Field of Seas (Flood Poems:1)

The sky has fallen to the ground:
the mud once dry, now hidden, drowned
beneath a sea of brown,
and green,
and grey,
so now reflections stay,
where, once, dark shadows lay.

The day stares down at its own image,
unseen before, except in streams,
that now are bursting at the seams.
Its face is sullen, dismal,
staring at the debris, though with a twinkle in its eye,
like a far off moon, smiling. Sly
Old Blue Eyes cried a tear
that made the fields disappear.
It made the treetops shake with fear,
for they were all that now stood clear.
It birthed an island, where none had prior been
and turned the tractor to a submarine.

Should we erase the words of Shelley when Emin is free to speak?

If you live anywhere in urbanised Britain, you are more than likely to have stumbled upon one or two obscenities crudely sprayed on the sides of buildings. Sometimes you might get a bit luckier and actually come across a highly artistic mural or something at least somewhat aesthetically pleasing. But no matter how beautiful the artwork, it will always reside well beneath the stigmatic blanket of graffiti.

I come to you, however, to challenge that view. To change the way we, as society, brand our creative peers. Sure, spray-painting swear words along the barriers of a public thoroughfare is pretty pathetic. And I do not condone such mindless vandalism. But there is definitely a point when graffiti transcends into the world of art.

Summertown, in Oxfordshire, has recently been vandalised. Somebody has taken it upon themselves to spray some lines from the poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley on the boards that surround a housing development. They have duly been painted over, and other words have appeared. The spray, it seems, is mightier than the brush. But I ask, should these words really be painted over time after time? Is that not just a waste of taxpayers’ money and human resources? In a world where text speak is becoming the mother tongue and the real literary giants, the forefathers of Stephanie Meyer, are fast dying in the embers of a forgotten literary past, should we not be embracing this attempt at spreading the delight of poetry?

Living in Margate, I seem to recall not so long ago that we (the town, I mean) paid some multiple of thousands of pounds to artist Tracy Emin for a permanent installation to accompany our new gallery. What we got was a bright pink neon sign, apparently in Emin’s own handwriting, which read ‘I’ll never stop loving you’. Forgive me for being old fashioned, but I do not regard that attempt at poignancy with as much reverence as the words of Shelley. Now Summertown are getting the words of Shelly permanently etched onto their sidewalks, for free. I repeat, for free.

If we are painting over Shelley, then let’s tear down Emin too. I’m just saying.

The Passerby (An Original Poem)

Houses stand empty,
As homelessness grows.
In the street lies a body-
He froze! With his clothes
As a blanket, no socks on his toes,
No bed, and no food,
His eyes barely closed.

He’d watched through a haze,
As he lay, comatose,
While the world passed him by:
As a man with a rose
Headed home to propose.

But we all decompose,
Humans, and flowers,
And the young man who froze
Has been rotting for hours.

‘I Have Eaten the Plums…’ (poetic quotes top 5:4)

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

William Carlos Williams, ‘This is Just to Say’.

For the penultimate installment in my poetry top 5, I have opted to include, rather than a quote, the entire body of the poem. This is because the poem itself is so short that quoting any part of it would pull said part so far away from the realms of context and coherency that it would be rendered inconsequential in forming any kind of analysis; b) even as a complete unit, the poem is still so vague in terms of its intended meaning that it demands the critic to consider it in its entirety.

This is perhaps one of the most, if not the most, analysed modern poems in existence, and its meaning is still debated to this day, exactly eighty years since it was written. The obvious message, construed from the final stanza, is of forgiveness. This could be as blatant as it seems; that the author is asking forgiveness for having eaten some plums belonging to the person we suppose to be his wife. It has even been conjectured that Williams wrote this poem as a note to his wife on a napkin, or pinned to the fridge. Taking the idea of forgiveness a step further, the plums could be a metaphor for something worse: perhaps he slept with another woman, and the plum analogy is actually symbolic of ‘eating of the forbidden fruit’, proverbially speaking. Others have argued that the poem represents the idea of sexual frustration, though personally I don’t really follow that reading. Whatever the interpretation you favour most, the sheer fact that this is a poem means that, so long as your idea is evidentially substantiated, your assertion exists within the realms of validity.

That being said, is this a poem? Certainly it looks like a poem; it is presented in three stanzas, of roughly equal shape and size. But that’s where the argument ends. There is no formal metre: none of the lines exhibit the same syllable count or stress count as any other, or at least not uniformly. There is no rhyme (that’s not to say that all poems must rhyme, I’m just highlighting the lack of any poetic techniques), no punctuation, no assonance, etcetera. The only instances of anything resembling awareness of poetic stylisation is the capital ‘F’ at the start of stanza three, and the repetition of ‘so sweet and so cold’ in the last two lines. Aside from these anomalies, the text reads as a sentence, albeit a sentence devoid of punctuation.

