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Poetry is older than religion and probably not much younger than the origin of human speech itself. Prior to the advent of writing , we only have a suggestive hint of events from the myths and folklore
that survived via oral transmission. We know that rhyming chants and songs were common to every so-called primitive culture that managed to limp through into modern times , when poets have sometimes tried
to connect to that archaic sensibility :
We are the music makers.
And we are the dreamers of dreams.
Wandering by lone sea-breakers ,
And sitting by desolate streams -
World-losers and world-forsakers ,
On whom the pale moon gleams :
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever , it seems.
This is an excerpt from Arthur O'Shaughnessy's Ode of 1874 , set to music by Elgar in 1912. In a W.H Auden poem of 1936 , the conceit has become paranoid :
You are the town and We are the clock.
We are the guardians of the gate in the rock.
The Two.
On your left and on your right ,
In the day and in the night ,
We are watching you.
Charles Causley was a modest Cornish poet who fought in the navy in the second world war and started publishing his
poems in the 1950s. He wrote “I am the great sun” with the opening announcement 'From a Normandy Crucifix of 1632' :
I am the great sun, but you do not see me ,
I am your husband, but you turn away.
I am the captive, but you do not free me ,
I am the captain but you will not obey.
I am the truth, but you will not believe me ,
I am the city where you will not stay ….
Such inauspicious times as ours deem poetry a waste of time , with little or no economic heft. Its worth remembering that one of the founders of modern poetry , the austere T.S. Eliot , wrote his seminal work (
The Waste Land) whilst working in a bank. An earlier version had the title He do the police in different voices. As in some arty film noir , its message remains just out of
reach throughout. We are no nearer to what the poet is trying to get at by its end than we were at its beginning. The elongated shadows of high culture stretch out over the course of
this voiceover “narrative” , which projects a mood of heightened (if bookish) anxiety and alienation across every meandering stanza. He do the bamboozle in different voices.
We depart , as so often from this dark corner , with the words of Philip Larkin ringing in our ears :
Sometimes you hear , fifth-hand , as epitaph : He chucked up everything and just cleared off.
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