Nothing now can ever come to any good

I love the funeral scene in IT Crowd where Reynholm Industries’ 2IC prefaces his eulogy by saying with great solemnity: “I’d like to begin by reading a poem that I saw in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral.” The surface joke here (I think) is the incongruity of elevated oratory and pop culture, but the underlying point is that pop culture topples elevation (indeed it’s supposed to). What starts as a touching scene about love and death, in which a forgotten and somewhat ironic poem is dusted off, becomes a cliché of unreconstructed emotion, a kind of emoticon for feeling sad. When things are ‘popularised’ they lose their quality of exalted singularity, their holiness. The sheen of the coin is rubbed off in its wide circulation. The upside might be a democratic redistribution of wealth, but the flipside is that the gold is gone. What we love, we love to death.

So now I’d like to share with you a poem that I saw in the show IT Crowd.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Minister Describes Fall of Icarus as "Tragic"

Of course, the 24 hour news cycle has changed things somewhat: most of us pause for a moment or two to hear the announcement about the boy falling out of the sky before we turn quite leisurely away. And in that moment there is a breathless expectation that someone in a suit will capture for us the momentousness of what has happened. However banal and bleedingly obvious it might seem when a politician labels a disaster as ‘tragic,’ ‘shocking,’ ‘appalling,’ or any other of his list of synonyms, there is also I think a genuine satisfaction of a genuine need. Human suffering and natural catastrophe demand language. Words that both gauge and contain their depths, and words delivered in a voice of authority. In fact these labels, though they seem pointless, move beyond mere verbalising into the realm of religious incantation. The blessing of a priest; the elevation of the ordinary into the sacred. It is also an acknowledgement, the same one Breughel's painting so conspicuously lacks, that something amazing has happened.

Poetry Challenge

Though I think poetry is tremendously important, I am not myself a writer of poetry. I gave that up after some adolescent attempts that, though long since destroyed, still bring a blush of shame to my cheeks. However, there are some ideas best (or only) expressed in verse, and since in this case I can’t follow Philip Larkin’s advice and write what I want to read, I thought I’d throw out a challenge to any aspiring poets who happen by this post.

I’ve been thinking a lot about boat people, oil spills, whaling, and how these issues circle and plumb our collective soul, and particularly as a country ‘girt' by sea. The word ‘seaworthy’ continues to float atop these thoughts. I feel constitutionally incapable of producing the poem they seem to demand, so I thought I’d cast them adrift and see if any passing poet hauls them aboard.

Any takers?

How everything turns away

Last week's offering made me think about other poems that respond to paintings. I like this one, "Musée des Beaux Arts," by W.H. Auden about Pieter Breughel's “Landscape with the Fall of Icharus.” It's a neat comment on the way those old Dutch paintings exquisitely rendered the ordinary, but it's also a poignant observation of the world's propensity to sail calmly away from the boy falling out of the sky.  The museum of the title is the Musée Royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique, which is well worth a visit if you're ever strolling up the Rue de Musée in Brussels.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's
horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns
away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
 

Sense and Sensuousness

With the advent of digital books and reading devices, many avid readers lamented the loss of the sensuous pleasures of reading: the bowed boards of old hardcovers; the feel of aging paper between the fingers; their fragrance of ruin. (For a lovely description of these effects, see the first paragraph of AS Byatt’s Possession.) These are indeed lost, or at least replaced with a new pleasure: the sleekness of plastic and the gentle clack of tiny keys. In some ways the loss is grievous and irretrievable, but in others, it is a virtue. If, like me, you’re seduced by the covers of new books – by their design and texture, the éclat they acquire from media exposure – the e-reader imposes some much-needed rigour to the reading diet. I’m not remotely tempted to download new and fashionable books on the strength of their glossy finish. Whereas, unleashed in Borders, I could easily spend a small fortune on books that will forever unfinished adorn my coffee table.