In the collection’s final poem ‘Who’ Causley writes of seeing the ghostly figure of himself as a child haunting the places around Launceston he has known his whole life. He sees his younger self wandering beside the River Kensey in old fashioned clothes and has a vision of the fields where he once played, now covered by houses. From the Other Bank . . . The poem comprises six stanzas, four of four lines each, one of three lines, and a final single-line stanza. This enables the poet to build up the picture, reaching a dramatic climax, and the final one-lined stanza a resolution. There is a regular rhyme scheme in that every line ends with consonant rhyme in groups of four, ABAB, CDCD etc. For example, ‘spins’ and ‘suns’ in stanza four; ‘dress’ and ‘grass’ in stanza two. This gives a sense of cohesion, but is so subtly done that it is easy to miss.

Speaking to the BBC in 1979 Causley confessed that he had decided that if he survived the fighting he would devote his life to only doing the things he enjoyed. After completing his teacher training at Peterborough he returned to Launceston and remained at the school there until he retired in 1976. Causley was born at Launceston in Cornwall and was educated there and in Peterborough. His father died in 1924 from long-standing injuries from the First World War. Causley had to leave school at 15 to earn money, working as an office boy during his early years. He served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, as a coder, an experience he later wrote about in a book of short stories, Hands to Dance and Skylark.

War & Teaching

The poem ends with an ambiguous last line, open to interpretation, about the nature of life and dying. Waterman, Rory (2016), Belonging and Estrangement in the Poetry of Philip Larkin, R. S. Thomas and Charles Causley, Routledge Publishing.

His poetry frequently refers to Cornwall and its legends, and Causley was recognised by being made a Bard of the Cornish Gorsedd in 1955. His scope and interests, however, stretched far beyond his native county. In addition, many poems relate to fellow writers like Keats, Clare, Lorca, Day-Lewis, Clemo, Betjeman and to artists he admired: Van Gogh, Samuel Palmer and Maxim Gorky, as well as the sculptor of local East Cornish origin, Nevill Northey Burnard.From boyhood Causley intended to be an author. He began a novel at the age of nine and continued writing in a desultory fashion throughout his education at Launceston College. At fifteen, however, Causley quit school to begin working. He spent seven gloomy years first as a clerk in a builder’s office and later working for a local electrical supply company. This period of isolation would have destroyed most aspiring young writers, but in Causley’s case, it proved decisive. Cut off from institutionalized intellectual life, he developed in the only way available–as an autodidact. “As far as poetry goes,” Causley has commented on these formative years, “I’m self-educated. I read very randomly, I read absolutely everything.” He also experimented–with poetry, fiction, and most successfully with drama. In the late 1930s he published three one-act plays. During the same period Causley also played piano in a four-piece dance band, an experience which may have influenced his later predilection for writing poems in popular lyric forms such as the ballad.

Poetry (ballads, other formal poetic structures and free verse; also, children's poetry); short plays, including for radio; libretti; short stories; essays and criticism. Among the English poetry of the last half century, Charles Causley’s could well turn out to be the best loved and most needed.’ Collected Poems (1975) solidified Causley’s reputation in England and broadened his audience in America. The volume was widely reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic almost entirely in a positive light, but most critics presented Causley’s achievement in a reductive manner. While they admired the ease and openness of his work and praised his old-fashioned commitment to narrative poetry, they did not generally find the resonance of language that distinguishes the finest contemporary poetry. By implication, therefore, they classified Causley as an accomplished minor poet, an engagingly eccentric antimodernist, who had mastered the traditional ballad at the expense of more experimental work. Only Edward Levy’s essay on the Collected Poems in Manchester’s PN Review made a serious attempt to demonstrate the diversity of Causley’s achievement and his importance as a lyric poet. Fortunately, subsequent critics such as Robert McDowell, D. M. Thomas, Michael Schmidt, and Samuel Maio have followed Levy’s lead to make broader claims for Causley’s work. Perhaps because of his years spent teaching Charles always had a special affinity with children and some of his best loved poetry was written for them. His book of poems for children ‘Figgie Hobbin’ named after a traditional raisin-filled Cornish pastry, was published in 1970 and I remember having it read to me as a child. Crammed with witty, satirical rhymes, many with a nod to Cornish legends, it became a firm family favourite. The resemblance is not merely a matter of rhyme and meter, stanza and tone. It is also one of spiritual genealogy–of primal sympathy and imaginative temperament. Like the Blake of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Causley is a demotic visionary, a poet who finds the divine–and the demonic–in the everyday world and reports it without apology in the available forms and accessible images of one’s time and place. Causley’s characteristic mode is often the short narrative (and he has never been tempted into the epic private mythology of the late Prophetic Books), but his decisive source is not Hardy or Auden, as important as they were in other ways, but Blake. His late eighteenth-century master, moreover, also provided him a potent example of how the poetic outsider can become a seer–a lesson not likely to be lost on a working-class Cornish writer remote from the Oxbridge world of literary London forty years ago.Among the English poetry of the last half century, Charles Causley's could well turn out to be the best loved and most needed.... Before I was made Poet Laureate, I was asked to name my choice of the best poet for the job. Without hesitation, I named Charles Causley -- this marvellously resourceful, original poet, yet among all known poets the only one who could be called a man of the people, in the old, best sense. A poet for whom the title might have been invented afresh. I was pleased to hear that in an unpublished letter, Philip Larkin thought the same and chose him too." [12] Through the Granite Kingdom (Wissenschaftlichter Verlag Trier, 2011 – ed. Michael Hanke): a collection of 22 critical essays, in English, by English, German and other writers and academics; ISBN 978-3868213386

Written at the height of British Neo-romanticism, which made personal style and individual voice the preconditions of artistic authenticity, Causley’s “Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience” revels in its impersonality. The poem is anonymous in the sense of the finest traditional ballads–the author’s individuality has defiantly appropriated a universal style. If Blake chose the term song in his “Songs of Innocence and Experience” to denote their radical simplicity and directness of expression versus conventional eighteenth century literary poems, then Causley’s title suggests his deliberate attempt to recapture a straightforward Blakean clarity. The poem concludes this exchange between a returning sailor and the boy to whom he has bought gifts:

Survivor's Leave followed in 1953, and from then until his death Causley published frequently. He worked as a teacher at a school in Launceston, leaving the town seldom and reluctantly, though he twice spent time in Perth as a visiting Fellow at the University of Western Australia, and worked at the Banff School of Fine Arts in Canada, and especially after his retirement which taken early in 1976 [2] was much in demand at poetry readings in the United Kingdom. He made many broadcasts. Charles Causley Poetry Competition Winners". Literature Works SW - Nurturing literature development activity in South West England. 22 January 2015 . Retrieved 18 January 2017. The 2018 Charles Causley International Poetry Competition Results". The Charles Causley Trust. 7 January 2019 . Retrieved 25 August 2020. Charles Causley gallery". Charles Causley Society. Archived from the original on 25 July 2011 . Retrieved 27 June 2011. Music at the festival has included regular appearances from Causley's distant relative, folk singer Jim Causley. featuring his settings of Causley poems, some of which have been recorded for commercial CDs.