The Foul Rag And Bone Shop Of The Heart

      Flicking through a few volumes tonight I came across a poem by Thomas Blackburn (1916-1977), a poet almost completely unrepresented in contemporary anthologies and only vaguely represented on this thingamajig we call The Internet.   I have to confess that I'd not known of him until this evening when I was leafing through The Faber Book of 20th Century Verse (eds. John Heath-Stubbs and David Wright), which I'm fairly sure hasn't been updated since the release of the third edition in the mid-1970s.   The only poem of Blackburn's offered in that volume, however, is remarkably good, and I'd strongly encourage each of you to read it here -- because, as far as my searches reveal, it's not to be found anywhere else on the Net.   Here is the poem:

Oedipus

His shadow monstrous on the palace wall,
That swollen boy, fresh from his mother's arms,
The odour of her body on his palms,
Moves to the eyeless horrors of the hall.

And with what certainty the Revelation
Gropes for the sage's lips; a whining bark
Breaks from that crumpled linen in the dark,
To name the extremity of violation.

How should he not but tremble as the world
Contracts about him to his mother's room,
Red-curtained, stifling; in the firelit gloom
His bloated manhood on her bed is curled.

Then up and blind him, hands, pull blackness down
And let this woman on the strangling cord
Hang in the rich embroidery of her gown;
Then up and blind him, pull the blackness down.

But as he stumbles to the desert sands,
Bleeding and helpless as the newly born,
His daughters leading him with childish hands,
I see beyond all words his future shape,
Its feet upon the carcass of the ape
And round its mighty head, prophetic birds.

I'm not sure if it's significant or not that the poem is twenty-two lines long; certainly not in the sense that said number of lines is the standard length of Hebrew acrostics (or "abecedarian poetry"), like those contained in the Book of Psalms, but twenty-two lines is also the acrostic-liberated length of four of the five "chapters" of Lamentations (at least in the original Hebrew, and maintained in most English translations, including the KJAV).   But here's where Doctor J sets in with a stroke of self-proclaimed genius of observation that pries open this poem considerably (    ).   Do you want to know what it is? Probably not, so go on to the next post; if, however, you're willing to accept that wanting to know what this "stroke of genius" is means opening a Pandora's box (and Doc J prattling on at some length), then click here.

       Okay, you asked for it, you glutton for punishment, so here it is: the poem is also the same length as W.B. Yeats' oft-quoted "The Second Coming," which, if you don't know it already, you can read here.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

      It should be obvious even to the deafest of ears-- at least now-- that Yeats' poem is lurking in the arras behind Blackburn's, with the words "I see beyond all words his future shape" sounding quite eerily like Yeats' "but now I know / That twenty centuries of stony sleep," at least at the level of prophetic declaration and summary underscored by s-alliteration.   This is to say nothing of the correspondences between WBY's "indignant desert birds" and TB's "prophetic" ones, or Yeats's "rough beast" and Blackburn's "carcass of the ape," and the emphasis in both poems on the lower-bodies of such animals (TB's feet, WBY's "slow thighs").   I don't want to suggest that Blackburn' poem is an imitation of Yeats'; it's not.   Rather, it's a revision, and possible a furtherance, of it, a recasting of the form in relation to another "end-of-an-age" figure-- in fact, the antithesis figure to Christ, as posited by Yeats in A Vision.   Oedipus, for Yeats, was one of two central pre-Classical myths (the Leda myth being the other) that emphasized the tragical, the heroical and the individual, myths that found eventually meet their antitheses in the primary myths of the Christian era, ostensibly comedical, redemptive and collective, with Oedipus' antithesis being Christ (and the antithesis to Leda and the Swan being the Virgin and the Dove).   The story of Oedipus, then, is a kind of paradigm for the end of man, the beast tortured and re-childed by human transgression, an understanding given fine footing in Blackburn's poem with Oedipus being "bleeding and helpless as the newly born," and forced to lean on the leadership of his daughters, children themselves and also doomed to horrible fates.  

      In Yeats' figuration in A Vision, the antitype to that paradigm is the myth of Christian liberation, though Yeats certainly didn't accept that as an end of things; he, after all, anticipated the coming of another myth, supposedly to come around the year 2000, that would amount to a return, or a re-annunciation, of the Oedipus and Leda myths.    Put more simply, a new age with more in common with the pre-Classical periods would eventually emerge in to signal the waning age of the Classical/Christian period.   Seen in this light, Blackburn's poem may be more than just a reflection on a literary-dramatic-mythic character.   It may be an anticipation of where we're going, toward, perhaps, a new era of the tragical and the individual, an age it seems condemned both by fate and by human action to "pull the blackness down."   This is, though, not an entirely bad thing, for in such blackness is the spiritus mundi or the anima mundi, the great memory of the world, of its bits and pieces and thoughts and images, "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart" from which the poet (and humanity as a whole) orders and essays to understand that world-- and thus truly creates.   The prophetic vision, it seems, can come only from darkness, blindness, even what I'll coin "childedness," the situations which most depend upon what Yeats elsewhere calls "the mill of the mind." It's in the "empathy" (for lack of a better word) with Oedipus that the "I" of Blackburn's poem can see Oedipus' "total shape," can see with a different kind of inspiration that which is "beyond all words."

