Forty Years Ago

NOTE: This is a poem I wrote a few years ago, when I was wallowing in a rather unfocused and inchoate conservatism, living in lodgings, listening to Sgt. Pepper over and over through headphones, reading Philip Larkin and George Orwell, suffering an unrequited attachment, eating granola bars for supper, etc. etc. Even then it didn't really represent my settled or unsettled views. But it's told from the point of view of a fictional character so that's OK.

I like to throw a bit of poetry onto the blog now and again, since I think poetry is important and neglected. If it bothers you that I publish my own poetry here, please make a complaint in writing to The Manager, Tesco, Dooradoyle, Limerick, Ireland. See if he cares.

Behind closed curtains, forty years ago
Fills up the screen in black and white.
How strange it must have been (he thinks) to grow
Up in the craters the Luftwaffe made;
To be a baby of the Blitz. But night
Has fallen now on history’s parade.

He watches mini-skirted women jive,
The pale young hero cursing TV sets
And package holidays. To be alive
When time was like the weather! When the news
Was like a story! Now nobody gets
Excited about class, no one has views

About the Common Market, no one talks
About how things were different in my day;
That’s gone the way of Cromwell and Guy Fawkes.
Time is an air-conditioned office now
And history an infinite replay.
There’s nothing that the world will not allow;

No rationing; no walking half a mile
To hear a radio, no being called
To spend two year in khaki; no big trial
For dirty books; at last nobody cares.
Curse on the telly, no one is appalled.
Puncture your face with studs and no one stares.

Nostalgic for small-mindedness, he feeds
On scenes of pits and queues and kitchen sinks
And every day the whole mirage recedes;
The guy who played the miner’s son just died
And she’s a Dame, that mini-skirted minx.
In this last room where history can hide
He owns a world of ghosts, self-mummified.

D'you Remember Her Collecting For Concern on Christmas Eve?

I've just been ironing clothes while playing music on my laptop. Some readers will recognize the title of my post as a line from "I Useta Love Her", a 1990 hit single by the Irish band The Saw Doctors. (As far as I know, it is still the song that has spent the longest time at number one in the Irish music charts.)

The full verse is:

D’you remember her collecting for Concern on Christmas Eve?
She was on a forty-eight hour fast, just water and black tea.
So I walked right up and made an ostentatious contribution
And I winked at her to tell her I’d seduce her in the future
When she’s feelin looser.

(Concern is an Irish charity, which collects for the Third World.)

I suppose I'm a fan of the Saw Doctors. At least, I have three of their albums, listen to them fairly regularly, and I went to see them near Salthill in Galway, one Hallowe'en night. (I always smile when I remember the words of their guitarist as they emerged for an encore, after the audience had been baying for one for some ten minutes: "Sure, why wouldn't we?". The whole down-to-earth attitude and aesthetic of the band seemed compressed in those few words, and the way he spoke them.)

"I Useta Love Her" is a wonderfully fresh song, laden with nostalgia and rather innocent naughtiness. (Though one line, unfortunately, is downright sacrilegious towards the Blessed Eucharist, and there are jibes at Catholicism throughout, though jibes of a rather mild variety.)

But what always strikes me, when I listen to it, is how perfect that line I've quoted in the title is, lyrically speaking. It flows so effortlessly, with such joyous euphony-- and it fits perfectly into the rhythm of the song, too. A line like that is a thing to be cherished, whether it is encountered in classical poetry or in a modern pop lyric.

(A strangely similar example that strikes me, but from a more literary source, is one from Lord Alfred Tennyson's Locksley Hall:

And she turn'd—her bosom shaken with a sudden storm of sighs—
All the spirit deeply dawning in the dark of hazel eyes—)

I seem to remember us singing "I Useta Love Her" in choir practice in my Catholic school, though I don't remember us singing the sacrilegious line (which is also rather too bawdy for fourteen year olds, which we were).

How do poetically perfect lines like that come to appear in pop songs? Is it just a fluke, or is there some ineradicable instinct for poetry in the human heart, which survives even into our essentially anti-poetic era, and pops up in the most unlikely places?

A Poem About Sex

The campy comic does his best
To make the viewers laugh again
With stories of the way he dressed
In Mother's clothes when he was ten.
A titter from the audience;
They've heard this old routine before.
Oh, don't you start to get the sense
That gender-bending is a bore?

It seemed that all we had to do
Was share the lip-stick and the pants
And suddenly we would break through
Into a limitless expanse
Where men were women, women men,
The ceiling had become the floor,
The sky the limit; that was then.
Now gender-bending is a bore.

