Derek Walcott – “The Schooner ‘Flight'” Part I “Adios Carenage”

The Schooner ‘Flight’ is a long poem written from the viewpoint of a biracial Trinidadian sailor Shabine, “red nigger” as he calls himself. The poem veers between blank verse and rhymed verse, between patois and standard English, just like the identity of the speaker, who says “I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me/and either I’m nobody or I’m a nation.” It’s hard to say when the poem is set: there is a reference to a car, but it’s also when schooners were still more than tourist vessels, so I’d venture 1950s? As the poem opens, the speaker blows out the light and leaves his home and his wife Maria Concepcion to the port. The Misleading Footnote says “carenage” is a place where boats are cleaned and repaired, which is true, but it’s also a town in Trinidad and it’s clear to me that’s what Walcott means.

As the speaker leaves the house, it’s before dawn. His mean neighbour is sweeping her yard and he almost feels like telling her off, because his wife sleeps lightly. He gets into a route taxi (which I assume is like a share taxi) and its driver, seeing his bags, comments that he must be now leaving for good. Shabine doesn’t answer. He looks in the rearview mirror and sees somebody who looks very much like him, crying. He loves his country, but he’s also fed up with chaos and corruption. He misses his wife terribly and in a beautiful long personification he sees her going to bed every time when he sees the sunset, which makes him think of her slipping in her bright-coloured nightie under the covers. He loves his wife and children, though the simile is somewhat ambiguous – “as poets love the poetry/that kills them, as drowned sailors love sea”. In the final stanza he compares the act of writing poetry to sailing: language is the wind, sails are the pages, and his winding and knotting ropes is the act of writing itself.

Derek Walcott – “A Far Cry from Africa”

This short poem, written in 1950s, was inspired by the bloody Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. Walcott, who was himself mixed-race (both of his grandfathers were white), expresses a very mixed feelings about the rebellion, taking neither the side of the Kikuyu, whom he compares to the flies feeding on blood, nor the whites. Scholars may discuss the “salients of colonial policy”, but this does not justify either the death of a murdered white baby or “savages, expendable as Jews”. He uses an image of “beaters”, people helping in the hunt by scaring animals out of their hiding places, beating the rushes to make a flock of ibises fly. This is an image as old as time and because of its repetitiveness could be seen as nature’s law. But man uses brutish violence in order to assert his elevated status and courage. “Brutish necessity wipes its hands/Upon the napkin of a dirty cause”, and like with the Spanish Civil War the ideals are used to justify violence. The poet identifies himself as “poisoned with the blood of both”, which could refer both to his white and black ancestry, but also the animal and human characteristics fighting with each other, since the previous verse says “the gorilla wrestles with the superman”. The poem ends with a series of rhetorical questions about how the poet can love both the English language and his African heritage.

Thom Gunn – “From the Wave”, “Still Life”, “The Missing”

“From the Wave” is a description of surfers, written in a regular 8-4-8-4 quatrains. It vaguely reminds me of a Romantic poem, but I could not remember which one, and both Google and various AI search engines really fail to give answers. (AI sucks at analysing poetry, BTW, even at the most basic level as counting verses and syllables.) It’s also not really the common metre of the English ballad or hymn, because there the even lines are 6 syllables long. So I’ll let this matter rest and instead focus on the poem, which describes in detail the wave rising and the surfers emerging, balancing upon the wave in a way that they seemingly learned from the wave itself. Indeed, they become “half wave, half men”, until they slide down its face to the shore, and after some paddling they swim out to the sea again. There is a real Wordsworthian vibe about this poem, with men becoming one with nature.

The last two poems are much darker, since they come from the collection The Man with Night Sweats published in the 1980s and dealing with the AIDS epidemic. “Still Life” is an ambiguous title, because “still life” is an art history term for paintings of artfully composed objects. But it is also a description of the poet’s friend on a hospital bed and thus could be read as “he continued to live” or “he was not moving, but still alive”. The poet describes in regular rhyming stanzas the dying man, his greyish-yellow skin and how he seemed not to be himself anymore, apart from the breath he could not still give up “as a life-long breather”, as he puts it ironically, and the breathing tube in his mouth gives his face an astonished look.

“The Missing” is also a formally traditional poem in iambic pentameter quatrains. The poet thinks about his dying or dead friends and imagines himself as a half-finished statue. He felt he was a part of a community, friends of friends, and one could also add, lovers of lovers, because though the poem is not explicit, it uses sexualised metaphors such as “supple entwinement” or “unlimited embrace”. It’s not only sex he received from his community: “Their push kept me as firm as their support”. Now with so many friends dead he feels less-defined, like this half-finished statue, “abandoned incomplete”.

