“So tell me the truth about love”; some observations about trends in modern poetry.

Two hundred years ago, Shelley wrote that poetry is a means of “perfectionizing” mankind. His object was “simply to familiarize the highly refined imagination….with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence, aware that until mankind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, the reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust.” 

He also called poets, “The unacknowledged legislators of mankind.” He thought the job of a poet was to tell the truth about love.

Ah, you say, with sangfroid or even satisfaction, thank heavens we have escaped from all that absurd romantic idealization.

In the twentieth century we see an altogether humbler and less self assured approach to writing about love. Yet a poet like Auden conceals a fair amount of philosophy and profound rumination inside the persona of an ingénue asking questions. He keeps it simple, folksy, and even uses rhyme. Not the iconoclastic style of the post Auschwitz poets perhaps, but still very different from the old romantic poets, very “modern”. 

Auden invites the reader to provide the answers to his silly-seeming questions. It is in considering these answers that you find yourself reflecting on love more profoundly, challenging the popular culture of the time’s banalities, going beyond the senses, and yet being drawn into the sights, sounds, smells and feel of love. Not so metaphysical as the old romantics, and yet it ends

Will it alter my life altogether?

Oh tell me the truth about love.

Somewhere behind the surface of things, that is what it does. Doesn’t it?

The poem is a model of metre, form, rhythm, even rhyme. It has profundity while pretending to be trite. It has earned its place in the canon. You can find it here.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/o-tell-me-the-truth-about-love/

At the dawn of a new century we really do have a brave new and dystopic world. 

The vogue is for clever words, unusual words, and for direct personal experience, no matter how lacking in meaning, truth and profundity that may be. 

Editors like novelty in metaphor. But it seems they are as disconnected from the profoundest truth of human loving as are the poets they encourage. 

Much as I have enjoyed the Blood Axe Books series on being alive and human, I am concerned that the poems about birth and early mothering lack psychological depth. To greet a new born child is as profound a moment of love as we are likely to have. Poetry of any quality should reflect that. 

I shall use as an example the poem “Love” by Kate Clanchy. 

It was included in Best Scottish Poems 2004. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2004 was Hamish Whyte

http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poems/love

I quote:

“Editor's comment: 
Lovely poem about the mother's puzzling encounter with her baby, this alien. I like the repetition of 'gave out' to mirror its breathing.

Author's note: 
'Love' comes from my book-length sequence of poems Newborn, which is about motherhood. The poems were written at different times during my son's first three years, and this is one of the last, written when I was remembering the chaotic first days with a baby rather than actually experiencing them.

New mothers are expected to 'bond' with their babies instantly: I found the process slower and stranger, and this is the record. 'Misericord' is the only odd word here, I think, – they're those grotesque little figures with caricatured faces carved under the seats of choir-stalls. The title may seem rather bold and bald, but this isn't a conventional romantic poem. And after all, love is what it's all about.”

If this is what love is all about we don’t need to wait for global warming to destroy the planet. 

The new born baby’s face is seen as a misericord. Such things rub against bottoms like babies being born, or when we stand in church. They sit underneath bottoms when we are seated there. Most male faces on misericord’s are of devils, or of the wonderful mythic being, the Green Man, who represents the life force bursting through the human dimension, nature within man. He is as primal as birth itself. A mother’s view of this might be blurred on the end of the exhaustion of child birth. One might claim that this was both meaningful and true of a new born. But if we unpack the word misericord, we find misery and a broken cord. There is no sign of love in this poem, no sign of loving connection with the baby. It is all about the suffering and anxiety of a mother who has made no connection with her child before birth and has no clue how to connect with it after the birth. We meet a description of his hands as “curled dry leaves”. Clever, one might say. It makes one think. But after a moment’s pondering, any loving person who ever had a child would be revolted. It is the antithesis of what a child’s hand is. A baby’s hand is the soft subtle opening leaf stretching from the core of the plant, not the one whose life has gone, and which is decaying, ready to drop.

Most mothers are afraid of their baby dying. Babes are so small, so vulnerable, so defenceless. But Clanchy goes on to describe the heat of the child as “profligate”. The most charitable way of interpreting this word is “Excessive”. But why not use that word if that is what she means. “Profligate” is unusual, clever, different. It is the sort of word that modern critics might like. It means immoral and debauched. 

She says misericord is the only odd word, she thinks. 

But this word is very odd indeed. How “clever” to see the old school innocent “trailing Wordsworthian clouds of glory” as something debased and debauched, “a joke on his father”. Can we believe this woman loves the baby or the father?

Next, she thinks his “filaments will blow”. One might guess the baby has a fever. But if that were true, medical professionals would have stepped in and made sure the baby was kept cool. This mother says she does not know how to keep him wrapped. Well, she would destroy the baby by wrapping him, if he is overheated. It is hard not to think there is a death wish in the background.

She does not know how to “give him suck”. No first time mother does. True. Luckily the baby has an innate rooting reflex and will take charge, unless the mother resists and blocks. So many modern mothers do resist, sadly. With their breasts full of silicon, many will never be able to breast feed. At least this woman may wish to nurture her child. She says she has “no idea” about him. What this means is that she is completely cut off from her own instinctual mothering responses. In this she is merely typical of the twenty first century western woman, emotionally cut off from herself or her baby. You could say she is telling the truth for her kind. 

But this should not be poetry. A poet has to have more to offer.

The author says she is writing the poem from her memories rather than from immediate experience.

It is said that women have their memory of giving birth unconsciously blocked, or they would never have another child for the pain is too great to contemplate. To remember a baby’s head as “small as a cat’s” is utterly delusional, however. The most noticeable thing about every baby is that the head is huge in relation to the body. There would be no pain in child birth if human heads were as small as cats. The soft spot on the top of the head, “hot as smelted coin” is another piece of specious cleverness. It is not remotely true, unless that incredible vulnerability burned itself into her. It is a strange thing to feel your way, almost inside the skull of a newborn. It is wonderfully soft, yielding and warm.

Then there is a burst of imagination around the downy hair of the baby. But it is a not realistic comparison. She has not met or touched a “rare snow creature”. Yet that is what she “starts with”, she says. The baby is thus a rare snow creature that you cannot get close to. It is a rare “beast”. Either that or it is an “emperor dying on cushions”. What it is not is a human being, wonderfully adapted to meet and love its mother, waiting for tenderness, care and love.

How can the editor approvingly describe the baby as “this alien.” How many aliens do we greet with love?

Is this then the truth about modern love? Is this what the best modern poetry has to tell us about love?