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Doctorate of Philosophy
in Creative Writing
Voiceprints of an Astronaut
A Poetry Collection
and
Politics and the Personal in the Sonnet and
Sonnet Sequence:
Edwin Morgan's “Glasgow Sonnets”, Tony Harrison's “from The School of Eloquence” and selected sonnets by Paul Muldoon
Aileen Ballantyne
Doctorate of Philosophy
University of Edinburgh, 2014
ii DECLARATION:
This is to certify that that the work contained within has been composed by me and is
entirely my own work. No part of this thesis has been submitted for any other degree
or professional qualification.
Signed -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
iii Acknowledgements:
I’m indebted to Dr Alan Gillis for his inspiration as a poet, teacher and critic. His
insight, his patience and his discerning encouragement during the process of writing
this collection have made the learning process both a pleasure and a challenge. The
critical essay on the sonnet form in three individual modern poets was a process of
discovery and one where, once again, his guidance, breadth of knowledge and
unstinting fairness ensured that I kept my aims and targets clearly in sight.
I’m also grateful to many poets and teachers who generously shared their knowledge
with me, and from whom I learned a very great deal in the MSc year at the University
of Edinburgh before embarking on this PhD. In particular my thanks, in this respect
go, again, to Dr Alan Gillis, to Professor Ian Campbell, to Robert Alan Jamieson, to
Dilys Rose and Professor Colin Nicholson.
My thanks are also due to Professor Ian Wilmut for several detailed interviews and
conversations for The Sunday Times in the years following the birth of Dolly the
sheep at Roslin, Midlothian. My thanks too, to all the staff at the Scottish Poetry
Library for endless information, to Julie Johnstone, curator of the SPL’s Edwin
Morgan Archive and Kay Bohan for generous help, even, recently, while the library is
closed for renovation.
My colleague, Russell Jones (now Dr Jones), was also an enormous help and support
in providing the kind of honest and constructive mutual feedback and camaraderie
between would-be poets that is hugely valuable and important.
Thanks are also due to my family, and in particular, to my husband Robert for sharing
the discovery along the way. Poetry is all the better for being enjoyed and shared.
My thanks to my older sister, Etta Epstein, for the memories, the road-trips, and the
fun. Finally, but importantly, to my son Alastair, who grew from teenager to trainee
journalist during the writing of this. Thank you Alastair, for “light-sabre battles on
far-distant moons,” for “rugby-tackling the dog”, and your continued inspiration.
iv ABSTRACT
“Voiceprints of an Astronaut” is a multi-faceted collection of poems that explores the
fluid borders between memory and the imagined, the personal and the sociohistorical. The “voiceprints” of the title poem are the words, both imagined and real,
of the only twelve men who ever walked on the moon.
My own device, of an imagined ‘interview’ with figures from history, is deployed in
the title poem. It is also used, for example, in the form of voiceprints from R.L.
Stevenson, (“Tusitala”), Mary Queen of Scots’ maidservant, (“Beheaded”,“A Prayer
fir James VI”), an acrobat-magician from the Qin Dynasty, (Bi xi Terracotta) and a
time-travelling 14th century monk transposed to the Scottish Poetry Library (“In the
Library”).
In poems such as “Earthrise”, “Starlight from Saturn”, “In the Library”, and “Lines
for Edwin Morgan” the tone is lyrical, taking the form of the sonnet, or sometimes
simply reflecting the ghost of a sonnet framework. Recent events such as the Haiti
earthquake are reflected, at times, by a purely personal response, such as in “Beads”,
while poems about the Aids epidemic in the 80’s, (“Lunch-times with Rick”, “The
Quilts”) spring from a period as Medical Correspondent for the Guardian, covering
Aids conferences in London, Stockholm, Montreal and San Francisco. Others, such as
“Roosevelt’s Bats”, “Fire-and-Forget” and “At Sea” are responses to modern war and
conflict. In all of these, my aim has been to explore the political through the personal.
The poems in this collection reflect an adult life split, almost equally, between two
cities: Edinburgh and London. Regular visits too, to North America are another
influence. An important part of the journey involved in writing these poems was a
discovery of a Scots voice I thought I’d misplaced, only to find again, in poems such
as “Beheaded” or “Haud tae me”.
Some of these poems are autobiographical, dealing with parenthood, childhood, and
growing up. Others, such as “Dana Point” or “Boy with Frog” celebrate a moment, a
time and a place. In the case of the series of poems beginning with “Jim” and ending
with “Black and White” the places and times take the form of memories, both in
Scotland and Canada, of a much older sister.
The critical essay that forms the second part of this thesis is entitled “Politics and the
Personal in the Sonnet and Sonnet Sequence: Edwin Morgan's “Glasgow Sonnets”,
Tony Harrison's “from The School of Eloquence” and selected sonnets by Paul
Muldoon”.
The first chapter examines the use of the sonnet form in Edwin Morgan’s “Glasgow
Sonnets”; the second chapter concerns the sonnets written by Tony Harrison in from
The School of Eloquence and Other Poems, published in 1978, while the third chapter
looks at selected sonnets by Paul Muldoon.
v Contents
2-69
Voiceprints of an Astronaut
A Poetry Collection
71-172
Politics and the Personal in the Sonnet and Sonnet Sequence:
Edwin Morgan's “Glasgow Sonnets”, Tony Harrison's “from The
School of Eloquence” and selected sonnets by Paul Muldoon
72-80
Introduction
81-109
Chapter 1
Don’t shine a torch on the ragwoman’s dram.
Coats keep the evil cold out less and less.
Edwin Morgan’s “Glasgow Sonnets”
110-137 Chapter 2
Elegies and Bullets
Tony Harrison’s “from The School of Eloquence” sonnets, 1978
138-172 Chapter 3
Playing for Mortal Stakes
Selected Sonnets by Paul Muldoon
173-178 Works Cited
vi vii Voiceprints of an Astronaut
A Poetry Collection
CONTENTS
5
Snow Angel
6
Winter
7
A Meteor Shower was Expected
8
Fire-and-Forget, Indian Springs, Nevada
9
Roosevelt’s Bats
10
Memorial Day
11
At Sea
12
Last Meeting
13
The Witness
15
Military Section, Royal College of Surgeons
16
Voiceprints of an Astronaut
21
Jim
22
Summer ’64
24
Motorhomes and Atriums
26
My Sister’s Tree
28
Black and White
29
Full Moon, March 12, 2012
30
Heavy in my Hands
31
The Colour of Desire
32
Lunch-times with Rick
33
The Quilts, Washington DC, 1987
34
A Pocketful of Posies
35
Clostridium Tetanus
2
36
Soul’s Departure
37
Second Creation
38
Relations: Jamie
39
The Great War, Imperial War Museum, London
40
No Concept of an Edge
41
Through a Lens in Winter
42
A Childhood
43
Pictures
44
Beads
45
Snow Apples
46
The Afterdeath
47
For Peggy
48
Haud tae me
49
Beheaded
50
Prayer fir James VI
51
Tusitala
52
The Palm House, Edinburgh
53
Bird of Paradise
54
Tuesdays from Two until Four
55
In the Library
56
At Dana Point
57
Element
58
Great Shining Water
59
Shingle Creek
3
60
They’re all out of water in Vegas
61
The Inventor
62
Out of her Depth
63
In the Garden
64
Water
65
Boy with Frog, Dorsoduro
66
Bai xi Terracotta (A Hundred Games)
67
Starlight from Saturn
68
When the Rowan’s Laden
69
Room
4
Snow Angel
We found her in the back garden
of the twenty-third house,
lying on her back,
legs and arms akimbo,
making snow-angels
like she did as a girl,
the white roots of her brown hair
startling now
in reflected snowlight.
Where’s Hannah? she said.
I want to play with Hannah.
It’s alright, we said, we’ve come for you.
We'll take you home.
But she knew, as she always did,
when we lied.
We brushed the ice off her blue nightdress,
warmed her freezing hands inside ours
and watched our mother’s wings
melt into the snow.
5
Winter
I want to be in part of the planet that's hot,
drinking frozen green-lime margaritas
in Hemingway's house in Key West,
stroking the fur of a cat that’s called
Frank, or Errol or Marilyn
to the sound of a house-fan
that purrs with molecular heat.
I want to be cooling the sweat
of the sun on my legs
in the long crystal swathe of his pool,
breathing great gulps of moist air
as I rise and I fall in its pulse.
I want to walk out on Duval where the scent
of white jasmine still lingers,
watch Louisiana pelicans swoop
for silver-scaled fish
in the salt and the swell of the Gulf,
celebrate each breath of red sunset
with bagpipes and brilliant bandanas,
beat hard on the gong and the drum
at the going down of the sun.
6
A Meteor Shower was Expected
Lines for Edwin Morgan
August 19, 2010
We weave him a sailboat of gorse and laurel,
daisies and rowan from the Kilpatrick hills,
carry him safe this late August night
in the storm of a planet that burned
for Bede and Columbus.
We peer through grey cloud
for the tail of the comet Swift-Tuttle,
through silver-spent rain from Perseus
to stars yet unborn in the blue
of the listening Pleiades,
where the plesiosaur swims, a jaguar weeps
and the meteor shower,
when it came,
was expected.
7
Fire-and-Forget
Indian Springs, Nevada
She packs the Hershey Kisses for the kids,
an apple and a plastic twist of raisins,
waves them off to school
beneath the green sequoia,
sips an ice-cold latte,
a moment to herself before the day,
picks up her watch and ID tag,
turns the blue Ford Taurus,
rolls the window down to breathe
the sagebrush on the way.
At the metal gate, she tilts her head
for the iris-check,
the camera scans her eye
and lets her in.
She sits down at her screen
and takes the joystick,
peers inside a land
of mirrored dust and shadows.
She triangulates her target.
Two rooms precise,
exact across the planet.
Her Reaper hovers, hawk-like,
soaring from her wrist.
She follows one familiar shape,
drops Hellfire where he stands:
a slick of blood and vapour
half a world away.
And when her shift is over
she takes them home
and holds them close
beneath the green sequoia,
and combs their hair,
and combs their hair.
8
Roosevelt’s Bats
How they must have envied you
your silent pick-and-choosing kill,
your mouth-suck chance to quietly cull,
select and take, and leave the husk.
Not for you the soaring flight
of archaeopteryx in the light,
but beating mammal-blooded
membrane-flight,
wings of leather in the night,
oh my Reaper prototype.
And so they held you,
thrumming, in their palms,
piled you in their planes in racks
of twenty-six on twenty-six
and with a little bulldog-clip
clicked a tiny bomb onto your chest
and set you loose.
9
Memorial Day
The man with the hailer
straddles the dust,
says I am your leader,
you will follow me.
I will make molten
volcanoes of souls.
We will stand tall,
carve out the names of the lost
in the marble that never grows cold
as the sound of their silence
drops into the sun.
10
At Sea
The piano-man lulls me to sleep with a drink and a smile;
for a few dollars more he'll sing one for me
as I gaze at the black tugging sea.
The GI in dress uniform asks again for his song
as we sit side by side holding on,
remembering a roadside, and friends long ago,
between whisky sours and Long Island Iced Tea.
The girl with the willow-blonde hair
asks for only one song:
“Not tonight sweetheart” the piano man smiles,
“it's way too sad for Christmas Eve,”
and follows her gaze as she leaves.
I slip into her seat, my long hair is curled,
my silk stockings seamed; a doodle-bug drones
and I’m down to my last cigarette;
the piano man lulls me to sleep
with Gershwin and Lerner and Loewe,
It's Almost Like Being in Love,
and I fold my dollars in the piano man's glass,
pretend he's smiling for me.
11
Last Meeting
Harry Patch and Charles Kuentz,
Ypres 2004
In winter sunlight, here near France,
they wheel the last two out.
One by land, and one by sea,
so they may meet, these two,
and drink warm tea from cups half-full.
As if to spill a drop of tea
would make them weep.
And so they talk of this and that,
And you, he says,
and why did you?
And you? he says,
and why did you?
I had my orders too, he says.
You came at me with bayonet fixed.
In my dreams I see you still,
and hear the cracking of your bone.
There was a boy, he says,
whose name I never knew,
opened waist to shoulder by a shell.
He was beyond all human help.
And as he lay he begged us:
“shoot me”, but was dead
before we could.
They drink their tea, eat biscuits from Alsace,
smiling now, together, here near France
they talk of how they each survived,
and ask each other’s pardon
in winter sunlight in the garden.
12
The Witness
I
Geraniums
I remember the terracotta pots
that held the geraniums
and the smell of new paint
on the windows and walls
when they cut off her hair that day.
The girls and the women
smelled the paint-smell
and it calmed them;
naked and quiet,
they laid clothes and shoes
by the pots that held the geraniums.
II
Testimony of Wilhelm Pfannensteil:
When it was done
the Ukrainians took
long wooden poles
each with a curved metal hook;
pulled each body in
by piercing its mouth.
The dentists came then
to tear out gold teeth.
I considered some time
before watching
at Belzec that day
to write up my hygiene report.
I could not conclude,
on that day at least, that bodies
were disposed of in a sanitary way.
13
III
Imperial War Museum,
London
I look through the glass now,
remember the steam
misting the glass of the porthole,
hear voices that run on a loop,
an old woman
with numbers on her arm
talking of ripples and pools,
circles subsiding, memory a stone
in its depth now.
I look at the things we left behind:
the glass from the cold beer we drank,
a pot for cooking,
a bow for a dress,
grey buttons and spoons,
and a red Bakelite thimble
like the one on the finger
of the fair-haired girl,
broken now, cracked by a stone, or a foot,
splayed like the petals of a geranium.
14
Military Section,
Royal College of Surgeons
December, 2011
This is the skull with the soft fontanelles
that grew long ago in the womb of a woman
and pushed its way down and was blessed.
These are the sockets of eyes in the face
of a boy who tilled the green field.
Here are the splinters of bone in the hole
where his song spilled on grass.
15
Voiceprints of an Astronaut
Earthrise
I never did dream I’d wake up on the moon,
wake to the sphere of the Earth, suspended,
chalked out of the void by a child
in white and in light and in blue
in the dark of a dark with no end.
I long now to reach out to Earth,
hold each last mote of her dust
safe-cupped and close in my palm.
If you could but lay here with me
in the ash of moon’s graphite-grey
you’d erase not a single Earth-line
or speck of coloured time,
or bee’s breath-weight of wind
with the hard edge of your hand.
16
II
Sleeping on the Moon
In the blackness of the blackness of the vacuum
I hear my spine unfurl,
singing in its lightness.
I try to sleep on the dark side of the moon,
weightless in my hammock,
remembering
as we travelled through the black
I saw light
kindle
red
joining
dot
to
dot
each flame a fire
each fire a man,
Nomad in Desert,
Aboriginal light,
holes of life on Earth.
I am thread
loosed from loom,
tug of chord
breath of womb
and I breathe my air,
sink my spine
in its lightness, singing
hammock-deep into dark,
and sleep now
with fire.
17
III
Amy
On the terrae of the moon,
tired of coring rocks,
I slug moon-stones into space,
do giant bunny-hops on film,
imagining her laughter
as my camera rolls.
And in the stillness of moon-nights
I feel the tugging of the chord
to Amy’s yellow nightlight
on the table in her room
and I trace out Amy's name
in grey-dead dust,
and I know when we come back,
to our footprints
and the stiffened flag,
Amy’s name will still be there
in the sands without wind,
without tide.
18
IV
Earthbound
I stand here with the crowd
at Cape Canaveral now and then,
remember the wet-ash taste of moon-dust:
the silver lunar module
rises up on film,
legs asplay,
charcoal-grey
falling away
an image –
running backwards –
of a bug splatted at full throttle
on the windscreen of my car,
its spindle-legs askew.
Now and then, in winter sun,
I feel the thud of re-entry
boom and judder through my feet,
and I know they are back.
At home in my backyard
in the cold of winter
I look up:
hear my spine clicking,
remembering its lightness,
and on the silver disc above,
I know just where, in the windless stillness
I traced out Amy's name with my finger
in grey moon-dust.
19
V
Lunar Sunrise
(for Amy)
Had I but known, I’d have held you
feather-slight in the crook of my arm,
flown with you to the place where Apollo
lights the night like the ascending sun
and all the redfish of Banana River
leap and thrash in mid-air
as the core of Earth vibrates
at our leaving.
We would turn on the dark side of the moon
to that single sphere of green and light
and watch our Earth rotate in cirrus clouds.
I would carry you to the Temple at Ephesus
and the Giant Buddha rock at Kiatang,
washed by foaming water at its feet.
I would hold your hand on Mount Omi
and the snows of Ruwenzori,
adorn your hair with shining tourmaline
and only then –
when we had spent
each single sweetness of our Earth
and watched as our sun rises
from our moon –
would I lay you down
where lilies grow,
had I but known it would end
with the plastic cup half-full
and the sheet
tucked too tight.
20
Jim
He arrived with a white mouse:
pink-rimmed eyes
and a translucent tail
nestled in a box
with six holes for air,
placed it in my lap;
I was convinced
he was the one.
She brought them all to the house:
Jim was the tallest,
blonde-haired and rangey,
he drove a double-decker by day
and courted my sister by night.
I took the mouse outside
to the garden shed
to meet the frogs
that lived in the drawer
from the fridge
then put it in my doll’s house
where it lived for weeks.
We were convinced
that Jim was the one
until my sister got on the plane
for Canada,
for wide open spaces
and skies
that went on for miles.
21
Summer ’64
When I was ten I opened
a box marked The Future.
His name was Gary.
My sister was twenty-four –
he was Ken to her Barbie,
wore his hair like Dr Kildare,
swept back from his forehead.
Gary clicked a single switch
on the dashboard
of his pale blue
Pontiac convertible.
The trunk opened, effortlessly.
The three of us ate salad
with Ranch Dressing,
bought Tab Coca-Colas and Manhattans
with swizzle sticks
and paper-folding parasols.
I liked the way the hair on Gary’s arms
was as tanned as his skin,
his elbow resting, relaxed,
on the rolled down window
as we drove to Lake Simcoe
letting the wind blow our hair.
He taught me to float
like a starfish in the lake.
My sister wore a coral bathing costume,
her long legs brown and smooth.
It’s my Lady Remington, she said.
Gary says it’s so much better
than all those sore little nicks
on my legs from a razor.
It’s electric.
How does Gary know you’ve
got razor nicks on your legs?
I said.
22
From the beach of course,
he sees my legs on the beach,
she answered, smiling.
After she swam
she just lay on the sand
like a bright salamander
and dried in the heat.
Gary unloaded our beach picnic,
took out two Tab Coca-Colas,
the droplets of icy water
on the bottles
sweating in the sun.
I’d love a Tab, I said.
On the drive back
I decided to take Gary apart,
starting with his head,
made him small enough,
to fit back in the box
before I went home on the plane
to our grey-harled flat
with its shared drying-greens,
hung with washing that never dried,
and a box of dolls
I threw in the corner
and never played with again.
23
Motorhomes and Atriums
Jet-lagged in the Marriott atrium,
long before their coffee’s brewed,
I sit beside a crystal fire,
red-blue flames behind the glass,
clean fuel up an endless chimney.
The howl of the February wind skedaddles
between the downtown offices and banks:
Toronto, my sister’s city.
The Toronto Blue Jays,
silent on the plasma screen,
Patsy Cline on the sound system.
A sleepless baby crawls
along the carpet near the fire,
her father humouring her.
You’d love this.
You’d know the baby’s name by now
and where they were from,
have her quiet in your arms,
your nursing skills kicking in,
as always.
We drove from Toronto to Lake George once,
four of us in your oversized motor home,
the summer of ’85.
The pair of us glued to Live Aid
and Bob Geldof,
picking up songs
from Wembley and Philadelphia
on the small TV all the way.
You slicing tomatoes and pickles,
conjuring sandwiches
between cupboard and counter,
perfectly balanced
on that long straight highway.
We’ll laugh about it, I think,
24
then I remember
that you won’t know
what I’m talking about.
I draw my coat around me,
catch the Go-train to the place
where they keep you safe and warm,
my hands deep in my pockets.
25
My Sister’s Tree
I
You were taken with it
when you came to visit,
picked it out that Sunday
up at Conifox.
We carved the hole out wide,
dug it in with coffee grounds
and compost,
let the roots attach,
hoped that it would hold.
Come spring
a shoot or two appeared.
You stroked the tight-furled buds,
watched their tinge of crimson
spread like a vein
through the whiteness.
You held the waxy cups,
translucent in your palm,
took photo after photo
almost like you knew
you wouldn’t remember
that last month in my garden,
and the magnolia
pushing out its flowers for you.
26
II
You’re a voice on the phone now.
I quote you random bits of Scots,
Burns to make you laugh,
sing you Johnny Cash songs
down the line
to hear you smile.
On good days, after your walk,
your carer dials my number,
puts you on the phone at four.
You tell me how the moon
is rising in your sky.
I tell you that it’s dark here now,
that I can see the same moon
shining in my sky
lighting up the branches
of the magnolia in the snow.
III
It’s the first of our May sunshine,
I’m taking a picture –
I’ll bring it with me on the plane.
I’ll tell you about the day we bought it,
how it’s rooted deep in my clay soil,
offering its flowers
and hope that you’ll remember.
27
Black and White
I was always a bit of a hoarder:
his bakelite camera,
the black and white pictures.
I open them up for you now,
carried 3,000 miles,
safe through the scans.
Here in the February sun,
in these last days as yourself,
your hand holds on tight still to mine.
I show you the eyes of the donkeys you rode,
the sand that you felt in your toes,
a grandmother hated,
a grandad adored
that I never knew,
and I ask one last time for the stories
before there was me.
But you ask me again
how I got here
to a room that’s too hot,
holding the pictures,
here to a love long-remembered
for a chess-playing miner, sixty years dead,
alive once again
for a moment or two.
Then you reel off the names in the album,
names I already know
storing your pictures
like a black and white camera
that captures the dark and the light,
the photographer gone long ago.
28
Full Moon
March 12, 2012
The moon rode with us
all the way from West to East,
so bright at first
I couldn’t look.
Here two miles high
in a Boeing Triple Seven,
slowly, my eyes adjusted
to the sheen of it:
a pulsing mirrored circle
alongside me in the dark.
I touched my leather rucksack,
safe beneath my seat,
my mother’s necklace,
Blue Grass perfume,
the turquoise ring,
assuring myself I had
all I needed.
