Mark McGuinness reads and discusses a passage from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Mark McGuinness

By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

PART THREE

There passed a weary time. Each throat
Was parched, and glazed each eye.
A weary time! a weary time!
How glazed each weary eye,
When looking westward, I beheld
A something in the sky.

At first it seemed a little speck,
And then it seemed a mist:
It moved and moved, and took at last
A certain shape, I wist.

A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist!
And still it neared and neared:
As if it dodged a water-sprite,
It plunged and tacked and veered.

With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
We could not laugh nor wail;
Through utter drought all dumb we stood!
I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,
And cried, A sail! a sail!

With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
Agape they heard me call:
Gramercy! they for joy did grin,
And all at once their breath drew in,
As they were drinking all.

See! see! (I cried) she tacks no more!
Hither to work us weal;
Without a breeze, without a tide,
She steadies with upright keel!

The western wave was all a-flame
The day was well nigh done!
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright Sun;
When that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the Sun.

And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,
(Heaven’s Mother send us grace!)
As if through a dungeon-grate he peered,
With broad and burning face.

Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)
How fast she nears and nears!
Are those her sails that glance in the Sun,
Like restless gossameres?

Are those her ribs through which the Sun
Did peer, as through a grate?
And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a Death? and are there two?
Is Death that woman’s mate?

Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Night-Mare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold.

The naked hulk alongside came,
And the twain were casting dice;
“The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!”
Quoth she, and whistles thrice.

The Sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the dark;
With far-heard whisper, o’er the sea.
Off shot the spectre-bark.

This is a passage from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s most famous poem, one of the best-known poems in the English language. It’s because of this poem that we talk about having an albatross around your neck. It’s also the source of the famous lines, ‘Water, water, everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink.’ So, in today’s podcast, I’m going to talk about what makes this poem so justly famous, and what an extraordinary storyteller, as well as an amazing poet, Coleridge was.

Interestingly, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was devised as a conscious literary experiment, a little bit like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, another Romantic classic.

It was Coleridge’s main contribution to a book called Lyrical Ballads, which he published in collaboration with William Wordsworth in 1798. The idea behind this book was a deliberate poetic programme: to make poetry more relatable by, in Wordsworth’s famous phrase, using ‘language really used by men’, instead of the rather ornate and highly artificial poetic diction and elevated poetic subjects which had been the stock-in-trade of poetry throughout the 18th century.

So, the book is not only seen as a cornerstone of Romanticism in English poetry but pretty well the beginning of modern poetry – the kind of poetry that we write today. I mean, in the sense of personal reflections on one’s life and experience, and expressing that. It’s why we typically associate poetry with personal experience, emotional expression and authenticity.

Now, that’s the main project, if you like, of Lyrical Ballads, and it was divided into two categories, as Coleridge explained in his book Biographia Literaria:

The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural, and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real … For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life.

Coleridge took the lead on the supernatural, while Wordsworth concentrated on poems about ordinary life. So as I say, The Ancient Mariner started as a conscious literary experiment. It’s a bit like a writing prompt you would get in a modern creative writing class, so sometimes these things do work, even for the most Romantic of poets. But it’s also pretty clear that Coleridge had accidentally tapped into the wellspring of his poetic genius, which if you ask me, in some ways goes even deeper than Wordsworth’s, certainly to darker places than Wordsworth ever plumbed in his poetry.

Picking up on the title, Lyrical Ballads: a ballad, as we’ve seen before on the podcast, is a traditional form associated with songs and storytelling. Thousands of traditional ballads that have survived, often being recorded by folklorists around the time that Coleridge was writing his own ballad. And Coleridge was thoroughly immersed in this folk tradition. He would have heard ballads in childhood, in taverns, wherever, and he alluded to traditional ballads in several poems.

And what we have here is a literary ballad, which, as the name suggests, is taking the oral tradition and making something a little more refined and extended than the oral ballads composed and sung and handed down by generations of unliterary and often illiterate balladeers. We’ve seen a few examples of the literary ballad, or ballad-like poems, in the podcast already, such as Edward Lear’s ‘The Jumblies’, Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’, Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Oxen’ and W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’.

Zooming in on today’s passage, this is from the beginning of Part Three of The Ancient Mariner. There are seven parts altogether. Immediately, that marks it out from most folk ballads, which are typically much shorter. This was a ballad to be read, or maybe read aloud, well beyond the kind of length that would typically be recited from memory.

Just to fill you in on the action: Part One famously begins,

It is an ancient Mariner,

So, in Coleridge’s words, in the marginal notes that he added to later editions of the poem, ‘An Ancient Mariner meeteth three Gallants bidden to a wedding-feast, and detaineth one’. The wedding guest is trying to get into the reception, he’s probably gasping for a drink after the church service, and he’s stopped by this Ancient Mariner, this old seaman with a long grey beard and glittering eye, who insists on telling him a story. In spite of himself, the wedding guest is, as Coleridge’s words, ‘spell-bound by the eye of the old seafaring man, and constrained to hear his tale’. So, that’s the framing device of the whole poem.

The Mariner says his ship set out with a good wind in fair weather, but was driven by a storm towards the South Pole. Then an albatross appears, which the sailors initially think is an omen of good fortune. But the Ancient Mariner, again, in Coleridge’s words, ‘inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen’. This makes him unpopular among his shipmates who were afraid of bad luck – and indeed soon afterwards, they find themselves becalmed. This is where the famous lines come:

Day after day, day after day,

Water, water, every where,

At this point the Mariner’s shipmates turn on him and hang the albatross around the Mariner’s neck, ‘in order to throw the whole guilt on the Ancient Mariner’. He was the Jonah, the scapegoat for the crew.

And this is where we pick up the story with today’s passage, from the beginning of Part Three of the poem:

There passed a weary time. Each throat

These opening lines contain the whole poem in microcosm. That first sentence, even, ‘They passed a weary time’, is the story of the whole poem, really. They passed a weary time, and the Mariner is going to weary the Wedding Guest and the rest of us by telling his story. Time is a really crucial quality in this poem: it speeds up at certain points in the action, it slows down at others. And yet, in another sense, the whole thing seems to take place outside of time, on a plane of magical or mythological reality.

Looking again at these first four lines, they constitute a classic ballad stanza form called common metre, where you alternate lines of four stresses and three stresses.

There passed a weary time. Each throat

This is the baseline metre of the whole poem. You can hear how it chugs along steadily and propels us through the poem, so it’s no surprise that this stanza has been used for storytelling from time immemorial.

But that’s not the whole story of this stanza, because Coleridge has added an extra two lines:

This is very typical of his practice in this poem: to have some stanzas longer than others for poetic and dramatic effect. In this case, it introduces a new piece of the action.

They passed a weary time. Each throat

Can you hear how the repetition of ‘weary’ and ‘weary time’ creates the effect of stasis? Because they’re becalmed, it’s wearying, it’s boring. The repetition is like the child in the back seat in a traffic jam, who keeps saying ‘I’m bored’.

And yet, with the addition of those two lines, suddenly the action starts up again:

When looking westward, I beheld

They’re becalmed, and it feels like it’s going to go on forever, and then suddenly he’s introduced this new element, and he’s done it by adding two lines to the stanza. Extra lines were not unheard of in traditional ballads; quite often, there would be an extra refrain to heighten the moment. But hardly anyone varied stanza length as extensively and expressively as Coleridge did in The Ancient Mariner. He’s taking this traditional folk tune and playing a Fantasia on it, it’s like the prog rock guitar solo version.

Coleridge typically uses these extended stanzas for close-ups or highly dramatic moments. And then he goes back to the basic four-line stanza when he wants to move the story on. Which is exactly what happens next, having introduced a glimpse of ‘something’ on the horizon:

At first it seem’d a little speck,

Isn’t this a brilliant description of what it’s like when you’re looking out, straining towards the horizon? There’s something there, but you can’t quite see what it is, and your eye is trying to resolve it. So first of all, he says, ‘I beheld a something in the sky’, then ‘it seem’d a little speck’, then ‘a mist’. He says ‘It moved and moved, and took at last / A certain shape, I wist.’ (‘Wist’ meaning ‘knew’.) But he doesn’t tell us what the certain shape is, heightening the suspense, which continues into the next stanza:

A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist!

The words ‘speck’, ‘mist’, ‘shape’, and ‘wist’ are all repeated from the previous stanza; the repetition continues the effect of stasis, but also claustrophobia. This whole poem is like a nightmare that folds back in on itself, that you can never escape, as we keep encountering the same words, the same phrases, the same images.

Then we get this delightful simile: ‘As if it dodged a water-sprite, / It plunged and tack’d and veer’d.’ So it’s dodging and plunging and tacking and veering about, as if it’s trying to escape from a water spirit, which is a very unsettling image and introduces the idea of supernatural intervention.

Finally the image resolves, and the object is identified, in a typically dramatic fashion:

With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,

So we’ve got more repetition here, in the rhyme of ‘slaked’ and ‘baked’, and also the clustered consonants: the L’s and the K’s and the B’s and the P’s – ‘unslaked … black lips baked’. It’s quite difficult to say. My mouth’s feeling dry as I say that; I’m very conscious of my tongue and my lips moving to pronounce the sounds. I feel like I could do with a sip of water.

So Coleridge doesn’t just repeat words, he’s more subtle than that. We’ve got repeating rhyme, obviously a form of repetition, but you also have repeating syntactic structure: ‘with throats unslaked, with black lips baked’. Similarly: ‘I bit my arm, I sucked the blood’ – the same grammatical pattern in quick succession. And a thoroughly gruesome image: unlike me, the Mariner doesn’t have a glass of water to hand, so he bites his own arm and sucks the blood to moisten his mouth so he can speak.

And that line, ‘I bit my arm, I sucked the blood’ is the extra line in this stanza, which heightens the tension just before the ship finally comes into focus, when he cries: ‘A sail! A sail!’

With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,

See! see! (I cried) she tacks no more!

So the Mariner says, rather optimistically, the ship is coming ‘Hither to work us weal’, to help us. And yet there’s something uncanny about its motion: ‘Without a breeze, without a tide, / She steadies with upright keel.’ Which hints that maybe this isn’t the kind of ship that you want coming towards you.

Then we get an absolutely extraordinary visual image of the ship approaching:

The western wave was all a-flame.

And once again, to these four lines are added two extra lines that propel the action forward:

When that strange shape drove suddenly

So, it’s a static picture of the sun seeming to stand still, to rest upon the waves. But then ‘suddenly’, the ‘strange shape’ of the ship appears and inserts itself ‘Betwixt us and the sun’.

And straight the Sun was fleck’d with bars,

So, a ship goes in front of the sun, but instead of being a solid shape, it’s more like a dungeon grate, where the sun’s face is peering ‘with broad and burning face’. That’s such a brilliantly evocative image. The poem has been illustrated by several illustrators of genius, including Gustave Doré and Mervyn Peake, but you don’t need an illustration for this; you can see it so vividly. To me, this one of the most arresting visual images in all poetry. It has such a stark simplicity. It’s like something from a children’s picture book, which is absolutely appropriate for the ballad form. Coleridge is extending the ballad into a more literary form, but he’s not over-elaborating. He sticks to the simplicity, the starkness, that is at the heart of the ballad form.

Then, very interestingly, the approach of the ship is described via the Mariner’s thoughts:

Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)

Are those her ribs through which the Sun

So what we have her is a series of questions that occur to the Mariner inside his mind, as he watches the ship approach and tries to figure out what it is’. He sees these shapes across the sun and asks ‘Are those her sails … ?’ ‘Are those her ribs … ?’

And then he asks, ‘And is that Woman all her crew?’ which is brilliantly immediate. He doesn’t say, ‘Oh, there’s a woman there. Is she the only crew member?’ It’s just, ‘is that Woman all her crew?’ And we suddenly realise he’s been staring at a woman.