A rainbow is a pretty sight
But nature makes them rather rare.
We thrill to watch a bird in flight
But not much happens in the air.
Oh my dear drag queen, do not knock,
There's nothing much behind that door.
This might come as an awful shock
But gender-bending is a bore.

When Jilly Jackson, PhD,
Has finished putting bullets through
The myth of masculinity
What is there left to say or do
In Gender Studies seminar?
Can that dead horse be flogged some more?
Though Grandma thought it quite bizarre
Now gender-bending is a bore.

Although we've had a century
Of your subversive bacchanals
Boys still play soldiers, stubbornly,
And little girls still reach for dolls.
So you've thrown out the pink and blue--
What have you found to swap them for?
Nothing you make is really new--
Your gender-bending is a bore.

NOTE: Some smart-aleck will probably point out that the convention of pink for a girl and blue for a boy is a relatively recent phenomenon, that blue used to be the colour for girls because of associations with the Virgin Mary, etc. etc. Yes. Yes. I do know all this. It's completely beside the point.

Thoughts on the Edge of Sleep

I want to sleep forever, sleep forever…
I do not want to die. I want to fall
Down, down through a bottomless pool. I want to never
Emerge again, or see the sun’s harsh light;
The angry faces and long delays and all
The burden of day will be drowned in a permanent night.

I am tired, tired, hopelessly tired of the long frustrations…
I am tired of the stranger’s face and inquisitive eyes.
I am tired of the fumes of cars, of barking Alsatians,
Of the zombie faces in ads, of exhausted supplies
Of paper and money and patience. I’m tired of the gulf
The unbridgeable gulf, between everyone else and myself.

I am tired of stupid jokes, of gossipy headlines,
I am tired of the heavy silence that summons trite words.
I am tired of the rush to meet purely arbitrary deadlines.
I am tired of the bus that pulls up forty yards
Away from the bus-stop. I’m tired of crude neon signs.

I want to sleep forever, to never be woken…
I do not want oblivion, or mere dreams…
I want to sink into a peace that will never be broken
To let my soul float, float away down measureless streams
To an underground sea, lit by the sun’s far-distant gleams.

I have seen enough, I have heard enough, I have been
In the open air enough. My soul overflows.
That hot summer’s day with my class-mates in Stephen’s Green…
The boiler room…that childhood party…all those…
I am full, I am full. It would take me a thousand years
To make sense of all that has passed through these eyes and ears.

I want to sleep forever. I want to break free
Of this cumbersome body, and let my mind wander at will.
I will wander through streets and through corridors—no-one will see--
And no-one will mock me—and no-one will argue—-oh, thrill
Of all thrills, to escape being seen...oh, how effortlessly...
How soundlessly, how boldly, how effortlessly...
Free, free, to be free....

It's Not Like You Wrote Anything Clever Before....

I want to be one of the children of God
A lover of sunlight, a man amongst men.
Beauty is nothing hidden or odd;
I will never write anything clever again.

The ballad that my great-grandfather sung,
The proverb that pleases now as then;
Only the ancient is always young.
I will never write anything clever again.

Why I Believe in Merrie England

First and most importantly, because it's too good not to have been true.

Secondly, because any of the Middle English literature I've read seems positively a-glow with child-like wonder, relish of simple things and naive piety.

Thirdly, because I am currently reading an anthology of Catholic poetry, edited by Shane Leslie, whose introduction quotes this refrain from a Middle English drinking song:

Bring us in good ale, and bring us in good ale;
For our Blessed Lady's sake, bring us in good ale.

How could anyone read those lines and not believe in Merrie England?

How Pleasant to Know Mr. Eliot

Today, for the second time in recent years, I borowed Four Quartets by TS Eliot and have been trying to penetrate it. I am generally anti-modern in all things, especially poetry, and so all my life I have felt a hostility to the more obscure works of Eliot-- that is to say, most of them. (Though even a determined reactionary like me can't ignore the sublime lyricism of his works.)

And yet, the more famous and oft-quoted passages from Four Quartets have been haunting me more and more. It was in one of Father Brendan Purcell's philosophy classes in UCD that I first heard the line "distracted from distraction by distraction" and it stuck in my mind. I can't even remember where I first read these lines, perhaps the most profound in all poetry:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Roger Scruton, the doyen of English conservatism (whatever is left of it, that is), in his book England: an Elegy accords the poetry of TS Eliot-- and Four Quartets especially-- a very high place, almost the quintessenial expression of Englishness and English spirituality. Peter Hitchens-- the other English conservative-- also turns to Eliot's religious poems to describe his own spiritual journey.

