Bernard Spencer and the Poetics of Exile
Bernard Spencer, though often relegated to the forlorn shelves of overlooked poets, was a singular English voice that traversed Mediterranean landscapes with a distinct language of introspection, subtlety, and fragmentation. Born in Madras (now Chennai), India, in 1909 and educated at Marlborough College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Spencer inherited the perspectives of empire while maintaining a psychological distance from the imperial voice. Often grouped with other “minor” poets of the 1930s, Spencer neither partook in the firebrand idealism of the Auden group nor embraced the complete detachment of later existentialists. Instead, his was a poetics of quiet exile, a gentle threading of displacement, perception, and loss into a lyrical form rich with unspoken philosophies.
His literary life remained intertwined with the British Council, for whom he worked in Greece, Egypt, and Italy during and after World War II. These diplomatic outposts lent his writing both geographical specificity and a veil of removal: caught between nations, linguistics, and identities. That condition — of betweenness — becomes central in understanding both the mood and idea within Spencer’s poetry.
He published sparsely: _Aegean Islands and Other Poems_ (1946) and _With Luck Lasting_ (1963) comprise much of his major output. Yet, within this modest corpus percolate images and phrases as striking as any produced in British poetry of the mid-century. The poetry of Bernard Spencer navigates internal states through external metaphors; it is a sea-worn tapestry of memory, departure, and fleeting presence.
In his piece “Returning to Delphi,” Spencer writes:
>“The giggles of schoolgirls reach back / from the parched stones, and try / to purchase for a flirtation’s length / the antique cold of prophecy” [_Collected Poems_, p. 72].
In just a few lines, he juxtaposes the ancient and the ephemeral, evoking not merely the passage of time but its quiet collapse. Here, the laughter of contemporary youth is not joyous but dissonant against an immutable historic weight. The moment is charged with philosophical tension: are we always, Spencer seems to ask, trivial intruders upon grand narratives, incapable of anchoring ourselves to continuity or tradition? Or does our transience redeem the permanence of cold marble by restating the need for new breath, new tones?
What strikes the dedicated reader upon repeated encounters with Spencer’s verse is his resistance to full presence. He does not impose an ego or ontology; instead, he ‘hovers’ — a term one could borrow from his fragment “Sketch for a Philosophy of Travel”:
>“To move lightly is not merely to escape / but to touch the earth with less theft.” [_Uncollected Sketch_, 1958 Archive, British Library—MS 483.21].
Here, travel ceases to be a physical act and becomes an ethical and almost metaphysical engagement. The notion of theft is crucial — an echo of ecological and colonial guilt, perhaps — but also a reverberation from deconstructionist ethics avant la lettre, wherein the subject must not appropriate the Other’s ground. He is years ahead of the conversation that Emmanuel Levinas and later Derrida would turn into ethical motifs: the encounter with alterity is defined by humility, not mastery.
Moreover, Spencer seemed to carry exile not only as location but as epistemology. Writing often from war-torn or politically unstable geographies, his poems draw no salve of certainty, no traditional lyric closure. Consider “The Reassurance,” perhaps his most anthologized work, in which he tries but fails to assemble any firm salvific sense in landscapes of chaos:
>“Did you say there’ll be peace when the war ends? / But didn’t the driftwood burn just the same?” [_With Luck Lasting_, p. 49].
This couplet does more than imply cynicism — it recounts a metaphysical disenchantment. Spencer isolates the fallacy of teleological hope; he renders the war within the human not as an incidental mirror of history but its architect. In its quietness, the poem descends into a kind of negative theology — it does not name the unsayable but cautiously circles around it.
It is this very circling — tensely noncommittal yet wholly anchored — that has made Bernard Spencer something of a poet’s poet, a custodian of lyricism flirting with philosophical caution. Anne Stevenson once remarked that Spencer’s restraint “hid a kind of severe Hellenistic honesty that made many of his contemporaries appear indulgent.”¹ Indeed, he was not a prophet but a cartographer of half-drawn spiritual geographies. His Mediterranean stationings were not just ornamental; they shaped a worldview in which light, space, and ruin collided into dimly illuminated insight.
Nowhere is this structure of thought more apparent than in the poem “Deck-Scene, Alexandria”:
>“When the wind rises above the radio static / and brings no message with it but dust, / it teaches you again that silence / is not the absence of meaning — only of names.” [_Aegean Islands_, p. 33].
Two lines here bear obsessive weight: “silence / is not the absence of meaning — only of names.” This is Spencer not simply as poet but as a metaphysician — austere, elliptical, and grimly luminous. In denying nominative mastery, Spencer releases us into the wilderness of signification. Meaning, divorced from the matrix of language, becomes a haunting presence — ungraspable, yet affective.
This line functions as a philosophical turning point in his oeuvre: an understanding that perhaps meaning is inherent in form, gesture, rhythm — and not necessarily in designation. Spencer thus implicitly dialogues with the ancient thinkers of his adopted Hellenistic homes. The Stoics, who found virtue in control; the Platonists, who understood absence as a sign of higher presence — these traditions are all quietly nodded to through his measured inversions.²
In a letter to Lawrence Durrell, dated February 3, 1954, Spencer described writing as “a matter of leaning with your whole body into absence and feeling, if you can, what shape of wind passes through you.”³ The phrasing, curious and ineffable, captures his approach to poetic insight: not the act of assertion, but that of becoming-porous — a sort of poetic kenosis that allows perception to occupy the self.
And thus one may conceive of Spencer not merely as a gentle English poet abroad, but as an itinerant metaphysician of the liminal. He lived on thresholds — culturally, historically, linguistically — and his poetry reflects that residence. In a world careening onwards in vectors of absolute assertions, polarities and inflated selves, Bernard Spencer may offer a newer, subtler model: one in which poetic consciousness is not a lamp but a lyre, vibrating cautiously toward intuitive glimpses, minor harmonies.
We end, then, not with a conclusion, but with a return — as is always the eloquence of exile. From “View from an Attic”:
>“I saw a bell-hung goat / graze on the hill’s curve / and thought — without knowledge — / perhaps this is the line that saves.” [_Collected Poems_, p. 81].
A line that saves — not by conviction, but by presence. Not by argument, but by enduring witness. This is the elegiac hum of Spencer’s philosophical story: that truth, while never stated, may linger in the line lightly laid.
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By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, exile, lyricism
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¹ Anne Stevenson, “Minor Keys and Major Maps,” in _Poets of the 1930s_, ed. Hugh Hewison (Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 201.
² Peter McCann, “Translating Stillness: Bernard Spencer and Hellenistic Thought,” _Journal of Modern British Poetry_, Vol. 14, No. 2 (2004), pp. 134–149.
³ Bernard Spencer to Lawrence Durrell, 3 Feb 1954, Oxford University Archives, MS Durrell 257.