Leptis Magna
Broken columns in the sand,
half-sunk, a broken forum
- a city, acres of it
broken amid the African sands,
did nothing for me;
dead stones from a dead world.
thirty-seater communal, constant-flush,
where sun-tanned Romans strained
to catch the gossip and the news from Rome,
with Marcus cornering on figs
and Septimus selling futures,
Caius, as usual, thumping "Home Rule for Africa",
was answered with a fart,
or was it no politics in the loo"?
- "Dirty Dec's for the best whores in
town".
Later, in narrow streets,
jostled by turbaned carriers,
dodging the camels, swearing in Latin,
fingering cloth in the shops,
wheeling and dealing
conquerors of the known world
and a dusty troop of soldiers
in from the desert
with mighty thirsts,
eyes flicking the birds.
They grinned for my camera which caught
broken columns, a wandering camel
and miles of sands that buried
the restless dead of Leptis.
SCOUTING FOR POETS
(World is suddener than we fancy it - Louis Macniece, Snow)
by Jeffery Wheatley, reproduced from Weyfarers 104.
In his
military days, before writing Scouting for Boys, Robert Baden-Powell escaped from Matabele (now Zimbabwean) natives
by running over large stones, putting only one foot on each and using a foot and
eye coordination beyond local ability, which he attributed to his skill at
country dancing. There are poems that work in this way, moving quickly from
image to image, seeing the next before leaving the last so that they share
associations common to each and sweep the thought chain along without a
pause.
William Empson wrote poems that skip along
the shared borders of life, science and metaphysics so that his Camping Out could begin with the practicalities:
And now she cleans her teeth into the lake:
and within a few
lines find that:
Soap tension the star pattern magnifies.
and
conclude that
Who moves so among stars their frame unties;
See where
they blur, and die, and are outsoared.
Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity remains a classic
analysis of the poetry of associations.
The late Patrick
(Paddy) Stevens, a brave and distinguished soldier and a Surrey poet,
used to say that words strike sparks off one another. Sparks formed by
associated ideas provide the links, which may be logical, punning or based on
the similarity of words. They allow swift movement from idea to idea and
increase the intensity of the work. A few lines from his Declaration of Independence provide an example. Pivotal
words have been emboldened by me, not by him:
So dare I
fumble with your soul
and offer
tentative regrets?
Am I an accident of
time
that will catch you on a
claw
or set the world upon a
rack
and coldly take the
pleasures I desire?
Other lines from the same poem
show the turbulence of his vision:
What is the mystery of the singing
bird?
. . .
I've spread my feathers on the football field, deployed my
argument in debate:
the ragged ends of my desires
are groping for a
touch,
not yet connected to the national system.
Can I devise a model to
explore
the massive range of my emotions
and the tumbling pictures in my
brain?
I look into your eyes to find
the ghosts of ancient warriors
who ravished on a whim.
Quickness of movement is not the same
as obscurity. Nor does clear mean prosey. Poems in which the links are personal,
rather than intuitive, may be inaccessible to the reader. The cloud of
associations may do their work subconsciously, so that they cause the hairs on
the back of your neck to rise before you understand why. The effect can be
heightened if the poem has a good plot, for example one in which an idea
introduced casually at the beginning suddenly returns at the end, given a new
and deeper meaning by what has passed between.
Louis
MacNiece's fine poem, Snow, moves in only twelve lines from the
sight of a bowl of roses against a window with snow beyond it through the
unexpected nature of everyday things to an almost mystical conclusion that
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses
The conclusion itself is rich in associations, recalling the 17th century
metaphysical poet George Herbert's hymn/poem The
Elixir:
A man that looks on glass
On it may stay his eye
Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass
And then the Heaven espy.
Herbert was connected with a religious community at Little Gidding (the
title and subject of Eliot's fourth Quartet, a poem in which snow and
roses are key images). And early on in Eliot's poem we have:
. . . Now
the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a
bloom more sudden
Than that of summer . . .
Which of itself
provides a little surprise, because Eliot suggests springtime whereas much of
MacNiece's imagery seem to imply winter, and it recalls the MacNiece line that:
World is suddener than we fancy it.
The Australian poet
Les Murray shows the same facility with associations
in many of his poems. There is a series of disconcerting prospects in The
Engineer Formerly Known as Strangelove, where he describes the process:
The Cold War is a Dämmerung long since of dead Götter
But I am still
in cutting edge high tech.
In a think-tank up to my neck
I rotate,
projecting scenarios.
Let it not be thought that I am suggesting
that all good poems are built in this way, not least because I have made no
mention of other virtues. There are poems written from the heart which reach the
reader through their simplicity, directness, good diction and absence of false
sentiment but which make little or no use of associative devices. Approaches to
form vary greatly but good poems have common features. Somewhere in his writings
Robert Graves likened a finished poem to a round
tower, from which no stone can be added and none taken away. This is a good
test.
References
William Empson, 1955. Collected
Poems, Chatto and Windus.
William Empson, 1961. Seven Types of Ambiguity,
Peregrine Books.
T. S. Eliot, 1959. Four Quartets, Faber and Faber. George
Herbert, 1889 edition of poems with Walton's Life, Walter Scott, London.
Louis MacNiece, 1949. Collected Poems 1925-1948, Faber and Faber. Les
Murray, 2002. Poems the Size of Photographs, Carcanet.
Patrick Stevens,
1976. Declaration of Independence, Guildford Poets Press.
POEMS and HISTORY
by Jeffery Wheatley, reproduced from Weyfarers 108.
The first half of the 19th century was a turbulent period
in British social history.A few poets reflected
it and sometimes their work is enduring, for example Shelley:I met Murder on the way.He had a mask like Castlereagh . . . (The
Masque of Anarchy). Free Trade was a
great economic issue. The Corn Lawskept bread prices too high for the
poor.Tennyson was a freetrader and this is reflected in several of his poems.
Our National Anthem dates from 1745, during the Jacobite Rising . Ebenezer Elliott was born in Rotherham in
1781. He hated school and was sent to
work in a foundry by his father.He later
became a powerful campaigner against social injustice and the Corn Laws.He was helped in his poetry by his father’s
library and by Southey. Towards the end of his life he was asked to write an
anthem for the people.He produced this:
THE
PEOPLE'S ANTHEM.
(1847)
When wilt thou save the
people?
Oh, God of mercy!
when?
Not kings and lords, but
nations!
Not thrones and crowns, but men!
Flowers of thy heart, oh, God, are
they!
Let them not pass, like weeds,
away!
Their heritage a sunless
day!
God ! save the people!
Shall crime bring crime for ever,Strength aiding still the
strong?
Is it thy will, oh, Father,
That man shall toil for
wrong?
No! say thy mountains;
No! thy skies
Man’s clouded sun shall
brightly rise,
And songs be heard, instead of
sighs.
God, save the
people!
When wilt thou save the
people?
Oh, God of Mercy!
when?
The people, Lord, the people
!
Not thrones and crowns, but
men!
God! save the people! thine they
are,
Thy children, as thy angels fair:
Save them from bondage, and
despair !
God, save the people !
Elliott died in 1849. The power of his piece was soon noticed in non-conformist circles and it found its way into some of the hymn books, where it remained (with a couple of edits) until at least the 1950s. Not kings and lords, but nations became The people, Lord, the people! Bondage became vice and oppression.The hymn was a not infrequent choice in a Dorking church in the 1960s, another period of social change and unrest, when the popularity of the monarchy was in decline.