It has become fashionable to claim that the English are essentially secular, that the Church of England was never anything but a hat-tip to the idea of the sacred, that religious fervour is essentially un-English. I have heard this idea advanced by the journalist Matthew Parris, amongst others. But I don't believe it for a second. I think true Englishness-- for all its understatement, common sense, moderation, and so forth-- is deeply rooted in the idea of the sacred. In fact, all the more down-to-earth virtues of Englishness only make sense when they remain rooted in the sacred, just as a wise-cracking and bubbly individual is only bearable if he retains a seriousness underneath.

So Four Quartets expresses the essence of English spirituality. But what's it all abaht, guv?

I don't know. I can only catch flashes of meaning here and there. To discern anything more, I think I am going to have to consult some works of poetry criticism (gulp). But there are many passages in the sequence that electrify me, even without my fully understanding them, especially this one:
 
If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid. Could it be put any better than that? Could there be any better reply to the scoffers like Richard Dawkins who wonder why the efficacy of prayer can't be proven experimentally-- without realising that praying for the purpose of an experiment is not prayer at all?

And prayer is more than an order of words, the conscious occupation of the praying mind...who hasn't prayed and felt this? Who hasn't felt that, even if the mind wanders at prayer, or one doesn't really feel like praying, prayer happens at a deeper level than the conscious mind-- one almost outside time, especially if it takes place in a church, where we feel surrounded by the saints and the ghosts of past congregations?

A Wonderful Review by Peter Hitchens of Philip Larkin's Collected Poems...

...to be found here.

Peter Hitchens is a British national treasure. In an age where both left-wing and right-wing have degenerated into two slightly different flavours of libertarianism, Peter Hitchens is pretty much the only proper conservative-- that is, social and cultural conservative-- still keeping the fires burning. (There is also Roger Scruton, but his conservatism is so refined and intellectualised and irony-laced that it's difficult for most of us to identify with it. At least, it's difficult for me.)

Hitchens suggests that Larkin might, rather paradoxically, be viewed as a great religious poet. (Larkin, of course, was not only an atheist but an atheist who was utterly obsessed with his mortality, articulating the horror of eternal oblivion in unsurpassably stark terms in his  masterpiece "Aubade".) One thing I find interesting is that Hitchens is an Englishman very much in the manner of Philip Larkin, with a very similar temperament and set of opinions. And yet one of these Englishmen professes Christian faith while the other stoically refused to do so. Faith is the difference that makes everything different.

Just in case anyone is interested, I wrote a Larkin-related article myself some years ago, which can be found on the website of the Philip Larkin Society here. It's an appreciation of a piece of Larkin juvenalia, "The School in August". The text of the poem is not reproduced with the article, but it's not difficult to find.

Why I am a Traditionalist Conservative

I'm tired of invoking Edmund Burke
And tired of the shuttlecock of debate.
I really don't care if the new ways work,
I'll always root for the out-of-date.
I'll always root for the long-in-the-tooth
Though the new be better a thousandfold.
No more shall I hide the terrible truth;
I like old things because they are old.

I like old things because they are slower
And cruder and leave us a chance to laugh.
Give me a scythe, not a new lawn-mower;
A daguerreotype, not a photograph.
I like old ways because they wander
I like them because they don't make sense.
I can't add seven and six, but I'm fonder
Of shillings and farthings than pounds and pence.

I like old things because the dust
Of custom and habit have fallen on them.
I like them because they've been blessed and cussed
And joked about since the time of Shem.
I'm all for cooked-up and fake traditions;
There's not a quaint fiction I won't uphold.
Let Christmas be laden with new additions;
I like new things that pretend to be old.

I thirst for cobwebs and rust and dog-ears
By ivy and lichen I take my stand.
I am not pleased when nostalgia's fog clears
And leaves us standing in no-man's-land.
I like a verse more the more it's recited;
I like a tale more the more it's told.
So call me backwards, blockish, benighted;
I like old things because they are old.

You tell me my sort have been moaning and mourning
Since someone rubbed sticks and discovered fire;
That mankind lives in an endless dawning
From tin to typeface to telephone wire.
You say that the past is doomed, you sages,
And tramp on its deathbed to prove you're bold;
By God, I don't think you so very courageous;
I like old things because they are old.