Next question: ‘Is that a Death?’ Unusually, death has an indefinite article: a Death. It’s like, you know, a scarecrow, a Guy on Guy Fawke’s night, a Pierrot or a Harlequin from the Commedia del’arte. It’s like it’s a stock character: a Death.

Next questions: ‘And are there two? / Is Death that Woman’s mate?’ So he’s saying, ‘My God, Death, which is traditionally pictured as male, has a mate, has a partner who is a woman’. I guess it’s possible, given the maritime context, that ‘mate’ here could be ‘shipmate’, but I think there’s a pretty strong suggestion that they are mates in the marital or sexual sense. Which is borne out by the language of the next stanza, one of the most mesmerising descriptions in all of literature:

Her lips were red, her looks were free,

We’ve seen this kind of thing before, haven’t we? It’s the blason or catalogue of the attributes of the beloved from Petrarchan love poetry, which we looked at in the episodes about Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ and Christopher Smart’s cat Jeoffry – you know, ‘her lips are like rubies, her eyes are like sapphires, her hair is like gold’. And we saw that well before Coleridge’s time it was so hackneyed it had been parodied by Shakespeare and used ironically by Marvell and for comic effect by Smart.

But Coleridge modulates the Petrarchan mode not into comedy but horror. The first two lines are very conventionally Petrarchan – She’s got red lips and hair as yellow as gold – but in the next line it flips: her skin is ‘white as leprosy’, and she is ‘The Nightmare Life-in-Death’. So she is clearly horrific, yet she’s weirdly compelling. There’s an unmistakable sexual magnetism here.

She’s names as the Nightmare Life-in-Death, which sounds like a traditional stock figure, but Coleridge actually invented her. And there have been all kinds of interpretations of this figure and what she represents.

We could take her name very literally, because Coleridge suffered badly from nightmares from boyhood onwards, so the Nightmare Life-in-Death could easily be the embodiment of these night terrors. By the time he wrote The Ancient Mariner he was in the early stages of the opium addiction that would plague him for the rest of his life, and one of the symptoms of opium addiction is vivid nightmares. So you don’t have to be a psychologist of genius to connect the Nightmare Life-in-Death with to the living death of addiction. If this is the face of the nightmare that Coleridge lived as an addict, then it’s all the more terrifying for that.

Inevitably, there have been Freudian interpretations of the Nightmare Life-in-Death, as well as feminist, Christian, philosophical, and ecological readings. Robert Graves uses her as one of the main exhibits in his book The White Goddess. Graves identifies her with the White Goddess, a.k.a. the moon goddess or Muse who has traditionally been seen as the inspiration for true poetry. Now I have some sympathy with Graves’s take, and she undoubtedly has some archetypal qualities, but I’m always wary of reducing a poem or a poetic image to a single interpretation. What makes Coleridge’s Nightmare Life-in-Death so hair-raising is that she is absolutely compelling, original, and memorable inside the world of the poem.

Anyway, she’s the Nightmare Life-in-Death ‘Who thicks man’s blood with cold’ – and in this case it’s a very particular man’s blood – the Mariner himself. Because it turns out that the Mariner and his shipmates are the stakes in a game of dice between Death and the Nightmare Life-in-Death:

The naked hulk alongside came,

The poem will shortly go on to describe the Mariner’s shipmates dropping dead because, of course, Death has won them. But the biggest prize is the Mariner and his soul, and that’s why Nightmare Life-in-Death says, ‘The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!’ Because what could be worse than death? Well, the Ancient Mariner is about to find out.

And I’m not going spoil the poem for you. If you haven’t read it, I absolutely recommend you get a copy right now and rip through it, and you will discover the fate worse than death that awaits the Mariner.

OK, once we’ve had the horrific close-up of the Nightmare Life-in-Death, in a marvellously extended five line stanza. Then we’re back to the standard four-line stanza as the action resumes, with the game of dice and then the final stanza of today’s passage:

The Sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out:

Talk about an abrupt exit! So ‘the stars rush out’ and ‘at one stride comes the dark’ – that doesn’t sound classically poetic, does it? Or even Romantic. But that abruptness, that kind of jerkiness, like a crudely animated film, is absolutely typical of the ballad form. And the ‘spectre-bark’, the ghost ship of Death and the Nightmare Life-in-Death, shoots off into the darkness, leaving the Mariner to his fate, which you will discover when you read the rest of the poem.

OK, I hope my comments on this passage from The Ancient Mariner have impressed upon you what an incredible poem this is. And would be nice to think that this poem was a huge triumph for Coleridge, publishing it alongside his great friend, Wordsworth, whom he admired so much. But alas, not really, because he always felt overshadowed by Wordsworth, and it didn’t help that Wordsworth himself made some very biting criticisms of the poem, in public as well as privately.

Coleridge often felt that he was a failure, that he had left his potential unrealised, but he did finish The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. And if this was the only thing that he had written, his poetic immortality would have been more than assured. There’s nothing else like it, either in literature or in the ballad tradition, the two streams that it draws from.

You can probably tell Coleridge is one of my all-time favourite poets. Accordingly, I have granted him the ultimate accolade of more than one episode of A Mouthful of Air, a laurel that has only previously been granted to Shakespeare, Yeats, and Hardy. What he shares with them is that he is a multi-faceted writer. In Shakespeare, we had a sonnet and a soliloquy; in Yeats, we had two very different types of poem. Hardy, of course, was a novelist as well as a poet.

And this kind of range is something that Coleridge shares with them. Back in Episode 34 we heard the spellbinding lyricism of ‘Kubla Khan’; in The Ancient Mariner, he takes us on a voyage of imagination into a dark night of the soul. And I haven’t even done one of his marvellous conversation poems – personal reflections and meditations in blank verse. Maybe I’ll get to one of those in a future episode.

But for now, let’s listen again to the Mariner’s encounter with the Nightmare Life-in-Death and savour the beauty, the horror, and the magnificence of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

PART THREE

There passed a weary time. Each throat
Was parched, and glazed each eye.
A weary time! a weary time!
How glazed each weary eye,
When looking westward, I beheld
A something in the sky.

At first it seemed a little speck,
And then it seemed a mist:
It moved and moved, and took at last
A certain shape, I wist.

A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist!
And still it neared and neared:
As if it dodged a water-sprite,
It plunged and tacked and veered.

With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
We could not laugh nor wail;
Through utter drought all dumb we stood!
I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,
And cried, A sail! a sail!

With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
Agape they heard me call:
Gramercy! they for joy did grin,
And all at once their breath drew in,
As they were drinking all.

See! see! (I cried) she tacks no more!
Hither to work us weal;
Without a breeze, without a tide,
She steadies with upright keel!

The western wave was all a-flame
The day was well nigh done!
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright Sun;
When that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the Sun.

And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,
(Heaven’s Mother send us grace!)
As if through a dungeon-grate he peered,
With broad and burning face.

Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)
How fast she nears and nears!
Are those her sails that glance in the Sun,
Like restless gossameres?

Are those her ribs through which the Sun
Did peer, as through a grate?
And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a Death? and are there two?
Is Death that woman’s mate?

Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Night-Mare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold.

The naked hulk alongside came,
And the twain were casting dice;
“The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!”
Quoth she, and whistles thrice.

The Sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the dark;
With far-heard whisper, o’er the sea.
Off shot the spectre-bark.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English Romantic poet, literary critic and philosopher who was born in 1772 and died in 1834. With his friend William Wordsworth he co-authored Lyrical Ballads, one of the most influential books of English poetry ever published. During his lifetime he was overshadowed by the poetic achievements of Wordsworth, and afflicted with opium and alcohol addiction. But he is now regarded as a great poet, with phrases from his poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner having entered the language and become proverbial. He was also an influential critic, especially on Shakespeare and in his major prose work Biographia Literaria.

This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday.

You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favourite app.

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The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman.

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The post From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge appeared first on A Mouthful of Air.

Gregory Leadbetter reads ‘Alchemy’ and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.

The Infernal Garden by Gregory Leadbetter

The Infernal Garden is available from:

The publisher: Nine Arches Press

Amazon: UK | US
Bookshop.org: UK

To separate the subtle from the gross
without injury either to spirit or body
I clip dead flowers to release the ghosts
that rise through the stem in green alchemy:
take that word, Arabic al-kimiya,
prune further, into late Greek and Coptic
to kemet, ancient Egyptian black:
the dark root of the art of elixir.
Sceptical of the power of language
to convey the quintessence of wisdom,
language itself learned how to speak hidden –
to sound both the word and its umbrage:
a darkness conducting the central fire:
a form, like a flower, for its signature.

Mark: Gregory, where did this poem come from?

Gregory: Well, it probably reaches right back to my teen years in some strange way, because when I was a teenager, I discovered a pleasure in reading all kinds of esoterica. And among that material was, of course, things about alchemy and the idea of the whole story of alchemy really, the idea that this was, I don’t know, among the most learned in the land, that these people were actually in pursuit of something that has since proved, well, let’s say, elusive, if not impossible, the idea that there might be this substance, the philosopher’s stone, the elixir, that might actually transmute base materials into gold, but also that this was, in fact, a metaphor for something about our search for knowledge and wisdom. The fact that that had been part of European and Arabic intellectual history, should we say, for so long, always fascinated me. And so that’s one strand.

And then, actually, I think the other strand is really to do with thinking about poetry itself and art itself and how often alchemy is used as this kind of metaphor for the transfiguring that goes on in the work of art and the work of poetry. So the poem has deep roots in my reading and thinking and the splicing together of that interest in, if you like, the esoteric tradition and poetry itself. I think that’s where it came from.

As to the timing, why now? I mean, why did I write this? Why did it take me so long if it’s been a lifelong interest? I think it’s quite difficult to write compellingly about these things. And that’s part of the interest in them, in some ways. Of course, it’s this idea that the occult and the esoteric is also a strange thing to sort of spend, to end a strange realm to enter, if you like. But for me, something just clicked. The time felt right to actually tackle this. And you know what, I wanted to do it in a very concise way, an intensely focused way. So, yeah, it’s those two strands in my interests, really. I think that’s where the origin story of the poem lies.

Mark: Well, thank you for such a concise introduction to a vast subject. I mean, alchemy is one of those things that really is endless. And you’re right about the fact that it was the learned, not the…maybe they were credulous, I don’t know, but we tend to think of alchemy and the occult now in terms of credulous superstition. But it really was the elite who were practising this. And it’s maybe not massively well known that Sir Isaac Newton spent more time studying alchemy than he did what we would consider physics.

Gregory: Absolutely.

Mark: So the idea of the Newtonian universe being devoid of magic would have been news to Newton.

Gregory: Exactly.

Mark: And I think it’s a really good point that, okay, on the one level, the quest continues to find the philosopher’s stone that’s going to turn these base metals into gold in a literal, concrete sense. But as you say, it’s always been a metaphorical, spiritual form of transformation for the practitioner.

Gregory: Yes.

Mark: And I think it’s interesting that there’s a lot of poetry written about alchemy and magic in general. And my theory is that they have a lot in common. You know, metaphorical thinking was integral to magic. And guess what, it’s integral to poetry as well.

Gregory: Yes, I couldn’t agree more. Poetry, for me, is a form of magic, perhaps the most compelling form, as far as I’m concerned. And what I mean by that is really that it’s something also that I suppose I’ve spent so long with it, it just feels so entirely natural to me to think this way. But working with poetry, you’re really working with what I think of as the psychoactive properties of language. You know, it really is a work of transfiguration. Even moment to moment, people talk about, ‘Oh, well, a poem is not going to change the world,’ but it does have a palpable effect on consciousness. And that is a change. That is a change that enters the fabric of reality. And working with language in the way that a poem requires you to work really is the work of transfiguration in that magical sense, as far as I’m concerned.

