By Nicola Healey
Crisis Actor by Declan Ryan was my favourite poetry collection of 2023 – I wrote on it at length for The London Magazine in July 2023, where my main focus was Ryan’s boxing poems. There was one poem that I didn’t explore there – its sensitive subject matter was such that it didn’t feel right just to touch on it, or that wouldn’t have done it justice. That poem was ‘Five Leaves Left’ on the English singer-songwriter Nick Drake. First published in the New Statesman in 2020 (in a slightly different form), the poem takes its title from Drake’s 1969 debut album.
When a poem is about a famous person, we inevitably bring something to the poem of what we already know about that figure, or how we have previously experienced them. This can either enhance the poem for the reader or occlude an unadulterated reading, so to an extent it is best to let the poem freshly unfold, so far as that is possible. Perhaps I initially avoided the poem as Drake’s music, and that album in particular, is intensely linked in my memories to when I was at university and first came across him: I used to cat-sit and house-sit for a tutor who had Drake’s CDs, so I would put them on whenever I was there. I was around the same age then as Drake was when he passed away, a little younger, and I remember being deeply struck by this ethereal, soulful, hushed yet resonant voice; plaintive, but not sad to listen to. Quietly bright. In the way that music does, his songs then became indelibly wrapped up in that time.
It is extremely hard to write about music (that’s probably another reason I paused with this poem). By definition, it is a wordless, ineffable domain, and there is a risk of either underdoing it or overdoing it in the attempt. Bill Wyman notes this difficulty in The Spectator capturing how much music can mean to people: ‘After all, how does one write about falling in love? […] The only thing harder than writing about music is writing about the loss of loved ones.’ Ryan, here and elsewhere, movingly does both.
Every turn of this well-controlled twenty-line poem holds interest and feeling. Typical of Ryan’s offbeat style, it has an appealing and distinctive momentum, a casual rhythm and tone that propels its unfolding. I like the way his frequent commas energise this movement, serving as both little launch pads and swift musical rests, allowing the poem to build and billow. The natural pulse and phrasing of his poems, together with a certain indefinable quality, works on the reader like music: subtly but surely, you absorb them. The whole poem needs to be read intact to appreciate this lyrical flow, which is nevertheless highly textured. This resonance isn’t necessarily to do with sounds themselves (or not overtly so) but channelled velocity, a kind of arterial pressure. In the TLS, Ryan has referred to the ‘murmurous quality’ that Michael Hofmann is drawn to in poetry, and I feel this musical murmur in Ryan’s work, particularly this poem. Hofmann recently called Ryan ‘an atrial or pericardial poet’ – I liked this, rather than just calling him a poet of the metaphorical heart. Evoking the chambers and surroundings of the actual heart sees Ryan’s poems as the bloodstream and the poet as the heart’s pump, and speaks to the visceral nature of poetry-making. You can tell that Ryan’s poems are never contrived and always go through the heart. And a heart murmur occurs when blood does not flow smoothly, there is some turbulence or friction (this, Wendell Berry finds, is ‘the real work’: ‘The impeded stream is the one that sings’).
Here, that friction is provided by the rub of Drake’s life and demise. Ryan alludes to Drake’s irreplaceability – ‘the only way to get the Nick Drake guitar sound // on record would be to have Nick Drake on guitar’ – as well as his musical stamina, almost monomaniacal dedication and technical mastery: ‘He could keep it going for hours: those hands again, their power, // their command the last of its kind.’ (He was famed for having very large hands, which aided his unusual range and dexterity.) The poem is studded with well-chosen, compressed biographical details like this, informed by reminiscences of friends, which conjure Drake’s physicality, character and historical context. ‘Those left who knew him / still talk about his hands. The size of them. His stoop // in Cambridge in a too-small new-build room’ (note the almost inaudible assonance in ‘stoop’, ‘too’, ‘new’ and ‘room’). The tall Drake literally didn’t fit into his living space at university. This almost Alice-in-Wonderland image could stand as a metaphor, too, for feeling hampered by the constraints and expectations of his environment, for how the sui generis Drake needed to forge his own path.
Drake went to the newly built Fitzwilliam College, Richard Morton Jack tells us in Nick Drake: The Life (John Murray, 2023) – ‘a brutalist desert’ his contemporary, John Venning, terms it, where Drake found it ‘grim’ to be. Venning doesn’t hold back, calling it ‘an architectural eyesore’, their rooms ‘shoeboxes’ and the entrance ‘the utilitarian backside of the building, utterly ugly and devoid of inspiration’. (I don’t deem this being precious or a marginal issue: it’s been clinically proven that bad architecture and ill-thought-through living spaces have a significant impact on physiological and mental health – not that we should need the glaringly obvious to be backed up by studies. That instinctive soul-plummet amid dispiriting sites is a warning sign.) Drake became disillusioned by Cambridge, preferring to escape to London (though he later regretted abandoning his degree). Nevertheless, songs that would end up on Five Leaves Left were honed in his cramped Fitzwilliam room, where he obsessively refined his guitar technique.