Tilted forward in my seatbelt
to the porthole
I gazed full-on
at the great silver disc of the moon,
the terrible press of thin cold glass
on my forehead.
29
Heavy in my Hands
I go outside to watch my father
cutting worms into small blooded pieces
with his spade
for the hedgehog.
He found her down the old railway line
rolled up in a ball, not moving,
underneath the dockens
and purple lupins.
He held his checked bonnet
out towards me.
I felt the weight of the hedgehog,
heavy in my hands.
I remember the stiff-brush
of her cold bristles in my palm,
the milky white skin
and the touch
of the two thistle-down puffballs
we found beside her
the next morning,
and my father, trying
for a week
to keep them alive for me.
30
The Colour of Desire
My mother kept the cochineal
in a small brown bottle
on the top shelf of the larder,
brought it out once a year on my birthday
to spell out the letters of my name
in brilliant crimson icing.
It was only when I reached my teens
I knew the price of cochineal,
so high once they quoted it
on the Commodity Exchange
in Amsterdam and London:
carmine dye for the Cardinal’s robes,
carmine for the King,
carmine for the soldier,
carmine for the palate of Michelangelo,
carmine dye from the female beetle:
its purple and dark scarlet hue
a harlequin of silken blood
against the mud and earth-dull dyes
of native greens and blues.
They traded it on the Triangle route
for tamarinds and cinnamon and gold,
and men so black
their faces glowed
like beacons in the hold.
They made it as we make it now,
grinding out the bright red stain,
for lipstick and for orange drinks,
party cakes and birthdays.
31
Lunch-times with Rick
(1956-1990)
How many partners an hour?
I write down the answer, in Pitman’s,
in an Islington bar,
those lunch times with you
discussing your book
and bath-house décor,
the rumours
of Belsen-thin men
in San Francisco,
Acheson’s words on the tombs,
and NHS leaflets of death
on the doorsteps.
Quarantine and tattoo them,
the senator says
the day that you hear about Steve,
and turn on TV to Diana’s slim
fingers, circling the wrist
of a man in a hospital bed.
There in our corner
at lunch the next week
you show me
two purple-red lesions
scarring
your beautiful face.
I write out Kaposi’s,
in longhand,
and we order the Dom Perignon.
32
The Quilts,
Washington DC, 1987
In ashes and rhinestones
the names of the dead
are opening
like flowers
on the National Mall
three by six
plots
with no earth
and no gravestone
acred
by stitches
of larkspur
and violets.
A nurse
in the crowd
remembers
the sound
of a voice
and the colours
of all
of their eyes.
33
A Pocketful of Posies
Hiding on the sleeve
of your coat,
I will walk beside you,
insinuate, mutate:
staphylococcus aereus,
simian, bovine,
I can jump across,
BSE, SIV, HIV,
lavender’s blue,
heliotrope cyanosis –
Spanish flu –
I was here before you,
watch you as you love,
copulate, beget,
insinuate, mutate.
Watch you take your first breath,
watch you as they cleanse you,
a-tishoo, a-tishoo,
watch you as they bless you,
scrape off a cell from your cheek,
write out a blueprint that’s perfectly you,
magnify me, amplify me,
tease the telomerase,
sing a ring o’ roses,
husha, husha,
watch the children play.
I was here before you.
You think that if you name me
I will go away?
34
Clostridium Tetani
They watched his naked body curl
into a perfect “C”:
a fortune-telling fish
curved red upon the palm,
every synapse, every tendon,
every sinew of his gut.
They knew it had begun by his smile.
Risus sardonicus,
they called it.
Jaw locked tight.
But the artist-surgeon had no Latin name
for the look
in the soldier’s eyes
as the soldier watched the surgeon
watch him die:
toes curled into fists,
fingers clasped like claws.
The surgeon drew him as he rose
into a perfect “C”,
chose the colours for his flesh
and shaded in the eye
that bulges as we watch him die
in the corner of a surgeons' room,
his striata locked into a rigid bow,
his body unmarked by the blow:
a gun-wound to the head in Corunna.
35
Soul’s Departure
On Friday in the rain at London City
the men with their machine guns stand on guard.
My plane’s on time, flagged up on the board,
lipstick in a see-through bag, nothing sharp or hard.
The X-ray scan shows orifice and bone,
sees no lethal blip in coiling wire.
The screen can read the functions of my i-Pad,
read the synapse of the motherboard.
But your X-ray cannot read my poems.
know the name I gave my child,
leaves my dreams as I ascend
to Paradise
intact.
36
Second Creation
Roslin, Midlothian, June 1996
A scientist asleep on the floor,
waking each night on the hour,
keeping his distance,
letting the ewe have her space.
Twenty-nine dead or miscarried before:
the head much too big, the spark still too small,
blowing on a pinprick of blackened
red-heat until it ignites into fire.
But the wonder, he says,
the wonder is that it succeeds at all.
37
Relations: Jamie
Your mum and your dad,
a Saturday shag, a 3 a.m. grope,
an alcohol haze, a honeymoon daze –
the reason you’re here is perfectly clear:
for me it began on a mortuary slab.
In a room smooth as ice
they sliced back my flesh –
sucked up my soul inside a pipette,
essence de moi, transparent in glass,
a clone in a bowl,
a son à la carte.
That’s the last Jamie up on the wall:
a blonde on my arm
for the upper-sixth ball,
the straight A’s predicted,
the colours for rugby,
the citizen’s cup, the chemistry prize –
you can see why they missed me
when they found me slumped dead
at the wheel of their Volvo:
a well-nourished male,
his stomach containing
some five times the limit
of Laphroaig, Lagavuilin,
Jack Daniels and gin.
They knew a few tricks then
my mum and my dad –
were hacking the phone
of this embryo guy –
recorded the dirt
on his crack and cocaine,
and persuaded him – nicely –
to make me again.
38
The Great War
Imperial War Museum, London
On the left is the gun
from Her Majesty’s Ship, Ramillies, 1916,
on the right is the gun
from Her Majesty’s ship, Resolution, 1915.
A young woman with a school-age boy
looks at the length of the guns,
reads the sign beneath:
Please do not climb on the guns
as you may get hurt.
She pulls her son to her side
in case he should climb on the guns.
39
No Concept of an Edge
We put our babies down on my King Size bed,
yours, four months older than mine,
crawled to the edge
while mine lay on his back
and played with the smiling plastic faces
dangling from his baby-gym.
“Look,” you laughed,
running to stop him:
“no concept of an edge.”
I remember you,
twenty years on,
when I read about the boy
whose mother pushed him
at school, at home, and on the pitch,
then to Oxford,
then the City,
where he worked as a dealer
and launched a dotcom
in his spare time,
bought a flat in Shad Thames
for its view of the Shard and the Gherkin,
pushed himself and his luck,
put one in for himself
now and again
until Compliance found out
and his boss let him go,
and he linked silver links in square double cuffs,
buttoned the suit by Turnbull & Asser,
ordered chilled Krug at the bar on the roof,
walked to the edge
and found no-one there.
40
Through a Lens in Winter
Before you were eight, my eye
was on the Camcorder lens
at every school race that you ran.
I wanted to capture the green
of the green of the grass,
the light in your eyes
when you’d climbed to the top,
balancing high on the top of the hay,
the shape of the wispy-tailed cloud
you said was your lion,
the smell of that perfume you made me
from daisies, rosehips, dock-leaves,
left in the shed for a week,
that look on your face
when you first saw the world
from the cockpit right up with the pilot,
the sound of your laugh
when you rushed up the stairs
of each London bus
to bag the front seat and be driver
to Highgate, Richmond,
Tottenham Hale.
But when I replayed
the Camcorder film
in winter’s first chill
all I could see was a smile in 1-D,
the occasional green of a tree,
and acre on acre of endless blue skies
where I’d tried to pan out
far too wide with my lens,
trying to imprison the spark
instead of watching the flame.
41
A Childhood
The ashes are bone-meal,
coarser than a human’s.
They turn the leaves
of the corkscrew-tree mildew-white,
trickling down into calendula
and sticky willow weeds.
I hold the green cardboard box,
with a name, and an invoice with mine,
follow the instructions
to peel and scatter
then go inside
and watch the rain.
But the shadow of a gold-haired spaniel
still appears now and then
in the rose and the bronze and the green
tones of the buddleia bush
and the laughter
of a child in summer echoes
in remnants
of cricket bats and swings.
42
Pictures
All I can see
is the back of your head
and hers.
You’re holding hands
in a dark orange sun
on a beach I don’t know.
I look at all the other
pictures of you
on shelves and odd surfaces
of the house,
pictures with ice-creams
and hockey sticks and bats,
the one in that red and white shirt
you liked,
rugby-tackling the dog.
I could step into any of them,
know where we were,
what we were doing that day.
But not this one.
In this one you’re with someone
who listens,
makes you look taller.
And I realise this picture
is what all of the others
were actually for:
for the one
where you’re looking
beyond me.
43
Beads
Blanketed by stars, my feet break
the iced tips of grass-blades.
Mars, the rust-red planet: a bronze dot in the sky,
Orion's belt, Cassiopeia,Venus shining.
Here at 3 a.m in my garden,
I try to name the dark.
I step inside kitchen-warmth,
take the box down from the shelf:
a wood-carved sea turtle burnished-red;
its carapace mahogany;
smell the acrid scent of the seed-beads
he said had magic powers;
remember his look as he carved my name
on the turtle’s wooden belly
by a Haitian beach.
I close its lid, perfect-fit,
remembering voices
drifting into restless sleep.
Creole women singing in the square:
a cathedral broken, open-roofed,
cracked when Earth broke,
voices singing out in prayer.
44
Snow Apples
When the last leaf falls from my tree
three pock-marked yellow apples
cling to bare-bone branches,
fermenting from within.
At November's first hungry snowfall
a corbie dips its beak.
A magpie, upended,
lingers tipsy-tailed.
In the morning hard-frothed ice
seals the apple-husks
and the barn-owl wheels,
widdershins,
searching silent trees.
45
The Afterdeath
You sip the wine in that patch
at the end of our garden
where sun falls
till nearly November,
where you and I tilted
our faces to warm them
while he dreamed upstairs
of light-sabre battles
on far-distant moons.
The red plastic wagon you bought him –
the one that he filled to the brim
with woodlice and leaves –
has bleached out to pink,
covered almost entirely by ivy
in the buddleia roots
where he used to hide.
The stars are not stars here,
but flashes of light –
now and then I can see you –
the gooseberry wine on your lips
I can’t taste,
the grey and black twist
of the curls on your brow,
I can’t touch.
I watch you asleep
in the bed where we loved,
watch till you wake
and I leave you.
46
For Peggy
Galashiels, October 18, 2011
I want to remember
the five well-swept steps
to his glasshouse,
the lead crystal bowl
with the yellow tomatoes
and you on your knees
in the grass with my son
when the swords
were made out of paper
and the braw lads
came running home laughing
and sat at your table for tea.
47
Haud tae me
See the wey the sunlicht faas
abin the green floo’er oan the hill,
see the sun ye canna reach
oan that bit gorse aside the loch.
Haud ma haun an we will clim
up tae the licht there yonner.
See the wey it’s further yet,
further as we gan.
See the wey it lichts thon bit,
the bit ye think ye’ll niver reach,
whaur ivery beuch o iviry tree’s
in bloass’m fae the sun.
We will gan thigither there,
afore the summer’s ower.
48
Beheaded
They pu’d ye doon tae yer knees, lady,
an took aff yer kirtle tae shew that they cuid
an left yir white throat shilpit-bare.
In manus tuas, Domine, ma lady,
in manus tuas Domine, ma lady.
Ye kivered the white o yer hair,
yer hair that was yince rosey-licht –
white hair sae young in a lass.
In manus tuas, Domine, ma lady,
in manus tuas Domine, ma lady.
They spaittered the Skye terrier dug,
that hid in yer skirts, wi yer bluid.
An ah held the white lace in ma haun.
In manus tuas, Domine, ma lady,
in manus tuas Domine, ma lady.
Ah haud it, still warm, in ma palm,
bone-lace wreathed wi the scent o yer skin,
an ah’ll say it fir ye, ma lady:
In manus tuas Domine, ma lady,
in manus tuas Domine.
49
A Prayer fir James V1
Westminster Abbey, London
A kiss ower late ye gi’ed her,
a kiss oan lips o stane –
a kiss fir priest denied her.
An effigy ye made her –
cairved her bricht an fair,
placed her hauns at prayer,
laid her in a haa o kings,
tae shew them hou ye lou’ed.
But neethur English queen sae high
nur queen o Scots sae low
can turn the tide or alter time,
the time fir she and thee
in Holyrood’s kind waas,
had they but let her keep ye.
50
Tusitala
It was not the place of my birth that I loved,
nor the trail of her smoke nor the sun on the Forth,
nor the dark of her light nor her half-light,
but this land I have found
and the splash and the roar of her sea
where the women take the hair from their heads
to weave bamboo-grass mosaics
and the ink dries on my pen as I write.
I stand now on a hillside
by the sweet vanilla planted
and her people are my people.
I remember, now and then,
the pale light of the North:
its soot-black towers
and razored dusk-black steeples
etched out in silhouette
and the counterpane coughed red
as I lay in bed, dreaming
paper-chains of islands in my head.
It was not the place of my birth that I loved
but this land I have found
where they call me Tusitala
and I breathe with the sea.
51
The Palm House, Edinburgh
When the steam trains came,
the engines and the tea,
the cardamom and cinnabar
and cinnamon and silk,
the merchants had the towers
fretted like their ships,
in iron and glass
to conjure up the light.
They brought orchids from Singapore,
giant water-lilies from the Amazon,
date palms from the Caribbean,
and the lofty fan palm,
sabal bermudana
with its gentle fronds,
shipped from Bermuda to Leith.
After fifty years of steady growth
in acid Scottish soil
it was uprooted,
trundled through the city
until their hands dug its roots in,
placed it in the Palm House,
almost grown too tall now,
bruising the great structure,
groping for its sunlight
in Edinburgh’s winter.
52
Bird of Paradise
I wanted to capture the gull-throated song,
the red of the lilt of the cardinal’s wing,
the sound of his cry in the yellow hibiscus,
the light of a million square diamonds,
the white-throbbing heat,
the coral-shaped head of the great cincinnurus.
And so in the cover of darkness
I grasp a long blade,
nick off each foot and the tip of each wing,
wrap him in the leaves of a cool green laburnum,
steal him to circle the haar of my garden.
53
Tuesdays from Two until Four
In the tambourine circle
they taught her to dance
Raqs Baladi,
taught her to howl –
the power
of that first ululation,
the sound she would make
at each marriage, each death,
each celebration,
taught her the muscles
that glide, the power
of her womb and her belly.
A year or two older,
she’s doing burlesque,
her red leather coat
on the peg at the door,
a girl in the flesh of a woman,
cymbals on each painted finger,
silver-round bells at her hips,
her hair a bright sunset,
her belly the curve of the moon,
she moves to their beat,
gyrates from her core
on a sawdust-strewn floor,
howls in her head now,
quiet in her lungs.
54
In the Library
I love to hear the whispered rise and fall
of Lizzie as she speaks of books,
the chuffing sound of volumes that she takes,
and slips on shelves in velvet ranks.
I love the sound of Lizzie’s breath, the lull
and silent heft each volume makes
as Lizzie’s fingers seek the spines
of books they made too tall for A to J.
Echoes now: I hear the sound of Lizzie’s voice
recall a name, a date, a poem –
and so I fix my eyes upon my book,
and see the words I want to make
in sans serif, constantia and bold –
and dream just once that Lizzie looks
and Lizzie speaks:
and I would write the colour of her eyes
in indigo from Xian He Shi,
in ametrine, and gold –
and tell her all the wonders of the world
in scripts of Carolingian and Uncial,
here in the pages of my book.
55
At Dana Point
Look, we said, lurching
to the edge of the boat,
and saw the silver swathe of them
playing in our wake,
close enough to see
the dolphins’ streak of muted colour.
We dropped the yellow hydrophone
beneath the churning waters,
listened to each click and whistle,
stood in line
with Chuck and Dodge,
the kids from San Diego,
for the underwater
one-man pod.
Face-down in the Pacific,
eyes pressed to the glass,
trying to understand
blue in the obsidian,
ribboning the dark.
56
Element
Floating, flesh going pink
in the warm
of the Gulf Stream,
arms and legs
spread out,
I saw the Magnificent Frigate Bird,
red-throated in the sky,
his towering height,
his hungry beak
snatching and tearing,
a mighty albatross-man
to my seagull wing-span,
pinned out
for the man o’ war bird
high above the water.
57
Great Shining Water
So close I could touch it,
smell its rancid breath,
hear the raucous crying
of its raw-throated cawing.
I poked each flapping nest
until the red-winged blackbirds,
the scarlet tanagers,
the tree swallows
and the yellow warblers
were all silent.
Then I killed the nightjars,
the chuck-will's-widows,
the plovers
and the purple martins
until my fear was gone
and the great lung
of the shining Okeechobee
breathed for only me.
58
Shingle Creek
Orlando, Florida
It’s a crime here to feed them –
though why anyone should want to
is a mystery.
Beneath the live-oaks,
curtained by Spanish Moss,
his green jacket submerged,
a small one, about the size
of a six year old child, lurks.
Two eyes like black beads,
one nostril above the algae
in Shingle Creek.
Above him on a branch,
the graceful anhinga bird fans out
her long black wings,
flightless as they dry in the sun.
The sign says,
Don’t approach.
Please stay on the path.
Most mornings on the way to breakfast,
we walk by him lazing in the water,
our feet on the walkway,
a mere snap away from his jaws
should he choose to move,
which he never does.
We move them out
when they get too big,
says the waitress,
topping up my coffee,
handing cream and sugar,
the news of a teen-shooting –
Lehigh Acres schools placed
on lockdown – playing silent
on the screen behind her.
59
They’re all out of water in Vegas
the great Hoover dam’s silted up,
the sign up on C ESAR’s
is missing an A,
the Bellagio fountains won’t play.
Howard Carter is calling them in
to low-ceilinged rooms at the Luxor,
his clipped English tones
on a look-a-sound loop.
The parch of the heat melts
the eyes of King Tut;
a woman is plying Anubis
with dirty martinis.
Inside The Venetian
a stray Illinois gondolieri
splinters her high notes in dust
from the Grande Canale.
At Aquarium, Mandalay Bay,
four guys from Ohio are calling the odds
on Blackjack, roulette,
and the octopus lasting the night.
The Light-Show’s
gone silent on Fremont,
tumbleweed rolls on The Strip,
no-one is watching
the fat man eat free
at The Heart Attack Grill,
the heat-induced crack
in the MGM glass
widens
on five lionesses,
thirsty, licking their lips.
60
The Inventor
He longs for the colours
of butterflies’ wings –
abalone wings, incandescent
in Rainforest light,
wings that shine green
to the eyes of all men –
yet will metamorphose
to the bluest of blues
when seen
through a butterfly’s eyes.
Jealous, he scours every tree
for the swallowtail-green,
spares the bright dust of her bloom
from the bruise
of the jar and the ether.
With index and thumb he fingers
her velvety thorax,
crushes her breath,
a slight nervy twitch
above his cheek.
He steadies the tip of a pin,
turning and turning her,
lifeless, suspended.
Chest-deep in swallowtail wings
he builds a great structure of gold
magnified one-thousand-fold.
In nano-spun platinum,
atom by atom,
he copies
each cuticle-scale,
refracting the light on his wings
until her last trick is revealed –
and he sees with a butterfly’s eyes.
61
Out of her Depth
I float on my back,
holding her on my breast,
feel the small bones of her skull
cupped in my hand like a bird’s.
her warm limbs relaxing,
yellow hair streaming,
a child swimming naked
on a turquoise-filled sea.
I move back from her,
my hands outstretched,
feeling the salt-water tug
of the darkness beneath.
62
In the Garden
(For M)
You bite on the sweet ruby flesh of a cherry,
feel the hard pip with your teeth and discard it,
gaze at the froth of the apple tree’s blossom
like someone who never saw buds
unfurl in the sunlight till now.
We lie on our backs
on the red tartan rug
we once used for picnics,
watching the holes
in the sky effervesce.
You tell me the night
has the chilled almond
taste of champagne
and you ask
if I’ll help you to die.
We have no desire
for the cold prefab-blue
of Zurich, or Switzerland’s snow.
I move the old stereo close to the window,
put Fingal’s Cave on the turntable.
We can hear it quite loud
in the shade of the trees
at the foot of our garden.
I pour you the dose
in a clear crystal glass
well-laced with Bruichladdich,
sit down on the grass
and hum every note alongside you,
until only I
am singing
the notes that Mendelssohn wrote.
63
Water
You will never hold me,
taste the things I touch,
blot me with the ocean,
seal my eyes from sight,
paint me grey-vermillion,
bruise my lips dark crimson,
for when the Earth was frozen,
bitter-hard,
I skimmed the loch
with a shaking hand,
split the membrane of the depth,
aureate in molten lead,
felt a tug of human kind,
a beating pulse inside.
64
Boy with Frog
Dorsoduro
Non toccare says the guard
at Dorsoduro, Non toccare.
Each hand tries to touch
the beacon-whiteness of the child,
caress him like a diamond.
At the tip of the Canale Grande,
at Punta della Dogana,
his sparkle rises from the sift and silt
of palazzos’ decay.
Look a little closer,
(hands behind your back
to keep the guard at bay),
no Michelangelo, no David this,
just a child
running naked from the water
to show you what he’s found there,
his flesh silken milk,
his body white as the moon.
At night they trap him in a net
of glass and steel and perspex
in case he flies away.
65
Bai xi Terracotta:
(A Hundred Games)
Other boys toyed with a ball and a cup,
a colt and a sword, a pup and a whip –
but Qin had the mould for our souls.
I was older than most –
no sure-footed warrior –
when Qin had me stand
in obsequious pose,
spinning my acrobat’s plate
for the living and dead,
there with Qin’s pot-bellied wrestlers
the terracotta swans
and the worms
in his mercury garden.
Down on one leg,
I stood long and sore,
let the potter steal my smile
and the style of my hair
to please Qin.