Mark: So that is a big, bold idea. And what I like about this poem, and also the whole collection, by the way, is the fact that you’re able to, have these weighty concepts that maybe some poets would shy away from these days, but you do it with real precision.

Gregory: Thank you.

Mark: I mean, obviously, a big danger in writing about magic is it’s such a colossal cliché.

Gregory: Yes.

Mark: But in every poem, you bring a freshness. You bring a clarity of thought. So in this one, for instance, I mean, you might say that the thesis of it is ‘to separate the subtle from the gross’. I mean, I guess that’s what you’re doing as a poet here. And then you really have got this fascinating etymological rabbit hole. So you go to the Arabic and then the Late Greek and Coptic and then the ancient Egyptian. Are these languages an enthusiasm of yours?

Gregory: Well, I don’t speak Arabic or Greek or Coptic or ancient Egyptian, alas, but I do have a profound interest in language and etymology, in particular. I mean, it’s a sort of obsession of mine, really. And so it’s a great delight to be able to work with words in this way. And again, I suppose there’s a reference in the poem to all that a word contains, but it’s not necessarily that obvious. So there’s a history to every word that we don’t always think about, but that history travels with the word. And it’s there whether we’re thinking about it consciously or not, that history has arrived with that word. And I suppose that’s another principle that kind of emerged in the composition of this poem. Yeah.

So the etymology and the way that etymology can yield these connections across cultures and actually complicate our sense of the language that we’re just working with day in and day out and can enrich that, that is a wonderful thing to me. And something that it’s great for everybody to bear in mind, the promiscuity of language, as it were, and these connections that it makes across time and space and peoples. It travels in the most unpredictable ways, and I find that very, very exciting.

Mark: Amen. My children are at the stage of rolling their eyes when daddy starts on about etymology again. It’s not far before we get into a conversation with whatever the subject is, I’ll say, ‘Well, what does the etymology tell us?’ And they’re like, ‘Do we have to, Dad?’ But I think, like most poets, I’m just fascinated by… obviously, we’re fascinated by words. A couple of episodes ago, I was talking to Peter Gizzi about Auden’s slightly throwaway but wise comment that poets should be humble because our raw materials are public property.

Gregory: Yes. Yes.

Mark: That’s that promiscuity that you talk about. And I think it’s natural to be thinking, well, what are these things? Where did they come from? And why is that one so similar to and resonant and redolent of that other word?

Gregory: Yes, exactly.

Mark: And it’s like, here, you deconstruct the word ‘alchemy’. So you’re going into ‘black: / the dark root of the art of elixir.’ And, of course, it can go back to that, but it also goes forward into ‘chemistry’. It’s the same root, isn’t it, for modern chemistry?

Gregory: It is. It is. Yeah.

Mark: And you talk about, ‘to sound both the word and its umbrage’, I think that’s a very key phrase. So ‘umbrage’, obviously, literally meaning shadow, but here, picking up the connotations, the history, kind of the whole penumbra of meanings that constellate around it. Maybe you could say something about that.

Gregory: Yes, that’s right. And again, I think this idea of… in the poem, I suppose, is this idea of that scepticism, actually, as well, about the power of language to work this magic. And I think that scepticism is absolutely essential here. You mentioned earlier, credulity. And so I think scepticism is our friend in all dealings with anything with that word magic. Because it also forces us to really, really think about what’s going on here.

And I suppose, with that idea of the umbrage being conveyed with the word and to sound it, both literally sounding it, uttering it, but also exploring it in the moment of utterance as well, to sound both the word and its umbrage, the idea of exploring the dark root of language in the very act of working with an uttering language and drawing upon that, the well, the darkness, the central fire, as it were, that goes all the way back, with ‘the darkness conducting the central fire’, as in the words of the poem, to working with all those, the mystery that is inherent to the use of language itself, and touching the common roots of life and language, the common roots of organic life and this seemingly insubstantial thing that works invisibly, that is words, that is language as well, and actually working with that common root.

Mark: Okay. So, okay, I’m imagining a listener listening to this and going, ‘Okay, that’s all fascinating, chaps. We get that you two are geeking out on language.’ What’s it got to do with alchemy, though?

Gregory: Yeah. So that is to do with… so again, that’s where the etymology comes in a little bit. So you go back to the Arabic, al-kimiya, and then all the way back to kemet. Now, that blackness… so kemet was actually the ancient Egyptian name for what we now think of as ancient Egyptian civilisation. It’s the black land. The black land. And that blackness was associated with the Nile flood and the rich black earth that was immensely fertile. So here, we’re getting to the idea of something that emerges, that is transformative, a darkness or blackness that is transformative and also almost infinitely and miraculously, you might say, fertile. So this idea of regenerative cycles, the generation of something that seems to transcend death, death is a part of it, that is recognised, but there’s also the regenerative principle at work in that moment.

And so that’s why it goes all the way back. I’m taking that alchemical idea of transformation and fresh generation and the search for the elixir back to this mysterious root in kind of the principle of life itself, really, sort of the emergence of self-regeneration. And I suppose that’s where it really connects and goes right back to the action at the start of the poem. We should say, perhaps, something about the greenness of this alchemy, the fact that I’m connecting it there with this pruning.

Mark: Well, that was a question I had: what are flowers doing in a poem about alchemy?

Gregory: Yeah. I mean that’s a swerve on my part towards, I suppose, again, connecting that process to organic life. And just something as simple as pruning, the gardener’s process of pruning, and again, I suppose, thinking of working with poetry is a kind of pruning as well. And the separation of the subtle from the gross, you can see that in terms of both what you do when you deadhead a plant when you’re pruning and you’re encouraging new growth. And I think working with language in a poem, you’re pruning in a way to encourage new growth. So I’m drawing these kind of analogies in this admittedly hyper condensed way across those three things, really.

Mark: And that hyper-condensed quality, that is really integral to alchemy, isn’t it? Because you’ve got the idea of the crucible wherein the transformation was supposed to be forged. And turning to the form of the poem, you’re using a very particular and quite familiar form of poetic crucible for this poem, are you not?

Gregory: I am, indeed, yeah, the sonnet, which is a form very close to my heart. And again, I suppose, one of the things I’m interested in when I’m working with received forms, in poetry, we sometimes have these debates about received forms and, resistance to received forms as well. But to me, language itself is a received form. We’re always working with received forms.

Mark: Good point. Good point. I will remember that.

Gregory: Literally, we can’t get away from it. So one of the things I love about the sonnet is the way it travels across time and space. As a form, it has its own cultural history, but it’s also immensely pliable, actually, even though, sort of, it has its kind of patterns, which are very familiar, as you know. But I find working within that crucible, within the intensity of that small space, to be immensely productive and far from limiting. I find that it actually enables things to happen that perhaps wouldn’t otherwise happen because of the pressures within the crucible of the sonnet and the materials that you’re putting into it and the processes that you’re enabling through the blend of words, through the ingredients, as it were, that are going into that crucible.

You know, that’s really where the magic is happening. It has to happen in the fabric of the poem itself or not at all. I think this is… again, we talked a little bit earlier about the difficulty of talking about alchemy and magic in productive ways. You can’t just dress up as a wizard and say, ‘Oh, I’m doing magic now.’

Mark: Tempting as it is! [Laughter]

Gregory: Tempting as it is, you know. And let’s not rule it out. But what I’m saying, it’s not just about, saying, ‘Oh, I’m being magical now.’ That’s actually not good enough. I’d rather say, ‘I’m not doing any magic at all,’ but try and focus on something that’s going on in the fabric of the poem itself. It has to happen there or not at all. And that’s where the real magic happens. It’s not just talking about these things. So again, perhaps a slight digression, but it connects back to what we were talking about. And it is related to this idea of the form of the sonnet and the kind of peculiar pressures that the sonnet applies in its demands that are inherently transformative.

You know, the connections that can be made are, again, I just find them extremely exciting when you find a connection across this, 14-line short thing, but something extraordinary can happen within that space. And of course, the sonnet itself contains a self-transforming principle in the idea of the volta. This is the term for, the turn, of course, the moment where things are changed in some way. And so I love the fact that the sonnet itself has that principle built in, as it were.

Mark: I was saying, in just last month’s episode about Sir Walter Raleigh’s sonnet, ‘To His Son,’ the sonnet has continued because it’s like a really handy thinking device for poets. There’s a certain shape and size of problem or topic or question that you just find yourself reaching for the sonnet before it starts to emerge as you write. And you’re absolutely right, and I think you make very interesting use of the volta, the turn in the sonnet.

So, as we’ve covered quite a few times on the podcast, the sonnet is basically divided into two. You’ve got the first eight lines, the octave, and then there’s the turn, which is a shift of perspective of some kind that leads us into the sestet, which is the final six lines. And I was rereading this poem this morning and noticing, the octave starts ‘To separate the subtle from the gross’. That’s where you begin. And you’ve got gross as the end word. And then, eight lines later, we are at ‘the dark root of the art of elixir’. So you’ve gone from gross to elixir in eight lines.

And as so often in really nicely written sonnets, you can almost read a poem from the end words. And you’ve got some lovely half rhymes here. You’ve got ‘gross’. It goes, ‘gross’, ‘body’, ‘ghosts’, ‘alchemy’, ‘al-kimiya, ‘Coptic’, ‘black’, ‘elixir’. I mean, that’s, like, a little poem in itself, isn’t it? And then the next line, the next word after elixir, which is kind of the ultimate goal of the art of alchemy and transformation, we’ve got ‘Sceptical’ – that word jumps in at the beginning of the sestet – ‘of the power of language’. And then it goes all the way down through ‘language’ – these are the end words – ‘language’, ‘wisdom’, ‘hidden’, ‘umbrage’, ‘fire’, ‘signature’.

In fact, I’m going to read the last two lines: ‘A darkness conducting the central fire: / a form, like a flower, for its signature.’ So obviously, I assume, you’re thinking of poetry in there as well. I mean, what you’ve done here is beautifully realised. I mean, at what point did you start to think, ‘Oh, I’ll write this as a sonnet?’ Was it from the beginning? Did it emerge in the process of writing? How conscious were you of putting sceptical there and, the various beginning and end points?

Gregory: Yeah. I think when I started to want to write about this, I think there were almost two options that seemed possible to me, either something that was really long or something that was really tight. And I opted for something that was really, tight. And so, almost as soon as I started writing, that was what I was conscious of. And then, as I started composing, I did think, ‘How is this going to be?’ and lots of possibilities in front of me. But the sonnet just felt right, almost as soon as I started. And when I started to find… when I started to think in terms of those rhymes and the half rhymes, it really started to catch its own. Its own subtle logic started to emerge in the composition in a way that I wanted to follow.

And with the volta, yes, I think it was really important to me, actually, to get that note of scepticism in, for all the reasons we’ve talked about. Because I was really thinking about the esoteric tradition. Again, as I was saying earlier on, why were they so obsessed, these people, as you say, the learned of those times? Why were they so obsessed with this idea of keeping things hidden, the esoteric, the inner thing? And I think it was something to do with this idea of, actually, if you just blurt this stuff out in an uninformed way or in a half-true way, it could cause more damage than good. It could cause confusion. You know, I think there was this scepticism about the capacity of language, perhaps, to carry these things, the capacity of science to do… science, in the broadest sense of the word, knowledge, to do its work. The scepticism as to knowledge itself, I suppose, as well.