Against Drake’s gently imposing physical presence, Ryan depicts something of his ethereality: those who knew him recall the transparency of his skin: ‘you could see through it, into virginity’ – that is a startling, strangely transcendent turn. The mind wants to read ‘infinity’, where Drake now exists. (Touchingly, his headstone is inscribed with a lyric from his final album’s last song, ‘From The Morning’: ‘Now we rise / And we are everywhere.’)
This is no idealisation of the singer, though, as the poem takes a darker turn half-way through, where a sense of purity, in music and spirit, gives way to the realities of deteriorating mental health and maladjustment: ‘Later on, he wouldn’t cut his nails, wash his clothes’. It seems likely that cannabis dependence contributed to Drake’s initial decline – ‘Drugs began in Aix’, Ryan’s poem punchily begins – though his difficulties were simmering first (his psychiatrist felt that drugs were an attempt at self-medication, rather than a cause of illness). This breakdown ‘was down the road’ though, that ‘brand of sadness’ just ‘a hint / in the air’ at the start, a foreboding scent, ‘like the fate of apples coming into season // that will perish uneaten in their bowl’. Ryan sharpens here a sense of natural talent coming to fruition but always on the brink of being missed, until a tipping point is passed and there is no going back. He then evokes Drake’s pastoral and mystical substance, his hinterland of Romanticism, with a dreamy Blakean vision:
His voice
the note of goodness in the fruit, of Englandlurching into colour, the trees of the forest bending their heads
like angels out of Blake, harvest time moving towards him […]
Blake was one of the only subjects that struck a chord with Drake at university (albeit not studiously so), and his influence can be felt in Drake’s songs. These lines evoke Drake’s haunting song ‘Fruit Tree’ on Five Leaves Left, whose foreseeing lyrics ponder the fickleness of fame with a Blakean simplicity. That ominous, looming ‘harvest time’, meanwhile, may be a reference to Drake’s song ‘Harvest Breed’ on his final album, Pink Moon, which appears to face imminent death. We get a fatalistic sense of Drake being a ‘product’ of a lost era, caught in a standstill, or an over-extended reverie – an embodiment of T. S. Eliot’s words: ‘you are the music / While the music lasts’. He most existed for and through his music, where ‘he stood apart, from the detritus of a life’, Ryan writes. Anyone who stands too far apart from life though, especially when their rarefied mission is overlooked – or when what they live for becomes inaccessible – is in danger of becoming detritus themselves – of wasting themselves.
Drake had a purist approach to his musical delivery, and a shy nature, so constitutionally struggled to cope with the demands and practicalities of public performances, especially as time went on and he became more discouraged. One senses that if he had been more psychically balanced by other occupations and interests, and not so intensely single-minded, this may have offered him some protection from implosion (though it was his hyperfocus that brought us the music). When the success he had worked so hard towards, and been assured of, did not materialise, it seems this shattered his core, he became increasingly isolated, and his creativity deserted him.
The line which closes the penultimate couplet is the emotional linchpin of the poem, acutely affecting, brilliantly placed and balanced, encapsulating the double bind in which the sensitive yet determined Drake found himself trapped: ‘He didn’t like it at home but couldn’t bear it anywhere else.’ The quiet intensity here, the tone of defeat – which invokes Drake’s own words after a suicide attempt – somehow charges the line and the whole poem as it draws to its inexorable end. (In the Guardian, Drake’s sister, Gabrielle, has talked about how, after he was forced to retreat to the family home, ‘Nick found his home a prison. As well as the only place he could be.’) The simple phrase that follows is equally moving: ‘He was tired.’ Out of context, this brief, bare sentence could have no emotional import, but the placement and concision are perfect: you feel the weight of Drake’s 26 years, and the formless future; the reader enters into this tiredness. Ryan shows how simplicity and restraint can carry the most emotional charge, and bear more than words can say. People who are much older may scoff at someone in their twenties being tired; a collective amnesia can descend as we age causing us to forget how very difficult, unstable and vulnerable a time, being new to adulthood, someone’s mid-to-late twenties can be, so we instead idealise and glorify being young. The line speaks of existential depletion: the effort of trying to live, understand life, fit in and make your independent way at a crucial juncture, and while enduring etiolating mental illness. (We now know that brains aren’t even fully developed until around the age of 30.) The intensity of youth and effort, combined with the apparent indifference of the yawning world, can make for catastrophic clashes and collapse.
