In May 2022, I wrote a poem entitled "The Tea Lady". I wrote it very slowly, on my morning tea-breaks, taking as much care as I reasonably could over every single line. I decided that, if I sat all through any given tea-break and never wrote a word, that was time well-spent.
This was a return to the compositional methods of my late teens, when I started writing poetry. I tried to make every single line as close to my ideal as possible. Later on, I started writing more quickly.
In the case of "The Tea Lady", I thought that this new-old approach paid off. It took several weeks, I seem to remember, but eventually the poem came together. As I wrote, I was sending drafts to a poet friend, who gave me a lot of good criticism, and was also enthusiastic about it.
Eventually, I decided to post it on Facebook, and...
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Deafening silence. I think a couple of people "liked" it, but that was about all. I even posted it a second time a good while later, but the result was the same.
Having my poetry routinely ignored on Facebook is one of several reasons I deactivated my account at the end of last year, and have no plans to reactivate it. I found it devastating, to be honest. Letting it be known how much my poetry meant to me made no difference. Nada. Rien. Tada. Zilch.
But what was I hoping for, you ask? Flattery and buttering up? Well, that's always nice, but any kind of engagement would have been very welcome. Even strident criticism. I've never been one of those people who write entirely for its own sake.
Yes, I know any particular person might be scrolling down their Facebook feed in an odd moment and have neither time nor inclination to read a poem. But when there is almost never any reaction, from anybody-- well, I wasn't happy about it.
My Facebook friends can claim to have been vindicated by the poem's reception elsewhere. I sent it to the few publications that accept verse submissions, including First Things. They all passed on it (if they replied at all). So maybe it was just bad.
The thing is, though, I don't think it was bad. I think it was at least accomplished. Writing traditional, formal poetry isn't easy. Just to rhyme, scan, and avoid bathos takes some effort.
It might have been the length that put people off, even though I don't think it's a long poem. It's fifty-five lines long, divided into eleven stanzas. Hardly an epic. But I'm pretty sure that people see a poem longer than a page and think: "I won't bother."
The sorts of poems I was emulating with "The Tea Lady" were poems such as "Church Going" and "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album" by Philip Larkin, as well as "A Prayer for my Daughter" and "Among School Children" by W.B. Yeats. These are reflective poems that need room to "breathe". Of course, these are also classic poems, and mine isn't even comparable in terms of its quality. But this is the sort of poem I was going to write. (I won't throw in any more self-deprecating comments like that, as I think they quickly becom tiresome. You can take them as read.)
As my blog title declares, I'm going to analyse my own poem, but I'm going to analyse it before I post the text itself. For two reasons:
1) A well-founded fear that people just stop reading when they see poetry. So, if I leave the poem to the end, they'll at least have read the analysis.
2) My own experience, fairly frequent, of growing interested in something after I've read an analysis of it. I've had this experience with books, films, and music. So who knows? Someone might want to read the poem after reading my analysis.
In any case, sometimes literary criticism or analysis can be enjoyable even apart from the text it's analysing. I've also had that experience myself.
"The Tea Lady" is set in the lobby of a conference centre. This is partly a case of "author appeal". I love conference halls, conference centres, convention centres, conventions, trade fairs, expos, or anything of that nature. I love the atmosphere, the sense of event, the sense of a horizon. I also love the word "lobby".
The main character in the poem is the titular tea lady and the whole poem is about her thoughts and feelings. I like the term "tea lady", but she's not really a tea lady in the traditional sense of someone who serves tea in a school or office. She's a member of the conference centre's catering staff, and she's helping to put out the tea and coffee during a break in a political party's conference. (I don't explicitly say it's a party conference, but I think it's fairly clear.)
The main theme of the poem is belonging, the sense of a "we". I'm endlessly fascinated by this.
Who are "we"? That's a permanently vexed question, asked in all sorts of different contexts. Who are the people? Who are the Irish? Who are the left? Who are the right? Who is Christian? Who is liberal? And so on.
I've just finished reading an excellent history of East Germany called Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer. This eternal question "Who are we?" presented itself to East Germans (and West Germans) in a particularly powerful way after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Were "we" East Germans? Were "we" socialists? The German people overwhelmingly decided that they were one people, despite forty years of conflict between East and West. (It seems to be the case that sentimental ties, in the end, often turn out to be more powerful than any practical considerations.)