There’s a recognition in the scepticism about language to do this kind of work, an implicit recognition that this kind of work is of a kind of awesome power. And what, therefore, is the right channel? How will this be manifested? How can the elixir be got? And if not by these means available to us. So, again, thinking about language as that medium, as this poem does, I wanted to face that head on really and to find a way through the way of incorporating both this sort of faith in language and the sort of magic of the psychoactive properties of language, a faith in that, but also, I think, a necessary and a healthy scepticism about its capacities that actually becomes kind of an enabling manoeuvre. Because, in recognising the scepticism, it forces us into a solution, in a way, or at least, I hope it does in this poem.

Mark: So what that’s making me think of is, the magician when they’re doing their trick. They always very carefully… now, look, examine everything. You know, you can look up my sleeve. You can see how there’s no kind of hidden things here. And obviously, it’s a way of addressing the scepticism. But inevitably, we know there’s a bit of misdirection going on as well.

Gregory: Indeed.

Mark: And look, there’s a very interesting and subtle shift, where, in the three lines into the sestet, you say, ‘Sceptical of the power of language / ‘to convey the quintessence of wisdom’. So that’s what you were just talking about. But then it kind of shifts: ‘language itself learned how to speak hidden’.

Gregory: Yes. Yes.

Mark: What’s going on there?

Gregory: Well, that’s probably a key line. And I think there’s possibly… I enjoy the possibilities of syntax. And when we ‘speak hidden’, it suggests also that something is being hidden in that act, but also that it is speaking the hidden. The syntax there remains open to both those possibilities. And I think that syntactical doubleness is really crucial to that line and what I’m up to, really, with that line and the poem as a whole, really. So I think this idea that language adapts, again, we’re just talking about, the uses of scepticism in a way, as well as the uses of that faith in the power of language. Language adapts to try and find a way through that kind of dilemma. And I think poetry is almost the quintessence of that adaptation, for me, because it’s both a form of saying and not saying.

It’s not just about travelling from A to B. It’s not just about getting to an endpoint or a punchline. The means, or I should say, the end is in the means. The end itself is in the means. And that, to me, is absolutely fundamental to poetry as an art form. Again, it’s in the process. It’s in spending that time, that space time within the sphere of the poem, within that atmosphere that it is created through its work with language. So I think that’s really what I’m trying to do there, actually, is hold that dilemma open and for language itself to fill the tension between it and find a way.

Mark: So you’re describing language itself doing something, and language itself is doing something through that syntactic doubleness. And I think this is really wonderful, because syntax – when you mention it, people’s eyes glaze over. It’s the worst English lesson ever! ‘Oh, no, we’re doing grammar this Friday afternoon.’ But you’ve hit on something really important, which is that syntax is the way that language becomes supple and flexible, and the meanings can shift. And for a poet, you really get to play with things, as you are doing very delightfully here.

And then that leads us into this wonderful ending, ‘to sound both the word and its umbrage’. We talked about, the denotation and the connotation, the associations of the word. ‘a darkness conducting the central fire:’ – I have to say, I’m quite envious of that line, Greg. And ‘conducting’, it’s a lovely word because it could be… I guess, thinking of the etymology, it’s got to be related to duct, to pipe, to stuff flowing or being directed in the flow. Maybe there’s an element of the conductor as in the sense of the musical conductor. And of course, conducting, it’s a scientific thing. I was going to say, it’s chemistry, but maybe it’s physics. I don’t know.

Gregory: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mark: But basically, that word is conducting a lot of different meanings and even disciplines, isn’t it?

Gregory: Yes. Yes. And again, that’s something I’m very keen on, is activating, if you like, as much of the spectrum of possibilities within a word as possible, when I’m using words in poems. And, yes, all of those senses that you described are there for me, certainly. And the idea that conducting is not necessarily entirely controlling, either. I think that’s another really important principle. It’s not about actually having a fixed determinant end, but it’s an enabling act, something that activates, animates. There’s this wonderful phrase in Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English poet, where he talks about ‘kindling the germinal power’. Kindling the germinal power. And these are…

Mark: He’s so good, isn’t he?

Gregory: Yeah. Yeah. And that is what I really want from poetry, really, from a poem, is that, to be kindled. And that is not determinative. You know, that’s not about arriving at a fixed endpoint. It’s about activating and animating and bringing alive, which is not about control. And I’d say that’s another aspect of that word conducting, that it’s not fixing something in place, it’s not determining it, it’s not limiting it, but activating and animating.

Mark: Again, I think that’s a lovely description of the final line. It’s not an endpoint, so much as something that’s been activated, so you say. So you’ve just talked about the central fire, a form like a flower for its signature. So I’m assuming that the form is initially literally the flame of the fire, which is like a flower. Of course, this is a poet writing about form and signature. And there’s signing it maybe with a flourish at the end. There’s a lot going on there, isn’t there?

Gregory: Yes, yes, I think you’re right. Yes. And I did want to make that analogy between a poem and a form of life, like a flower, I suppose. And also the idea that, again, what is the endpoint? What is the quintessence? What is the elixir? What is that ultimate wisdom? And then bringing that back to something. These things are often addressed in very intellectual terms. I suppose I wanted to bring it back to something more physical. And the flower is important there. Again, the idea that, actually, the answer may be something that is just alive, you know. You wouldn’t say, ‘What’s the point of a flower?’ Well, I suppose some people might do that. And, of course, in biological terms, you can say, ‘Oh, well, it’s an adaptation to these conditions that evolved by natural selection.’ And that’s absolutely fine, you know. But also, it is the fact that it simply is. I think that’s the thing that I’m perhaps drawing attention to there, this idea of something that actually is not purely reducible to intellectual terms but is actually much more to do with the fact of, and really, if you like, the miracle of life itself.

Mark: Well, Greg, that feels like a good point to stop, so that we don’t start reducing anything in your poem into too gross matter. And, yeah, let’s have another listen to the poem and marvel at the marvels of alchemy and poetry. Thank you, Greg.

Gregory: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

To separate the subtle from the gross
without injury either to spirit or body
I clip dead flowers to release the ghosts
that rise through the stem in green alchemy:
take that word, Arabic al-kimiya,
prune further, into late Greek and Coptic
to kemet, ancient Egyptian black:
the dark root of the art of elixir.
Sceptical of the power of language
to convey the quintessence of wisdom,
language itself learned how to speak hidden –
to sound both the word and its umbrage:
a darkness conducting the central fire:
a form, like a flower, for its signature.

‘Alchemy’ is from The Infernal Garden, published by Nine Arches Press.

The Infernal Garden is available from:

The publisher: Nine Arches Press

Amazon: UK | US
Bookshop.org: UK

Gregory Leadbetter’s new collection of poetry is The Infernal Garden, published by Nine Arches Press. His previous books with Nine Arches Press are Maskwork (2020) and The Fetch (2016). His other works include Caliban (Dare-Gale Press, 2023); Balanuve, with photographs by Phil Thomson (Broken Sleep, 2021), and The Body in the Well (HappenStance Press, 2007). His writing for the BBC includes the extended poem for Metal City, broadcast on Radio 3 in 2023. As a critic he publishes widely on the history and practice of poetry, and his book Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination was awarded the University English Book Prize 2012. He is Professor of Poetry at Birmingham City University.

This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday.

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Episode 85 From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge  Mark McGuinness reads and discusses a passage from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.Poet Samuel Taylor ColeridgeReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessFrom...

Episode 84 Alchemy by Gregory Leadbetter  Gregory Leadbetter reads ‘Alchemy’ and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.This poem is from: The Infernal Garden by Gregory LeadbetterAvailable from: The Infernal Garden is available from: The publisher: Nine Arches...

Episode 83 Sir Walter Raleigh to His SonMark McGuinness reads and discusses ‘Sir Walter Raleigh to His Son’ by Sir Walter Raleigh.Poet Sir Walter RaleighReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessSir Walter Raleigh to His Son By Sir Walter Raleigh Three things there be...

The post Alchemy by Gregory Leadbetter appeared first on A Mouthful of Air.

Mark McGuinness reads and discusses ‘Sir Walter Raleigh to His Son’ by Sir Walter Raleigh.

Sir Walter Raleigh

Mark McGuinness

By Sir Walter Raleigh

Three things there be that prosper up apace
And flourish, whilst they grow asunder far,
But on a day, they meet all in one place,
And when they meet, they one another mar;
And they be these: the wood, the weed, the wag.
The wood is that which makes the gallow tree;
The weed is that which strings the hangman’s bag;
The wag, my pretty knave, betokeneth thee.
Mark well, dear boy, whilst these assemble not,
Green springs the tree, hemp grows, the wag is wild,
But when they meet, it makes the timber rot,
It frets the halter, and it chokes the child.
Then bless thee, and beware, and let us pray
We part not with thee at this meeting day.

So, today we have a poem by someone you’ve almost certainly heard of, but whose poetry you may well not have come across before. Sir Walter Raleigh was much more famous for being a courtier, adventurer and explorer, for popularising the smoking of tobacco, and for generally cutting a dashing swathe through the Elizabethan era.

These days we wouldn’t expect our politicians and military leaders to be poets as well, but it was perfectly typical of English gentlemen of the period that they would be at least competent at writing poetry, and many of them were very good at it. On the podcast, we have already encountered the work of other gentleman courtiers: Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Edward Dyer. If you’ve heard those episodes, you’ll know that those poets write in what to us looks like a very conventional, courtly style that is associated with Petrarchan love poetry, going back to Petrarch, the 14th-century Italian poet. A lot of these 16th-century poets were very much writing in the mode of, in imitation of, using the same poetic forms as Petrarch, among which the sonnet, was very prominent.

And so, in this poem, we have another knight from Elizabeth’s court writing a sonnet, but it’s in a very different style. It’s much more down to earth, much more pithy, and there is a vein of pretty dark humour in this poem. In tone, it’s much closer to Shakespeare’s sonnets and John Donne’s poetry. Raleigh was a very worldly-wise character, very ambitious and very cunning in his military exploits and political scheming. So, we get none of the elaborate, florid language that we would find in Sidney or Wyatt; we’ve got this terse, epigrammatic style instead.

An early manuscript of this poem has the title ‘Sir Walter Raleigh to his Son.’ It is often anthologised under the title ‘The Wood, the Weed, the Wag’. And it begins by posing a riddle:

Three things there be that prosper up apace
And flourish, whilst they grow asunder far,
But on a day, they meet all in one place,
And when they meet, they one another mar;

So the speaker tells us there are three things that prosper and flourish as long as they are apart, but on a certain day, they’ll meet all in one place, and when they meet, they will mar one another, meaning they will harm or destroy each other.

So this obviously begs the question: what are those three things? If we were Bilbo or Gollum playing the game of riddles, we’d invite the other player to guess, but in the second quatrain Raleigh helpfully gives us the answer to the riddle:

And they be these: the wood, the weed, the wag.
The wood is that which makes the gallow tree;
The weed is that which strings the hangman’s bag;
The wag, my pretty knave, betokeneth thee.

The wood makes the gallows tree where criminals were hanged. The weed is hemp, which was used to make rope. Here Raleigh says it ‘strings the hangman’s bag’. But it’s obviously also suggestive of the rope that makes the halter, which he used to hang criminals. And the wag, in 16th-century slang, meant a young man, especially one who was mischievous and full of humour. A related word, ‘waghalter’, meant someone who was likely to swing in the hangman’s halter.

And the speaker of the poem says, ‘the wag, my pretty knave, betokeneth thee.’So if we take the title ‘Sir Walter Raleigh to his Son’ at face value, then ‘thee’ must refer to Raleigh’s son. And it’s quite a dramatic moment in the poem when the quatrain ends with that word, thee, because all the way through, it’s been a fairly abstract argument – ‘Three things there be…’ talking about generalities. But there’s no sense of personal connection until we get to that line. The fact that he calls him ‘my pretty knave,’ shows that the speaker has something at stake personally here, and if that’s his son, the stakes could hardly be higher. And the fact that he ends this quatrain with thee is the moment where we realise, ‘Oh, he’s speaking to his son.’ Even if we didn’t have the title to nudge us, this would still be the moment where the poem becomes personal, where all of these abstract circumstances cohere. We have a sense of the father speaking directly to his son – and by implication, a sense of the son’s presence, listening to his father.