This creates an interesting conundrum: where do we draw the line between one style of writing and another? Previous posts have already dealt with apparent contradictions regarding the legitimacy of a proffered style (my last post about Pale Fire touches on the fact that the text is claimed by the author to be a novel, despite the fact that the majority of it is presented in the style of a poem, and my own poem, My Silent Wife, I claim to be a sonnet despite the fact that it doesn’t really incorporate any regulatory requirements of a true sonnet). In my humble opinion, the writing is exactly as the author intended it, thus a claim by the author that it is a poem, a novel, or otherwise, should not be a point of contention. Having said that, I do appreciate that it could be difficult to accept something as one thing, when it takes the shape of another. I still maintain, however, that to assign a different set of rules to a piece of writing changes the poem’s ‘DNA’. The poem has the sole purpose of capturing the mind, thought processes, emotional circumstance, and other personal attributes of the poet, at the exact time as he wrote it. In other words, the poem is a response to a precise moment in time.

In my opinion, a response to a precise moment in time is exactly what this poem is. I like the idea that Williams did not intend this poem to hold any real, discernible meaning, other than to serve as an apology for eating the plums. This creates a synergy between the act of eating the plums and the act of writing the poem; the speaker ate the plums as an honest response to a moment in time, just as he wrote the poem as an honest response to the moment in time that came directly after he ate the plums. The poem, if that meaning is assumed, serves then as an example of the way we live our lives; we act spontaneously. If there are some delicious looking plums there, of course we’re going to eat them (though I’d probably just eat one; eating the rest is somewhat gluttonous). And once we have eaten them, we will naturally have a response to that action. And Williams’ response was this example of tongue-in-cheek remorse. I say tongue-in-cheek because, let’s face it, he wrote this poem with a smile on his face and a sense of self-satisfaction, no matter how guilty he pretends to feel. Perhaps, however, that sense of self-satisfaction goes further: perhaps this poem was written to be deliberately vague and ambiguous so that Williams could revel in the fact that scholars would argue about the poet’s intended message? Perhaps there is no meaning, and that, in itself, is the point of the poem?

My Silent Wife (An original poem)

I loved the way she’d never help, but watch,
As I’d make salted butterscotch
To top the cakes; yet still I knew
That she’d present them as her own, as housewives do,
And all the party guests would chew and chime,
They wished their wives could cook like mine!
She looked divine, in radiant satin silk,
That flowed so shiny, smooth as frothy milk.
She’d chortle as my boss told lurid jokes,
Though he would feign a deafness when she spoke.
I thought that at the time she did not care,
Or did not know her voice was drowned by air;
She nonchalantly played a flirty host;
A sexy, radiant, silent, muted ghost.
My boss felt such untamed carnal commotion,
That I got my prize – my first (and last) promotion.
Post-revelry, when all was said and done,
My silent songbird sung her secret song,
She smiled and said ‘It’s diamonds, or I’m gone.’
And I pictured losing her comely ass, in thong.

‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ (poetic quotes top 5:2)

Here is the second installment of my poetic quotes top 5. Enjoy!

‘How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d’

Alexander Pope, ‘Eloisa to Abelard’; lines 207-210

Familiar to many from the film which takes its name from the third line, this quote is fundamentally a nod to the blessings of innocence and ignorance. Recall, for a second, the old adage that ‘ignorance is bliss’; that is the essence of this quote.

The poem, written in 1717, is a romantic (note the difference between the de-capitalised verb here, and the capitalised noun in my last post) tale about the unrequited love between Eloisa, and her tutor, Abelard, who is 20 years her senior. It is based on the true story of Heloise and Abelard Pierre, which dates back to the 12th century. Abelard is a supreme philosopher and he is nominated as the Canon of Notre Dame. Eloisa’s uncle, Fulbert, discovers the details of the affair between the two lovers and tries to put an end to it. Eloisa and Abelard continue their liaisons discreetly, and eventually she becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son. In order to avoid displeasing Fulbert, Abelard concocts a plan to get married in secret, but Fulbert announces the engagement publicly so Eloisa denies it, in order to avoid tarnishing Abelard’s reputation, and harming his career, and Abelard convinces her to go to a convent for protection. Fulbert thinks that Abelard has sent her away to get rid of her, so he has Abelard castrated. Eventually Abelard’s career is ruined by his relationship with Eloisa and he goes into hiding, living a solitary life as a hermit. He and Eloisa exchange love letters for the next twenty years, and spend only the briefest amount of time in each other’s company before they die. 600 years later, Josephine Bonaparte (wife of Napoleon I) learns of their story and has them exhumed so they can be buried with each other.