We spoke, as I posed,
Bi the potter and I, of Gao Jianli,
of the lute-player’s tears of bright blood
running red from the place
where his eyes glistened once;
of the sound of the doors of a tomb,
the silence of shovels and picks
from workers sealed deep
underground;
of Anqi Sheng's potion of youth,
of young men and girls
yet untouched,
lost to us now in their bloom,
and I look in your eyes
as you queue in long lines
just to watch me,
spinning the world on my finger,
watching you dying,
watching me living.
66
Starlight from Saturn
I dreamed I could gather the waves
and the fountains of Ganymede’s oceans,
fly through the ice-rings to Saturn’s lost moon,
wet-faced and crying wind and rain.
There I would make a prism
to shine on my Earth like a bright-moving film
of poppies in iris-blue skies,
and nectar-bees drowsed in the haze
of a day when mother wove coral
and seaweed and starfish and pearls,
and father found dolphins and sperm-whales
and fish flying high on an indigo sea
in the blue luminescence of Earth
extinguished so long long ago.
67
When the Rowan’s Laden
Look beneath my gravestone,
through the keekie-hole
when the rowan’s laden,
when the summer’s done.
A skein of geese above me,
leaves half-green, half-brown –
do not come in warm July.
Come in first damp chill of evening,
loose the boat beside the loch,
see the fire is set
and touch the silvered lichen
on the wishing gate.
68
Room
I want to begin in a new-moon room
with you
and the swing in the garden
waiting
for the girl with sweet limbs
to grow strong
and the walls, opalescent,
open to the wind.
69
70
Politics and the Personal in the Sonnet and Sonnet
Sequence:
Edwin Morgan's “Glasgow Sonnets”,
Tony Harrison's “from The School of Eloquence”
and selected sonnets by Paul Muldoon
71
Introduction
“There are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the
poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not
only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of
the world itself. We want the surprise to be transitive like the
impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the
television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart
back to its proper rhythm. We want what the woman wanted in the
prison queue in Leningrad, standing there blue with cold and
whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin's regime and
asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her
art could be equal to it.” (Heaney, “Crediting Poetry” 454)
There are many ways of throwing light on “the news” – the colour magazines
tucked inside the quality Sunday newspapers of the late 60’s brought us, amidst the
adverts for perfume and cigarettes, graphic pictures and reports of starving children in
Biafra, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the wars and natural disasters of the
world. In the 70’s we watched the violence of the Northern Ireland conflict unfold on
the nightly TV news, or read about it in precise eye-witness reports from seasoned
correspondents such as Robert Fisk in The Times. Today the live image of the war
correspondent standing amidst the flames and the rubble has become commonplace,
be it in the Middle East, Iraq, Syria or the Ukraine. In theory at least, we can now
experience the fear and the noise of warfare at any given moment, through our
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television or computer screen. In fact, the opposite may be true: the ubiquity of
images of modern warfare, surrounded by the cacophony of 24-hour news and
advertising, dulls our senses. As Heaney put it, nearly 20 years ago, in 1995:
We channel-surf over so much live coverage of contemporary
savagery, highly informed but nevertheless in danger of growing
immune, familiar to the point of overfamiliarity with old newsreels
of the concentration camp and the gulag… (ibid 465)
News reports or the foreign correspondent’s first-hand experience arguably
offer the basis, at least, for a kind of “documentary adequacy”, to use Seamus
Heaney’s apt phrase. (ibid 465) “It is difficult at times,” Heaney says, “to
repress the thought that history is as instructive as an abattoir”. …. (ibid 456)
For Heaney, however, there is another kind of adequacy, an adequacy that has
to do with the “‘temple inside our hearing’” which the passage of the poem
calls into being:
It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission
and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and
rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem’s concerns or the
poet’s truthfulness.” (ibid 465)
The attempt to pinpoint the crucial difference between history and poetry can
be traced back to Aristotle’s argument:
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The difference between the historian and the poet is not in the one
writing prose and the other verse … The difference is that the one
tells of what has happened, the other of the kinds of things that
might happen… For this reason poetry is something more
philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history; for
while poetry is concerned with universal truths, history treats of
particular facts. (43)
This presents us, at first sight, with an apparent conundrum: the poet, to be worth
reading, needs to be addressing matters of truth; we must trust the poet’s reliability,
the veracity of his experience. But we also expect something more from the poet: a
glimmer of hope, perhaps, a sense that man’s endeavour, in the brief but perfectly
realised framework of a poem, may, for a moment, rise above the enormity of
ongoing violence and loss. That it might, even, make some kind of sense of it.
Seamus Heaney reflected an influential argument when he claimed that the successful
handling of the political in a poem often derives from an overtly personal
engagement. As Heaney noted in 1975 at the height of the Troubles: “During the last
few years there has been considerable expectation that poets from Northern Ireland
should ‘say’ something about ‘the situation’ … In the end they [poets] will only be
worth listening to if they are saying something about and to themselves.” (quted in
Andrews 376)
The poetic secret, perhaps, as Patrick Kavanagh put it in the sonnet “Epic” in
1951, is to write about the local, the small things: “who owned / That half a rood of
rock, a no-man’s land / Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.” The nub of
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Kavanagh’s argument follows after the eighth line, at the turn or volta of the sonnet,
in the remaining sestet:
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.
(Kavanagh 184)
The sonnet form of “Epic” is possibly not coincidental. Indeed, many political
poems that exemplify Heaney’s sense of a “retuning of the world” seem to take the
form of a sonnet, such as Michael Longley’s “Ceasefire” (225) published in The Irish
Times in 1994, or Heaney’s own “Requiem for the Croppies” (Heaney, New Selected
Poems 12) published in 1966, 50 years after the Easter Rising of 1916. Indeed the
poem that springs most readily to mind when discussing the mutability of mankind’s
political kingdoms, Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, (107) is itself a sonnet: the fleeting
nature of a king’s power distilled in a poetic form that has survived for centuries; a
longevity due, at least in part, to the sonnet’s adaptability.
The sonnet, of course, is not alone in its durability: man’s more successful
inventions have a habit of surviving, albeit altered in appearance. In this sense,
poetic structure might well share a form of kinship with, among other things,
architecture. Take the London skyline, for example. Scarcely a year goes by
now, it seems, without a new and more oddly shaped skyscraper appearing
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there: the towering razor-edged Shard, the “Gherkin”, the “Walkie Talkie” or
the “Cheesegrater” – conflations of the imagination whose names, official and
otherwise, are a testament to their novelty. Without the invention, however, of
the steel structures of those first New York skyscrapers of the 1930’s such
flights of fancy would never have got beyond the pile-driving of their
foundations. So it is, it seems, with the sonnet. Poets, as well as architects, build
on the structures of the past, making out of these structures a thing – apparently
at least – entirely new. On closer inspection however, the ghost of the
infrastructure of the original form is still present, providing a framework of
endless possibilities for each new generation.
According to A.D. Cousins and Peter Howarth in the introduction to The
Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, the sonnet form was invented sometime
in the mid 1230s by a lawyer. (1) This may be to oversimplify the case
somewhat – but the idea of such legalistic beginnings for a form that has proved
itself so particularly well-suited for persuasion, for the arguing of a case, then
turning that case on its head again, holds considerable appeal. For Don Paterson
the precise origins of the sonnet seem more complex: “Nobody can say for
certain where or when the sonnet originated,” he comments. (xv) Paterson is,
however, certain on two points: firstly the durability of the sonnet:
Poets have been writing sonnets for about 750 years, and in English
for around 450 (In Britain, only the Augustans could find no use for
it – perhaps finding it ill-suited to their windy concerns). It’s odd,
then, that some people are surprised by the fact that sonnets are still
written today; if anything, the sonnet has flourished in this century,
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to the extent that it has become a quite unremarkable part of the
contemporary poet’s armoury. (ibid xiii)
Secondly, he is certain of its powers; for Paterson the sonnet is “perfectly
fitted to the shape of … human thought”. He continues: “If some thirteenth
century Italian hadn’t “invented” the sonnet, someone else would have arrived
at the sonnet as we arrived at the wheel, out of evolutionary necessity.”
(Paterson xiv-xv)
It was this pre-eminence of the sonnet, “the celebrity of verse forms” as Gillis
puts it, (567) which sparked the initial question for this thesis: how can the sonnet be
used to illuminate contemporary political issues? What is it about the sonnet that
renders it so serviceable for each generation, yet retains all the while its ability for
innovation and adaptability to the style of very different poets? The first, and most
obvious answer is, of course, its brevity. As T.V.F. Brogan puts it in “Prosody” in
The New Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics “An average sonnet
probably contains not more than 100 words. Yet one of the most widely held beliefs
about poetry is that poems “say” more than prose. If so, then each word must find
ways of being more than it would in prose.”(983) The sonnet’s brevity tends to
produce an intensity of meaning, in which each and every word strives for
effectiveness. Also the sonnet’s brevity enables it, according to Paterson, to be
“easily memorised … carried around in the brain perfectly intact”. (Paterson xvi)
For Gillis, however, a large part of the appeal of the sonnet lies in the fact that its
length is “poised between imagination and discourse”:
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On the page, as a spatial grid, it looks like it could be held at once
in the mind, yet it can’t, it needs to be temporally passed through:
the diachronic and synchronic are held in delicious flirtation.” (569)
More broadly, a deeper reason for the sonnet’s pervasiveness lies, perhaps, in the
elusive human appeal of form itself. Referring to what he calls Yeats’ “necessary
poetry”, Heaney summarises the importance of form in “Crediting Poetry”:
The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power
to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's
credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our
consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness
all around it. (467)
It is the examination of the power of the sonnet that is the subject of this thesis –
this and the “politics and the personal” in a selected group of sonnets written by
Edwin Morgan, Tony Harrison and Paul Muldoon from the early 1970’s onwards.
Stephen Burt argues that “‘contemporary poetry’” began for the sonnet “as early as
1938”, when William Carlos Williams, the best-known opponent of sonnets in the
early 20th Century, reconsidered his stance against the sonnet, calling it “‘a dialogue
unit upon which all dramatic writing is founded’”. (247) As the 20th century
progressed, the sonnet, at times, changed almost out of all recognition from its
original form. By 1954, as John Fuller points out, Ezra Pound was arguing in Literary
Essays that the sonnet “has moved too far, indeed has been somewhat vitiated since it
was sundered from its musical setting in about 1290”. (Fuller 49) For Burt, by 1962,
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after the publication of William Carlos Williams’ “Sonnet in Search of an Author”
(Williams 225) the sonnet “no longer represented something inimical to the modern,
the new, the natural or the genuine”. (256)
Williams’ turn to the sonnet was followed, notably, by Ted Berrigan’s The
Sonnets in the early 60’s, with their personal intimacies, their references to friends,
New York City and post-modern disdain for order. By 1967 John Berryman’s
Sonnets to Chris were published: “the closest a modern poet has come to the sonnet
sequence as practised by Sidney – indeed, so close as to constitute pastiche – he even
retranslates Petrarch”. ( Burt 257) The sonnet form was then used extensively by
Robert Lowell, who, between 1967 and 1973, produced hundreds of unrhymed
sonnets with “stacked, corrosive lines … isolated images … jarring transitions, public
history and private life … juxtaposed over and over”. (Burt 256)
Even our contemporary perception of the adaptability and flexibility of the
sonnet is in itself not new. Donne argued some 400 years ago in his poem, “The
Canonization” (9) that the “well-wrought urn” of the sonnet may serve just as well as
“half-acre tombs”, its brevity and form often more memorable and effective than a far
longer poem.
We’ll make in sonnets pretty rooms;
The greatest ashes as half-acre tombs.
Donne’s words perhaps remain no less true today, whether the subject be poverty in
rat-infested 1970’s Glasgow tenements, (Morgan’s “Glasgow Sonnets”) a scathing
condemnation of the English class-system, (Harrison’s “from The School of
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Eloquence”) a multi-faceted insight on Northern Ireland in the Troubles, or the role of
the Bush regime in the war in Iraq (Muldoon). The sonnet form itself – and crucially
important also, the widely varying use of rhyme in our three examples – proves both
the durability and remarkable adaptability of the form.
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Chapter 1
Morgan’s “Glasgow Sonnets”
“Don’t shine a torch on the ragwoman’s dram.
Coats keep the evil cold out less and less”.
(Morgan 289, “Glasgow Sonnet II”)
In 1972, his translation of the sonnets of Petrarch, Scève, de la Vaga, Tasso and
Mariono in 50 Renascence Love-Poems already underway, Edwin Morgan sat down
in his flat in his native Glasgow and produced the “Glasgow Sonnets”. In his use of
the sonnet sequence for this series Morgan succeeded in achieving a poetic form of
social commentary, a density of imagery and sheer variety of “voice” and tone while
precisely following the sonnet’s demanding rules. Morgan’s subject is grinding
poverty: decaying tenements, unemployment, industrial decline and the cycle of
deprivation in Glasgow in the 60’s and early 70’s. Even today, Morgan’s“Glasgow
Sonnets” of 1972 remain unusual. There cannot be many Petrarchan sonnet
sequences which contain, in 140 brief lines, the precision of Petrarch’s original form
combined with details from a Shelter housing report,1 (sonnet I), clear references to
the Communist Manifesto (sonnet IV), and references to the French Revolution
coupled with a direct quote from a trade union leader, (sonnet V).
Some would see the Petrarchan form of the sonnet as particularly fraught with
potential pitfalls even for a simpler task. As A.E. Houseman argued in “Swinburne”
in 1910:
11
Edwin Morgan. “For Bonfires ii and Glasgow Sonnet i”. Ed. Hamish Whyte. Nothing Not Giving
Messages: reflections on his work and life. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990, 252-253.
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The English language is comparatively poor in rhymes and most
poets, when they have to rhyme more than two or three words
together, betray their embarrassment. They betray it, for instance,
when they write sonnets after the strict Petrarchan rule: the poetical
inferiority of most English sonnets, if compared with what their
authors have achieved in other forms of verse, is largely though not
entirely the result of this difficulty. (Hirsch and Boland 390)
So why did Morgan – already a talented innovator of new forms he tailormade to his purposes, such as his groundbreaking Newspoems and Instamatic Poems
– stick so precisely to rules that date back to 13th century Italy for this important and
challenging task? The first and most obvious appeal of the sonnet for Morgan, a
leading exponent and innovator of “concrete poetry”, is its shape. The sonnet is
pleasing, almost square, small and compact with a certain visual “logic”. As Don
Paterson puts it “As poetry moved slowly off the tongue and onto the page, the visual
appeal of an approximately square field of black text on a sheet of white paper must
have been impossible to resist.” (xvi).
Morgan is meticulous in all technical aspects of his chosen form, including the
volta or turn around line eight, but he favours the more visually pleasing “concrete”
unbroken square which is also closest to the original. In the red-bound pamphlet in
which the “Glasgow Sonnets” first appeared, each sonnet, standing like a “tenement”
or high-rise, appears in high quality black ink, with each sonnet given a page to itself.
The sequence opens with three sonnets detailing the Glasgow of slum
tenements, the old Glasgow that was slowly being cleared away. As the poet writes,
town planners are replacing decaying tenements with the clean lines and structures of
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modern architecture in the form of flyovers and motorways and the highest
residential building in Europe: the multi-storey flats at Glasgow’s Red Road. Initially,
in the middle sonnets of the sequence, this prospect of modernity fills the poet with
hope, but as the poem progresses the reality of life in a towering high-rise becomes
clear.
By examining in some detail how Morgan uses the form, rhyme schemes and
associations of the Petrarchan sonnet to construct the sonnets in this sequence, we see
how the use of this apparently rigid and traditional form can greatly add to the
effectiveness of what is said through a particular pattern of rhyme, rhythm, delayed
expectation and musicality. This can be clearly seen in the first sonnet:
A mean wind wanders through the backstreet trash.
Hackles on puddles rise, old mattresses
puff briefly and subside. Play-fortresses
of brick and bric-a-brac spill out some ash,
but in the fifth a chipped sill buttresses
mother and daughter the last mistresses
of that black block condemned to stand, not crash.
Around them the cracks deepen, the rats crawl
the kettle whimpers on a crazy hob.
Roses of mould grow from ceiling to wall.
The man lies late since he has lost his job,
smokes on one elbow, letting his coughs fall
thinly into an air too poor to rob.
(Morgan 289)
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In Sonnet I the rhyme scheme, as in all ten, is abba abba in the octave and cdcdcd
in the sestet. There are no half rhymes or variations in line length or rhyming pattern
from the prescribed form: Morgan depends, for his effects, on different techniques.
There are of course fewer rhyming words in English or Scots than in Italian – but
when used well the Petrarchan sonnet creates a particular lyrical effect. As John
Fuller points out:
The eight lines of closed rhyme produce a certain kind of musical
pace which demands repetition. Any expectation of stanzaic
continuation is, however, violated by the six lines of interlaced
rhyme, which follow: the sestet is more tightly organised, and
briefer, than the octave and so urges the sonnet to a decisive
conclusion. (3)
By the time we get to the second rhymed quatrain our ear is effectively
anticipating the rhymes, thus heightening the effect. Morgan also makes use of the
unusual technique of feminine rhyme here. The cumulative impact of the feminine
rhymes: “mattresses, fortresses, buttresses, mistresses” is successful both in meaning
and in terms of the sound world created. The last three rhymes have slightly archaic
connotations; they create associations with courtly love: the ideal of a castle-like
architecture and vocabulary contrasting sharply with the reality of “mattresses” – in
this case discarded mattresses lying in the courtyard in a place where even the
puddles have “hackles”, the kettle “whimpers” on a “crazy hob” and the wind is a
“mean wind”. All is out of joint. Yet the four rhymes with their repeated two syllable
sibilant “tresses” create a caressing sound, building up an almost somnambulant
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sense of “falling away” in their last syllables that suits the weary hopelessness of the
subject matter. The effect of these repeated sibilants is further echoed by a series of
“s” sounds in “wanders”, “hackles”, “subsides”, “spill”, “sill”, “last”.
In his introduction to 50 Renascence Love-Poems Morgan writes of the “truly
beautiful glaze” of Petrarch’s poetry, but adds that although it is of the “first quality”
it is this very “glaze” which must stand between us and him (Petrarch): “the deadly
glaze of the ideal.” It is for something very far from “ideal” that Morgan uses the
form – which is exactly the point, and the irony. Therein, as we shall see, lies much
of the skill.
“We’ll make in sonnets pretty rooms,” writes Donne in “The Canonization”. (9)
The reality Morgan portrays is far from the Renaissance ideal, thus the form itself is
instrumental to the content. Unlike the orginal Petrarchan sonnets, the tears in the
Morgan poem are the tears of grinding poverty. The lulling sounds of the feminine
rhymes with their genteel associations and sounds are artfully interspersed with a
cacophony of far harsher sounds and punctuated by dissonant images. Mother and
daughter “the last mistresses” (of a place no-one would wish to be mistress or master
of) peer out precariously from their fifth floor window, while below them, “four
storeys have no windows left to smash.” The “play-fortresses” continue the repeated
feminine rhyme of “tresses” with its subliminal fairy-tale castle suggestions of a maid
with long “tresses” imprisoned in a dreadful parody of a “fortress” or castle. The
“play-fortresses” could be taken to mean the poorly-built crumbling tenements or
makeshift children’s “play-fortresses / of brick and bric-a brac that spill out some
ash.” Whether for adults or children, no matter – either is a million miles from where
anyone with a choice would live or want their children to play.
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The sense that the architecture and the tenements are a prison-like fortress is not
accidental. The incongruity of the discarded mattress is heightened in terms of what it
is “doing” – spilling out its feathers that “puff briefly and subside” in a
foreshadowing of the cough-wracked man in the last line of the poem. The
enjambment in lines two to three: “old mattresses / puff briefly and subside” is near
onomatopoeic in its effect and adds to the dignity and gravity of the sonnet. The same
technique is then used again in lines six to seven as we linger on the word
“buttresses” (the first of many architectural references in these sonnets) and sound
and sense combine to offer support to the mother and daughter. But the very
windowsill that “buttresses” mother and daughter in their home (its gentle sound
echoing its normal supportive and attractive connotation) is “chipped.” And all this
“lulling” and “caressing” of sound pattern is in constant counterpoint to a far harsher
meaning that is constantly and brutally punched home by the rhymes: “trash”, “ash”,
“smash” leading up to the volta in line eight: “ that black block condemned to stand,
not crash.”
As to rhythm, the traditional iambic pentameter forms the basis, with variations,
such as the repeated three stresses on the “mean wind wanders” to bring emphasis.
The volta or turn comes neatly in its formally prescribed place at the end of line eight
with the anger of the poet’s argument that such blocks are “condemned to stand, not
crash.” This is a pastiche of a fortress or castle, and there is no knight to rescue
mother and daughter. There are indeed “roses” growing on the walls: the “roses of
mould” from the damp, on the inside where people live. In a final coup de grace
Morgan continues the subtle images of castles and courtly love that places the
contrasted reality in such stark relief. He finishes with the image of a man who has
the “leisure” to prop himself up on the sofa all day: a parody of the pose of the
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Elizabethan poet-courtier/sonneteer who has little to do all day but write the perfect
sonnet: “The man lies late since he has lost his job, smokes on one elbow, letting his
coughs fall / thinly into an air too poor to rob.” At first glance the man is also,
perhaps, the modern epitome of Baudelaire’s ennui in Les Fleurs du Mal. But it is
more than that: the key to the difference in Morgan’s poem is in the two phrases that
are not in the present continuous: “since he has lost his job” and the rhyme that
completes the ending of this sonnet: “into an air too poor to rob”. The rhyming of the
straightforward short Anglo-Saxon words: “job and “rob”, and the plosive “b”s pull
us up short. The rhyme is a simple one but there is sufficient disparity between the
meaning of the two rhymed words to make us look at them both in a different light
due to the weight and attention-grabbing nature of the rhyme we have “waited” for.
As Robert Frost argued in: “The Constant Symbol” the problem with some of
Shakespeare’s sonnets was that “he gets through the twelve lines and doesn’t quite
know what to do with the last two”. (quted in Maxson 6) The Petrarchan form avoids
the potential triteness and rhetoric of this epigrammatic final couplet. When it is used
skilfully, as here, the delay enforced by the cdcdcd rhyme scheme chosen for the
sestet heightens the effect of the “punch-line” but avoids the moralising tone that can
sometimes come from a fully rhymed epigrammatic rhyming couplet. In this first
sonnet Morgan has shown us poverty with documentary reality; poverty has an effect;
the effect is on one individual, the effect is not generalised. The man “has lost his
job” because of something external; and by the time we get to Sonnet V, we will
know what that is.