Moving on to the third quatrain, as seasoned sonnet readers, we know that in the classic Petrarchan sonnet, and very often in the English or Shakespearean version, there is a turn, a shift of tone or emphasis or perspective that typically comes between the eighth and ninth line. The octave, made up of the initial eight lines, sets up a situation or proposition, and then the remaining six lines, known as the sestet, give us a different perspective or a counterargument. And what we get here is a pretty abrupt shift into the imperative: from this point, the speaker is giving advice, telling the wag what to do:

Mark well, dear boy, whilst these assemble not,
Green springs the tree, hemp grows, the wag is wild,
But when they meet, it makes the timber rot,
It frets the halter, and it chokes the child.

There’s a lot going here in just four lines. Let’s slow down and take it line by line.

‘Mark well, dear boy, whilst these assemble not’ means ‘Notice, dear boy, that as long as these three things have not been brought together…’ Then we get this wonderful next line, ‘Green springs the tree, hemp grows, the wag is wild.’ It’s a delightful line with a lushness and a zest that is very untypical of the rest of the poem. It’s the one moment where we get a bit of poetic lift-off. It makes me think of ‘Greensleeves’ and I can hear viols playing in the background. So, the tree and the hemp are springing and growing, and the wag, the young man, can go off and be as wild as he likes, sow his wild oats, go on adventures, and so on.

And then the next line hits us really hard with a but:

But when they meet, it makes the timber rot,
It frets the halter, and it chokes the child.

That’s a pretty brutal come-down from ‘Green springs the tree and the wag is wild,’ isn’t it? He’s saying that when these three things come together, the gallows wood with the rope, it makes the timber rot, it ‘frets’ meaning ‘frays’ the hangman’s noose, and it chokes the child. It might seem a bit odd that the timber rots and the noose frays; if we take these images literally, they would arguably prevent the hanging. But Raleigh’s using a bit of poetic licence here and the images are meant to be suggestive of ruin and destruction. And while ‘frets the halter’ could mean that the rope is frayed, it could also mean that it tightens under strain and gnaws into the child’s neck, which is a pretty grisly image.

But when they meet, it makes the timber rot,
It frets the halter, and it chokes the child.

The ‘it’ here is the circumstance of these three things coming together. It’s the meeting. ‘You’ve got the wood, you’ve got the weed, and you’ve got the wag. When they’re apart, they can all flourish in their separate ways, but when they come together, they’re all destroyed.’

So this is the full grisly solution to the riddle: the timber rots, the halter frays or tightens, and it chokes the child. When he says ‘child,’ the idea of a child being hanged is so much more dramatic and visceral than the idea of a man being hanged. The fact that he’s rhyming ‘wild’ with ‘child’ really shows the contrast between freedom and being choked. And the alliteration in chokes and child really adds force to the line, it’s the moment where the stool is kicked away or the trapdoor opens, and the body slams down at the end of the rope.

But Raleigh is not done yet, because, as we know, an English sonnet, also known as a Shakespearean sonnet, ends in a final rhyming couplet that is designed to either sum up what has gone before or offer a counterpoint to what has just been proposed. What we get in this case is quite a startling shift in tone:

Then bless thee, and beware, and let us pray
We part not with thee at this meeting day.

It’s significant that ‘bless thee’ comes before ‘beware’ because it could easily have been the other way round. But it’s much softer this way. We can feel the fatherly love. He’s saying ‘I love you, but you’ve got to watch out’. He ends with a fairly conventional invitation to prayer, ‘then let us pray’, but the syntax runs on into the final line, revealing that it’s a very specific prayer:

Then bless thee, and beware, and let us pray
We part not with thee at this meeting day.

So he’s saying ‘let us pray that we are not parted from you’. The ‘we’ here clearly suggests more than one person is going to part with the son, so at a minimum, I’d guess the speaker is thinking of his wife, the boy’s mother. Perhaps he’s also thinking of the wider family and community. There’s also a clever antithesis, a contrast, in the final line, between parting and meeting. The whole poem is premised on the idea that the wood, the weed, and the wag are fine as long as they’re apart, but if they meet, they will mar each other. So he’s saying that if that meeting happens, then there will also be a parting. So this is a beautifully economical and emotionally freighted couplet:

Then bless thee, and beware, and let us pray
We part not with thee at this meeting day.

The poem states that the meeting will certainly happen – gallows definitely exist and young men will definitely be hanged – but the implication is clear: make sure the wag at the gallows is not you.

So that’s the basic argument and movement of the poem, and we can see how skilfully Raleigh uses the sonnet form as a way of thinking through and making his point. Sonnets are so common in English literature that the form is a kind of thinking device for poets. They pick it up and use it to work through problems or situations that are a certain shape or size. Raleigh clearly uses it very skilfully, but what I want to focus on is this remarkable riddle of the wood, the weed, and the wag, which he first poses and then solves.

The obvious question, I think, is, why use such a weirdly abstract, convoluted way of warning the child? Why not cut straight to the chase and lay things out in more explicit terms?One reason is that this was the convention of the day. Poets tended to use what we’d consider very elaborate and artificial devices in their poems, as a display of wit and ingenuity.

But also, thinking about this as a warning from a father to a son, any parent will be familiar with the problem of how to warn a child about potential consequences without being the boring old fogey. How can you get them to listen and take you seriously?

Parental advice was a well-worn genre in Elizabethan literature. Raleigh himself wrote a much more straightforward and conventional prose piece of advice to his son, Instructions to His Son, where he goes through the conventional advice: choose your wife carefully, don’t just be seduced by beauty; avoid quarrels, but be brave if you do engage in a duel; avoid flatterers, fancy clothes and strong drink; and be honest and true to yourself.

If this advice sounds familiar. you may be thinking of Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who was a bit of a figure of fun, chuntering on with his well-meaning advice to his son Laertes:

                                                             Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

So this was a familiar enough genre at the time for Shakespeare to be able to parody it within Raleigh’s lifetime. And it’s easy to see why a father would want to avoid sounding too much like Polonius. So maybe the elaborate device was simply Raleigh’s way of trying to get his son’s attention. Setting him a riddle, is like an invitation to a game. If you’re a parent, you’ll know it’s much easier to get a child to join in a game than it is to listen to some advice. I think we can pick up the anxiety of a parent trying to get the child to understand that this is something that could happen to you. He’s trying to bring home consequences to a child who doesn’t grasp them because he doesn’t have the life experience that the parent does.

So those are possible reasons for Raleigh’s use of such an elaborate riddle. In terms of the effect of the riddle, it allows for some very different readings of the poem. On one hand, it’s possible to have quite a cynical reading because the speaker does not offer his son moral instruction. He doesn’t mention any of the crimes you could be hanged for, or explain why they might be intrinsically bad. Instead, the speaker uses this elaborate conceit to basically say, ‘don’t end up swinging from a rope’. So we could read this quite cynically: ‘Do what you like, just don’t get caught!’ We do know from Raleigh’s other writings, including the Instructions to His Son, that he had a strong ethical code, but that’s not in this poem. So, if we take this poem purely on its own terms, that cynical reading is very much alive, and it’s not inconsistent with the wily, scheming, piratical aspect of Raleigh’s character.

However, a much more sentimental reading is also available. You could read it as being written by a father who is so fond of his son that whatever he may be guilty of, the father wishes fervently that his son is never caught and hanged. A bit like the Kate Bush song ‘Mother Stands for Comfort’ where the mother is turning a blind eye to the fact that her son is a murderer; she’s going to protect them regardless. And I think it’s a sign of a brilliantly written poem that Raleigh’s sonnet is open to such widely diverging interpretations.

Now if you’re a long-time listener to this podcast, you’ll know that I am always careful about reading poems as versified biography, but since this one is titled ‘to his son,’ we are entitled to ask: was this really addressed to Raleigh’s son?

Raleigh was a father to three sons. One sadly died as an infant. Another, Walter, was a soldier and adventurer like Raleigh, who was killed on an expedition to South America. He also had a third son, Carew, who died at home in his sixties; one account says that he was ‘killed’, but there is no evidence that he was executed. So it’s conceivable that the poem was written with either Walter or Carew in mind. The good news is neither of his sons were hanged, so if either of them did read the poem, I guess you could say it had the desired effect.

The bad news, as you may well know, is that Raleigh himself, the author of this poem on how to avoid being executed, was in fact executed. He was beheaded for treason. It’s debatable whether he deserved the charge. He liked to bend the rules, and on this occasion, he bent them too far. When a soldier under his command sacked a Spanish town when there was supposed to be a truce between the two countries. He was executed in 1618 when, under heavy pressure from the Spanish, James I revived an earlier sentence of treason.

Now there is an important distinction to be made between being hanged and being beheaded. In Elizabethan society, to be hanged was a punishment for common criminals, for thieves, robbers and murderers. To be beheaded was a much higher-status form of execution – a gentleman’s death. So, for instance, if you were a commoner convicted of treason, you were liable to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, but a gentleman could be granted the privilege of only being beheaded, which was a quicker and less painful death.

That large caveat aside, I do think there is a dramatic irony in Raleigh writing a poem to warn his son against being too wild and waggish when he was the one who failed to heed his own advice, who failed to avert the circumstance where the wood of the executioner’s block, the steel of the axe, and the wag, Walter Raleigh himself, would all come together. And at that meeting, there would also be a parting of Raleigh’s head from his shoulders.

Now at this point I’m veering into speculation, but I can’t help imagining Raleigh recalling this poem on the eve of his execution, puffing away on his pouch of tobacco, and savouring the irony that it was he, rather than his son, who had failed to heed his own warning. I imagine Raleigh taking a puff and chuckling at the joke, as if he were saying to fate, ‘Ha! That was a good one’. And we do know that Raleigh’s maintained his dark humour and wit in the face of death. Just before his execution, when he was shown the axe, he is recorded as saying ‘This is a sharp Medicine, but it is a Physician for all diseases and miseries’. Imagine being that witty just moments before someone cuts your head off! So he was a true poet to the bitter end.

So let’s have another listen to Raleigh’s sonnet and savour the cleverness, the irony, and also, I think, the courage with which he plays with words, with wit, with riddles, and with the sonnet form, in a game where the stakes could not be higher.

By Sir Walter Raleigh

Three things there be that prosper up apace
And flourish, whilst they grow asunder far,
But on a day, they meet all in one place,
And when they meet, they one another mar;
And they be these: the wood, the weed, the wag.
The wood is that which makes the gallow tree;
The weed is that which strings the hangman’s bag;
The wag, my pretty knave, betokeneth thee.
Mark well, dear boy, whilst these assemble not,
Green springs the tree, hemp grows, the wag is wild,
But when they meet, it makes the timber rot,
It frets the halter, and it chokes the child.
Then bless thee, and beware, and let us pray
We part not with thee at this meeting day.

Sir Walter Ralegh was an English courtier, soldier, explorer and writer who was born around 1552 and died in 1681. A favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, he rose rapidly at court and was celebrated for his voyages to the Americas and his role in popularising tobacco. But he fell from grace under James I and was eventually executed for treason. Alongside his political and colonial ambitions, Ralegh was a gifted prose stylist and poet. His verse – often short, epigrammatic, and sombre – circulated in manuscript among courtiers, while his prose works include The History of the World and the didactic Instructions to His Son. He remains emblematic of Elizabethan wit and ambition.

This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday.

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Peter Gizzi reads ‘Findspot Unknown’ and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.

