version) in Blackmore’s The Unthronged Oracle (Cirencester: Mereo Books, 2016), 110-123.
[ii] Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, Chapter III.
[iii] Laura Riding, Contemporaries and Snobs, (London: Cape, 1928), 9.
[iv] Joyce Wexler’s unpublished dissertation, ‘Construing the Word: An Introduction to the Writings of Laura (Riding) Jackson’, Northwestern University, 1974, 63-65.
[v] A Survey of Modernist Poetry, quoted from the Carcanet edition, op.cit., 71.
[vi] My reading of this poem (and of ‘Tale of Modernity’) in The Unthronged Oracle, op. cit., Chapter 11, incidentally confirms the conclusive case made by Mark Jacobs in ‘Modernist Misogyny’, English, 2015, 1-20, for Riding, not Graves, having played the leading role in the A Survey of Modernist Poetry essay on Shakespeare.
[vii] ‘Tale of Modernity’ in Collected Poems, 142