The effect of Morgan’s technique, used in the “Glasgow Sonnets” and in his
Instamatic Poems, is often cinematic: the camera shows us the wind blowing the
courtyard trash, then pans in to the exterior of the buildings, focusing for a moment
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on the “mother and daughter”, then rests in the final lingering close up on one man
smoking on one elbow. Morgan also uses this cinematic technique with great success
in parts of earlier poems such as “Trio” (172), “In the Snack-Bar,” (170 ) and
“Glasgow Green” (168) and in Instamatic Poems such as “Glasgow October 1971”
(225) or “Venice, April 1971”. (221) The sonnet and its structures offer different
ways of “framing” the camera shot cinematically and is most strikingly used in this
way in sonnets one and two in the sequence with the “narrator” coming in briefly
with information that fills in the description, such as “condemned to stand not crash”
and “lies late since he has lost his job”.
John Wain argues in London Magazine,1983, that lyrical quality was not what
Morgan was known for:
He has, on the whole, not a very good ear; one rarely finds a line,
let alone a whole poem that has much lyrical quality … but he has
kept himself alive to the possibilities of form, the advantages that
can come from an ability to master it, and the result can be seen in
the excellent ““Glasgow Sonnets”. (77)
What Wain says is only justified up to a point – there are many moments of
lyricism in Morgan, and full poems such as “Trio” and love poems such as
“Strawberries” and “One Cigarette” certainly contain a strong lyrical quality. There
is, however, also often a plainness and a directness about much of Morgan,
particularly in some of the Instamatic Poems or “Stobhill”, with its more dramatic
intention. It is this directness combined and contrasted with the lyricism of the
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sonnet-form that is used, at times, with striking effects in this sequence. Sonnet II in
the “Glasgow Sonnets” is nothing if not precise and economical:
A shilpit dog fucks grimly by the close.
Late shadows lengthen slowly, slogans fade.
The YY PARTICK TOI grins from its shade
like the last strains of some lost libera nos
a malo. No deliverer ever rose
from these stone tombs to get the hell they made
unmade. The same weans never make the grade.
The same grey street sends back the ball it throws.
Under the darkness of a twisted pram
a cat’s eyes glitter. Glittering stars press
between the silent chimney-cowls and cram
the higher spaces with their SOS.
Don’t shine a torch on the ragwoman’s dram.
Coats keep the evil cold out less and less.
The incongruity of the opening line combined with the familiar iambic pentameter
sets up a compelling dissonance. Morgan’s documentary style is very much in
evidence here: the places and road names and gang slogans are all precisely given, as
is the precise graffiti, though poignantly it is coupled with a Latin prayer for delivery
from evil: “The YY PARTICK TOI grins from its shade / like the last strains of some
lost libera nos / a malo.” The physicality of the first line and the images of salvation
denied, of hell and of damnation delivered, continue:
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No deliverer ever rose
from these stone tombs to get the hell they made
unmade.
In the omnipresent “shade” of the gang slogan the same children never make the
“grade”. Even the stars “cram the higher spaces with their SOS.” In an echo of sonnet
I, a single human being is introduced only in the last few lines – in this case in the
darkness. But there is to be no torch, no judging glare of the spotlight. “Don’t shine a
torch on the ragwoman’s dram. / Coats keep the evil cold out less and less”. The
coat, like every other positive life-giving image of comfort in this sonnet, is useless
against the pervasive hopelessness: the fleeting image of grinding poverty’s
desperation is tangible.
Here in the first two sonnets in the sequence is an all-too-real city with pervasive
echoes of James Thomson’s mythical City of the Dreadful Night (30) where the
traveller is doomed never to leave: like the grey tenement street of Sonnet II that
“sends back the ball it throws”, there is no return. In Thomson’s poem the sense of
evil and despair is all-pervasive:
The street-lamps burn amidst the baleful glooms,
Amidst the soundless solitudes immense
Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs.
The silence which benumbs or strains the sense
Fulfils with awe the soul’s despair unweeping:
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There are strong echoes of Thomson’s Dantaesque nightmare in Sonnet II. The
Glasgow Morgan depicts is a place that fosters images of sterility: a street that claws
back the souls that briefly escape. The dog is starving, the pram twisted; even the
stars – the Universe beyond – send out an SOS. Like the “castle-fortress” of Sonnet I
the reality evoked is all the more cruel for its imaginary counterpoint of what might
have been.
Such echoes are also found, for example, in Eliot’s “Preludes”. But Morgan’s
style in talking about the city is very different from the detached imagist picture of
poverty Eliot paints in “Preludes”. (23) Morgan is a poet who is intensely familiar
with, and politically engaged with his subject matter. The difference is in the
viewpoint. The individual in Eliot’s “Preludes” is the generalised “You”.
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.
Eliot’s image of “yellow soles of feet / in the palms of both soiled hands” is
almost tangible and highly memorable: but like his “dingy shades / In a thousand
furnished rooms,” evocative as they are, they could belong anyone or no-one. There
is no sense of the documentary reality and engagement that is so omnipresent in
Morgan generally and in the “Glasgow Sonnets” in particular. Morgan’s woman with
her dram and the coat that keeps the cold out “less and less”, and the man smoking on
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one elbow, though briefly glimpsed, have cameo roles that successfully engage the
reader’s empathy. As Morgan himself puts it, describing how he walked around
Glasgow as it underwent the massive architectural changes and upheavals of the 60’s:
I don’t have a car, so I walk about the city quite a lot... ‘Glasgow
Sonnet I’ ….uses direct observation, imagination, and a reference to
a Shelter housing report. As far as observation is concerned, writers
who live in large cities and use urban material develop –
instinctively! – a very quick, unstudied, unprying, oblique, yet
intense and unforgetful way of looking at people and things: it’s
like using a very good silent automatic camera disguised as a pair of
eyes. (Morgan, “For Bonfires ii and Glasgow Sonnet i” 252-3)
Morgan’s Glasgow, like the world Thomson creates, is one, at times, of despair,
although there is also humour and “gallus men” and the capacity for joy. The crucial
difference is that the inhabitants of Morgan’s world are real, living in places with
names like Govan or Maryhill or Red Road – and there is hope. Eliot’s pessimism has
no place in Morgan’s world. Hope takes the form of man’s own actions, and control
over his destiny. We see this, in particular, in Sonnet VIII with its looping flyovers: a
tearing down of the old to make way for the new.
The multi-lingual Morgan also has a finely tuned ear for the dialect and cadences
of his native city. In Sonnet III Morgan changes the mood of the sonnet sequence
with the ear of a dramatist, and we see here an effective example of William Carlos
Williams’ point, referred to earlier in Burt’s essay on “The Contemporary Sonnet”,
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that the sonnet is “‘a dialogue unit upon which all dramatic writing is founded’”.
(247)
‘See a tenement due for demolition?
I can get ye rooms in it, two, okay?
Seven hundred and nothing legal to pay
for it’s no legal, see. That’s my proposition,
ye can take it or leave it but. The position
is simple, you want a hoose, I say
for eight hundred pound it’s yours.’ And they,
trailing five bairns, accepted his omission
of the foul crumbling stairwell, windows wired
not glazed, the damp from the canal, the cooker
without pipes, packs of rats that never tired –
any more than the vandals bored with snooker
who stripped the neighbouring houses, howled, and fired
their aerosols – of squeaking ‘Filthy lucre’.
The difference in sound and tone when the slum landlord’s dialect switches to the
standard English of the narrator at the volta, which falls, here, between the seventh
and eighth lines, is enhanced by the sonnet form. “And they, / trailing five bairns,
accepted his omission.” As a result of the enjambment, the emphasis falls squarely on
the word “they” – giving all the dignity of the form exactly where it is needed – just
before the only three words of dialect spoken by the poet/narrator in a sestet
otherwise delivered in standard English: “trailing five bairns”.
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Giving voice to others is an important part of Morgan’s skill as a poet. The fact
that he chooses the High Art form of the sonnet is an integral part of the message. As
Tom Leonard points out in his introduction to Radical Renfrew, the Scottish National
Dictionary declared in 1936 that the dialect of industrial Glasgow had become
“hopelessly corrupt” due to the influx of Irish and foreign languages. “A people, in
other words, for whose words, issuing from their own lips one should have no
respect”. (xxiv) Although dialect is used, in part, to satirise the landlord, it is also
simply realistic. In other phrases, spoken by the narrator, such as “and they trailing
five bairns” or “the same weans never make the grade” it is an entering into the sound
world of the subject. As such it is entirely effective.
Morgan’s consummate use of dialect, both in the “Glasgow Sonnets”, his Glasgow
poems and his translation of Mayakovsky into Scots and in his use of the sonnet form
to write about class issues, call to mind the work of Tony Harrison. But the tone and
“voice” are very different. There is deep anger and a clear sense of speaking from
experience in both, but with Harrison, in contrast, the anger is deeply personal and
confessional. Harrison’s 1978 “from The School of Eloquence” sonnets work both
individually and as a cumulative whole to create a moving and effective picture of the
guilt of a man pulling away from his working class roots in general and his dying
father in particular. This is not to suggest that the empathy with people living in
tenement slums, for Morgan, is any less valid in poetic terms. It is not. There is
nothing remotely patronising or distant about the tone in “Glasgow Sonnets”. As
Kevin McCarra notes in Eddie@90: “While the poems deal with a great range of time
and space, Morgan keeps coming back to Glasgow like a man turning the key in his
lock late in the evening.” (52)
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Morgan has an accurate and empathetic eye for someone marginalised by the rest
of society as are many of the subjects of his poems, including the tenement and highrise dwellers and jobless shipyard workers of “Glasgow Sonnets”. This “eye” is
evident from poems such as “Glasgow Green.” There is also, in Morgan, a strong
sense of the “duty” of the poet – what Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy would call, in
her recent bringing together of contemporary poets to write on the Iraq War in The
Guardian, a need to “bear witness.” (Duffy) The sense of a warning that begins to
echo through “Glasgow Sonnets” from Sonnet IV onwards is, at times reminiscent of
the socially committed stance of what Spiller calls the “city poet”. Referring to
Milton’s sonnet, “When the Assault was intended to the city” Spiller says, “by a not
over-modest comparison of himself to Pindar and Sophocles he (Milton) claims the
status, idealised in humanist ideology, of city poet.” (194).
Again and again, contemporary commentators highlight Morgan’s compassion
and humanism. This, combined with calling on historical figures in the place of
religion, put the largely non-religious Morgan in his context as the poet-narrator of
this sonnet sequence. “Morgan has always had a sharp sense of human suffering,”
writes Robert Crawford. (23) Iain Crichton Smith also stresses Morgan’s sense of
duty as a poet. “Neither the public nor the private Morgan is religious. He is, I would
say, a humanist”, (50), and notes also that, in writing about Mayakovsky in his
Essays Morgan could be writing about himself:
What gives Mayakovsky’s work its peculiar character, and I think also its
peculiar value, is its unusual combination of wild avant-garde leaning and
flashes and something of central human concern. A grotesque and vivid
fantasy is never lost; neither is the sense of pain, of loneliness, of longing,
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sometimes misguided by creative exhilaration; neither is the sense of
history and the role and duty of the poet. (Morgan, Essays 64)
Morgan explores the role of the poet briefly in Sonnet IV. Referring to Hugh
MacDiarmid’s poem, “Glasgow 1960”, which was published in 1935, Morgan writes:
“We never got / an abstruse song that charmed the raging beast.” MacDiarmid’s
satirical poem – which takes the form of a sonnet written in the rhyming couplets of
light verse – envisages a future Glasgow where Ibrox football ground will be
crowded, not with football supporters, but a for “a debate on ‘la loi de l’effort
converti’ / Between Professor MacFadyen and a Spainish pairty”. At the same time,
in this fantasy of “flyting”, MacDiarmid predicts that a “Scottish Author’s Opinions”
on a “Turkish Poet’s Abstruse New Song” will sell in the street like “ hot cakes”
(430).
Sonnet IV is effectively a “scene-setter” for the important Sonnet V, giving some
historical context to the 1970’s Clyde shipyard workers work-in, with its roots in the
Red Clydeside demonstrations of the 1920’s. A passing reference to the Communist
Manifesto in Sonnet IV: “you have nothing to lose but your chains” is subtly prefaced
with a reference to the soup kitchens and the 1930’s with its long associations of
poverty and real starvation. This, and the naming of a nation’s past poetic patriarch in
the form of MacDiarmid (as Milton invokes Pindar and Sophocles in “When the
Assault was intended to the City”) all prevent the tipping of the fine balance over into
mere rhetoric. Also, in the elegiac tone of the sonnet, with the poet speaking himself
for the first time in a prolonged burst of gentle Scots dialect, evoking the playground
rhyme of “sticks and stanes may break yer banes but names’ll niver hurt ye”, we have
a dignified naming of names and identification of doomed “cities”, or in this case
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areas of Glasgow. It was no accident that it was in Glasgow Govan, home of
engineering and shipyards, that the SNP won its landmark victory over Labour in
1973. Morgan’s predicted “rebellion” in his “Glasgow Sonnets” of 1972 happened,
in a way, with a swing away from Labour of more than 26 per cent.
So you have nothing to lose but your chains,
dear Seventies. Dalmarnock, Maryhill,
Blackhill and Govan, better sticks and stanes
should break your banes, for poet’s words are ill
tae hurt ye.
This is “the long unfinished plot / of heating frozen hands” on which reason and
poetry: “the flow of soul” can make little impact. Morgan takes up the theme of
history and the poet again in the intimate and lyrical lines of Sonnet VI:
The North Sea oil-strike tilts east Scotland up,
and the great sick Clyde shivers in its bed.
But elegists can’t hang themselves on fledfrom trees or poison a recycled cup –
If only a less faint, shaky sunup
glimmered through the skeletal shop and shed
and men washed round the piers like gold and spread
golder in soul than Misubishi or Krupp –
The images are ageless but the thing
is now. Without my images the men
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ration their cigarettes, their children cling
to broken toys, their women wonder when
the doors will bang on laughter and a wing
over the Firth be simply joy again.
The details chosen are simple and personal, they emphasise the joy of what might
have been. As any documentary maker or journalist will tell you, the information you
get depends entirely on the question you ask. The question Morgan asks here is what
are the small pleasures lost when someone loses their job? The answer is a telling one
– far more telling than a list of the woes of poverty. Morgan’s empathetic tone is the
antithesis of the detachment of Eliot’s “Preludes”. This is not, perhaps the absolute
poverty of starvation; it is the relative poverty of the 70’s: but in Morgan’s hands is
no less real in its deprivations. The sound produced by the enjambment of the word
“wing” mimics the sense of the freedom of a sail down the Clyde, the classic 60’s
Glasgow working-class pastime of a trip on a Clyde steamer: “goin doon the watter”:
a family outing denied at times of financial hardship, a livelihood stolen by the
multinationals: “Mitsubushi or Krupp.”
In “Noise and Smoky Breath” a four-page address given by Morgan in 1983 to
launch an exhibition and book of poems and Glasgow images, he writes of his
fascination with machines as portrayed in the Fritz Lang film, “Metropolis” which he
saw as a boy at the end of the 1920’s.
…. Men as robots, as slaves of the machine, cocking in and
clocking off, doing repetitive mechanical jobs…. but there was also
an imaginative appeal….Maybe I was influenced by the fact that
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my father was in the iron and steel trade (at the scrap and
shipbreaking end) and knew a great deal about it. When we went on
a Clyde steamer he would make a bee-line for the engine-room,
dragging me with him: to me, as a boy, the engines would have had
only a sort of hypnotic functional beauty, the sleek well-oiled
movement, the various parts that always wonderfully avoided
hitting each other, but my father knew how the parts were made,
how they fitted together, he could tell me how the boat actually
moved, and somehow the whole industrial process remained
human, despite all its problems, and I was never able to become a
Luddite. (1)
If there is any doubt about the “personal” nature of Morgan’s interest in the subjects
of “Glasgow Sonnets” one need only read these lines about his father, who died in
1965. With the exception of the moving and deliberately broken “wordsearch” of a
poem, “Message Clear”, they are perhaps the closest Morgan came to writing a full
length poem for his father: "This poem was written when my father was very ill,
dying of cancer, and I was coming home from the hospital”. (Morgan, “Let’s Go” 60)
In understanding the “Glasgow Sonnets” it is also worth noting here that this is
the poet who was, around the same time, translating Mayakovsky into Scots. Take,
for example, a line from Morgan’s translation of Mayakovsky’s “Wi the Haill Voice”
( Morgan, Collected Translations, 38): “My pages are fechters I put on parade,” says
the Russian poet when translated by Morgan. Petrarch’s form, too, in Morgan’s hands
has been drafted into revolutionary mode. The use of Scots dialect is clearly political,
both in his translation and in its deliberate use coupled with the historic prestige of
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the Petrarchan sonnet form in his “Glasgow Sonnets”. Many of these are highly
effective, perhaps few more so than “Glagow Sonnet V”.
‘Let them eat cake’ made no bones about it.
But we say let them eat the hope deferred
and that will sicken them. We have preferred
silent slipways to the riveters’ wit.
And don’t deny it – that’s the ugly bit.
Ministers’ tears might well have launched a herd
of bucking tankers if they’d been transferred
from Whitehall to the Clyde. And smiles don’t fit
either. ‘There’ll be no bevvying’ said Reid
at the work-in. But all the dignity you muster
can only give you back a mouth to feed
and rent to pay if what you lose in bluster
is no more than win patience with ‘I need’
while distant blackboards use you as their duster.
Here Morgan’s sonnet sequence moves up a gear, becoming more overtly political.
It is difficult not to hear overtones of the anger of Mayakovsky in Morgan’s opening
three lines as Marie Antoinette’s infamously heartless: ‘“Let them eat cake”’ is
compared, favourably, to false hopes of jobs and tears from government Ministers at
Whitehall: “let them eat the hope deferred / and that will sicken them.” But even here,
the personal prevails, in the form of a skilfully drawn cameo of Jimmy Reid, who
lead the shipyard workers’ work-in in the 1970’s. “There’ll be no bevvying,” says
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Reid. As Colin Nicholson points out, at the start of the occupation Jimmy Reid
announced to press, radio and television journalists:
We are taking over the yards because we refuse to accept that
faceless men can make these decisions…. We want to work…
There will be no hooliganism, there will be no vandalism, there will
be no bevvying (drinking). It is our responsibility to conduct
ourselves with dignity and maturity. (77)
The restrained anger and dignity of the unemployed and disenfranchised workers is
given expression in the sonnet form, with rhymes that echo the effort of courage of
standing up against the might of bureaucracy. The word “muster,” is rhymed with
“bluster” as the poem constructs for us the futility of the protest and men left, in spite
of their dignified and lengthy protest, with the empty word “bluster”, and lost wages
and mouths to feed. We must wait for the sound and sense of the final rhyme,
increasing the reader’s intuitive expectation of the rhyme in the following line with a
delay of another full line of iambic pentameter in the Petrarchan form of the sonnet.
When it comes, particularly as a contrast to “bluster”, it is perhaps as demeaning to
the working man as it is possible to be: “while distant blackboards use you as their
duster.” The meaning is immediately evident – the “duster” is the insignificant
“thing” that absorbs the dirt and the muck and pollution of industry: the worker. The
worker whose entire existence and livelihood can be rubbed out as easily as a
fragment of chalk-dust by a blackboard duster in a decision taken thousands of miles
from his job and his home.
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In Sonnet VIII, Morgan appears to have hope for the modernist future of
Glasgow. Referring to the architect Charles Renee Mackintosh, (McCarra 52) the
sonnet begins: “the flyovers breed loops of light / in curves that would have ravished
tragic Toshy.” The bb rhymes are “Toshy,“washy” “Haugh, she” (Sauchie Haugh
being the old name for Glasgow’s main street: Sauchiehall Street) and “sploshy”. To
say the rhymes are audacious would be an understatement. But they are certainly
humorous, and provide a welcome change of tone and a ray of hope amidst the
crumbling despair of the old – which is also what they are about. As Garioch says,
“All this showing off is artistically justified, as the poem is about these new structures
that appear to have insufficient visible means of support.” (55) The repeated “o”
sounds in lines like “unpompous, nothing wishy-washy” and “flyovers” and “loops of
light” also reflect the lightness and airiness of the vistas opening up. Morgan
approves of Mackintosh-like structures and the “ukiyo-e” (more “o” sounds) of a
dream of Japanese floating cities beyond the unreal dream of “Lochnagar”. Indeed
the preceding Sonnet VIII is effectively a rant against the fashion for rebuilding and
modernising within the façade of the old: “Prop up’s the motto. Splint the dying age. /
Never displease the watchers from the grave.”
So it is with some hope that we arrive, in Sonnet X at the thirtieth floor of Red
Road in the final sonnet, where we are greeted with the verbal picture of the
schoolboy reading King Lear:
From thirtieth floor windows at Red Road
he can see choughs and samphires, dreadful trade –
the schoolboy reading Lear has that scene made.
A multi is a sonnet stretched to ode
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and some say that’s no joke. The gentle load
of souls in clouds, vertiginously stayed
above the windy courts, is probed and weighed.
Each monolith stands patient, ah’d and oh’d
and stalled lifts generating high-rise blues
can be set loose. But stalled lives never budge.
They linger in the single-ends that use
their spirit to the bone, and when they trudge
from closemouth to laundrette their steady shoes
carry a world that weighs us like a judge.
We enter at the point where Edgar invents a landscape to forestall his father’s suicide,
a landscape where “he can see choughs and samphires, dreadful trade.” If we look up
Shakespeare’s actual words, we see:
Edgar: Come on sir; here’s the place.
Stand still. How fearful
And dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the mid-way air
Show scarce so gross as beetles. Half-way down
Hangs one that gathers sampire – dreadful trade!
(Shakespeare, King Lear, 146, 4:6,11-15)
The reference charts, perhaps, any normal man’s reaction to being at a great
height: fear and dizziness and a feeling of detachment and unreality. It is a normal
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age-old reaction the planners probably forgot – and that we might have forgotten now
that high-rise council tower blocks for the poor of Europe are a commonplace. We
might of course also have never thought of it, if we never had to live our life there. It
is the “sense” of such a life that Morgan is attempting to get across. The “dreadful
trade” of poverty referred to is the hazard-filled trade of samphire-gathering on the
cliffs in Shakespeare’s time. Little changes throughout time: the specific
deprivations, dangers and degradation of poverty simply alter from cliff-face to highrise. The “long unfinished plot / of heating frozen hands” of Sonnet IV is still with us,
just in a different form.