Fierce Elegy by Peter Gizzi

Fierce Elegy is available from:

The publisher: Penguin UK

Amazon: UK | US
Bookshop.org: UK | US

Thus far we have spoken
only the codes,
a litany of survival.
Thus spoke the silvered asphodel
next to the factory ruin.
Sound carries on water.
My subject is the wind.
To take umbrage at what a tree can do,
watching one single birch
become lightning stunning the sky.
Landscape is a made thing,
to see the mind seeing itself.
To see thought, a wing
in night, the long brooding.
Take it, listen, the night is orchestral
when the power’s on.
Everything disporting.
A furred wand upon nothingness.

I get it, it was good to leave the world,
to find myself in thou.
There’s a lot to be said
for seeing in the dark,
and more to the light
when there’s nothing to see.
If I write about the moon,
it’s because it’s there.
I am landlocked, surrounded
by rivers and lakes, pills and leaves.
I saw a better life, it was far off ,
sun on moss next to a friend,
the softening air, the dandelion fluff .
It was kinda real, and kinda not.
Can’t see it today.

And out of nothing, breath.
A beast-like shadow in the glass.
If I brought back every feeling I had
where would I put them,
what could they mean
to this world on the floor?

It was best to let the moon unravel
and focus the truth of the music.
It was best to let the music
unravel and focus the truth of night.
Like when I found you
in the back of my mind.
I am talking about people
and the night.
People inside the night.
The night and what we are made of.
The things and the people.
The signal and its noise.

Mark: Peter, where did this poem come from?

Peter: Well, I favour archaeological terms simply because I think they give depth to poetry, and I believe that depth is an important part of this art that it’s been with us forever, from the beginning.

So ‘Findspot Unknown’ is something that you’ll find in a museum. In fact, I found it in the British Museum years back. And you’ll go to an artefact, it’ll say ‘Assyria 800 BC.’ And then you’ll come to the next artefact, and it says, ‘Findspot Unknown.’ And that really got me because it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. That’s an artefact of unknown origin.’ It’s a thing, and it’s a mystery, right? So I began to think, it’s like, ‘Oh, I get it, a poem is an artefact from an unknown origin.’ It’s a mystery, right? But then I wrote the poem, then I was reading it, like, a year later. I was reading it somewhere, and I thought, ‘Hey, wait a minute, I’m an artefact from an unknown origin, you know.

And the unknown part is really important to me, Mark, because to me, the role of the poet is to remain a mystery in the face of violence. I don’t want to respond in kind to the news. I used to write poems that were more kind of overtly political, but, I began to say, ‘I don’t want to just bang a drum and respond over and over to this heedless noise that comes in.’ And I began to dial in the larger piece. So I am interested in the poem beginning in mystery and ending in mystery. And along the way, it gives features or begins to depict that quality of unknowing to find some other type of meaning rather than the language we use every day to communicate, right? I wanted to communicate something much larger and stranger.

So one last thing about the title poem, or the beginning poem, excuse me, is that every first poem in every one of my collections is the first poem of that collection. And for whatever reason, it creates an enabling fiction, meaning it’s, like, a false engine, but in fact, it’s a real engine that allows me then to imagine an open space that then I can wander into, that I can continue to write into because it has an idea that’s capacious, large enough that I can continue to keep refreshing it.

Mark: I love the fact that it opens, like you say, in mystery, in what we don’t know, and that you’re… I mean, throughout your work, you’re writing into the unknown, into the invisible. Death features very strongly in this collection, obviously being called Fierce Elegy.

Peter: Sadly, in many collections in the last decade or more.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. And, I’m just thinking because some listeners to this show are very familiar with contemporary poetry, others are quite new to it. And, if somebody is new to contemporary poetry and they come to this and they’re feeling a little disoriented or maybe even intimidated and trying to find their bearings, could you say anything to them about how to find their way into it and not feel bad?

Peter: Certainly. So when I was young and starting off and the poetry captured my imagination, I always read things that were just ahead of me. Let’s say Emily Dickinson. It’ll always be just ahead of us. And I found that kind of useful because what I realise is, when someone’s reading a poem or hearing a poem, you get what you get. There’s no right, wrong answer ever. You receive what you receive, whatever lights you up at certain moments that make you think, then you’ve got it.

And then, like everything, it needs to be reread. It needs to be revisited because it does create a mystery that’s just ahead of what I might know. And that’s actually a really lovely thing because what that means is the poem is always present. It’s always alive. It’s always signalling to us something new. And the more that I’d read a poem, let’s say by John Ashbery the a great American poet, let’s just… or Emily Dickinson, basically the advanced guard in American poetry, I keep finding things. And I think it’s okay.

And ‘intimidating,’ I don’t accept as a concept. People need to let that go! As though a poem has a kind of lesson it needs to… you know, like, a mathematical equation. That’s never the case. And when it’s taught that way or imagined that way, it instantly shuts it down for someone.

Poetry is about not knowing and accepting the fact that you don’t know and that you don’t get it all at once. And that’s a beautiful thing because if it’s any good, you can keep returning to it. And so poems that I don’t favour that are very popular in culture are the ones where you know where you are at every moment because what happens is the content is delivered, and finally, the poem is disposable. And sadly, that’s true of most popular poetry.

And I find it a real disservice to this profound art that is the human record to make the bar so low for someone to discover their interiority. I just find it… It just makes me so angry. It’s such a disservice to all the women and men for centuries who have worked at this, right? Everybody’s got ideas, everybody’s got feelings, everybody’s got a story to tell, finally, that has absolutely nothing to do with poetry.

Mark: Amen. I think, you know, you mentioned the news. We’re living in a world where there are so many strident and fixed and opposing opinions, where there’s so much pressure to have a position and to feel like you’re on top of things and so many people offering hot takes and very strong viewpoints. To me, I always find poetry a wonderful antidote to all of that because life is a condition of unknowing, of mystery, of being in uncertainties. You know, Keats talked about negative capability, that we don’t know –

Peter: A favourite term of mine. A major, major, term of mine. And I like what you’re saying, Mark. You’re absolutely on it.

So, why elegy then? This leads me into that unknowing, that mystery piece, okay? So elegy, to me… Or particularly, let’s start with this. In the 21st century, in this totally degraded digital age of this culture that’s overtaking us, right, we’re outmatched, it’s not really helpful, because what happens is there is constant noise coming in over the barricades into your soul. And we live in this time of these massive, distorting, accelerated, interlocking crises with zero resolution. Just look at the news each day that’s coming now out of America. It is just a nightmare. I’m outmatched.

So, elegy then, interestingly enough, becomes a very reasonable tool to understand objective reality. And what I mean by that is we can all agree about periodicity. We can all agree that nothing is here forever. We’re just passing through. That we’ve been given this incredible miracle to be on this amazing planet circling around a star in a galaxy of 400 billion stars in a universe that we can just see, our viewable universe, that has something like, I don’t know, three trillion galaxies.

So what am I trying to say? Nothing is here forever. We will lose people, and we too will go. And death does not really frighten me anymore because I’ve helped so many people cross over. What I realise it is, it’s a part of life, not the opposite of life. And we shouldn’t be afraid, right? It’s what it is to be.

But more importantly, we can agree that nothing is here forever. All matter is in a state of constant change. And that’s not just me, or my family, or my loved ones, it’s animal kingdoms, it’s ecosystems, it’s languages, it’s civilisation. Everything’s just passing through, right? And the whole human record from the beginning is not even as long as the life of a gnat or a mosquito in the face of the sun. We are basically a mirage. And to accept that condition of being.

Sure, it’s a mystery and it’s not knowing, but it gives us the opportunity to accept the majesty of being, the gift of consciousness, the gift of being able to be here just for a moment. So it should teach us to be good to one another, to embrace one another, to love in the face of that condition that will be gone. And so that’s why I think the elegy is a reasonable way. We can all agree. The news, nobody can agree, right? But this fact is true. Does this make any sense?

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So when I hear you read this poem, what I hear is the voice of a really human voice trying to come to terms with this or speaking his own truth about how this is. There’s also an element of the dramatic monologue.

Peter: Yes.

Mark: I mean, I’m curious about, as a poet, how do you find your way into writing a poem like this? Does it start coming to you? Do you have to go out and look for it?

Peter: Well, I mean, this came to me from the world, and I think the majority of what I write comes from the world. And the beautiful thing is that I get to put these various things for my sensory data and emotional interiority. I get to bring them together in such a way as to create a very unique, way to be in a moment in the world.

And so, it does come to me, Mark, because for me, language is bigger than me. It’s older than me. It doesn’t live in me. We all live in it. It basically rents us. And when I’m writing, I’m an open vessel. I’m an open vessel. So what I mean is when I say ‘fierce’ in this instance, for me, ferocity can be reimagined as an ultimate radical holding open to dilate, right, to be vulnerable and accept that as a beautiful strength because I’m not going to be here forever. I’ve seen my entire family pass through, right? So I’ve accepted that hard fact, but I’ve also seen it as a gift to have me open and basically see. It gives me eyes. Grief gives me eyes. And so in the end, I’ve transformed my sorrow into a joy.

And so when I write, it comes to me. And I use the pronoun ‘I’. I favour it at times. And what I realise is ‘Peter Gizzi’ is just a tiny piece of that pronoun, right? We all share it. It doesn’t even belong to me. It belongs to all of us. And what that means is that pronoun is wound and sprung with so much historical data, with so many affiliated voices. And I’m interested in bringing in that striation, that depth, that layered quality. And that’s what I mean by archaeology, which I mentioned earlier.

Mark: So the ‘I’ can be the reader as much as the poet?

Peter: Absolutely. And Arthur Rimbaud, the great child poet of the 19th century in France, who stopped writing at 19, who’s forever younger than us, forever, you know, he was a child genius, an enfant terrible, but a beautiful letter to the seer that he writes to one of his teachers. He says, ‘The poet must be a seer,’ but then he says, ‘I is an other. I is an other. It’s not me,’ right? I mean, selfhood is random, you know. It’s random to become a self in some ways, you know. And in other ways it’s indelible because we love.

Mark: And I love what you say that language rents us. It reminds me of Auden’s comment. He said, poets should be humble because our raw material is public property.

Peter: That’s lovely. He’s absolutely correct in that, right? Also, the Beat fiction writer, William Burroughs, said, ‘Language is a virus from outer space.’ But I’m saying…

Mark: It probably was for him!

Peter: …if you’re really into this thing from the beginning, right… When I started out, it was an act of will, you know. But as you go along, what this teaches you is how to listen. And as you go along, you learn how to listen. And that’s an amazing gift of a life, right? So that’s what I’ve learnt to do, is to witness and receive, right? But I don’t write autobiographical poems. I don’t name-check my dead because I realise my story is everyone’s story.

And the thing is, my journey, Mark, in poems and in life, and it’s, you know, not easily won, it’s taken a life, is that I want to be the right size. I don’t want to be bigger or smaller than anyone or anything. I just want to be tuned. I want to be the right size.

Mark: When you talk about being tuned, I mean, one of the things I really like about your work is your ability to have so many different registers within a single poem. I mean, we’ve got ‘the codes, / a litany of survival. / Thus spoke the silvered asphodel / next to the factory ruin.’ And then a few lines later you’ve got the humour of ‘to take umbrage at what a tree can do.’ I assume there’s a pun there on shadow. And then we get very kind of…

Peter: We get ‘thou’.

Mark: We get ‘thou’, right!

Peter: That’s massive.

Mark: And then after thou, we’ve got very American demotic. ‘It was kinda real and kinda not./ Can’t see it today.’ Some poets would have a filter, and they’d say, ‘Well, this language needs to go in this poem, and this one can go in this poem.’ but you evidently, you don’t tidy things up.