Thom Gunn – “Black Jackets”, “My Sad Captains”

Thom Gunn started his career with writing fairly formal verses, which prompted critics to include him in the British school of poetry of the 1950s called The Movement, together with, among others, Philip Larkin. “Black Jackets” is such an early poem, describing in rhyming quatrains the experience of a working-class boy in a pub, looking at his own black leather jacket and those worn by other men in the pub. In the pause between songs on the radio or the jukebox he hears the leather crack and he looks admiringly on the scuff marks on its sleeve. The similar jackets worn by other men reflect flickers of light, like ships in the Bay. The boy thinks back to his initiation into what I assume was a bikers’ gang, when on his shoulders they put the tattoos: one of them was the name of the group, “The Knights”, and the other is the slogan “Born to Loose”.

When Gunn moved to the USA, he experimented more freely with the form, and “My Sad Captains” is a syllabic unrhymed verse. “My sad captains” is the phrase borrowed from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, when the vanquished Marc Antony calls his generals for one last night of partying. But who are these sad captains for Gunn? It remains unclear, although he refers to them as men, “a few friends, and/a few with historical/names.” They could be people (personally known to the poet or not) whom he used to idolize, but many critics also think that he could be thinking about his past poems or his past poetic models. My gut feeling is they are Gunn’s dead idols, who in their posthumous life are “winnowed from failures” and move to an exalted orbit of stars.

A.K. Ramanujan – “Foundlings in the Yukon”

After a spring break I am finishing the Ramanujan section with the poem that didn’t make it to the tenth edition of the NAEL, “Foundlings in the Yukon”. It is inspired by a news item about some pleistocene-era seeds found by miners which, when planted, sprang to life and produced leaves in 48 hours. The rest of the poem is an attempt at a metaphorical explanation of this haste, as if there were some pent-up energy in these seeds waiting to be released, like Rilke got relief at the Duino castle from his creative block. The seeds are both older and younger than contemporary plants.

A. K. Ramanujan – “Self-Portrait”, “Elements of Composition”

I have a bit of a problem with including Ramanujan in the NAEL since he was born in India and spent most of his adult life teaching at the University of Chicago. The argument that he was born in British India is a bit weak. The first poem, ‘Self-Portrait’, is very short and describes the speaker’s surprise when he doesn’t recognise himself when he glances at himself in the mirror, but sees a portrait of a stranger, ‘often signed in a corner/by my father’. The second, ‘Elements of Composition’, is much longer but, like the first, is written in free verse. The title is reminiscent of various academic textbooks, such as David Irving’s Elements of English Composition, popular in the 19th century. But it’s not about composing an essay, it’s about the poet analysing himself and his own composition, starting with biology (sperm and egg) and chemistry (the elements). From there, he moves on to his mind, his senses, his family’s memories (his uncle playing shadow puppets with his fingers, his sister’s panicked face before her wedding). The memories are not only his own, because he remembers a newspaper clipping of a place in Nairobi that his friend carried in his wallet, the place that might have been destroyed during the riots of the 1970s. He also remembers the lepers of Madurai in the shadow of ancient temples and the masked processions of Muslims celebrating Muharram. The whole complex culture of India passes through him and also connects him to the West, like the Hindu story of a god who divided himself into a female and a male, so similar to Plato’s androgynous figure. As he assembles all these elements, he is also aware that he will disintegrate into them, like a “caterpillar on a leaf, eating/being eaten”, an allusion to the Upanishads: “What eats, is eaten, and what is eaten, eats”.

Nadine Gordimer – “The Moment before the Gun Went Off”

The accident happened during a hunting trip when Marais was driving his truck with Lucas in the back, the black man on the outside, the white man on the outside. Marais’s rifle was in the repair shop, so he took his father’s old rifle. He was sure it was unloaded because his father had taught him never to bring a loaded gun into the house, so he did not check. He was also taught never to travel with a loaded gun in the car. When Lucas saw the kudu buck that Marais wanted to cull, he tapped the roof three times, which was thier signal to look left. Marais drove over a pothole at high speed and the gun went off.