In the space of the few years covered in the ten sonnets all that has happened, as
Morgan outlines it, is that in place of crumbling tenements there are the lifts that
never work, generating the “high-rise blues” which made Red Road one of the most
notorious blocks in Europe. Here “stalled lives never budge” – an echo of “the same
weans never make the grade” and the ball sent back by “the same grey street” in
Sonnet II. Even the wind of Sonnet I is still there in the “windy courts” of the highrise.
The multi-storey, Morgan writes, “is a sonnet stretched to ode.” His reference to
form is entirely self-conscious in the time-honoured manner of the sonneteer. The last
sonnet contains some of the sequence’s most striking images: “The gentle load / of
souls in clouds, vertiginously stayed / above the windy courts, is probed and
weighed.” Like the Petrarchan images of courtly love in the first sonnet, the lyrical
idea of “souls in clouds”, the long vowels and slow, stately rhythm of these lines is
grossly and poignantly at odds with the reality of a high rise with a broken lift. But
when one pauses for a second and considers the image being created it is more
startling still: this is the non-religious Morgan conjuring a picture (such as was
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common in the paintings of Carlo Crivelli and other medieval religious artists) of the
Archangel Michael weighing the souls of human beings on a pair of scales hanging in
mid-air. What is most striking about such paintings is not so much the religious
connotations of souls heavy with sin but the visual image of an overbearingly large
angel, his feet on the slain devil, with a couple of small frightened human figures
balanced precariously in mid-air on a pair of scales. What better metaphor for what it
feels like to be put into a 30-storey high rise, your soul “vertiginously stayed”?
It is perhaps far-fetched to say of the origins of the sonnet, as Oppenheimer
does, that “in making the first European lyric intended for silent, personal
performance, Giacomo constructed [the sonnet] according to the architecture of the
soul and of heaven, and set it to the music of the spheres”. (190) We do recognise,
however, as Oppenheimer says, that the proportions of the octave and the sestet echo
the proportions 6:8 and 6:8:12 which played “exceedingly interesting roles in the
history of ideas, not merely in Giacomo’s time but in the Renaissance, and most
particularly in Renaissance architecture where they describe the ‘harmonic’
proportions of rooms”. (189) With its well-defined architectural proportions the
sonnet here is arguably Morgan’s ironic metaphor for crumbling tenement blocks and
the folly of 1960’s tower-block architecture.
By the time he was to publish “Glasgow Sonnets”, in 1972, Morgan was
already an accomplished poet of Glasgow street life. He was known for memorable
poems such as “Good Friday” (163), “The Starlings of George Square,” (165),
“Glasgow Green,” (168), “Trio” (172) and The Instamatic Poems (217-229) – quite
apart from his concrete poetry, space poems, love poems and some of his widely
acclaimed translations, including his translation of Beowulf and the poems of
Mayakovsky. Both critics and admirers of Morgan’s work agree, as we have seen,
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that his “Glasgow Sonnets” are a substantial achievement. Comparing the Instamatic
Poems unfavourably to the range and variety of poems in From Glasgow to Saturn
(the volume in which “Glasgow Sonnets” were published in 1973), Crichton Smith
writes:
Morgan is not at his best when he is being realistic. He needs a
certain slantness, a certain imaginative freedom and oddness, a
certain amplification of his linguistic resources, to be the poet that
he truly is… Yet again the realistic poems like “Death in Duke
Street,” and “Stobhill” are dull and lack the linguistic resonance we
find in so many other poems, although I would make an exception
of the “Glasgow Sonnets”. (44-45)
The searching for rhymes that comes with the strict form of the sonnet can lead to
a depth of imagery that often comes from the unconscious rather than the conscious
mind. “The sonnet,” as Fuller puts it, “encourages intelligence, precision and density
of imagery”. (6) All these are found, to varying degrees, in each one of these ten
sonnets. There is also a single powerful image, a leitmotif that runs through this
sonnet sequence: the Clyde, the river of the Clyde steamers of Morgan’s childhood
that rang once with the “riveters’ wit”.2 By Sonnet V these living shipyards are
“silent slipways”, while, in Sonnet VI, Morgan refers to the West Coast, the side of
Scotland that missed out on the lucrative oil-boom of the North-East: “The North Sea
2
A brand of humour that was the mainspring of the extended monologues of former Clyde shipworker,
Billy Connolly, then a 70s Glasgow icon.
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oil-strike tilts east Scotland up, / and the great sick Clyde shivers in its bed.” In the
same sonnet, the personal effects of economic decline are expressed in terms of the
city’s river: “women wonder when / the doors will bang on laughter and a wing / over
the firth be simply joy again.” By Sonnet IX the Clyde becomes a symbol of change:
a faith in the future in keeping with the Futurist philosophy of the poem: a sweeping
away of the old, and the need for each generation to make its own “city”: “Give the
Clyde the rest. / Man and the sea make cities as they must.”
Morgan went on, by 1984, to write Sonnets from Scotland; he became Glasgow’s
first poet laureate in 1999, and by 2004 he was Scotland’s National Poet. His
concern, increasingly, was to give a voice to others rather than developing his own
“voice”. As Morgan brings his sequence to a conclusion it is this public voice that is
emerging:
They linger in the single-ends that use
their spirit to the bone, and when they trudge
from closemouth to launderette their steady shoes
carry a world that weighs us like a judge.
The repeated “u” sounds and plosive “ds” in “trudge,” “world” and “judge” with
their heavy, hard dragging sound add to the sense of grinding monotony of poverty
unchanged by the advent of the high-rise. Together with the long “i” in “linger”, the
interminable slowness of social change is, it seems, enacted in the very sounds
Morgan chooses in these four lines. Without the dignity, the lyricism and depth of
imagery possible in sonnet form, combined with Morgan’s inherent ability to allow
us to empathise with his subjects, such a conclusion might seem like moralistic
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rhetoric. In its form, in its wording, in the pulsing ring of its rhymes, and preceded as
it is, by the striking image of “gentle load of souls” on the 30th floor of a high-rise, it
is far from that.
The sonnet form, it seems, in Morgan’s case, may have produced results that
surprised even the poet himself. Eight months after they were written, Morgan writes:
“Several people, by the way, have said they think the sonnets are among the best
things I’ve done, and if this is true it is strange that it should come from reverting to
such an ancient and worked over form as the sonnet.” (McGonigal 215) The
“Glasgow Sonnets” however, remain unique to Morgan. While the sonnet form may
create lyricism, intensify the effective use of metaphor, and, at times, greatly improve
the work of a poet, it remains adaptable to the individual poet’s needs. These sonnets,
for example, do not contain the sense of sustained individual poetic “voice” of
Heaney in his “Glanmore Sonnets”, or Harrison in his “from The School of
Eloquence” sequence. Morgan is a chameleon, a showman. This sonnet sequence is a
kaleidoscope of scenes; scenes that make a whole, with what amounts to a
commentary, woven together by the precise ear for dialogue of a dramatist, the
effective imagery of the Clyde, cameo shots of people, telling images of loss and
deprivation; of hopelessness and a humanist collective shame at the neglect of fellow
humans that has allowed this to happen. The poet himself appears, briefly,
questioning the purpose of his art in Sonnet IV as we have seen. But his role is
mainly that of an involved and empathetic observer. As the poets of the 1920’s called
for greater realism and social awareness in the poetry, so Morgan was looking
towards an entirely different approach to poetry from Pound and Eliot, or indeed
Heaney. As Morgan himself put it:
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I knew that it was not my job to ‘find my own voice’, as reviewers
are always encouraging young writers to do. This is one kind of
poetry, which is not mine. Good luck to Seamus Heaney, but I
pushed out, and continue to push out, a different boat. (Morgan,
“Roof of Fireflies” 192)
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Chapter 2
Elegies and Bullets
A defining feature of both Morgan and Harrison is their need to give a voice to the
voiceless. The difference – and it is a crucial one – lies in the approach. In Morgan’s
“Glasgow Sonnets”, the speaker documents the scene: “Without my images the men /
ration their cigarettes, their children cling / to broken toys, their women wonder when
/ the doors will bang on laughter and a wing / over the firth be simply joy again.”
(Morgan 291) In contrast, in the sonnet sequence, “from The School of Eloquence”, it
is often Harrison himself who is centre-stage. The politics of using the pure Petrachan
sonnet, the most difficult of the sonnet forms, to write about people whose only home
is condemned tenaments is statement enough: there is no sense of a personal struggle
for Morgan himself in the “Glasgow Sonnets”. Conversely, for Harrison the choice of
the sonnet and its metrical form is intensely personal. The need to prove himself
capable of mastering the High Art forms of metre, verse and the sonnet stems,
according to Harrison himself, from the treatment of “T.W”, the young Harrison, as
described in “Them and [uz]”. Interviewed by author and academic, Richard Hoggart,
to whom this ‘manifesto’ sonnet is dedicated, Harrison says:
…strong rhythm is necessary for me. At first I thought I wanted to do it
because it was what the most classical things were, say the sonnet and the
rhyming couplet; and I wanted to be able to do them, because I was the
person who wasn’t allowed to read poetry in my own voice. But I will
now do them in my own voice. Those rhythms mean to me that appetite
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for life… That rhythmical thing is like a life-support system. It means I
feel I can go closer into the fire, deeper into the darkness… (42-43)
The young T.W. in “Them and [uz]” (20) is the scholarship boy at Leeds
Grammar, belonging neither, any more, with his working class parents, nor with the
class he has, condescendingly, been allowed to join. This struggle for Harrison forms
the essential personal part of the wide-ranging political themes of “from The School
of Eloquence” as first published in 1978. The personal origins of its themes are
perhaps most memorably described in the form of a putdown of the young Harrison
in the Received Pronunciation voice of his teacher as Harrison begins to read Keats’
“Ode to a Nightingale” in “Them and [uz]”:
4 words only of mi ’art aches and … “Mine’s broken,
you barbarian, T.W.” ’ He was nicely spoken.
‘Can’t have our glorious heritage done to death.’
I played the Drunken Porter in Macbeth.
‘Poetry’s the speech of kings. You’re one of those
Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose.’
What is apparent at a glance is that the adult Harrison will not be seeking his
revenge in the traditional form of the Petrarchan or the Shakespearean sonnet.
Quite apart from their diverse and varying stanza breaks, these sonnets have
sixteen lines, not fourteen. As we shall see, these sixteen lines, and the strong
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five beats of the iambic pentameter are the two constants that hold this sonnet
sequence together in terms of form. Throughout, his sixteen lines of rhyming
iambic pentameter are bent and buckled to the needs of his subject matter – the
rhyming patterns, though consummately and consistently maintained within
each individual sonnet, also vary considerably from sonnet to sonnet.
It is the eighteen sonnets that were published in 1978 in from The School of
Eloquence and Other Poems, which concern us here. Of the four available
versions of Harrison’s still unfinished sonnet sequence, this first version is the
most overtly politically concentrated in tone. It is here also, in these first
eighteen, begun in 1971 (Astley 511) that the themes for the longer ninety-three
sonnet version of the sequence are laid down. This earliest form of the sequence
is also by far the most directly comparable in length and tightness of purpose to
Morgan’s “Glasgow Sonnets”.
The phrase, “School of Eloquence”, which gives Harrison his title is taken from
E.P. Thompson’s seminal study of emergent class-consciousness, The Making of the
English Working Class, published in 1963. It refers to the 18th century
“Corresponding Societies” which sought to teach and spread “eloquence” – in this
context the ability to speak persuasively in an educated manner. Harrison’s quote,
and the fuller version from which it is taken, (Thompson 174) makes it clear that the
artisans’ pursuit of eloquence and education was doomed. The 18th century working
man could strive, certainly, to attain both these attributes, even meet with some
success, but the power continued to lie with those with the wealth and influence to
introduce special legislation in 1799 – “utterly suppressing and prohibiting by name”
the London Corresponding Society:
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Even the most indefatigable conspirator, John Binns, felt that further
national organization was hopeless…. When arrested he was found in
possession of a ticket which was perhaps one of the last “covers” for the
old L.C.S.: Admit for the Season From The School of Eloquence. (ibid)
As Thompson explains, eloquence was not enough. It is one of many extinctions
Harrison alludes to in this sonnet sequence; John Binns is just the first of many of
history’s forgotten names and stories that echo through its pages. “The inarticulate,”
as Thompson puts it, “by definition, leave few records of their thoughts.” (ibid 55)
The stories and names of what Byrne call’s history’s “unheard dead” (37) resonate
throughout the sequence. As Rylance notes, “Harrison’s ‘poetry from below’ is
continuous with the ‘history from below’ of socialist historians like Thompson.”
(“On not Being Milton” 120) The reader is expected to absorb the names of history’s
previously unnamed dead in the same breath as learned references – names that
Harrison’s poetry-reading audience would take in their stride such as Demosthenes or
Cicero, Burke or Milton.
The unashamedly political message on class contained in these eighteen sonnets is
deliberately delivered in the High Art framework of the sonnet sequence – but
throughout Harrison bends and breaks the form to fit to his own purposes. Even
within that sixteen-line framework there are many variations; they often differ from
each other in shape, sometimes presenting in quatrains, sometimes sestets,
interspersed, often, with single lines of dialogue set out as single lines. The rhyme
patterns too, though clearly and reliably present and recognisable in each sonnet, vary
from sonnet to sonnet, again, even within these first eighteen. Critics disagree on
whether Harrison’s sixteen-line rhyming poems actually count as sonnets at all. They
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are often called “Meridithian” but the only real connection between Harrison’s
sonnets and Meredith’s Modern Love sonnets in terms of form is that the sixteen-line
sonnet is used in both as a more flexible means of narration in a long sequence.
Meredith’s sonnets, unlike Harrison’s, are traditional in that they follow a set pattern
of rhyme throughout and appear as a single unbroken block of sixteen lines. Is the
similarity enough to call Harrison’s poems sonnets? Burt and Mikics argue in their
introduction to The Art of the Sonnet that “Tony Harrison’s sonnets … count as
sonnets not only because he called them sonnets, but because they echo George
Meredith’s sixteen-line form.” (24) In contrast, Dunn points out, correctly, “they are
not Meridithian sonnets” and calls the poems in this sequence “quatrains” and
“sixteen liners”. “His [Harrison’s] sixteen line form is really four quatrains subjected
to variations; but its narrative dynamic can be lyrical as well as social and political
kkkkkllland sometimes all three at once.” (130)
At times the tone of these sonnets is so intensely autobiographical it feels almost
like a diary; the personal and the political intertwine. This is both their weakness and
their strength. At their best and most technically accomplished, such as in “Me
Tarzan”, they form a constantly time-shifting narrative. “Me Tarzan” (15) is the fifth
sonnet but there is little doubt that a screenwriter would open with the arresting
image it describes and its immediate sense of time and place:
Outside the whistled gang-call, Twelfth Street Rag
then a Tarzan yodel for the kid who’s bored,
whose hand’s on his liana … no, back
to Labienus and his flaming sword.
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Off laikin’, then to t’fish ‘oil, all the boys,
off tartin’, off to t’flicks but on, on, on,
the foldaway card table, the green blaize,
De Bello Galico and lexicon.
It’s only his jaw muscles that he’s tensed
into an enraged shit that he can’t go;
down with polysyllables, he’s against
all pale-face Caesars, for Geronimo.
He shoves the frosted attic skylight, shouts:
Ah, bloody can’t ah’ve gorra Latin prose.
His bodiless head that’s poking out ’s
like patriarchal Sissy-beeding-ro’s.
A version of Twelfth Street Rag by Pee Wee Hunt and his Orchestra topped the
charts in 1948, neatly placing the time scale, and the central character, Harrison, born
in 1937, at around the age of 11. The “Tarzan” image, culminating in the
outrageously rhymed “Latin prose” with “Sissy-bleeding-ro’s”, is an apt one, and also
part of the time and place of the 1940’s cinema character, Tarzan, to whom Harrison
humorously compares himself. The pun on the gang’s taunt of Harrison as “Sissy”
becomes subtler in later editions as “Cissy-bleeding-ro’s” (Harrison Selected Poems
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116), but such changes in the wording of individual poems in later editions are the
exception. The description of a “bodiless” Tarzan poking his head out of the attic
skylight shouting “Ah, bloody can’t ah’ve gorra Latin prose” is there for amusement
and the image it creates (given the crucial importance in the movies, of the Tarzan
actor’s physique) but it also makes the point that, for the scholarship boy, the
intensity of study cuts Harrison off from his peers. The sense that the boy has no
“body”, only a head, links with his isolation and the list of the gang’s activities he’s
missing in stanza two.
The longer, sixteen-line version of the sonnet lends itself well to the narrative and
dialectic. The story of the young Harrison is outlined in the first three abab rhyming
(and half-rhyming”) quatrains, then the last four lines split off the young Harrison’s
dialogue line: “Ah, bloody can’t ah’ve gorra Latin prose,” giving full vent and
emphasis by its separation, visually, on the page. The gang’s words, such as “off
tartin’, off to t’flicks”, like his words shouted from the skylight, are in italics,
signifying, as throughout the sonnet sequence, the Leeds dialect captured here in the
High Art form of the sonnet. Further, Harrison underscores the sense of the boy’s
longing and isolation with the rhythm in the line: “Off laikin’, then t’fish ’oil all the
boys,” throwing the strong iambic stress in the second quatrain heavily on “all”,
preceded by the alliterative ’oil giving a long, almost plaintive sound. The boredom
the young Harrison feels with Latin translation at this point is then underscored with
the three strong beats on the three monosyllabic words, “on, on, on.”
Read and committed to the flames, I call
These sixteen lines that go back to my roots
my Cahier d’un retour au pays natal,
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my growing black enough to fit my boots.
The stutter of the scold out of the branks
of condescension, class and counter-class
thickens with glottals to a lumpen mass
of Ludding morphemes closing up their ranks.
Each swung cast-iron Enoch of Leeds stress
clangs a forged music on the frames of Art,
the looms of owned language smashed apart!
Three cheers for mute ingloriousness!
Articulation is the tongue-tied’s fighting.
In the silence around all poetry we quote
Tidd the Cato Street conspirator who wrote:
Sir, I ham a very Bad Hand at Righting.”
Placed, arrestingly, as an opening sub-clause in one of the many grammatical quirks
that characterise these sonnets, are the words of revolution: “Read and committed to
the flames”. The dedicatees of the poem are poets Sergio Vieira and Armando
Guebuza, formerly leading members of Frelimo, the Marxist governing party of
Mozambique. The “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal” by Aimé Césaire concerns the
1930’s black West Indian struggle to regain their native tongue.
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A comment Harrison makes in an interview with John Haffenden in Poetry Review
in January 1984 is a telling one: “I had a very loving upbringing, without question, a
very loving, rooted upbringing. Education and poetry came in to disrupt that loving
group, and I’ve been trying to recreate new wholes out of that disruption ever since.”
(246) Harrison is arguably doing just that: reassembling disruption and creating new
“wholes” out of his own reinterpretation of the sonnet. Each sonnet in this sequence
recaptures a struggle, either with Harrison’s own guilt at breaking away from his
parents or the struggle to give a voice to the silenced of history.
The highly concentrated form of the sonnet allows for a density of meaning and
allusion that is particularly notable in “On Not Being Milton”. The poem’s first abab
quatrain uses the simple rhyming words “roots” and “boots”. “Roots” is a commonly
used word for both working class origins and the “roots” of the descendants of black
slaves; thus Harrison’s alignment with négrisme and the struggle with the liberation
of Mozambique (as in this first sonnet’s dedication). In “growing black enough to fit
my boots”, Harrison implies he is wearing the “boots” of the worker and the black
identity combined with the dirt and grime of the coal mine. There are layers of
meaning here: Harrison himself, marked out by his accent, here aligns himself both
with minority groups visibly marked out by colour and the miner marked out by the
coal-dust that sticks to his skin. This poem is also about survival, survival of
language, of culture, of a species. The “blackened” image in relation to coal comes up
again concerning the once white “Peppered Moth” in “Dark Times”. This later
sonnet, added to the “from The School of Eloquence” sequence in 1984, links the
“blackening” of coal with later images of war, Hiroshima and mankind’s ultimate
extinction.
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Its predators could spot it on the soot,
but Industrial revolution and Evolution taught
the moth to black its wings and not get caught
where all of Nature perished, or all but.
(Harrison, Selected Poems 188)
The lines “the stutter of the scold out of the branks / of condescension” takes the
link between black slaves and the workers of pre-industrial England a step further –
in the form of the 16th and 17th century cruelly spiked iron “branks” that forcibly held
down the tongue, an iron gagging device designed to silence, torture and humiliate
the female “scold” and prevent her speaking out. Less well known perhaps was its
use as a suicide prevention device for black slaves who succeeded in escaping. It was
used to prevent them from eating dirt or otherwise ending their lives by poison.
The “branks / of condescension” is a richly telling phrase. The scold’s bridle or
“branks” were used to preserve the status quo of the ruling hegemony – be it of the
male patriarch, the workhouse-master to keep the poor in their place, the church to
prevent a dissenting voice or the Plantation slave-owner’s highly visible method of
ensuring that any renegade runaway slave would be worked to death, with even the
means of the lowliest most desperate form of suicide, suffocation by eating dirt,
denied him.
Harrison’s distortion of the ‘rules’ of the sonnet in this poem are evident in the
volta, which comes at the eleventh line as the strength of the “Enoch”, the deadweight hammer wielded by the muscles of the worker, breaks the machine, changing
history as it “clangs a forged music on the frames of Art, / the looms of owned
language smashed apart.” The “eloquence” of the traditional sonnet too is “forged”, is
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“counterfeited” in the consonance of words whose sounds have the very opposite
effect to lyricism and eloquence: “condescension,” “thickens” and “lumpen”: “The
stutter of the scold out of the branks / of condescension, class and counter-class /
thickens with glottals to a lumpen mass / of Ludding morphemes closing up their
ranks.” The iron scold itself has become a physical object of speech, the object of
first utterance and language “articulated” by the struggle of a trapped tongue into
making a sound of its own. The sound is the sound of “glottals” as in the glottal stops
of working class dialect, a “lumpen mass” (as in the derogatory modern phrase
“lumpen proletariat”), cleverly orchestrated to become the “Ludding morphemes”;
pitiful struggling sounds to be sure, but which, when massed together, have the power
to physically smash apart “the loom of owned language” as the Luddites broke
machines with cast-iron Enoch sledge-hammers.