The tragic tale is similar to the more well-known story of Romeo and Juliet, and indeed is often categorised alongside Shakespeare’s masterpiece as one of the greatest love stories ever penned. The quote I have selected from the poem is poignant as it is antonymous with the rest of the narrative. In this section, Eloisa is speaking of a nun. The first line directly identifies the subject; a ‘vestal’ is a chaste woman – a nun in this case. With that in mind, the first line can be interpreted to mean that innocence and morality lead to happiness and good fortune. In other words, if you know not of love, or of sexual interaction, then you are sure to be in a much more agreeable situation, because you are devoid of the anguish that accompanies love. To refer once again to Shakespeare, ‘the course of true love never did run smooth’ (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Juxtaposing the opening line of the poem with Shakespeare’s assertion, it becomes apparent where the derivation of the meaning of ‘how happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!’ lies.

The next line has many people confused when trying to deduce an interpretation of their own, due to its awkward syntax. However, if I rewrite it thus; ‘forgetting the world, by the world forgotten’, its meaning is slightly more evident. Put simply, it implies that the innocence and purity construed from the first line allows the nun to disappear from all concerns, and to be without concerns herself. In other words, she has forgotten the world around her, and in turn has been forgotten by the world. This is the scenario which Eloisa most desires; she wants to be totally unaware of the troubles that currently afflict her, and for the world around her to be totally unaware of her as well. She believes that only by being virtuous and at the same time ignorant of true happiness, can one really be solely happy, because true happiness carries with it the reciprocal – torment and suffering.

The third (and most famous) line serves to reinforce the imagery I have already conjectured. Sunshine is used here as a symbol of light and happiness, and ‘the spotless mind’ is a metaphor for ignorance, or a lack of memories: in other words, a mind that has forgotten the pains of an Earthly existence. So, the line fundamentally pertains to the preordained notion that happiness can only last so long as innocence remains. In fact, this line takes it one step further, by asserting that happiness can be infinite, so long as knowledge of pain is absent.

The final line serves to ratify the overall notion that happiness can be achieved by remaining distant from the world as a whole. Basically it states that your prayers for happiness will be granted, but you will forego any further wishes, because happiness is all you will ever have. Only by never knowing heartbreak can you ever know happiness as a lone emotion.

If we now step out of the 18th century, and cast our minds forwards 300 years to the present day, we can see why this poem has stood the test of time, and why it still resonates with readers to this day. For a start, everybody can surely sympathise with Eloisa, for nobody in this world can claim to be indifferent to, or unaware of pain and suffering, thus nobody can claim happiness to be the only emotional response they have ever experienced. Furthermore, everybody probably wishes they were able to forget certain aspects of their past in exchange for sunshine. I think, in a modern interpretation, it’s probably acceptable to project this quote over a larger surface, symbolically speaking, because the search for happiness in the present day is not solely attributed to the quest for true love. We have become less chivalrous as time has passed, and now we associate happiness with wealth and materialism, as well as finding our one true love. In the technological age, we are more likely to strive to be famous on the internet, and that fame, we suppose, would bring happiness with it. We yearn to be adored by society, admired by our peers, and accepted wherever we go. The simple message of those four lines of poetry are now such an alien concept to us that, rather than serving as an example of our highest ambitions, it has the opposite effect; perhaps it’s time we realised that true happiness is not found by creating the most popular internet video, or by being the centre of attention at the local bar, but by being separate from all the vices offered to us on a daily basis, and living our own lives as virtuously and as full as we possibly can. Of course, we are, like Eloisa, doomed never to experience happiness eternally, because love will not allow us never to experience heartache.

‘Philosophy Will Clip an Angel’s Wings’ (poetic quotes top 5:1)

I have decided to do a top 5 of my poetic quotes, along with a brief analysis of each, and I shall try to relate each quote to the present day. In no particular order, here is the first installment…

‘There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture — she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine,
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-personed Lamia melt into a shade.’

