Austin Spendlowe: Russet Yeas and Honest Kersey Noes: Imogen Cassels and Sonnet 94

Silk Work, by Imogen Cassels. Prototype, 2025, 72pp, £12.99.

Faraway, in Silk Work’s ‘Some notes & sources’, Imogen Cassels reprints sonnet 94 in toto. It comes after a line from Jacques Lacan’s ‘The Mirror Stage’ (1936) as the second of ‘two invisible epigraphs’ to ‘Chesapeake’, a long six-part poem whose title points to the origins of settler colonialism in America, but whose course embraces much more beside. So goes the note:

They that have power to hurt and will do none,

That do not do the thing they most do show,

Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,

Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:

They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces

And husband nature’s riches from expense;

They are the lords and owners of their faces,

Others but stewards of their excellence.

The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet

Though to itself if only live and die,

But if that flower with base infection meet,

The basest weed outbraves his dignity:

For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

An epigraph is conspicuous, literally written (Gr. graph) upon (epi). Cassels’s adjective ‘invisible’ upturns that etymology. Speaking to Nick Jenkins in Oxford Poetry (1983), Mick Imlah took aim at a poetry criticism hamstrung by the ‘lazy and frequently false’ search for ‘influence’, dryly glossed as ‘a word poets tend to apply to something they’ve grown out of’ (read: Yeats in Larkin’s North Ship [1946]). ‘To claim Shakespeare as an influence’, Imlah avers, is ‘redundant or facetious’. In not-dissimilar terms, F.T. Prince remarked to Anthony Howells in PN Review (1992) that ‘Shakespeare can’t be an influence, can’t be a model’, a surprising admission from the editor of Shakespeare’s Poems (1962) for the Arden Two series. What is Cassels up to?

‘Chesapeake’ opens with a frenzied search and a bristly raison d’être, with which Cassels sets out her stall:

from here . we may

go on morning searching

over jagged celandine

in faith, for an anti-part

of voices [.]

As Silk Work’s backmatter confirms, the first line-and-a-smidge repurposes the last sentence of Eric Griffiths’s doctoral thesis, ‘Writing and Speaking in the work of Eliot, Pound and Yeats’ (1980). That poky little punctus, though, is Cassels’s innovation: it recalibrates the poem’s starting coordinates to the full-stop that closes 94, a suspended singularity that stands iconically for where the sonnet ends and criticism begins. That its masked mass (‘we’) busily roots around ‘for an anti-part’ is a nod to any half-decent critic’s first grappling with the logic of a Shakespeare sonnet, not least 94. ‘[I]n faith’, in the poem’s second part, Cassels gestures to the logic of 94’s human-humus conceit with a ponderous ‘hand in its dull hovering | before choice’, a move that recurs arboreally in part vi’s penultimate image: a ‘life that steadies itself over | a green branch before thinking’.

The poem in this way studiedly pilfers the logic and lexis of 94, as is visible in the first sentences of part ii:

murano shift to bay, sour

weather and a gust of wax.

sing bonny bonny for an out

to pastoral, green weeds,

the long, cold fashion

for drowning.

94’s couplet tie survives in ‘sour’ and ‘weeds’; so, too, does ‘The summer’s flower’ in 94 sprout in part v.’s public service announcement: ‘all | funerals in summer || now, because of the flowers’. ‘Chesapeake’ likewise inherits its shape from 94. In The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997), Helen Vendler argues that 94 is built of ‘two mini-poems’, each kept apart by ‘structural experiment’, whereby ‘Shakespeare “splits” the couplet into two separate lines’, as happens nowhere else in Sonnets (1609). A like bifurcation informs the two-stanza, double-sonnet structure of the poem’s six parts.

Mapping similarity without deviation, however, screens off Cassel’s full project. 94’s pronominal opacity, what Vendler calls its ‘mask of impersonality’, has entertained critics for centuries. Any search for who ‘They’ are, or even for a main verb ‘They’ might govern, is a fool’s errand. In ‘Chesapeake’, Cassels cleverly snatches off that ‘mask’, wrests ‘owner[ship] of their faces’, and fabulates a first-person voice to approximate what lies beneath. The work is neatly encrypted in these nifty lines:

the last trick

of a horizon being

that you can reach it.

The epigraph, ‘invisible’ or otherwise, is something Gérard Genette recommends in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997) as a good career move: ‘with it, [the writer] chooses [their] peers and thus a place in the pantheon’. An ‘invisible epigraph’, we may say, installs Cassels directly between the poet of 94 and its readers.

Throughout Silk Work the gap between poetry and criticism is paper-thin. References to Griffiths, Christopher Ricks’s Beckett’s Dying Words (1993), and Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) situate Silk Work’s poetry in an Empsonian tradition. In ‘Felicity’—which lifts a line from Empson (italicised here as in Silk Work)—Cassels’s forward slash marshals the narrowing gap:

Spirit is a bone;

hail is cashmere; whenever I’ll be afraid /

of the obscurity of water; this moment

is apocalyptic and a type of heaven.

The quoted line transpires in Empson’s jottings on false antitheses in Seven Types of Ambiguity. How a year might be swift, a morning enduringly still in a couplet from one of Arthur Waley’s Chinese translations holds Empson’s thoughts captive for nearly two pages. The poet-critic chews over the twin temporalities of time-felt and time-ticking, which ‘Felicity’ styles anew through its overlapping poetic and literary critical timeframes: that slash marks a line break reported in prose, as it were, out of poetic time.