The narrator regrets that Marais, a well-known man in the neighbourhood, was even asked to swear to this version of events. South Africa, in their view, is going… well, south, with riots in the cities and blacks being allowed to sleep with whites. The latter helps us date the story after 1985, when the provisions of the so-called Immorality Act banning interracial sex were repealed. The narrative paints a picture of a besieged community where all the white farmers, including Marais, have radio links between each other’s houses and cars, and there have been cases of people being killed by land mines. So the unspoken thought of everyone who talks about the accident is: it could have been worse.

Now there is a description of the funeral, with a very expensive coffin, clearly paid for by Marais (blacks always love to splash out on funerals). Lucas’s young widow is there, obviously pregnant (of course) and with a young son, too small to understand what’s going on, but very solemn (blacks don’t shield their children). Lucas’s mother, whose parents also worked for Van de Vyvers, is also there. She can’t be more than in her late thirties (blacks start to have children at puberty), and she’s not looking at Marais, only at the grave, where Marais is also looking. Marais’s wife, Alida, is there in her Sunday hat to show her respect. The story then returns to the moment of Lucas’s death. They were both excited and happy, and when Marais saw Lucas’s body fall, he thought he had just had a fright and fallen. How will they ever know – the unsympathetic white SA liberals and the foreign press – that Lucas – and here the Chekhov gun goes off – was Marais’s son.

Nadine Gordimer – “The Moment before the Gun Went Off”

This very short short story by the doyenne of South African literature is set in the late 1980s, when apartheid was coming to an end. It is set in rural South Africa and the narrative voice clearly represents the point of view of white South African farmers, such as the main character of the story, Marais Van der Vyver. The narrator is not a specific person, but a kind of collective Greek chorus of Boer farmers. The meaning of the title is (partly) explained in the very first sentence – Marais has shot and killed one of his black farmhands. It was an accident (of course), but it’s going to be all over the national and international media because the killer was white, the victim was black, and Marais is a leader of the local party (presumably the National Party). The narrator’s main concern seems to be how the incident will be portrayed in the anti-apartheid media, especially the foreign media, and how they will not believe Marais’s statements that it was a terrible accident, that Luke was his friend, and that he will look after the widow and children. Of course, his white neighbours, who have known Marais since he was a shy boy, won’t understand; unlike people outside South Africa, who see this country as full of white villains oppressing black victims, they won’t understand that many farmers have a black friend of some kind, not the kind you dine with, but a friend nonetheless. The media also won’t report that when Marais came to the police station with Luke’s body to explain what had happened, he cried and the officer was so embarrassed for him that he went outside to let him collect himself.

Philip Larkin – “The Explosion”, “This Be the Verse”, “Aubade”

“The Explosion” is a poem about a mining disaster, but it does not refer to any particular event – apparently Larkin was inspired to write it after watching a BBC documentary about the British mining industry and its dangers. It’s written in unrhymed three-line stanzas. It begins with an ominous scene of the miners marching towards the “tall gates standing open”, unaware that they are marching towards death. This being England, where coal mines are often located in rural areas, one of them chases a rabbit, fails to catch it, finds a lark’s nest instead, brings it to show his mates, and then carefully puts it back on the ground. “At noon there was a tremor”; the cows stopped chewing and the sun dimmed. The next verse is in italics to indicate that it’s a quotation from the memorial service. When the preacher says “we shall see them face to face”, the dead men’s wives do see them in their imaginations, portrayed as a kind of hero, “gold as on a coin”, larger than life, walking towards them, and one of them showing them “the eggs unbroken”. The last stanza is cut off after one line, as if the speaker had choked on his tears at the image of the tiny, fragile eggs.

“This Be the Verse” is probably the poem responsible for thousands of babies not being born. The title alludes to a poem called “Requiem” by R. L. Stevenson, which was placed on his grave in accordance with the instructions given in the line “This be the verse you grave for me”. But Larkin’s own epitaph is not like Stevenson’s lyrical epitaph – like many of his poems, it begins with a deliberately crude line: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”, and although the rest of the poem suggests that Larkin is referring to the psychological damage done by parents to their children, there is also an ambiguity derived from the original meaning of the word “fuck” as referring to the sexual intercourse that brings us all into existence. But for Larkin, procreation doesn’t mean passing on all sorts of nice qualities, only your faults, even if you don’t mean to. The parents themselves were ‘fucked up’ by the older generation, and so on. So Larkin’s advice is to “get out as early as you can” (with a possible reference to coitus interruptus) “and don’t have any children yourself”.