Keats, ‘Lamia’; part II, lines 231-238

This quote epitomises the debate between Romantic writers (not authors of amorous literature; authors writing between c1800 – 1850) that science and rational cognition was more important than the power of the imagination (including ideas pertaining to magic and spiritualism) , or vice-versa. The narrative of this poem follows the story of Lamia, a serpentine immortal being, who masquerades as a beautiful woman in order to seduce Lycius, a gullible adolescent. Lamia does not come across as evil; it seems that she only wishes to be able to live happily ever after with Lycius, as the fairytale version would surely go. But Lycius’ mentor, Apollonius, sees Lamia for a fraud, and causes her to disappear simply by staring through her. Lycius then collapses and dies too. Although Lamia’s intentions are fundamentally good, it has to be noted that she has achieved her goal through means of deceit. This raises the question of whether or not it is better to find true love, even if that love owes its existence to a deceitful conception, or whether it is better to live a wholly truthful life, even though that truth may cause all happiness to fall to redundancy.

The above passage serves to expand on the narrative theme. Beginning with the first line, the image conjured is of a reverent (the word ‘awful’ is used here in its archaic form; to mean awe inspiring or admirable) rainbow, perhaps created by some sort of higher being or something magical. However, the next line implies that, with the advent of scientific understand, the rainbow is reduced to be included in ‘the dull catalogue of common things’, citing the fact that we know ‘her woof’ and ‘her texture’, meaning that we are aware of exactly what a rainbow is, and how it is caused. This serves to make the rainbow appear banal.

The next line implies the same message, but more directly. Fundamentally, it states that science will render the power of imagination futile. This idea is fortified by the succeeding lines; the idea that science will, eventually, solve all the unanswered questions and erase the possibility of anything magical or fantastical being given as an explanation for something tangible.

The final two lines of the extract force home the overall message of the poem; science will ‘unweave a rainbow’, in other words, cognitive rationale will reveal the true nature of any phenomena, just as the power of understanding resulted in the demise of Lamia.

As stated earlier, Lamia owed her happiness to a lie, thus it is logical to conclude that the general message of this poem is that anything considered magical, spiritual or imaginary is merely a lie and, if we go back to the notion that Lamia is really a serpent, then it is fair to assert that the belief that lies are poisonous is the overall conjecture.

I feel that the message in this poem is still relevant today; with science progressed far beyond what was even imaginable in the 1800s, every day we are disproving more and more ideas that were founded in the realms of the imagination. As a result, we have far less to be in awe of than our ancestors would have done. Imagine, for example, that rainbow once again. Imagine seeing it in the 1800s, before you knew how a rainbow was formed. It’s fairly logical to assume that, since nobody knows how it got there, it must have been but there by divine intervention, or some other spiritual force. But if you place that rainbow into the present day, though we still look upon a rainbow and regard it as naturally beautiful, we still place it in ‘the dull catalogue of common things’. With the progression of science, we are severing our imaginative capability, and it has surely got to be of some degree of concern that a diminishing capacity to imagine and to think spiritually may have a serious impact, one day, on our creative ability. What happens if we were to reach a point of total understanding of the universe? If we were, hypothetically, able to prove that no life existed anywhere in the universe, except on Earth, then that knowledge would have a massively detrimental impact on science-fiction, for example. I think somewhere along the lines, there might come a time when scientific progress might become so advanced that everything currently unexplainable will simply become another item on a list of ‘dull, commonplace’ things. When that happens, the world will be a very boring place.

Semantics (An original poem)

Semantics,
or the study of the meaning of words,
and their relationship with other words,
governs our approach to writing.
Whether we are creating, debating
transliterating or annotating,
our preoccupation lies with
the way the words interact
and the messages this conveys.
But how can we be sure of ourselves,
when analysing Shakespeare or Chaucer?
How do we know what they thinked
when they inked a certain made-up word?
See word association,
you know, the words that form a relation,
in your mind,
to the words you hear in the oration,
that you’re hearing,
or on the page before your eyes,
creates differing manifestations;
comprises different images,
to people who come from
beneath different skies.
See, I say blue
and I think of peace and tranquillity,
but to you it means depression
or vulnerability.
I say red, you say danger,
I say danger, you say stranger,
I say stranger, you say friend,
I say friend, you say heart,
I say heart, you say red,
I say red, he says fire,
I say fire, she says desire,
I say desire, he says lust,
I say lust, she says mistrust,
I say mistrust, he says hatred,
I say hatred, she says “yeah, I hate red too.”
I point out a girl in a red dress –
one guy says that red means love.
He’s right, that girl and I had sex.
I point out the girl in red again –
another guy says red means anger.
He’s right too, she’s also my ex.
See semantics, man,
is for literary pedantics
and amateur romantics
who pen things like
“My love for you is like a red, red rose.”
Word association
is for shrinks to pretend to think they know how you think.
But what they won’t tell you
is that what you should be thinking about
is how to realise your aims.
Forget semantics,
go and play some games,
and get up to some antics.