Harrison alters the stanza breaks and formal rhyming patterns of the sonnet form,
not just by making it sixteen rather than fourteen lines; he also varies the classic
Petrarchan abba abba rhyme pattern of this important middle stanza to abba bccb,
breaking the classic pattern by inverting it – but first indicating that he knows what it
is. The bb rhymes in the second half of the middle stanza “of Leeds stress” and
“ingloriousness” are full rhymes with each other, but only half-rhymes with the fullyrhymed “class” and “mass”. This device forges its own discordant ‘music’ on the
rhyme: “the frames of Art / the looms of owned language smashed apart.” The metre
and the rhyme with “frames of Art” making the sound of the second “aa” in “apart” a
flat Leeds vowel. Harrison writes: “Each swung cast-iron Enoch of Leeds stress /
clangs a forged music on the Frames of Art.” Then he does just that: message and
medium combine and he uses the art of the sonnet, its rhythm and its rhyming
traditions to physically put a “Leeds stress” on it. Later, he notes, triumphantly, after
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his teacher’s scathing put-down of his Beeston dialect in “Them and [uz]” that
“Wordsworth’s matter/water are full rhymes,” italicising them like his own Leeds
dialect.
The first morphemes from a tongue freed from the scold’s bridle, freed (albeit
briefly before Tidd is hanged) from the “condescension” of the 18th century members
of parliament in charge, will, by their very nature, be inarticulate and halting. They
are the first and smallest elements of language uttered by the Cato Street conspirators,
the stumbling words written by Richard Tidd before he was hanged: “Sir, I Ham a
very Bad Hand at Righting”. The words are mis-spelled at a time when spelling was
only just being standardised; their irony, in terms of the conspirators’ powerlessness
to put things “right”, to “right” injustice is all too sadly apparent in this powerful
ending. The important line of dialogue is given its own line for emphasis: the timing
of the dramatist imposed upon the art of the sonnet.
“The Rhubarbarians I”, (12) like “On Not Being Milton” is among the most skilful
in the sequence in terms of merging of metaphor, language, form and content. It
celebrates the possibility of revolution and action, and from its stuttering beginning,
takes up the theme of utterances and sound once more. The glottals that thickened to
a “lumpen mass” of inarticulacy in “On Not Being Milton” now begin, stumbling and
stuttering, to liquefy and “flow”:
Those glottals glugged like poured pop, each
rebarbative syllable, remembrancer, raise
‘mob’ rhubarb-rhubarb to a tribune’s speech
crossing the crackle as the hayricks blaze.
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The gaffer’s blackleg Boswells at their side.
Horsfall of Ottiwell, if the bugger could,
’d’ve liked to (exact words recorded) ride
up to my saddle-girths in Luddite blood.
What t’ mob said to the cannons on the mills,
shouted to soldier, scab and sentinel
’s silence, parries and hush on whistling hills,
shadows in moonlight playing knurr and spell.
It wasn’t poetry though. Nay, wiseowl Leeds
pro rege et lege schools, nobody needs
your drills and chanting to parrot right
the tusky-tusky of the pikes that night.
In the first two lines of the poem the invocation of the first coagulated utterances
from the tongue of the silenced are echoed by the stumbling rhythm. “Those glottals
glugged like poured pop, each / rebarbative syllable, remembrancer, raise. ” But as
the lines progress, the “Ludding morphemes” of “On Not Being Milton” develop into
syllables, “each rebarbative syllable” taking up the fight, together with each
“remembrancer” of things past, of the figurative history of the repressed, to become
‘mob’ – this word deliberately placed in the already clumsy rhythm of these lines to
maximise the crude flatness of its sound and meaning. The meaningless theatrical
extras’ “rhubarb-rhubarb” – the sound, here, of the inarticulate when muttered en
masse becomes “a tribune’s speech / crossing the crackle as the hayricks blaze”. The
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alliterative hard “k” sounds mimic the sounds of dry hay burning, the onomatopoeia
of the line raising the mob’s mutterings to the eloquence of poetry, fulfilling
Harrison’s personal declared intent in “Them & [uz] II”: “So right, yer buggers then.
We’ll occupy / your lousy, leasehold poetry.” (Harrison 21)
It is not just sounds and rhythm at work here, but the way both consistently echo
the meaning at every turn. Much of the sense of “The Rhubarbarians I” is in its
sounds. As the tribune’s “speech” becomes, not mere words but action the “hayricks
blaze”; the “tribune’s speech” all too clearly being the violence and destruction that is
the workers only form of protest since, of course, in reality there is no plebeian
tribune to speak for them. Consistency of sound with meaning is there too in the
words of the millowner, Horsfall of Ottiwells: ‘d’ve liked to (exact words recorded)
ride / up to my saddle-girths in Luddite blood”. These are just as clumsy and ugly as
the mob’s in terms of sound, rhythm and sense, with their implied coarseness
emphasised by the expletive-deleted phrase “(exact words recorded)” which also
means, of course that the words of the ruling classes or masters were indeed
“recorded” by history while the words of the inarticulate workers were merely
indistinguishable background “rhubarb”.
Like Morgan, with his use of a Shelter report in “Glasgow Sonnet I” Harrison
clearly values documentary reality. As Rowland notes, Horsfall’s italicised words:
“ride / up to my saddle-girths in Luddite blood” are direct quotes from Thompson’s
The Making of the English Working Class:
William Horsfall, of Ottiwells, near Huddersfield, was choleric and
impatient to meet an attack; his men were armed, and he had a
cannon mounted in his mill, with embrasures to cover the line of
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attack; he had boasted that he wished to ‘ride up to his saddle
girths’ in Luddite blood’. (268-9)
Thompson also attributes the lack of historical information about the Luddites
today to a combination of the secrecy of the Luddite movement and vigilance by the
authorities at the time:
If there had been an underground in these years, by its very nature it
would not have left written evidence. It would have left no
periodicals, no minute Books, and since the authorities watched the
post, very little correspondence.” (qutd in Rowland 269)
The question of “what t’ mob said to the cannon on the mills” then is problematic.
We don’t know. Harrison’s answer is in the sounds and rhythms of the sonnet: “ ’s
silence, parries and hush on whistling hills, / shadows in moonlight playing knurr and
spell.” The sibilants, picking up from “soldier, scab and sentinel” of the previous line
echo the sound of whistling wind in the hills, the shadows of protestors through the
ages playing the northern game of “knurr and spell”. The lyricism of the iambic
pentameter is restored as the sound echo of the sibilants of the “parries and hush” join
with the clicking metallic sound of the dentals and plosives in “the tusky tusky of the
pikes that night”. As the Luddites take up their pikes and a power, of sorts, is
conferred by joint action (albeit violent); and a lyrical “harmony” is restored as the
epigrammatic Shakespearean couplet is closed.
The importance of vernacular speech and words not recorded by historians or the
Canon of English Literature are emphasised further as the longer version of the
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sequence develops. Most memorably, perhaps, is the single “lost” line hidden, “nailed
behind a shutter” at Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage, recorded in “Remains” (Selected
Poems 180) as the words of W. Martin, paperhanger, 4 July, 1891. It reads simply:
“Our heads will be happen cold when this is found.” Harrison writes: “it’s never
trespassed on ‘the poet’s’ aura, nor been scanned, as it is, five strong verse feet.”
(ibid)
Harrison reminds us throughout the longer version of this sequence that his
dedication to the use of the iambic pentameter form throughout his work is not
simply his means of “occupying” the High Art from of poetry: iambic pentameter, he
notes, again and again, is the natural rhythm of speech that has merely been taken
over and utilised by poets. The iambic pentameter is not ‘owned’ by poetry any more
than the means of production should be owned by the mill-owners in “On Not Being
Milton”. We see this, for example in “Confessional Poetry”:
But your father was a simple working man,
they’ll say, and didn’t speak in those full rhymes.
His words when they came would scarcely scan.
Mi dad’s did scan, like yours do, many times!
(Harrison Selected Poems 128)
It is worth looking in some detail at how the personal images of language,
stuttering and the struggle to articulate are used in the 1978 sequence and how they
interlace with the themes of class, hegemony and repression. Harrison introduces the
sonnets with the four-line quatrain, “Heredity”:
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How you became a poet’s a mystery!
Wherever did you get your talent from?
I say: I had two uncles, Joe and Harry –
one was a stammerer, the other dumb.
The tone is that of the music-hall joke, reminiscent of the stand up comic’s routine
beginning “Wherever did you get that hat/dog/…. ?” stopping just short of the “I say,
I say I say” of the music hall comic, but our doubts about the existence of these
extraordinary uncles are apparently groundless. Each is mentioned later in the
sequence, most memorably Uncle Joe in “Study”, the fourth sonnet in the 1978
sequence, the “damascener’s hammer” (Harrison 14) of his stammer, the insistent,
pounding of the engraver, making its mark of change slowly on the metal, a weaker,
slower version of the Enoch iron sledge-hammer of the Luddite worker.
The skill of the poet in creating the “personal” in the small cameo space of a
sonnet is to give the reader a character so immediately vivid and so unique that, in the
proverbial words of the tabloid reporter, the reader is convinced that “you couldn’t
make it up.” The image of Uncle Joe, “his gaping jaws / once plugged in to the power
of his stammer / patterned the stuck plosive without pause / like a d-d-damascener’s
hammer” is just that. The onomatopoeic plosive “d” with its stuttering sound and the
power of the stammer, like some kind of electric plug is so memorable that Uncle
Joe, whoever he was and whether he actually existed or not, is entirely credible.
The convincing use of Uncle Joe and his stammer as a metaphor for the gaining of
language and the struggle for language is laid down in these first few pages, then
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used regularly, and to great effect, as the longer version of the sequence continues. In
“Self-Justification”, for example, Harrison writes:
And Uncle Joe. Impediment spurred him
the worst stammerer I’ve known, to be a printer.
He handset type much faster than he spoke.
Those cruel consonants ms ps and bs
on which his jaws and spirit almost broke
flicked into order with sadistic ease.
It seems right that Uncle Joe, ‘b-buckshee
from the works’, supplied those scribble pads
on which I stammered my first poetry
that made me seem a cissy to the lads.
Their aggro towards me, my need of them ’s
what keeps my would-be mobile tongue still tied –
aggression, struggle, loss, blank printer’s ems
by which all
eloquence
gets justified.
(Selected Poems 172)
The “blank printer’s ems”, the lead spacers used when newspaper print was set by
hand by skilled printers gives this poem its final line, the appearance of which mirrors
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its meaning. The printer’s ems were used to justify print down the right hand side of
the column, leaving blank spaces between characters to achieve this. The poem is set
“ragged right” throughout but then is itself “justified” in the final line, just as the
suffering of aggression, struggle, loss Harrison felt is finally “justified” or formalised
in print in his poetry. But the justification comes at a price: “my need of them’s”
rhyming, tellingly with “printer’s ems”, making us look at the link in both rhyme and
meaning; the loss and blankness of the scholarship boy clearly felt in isolation, just as
the word “eloquence” is isolated, with space all around it in the justified last line.
It is worth turning now to how some of these “sonnets” are constructed as this
offers further insight into Harrison’s method and reveals the strength of a compelling
linear narrative voice of this sonnet sequence. The sequence works best where its
leitmotifs and themes function as whole, rather like an opera. “Wordlists II” (16) for
example, begins, as most of Harrison’s successful poetry does, with words designed
to be spoken:
The Funk & Wagnalls? Does that still survive?
Uncle Harry most eloquent deaf-mute
jabbed at its lexis till it leaped to life
when there were Tory errors to confute.
A bible paper bomb that dictionary.
I learned to rifle through it at great speed.
He’s dead. I’ve studied, got the OED
and other tongues I’ve slaved to speak or read:
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L &S dead Latin, L & S dead Greek,
one the now dead lexicographer gave me,
Ivan Poldaug, his English-Czech slovnik;
Harrap’s French 2 vols, a Swahili,
Cabrera’s Afro-Cuban Anagó
Hausa, Yourba, both R.C. Abraham’s –
but not the tongue that once I used to know
but can’t bone up on now, an that’s mi mam’s
From the stuttered morpheme of the iron scold to the inarticulate and mis-spelt
written words from the pen of Tidd the Cato Street conspirator and a stammerer, now
we have a deaf-mute man finding his “eloquence”. The personal and the political
once again are inextricably linked. Exactly how Uncle Harry communicates is not
entirely clear, perhaps through stabbing at sections of the encyclopaedia to factually
back up his anti-Tory views. The power of the actual words themselves, however, is
entirely evident through Harrison’s metaphor: “A bible paper bomb that dictionary. /
I learned to rifle through it at great speed.” The Funk & Wagnalls dictionary, with its
great fund of words and knowledge, is a life-changing force for Harrison. He terms
its paper a “bomb”; it is something to “rifle” through, and its words are weapons, a
means of revolution. “I learned to rifle through it at great speed. / He’s dead. I’ve
studied, got the OED / and other tongues I’ve slaved to speak or read.” The “speed”
he refers to is highlighted in the rhythm of the second line, beginning, as Harrison
with the two monosyllabic words: “He’s dead.” These two stressed syllables make
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one sentence and the short clauses of the next two lines mimic the concept of speed
well, also moving the “story” along effectively to its climax.
As the sonnet continues the reader quickly trips through the rhymes of the six lines
of “other tongues I’ve slaved to speak or read” – “dead Greek” rhymed with
“slovnik”, for example. He continues the list, building to the last two lines, given a
separate final stanza of their own:
but not the tongue that once I used to know
but can’t bone up on now, and that’s mi mam’s.
The Afro-Cuban Anagó, with the stress on the last long o rhymes with the long o in
know, while, the biblical “Abraham’s,” often considered the original language from
which all others came, rhymes, tellingly, with the final “mi mam’s”. We know,
analysing “Wordlists II”, whose final lines evoke emotion and empathy in the
listener, that we have been successfully manipulated by Harrison’s use of the rhyme
and the drama of a sonnet-form of his own making, used as it is here to maximise the
impact of his “pay-off” lines. It teeters on the edge of sentimentality, to be sure, but
unlike the much later sonnet, “Bye-Byes” (163, Collected Poems, Harrison 2007) to
his mother, “Wordlists II” stays on the right side of emotive; and it works. The
sudden use of dialect, in Harrison’s “own” voice comes as something of a shock
within the context of the polygot Harrison and the complex list of languages learned,
but we have been prepared for this in snatches of similar dialect in poems such as
“Study”. We quickly understand that for the grammar school boy who no longer
belongs in either “camp” something has been lost in the struggle to gain knowledge
and education: his mother-tongue.
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This ability to switch tone is a feature of this sequence, and one that works well
within the dialectic of the sonnet form. Rylance notes that an interviewer (Michael
Davie of The Observer) recalls Harrison’s remark that Milton could go in a moment
from the public and political to the “privately tender”. “That was one of the things
that he, Harrison, tried to do in his work.” (Rylance, “On Not Being Milton” 118)
Such switches are particularly noticeable in the elegiac sonnets to Harrison’s parents
(and his father in particular) that follow in Continuous. The first of these, “Bookends
I”, (24) written after the death of the poet’s mother, is contained in this 1978 version
of the sonnet sequence:
Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead
we chew it slowly that last apple pie.
Shocked into sleeplessness you’re scared of bed.
We never could talk much, and now don’t try.
You’re like book ends, the pair of you, she’d say,
Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare …
The ‘scholar’ me, you, worn out on poor pay,
only our silence made us seem a pair.
Not as good for staring in, blue gas,
too regular each bud, each yellow spike.
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A night you need my company to pass
and she not here to tell us we’re alike!
Your life’s all shattered into smithereens.
Back in our silences and sullen looks,
for all the Scotch we drink, what’s still between ’s
not the thirty or so year, but books, books, books.
Fragmented, for most of the poem into two line segments, the shortness of the stanzas
echoes the stumbling ‘dumbness’ – an imposed dumbness now – the silence between
father and son now the mother is dead. “Down with polysyllables” the young T.W.
says earlier in “Me Tarzan, turning to his Latin translation; and here in “Bookends I”,
his mother dead, it’s as if, involuntarily, back home at his parent’s hearth, the adult
Harrison returns to monosyllables. Only “suddenly” “slowly” and “apple” break the
pattern of monosyllabic words in these first two lines: “Baked the day she suddenly
dropped dead / we chew it slowly that last apple pie.” In the last lines the three
monosyllabic stresses: “books, books, books” echo the “on, on, on” earlier in
reference to the young T.W. at home, isolated from his peers at his books in “Me
Tarzan”. Now, it is entirely clear, it is those same “books, books, books” that isolate
him from his father. There is no parental fault here, nor is it, as Blake Morrison notes,
the scenario of Larkin’s “Reference back” where the generational separation is
inevitable. (55) This is a highly political elegy and Harrison, self-conscious as
always, is fully aware what he is doing with the monosyllables and the constraint of
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his grief within his chosen sixteen-line rhyming framework. This sonnet does exactly
what it’s intended to do: it moves us and, in so doing makes an effective political
point on the class system in England in the 40’s and 50’s in the process.
The public voice of protest in Harrison is clearly in evidence in poems such as
“On Not Being Milton”, (11) as we saw earlier: “Each swung cast-iron Enoch of
Leeds stress / clangs a forged music on the frames of Art, /the looms of owned
language smashed apart!” In “Bookends I”, however, this “Leeds stress” is deployed
for a form of protest that is intensely personal. The monosyllabic words used in the
opening lines of “Bookends I”, the direct quote in Leeds dialect from Harrison’s
mother in stanza three and the imposition, by punctuation, of rhymes using dialect
words such as “between ‘ s” to rhyme with “smithereens” make it virtually
impossible to read this sonnet without falling into the Leeds dialect throughout. This,
of course, is exactly what Harrison intends. Once again he is imposing the music of
his native dialect on the “frames of Art” in the form of the sonnet. The “Leeds stress”
is in evidence, in particular, in the rhymes on “gas” and “pass” in the fifth stanza
where its use tellingly highlights the now unbridgeable divide between father and
son. The point made is both personal and political. As John Lucas notes:
Literally the most telling evidence of the gap (between Harrison and
his father) comes on the rhyme ‘gas /pass’. For of course it’s only a
rhyme if you haven’t doffed your flat a’s. Books, education, sunder
the would-be rhyme words. I have read this poem aloud on a
number of occasions and always the decision about whether to
enunciate the rhyme or not comes as a moment of pure
embarrassment. (355)
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In such sonnets Harrison – who writes only in verse – relentlessly exposes the
raw nerve of his own emotions at his mother’s death to make a political point,
manipulating us through the metre and rhyme of the sonnet in the process. Politically
motivated sonnets such as “National Trust” (19) use a different technique:
Bottomless pits. There’s one in Castleton,
and stout upholders of our law and order
one day thought its depth worth wagering on
and borrowed a convict hush-hush from his warder
and winched him down; and back, flayed grey, mad, dumb.
Not even a good flogging made him holler!
O gentlemen, a better way to plumb
the depth of Britain’s dangling a scholar,
say, here at the booming shaft at Towanroath,
now National Trust, a place where they got tin,
those gentlemen who silenced the men’s oath
and killed the language that they swore it in.
The dumb go down in history and disappear
and not one gentleman ’s been brought to book:
Mes den hep avas a-gollas y dyr
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(Cornish) –
‘the tongueless man gets his land took.’
(Harrison 19)
The advantage of the sonnet sequence here is that the gradually accumulating
leitmotifs, of stuttering, inarticulacy, dumbness and the “branks” add greatly to its
impact. The convict returns from the blackness “flayed, grey, mad, / dumb.” The
persistent theme, that a “tongue” or an education can be given by “gentlemen” to
history’s forgotten poor, but equally, can be removed again with ease and without the
slightest risk of retribution is forcibly made – differently in each sonnet –
but always it is through the personal that we come, all the more forcibly, to the
political. In “National Trust” the poor are rendered inarticulate, their words and
experiences confined to the “bottomless pits” of history, the politics told in the story
of one unnamed man, the physicality of his torture hammered home in the irregular
but highly effective seven strong beats of: “and winched him down; and back, flayed,
grey, mad, dumb”. The words of this line are workmanlike; not one word is more
than a single syllable long. The emphasis falls heavily on each of the last four words,
“flayed, grey” with its internal rhyme and finally the consonance of “mad, dumb.”
This sonnet is split into two rhyme schemes, the first rhyming abab abab
(counting “on” and “dumb” as near rhymes) the second rhyming cdcd efef. It is a
challenging scheme, more so than that of the traditional Shakespearean sonnet.
Harrison’s old enemy, the traditional “lousy leasehold poetry” is hijacked once again
to make his political point. For good measure he restores the Cornish in the form of
an extract from an englyn, a Celtic poem with three-line stanza (Rowland 274): “But
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a man without a tongue shall lose his land,” fitting it into the rhyme pattern of this
second rhyming scheme as “the tongueless man gets his land took.”
Arguably it is in poems such as “National Trust”, where the character “Tony
Harrison” is “separate”, that the achievement is at its most durable. For Luke
Spencer, with the publication of Harrison’s from The School Eloquence and other
poems (1978) and its extended sequel, Continuous (1981), “Harrison’s work took a
considerable stride forward in its ability to express political meanings. Some of the
sixteen-line sonnets that make up the sequence have the compact symmetry and force
of bullets fired in the class war.” (67) The brevity and tight containment of the sonnet
(even at sixteen lines) together with its insistent formal rhyme and argumentative
power is the key to Spencer’s remarks and the key to the durability of the sonnet form
over the centuries. This sonnet sequence works as whole: there are the “bullets” the
hard-hitting sonnets, such as “Them and [uz] I & II”, the stand-alone show-stoppers
such as “National Trust” where Harrison forgets his own angst and guilt at drawing
away from his parents and encapsulates the personal and the political in sixteen lines
which require no prelude, build-up or introduction. Then there are the sonnets, like
“T’Ark”, with its continuation of the themes of silence and extinction, or “The
Earthen Lot” with its recognition of the forgotten craftsmen who built England’
churches. Such sonnets don’t stand well alone but work as essential parts of the
sequence.