      Beyond, of course, yet not entirely: the poem is within words; but that which was imminent is left unstated, in the ellipsis of a cultural memory that reminds us what finally happened to Oedipus (exile and finally death at Colonus).  That knowledge, however, is left conspicuously immanent to both the poet and the poem's readers, both peculiarly individualized rather than collectivized, concerted to the tragical and the pitiable rather than the comedical and the restorative.   The Christian and comedic perspectives emphasize restoration, the happy-ending or the reunification and reconstitution of societies and or spirits.   The Oedipal and tragic perspectives emphasize isolation, the extent to which time constricts rather than expands, and the individual is progressively shut out from society and left to his own suffering.   The poet, it seems, at least in Blackburn's poem, can perhaps only understand the world through an understanding of his own blindness, through a perspective more intensely individuated and informed by the imaginary rather than the strictly-visual.   The figure of Oedipus is the touchstone for genuine lamentation, for what one might call the pity that passeth all understanding.   This is what the poet must understand, or at least it's one of the lessons the poet must learn: to depend upon the mind's eye, to depend upon that dark storehouse of the imagination as one only generally does when one's vision is most obscured, to depend upon and indeed embrace the lucidity of darkness.   This is also to see with the child's eye, driven more by imaginative association than identification by sight, creating most when knowledge does not provide.

      This is all, of course, getting quite complex, perhaps labouredly metaphysical (to say nothing or metaphorical), and even digressive.   With, however, all of the above said, to return to the poem, one can now be more impressed with its accomplishments of phrase and modulation. The poem doesn't quite slide into pretentious oracularity, as some might argue Yeats' poem does.    In fact, there's a kind of restraint that subverts one's expectations.   The almost Stevensian dislocation of "prophetic birds" in the final line leaves the poem in unexpected tonal declension; it has chosen understatement rather than grand-chorusing, which, given the subject matter, is a tad surprising (and effective).   Then there's that curious self-revision in the penultimate stanza that turns "Then up and blind him, hands, pull blackness down" into "Then up and blind him, pull the blackness down."   The latter has a strange kind of raillery to it, a kind of rough and stubborn and almost "damn-the-torpedoes" heroic sensibility that carefully curtails the desire to pity Oedipus unnecessarily.   It's a nice trick, because the easier path, I sure, would have been to play to the sentimental, to indulge in an appeal to sympathy; but, given the subject, it's wiser, as he's done, to give the line a tough humour to remind us, however briefly, that one of the things we generally tend to appreciate about tragic figures is that they accept their fates instead of simply resigning themselves to them.   It's also a nice touch-- or merely a serendipity?-- that the revised line falls into a perfect iambic pattern that vaguely recalls Shakespearean battle-cries (like, say, Macbeth's final words, or the end of Henry V's St. Crispin's Day speech).

      And there are the number very finely-turned phrases: "swollen boy," "the eyeless horrors of the hall," "this woman on the strangling cord," "his bloated manhood," and even "the rich embroidery of her gown" which sounds to me suggestively Housman-like (c.f., "And set you at your threshold down / Townsman of a stiller town" from "To An Athlete Dying Young").   The poem also does a nice job of seeming to collapse temporal dimensions, as if to suggest a logic of determinism, as if to remind us that the various stages of Oedipus' being (as baby, as swollen boy, as man with his own manhood, as father) have been inevitable stages in his own unidirectional fate, toward the remaking of the blood-sotten child.    These times, these states of being within a chronology, are constantly overlapping with one another, those states not simply continuous but conspicuously and uncomfortably contiguous.   This is a very nice touch, indeed, and it's accomplished with such seeming simplicity that one might not immediately realize the calculation of it.   The poem's one awkward bit ("to name the extremity of the violation"), which on the first reading jars the rhythm, then even seems to develop a raison d'etre, to be as discordant as Tiresias' revelation.    I still think that line doesn't quite work, but at least there's an argument to be made for it.   So, all told, the poem works very effectively and very economically, and it does so within some potentially very demanding strictures-- all the while seeming rather effortless.   Indeed, a rhythm that might at first seem stage-managed by the tradition of iambic pentameter becomes, with more careful consideration, almost subliminally effective in suggesting a vatic articulation more assured than measured.   In short, it's a damned good poem, and one that grows with scrutiny rather than shrinking under it.

      Unfortunately, I can't say if any of Blackburn's other poems are as good as this one.    Here are a few others for your consideration, but none of them in my estimation are as strong or as rewarding.   But Blackburn's "Oedipus" is one of those poems that should probably be put more noticably along side some of the pieces by Larkin and Hughes and Plath as mid-century pieces that could survive suprisingly well into the ages.    If only, that is, people know it's out there.

