Coincidence: A Poem I Wrote Twenty Years Ago

Recently, I was going through typescripts and manuscripts of my old poems. In a way, it was like reliving a trauma. I put so much work into these poems. I sent them to various magazines and newspapers and publishers and they always got sent back to me, with a handful of exceptions. (I still have dreams of hearing letters fall through the door of my old flat, and desperately hoping there might be some good news.) It was brutal! This was the main focus of my life for about ten years and nothing came of it-- absolutely nothing.

I've published many of them on my blog over the years. But when I go through my archives I'm surprised how many I've never used. Some of them were not bad.

This is one, I think. It was written before I became a Christian, from a perspective of profound (and reluctant) scepticism. My innate scepticism is what held me back from becoming a Christian for many, many years. I had such a very hard time believing in anything supernatural or paranormal. I was too wretchedly aware of the human capacity for wishful thinking. On the other hand, I loved hearing stories about the uncanny, supernatural, magical, and so forth-- and "hoping it might be so".

The image in the final lines-- of the baby staring into a fire, and imagining pictures in the flames-- seemed to me then like a perfect metaphor for human consciousness, a quirk of nature in a meaningless universe. I still like the image. I like any reference to looking into flames, or steam, or smoke, or water. But especially flames.

Coincidence

The night the club burned down, she wasn’t there;
She’d called in sick for once. A Scottish man
Phoned up his sister’s number, unaware
He had a sister. Some great master plan
In invisible ink lies in a tight-shut drawer
With all our fates marked out in criss-crossed lines

So maybe Scott will make it through the war
Picking his way out through a field of mines.

The voice gets stronger when the cynic smiles:
How likely is it every light was green
As we drove out to the hospital, miles and miles?
And the cynic’s eyes, too softly to be seen,
Light with a gentle longing: Maybe, maybe,
The world is not indifferent to our aims…

Before the flicker of the fire, the baby
Stares wide-eyed at the pictures in the flames.

Poems I like: The Rolling English Road by G.K. Chesterton

I feel a bit uneasy including "The Rolling English Road" in my series of poems I like (not quite favourite poems), because I have to be honest and admit I'm not entirely sure I understand it. Some of the references are over my head. Whether that is a flaw in me or in the poem, who knows?

G.K. Chesterton is the author who has had the biggest influence on my life. When it comes to his poetry, though, I have mixed feelings. Some of it ("To the Babe Unborn", "Lepanto", "The Donkey", "The House of Christmas", and the dedicatory poem at the start of The Man Who Was Thursday) is, in my opinion, absolutely first-rate: deserving of a place in any English poetry anthology. I think he could have been one of the great English poets if he had dedicated himself to poetry.

I wouldn't put "The Rolling English Road" in this class, but it's hard to say why. I've been looking for its weaknesses and all I can really find is the third verse, which seems excessively oblique to me. Or is it? I always thought it referred to some particular person (real or imaginary), but now I assume it refers to the "rolling English drunkard" of the second line. Is he a sort of archetypal figure, like the English solder in the modern Christmas song "Stop the Cavalry" who has been fighting in centuries of wars?

And what exactly does Chesterton mean when he says: "My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage, or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age?" Is it a rejection of artificial revivalism? I don't know. I've never known. Maybe I'm too stupid.

But that's enough about the poem's weaknesses, which might be just my lack of appreciation.

When it comes to the poem's strengths, I think the rollicking metre might be the best thing about it. It's so hearty, masculine, folkish, full of gusto, and everything that we love about Chesterton-- everything that is a corrective to cynicism, decadence, nihilism, swank, and all that kind of thing. It's a very avuncular, hand-rubbing, red-cheeked kind of poem-- and I like that.

I like its use of repetitions and patterns. It's a bit like a nursery rhyme. I like how it uses place-names and gives their very ordinariness a magical sound. I love its use of very English terms like parson, sexton, and squire.

And some of the lines are just a joy to read and repeat. "The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road"-- that seems like a line from a skipping chant or a children's game, it has a sort of timeless energy.

My favourite four lines in the poem come from the second verse, and they very frequently come into my mind. They are:

I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,

And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;

But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed

To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,

That's not only marvellously John Bull-ish, but I think encapsulates the poem's theme: the beauty of irregularity and the organic, as opposed to deadening regularity and rationalism. Also, they express my own Francophobia, even though Chesterton himself was a Francophile. ("All bad ideas come from France", as David Starkey says.) All prejudices aside, however, I'm opposed to all attempts to flatten the delicious irregularity of human societies.

I also love the couple of lines at the end of each verse. Can it be called a refrain? It's not exactly a refrain, since it's not the same lines each time, or even close to it. But it's something like a refrain. In them, the poet addresses us directly, in the manner of an old friend who has shared many adventures. It's rather odd-- what does it mean, exactly?-- but it works. It creates a warm, retrospective, comradely glow. I've yearned for that kind of thing in my own life, but I worry I'm too old to enjoy it now.

The more I've written this blog post, the more I'm coming to think that this is, actually, a great poem after all, and that I simply don't fully understand it. It's a strange thing-- I've always assumed this poem is much better-known than it is. It seems like the sort of poem that should be a popular favourite, to have seeped into the cultural conscience. But it's not, and it hasn't.

