Christ on Ilkley Moor: An Analysis of Grayson Ellis’s ‘Innocence Lost’

Innocence Lost

Do you remember it? I cannot remember
anything else. That cold spring
of it all. On Ilkley Moor
I hiked all day. Through the rich
Yellow spikes of Bog Asphodel, 5
following the badger trails and chill cries of the
Redshank. In the limited shelter
Of a brazen hillock
I gave up my innocence
To poetry, and to nature’s cruel Muse. 10
And after, starving and wide-eyed
as a tawny owl, flew raggedly back to
Your uncle’s cottage,
Where you were waiting, reading Proust,
For a cheap cabernet and a can of meat. 15
You blessed our entwinement
twice, you blessed the can
of meat. Then, thrice blessed, we went to bed.
It was bacon grill, I remember.

Grayson Ellis (c) 1969
From ‘Porcupine’
Reproduced With Permission

It has become common practice to place Grayson Ellis in the tradition of nature poets stretching back through Ted Hughes, William Wordsworth, John Clare, and including figures such as Andrew Marvell or even John Milton. However, there is an argument one might make which places Ellis in a different tradition altogether. In this essay, I will argue that, in his poem ‘Innocence Lost’, Grayson Ellis foregrounds the Catholicism often latent in his work but rarely explored given the critical bias towards his misanthropy, bisexuality, and his early political activism and later isolationism.

Ilkley Moor is an unusual setting for Ellis, given that he is generally recognised as the ‘bard of Shropshire’. However, though set in Yorkshire, the poem treads familiar ground. ‘Bog Asphodel’ (l. 5) calls to mind, naturally, Sir Phillip Sidney’s sonnet sequence, ‘Astrophel and Stella’; only, to Ellis, one of the most anti-romantic poets of his age, love does not fit into fourteen lines. Love is akin to a cruel conquest, since, as Ellis would surely know, Bog Asphodel is also known as ‘Narthecium ossifragum’, the Latin name meaning ‘weak bone’. This playfulness is typical of Ellis. Sex is reduced to the hard slog through the bogged mire of lust and whatever his penetrative ambitions (alluded to by the spiked plant), his ‘bone’ is weak, flaccid.

During the mid-1960s, Ellis reveals in his diaries that he experienced long periods of impotence.

I write poetry when my organs scream out for satisfaction but nothing works for me. I can only harden at the appearance of my landlady come to demand rent. How can I lust after such a creature I do not know. Perhaps it’s a form of absolution for what happened in Sardinia.
(Grayson Ellis, ‘Diaries’, Volume 1: 1958-69)

It might be too much to assume that the ‘brazen hillock’ is the same woman, but one has to bear in mind that landscape to Ellis is often sexualised. His tropes are those of the lustful man. Even the word ‘hillock’ has a sexual edge, the pregnant push of the double ‘l’, ending with the ‘lock’ to which perhaps only he has the key.

The poem reaches its consummation, as it were, with the two lines which stand proudly like an accusation, and are so reminiscent of Eliot:

Where you were waiting, reading Proust,
For a cheap cabernet and a can of meat. (ll. 14-15)

The Catholicism is apparent with the explicit reference to the sacrament. Here we have both wine and bread, though the bread (symbolic of flesh) is made quite real in the form of a can of meat. Critics, notably Professor Granger, have noted that Ellis takes ‘great satisfaction in elevating the ridiculous to almost religious levels of significance’ (‘The Barn Owl’ [Pengrove, 1982]). His 1975 poem ‘Tinned Meat’ includes the line: ‘twist me open, my spirit bled its last jelly’.

Here, in ‘Innocence Lost’, the ‘can of meat’ becomes a metaphor both for the virile manhood but also for the human spirit contained in the hard shell of corpulent matter. Yet there is a paradox here that is doubly apparent. The bread of the transubstantiation has become meat, yet meat had also been transformed to spirit and the ‘body’ is now the cold container of the tin. This confusion is deliberate. To Ellis, sex is not separated from his being. There is no attempt to attain a higher being. The meat is both his spirit and his manhood; his manhood, as many have pointed out, is the essential spirit of Grayson Ellis. This, I think, mocks the notion of the blessing, found in the last four lines of the poem.

You blessed our entwinement
twice, you blessed the can
of meat. Then, thrice blessed, we went to bed.
It was bacon grill, I remember. (ll. 16-19)

The blessing of the meat has ancient associations in rituals. However, with typical abandon, Ellis does not reach for the language of the church. The urbane ‘it was bacon grill’ demands to be read as straightforward understatement. His meat is tortured in the hand of his lover.

However, Ellis is never one to shy away from heresy. He is an avowed agnostic and here it’s as if he deliberately wishes to offend the practicing Christian. The bacon being grilled directs the mind towards a language of sacrifice, in which the spirit is subjected to torture. It is surely the image of Christ on the cross, the flesh suffering under the burning heat of the midday sun high on that hill in Golgotha. It would be a stretch to assume this had we not the evidence of the 1978 unpublished verse, ‘Christians Love Bacon Sandwiches’, which ends with one Ellis’s more sardonic lines, the order to ‘Chew the meat, salvation in tooth / Gristle, muscle, sin and tomato satisfaction’ (l. 37-38).

Only, on Ilkley Moor, there is no ‘tomato satisfaction’. Even sex, once endured, becomes the fading remnant of a memory.

Shelly Greene
The University of Preston