Peter: I don’t know what my problem is. It’s just how it is for me because… You know, I was thinking about this. People have been asking me this recently, I mean, and throughout my life. But I’m not saying this is a… I’m not, like, writing this in stone about how I work, but you know what I’m beginning to imagine, a nice way to phrase it, is that I am interested in the relocation of the high lyric voice. I’m interested in relocating it into everyday demotic speech. And yet, I don’t want to lose that incredible depth that I am working in the most profound, gifted art of the human record, which is sacred to me. And I don’t want to let any of that go either. It’s important to me to always understand that I am within this medium, which, in fact, Mark, is deathless. And I’m just a piece of this massive song. And what an incredible privilege that is.

Mark: Yeah. I mean, through this, throughout the whole collection and obviously the previous volumes of your work, I don’t think anyone could be in any doubt of the seriousness of intent and the ambition and the sensitivity and the… I don’t know, there’s that indefinable lyric quality that shines through. And yet I love the fact that it can coexist. It can have – ‘It was kinda real and kinda not. / Can’t see it today.’ – that this actually is part of daily life and daily speech as well.

Peter: Poetry is part of daily life, you know. To me, Mark, poetry is the art of being closer. It’s an intimate art. It’s a human art, right? And to me, like, reading a poem that I didn’t quite get at 17 that I keep reading my whole life and I get more and more from it, it’s like poetry is like friendship. It happens one poem at a time over a life. Nobody gets it all at once. I certainly haven’t.

And I’m still learning from this art. I haven’t written in over a year, by the way, or even more. And sadly, that’s my practice. It’s embarrassing to say, but I really don’t know how to write a poem anymore. I’m totally lost. I’ve forgotten. And, it’s embarrassing, right? Because if I were a violin player, I’d just pick it up and play. Sadly, my practice is ungainly and perhaps untutored and a little homespun. But what that means to me is, what I’ve learnt to accept that is when I get that poem that begins a book, I’m starting all over again from the beginning. So what it means is, I guess, the benefit of it, it keeps me green. It keeps me constantly beginning. I’ve learnt to think that’s an okay place to be.

Mark: Yeah. I took a class with Don Paterson once, and he said he spends most of his time not writing poetry.

Peter: Yeah, that’s true.

Mark: And it’s a weird thing about poetry. That’s the thing you can be known for and yet spend… And he said, the other thing is, the better you get at… once you get an idea at knowing how to follow through and capture that, the less time it takes.

Peter: Perhaps, yeah.

Mark: But what I think I’m hearing from both of you as important is to be alive to that moment, not to try and churn it out and fake it at other times but to be absolutely honest.

Peter: Because you know when you fake it, you know when you fake it. I mean, the poetry I read, why do I read it? There’s a wager there. There’s an honesty, there’s a striving, there’s a reaching, and… Can I continue on this thought?

Mark: Yeah, please do. Yeah.

Peter: Okay. So what I’ve come to learn is that all the poets that I love, the action for them is just ahead of them. That’s right. They’re just ahead of period style, they’re just ahead of what they can manage, they’re ahead of authorial intention. It’s just ahead of them. They’re reaching, right? They want surprise, they’re discovering something. So in fact, what I’ve come to realise is tradition’s not behind me shoring me up, it’s ahead of me. Tradition is ahead of us. That’s where it lives, that’s where the action is. It’s always just ahead of us. And if I subscribe in this model, which I’ve learnt to do, it means that, for me, writing is just an occasion to rise to.

Mark: I like that. I mean, we’ve got T. S. Eliot’s famous essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent.’ He liked to say that when a new poet comes along, they reconfigure all the poets of the past. But you’re even going further than that. You’re saying those poets from the past are actually ahead of us.

Peter: Always.

Mark: And that we should be looking ahead.

Peter: And that’s what’s beautiful.

Mark: Right? And trying to follow. That’s a lovely way of looking at it.

Peter: You know, I have a poem in Threshold Songs that’s called ‘Tradition & the Indivisible Talent.’ Yeah, it’s riffing off of… I mean, Eliot is someone you encounter when you’re young, correct? And in the beginning, you’re in high school, they always give you ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ And as a 17-year-old, you’re like, ‘This is weird. I’m trying to tough this out.’ You know, now I read it, I’m like, ‘I don’t really like this poem anymore. It’s okay. It’s a period piece.’

What I really love of Eliot is the Four Quartets. Now there he came to something so magnificent. You know why? He let go. It was no longer ‘T. S. Eliot’. He let go. When he’s young and making that poem, he’s aware of what he’s doing. That’s what I’m saying. It’s an act of will. But where he went is transcendence. It spoke through him. He took anonymous pastoral verse, and he kept it anonymous. He kept it transcended. Now that’s where that gentleman found his art. And I speak as a practitioner of 40-plus years. I do know what I’m speaking about. Now, people can argue with me, I know I’m right.

Mark: Amen to that. No argument here. Four Quartets is one of the cornerstones, but one of those you keep coming back to, as you say.

Peter: Oh my God, yeah.

Mark: And okay. So focusing a little bit more on the formal choices you’ve made here. You’ve got these very short lines, and that’s quite characteristic of several poems in the collection. Could you say something about that choice? Was that there from the beginning? Did that evolve as you were draughting it?

Peter: Well, it’s interesting. That’s the only question I ever get asked in England. Now, America, they never ask that question. Here, all the time. Okay. So what I favour about that particular line, A, it’s my instrument, it’s how it comes to me, it comes to me in lines. Everybody wants me to write a memoir. If I told you my life, you’d be like, ‘Wow, you should really write a memoir.’ It’s not my art. And thought comes to me in pieces, in fragments, right? It comes to me with the constituent parts of the world of seeing and feeling, and then I begin to put them into a rhythm, in a sequence that’s bigger than what I want. It’s bigger than me. Poetry is bigger than me.

And I love that, that it’s deathless. And somehow, I found my way into this magnificent achievement of the human record. What a gift, what a privilege. You know, it’s great about the prize. I’m very happy, deeply surprised, but it’s kind of, like, a happy accident. It’s not why I do this, right? I do it for this other way of being in the world. It’s such a privilege to be a poet.

Let’s go back. You want me to stay talking about form? Okay. So what happens with a shorter line, right, is that you can take a long thought, a long idea, and by breaking it in this way, it creates momentum. It creates rhythm. It becomes percussive. It becomes physical, and through that physicality, becomes human presence, becomes a body. And so I like that it becomes… it keeps turning, it’s more curvy, it’s more like how consciousness exists in our mind, right, as opposed to this perfect soliloquy. Again, I just combed it all out for you. And then what am I? I’m bored out of my mind. That’s not what I’m interested in. But yeah, I favour that line.

Now, why is it a British question and not an American question? Very simply. This is a lesson for your listeners here as a pedagogical moment from an old poet. Okay. So 1922 is the tsunami of modernism with The Wasteland, tsunami, right? But there’s a doctor in his early thirties practising medicine as a paediatrician in Rutherford, New Jersey. And that happens to be the great William Carlos Williams, one of the cornerstones of modernity, master. He had a problem with The Wasteland. He couldn’t stand Eliot, right? But that’s a good thing because that’s called the unavoidable rivalry of contemporaries. And that’s a really useful tool because if somebody writes something that puts you on notice, that’s a good thing. Why? The whole art goes up.

When people write low-bar autobiographical, poor-me bullshit, then nobody’s learning anything. It’s just all about me, right? That’s not what poetry is. That’s what I’m saying, when it’s finally not about your story. Okay. All right. That’s another thing.

But Williams reads it, has a problem with it, and then he writes a book called Spring and All, which comes out in 1923. It’s published in 300 copies, printed in Dijon, France, by Robert McAlpin for Contact Editions. Many of them were destroyed at the border. It’s a paperback book from 1923. And the line that all American poetry lives on is not The Wasteland. It’s Spring and All. When he breaks into that idiomatic American line, which is short and staccato, it’s like a miracle.

You know what they do in history? ‘On this day in history…’ Well, on this day in history, William Carlos Williams, a paediatrician in his third floor, invented what would become contemporary poetry. So I call 1923 the Quiet Revolution of Poetry, as opposed to the tsunami. Does this make any sense?

Mark: Thank you. I love that.

Peter: Was that a clear moment for your listeners?

Mark: Yes, yes. It will be. And I’m sure the American listeners will be more familiar than the British ones, but it’s really… you’re absolutely right because with Williams, what you get is much closer to actual speech.

Peter: And yet what he’s writing about is just out there. Yeah. Yeah. And the other guy I love in ‘23 is Wallace Stevens with Harmonium, another cornerstone. It’s interesting. Those two stateside modernists, a doctor and a lawyer, had everything to do with the shaping of American poetry. It’s interesting. But the gateway drug for me, I’m just going to admit, was Ezra Pound. That was my gateway drug into poetry.

Oh yeah. I mean, that’s a whole other conversation, but I’m just going to say very clearly, he can write. Everyone agrees. Everyone that likes him or not, everyone agrees. And that includes T.S. Eliot. What he writes about Pound is beautiful. He gets it. He sees the achievement despite his insanity, you know. And his unfortunate political views as he got older, that, to me, if you actually read the transcripts or read his time in St. Elizabeth’s, the madhouse they put him into, he is completely paranoid schizophrenic. He’s out of his mind, right? He really is insane. People have Hitler complexes, they have Napoleon complexes, they have Christ complexes. You know, it manifested him in an ugly way, but you know, we live in this age of neurodivergence. We have so much room for PTSD. How about the First and Second World War broke him? How about the fact that he lost his mind?

Plus, his project is so mad, it’s so massive, nobody could contain it. But we need to have a little sympathy for people losing it, right, as opposed to judging them, you know, in this moment of, like, ‘I don’t want to read that person because I didn’t like their politics.’ I’m like, ‘Okay. Don’t read them, don’t like their politics. And now you’re just going to let go a whole era and not know about it,’ because we don’t know what the cobbler or the baker or the butcher thought in their era. We know about these people because they were public.

Mark: Well, we would be letting go…

Peter: Sorry, I’ve left the building here. Yeah, go ahead.

Mark: No, we’d be letting go of a lot of poets if we had to put them through that filter.

Peter: And then the real question I tell my students is, what are they going to say about us, Mark? We know that 49% of the planet lives on less than $5 a day. That’s, like, 3.4 billion people. I have shelter, I have food, I have heat, I have mobility, right? That’s not true for the majority of the world. What the hell am I doing about it? I said, ‘What are you doing about it?’ How about nothing? We are all on the wrong side of history, just saying.

I just want to say, Mark, I’m very delighted that you have this podcast and you take the time to really consider what a poem and what poetry can be in our lives. You know, that’s a great service that you’re doing for all of us. And what I would say to your listeners is don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. Step into the poem and find a new world. Find a new world in yourself and in others. It’s an amazing tool for opening. So when I say ‘fierce elegy,’ I like to say that the elegy is a mode that can take a broken heart in a fierce world and turn it into a fierce heart in a broken world.

Mark: Thank you, Peter, for sharing your poetry, your world and your passion with us today.

Peter: Thank you for having me.

Mark: It’s been a real eye-opener listening to you just as it is reading the book, Fierce Elegy. So let’s listen again to the poem you read for us today, ‘Findspot Unknown.’

Thus far we have spoken
only the codes,
a litany of survival.
Thus spoke the silvered asphodel
next to the factory ruin.
Sound carries on water.
My subject is the wind.
To take umbrage at what a tree can do,
watching one single birch
become lightning stunning the sky.
Landscape is a made thing,
to see the mind seeing itself.
To see thought, a wing
in night, the long brooding.
Take it, listen, the night is orchestral
when the power’s on.
Everything disporting.
A furred wand upon nothingness.