The Rolling English Road

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,
And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;
But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,
Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,
The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.

His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run
Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?
The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which,
But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch.
God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear
The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier.

My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,
Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,
But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,
And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;
For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

Traditions Again

"It is said that if you scratch civilisation you find a savage. If you scratch the owner-occupier of a desirable semi-detached residence you will find a man who is unconsciously seeking something safe and familiar, something with roots deep in the forgotten past. He may call Morris dancers “quaint”, laugh at the idea of wassailing his apple trees and refuse to appear as St. George in a mummer's play, but he will still eat hot cross buns on Good Friday, hang up mistletoe at Christmas, and give a Halloween party. He will hesitate to walk under a ladder, and will look at at the weather forecast with more than ordinary interest on St. Swithin's Day.... If folk customs ever did die out there would be a loss of vigour, colour and diversity thaat an age of drab uniformity can ill afford "

From the introduction to A Year of Festivals by Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd, 1973.

I read recently that Christmas mumming died out because householders simply refused to open the door to them. Christmas had become domesticated and mummers were seen as old-fashioned and embarrassing. I don't know if this is true. It would be sad if it were.

The Anniversary of my Baptism

"Dear parents, in asking for Baptism for your children you express and witness to your faith, to the joy of being Christian and of belonging to the Church. It is the joy that comes from knowing you have received a great gift from God, faith itself, a gift which not one of us has been able to deserve but which was freely given to us and to which we responded with our “yes”. It is the joy of recognizing that we are children of God, of discovering that we have been entrusted to his hands, of feeling welcomed in a loving embrace in the same way that a mother holds and embraces her child. This joy, which guides every Christian’s journey, is based on a personal relationship with Jesus, a relationship that directs the whole of human existence."

Pope Benedict XVI, 2013

(That is my uncle holding me, not my father. I don't know who the long-haired figure is, or the priest. Nor do I know why it took three years for my solildly Catholic parents to get me baptised!)

A Much-Quoted Paragraph

This is a passage from a 1927 pastoral letter from the Irish bishops: "The evil one is ever setting his snares for unwary feet. At the moment, his traps for the innocent are chiefly the dance hall, the bad book, the indecent paper, the motion picture, the immodest fashion in female dress – all of which tend to destroy the virtues characteristic of our race."

I can't even guess how often I've encountered this passage reproduced in various books and articles. It's always presented as Exhibit A of the Church's intolerance, puritanism, authoritarianism, and what have you. Even Catholic sources tend to quote it in this light. (Significantly, perhaps, I can't find the whole pastoral letter anywhere, though I haven't tried very hard-- just that one passage in isolation.)

Was it so ridiculous after all? Yes, films and newspapers from the 1920s would probably strike us as very innocent and even quaint today. But it also seems impossible to deny that mass media led to a liberalisation of morals, however you take that fact. It didn't come out of nowhere and surely it wasn't dramatic in its early stages. The very fact that what disturbed the bishops in 1927 now seems laughable might say something, and not what it's always assumed to say.

The Magic of Titles

Continuing somewhat the theme of my last post...

I find titles extremely evocative. I mean titles of creative works, or even of non-fiction books (which may not be considered creative works, although I think they should be).

I've noticed that I can give almost any situation some grandeur or poetry by just making it into a title.

For instance: this evening I was waiting to let someone into a building. I was standing between an outer door and an inner door. The person didn't show up for a long time and it was quite boring, but imagining the title Between Two Doors made it a bit more meaningful. It could be the title of a history book about some interim period, like the Weimar Republic.

You could do it with anything. Sitting through a child's birthday party, bored out of your skull? Pink Icing and Fizz might give it a certain pathos.

Waiting in a queue? Nowhere Any Time Soon makes it seem like an award-winning social realist drama.

Sitting in a pub listening to a drunken person, wishing you were home? Somewhere Around Midnight might give it a certain raffish, boozy glamour.

And so on. 

Exciting the Imagination: the Case of Shakespeare

I was writing recently on the subject of hype. (Also here.)  As I said in the posts, I don't mean hype only in the sense of commercial publicity, but in the more general sense of generating excitement, of making a big deal out of something.

One of the forms of hype that especially interests me is what I might call self-administered hype-- deliberately trying to excite one's imagination about something.

I'm guessing we all do it, but how much? I do it a lot.

Here is an example. If I decide to read a Shakespeare play, I find myself deliberately calling to mind all the times my imagination was stirred by the idea of Shakespeare. (Be warned: I've written about these before.)

The first instance I can remember is when my father was watching BBC productions of Shakespeare in the 1980s. I think it was this series.  I can't remember much of it, but I do remember a figure against a dark background. Whether this occured to me at the time or not, this image has now become emblematic to me of Shakespeare as the dramatist of universal, timeless human nature. My father might well have put this idea in my head as he spoke to me about the productions (I would have been eight in 1985). He was wonderful at describing writers and literature in an exciting way. Many years later, I remember him telling me that "Shakespeare's mind was like a sponge."