---

      Read "An Invitation"

An Invitation

Holding with shaking hands a letter from some
Official — high up, no doubt in his Ministry —
I note that I am invited to Birmingham,
There pedagogues to address, for a decent fee.
‘We like to meet,’ he writes, ‘men eminent
In the field of letters each year’ — and that’s well put,
Though I find his remark not wholly relevant
To this red-eyed fellow whose mouth tastes rank as soot.
No doubt what he’s thinking of is poetry
When ‘Thomas Blackburn’ he writes, and not the fuss
A life makes when it has no symmetry,
Though, of course the term, ‘a poet’, being posthumous,
Since I’m no stiff, is inappropriate.
What I can confirm is the struggle that never lets up
Between the horses of Plato beneath my yoke,
One after Light, and for Hell not giving a rap,
The other only keen on infernal smoke;
And poems . . . ?   From time to time they commemorate
Some particularly dirty battle between these two.
I put the letter down — what’s the right note?
‘Dear Sir,’ I type, ‘how nice to speak to you!’

      Read "Café Talk"

Café Talk

'Of course,' I said, 'we cannot hope to find
What we are looking for in anyone;
They glitter, maybe, but are not the sun,
This pebble here, that bit of apple rind.
Still, it's the Alpine sun that makes them burn,
And what we're looking for, some indirect
Glint of itself each of us may reflect,
And so shed light about us as we turn.'
Sideways she looked and said, 'How you go on!'
And was the stone and rind, their shinings gone.

'It is some hard dry scale we must break through,
A deadness round the life. I cannot make
That pebble shine. Its clarity must take
Sunlight unto itself and prove it true.
It is our childishness that clutters up
With scales out of the past a present speech,
So that the sun's white finger cannot reach
An adult prism.'
                'Will they never stop,
Your words?' she said and settled to the dark.

'But we use words, we cannot grunt or bark,
Use any surer means to make that first
Sharp glare of origin again appear
Through the marred glass,' I cried, 'but can you hear?'
'Quite well, you needn't shout.' I felt the thirst
Coil back into my body till it shook,
And, 'Are you cold?' she said, then ceased to look
And picked a bit of cotton from her dress.
Out in the square a child began to cry,
What was not said buzzed round us like a fly.

I knew quite well that silence was my cue,
But jabbered out, 'This meeting place we need,
If we can't find it, still the desire may feed
And strengthen on the acts it cannot do.
By suffered depredations we may grow
To bear our energies just strong enough,
And at the last through perdurable stuff
A little of their radiance may show:
I f we keep still.' Then she, 'It's getting late.'
A waiter came and took away a plate.

Then from the darkness an accordion;
'These pauses, love, perhaps in them, made free,
Life slips out of its gross machinery,
And turns upon itself in unison.'
It was quite dark now you must understand
And something of a red mouth on a wall
Joined with the music and the alcohol
And pushed me to the fingers of her hand.
Well, there it was, itself and quite complete,
Accountable, small bones there were and meat.

It did not press on mine or shrink away,
And, since no outgone need can long invest
Oblivion with a living interest,
I drew back and had no more words to say.
Outside the streets were like us and quite dead.
Yet anything more suited to my will,
I can't imagine, than our very still
Return to no place;
As the darkness shed
Increasing whiteness on the far icefall,
A growth of light there was; and that is all.

      Read "Trewarmett"

Trewarmett

Darkness, feathers are shed;
These birds are gathered back
By the enormous hand
That cast them at dawn seaward
In crumbs of living bread
To their forefathering rock.

Piercing the lense of a wave,
From the beat of it and the swell
The feathered life they have
Is indivisible,
As from the undertow
And skin of a nervous sea
Fish and themselves also
They reap perpetually.
Being clothed and without a seam
In the pouring waters they thread,
How can they miss their aim,
By the loose surge targetted
Forever towards their home.

Darkness, feathers are shed,
From this bird-whitened stone
I watch a cormorant pluck
Life from the nervous sea,
With a moon behind my back,
Conscious of God knows what
Anxious irrelevance,
As these birds swim in the eye
Of the green circumstance
From which I am undone
By my duplicity.

Watching a bird, and a man
Watching a bird in the surf,
Watched by a man, and that faint
Rim of horizon far off
Where darkness breeds from a glint
Of metal, I wait for the tide
To work its equation out.
Though hunger, compulsive dread,
By a moon’s impetus
That takes the sea by the throat,
Are ghosts forever unlaid,
I assert as it gathers up all
Of night to one moment of stress
That is perpetual,
My own selfconsciousness.
The waters boom and rave,
Being human what else can I have
Than such good and growing pain,
Between the living and dead,
On this sea-shaken stone.

---

      By the way, the title of this entry, a phrase invoked by Blackburn in a 1962 discussion of poetry and poetic-principles for The London Magazine, is from W.B. Yeats' "The Circus Animals' Desertion."

The Circus Animals' Desertion

I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride.

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

       And here is Yeats' "Leda And The Swan."

Leda And The Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in the bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
                        Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

(Phew, I'm exhausted.   Entirely too much writing for a Saturday morning.   I may have to have some "toast" for breakfast.   )