Another big theme of the poem is the difference between male and female attitudes to this idea of "we". Basically, my thesis is that men tend to have a wider interpretation of "we", while women have a narrower one. Men are more public, and women are more private. This is obviously a generalization, and doesn't apply in every case. I don't even insist that it's true, and I don't think it even has to be true for the poem to work. It's an idea to play with.
If you don't think this public-private dichotomy is really a male-female one, you can just accept it on its own terms. I think almost everybody feels this tension within themselves, to some extent. Patrick Pearse expressed it very powerfully: "Two things have constantly pulled at cross-purposes in me: one, a deep homing instinct, a desire beyond words to be at home always, with the same beloved faces, the same familiar shapes and sounds about me; the other, an impulse to seek hard things to do, to go on far quests and fight for lost causes."
In the poem, the feminine attitude is represented by my tea lady, while the masculine attitude is represented by her father, of whom she finds herself thinking while the attendees of the conference come out to have a tea-break.
The tea lady's father is based on my own father. Although he was a devoted family man, he was always very much focused on public affairs. In later life, he used to lament that he had paid so much attention to the public good, rather than his own good. I don't think he really regretted this, though. I think it was quite rhetorical. I think he would have made the same decisions if he could do it all again.
The tea lady in my poem thinks the attendees at the political conference (mostly men) are rather ridiculous, with all their high-flown rhetoric and social ideas. And they are! How much of male hunger for a crusade, a cause, is down to simple ego and the quest for excitement? Quite a lot of it, I'm guessing. ("Fierce in the fray like Arthur's knights" is supposed to be sardonic; I'm not sure this is clear, which is a weakness.)
But my tea lady won't let herself despise the attendees, because they remind her of her father, and her father's political idealism. She knows this was essential to his character.
The dichotomy between private and public is one of the eternal dichotimies that gives life much of its drama and flavour. Attempts to eliminate it (such as totalitarianism and anarchism) are not very convincing-- or even appealing, in my view.
My tea lady is inclined to favour private life entirely, but she knows in her heart that this isn't possible. Political, social, and other allegiances are natural to human beings; to seek to escape them is to reduce our humanity. The heart of the poem are the lines:
Nation and party and politics--They all began in a baby's cry.
The tug-of-war of fidelity,
The ancient conundrum “Who are we?”,
The timeless task of togetherness.
The catering staff put out the tea
In the lobby outside the conference hall.
A voice from within, resoundingly,
Said something about diversity
And how inclusion would help us all.
There were cheers, and cheers, and then more cheers,
And the crowd streamed out in twos and threes.
One lady deep in her middle years
Poured tea and coffee and shut her ears
To the talk of polls and majorities.
She was thinking of somewhere long ago
And far away, on a winter’s night.
Her father walking her through the snow
His hand in her’s, and a secret glow
That filled her heart, as their hands squeezed tight.
She was thinking of how, down forty years,
That grip seemed stronger than time or space.
That voice, long silent, rang in her ears
Much louder than party conference cheers
Much louder than anything in this place.
But Da was a devil for politics.
He would have been right at home here now;
Right in the thick of it, getting his fix,
Calling out chancers and dirty tricks
Never a neutral any which how.
All this grand strategy, over tea–
She couldn’t despise it, for his sake.
Because the sacred syllable “we”
Meant more in his philosophy
Than the little world love makes.
“We” to him was the working class,
And Ireland, and people he’d never met,
“We” to him was as common as grass.
To her it was the Waterford glass
Kept in the china cabinet.
She looked around at the mostly men
All loudly setting the world to rights.
Doing today what Da did then
World without end, amen, amen,
Fierce in the fray like Arthur’s knights.
She had to bless them, even though
None of their slogans touched her heart.
But that night’s walk in the secret snow
And all of this braggadocio
Somehow couldn’t exist apart.
Nation and party and politics–
They all began in a baby’s cry.
Love meant taking the whole damn mix
The Christmas crib and the crucifix,
The marching song and the lullaby.
Here, with the steam from coffee and tea,
Hovered all history, more or less:
The tug-of-war of fidelity,
The ancient conundrum “Who are we?”,
The timeless task of togetherness.