There was a sense of event about the broadcasts-- or so I remember it.

Later on (although I can't remember when this was-- it might have been any time from my childhood to my teens) my father recited the "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" speech from Macbeth, which both appalled and gripped me, especially the final words: "A tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing."

I think my next brush with Shakespeare came when I read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. This might have been in my early teens. In that book, the "savage" (a character who lives outside the dehumanized utopian system) likes to quote Shakespeare, and I was electrified by this line that he quotes from King Lear: "The wheel has come full circle: I am here." (This line still agitates me, although I can't tell whether it's because of its intrinsic power or not.)

The savage also quotes a line from The Tempest that seized my imagination: "Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices."

Another time (it's impossible to date these memories), I found myself reading an old school textbook of Hamlet that was in our bookcase. The introduction said something like: "Hamlet is a prism through which we view our own experience of life". I'd never encountered this idea before and it stirred me. (How many synonyms can I find for "excite" in this blog post? Reader, may I just say "excite" from now on?)

My next Shakespearean memory comes from a school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It was staged by another (and older) class; I was only in the audience. I couldn't follow the story very well, but I was moved by the sense of excitement and lushness about the production. I'm not much of a theatre-goer, but for my money, school drama is more magical than professional drama, by virtue of its sheer amateurism. I may be imagining that I could smell greasepaint, but that's how I remember it.

English was by far and away my favourite subject in secondary school. I had one excellent English teacher for two years, when I was fourteen and fifteen. (I had the opportunity in later years to tell her how much her teaching meant to me, and it she seemed to be quite moved by this.) We studied The Merchant of Venice in her class-- the first time I had studied a whole Shakespeare play.

One period of studying The Merchant of Venice especially stands out in my memory. The teacher explained to us the various ways in which character could be conveyed in drama-- through action, language, costume, expression, and so on. I'd never thought about this before and I was-- well-- greatly excited by it.

And here's where we come back to the main point of this blog post. I have a very distinct memory, from this period of studying The Merchant of Venice, of deliberately exciting my imagination before a class. I found myself conjuring up the scents of Venetian cargoes-- coffee, spices, and so forth-- trying to evoke the whole atmosphere of Venice as I imagined it.

The other play we studied in my school years was Hamlet, when I was seventeen and eighteen. My memory of this experience is less vivid, strangely enough.

The last experience I have to mention is from around the same time, but it's a non-school memory. I was seventeen and I had just earned what was perhaps the first payment of my life, for cleaning somebody's shed. (I was not an enterprising kid. The job came to me.) I think I earned ten pounds for it. This was before the introduction of the euro.

I bought two books with the money: a horror novel called Ancient Images by Ramsey Campbell (which was pretty good) and a big poetry anthology called The Library of World Poetry, edited by the American poet William Cullen Bryant, and first published in 1872.

I bought the book in the bargain basement (which was literally a basement) of Chapters bookshop in Dublin. The shop still exists, although it's moved a few streets from where it was then.

The Library of World Poetry included excerpts from long poems and verse dramas. I can very vividly remember leafing through it, trying to decide whether or not to buy it, and coming across Prospero's speech from The Tempest. I may have encountered the famous last two lines already, but I had never read the speech in its entirety:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

This speech has come to haunt my imagination over the decades. I can remember being struck by it at the time, although perhaps mostly at a subliminal level. I had a very strange sensation, as I was reading: like I was falling, or floating, or both. The speech seemed to illuminate human nature as a whole, existence as a whole-- a feature common to Shakespeare's most famous speeches.

Such a long post, to make a simple point-- that I find myself deliberately evoking such memories, when I sit down to read Shakespeare. And this "self-administered hype" isn't at all unique to reading Shakespeare, but is something I do with any number of things-- things as simple as making a cup of tea!

After this rather lengthy discursion into Shakespereans impressions, I'm rather embarrassed to mention (although I'd be ashamed not to mention) that I'm by no means a great devotee of the Bard. I wish I was. I've tried to be. Some of the language in the plays (especially the great speeches) genuinely sets my mind and imagination on fire, no matter how often I read them or call them to mind. But as for the actual drama of the plays-- I regret that I am somewhat oblivious (or at least unappreciative) of their greatness. Perhaps fifteen or twenty years ago I read through most of The Riverside Shakespeare-- slowly, reading each play several times, as well as the introductions and notes. This made very little impression on me and I remember very little from this reading. I've never read Othello and I've only read Macbeth once, on an afternoon when I was sleepy and didn't take in much of it.

The only Shakespeare play that really appeals to me as a play is The Tempest-- and not just for Prospero's speech, although that seems key to the flavour of the whole work.

As well as this, I have never been an admirer of the sonnets. Occasional lines here and there give me pleasure, but the only sonnet I really love is the one that begins "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun." They seem artificial and contrived, and not in a good way. I know this is a defect in me. (At the same time, I do greatly love some of the songs from Shakespeare's plays, especially "Fear no more the heat o' the sun" and "When icicles hang by the wall").

But that is something of a postcript. This post was really about the whole idea of deliberately exciting one's own imagination. I'm interested to know if other people do this, as well.