Dreaming in Drought: The Lingering Shadows of W.S. Graham
In the small fishing village of Greenock on the west coast of Scotland, Wystan Hugh Auden once joked—or perhaps threatened—that poetry was a “way of happening, a mouth.” But in the obscure, less noisy echoes of 20th-century verse, the mouth that whispered through fog and damp was that of William Sydney Graham (1918–1986), often abbreviated W.S. Graham. Born in the shadow of industrial soot and coastal dread, Graham’s contribution to the inner architecture of English poetry eludes neat categorization. Shunning visibility for trance, and celebrity for serious solitude, he was a poet who spun scaffolding from madness and drew metaphysical blueprints in bramble. He invites our reading not in a museum but in a windswept inner cave.
Graham’s early years were spent amid the dissonant rhythms of shipyards and pubs, with his working-class Glaswegian roots spiraling ideologically into a lifelong partnership with outsiderliness. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art, perhaps not so much to learn painting in the conventional sense, but to immerse himself in creation, tangentially: the study of form, failure, and silence. Early works such as *Cage Without Grievance* (1942) and *The Seven Journeys* (1944) exhibited an intense involvement with the New Apocalypse movement, a loose-knit poetic tendency that prized surrealism and experimentation.
But Graham’s real voice—ambiguous, querulous, sensorially throttled—only began unpeeling over years of isolation. Alan Riach, Graham’s faithful commentator, points out that the poet’s shift from lyrical exuberance to metaphysical excavation began after he exiled himself to Cornwall. In the rugged isolation of Madron and Zennor, his work matured toward linguistic chiaroscuro. As Graham wrote in “The Constructed Space”:
> “Meanwhile surely there must be something to say,
> Maybe not easy either,
> Said between the goodbye and the next
> Hello. That’s leaves falling in space,
> The poetry of the leaves falling.”
This in-between-ness became his ultimate preoccupation—not grief, not transcendence, but that ambiguous hush when neither has fully swelled. So Graham’s linguistic project was more a deferralscape, a philosophy of pause, not answer. He was never interested in building bridges outside of language, but in wandering within the bridge itself—to discover that it, too, is a tunnel.
His friendship with painters like Peter Lanyon and Bryan Wynter further shaped his poetics. These abstract landscape painters helped him realize that one does not see Cornwall; one experiences it sedimentally, as layers of atmosphere pressing against thought. Subsequently, Graham’s poems began to adopt a painterly quality: not descriptive, but material in their texture. In “To My Wife at Midnight,” he writes:
> “I leave this at your ear for when you wake,
> A poem should not mean
> But be.”
Strangely echoing Archibald MacLeish’s dictum, yet encoded more intimately, Graham’s lines function less as messages than residues. Therein lies a divinely pessimistic sensibility: the idea that language is not a ladder leading beyond itself, but a cell whose bars have grown fragrant.
Let us pause here to highlight something deeper. The poet’s idea of language was founded on metaphysical lacunae.* He did not believe in the transparency of linguistic form—instead he believed each utterance was ‘a musical mishearing of the world.’ And this world, though tactile, becomes abstracted in Graham’s lexicon into symbols of failed connection. Consider *Malcolm Mooney’s Land* (1970), perhaps his darkest and richest offering. This long poem is both narrative and incantation, revolving around the fictional character Malcolm Mooney, a cartographer turned nomad, whose efforts to map and chart are thwarted by the instability of perception itself.
At one point Malcolm, wandering the metaphysical terrains of Graham’s mind, notes:
> “If I could write down how I hear the thing singing
> Out of the ordinary in me…
> If I could go
> Beyond however – however is always.”
This persistent “however” is the hinge upon which Graham’s philosophy of language swings. Reality is grasped only through error—the incorrect word, the reiterated misunderstanding. He does not mourn this, but elevates it: even broken speech constitutes profound communion.
Graham’s belief, then, was not that literature bridges the human condition, but that literature *is* the human condition in its failed attempting. We may here venture into philosophical terrain. In the Grahamite cosmos, knowledge is not transmitted but approximated—liminal, perpetually emerging. If Wittgenstein had an island in the Hebrides, he might’ve come close to what Graham was reaching toward: an anti-semiotic transcendentalism, where the sign is both veil and presence.
Look again at Graham’s work through this prism: his invocation of “you” in so many poems now takes on the character of intimate estrangement. “Dear Bryan Wynter,” he begins a valedictory poem to his painter friend who had passed,
> “This is not a mourning
> But this is a door
> Which has been suddenly closed
> To keep the weather out.”
Here, mourning is no longer emotional, but architectural. Language assumes an episodic physicality—it becomes an edifice suddenly built to regulate sorrow, to transform it beneath metaphor. The poem is the act of translation—and more crucially, the act of shielding.
Is this devotion to language’s imperfection, its hallucinatory realness, a form of heresy? Possibly. In “Implements in Their Places,” Graham writes:
> “Put the words in their places.
> Words are not coins.
> They grow distanced in the dark
> And carry with them old
> Secrets of the night and
> Should not be disvalued.”
These lines affirm not just his romance with language, but a kind of proto-idealism—language as the etheric vehicle for ambiguity, not assertion. Wordsmiths build meaning not as carpenters, but as windwalkers—balancing fragile syllables on trembling strings of ontological uncertainty.**
For all his relegation to the periphery of canonical discourse, Graham’s work defies classification. Not quite modernist, not truly postmodern, he remains a bard of the thresholds. He is the chronicler of miscommunication, of the silent syntax between friend and fugitive thought. In a world increasingly mechanized, quantified, his poems widen the aperture on that which is ineffable.
Sifting through Graham’s corpus, one begins to absorb the impression that reading him is less about accumulation of knowledge, and more about entering a strange metabolic process. Like certain mushrooms that feed off old roots, Graham’s poetry devours and recycles past utterances, both his and others. It teaches us to trust words that arrive bruised. It teaches us to observe silence not as absence, but as reverent prelude.
And so here, at dusk beside the firelit edges of this article, let us remember again “The Constructed Space”:
> “I live in this constructed space
> Where the poem finds you
> And lies long lost to hear.”
We, the ever-hearing, do not read Graham. We stand, drenched, beside him in his weathered imaginarium, where birds fly out of the wrong poems and metaphors build boats we do not know how to steer.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, cartography, fringe-poetry
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* “Graham is writing from within a space in language that is neither private nor public—it is a communal invention in continual deferral” (Walker, David. *Poetry and the Ethics of Space*. 1997, Oxford UP).
** “WS Graham’s linguistic anxieties form a bridge between the epistemological limits of expression and a new poetic mysticism grounded in presence without articulation” (Lloyd, Miriam. “The Voice That Speaks As Silence.” *The Radical Lyric*. University of Edinburgh Press, 2004).