The formal cadences and rhyming patterns of the sonnet however, not only give
Harrison inspiration and the means to express that emotion, they also contain it.
Verse, metre and form provide what Harrison himself calls, in an interview with
Hoggart in 1986, “a sterile jar”: “I’m a very passionate person. And I feel that I need
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a way I can control what I say… It’s like giving blood. If you’re dying I can’t give
you blood by slashing my wrists; it has to go through a sterile jar.” (43)
This self-conscious analysis characterises Harrison. Now 76 and interviewed last
year at the Chester Literary Festival by Jeremy Isaacs, Harrison notes, with the
satisfaction of one used to using and crafting his own emotions: “I always work in the
same notebooks. All these notebooks are now in the University of Leeds and I can’t
go and look at them unless I put white gloves on. I can’t go and spill wine over them
like I used to.” (interview broadcast on Radio Four “V”, February 18, 2013).
As Eliot would put it in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” the “perfect” artist is
separate from the man:
The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him
will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more
perfectly will the mind transmute the passions which are its
material. (38)
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Chapter 3
Playing for Mortal Stakes
Trying to tell it all to you and cover everything
Is like awakening from its grassy form the hare:
In that make-shift shelter your hand, then my hand
Mislays the hare and the warmth it leaves behind.
(Michael Longley Collected Poems 197)
As Michael Longley suggests in his four-line poem, “Form”, the
meaning of form in a poem, and its relation to content, can be difficult to
establish. In the process of doing so, it’s as if we had disturbed a hare in
his lair: we may lose the “warmth”, the significance. As Peter McDonald
notes, in “Form” Longley is registering an awareness that what poems say
is inextricable from how their language disposes itself: “an awareness of
what has escaped conditions the very attempt to ‘tell it all to you and
cover everything.’” (McDonald 147)
As we have seen, in Harrison’s case the “form” of the sonnet and its
attendant restrictions allowed Harrison a means of filtering the personal
and political expression of his themes of class, language and personal
identity. The subject-matter of the Harrison sonnets examined in this
essay, though political in the widest sense, is also, at times, intensely and
clearly personal. That is a large part of the point of the “from The School
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of Eloquence” sonnets: the political point on class and language is in
itself often made through Harrison’s own life-story and relationship to his
parents. In Muldoon’s case however, there is a conundrum: he draws
extensively on the landscape of his childhood and early youth while
simultaneously keeping the reader guessing and never giving too much
away: he is almost never confessional. In addition, as Peter McDonald
notes there is in Muldoon “a persistent air of provisionality”. (McDonald,
2) This ludic aspect of Muldoon’s approach may relate back to the
Troubles and be underpinned by something deadly serious; as Bernard
O’Donoghue suggests: "He’s a Troubles poet from the beginning,
cautious from the start… There’s a mock-innocence in the poems, a
disturbing way of reporting violence – horribly literal, half-humorous –
that works as a shock tactic.” (quted in Potts)
Paul Muldoon’s second collection, Mules, opens with a poem entitled “Lunch
with Pancho Villa” in which Pancho Villa, the celebrated, but entirely fictitious,
revolutionary and pamphleteer addresses the poet:
Look, son. Just look around you.
People are getting themselves killed
Left, right and centre
While you do what? Write rondeaux?
There’s more to living in this country
Than stars and horses, pigs and trees,
Not that you’d guess it from your poems.
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Do you ever listen to the news?
You want to get down something true.
Something a little nearer home.
(Muldoon, Poems 41)
Muldoon himself does indeed attempt “something true. / Something a little
nearer home,” in his poetry, but never in the crude voice of the political
pamphleteer. While he may not, as self-instructed, “write rondeaux” (or at least
not often) he does write villanelles, double villanelles, ghazals, sestinas,
exploded sestinas, pantoums and sonnets: quasi-sonnets, crumbled sonnets,
destructed sonnets, deconstructed sonnets, and veiled sonnets. No sooner, it
seems, than a critic has forged a new name for his last form of “sonnet” than
Muldoon again rewrites, and continues to rewrite the form. Muldoon also,
regularly, does succeed in writing about “the news”, without, apparently taking
sides, while still offering a slant or an insight that illuminates. In Mules itself,
for example, like the callow youth in the poem, Muldoon “rambles on” about
stars and horses, pigs and trees, while simultaneously recognising the latent
violence even in the rural environment. (Kendall 47) Muldoon’s oblique
approach allows him to avoid the overt political statement. As Seamus Heaney
put it:
[Muldoon’s] swerves away from any form of poker-faced solidarity
with the political programs of the Northern Catholic minority (from
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which he hails) have kept him so much on his poetic toes that he
has practically achieved the poetic equivalent of walking on air.
(quted in Kendall 47)
For Muldoon, as with Frost, “all the fun’s in how you say a thing.” (qutd in
Buxton 33) Muldoon sums up this aspect of his approach himself in “They that wash
on Thursdays”: “So I learned firsthand / to deal in the off-, the under-, the sleight-ofhand, / writing now in that great, open hand / yet never quite showing my hand.”
(Muldoon, Poems 442). Interviewed in The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet
Muldoon talks about "the game" in reference to the sonnet:
In that respect, the description of the sonnet as a 'closed' form is
itself a bit closed. It fails to take into account that the sonnet is no
more closed than an arena is closed and that, for better or worse, the
funeral games played there are played for fun and that, to borrow
Frost's phrase, all games might have 'mortal stakes'. (Cousins,
Howarth 11)
The sonnet holds a huge appeal for Muldoon. In Muldoon’s hands the sonnet lends
itself to the metaphoric, the allegorical, the mysterious, the highly allusive and the
deeply intertextual. His second collection, Mules (1977), contains eighteen sonnets in
just 48 pages. As Kendall notes it is Mules which “first heralds Muldoon’s obsession
with the form … his use of pararhymes and idiosyncratic rhyme schemes in the
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sonnets in Mules … prepare for more outrageous liberties with the sonnet in Quoof
and later volumes”. (46)
In order to see how such modifications work in practice it is worth looking in
detail at a range of Muldoon’s individual sonnets and also, more briefly, how one of
Muldoon’s sonnets operates in the context of his most recent sonnet sequence, “Horse
Latitudes”. The sonnets to be examined in this chapter are: “The Merman,” “The
Right Arm”, “Ma”, “Aftermath”, and “Blackwater Fort” from the “Horse Latitudes”
sonnet sequence. To gain some insight into how the use of the sonnet has developed
in Muldoon, we will first look, in some detail, at “The Merman” from Mules (1977) a
parabolic expression of the sectarian fanaticism and violence around him in the
Ireland of the 70’s.
He was ploughing his single furrow
Through the green, heavy sward
Of water. I was sowing winter wheat
At the shoreline when our farms met.
Not a furrow, quite, I argued.
Nothing would come of his long acre
But breaker growing out of breaker,
The wind-scythe, the rain-harrow.
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Had he no wish to own such land
As he might plough round in a day?
What of friendship, love? Such qualities?
He remembered these same fields of corn or hay
When swathes ran high along the ground,
Hearing the cries of one in difficulties.
(Muldoon, Poems 58)
The rhyming pattern is idiosyncratic, using both pararhyme and full rhyme, but at
this stage the traditional form remains clearly present. Edna Longley describes it as
“slightly veiled sonnet form in which the line-length veers between six and eleven
syllables”. (E. Longley, “Stars and Horses, Pigs and Trees” 54-60) “The Merman”, its
lyrical narrative tone followed by an ominous, mysteriously disturbing last line, is
typical of the undertow of violence in Mules. The odd half-rhyme between “qualities”
and “difficulties” draws attention to the contrast in mood between the words, and
their setting three lines apart prolongs the sense of the ominous in the poem. Its
central character of a “merman” – half man, half fish, is one of several hybrids and
quirks of nature contained in this volume, such as the centaur, (“The Centaurs”,
Poems 43) the “five-legged calf”, (“Duffy’s Circus”, Poems 66) and the woman from
“Blemish” who looks at the world “through one brown and one blue eye”. (Poems
57) Most striking of these, perhaps, is the mule, (“Mules”, Poems 67) the sterile
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offspring of a mare and a donkey, from which this volume takes its title and which
continues to figure as an important metaphor in Muldoon.
The tone of “The Merman” is, at times, a pastoral one, and it is reminiscent of
Frost’s “Mending Wall” (Frost 9-10) in its narrative balance and apparent subject
matter. The merman and the farmer have encountered one another “at the shoreline
when our farms met.” The phrasing here is unusual; not “where our farms met” but
“when”. Subtly, in spite of the lyrical narrative, we pick up the subtext from aspects
of the language, such as the possibility of conflict at the “shoreline”; the border
between one thing and another. In the Frost poem the narrator wonders “what I was
walling in or walling out”: the threat contained in the breaching of that boundary is
unspecified. In contrast, the implied violence at the meeting of two borders in the
Muldoon poem, the “cries of one in difficulties”, while also unspecified, is
disturbing. The fact that the cause of the “cries”, the violence behind the sound, is
non-specific makes it all the more disturbing. Two cultures, two ways of life that are
completely alien to each other, have been, in the confines of the artifice of this
parabolic sonnet at least, in some sort of meaningful dialogue with one another. But
only briefly. The short-lived desire for understanding between the two for that
moment is doomed and the poem ends with an act of violence, the land-farmer,
perhaps, “drowning” in his own harvest when “swathes ran high along the ground”.
The use of the word “swathes” carries sinister undertones of reaping and death. The
language again provides a subtext; a potential undertow of violence: “sward” in “the
green, heavy sward” puns with sword, and invented farm implements such as the
“wind-scythe” bring together of land and sea – but only by means of a word strongly
associated with reaping and death.
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This apparently simple sonnet, by its parabolic nature, allows for a myriad of
interpretations as it remains entirely (apparently at least) within the world of this
mythical meeting, leaving the reader to find his own meaning. In this way, “The
Merman” outlives its time, bringing to mind different interpretations for different
readers as each new generation reads the poem. Reading this sonnet now, with the
virtue of hindsight, “The Merman” might, potentially, “put one in mind”, to use a
favourite phrase of Muldoon’s, of the informal discussions between John Hume and
Ian Paisley in their respective European roles at the European Parliament in
Strasbourg in the early 80’s, away from the native border that would make such a
dialogue impossible. Such talks, the ceasefire and the finalisation of the peace
process itself, took place long after the poem was written of course. It is a mark of the
success of the art form that we can think in this way. As Edna Longley puts it, more
generally: “This meeting on the margin becomes an unparaphrasable parable that
would satisfy MacNeice’s requirement for double or multiple level writing (Muldoon
is attracted to the later MacNeice).” (E. Longley, “Pigs and Horses” 55)
In our second sonnet, “The Right Arm” from Quoof however, meaning is
uncovered in an entirely different way.
I was three-ish
when I plunged my arm into the sweet-jar
for the last bit of clove-rock.
We kept a shop in Eglish
that sold bread, milk, butter, cheese,
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bacon and eggs,
Andrews Liver Salts,
and until now clove-rock.
I would give my right arm to have known then
how Eglish was itself wedged between
ecclesia and église.
The Eglish sky was its own stained glass vault
and my right arm was sleeved in glass
that had yet to shatter.
(Muldoon, Poems 107)
The key to meaning in this “crumbled sonnet” as Michael Donaghy termed the
sonnets in Quoof, (81) appears to be in words that sound alike, words that are based
round the important missing word “church”, which is the origin of the village-name
“Eglish”, and words with a similar sound such as “ecclesia” and “église”, the Greek
and French words, also, respectively for church. We have, therefore, a village whose
name derives etymologically from the word for church “wedged between” two other
words for church. As Edna Longley suggests, in this poem Muldoon “substitutes puns
for etymology as a method of uncovering meaning”. (E. Longley, Poetry in the Wars
208)
Names of places and people that would be rightly glossed over in a reading of
many authors are best paid attention to in Muldoon. Muldoon is perfectly capable of
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reading great significance into given names and words – names such as his own last
name, or “missing names” such as the “Lee” in Robert Lee Frost over which there is
absolutely no authorial control. (Muldoon, The End of the Poem 58-9) In terms of
traditional full rhymes in “The Right Arm” we have “three-ish” / ”Eglish”, “salts” /
“vault”. And, in terms of half-rhymes we have “butter” / “shatter”. This last stretches
across almost the full length of the sonnet, from the fifth line to the fourteenth – an
innovative technique that Muldoon uses regularly in his sonnets. It’s a technique that
can heighten and intensify the effect of the rhyme, when, as in this case, two words
with disparate meanings are yoked together. Muldoon then introduces a list of fresh,
nurturing farm-food such as “milk, butter, cheese” only to link these images, finally
to glass that has “yet to shatter”. The familiar products give a sense of peace and
security that is echoed in the subject matter of the first eight lines of this much
curtailed sonnet, with the syllable count of its lines ranging from just four to the more
traditional ten, and everything in between. These first eight lines end with a small
joke: “and, until now, clove-rock.” Only when we reach the volta which, even in this
crumbled sonnet, remains more or less in the traditional place, at the ninth line, does
the mood change with: “I would give my right arm to have known then”. The voice is
now the voice of adulthood and the phrase is an adult cliché – the phrase adults use
when they desire something. This takes over from the carefree childlike abandon of
“I plunged my arm into the sweet-jar” of the first line. The change of tone brings the
reader up short. The literal meaning of the cliché is evident, highlighted as it is in the
structure of the poem, and provokes foreboding. The security of the family shop
remains, for now, but the word église, with its “s” and hard “g” sounds remaining as
an echo, slides into “stained-glass”, the stained-glass vault of the church that contains
and gives safety, but from which there is no looking out into the world beyond, and
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the child’s right arm “sleeved in glass / that has yet to shatter.” The glass of the
church is “stained” – a normal enough concept made disturbing by the fact that the
sound has been been so strangely emphasised by église, combined with its
foreshadowing in “sleeved in glass”. With no background knowledge of the poet
whatsoever, the subtext in these lines is evident, from the sense, from the rhyme
scheme and the form. With background knowledge of, for example, Muldoon’s
“Blowing Eggs” in New Weather, the nuances of the word “stained” in relation to a
church window become more sinister still. The earlier poem refers to the child’s
hands in the act of first puncturing a bird’s egg with memorable physical detail:
Puncturing of the waste
And isolate egg and this is the clean delivery
Of little yolk and albumen
These his wrists, surprised and stained.
(Muldoon, Poems 5)
With the knowledge that the poet is writing this sonnet in Ireland in 1983, and
that the “three-ish” aged child in the 1950’s shop was growing up in the Ireland of the
60s and 70’s the “yet to shatter” becomes a moment of frozen time; a lull before the
bomb-blast, the shattered glass of windows. The violence is unspoken; the damage to
the human body in its wake, implied; never spelled out.
In page-order, the next poem to “The Right Arm” in Quoof is “The Mirror, In
memory of my father. (Muldoon, 108-9) Concerning a father’s death, this poem offers
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a further layer of interpretation: the father lifts “the monstrous old Victorian mirror”
from the wall, unaided by the son, followed by the son’s guilty realisation: “two days
later / it was the mirror took his breath away”. The absence of a helping hand by son
to father is assigned as the cause of the father’s death from a heart attack and the
shattering of glass is linked to mourning and loss. This, in turn, is immediately
followed by a translation of an Erich Arendt poem entitled “The Hands”; a
particularly ghoulish sonnet which appears to obliquely invoke the endless violent
reprisals and calculated ritual punishments of sectarian violence. Again this is
suggested, not spelled out.
In a different twist on this sideways approach to talking about violence Muldoon
takes commenting on the political by means of the personal to extremes in a sonnet in
Quoof entitled, “A Trifle”:
I had been meaning to work to work through lunch
the day before yesterday.
Our office block is the tallest in Belfast;
when the Tannoy sounds
another bomb alert
we take four or five minutes to run down
the thirty-odd flights of steps
to street level.
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I had been trying to get past
A woman who held, at arm’s length, a tray,
and on the tray the remains of the dessert –
a plate of blue-pink trifle
or jelly sponge,
with a dollop of whipped cream on the top.
(Muldoon Poems 120)
The everyday nature of violence in Belfast at the time is made clear, obliquely, by
Muldoon’s carefully matter-of-fact description of a woman so used to bomb alerts
that she runs down “thirty-odd flights of steps” carrying a lavish dessert, determined
not to spoil its perfection just because her life may (or may not) be at risk. Muldoon
heightens this sense of ongoing atrocity with the use of the pluperfect at the start of
both the octet and the sestet of this curtailed sonnet – emphasising how violence
occurs against backdrop of domestic everyday detail, an observation which has the
effect of heightening our sense of the horror of the atrocity. There are of course, as
many possible interpretations of what John Lyon calls a “sonnet …about
insignificance” (111) as there are critics, but Hugh Haughton perhaps sums it up most
succinctly, calling it “nonsense verse”, while adding, of course, that “nonsense verse
also has a serious side”. (ibid 113)
There are times, in Muldoon’s poetry, where he appears to deal with the violence
of his native Ireland in a way that is almost too distant. Paradoxically, however, it is
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this very refusal to simply engage in a narrative of violence that has become the
defining feature of Muldoon’s work. Edna Longley speaks of “the core of ice in
Muldoon’s imagination, possibly where religion has frozen.”(E. Longley, The Living
Stream 226) Other leading critics, such as Helen Vendler in particular, perceive a
lack of emotion in Muldoon. In a review of several books by Muldoon, including The
Annals of Chile (which contains two of his most moving elegies, “Incantata” and
“Yarrow”) Vendler writes:
When I first read Muldoon, I thought – to put it bluntly – that his
lyrics were impressively constructed but too often had a hole in the
middle where the feeling should be. My former student Steven Burt
… argued the point persistently with me, insisting that one could
deduce the unstated feeling in a Muldoon poem from the contours
of his language, much as one can deduce the shape of a bronze from
the mould used to cast it. (58)
One example of what Burt is describing here is to be found in the intensely
personal sonnet “Ma” in Mules. (Muldoon, Poems 49) The enforced shape of the
sonnet itself is part of the meaning here, restraining the process of grief within its
boundaries:
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Old photographs would have her bookish, sitting
Under a willow. I take that to be a croquet
Lawn. She reads aloud, no doubt from Rupert Brooke.
The month is always May or June.
Or with the stranger on the motor-bike.
Not my father, no. This one’s all crew-cut
And polished brass buttons.
An American soldier, perhaps.
And the full moon
Swaying over Keenaghan, the orchards and the cannery,
Thins to a last yellow-hammer, and goes.
The neighbours gather, all Keenaghan and Collegelands,
There is story-telling. Old miners at Coalisland
Going into the ground. Swinging, for fear of the gas,
The soft flame of a canary.
Immediately we are distanced from the subject: “old photographs would have
her bookish”; the “would have her” suggests a pose – whether by the subject or the
photographer; an ability to fix a memory, set a desired scene, just as the poet is about
to do in the poem. The tone is conversational, self-aware; the photographs of his
mother, the speaker clearly knows, are idealised memories: “The month was always
May or June”. The lines are replete with sound echoes and internal rhyme, the “o”’s
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in “old / photographs” turning, for example, to a half-rhyming “oo” in “would”. This
in turn is followed by a novel version of reverse rhyme: photographs” and “would
have” – a reverse rhyme, only, however, if you allow that the labiodental fricatives
“f” and “v” are rhymes, an innovative rhyming technique of Muldoon’s highlighted
by Andrew Osborn. Osborn takes the analysis of sound echo rhymes such as “sitting /
buttons”, further, giving them the apt name of “fuzzy rhyme”, along the principles of
“fuzzy logic”. (328) Such is Muldoon’s innovation with rhyme, it seems, that critics
must invent new language to describe his techniques.
The speaker’s memories of his mother are carefully chosen: she reads Rupert
Brooke. This information, in itself, is part of the duality of tone and language in this
sonnet. Brooke, a quintessentially English poet whose sonnets include the patriotic
and idealised “The Soldier”, is presented with little comment other than the phrase
“no doubt from Rupert Brooke”, which can be read, as Kendall does, as sardonic
(Kendall 13) or merely accurate and gently mocking. Biographically we note that
there were few books in the Muldoon household: “The only book Muldoon
remembers is a copy of The Poems of Rupert Brooke, which his mother cherished
because she had received it as a prize from her teacher training college.” (ibid).
Despite the connotations of this particular poet, the fact that his mother reads him is
given no further comment in the poem – directly at least. Muldoon’s dislike of his
mother’s snobbishness, her class-consciousness, displayed in, for example, the sonnet
entitled “Profumo” (Muldoon, Poems 155) is strongly present in the language, rhyme
and structure of “Ma”: “I take that to be a croquet / Lawn”, he writes, the incongruity
of a croquet lawn emphasised by the pronounced and unusual line-break in a
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technique regularly and effectively deployed by Muldoon. The word “croquet” is
then mirrored by several slant-rhymes further on, such as far more culturally
incongruous “crew-cut” of “an American soldier perhaps”, adding further to the
question marks and mystery behind this apparently simple tribute to his mother. The
reverse-rhyme or “fuzzy rhyme” of Rupert Brooke with “motor-bike” is particularly
unusual, and certainly not, as Osborn notes, the conventional rhyme Brooke himself
would have chosen. This may, of course, be the point. The yoking together of
completely disparate ideas in rhyme is an important and continuing feature in
Muldoon’s poetry and one which lends itself to the brevity and dialectic of the sonnet
form.
Muldoon’s use of the volta is also particularly striking in “Ma”. It comes in the
half-line, “And the full moon” – which is typeset to the right. This physically breaks
the sonnet away from the octet, and from the image therein of a mother, in class
terms at least, removed and distanced from Muldoon’s farm labourer father and the
farming and mining community around her. The rhyme scheme also switches to a
simple traditional one here, further emphasising the change of mood. The tone
becomes elegiac, lyrical, as if, having shown in the octet how the mother wished to
be seen, and having addressed, obliquely, through language and rhyme, a mystery
from the past, the mourning can begin in the sestet. “And the full moon” chimes with
the overtly traditional and conventional rhyme of “June”. The moon, symbol of
creativity and fertility begins as full, the names of the surrounding villages are
repeated and echoed in full rhyme (“swaying over Keenaghan”, “all Keenaghan and
Collegelands,” / “Old miners at Collegelands”). And all the while, as the neighbours
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gather, light is disappearing. The full moon “Thins to a last yellow-hammer, and
goes.” The internal half-rhymes of “thins” and the sound of “goes” in the last line,
disappearing, echoing the disappearance of the gold of the moon, of the yellowhammer, of light. The lines lengthen. The “old miners” are now “going into the
ground. Swinging, for fear of the gas”, the “gas” the disturbingly half-rhymed echo of
“goes” three lines earlier. The golden yellow symbol is picked up once more, but this
time in “the soft flame of a canary”, the bird who will die first when there is lethal
gas in the pit, this last line reduced, for due emphasis, to just four beats.