‘Felicity’, though, is bent on aesthetic enquiries of its own: ‘some things are no good’, huffs the first line, like an arrière-garde critical virtuoso; the later charge—‘that’s a readymade or just [/] citational beatitude’—picks up the tune. Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950), a Russian ballet impresario who had a walk-on part in Auden’s ‘September 1, 1939’, takes centre stage in ‘Faun’, a sonnet with a secret. Its simile—‘like a soiled metaphor’—unwittingly compresses Empson’s ‘All languages are composed of dead metaphors as the soil of corpses’, which appears a page after ‘Felicity’s ventriloquised line in Seven Types of Ambiguity.

Cassels leaps in and out of critical cult classics with all the grace of Nijinsky’s famed en pointe. In Silk Work’s rascally punctuation there’s shades of Robert Graves and Laura Riding’s trailblazing essay ‘William Shakespeare and E.E. Cummings: A Study in Original Punctuation and Spelling’ from their Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927). With cummings-like gall, Cassels’s reprint of 94 jettisons a caesura after ‘hurt’ and enjambs lines five and nine independently of both Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Arden Three and G. Blakemore Evans’s New Cambridge Shakespeare editions.

The most leapt-into study in Silk Work is Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry (1978). In the book, ‘poetic artifice’ pertains to ‘all those complex and elusive relations between verbal form, verbal meaning, rhythm and poetic convention’, for which Forrest-Thomson’s introduction nominates 94 as a locus classicus. Visionary is the only word for Forrest-Thomson’s account of the sonnet, which relies as much on microscopic precision as it does on such peculiarities as this phonetic rendition of 94’s first quatrain:

Ay Oh Mallal an ouch turumto foone

A Ah honol layllay mallala Oh

Oooch muvsing uhvsing ah ten shelves ossone

Untooved vold ond ta terumdum go.

Brian Kim Stefans wrote for Jacket2 (2001) that although Poetic Artifice is perfectly suitable in a university library, it also engages the poet in ‘serious shop-talk’. As W.D. Snodgrass would later do in De/compositions (2001), Poetic Artifice utilises creative tools for critical ends.

Poetic Artifice triangulates the metiers of poet and professor, which Forrest-Thomson’s verse often does, too. It happens in those professorially titled early books—twelve academic questions (1970) and Language Games (1971)—but properly gets going in On the Periphery (1976). There, ‘Cordelia: or, A Poem Should not Mean but Be’—titled jointly after King Lear and Archibald MacLeish—smuggles 94’s first line into its literary-historical hodgepodge, alongside clippings from Paradise Lost, cameos from Cavalcanti, Donne, and Pound, and an enchanting anecdotal streak:

And we stopped in Prynne’s rooms in a shower of pain

And went on in sunlight into the University Library

And ate yoghurt and talked for an hour.

Those rooms belong to J.H. Prynne, whose spit-and-sawdust early work Forrest-Thomson intricately lauds in Poetic Artifice, and who would publish an eighty-six-page word-by-word commentary on 94 in 2001. He is inevitably in Cassels’s orbit, something not lost on Jeremy Noel-Tod (TLS August 8 2025), but Prynne’s knotty prolixity survives only vestigially in Silk Work: an influence, as Imlah had it, that Cassels ‘has grown out of’.

Forrest-Thomson’s influence, however, is something that Silk Work is grown from. In verse and prose, Forrest-Thomson advocates uncompromisingly for the ‘connection between texts and the existential actualities of human life’ that Edward Said expounds in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1973). Forrest-Thomson’s project, however, is not to be confused with John Berryman’s quip in The Freedom of the Poet (1976), that ‘When Shakespeare said “Two loves have I”, reader, he was not kidding’, or Yeats’s comparable argument in ‘The Scholars’ (1919). For Forrest-Thomson, it is a subtler, everyday love that reinstates the humanity of past poets, as the terminal motto of ‘Cordelia’ attests: ‘Waste not and want not why you’re here | the possibilities of joy’.

Like Forrest-Thomson, Cassels restlessly cross-examines where poetry slots into life. Silk Work soars when it heeds ‘Cordelia’s epigrammatic close, as in ‘Romanov’: ‘How group photograph | of you. So sonnet, so love letter’; or even merely in the ‘sweet adjacency | of Spanish coasts’ (‘Abrace’). As a carousel of thoughts broken off before being fully articulated, Silk Work recuperates something of the richness of not knowing that has edified readers of 94 for centuries.

When Basil Bunting went to Rapallo to enrol in Pound’s ‘Ezuversity’, he was told to play il miglior fabbro with Shakespeare’s sonnets, correcting erroneous inversions and stripping back superfluous words. What survives of his axe-work, particularly his version of sonnet 34, is entirely at odds with Cassels’s accretive approach in Silk Work. If you tug on Cassels’s epigraph to 94 in ‘Chesapeake’, as you might the wayward thread of a cardigan, Silk Work begins steadily unravelling: one spots, for instance, that those lines at the start of the second part of ‘Chesapeake’ echo Forrest-Thomson’s ‘Pastoral’.

The list of poets that have sought out 94 is vast: Thom Gunn’s ‘A Wood Near Athens’ from Boss Cupid (1996), Ted Berrigan’s ‘In The Land of Pygmies & Giants’ from A Certain Slant of Light (1988), Adrienne Rich’s ‘An Unsaid Word’ in A Change of World (1951), etc. What Cassels manages in Silk Work, however, is singular. In these relentlessly palimpsested lyrics, Cassels affirms that a criticism of influence does not end when the poet’s library borrowings list is unearthed. The joy is in how an influence journeys in the mind, is woven into the very grammar of thought. It cannot be a coincidence that in Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598), Shakespeare’s most explicit comment on the merits of academic life, Berowne’s sonneteering is built on the same metaphors that supply the book with its title:

Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,

Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical—these summer flies
Have blown me full of maggot ostentation.
[…]
Henceforth my wooing mind shall be expressed
In russet yeas and honest kersey noes.

Austin Spendlowe is studying for an MPhil in English Studies at Cambridge.