The Poetry of N. P. Van Wyk Louw

by

Herman Charles Bosman

The work of N. P. van Wyk Louw is strong with the harsh and rough-hewn accuracy of the earth. He writes in Afrikaans. His poems would translate readily, for they are clothed in images and not in words: his poems are a collection of bitter similes ornamented with flesh. His work is fairly representative both of the trend and stature of present day Afrikaans literature. It is no mean stature.

N. P. van Wyk Louw has found substantially all that there is to one side of poetry. And it is significant that what he has found has turned out ashes. He has approached poetry from the negative side, from the brown earth of the human body, from the dark pit that is the human heart. The negative approach to a thing is often the most powerful approach from the point of view of strategy.

And in respect of expressing this one half of poetry, this half that is heavy with the somber brutality of the soil---where the emotions are hacked out of the body, and the body is plaited like grass, and the soul is starkly furnished as a bedroom---here van Wyk Louw is a master. And this is the place also of his defeat.

It is eternal irony of life that the man or woman who has found all life in a conscious seeking for life has also found ultimately that life has passed him or her by, like a herd of cattle driven past in dust.
          “Oh suiwer hart wat honger was
           in al jou lang deurwaakte nagte
           na lewe versadiging
           van trane en lag en wilde klagte;
           wat so ‘n hoë gang wou deurskou
           soos water in jou hand gekelk
           en in die witte son gehou;
           wat alle vreugde wou besit
           en al wat die aarde aan skoonheid het
           vang met die lyf se brose net . . . “
Casting the body into life as a net. What will you bring forth out of deep, oh, body, chained at both ends? Your head chained to the substance that is dreamless in stones, your feet chained to a song.

The body cast forth into life like a net will capture an infinity of things: strung jewels, flowers and ecstasies, the rich purple that is hung on sorrow and on grapes, crowns and strong leaves and the strange follies of crowns and leaves, earth-blown dreams and stray excrescences---everything. Everything that there is in the world, in fact. Oh, everything except poetry. And this is N. P. van Wyk Louw’s eternal defeat, as it is the eternal defeat of the snarer who captures what he seeks whether he sets forth on the chase with his body or with a butterfly net.

The spirit of poetry dwells not in the world but in the desert. She is not lured by the body, particularly not if that body is haunted by ghosts. She is afraid of those pallid spectres from the past. The spirit of poetry dwells not in the world but in the waste land. And there are no nets by which she may be snared---would that there were! She comes pale lipped in the trembling of the wind, unsought and unbidden, wanly, and there is the starlight in her eyes. This is poetry. Hell! This is paradise.

There is a terrifying dark power in the human soul that of its own accord confronts its Maker in nakedness and humility, within the walls of the flesh silently sorrowing. Why should the soul of man be carnal and the heart of man be spirit? And why should these things be so for ever?

From the moonless depths of his being van Wyk Louw has produced a stark realism that is at times the twin sister of romance, and that is therefore all the more fascinating to the mind of a romantic---who always knows that poetry is not created that way. Van Wyk Louw has created a bitter illusion of romance whose only flaw is its passionate human sincerity: For, alas, romance has other sincerities: other than human honesties. More ruthless than any sincerities that the most stubborn realism can never find, seek where it will. And romance has no nets. Realism weaves around itself nets that are never broken. Romance weaves around itself spells that were broken long ago.

The difference between poetry and philosophy is that poetry is so much more simple. Poetry is naively direct, hanging a red flower on the breast of sorrow like the next day is hung on the breast of a girl who has lost her chastity. Philosophy keeps on discovering new truths. Poetry is the green mould on the ancient truths of the world.

Much that van Wyk Louw has written is the raw material both of poetry and of philosophy. He has learnt many of the age old truths of life, deathlessly sprung forth from man’s mortality, and he has expressed these truths with a superb and rigid courage. The truth about the canker eating at the heart of the rose, whereby beauty lives on only in being sullied: purity weeping by her broken walls, loveliness that is for ever stained. And the truth that high destiny is eternally in its infancy, a bright child born out of the womb of decay. And the age old truth that love is strong only when it has seemingly begun to hate.

An ever recurring theme in N. P. van Wyk Louw’s poetry is his anguish at finding his soul impounded in the fetters of the flesh. He has written a number of gloomily magnificent passages on his sufferings: his naked grief because the spiritual in him is being constantly betrayed by the physical. Some of the images he employs are more than a little reminiscent of the melancholy majesty of Job. Job railing at God. Job upbraiding God “because Thou has fenced me in with bone and sinew.” Forgetting that it was not God who fenced him in.

Originally from South African Opinion---Trek, March 1944. Now in Bernard Sachs, Herman Charles Bosman As I Knew Him, The Dial Press, Johannesburg, 1971.