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.
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
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?