Michael Allen points to “something raw and contemporaneous in the narrator’s
sensibility (in the)…. unsettling shift of stress as between ‘canary’ and its
anticipatory rhyme ‘cannery’” in this poem, and notes that Muldoon uses rhyme as
means of allowing external forces to mould the poem:
One can see already that Muldoon’s surrender to the energies
inherent in rhyme, an almost novelistic immersion (‘I believe in the
serendipity of all that, of giving oneself over to that’), intensifies
the sense … of the poetic persona as just one component of an
exploratory process involving extra-discursive forces. (69)
The despair is in the sounds and the structure. As Burt argues: “Muldoon’s
controlling skepticism can indeed be mistaken for a lack of feeling. Yet… he himself
finds in it a scrutiny which itself conveys feelings of uncertainty and self-doubt; a
desire for detachment which is itself an emotion”. (quted in Buxton 171). In “Ma” as
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we have seen, the stranger on the motor-bike with his mother is introduced, then
dismissed, with “Not my father, no”. The sense of something better not explored,
held back – or simply, perhaps, the discovery, after death, of a side of a parent we
knew nothing of. As we saw in the previous chapter, regarding Harrison, it is
sometimes the very stricture of rhyme and structure itself that allows the poet to enter
into the darkest parts of human existence. This is also true of Muldoon, but his need
for the artifice of form goes further still: words, etymology, structure, rhyme and
repetition are vital to Muldoon. As Buxton puts it:
Frost’s insight that a poem ‘has an outcome that though unforeseen
was predestined’, held in tandem with the belief that poetry also
‘inclines to the impulse’ and ‘runs a course of lucky events’ is
astonishingly compatible with Muldoon’s perception of the
composition process. That the outcome is a ‘momentary stay
against confusion’ – a means of dealing with the intimidating, the
incomprehensible, the disconcerting … (183)
This need for the artifice of form in Muldoon is extreme. In “Incantata” for
example, written following the death of his lover, the artist Mary Farl Powers, it is
through form and rhyme that Muldoon utilises the rage he feels at her death, her
refusal to have traditional, potentially life-saving cancer treatment due to her belief
that our fates are pre-ordained:
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… you simply wouldn’t relent
from your vision of a blind
watch-maker, of your fatal belief that fate
governs everything from the honey-rust of your father’s terrier’s
eyebrows to the horse that rusts and rears
in the furrow …
(Muldoon, Poems 341)
“Incantata” itself, as Buxton notes, is governed by a design pre-determined by the
author, following a mirrored rhyme scheme for 23 stanzas before turning back on
itself and running back down through the same pattern to the final stanza. In this
way, the verse itself is structured in such a way that it does not allow for possibilities
– only for the certainty of its finality. (Buxton 177) It is at this point, in writing about
the death of his mother in “Yarrow” and Mary Farl Powers in “Incantata”, that
Muldoon lays down the 90 rhyme sounds that re-occur in later volumes.
In an interview with John Haffenden, Muldoon speaks of his interest in “structures
that can be fixed like mirrors at angles to each other … so that new images can
emerges from the setting up of poems in relation to each other.” (quted in Buxton
179) We see this not just within individual volumes of poetry but across volumes. In
order, for example, to better understand the themes of the sonnet “Aftermath” in Hay,
it is worth looking briefly at how, the speaker in “Incantata” writes of his premonition
of Mary Farl Powers’ death in a theme that interlinks with the nature of suffering and
art. The speaker links together the personal, the historical, the mundane and the
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artistic in what feels like a never-ending continuum, a spell-like list of all that has
been swept away: from Powers’ “mud-packs,” to “jump-suits worn under your bottlegreen worsted cloak” and “your fervent eschewal of stockings and socks”:
I thought of your animated talk of Camille Pissaro
And Andre Derain’s The Turning Road, L’Estaque:
When I saw in the swallow’s nest a face in a mud-pack
From the muddy road I was filled again with a profound
sorrow.
Then this, two stanzas later:
I thought again of how art may be made, as it was by
Andre Derain
of nothing more than a turn
in the road where a swallow dips into the mire
or plucks a strand of bloody wool from a strand of barbed wire
in the aftermath of Chickamauga or Culloden
and builds from pain, from misery, from a deep-seated hurt,
a monument to the human heart
that shines like a golden dome among roofs rain-glazed
and leaden.
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(Muldoon, Poems 335)
Two years later, published in Hay in 1998 in the “aftermath” of the peace
agreement, the theme of suffering and art – and the swallows – emerge once more in
the sonnet “Aftermath”. The tone is again remarkably matter-of-fact; the violence
described within its confines all the more disturbing as a result. The quasi-sonnet,
which, this time, has echoes of the rondeau, is stretched to 15 lines and broken into
three parts:
I
“Let us now drink,” I imagine patriot cry to patriot
after they’ve shot
a neighbor in his own aftermath, who hangs still between two
sheaves
like Christ between two tousle-headed thieves,
his body wired up to the moon, as like as not.
II
To the memory of another left to rot
near some remote beauty spot,
the skin of his right arm rolled up like a shirtsleeve,
let us now drink.
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III
Only a few nights ago, it seems, they set fire to a big house and it got
so preternaturally hot
we knew there would be no reprieve
till the swallows’ nests under the eaves
had been baked into these exquisitely glazed little pots
from which, my love, let us now drink”
(Muldoon, Poems 448)
The rhyme scheme is aabba in section I, aabc in section II and aabbac in section
III, with the c rhyme “drink” being a full rhyme. The rhyming over three sections:
“patriot “/ “shot” / “not” /” rot” / “spot”/ “got”/ hot”/ “pots”, leads with almost a
nursery-rhyme simplicity and inevitability to the swallows’ nest baked into “these
exquisitely glazed little pots”. The horrific price for the eventual artistry of these
“little pots” has stretched over three historical eras, and the poet has given each its
own stanza. The victim in the first stanza is “ shot / …..in his own aftermath”, left
hanging between two sheaves / like Christ between two tousle-headed thieves””. The
dead man is left between the sheaves of corn, “wired up to the moon / like as not,” –
ironically both the moon and the sheaves are symbols of fertility. Christ too, is strung
up “between two tousle-headed thieves”, signifying, perhaps, Christianity squandered
and hung out to dry between the warring factions of sectarianism.
The second victim is described, disturbingly, only in terms of a single detail: “the
skin of his right arm rolled up like a shirtsleeve,” his humanity reduced to this single
point. (It is impossible, of course, not to remember when reading this the child’s
“right arm sleeved in glass / that has yet to shatter”). In the third stanza we have,
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finally, the image of the swallows, harbingers, once, of summer burned in their nests
along with the “big house”. Time, as regularly happens in a Muldoon poem, is
effectively telescoped. We move swiftly to another victim of violence and
sectarianism “left to rot / near some remote beauty spot” in the second stanza to the
colloquially deceiving “Only a few nights ago”. In fact, of course, we have leapt back
in time to the 1920s’s when “The ‘Big House” or country mansion of the Anglo-Irish
landed class, was a target of republicans throughout the Irish revolution of 1919-23.
The swallows in “Aftermath”, whose eggs and bodies and nests are baked into
“exquisitely glazed little pots” for the lovers, mirror the swallows in “Incantata”. If
we recall the nest-making material from the blood-soaked wool of Culloden in our
reading we are given a further layer in the complexity and emotional thrust of this
already powerful image. Like many of Muldoon’s most successful sonnets, such as
“The Right Arm”, “The Lass of Laughrin” or “Ma”, the timeshifts pose no stumbling
block on first reading yet hugely enrich the sonnet on each repeated reading. It is the
complexity in Muldoon that often leads critics to compare his poetry with Frost,
complaining in the meantime that Muldoon’s poems lack the immediate appeal of
poems such as Frost’s “The Road not Taken” or “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening”, which can be read and enjoyed on many levels. This complaint is not
always valid, however, as we see with these sonnets, which are often both
immediately appealing, albeit disturbing, on first reading, while also being
deceptively complex and multi-faceted if further analysis and background reading of
Muldoon and other poets is added to the mix. The sonnet, traditionally, is seen as a
“moment’s monument”,3 but in Muldoon the moment is stretched backwards and
3
“A Sonnet”. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. (Ferguson, Salter, Stallworthy 1106).
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forwards through time and across his own collections. It’s important to remember,
however, that for the reader, a large part of the appeal of the sonnet is, quite simply,
its brevity. In that, at least, in terms of the definition of prosody and the sonnet,
Muldoon’s poems may not have strayed too far from the sonnet form.
As Rachel Buxton notes, Muldoon recalled in his inaugural Oxford lecture that
Frost himself argued that a poem “is best read in the light of all other poems ever
written”:
We read A the better to read B (we have to start somewhere, we
may get very little out of A). We read B the better to read C, C the
better to read D, D the better to go back and get something more out
of A. Progress is not the aim, but circulation. The thing is to get
among the poems where they hold themselves apart in places as the
stars do. (Frost, qutd in Buxton, “Never Quite Showing his Hand”
37)
Maria Johnston takes a similar view, referring this time to Horse Latitudes:
It’s clear that these Oxford lectures employ the same mode of close,
creative reading that Muldoon expects from readers of his own
poetry and so one must read his Horse Latitudes in this way.
Charles Bernstein once remarked that “there is no end to what you
might need to know to read a poem,” and no contemporary poet
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seems more aware of this than Muldoon himself as both reader and
poet. His work continues to delight in the unending possibilities of
language, the multiplicity of available realities and perspectives,
and the boundlessness of human knowledge and invention.
(Johnston, Contemporary Poetry Review)
In terms of understanding the use to which Muldoon puts the sonnet
form in his more recent work it is worth examining the complexities and
intertextualities in one of the nineteen sonnets in the “Horse Latitudes”
sonnet sequence contained in the eponymous collection. As Peter
McDonald notes, “especially in his work since Madoc (1990), Muldoon
has allowed formal patterns to become more pronounced, and their
bearing on the poetry’s ‘meaning’ to become increasingly problematic”.
(McDonald 152)
Attempting to throw some light on the sequence by referring to comments made by
Muldoon at a poetry reading, James Fenton comments:
Muldoon tells us that he started work on the 19 sonnets that form
the title sequence of his new collection, Horse Latitudes, as the US
embarked on its foray into Iraq. The poems have to do with a series
of battles (all beginning with the letter 'B' as if to suggest a 'missing'
Baghdad) in which horses or mules played a major role. Intercut
with those battle-scenes are accounts of a 'battle' with cancer by a
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former lover, here named Carlotta, and a commentary on the agenda
of what may only be described as the Bush 'regime'. (Fenton)
Battle after battle is described chronologically through history up to “Burma” and
World War II as the narrator, accompanied by the dying Carlotta, takes us through
each one in turn. Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”, discussed at length by Muldoon
in his collected lectures as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, The End of the Poem, (323)
is perhaps an influence on this sonnet sequence:
Ah love, let us be true
To one another! For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams.
So various, so beautiful, so new.
Hath really neither joy, nor love nor light.
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain:
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
In the first sonnet, “Beijing”, Carlotta is described as “proud-fleshed”, then the
word “hypersarcoma” is juxtaposed with this. At first reading we might assume
Carlotta is suffering from some kind of fast-progressing hyperactive “tumour”
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perhaps, as sarcoma means tumour. The creation of a tumour – the division of cells
that occurs in cancer – is of course also a parallel with the process of embryo
development exponentially from two cells to four, then and so on. We could,
therefore read the word as representing life itself.
For Muldoon, the completion of a life, and the process of grief are inextricably
bound up with language, its structure, its etymology, metaphor and leitmotif. As
McDonald notes, “the process intuited by Wordsworth, of poets creating the taste by
which they are to be understood, applies to Muldoon just as much to earlier poets
such as T.S. Eliot or W.H. Auden.” (2) With the background for the writing of the
Horse Latitudes volume in mind and the “missing” Baghdad of Fenton’s review, we
move on to look in detail at our selected sonnet from his “Horse Latitudes” sonnet
sequence, subtitled, “Blackwater Fort”:
As I had held Carlotta close
that night we watched some Xenophon
embedded with the 5th Marines
in the old Sunni Triangle
make a half-assed attempt to untangle
the ghastly from the price of gasoline.
There was a distant fanfaron
in the Nashville sky, where the wind
had now drawn itself up and pinned
on her breast a Texaco star.
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“Why,” Carlotta wondered, ‘the House of Tar?’
Might it have to do with the gross
imports of crude oil Bush will come clean on
only when the Tigris comes clean?”
(Muldoon, Horse Latitudes 9)
The reader is immediately struck – as often in a Muldoon poem –
by the unusual tense in the first line: “As I had held Carlotta close”. The narrator
speaks of having held someone, past tense, a loved one, someone who has already
faced death, perhaps. In Muldoon, past and present seem inextricable. The narrator
and Carlotta are watching a television report of the war. The “Xenophon” of Greek
mythology is either a reporter/messenger figure or a mercenary. The context would
suggest a reporter, but “embedded” with the 5th Marines as war reporters were in Iraq.
This veiled reference to mercenaries is underlined by the title of the “battle” this
sonnet refers to: “Blackwater Fort”. At the time of writing Blackwater was the name
for what Jeremy Scahill called “the most powerful mercenary army”. (Scahill 1) This
army was used extensively, and controversially in Iraq, thus, arguably, “Blackwater
Fort”, or Iraq, becomes, by association, a fort held by mercenaries – in the broadest
sense by people who are fighting for money. As a commentary on the war and the
Bush regime’s handling of the war, it’s succinct and far more blunt and effective than
a similar comment would be in prose. But of course, it’s not as simple of that. As is
so often the case in Muldoon, words contain multiple layers of meaning. We have to
look, not only at what has gone before in terms of all the other poems ever written but
to the world outside the poem, lead by the language. Language, after all is
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the only tool we have to make sense of our lives. The language may take us for
example, to a CNN article of 2004 which reports on the ambush, killing and display
of the bodies of four Blackwater employees in Fallujah. The young men’s bodies
were burned, dragged through the town then left, hanging, on a bridge over the
Euphrates. The incident took place in Fallujah, in the Sunni Triangle, just before a
hand-over to the Marines as the report indicates:
Fallujah is part of al Anbar province in the Sunni Triangle, a region
north and west of the capital that has been a hotbed of opposition to
the U.S. presence.
A changeover from the 82nd Airborne Division to the Marines is
under way in al Anbar. (CNN International)
The mother of one of the young men spoke, later, of seeing her own son’s body in
a televised report. (CNN USA) The lines that suggest this, or a similar televised
atrocity, in the sonnet itself are the specific mention of “the old Sunni triangle” and
the TV reporter’s “half-assed attempt to untangle / the ghastly from the price of
gasoline”. The internal rhyme pattern used here is (ironically) embedded rhyme – the
“ghas” in “ghastly” with the “gas” in “gasoline”, another incidence where opposing
images are linked together, tellingly, by sound and rhyme in Muldoon, forging the
link between ghastly and gasoline into our minds as we read.
An atrocity televised by CNN may or may not have inspired the events hinted at in
this sonnet. On the principle of mirrors at angles across the poems that we see in
Muldoon, however, the potential parallels in “Blackwater Fort” between actual events
and the mercenary purposes of war are evident. As Leontia Flynn notes, Muldoon’s
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recent poems often contain a “hypertext” link to the internet, so that “an endless
proliferation of further poems seems invisibly to hover, a half-rhyme or ‘click’ away
around the Muldoon poems on the page.” (87-89)
The reported incident may, also, possibly, hark back to the body “strung up to the
moon” in “Aftermath”. There are, also, echoes of Ireland and the Blackwater river
from “Dancers at the Moy” (Muldoon, Poems, 10) and “Moy Sand and Gravel” from
the collection of the same name, published in 2002:
To come out of the Olympic Cinema and be taken aback
by how in the time it took a dolly to travel
along its little track
to the point where two movie stars’ heads
had come together smackety-smack
and their kiss filled the whole screen,
those two great towers directly across the road
at Moy Sand and Gravel
had already washed, at least once, what had flowed
or been dredged from the Blackwater’s bed
and were washing it again, load by load,
as if washing might make it clean.
(Muldoon, Moy Sand and Gravel 80)
The action of washing “what had flowed / or been dredged from the Blackwater’s
bed / … as if washing might make it clean” takes place, it seems in parallel, in the
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Moy. It is not spelled out in “Moy Sand and Gravel” what is being washed by “those
two great towers directly across the road” though the implied violence of “what had
flowed / or been dredged up” is clear enough. Less obvious is the potential parallel
reference to the Twin Towers, given the date of publication of Moy Sand and Gravel
in 2002.
In “Blackwater Fort” the function of the Tigris as the eternal (but unsuccessful)
cleanser of bloodshed is more ironic. We have, for example, the pronounced
enjambment in: “gross / imports of crude oil / Bush will come clean on / only when
the Tigris comes clean?” This disruption of language through the formal patterning of
Muldoon’s version of the sonnet form is particularly telling here. We talk, usually
enough, of gross domestic products, but not “gross imports”, so the deliberately
unusual and “incorrect” use of language is arresting, making us examine the word
“gross” more carefully. As a result our attention is drawn to its colloquial American
slang meaning of “gross” as in obscene, disgusting, or more literally “fat” from the
French “gros”. The unusual meaning is, of course further emphasised by the
pronounced enjambment, followed immediately by “crude oil”, which, again, we now
take in the more literal meaning of “crude” as bawdy or debased.
By this point in the sonnet, Carlotta has become a symbolic fantasy figure on
whose breast the wind “has drawn itself up and pinned …. / a Texaco star. The clear
oil/gasoline reference in this is then linked to the obscure “House of Tar” comment
by Carlotta, a reference, in all probability, to Bertolt Brecht’s “German Satires”:
But their Third Reich recalls
The house of Tar, the Assyrian, that mighty fortress
Which, according to the legend, could not be taken by any army, but
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When one single, distinct word was spoken inside it
Fell to dust.
(Brecht 298)
The precise meaning of language, its position and sound echoes, together with
references to all that has gone before form an essential part of the reading of
Muldoon’s sonnets. “He does work on the language, not just within it.” (Paterson,
Laureation Address)
Space constraints do not permit a full analysis of the “Horse Latitudes” sonnet
sequence and its many layers. Suffice it to say, here, that the rhyme scheme doubles
back on itself as the sequence draws to a close underlining, as in “Incantata”,
circularity and inevitability. In this case, the inevitability, thematically, is evident
from the thousands of terracotta warriors and horsemen buried with Qin in the first
sonnet; such vast armies were needed then and depressingly still are. In the simplest
terms, nothing it seems, has changed as the narrator is accompanied through the wars
of history by Carlotta, whose “hypersarcoma” is mirrored by the inevitable violence,
bloodshed and death described in this chronological toll of battles where the horses of
each battle symbolise the ever-repeating cycle of slaughter. In a further layer of
meaning, the “Blackwater Fort” title could also be taken to mean the historical Irish
battle of Blackwater in which the troops, holding out against the enemy and starving,
fed themselves on the flesh of their horses. This, in turn, rather like the principle that
lies behind Muldoon’s earlier sonnet, “Something Else” (Muldoon, Poems 173) harks
back, disturbingly, to the horses bought for profit to sell for a cancelled war in
“Dancers at the Moy” and the Blackwater river again:
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The black and gold river
Ended as a trickle of brown
Where those horses tore
At briars and whins,
Ate the flesh of each other
Like people in famine.
The flat Blackwater
Hobbled on its stones
With a wild stagger
And sag in its blackbone” .
(Muldoon, Poems 10)
Further, there is the tantalising meaning of the ending of the “Horse Latitudes”
sonnet sequence. Only in the 19th and last sonnet, “Burma”, do we have the final
revelation of Carlotta’s Italian grandfather’s job: cutting the vocal chords of mules to
avoid giving away the “position” of the army. The grandfather makes several
disturbing appearances throughout this sonnet sequence, carried over from the first
sonnet “Beijing”, then appears, with “carpenter’s rule” once again in the last line of
“Burma”, the very last sonnet: ‘“And give away their position’”. (Horse Latitudes
21) Finally, nineteen sonnets on, in Muldoon’s italicised “position”, we have a rhyme
for the word “musicians” which comes at the end the first line of “Beijing”, the very
first sonnet of the series: “I could still hear the musicians / cajoling those thousands
of clay / horses and horsemen through the squeeze / when I woke beside Carlotta.”
The cover-ups and propaganda of war continue: the “cajoling” of soldiers into the
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sealed tomb of an emperor (be they clay or flesh and blood), the facts surrounding
the mutilated bodies of soldiers strung up for display, a war fought over “gross /
imports of crude oil”, or the cutting of a mule’s vocal chords in Burma. Whatever the
century the old adage of war and censorship remains: the first casualty of war, as
always, is truth. This, perhaps, is the “word” referred to in the “House of Tar”, the
word that, if uttered would make a regime fall to dust. Understanding the world
through the power of language is the challenge Muldoon sets himself, and us. The
fact that the confined “room” of the sonnet continues to work so successfully, be it a
crumbled, a veiled or a deconstructed sonnet, is perhaps a more important tribute to
the continuing power of the form than repeated attempts to name and define it. As we
have seen, the sonnet works for the most difficult of tasks and has done – memorably
– for generations of major poets of the 20th and 21st century, from Wilfred Owen and
Robert Frost to Heaney, Longley, Walcott, Harrison, Morgan and Muldoon. The
enduring appeal of the sonnet form, it seems, is as intrinsic as man’s desire to find
patterns in the stars, in nautilus shells or hives made by bees. It is both familiar and
unfamiliar, a place to explore, and a place to find the unknowable. As Heaney put it
in “Personal Helicon”:
I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
(Heaney, Selected Poems 27)
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