And finally, “Aubade”, a beautiful poem in which Larkin stares mortality in the face. The title refers to a medieval genre in which lovers mourn the approach of dawn because they must part. Like “This Be the Verse”, it also begins with the crude line “I work all day and get half-drunk at night”, and when the speaker wakes up at 4am, he is alone, unlike the medieval lovers, and unlike them, the approaching dawn makes him think he is one day closer to death. He can’t help thinking about where, when and how he will die, even though he knows it’s pointless. What keeps him awake is not regret for wasted opportunities, but the simple fact of death, “not to be anywhere/and soon”. Larkin rejects both the consolation of religion, “that vast moth-eaten musical brocade/created to pretend we never die”, and philosophy, with its “specious reasoning” that once we’re dead we won’t know it, so it’s irrational to be afraid of something we won’t feel. So this fear always remains like a small spot at the edge of our vision, and blows up when we have no company or drink to quell it. Courage doesn’t help, it’s only for not frightening others. “Death is no different whined at than withstood.” But fortunately it is getting light outside, the busy day is beginning, the “rented world”, as Larkin calls it because we do not really own it, “begins to rouse”. The poem is mostly written in iambic pentameter, with the penultimate line of each stanza reduced to trimeter, and it’s interesting that in the first four stanzas these lines were the starkest: “of dying and being dead”, “to be nowhere” etc., but in the last stanza we get “work has to be done”, which is hardly optimistic, but at least gives the reader an idea of how to fill the time between now and inevitable death.

Philip Larkin – “High Windows”, “Sad Steps”, “Homage to a Government”

“High Windows”, one of the best-known poems by Larkin, begins like many poems of his, with a down-to-earth, even brutal pronouncement, and then moves towards something like transcendence (or, to use a typically Larkinian litotes, not unlike transcendence.

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

So goes the first famous stanza, in which Larkin establishes himself as a rather unpleasant, dirty old man who fantasises about what kids are up to these days. But as the next stanza reveals, he doesn’t just envy the boy for being able to have sex with the girl without fear of pregnancy, he also envies them for the freedom from outdated customs and traditions that makes their lives “the long slide // To happiness, endlessly” (Larkin is very fond of enjambment between stanzas, which gives his poems a kind of fluid movement). Then he wonders – did old people forty years ago look at him and his contemporaries with similar feelings, envying their freedom from religious prescriptions, and also imagine their lives as a long slide to happiness? (Incidentally, Larkin’s twenties fell during the Second World War, and although he was exempted from military service on medical grounds, I don’t think it was a particularly good time to be young). The answer to his question is not in words but in an image that comes to mind – the high windows of the title, beyond which there is nothing but the expanse of the deep blue sky, offering the promise of endless freedom to the one looking through – or perhaps the speaker, as an old man, feels separated by the glass of his age from the freedom enjoyed by the young?

The title of “Sad Steps” alludes to sonnet 31 of Astrophil and Stella by Larkin’s namesake, Sir Philip Sidney. But like “High Windows”, it begins with a deliberately prosaic image of the speaker “groping back to bed after a piss”, opening the curtains and startled by the image of the moonlit night. He fights hard against surrendering to the poetic beauty of the night, using language that deliberately sounds like very bad poetry, calling the moon a “lozenge of love” and escalating to “O wolves of memory! Immense!” Then he ends the stanza with his characteristic enjambment “No//One shivers slightly, looking up there”. The enjambment cuts through like the merciless light of the moon, which reminds him of the “strength and pain” of being young, and although he is no longer young, he knows that many people out there are.

“Homage to a Government” is a fine poem inspired by some very dubious political views. In 1969, Harold Wilson’s government decided to reduce the number of British military bases “East of Suez”, as the British rather vaguely call everything that happens in their foreign policy in Asia. The poem does not rhyme, but repeats whole words, once using a homophone “hear-here”, and the constant repetition reminds me of the constant use of political sound bites, or whatever the spin doctors decide is the “message of the day”, although I am not sure it was as bad in 1969 as it is now. Larkin sees the British military presence in clearly positive terms, as something that has kept these places ‘orderly’, and now they will have to keep themselves orderly. It is a bit ironic, given that one of those places was Singapore, which I understand has done a pretty good job of keeping itself in order since then. But what Larkin laments is not primarily the fact that all these far-flung places will fall into disorder without the British army, but the fact that it signals the end of British imperial power. Britain becomes a shell of its former self, with the statues still on pedestals, but “our children won’t know it’s a different country/All we can hope to leave them now is money”. Sordid economic calculation replaced what Larkin clearly held to be high ideals (albeit highly contestable ideals).