The closing two lines of ‘Five Leaves Left’ are similarly powerful in their tactful understatement and bathos. Drake appears (and disappears) as a lost soul who had given up on time, and his future: ‘He hung a future on the stopped cogs / of his alarm clock, then slept through it.’ The subtle echo of that hard, short ‘o’ sound (‘stopped’, ‘cogs’, ‘clock’) heightens a sense of disjunction and stoppage in these admirably intricate, gently rendered lines. Time had ceased for Drake: he was out of sync with his time and place; the machinery of life wasn’t working for him.
Music had enabled for Drake a delicate, timeless balance of being both ‘in and out of time’, as Eliot puts it in ‘The Dry Salvages’ – a transcendent yet grounded freedom, tethering him to his life and to the world. This is an example of what William Stafford calls ‘the thread’, a filament of substance peculiar to each individual and which gives interior meaning to life: ‘While you hold it you can’t get lost.’ (‘The Way It is’) Beyond Drake’s reach, he was now only out of time (or trapped in time – too aware of killing time), and spinning out of control. Drake died in his bedroom in Warwickshire on the morning of 25th November 1974, due to an overdose of antidepressants.
The album’s (and poem’s) unbeatably complete title – a casual masterstroke, which whimsically refers to the note towards the end of a packet of Rizla cigarette papers, saying ‘Only 5 Leaves Left’ – has a ring of gentle urgency, of time and energy running out, indicating action must be taken to avoid depletion. It hints at a cycle of dependency, has fitting autumnal connotations, as well as being a lyrical, sonically pleasing phrase. It takes on a prescient tenor in the light of Drake’s early death: he had just five years left at the time of the album’s release.
*
Ryan has written compellingly and with great sympathy on Drake in prose, too, in a review of Morton Jack’s book, a driven, compact, authoritative piece that shines like a slab of granite – the hard clarity is starkly impressive and unyielding. (Ryan is one of the best prose stylists around, and to my mind the most enjoyable.) He highlights how Drake’s difficulties with expressing himself, outside of music, were evident early on: ‘I shall always feel that it was his inability to communicate in class that was the real stumbling block’, a former teacher remarked. This observation, Ryan writes, ‘would become a refrain throughout the rest of his short life’, a ‘reticence and reserve’ which ‘calcified into something more crippling with time’. It is painful to read in Morton Jack’s book of how Drake became increasingly confused, indecisive and uncommunicative to the point of muteness and catatonia, and one can only imagine his inner disarray and desperation (he was once found by police stuck at a zebra crossing because he couldn’t even ‘muster the wherewithal’ to cross the road). It is particularly difficult to read of his desire for the company of various friends, to escape the ‘prison’ of home and inertia, yet his inability to connect with them once he was there. It is clear that he made repeated efforts to rejoin life, in and outside of music, and to regain a sense of direction and meaning. This is probably the hardest aspect of The Life to read as it is very real.
Ryan’s poignant alarm-clock image alludes to the fact that Drake is ‘sleeping’ through his own belated success: his future carried on even though he did not. Amidst everything, Drake knew his worth: in despair, The Life reveals, he had told his father in 1972 that ‘One day people would realise’ the true value of his work – insight which came true in time for his family to see, if not for him.
What both ‘Five Leaves Left’ and Ryan’s review confront, with a rare compassion, is the human paradox that Drake’s unique musicianship didn’t exist in spite of his struggles but because of them (before they morphed into illness). And (another paradox) that we shouldn’t romanticise suffering and illness, nor overlook those artists who won’t, or can’t, fit in and ‘play the game’, who become utterly stranded as complicated human beings. In his review, Ryan writes:
[…] his gifts were genuine, and would resonate if communicated properly. But this book makes it clear that those gifts grew out of suffering. Nick Drake’s brand of walled-in unreachability, when not holding a guitar, was a mark of defeat, not élan.
We can only wonder whether Drake would have become undefeated if there had been more time. The imperishable ‘note of goodness in the fruit’ of his voice nourishes generations, offering succour. But there is a troubling irony in the fact that it took his irrevocable absence for his artistry to be communicated properly to the world.
This essay was first published online in summer 2024 with The Hopkins Review.
With thanks to Faber and the poet for permission to quote from ‘Five Leaves Left’.