A fountain bubbled dreamily.
Rose and descended endlessly
Then higher still, a tiled cartoon
Of Moore Street shawlies. Just across
Tinkled a mezzanine café
And, further up again, there was
A mirrored ceiling. All the way
Above that ceiling, Space Age-style
Glass lifts took shoppers up to see
The streets below. My juvenile
Soul swooned in quiet ecstasy.
One year they put some banners up
With lines from Wordsworth's "Daffodils"
I guessed this was the FA Cup
Of poetry; the Orson Welles,
The Sergeant Pepper, Everest,
The Parthenon, all that could boast
Of being best, the very best,
The poem the whole world loved the most.
I was a Stars Wars baby with
Strange knowledge of things long ago
Things all but lost, like sunken myth,
From long before the Late Late Show.
Optimus Prime and Patrick Pearse
Looked over me from infancy
Queen and Iron Maiden filled my ears
Arcadia my memory.
With lines from Wordsworth's "Daffodils"
I guessed this was the FA Cup
Of poetry; the Orson Welles,
The Sergeant Pepper, Everest,
The Parthenon, all that could boast
Of being best, the very best,
The poem the whole world loved the most.
I was a Stars Wars baby with
Strange knowledge of things long ago
Things all but lost, like sunken myth,
From long before the Late Late Show.
Optimus Prime and Patrick Pearse
Looked over me from infancy
Queen and Iron Maiden filled my ears
Arcadia my memory.
My innocence was ten miles deep
To think the world loved poetry
Enough to care that much. The creep
Of time-thieving technology
Had choked us less, and Ireland still
Trailed clouds of glory from its birth
(Since grand ideals take time to kill
And dreamers to be thrown to earth)
But even thirty years ago
The gig was up, and Pegasus
Was saddled tight and kept to show
The kids around the syllabus.
Must shopping centres kill the soul?
Can daffodils sustain the heart
At second-hand? Does time unroll
Away from nature and from art
Unstoppably? Or did I snatch
A glimpse of something possible?
Some promise that the soul can catch
(Even in suburbs, even still)
The light that never was on sea
Or land, or blue remembered hills?
Is there a place for poetry
So far from daffodils?
To think the world loved poetry
Enough to care that much. The creep
Of time-thieving technology
Had choked us less, and Ireland still
Trailed clouds of glory from its birth
(Since grand ideals take time to kill
And dreamers to be thrown to earth)
But even thirty years ago
The gig was up, and Pegasus
Was saddled tight and kept to show
The kids around the syllabus.
Must shopping centres kill the soul?
Can daffodils sustain the heart
At second-hand? Does time unroll
Away from nature and from art
Unstoppably? Or did I snatch
A glimpse of something possible?
Some promise that the soul can catch
(Even in suburbs, even still)
The light that never was on sea
Or land, or blue remembered hills?
Is there a place for poetry
So far from daffodils?
I really enjoyed this poem. It is thought-provoking in a way that forces me to reread lines and phrases.
ReplyDeleteI think the first stanza is very good at drawing the reader in, probably because I know the author. I wasn’t sure of the tone of the first verse until I read “My juvenile / Soul swooned in quiet ecstasy”, which illustrates that this location was a very captivating experience for him as a youth.
I loved the second stanza and how he refers to ‘Daffodils’ as superior poetry in the sense that it is seemingly loved by all, and this fame is something many aspiring poets dream to one day reach.
I think in the third stanza, I like how the poet openly highlights how much that he is a product of his nation and culture. I loved the two contrasting images of Optimus Prime and Patrick Pearce watching over him. There is a lot of humour in how preposterous it is to put these two characters together in one line.
I loved the line “my innocence was ten miles deep,” which does make you stop and think things a bit more by considering something concrete like distance in miles. This is more thought-invoking than simply saying: “I was very innocent.”
My favourite line of the whole poem is “The creep/ Of time-thieving technology” The choice of putting “The creep” at the end of the line puzzles the reader because we don’t know if the poet is referring to a noun or verb until the next line.
“Of time-thieving technology” is deliberately provocative because the writer is challenging the common belief that technology saves time, but Mal is claiming the exact opposite with this phrase.
The choice of “choked” is a very stark word to portray what the writer is feeling. However, the phrase “Had choked us less” threw me a bit because I was expecting him to write “more” and therefore had to reread that line before I could get what I think he was trying to say: that we are choked so much by modern culture that, had we been choked less, Ireland still might trail some of its earlier birth.
I had an image of a banishment of heaven with “and dreamers to be thrown to earth”; however, there seems to be hope that Pegasus is mentioned in a line below this, and since he is a winged creature, there is a longing that he might bring dreamers back up to heaven.
Of course, the last stanza poses many questions, but it seems to suggest that poetry can exist in things other than just nature. And if there was a simple answer, the poem wouldn’t need to be written. People can write poetry on anything, as this poem demonstrates. But the poem seems to yearn for something transcendent that many people often find in nature, as William Wordsworth’s life and his ‘Daffodils’ poem demonstrate. But I am of the opinion that we can find something transcendent in the ordinary, which may sound like a contradiction. But Maolsheachlann has clearly demonstrated this with his poem.
Thanks for this wonderful comment, Anonymous. I'm honoured and delighted you found so much in my poem and your identification of the ambiguities is entirely right.
DeleteI am hopeless on making technical comments on poetry, but I found this poem quite touching and captures many of my own sentiments about time, atmosphere and so on.
ReplyDeleteThat means a lot to me! Thank you so much! Atmosphere is always the thing I am aiming at, so that pleases me vastly.
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