I get it, it was good to leave the world,
to find myself in thou.
There’s a lot to be said
for seeing in the dark,
and more to the light
when there’s nothing to see.
If I write about the moon,
it’s because it’s there.
I am landlocked, surrounded
by rivers and lakes, pills and leaves.
I saw a better life, it was far off ,
sun on moss next to a friend,
the softening air, the dandelion fluff .
It was kinda real, and kinda not.
Can’t see it today.

And out of nothing, breath.
A beast-like shadow in the glass.
If I brought back every feeling I had
where would I put them,
what could they mean
to this world on the floor?

It was best to let the moon unravel
and focus the truth of the music.
It was best to let the music
unravel and focus the truth of night.
Like when I found you
in the back of my mind.
I am talking about people
and the night.
People inside the night.
The night and what we are made of.
The things and the people.
The signal and its noise.

‘Findspot Unknown’ is from Fierce Elegy, published by Penguin UK.

Fierce Elegy is available from:

The publisher: Penguin UK

Amazon: UK | US

Peter Gizzi is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Fierce Elegy (2023) Winner of the Massachusetts Book Award; Now It’s Dark (2020); and Archeophonics (2016), a Finalist for the National Book Award; all published in the United States by Wesleyan. In 2024 Penguin UK published an edition of Fierce Elegy which was awarded The T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2018 Wesleyan published In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi. He is the series editor of the four volume of The Collected Works of Jack Spicer. He teaches Poetry and Poetics in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. 

Photo © Carol Lollis 2025

This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday.

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To separate the subtle from the gross
without injury either to spirit or body
I clip dead flowers to release the ghosts
that rise through the stem in green alchemy:
take that word, Arabic al-kimiya,
prune further, into late Greek and Coptic
to kemet, ancient Egyptian black:
the dark root of the art of elixir.
Sceptical of the power of language
to convey the quintessence of wisdom,
language itself learned how to speak hidden –
to sound both the word and its umbrage:
a darkness conducting the central fire:
a form, like a flower, for its signature.

I get it, it was good to leave the world,
to find myself in thou.
There’s a lot to be said
for seeing in the dark,
and more to the light
when there’s nothing to see.
If I write about the moon,
it’s because it’s there.
I am landlocked, surrounded
by rivers and lakes, pills and leaves.
I saw a better life, it was far off ,
sun on moss next to a friend,
the softening air, the dandelion fluff .
It was kinda real, and kinda not.
Can’t see it today.

And out of nothing, breath.
A beast-like shadow in the glass.
If I brought back every feeling I had
where would I put them,
what could they mean
to this world on the floor?

It was best to let the moon unravel
and focus the truth of the music.
It was best to let the music
unravel and focus the truth of night.
Like when I found you
in the back of my mind.
I am talking about people
and the night.
People inside the night.
The night and what we are made of.
The things and the people.
The signal and its noise.

Mark: Peter, where did this poem come from?

Peter: Well, I favour archaeological terms simply because I think they give depth to poetry, and I believe that depth is an important part of this art that it’s been with us forever, from the beginning.

So ‘Findspot Unknown’ is something that you’ll find in a museum. In fact, I found it in the British Museum years back. And you’ll go to an artefact, it’ll say ‘Assyria 800 BC.’ And then you’ll come to the next artefact, and it says, ‘Findspot Unknown.’ And that really got me because it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. That’s an artefact of unknown origin.’ It’s a thing, and it’s a mystery, right? So I began to think, it’s like, ‘Oh, I get it, a poem is an artefact from an unknown origin.’ It’s a mystery, right? But then I wrote the poem, then I was reading it, like, a year later. I was reading it somewhere, and I thought, ‘Hey, wait a minute, I’m an artefact from an unknown origin, you know.

And the unknown part is really important to me, Mark, because to me, the role of the poet is to remain a mystery in the face of violence. I don’t want to respond in kind to the news. I used to write poems that were more kind of overtly political, but, I began to say, ‘I don’t want to just bang a drum and respond over and over to this heedless noise that comes in.’ And I began to dial in the larger piece. So I am interested in the poem beginning in mystery and ending in mystery. And along the way, it gives features or begins to depict that quality of unknowing to find some other type of meaning rather than the language we use every day to communicate, right? I wanted to communicate something much larger and stranger.

So one last thing about the title poem, or the beginning poem, excuse me, is that every first poem in every one of my collections is the first poem of that collection. And for whatever reason, it creates an enabling fiction, meaning it’s, like, a false engine, but in fact, it’s a real engine that allows me then to imagine an open space that then I can wander into, that I can continue to write into because it has an idea that’s capacious, large enough that I can continue to keep refreshing it.

Mark: I love the fact that it opens, like you say, in mystery, in what we don’t know, and that you’re… I mean, throughout your work, you’re writing into the unknown, into the invisible. Death features very strongly in this collection, obviously being called Fierce Elegy.

Peter: Sadly, in many collections in the last decade or more.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. And, I’m just thinking because some listeners to this show are very familiar with contemporary poetry, others are quite new to it. And, if somebody is new to contemporary poetry and they come to this and they’re feeling a little disoriented or maybe even intimidated and trying to find their bearings, could you say anything to them about how to find their way into it and not feel bad?

Peter: Certainly. So when I was young and starting off and the poetry captured my imagination, I always read things that were just ahead of me. Let’s say Emily Dickinson. It’ll always be just ahead of us. And I found that kind of useful because what I realise is, when someone’s reading a poem or hearing a poem, you get what you get. There’s no right, wrong answer ever. You receive what you receive, whatever lights you up at certain moments that make you think, then you’ve got it.

And then, like everything, it needs to be reread. It needs to be revisited because it does create a mystery that’s just ahead of what I might know. And that’s actually a really lovely thing because what that means is the poem is always present. It’s always alive. It’s always signalling to us something new. And the more that I’d read a poem, let’s say by John Ashbery the a great American poet, let’s just… or Emily Dickinson, basically the advanced guard in American poetry, I keep finding things. And I think it’s okay.

And ‘intimidating,’ I don’t accept as a concept. People need to let that go! As though a poem has a kind of lesson it needs to… you know, like, a mathematical equation. That’s never the case. And when it’s taught that way or imagined that way, it instantly shuts it down for someone.

Poetry is about not knowing and accepting the fact that you don’t know and that you don’t get it all at once. And that’s a beautiful thing because if it’s any good, you can keep returning to it. And so poems that I don’t favour that are very popular in culture are the ones where you know where you are at every moment because what happens is the content is delivered, and finally, the poem is disposable. And sadly, that’s true of most popular poetry.

And I find it a real disservice to this profound art that is the human record to make the bar so low for someone to discover their interiority. I just find it… It just makes me so angry. It’s such a disservice to all the women and men for centuries who have worked at this, right? Everybody’s got ideas, everybody’s got feelings, everybody’s got a story to tell, finally, that has absolutely nothing to do with poetry.

Mark: Amen. I think, you know, you mentioned the news. We’re living in a world where there are so many strident and fixed and opposing opinions, where there’s so much pressure to have a position and to feel like you’re on top of things and so many people offering hot takes and very strong viewpoints. To me, I always find poetry a wonderful antidote to all of that because life is a condition of unknowing, of mystery, of being in uncertainties. You know, Keats talked about negative capability, that we don’t know –

Peter: A favourite term of mine. A major, major, term of mine. And I like what you’re saying, Mark. You’re absolutely on it.

So, why elegy then? This leads me into that unknowing, that mystery piece, okay? So elegy, to me… Or particularly, let’s start with this. In the 21st century, in this totally degraded digital age of this culture that’s overtaking us, right, we’re outmatched, it’s not really helpful, because what happens is there is constant noise coming in over the barricades into your soul. And we live in this time of these massive, distorting, accelerated, interlocking crises with zero resolution. Just look at the news each day that’s coming now out of America. It is just a nightmare. I’m outmatched.

So, elegy then, interestingly enough, becomes a very reasonable tool to understand objective reality. And what I mean by that is we can all agree about periodicity. We can all agree that nothing is here forever. We’re just passing through. That we’ve been given this incredible miracle to be on this amazing planet circling around a star in a galaxy of 400 billion stars in a universe that we can just see, our viewable universe, that has something like, I don’t know, three trillion galaxies.

So what am I trying to say? Nothing is here forever. We will lose people, and we too will go. And death does not really frighten me anymore because I’ve helped so many people cross over. What I realise it is, it’s a part of life, not the opposite of life. And we shouldn’t be afraid, right? It’s what it is to be.

But more importantly, we can agree that nothing is here forever. All matter is in a state of constant change. And that’s not just me, or my family, or my loved ones, it’s animal kingdoms, it’s ecosystems, it’s languages, it’s civilisation. Everything’s just passing through, right? And the whole human record from the beginning is not even as long as the life of a gnat or a mosquito in the face of the sun. We are basically a mirage. And to accept that condition of being.

Sure, it’s a mystery and it’s not knowing, but it gives us the opportunity to accept the majesty of being, the gift of consciousness, the gift of being able to be here just for a moment. So it should teach us to be good to one another, to embrace one another, to love in the face of that condition that will be gone. And so that’s why I think the elegy is a reasonable way. We can all agree. The news, nobody can agree, right? But this fact is true. Does this make any sense?

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So when I hear you read this poem, what I hear is the voice of a really human voice trying to come to terms with this or speaking his own truth about how this is. There’s also an element of the dramatic monologue.

Peter: Yes.

Mark: I mean, I’m curious about, as a poet, how do you find your way into writing a poem like this? Does it start coming to you? Do you have to go out and look for it?

Peter: Well, I mean, this came to me from the world, and I think the majority of what I write comes from the world. And the beautiful thing is that I get to put these various things for my sensory data and emotional interiority. I get to bring them together in such a way as to create a very unique, way to be in a moment in the world.

And so, it does come to me, Mark, because for me, language is bigger than me. It’s older than me. It doesn’t live in me. We all live in it. It basically rents us. And when I’m writing, I’m an open vessel. I’m an open vessel. So what I mean is when I say ‘fierce’ in this instance, for me, ferocity can be reimagined as an ultimate radical holding open to dilate, right, to be vulnerable and accept that as a beautiful strength because I’m not going to be here forever. I’ve seen my entire family pass through, right? So I’ve accepted that hard fact, but I’ve also seen it as a gift to have me open and basically see. It gives me eyes. Grief gives me eyes. And so in the end, I’ve transformed my sorrow into a joy.

And so when I write, it comes to me. And I use the pronoun ‘I’. I favour it at times. And what I realise is ‘Peter Gizzi’ is just a tiny piece of that pronoun, right? We all share it. It doesn’t even belong to me. It belongs to all of us. And what that means is that pronoun is wound and sprung with so much historical data, with so many affiliated voices. And I’m interested in bringing in that striation, that depth, that layered quality. And that’s what I mean by archaeology, which I mentioned earlier.

Mark: So the ‘I’ can be the reader as much as the poet?

Peter: Absolutely. And Arthur Rimbaud, the great child poet of the 19th century in France, who stopped writing at 19, who’s forever younger than us, forever, you know, he was a child genius, an enfant terrible, but a beautiful letter to the seer that he writes to one of his teachers. He says, ‘The poet must be a seer,’ but then he says, ‘I is an other. I is an other. It’s not me,’ right? I mean, selfhood is random, you know. It’s random to become a self in some ways, you know. And in other ways it’s indelible because we love.

Mark: And I love what you say that language rents us. It reminds me of Auden’s comment. He said, poets should be humble because our raw material is public property.

Peter: That’s lovely. He’s absolutely correct in that, right? Also, the Beat fiction writer, William Burroughs, said, ‘Language is a virus from outer space.’ But I’m saying…

Mark: It probably was for him!

Peter: …if you’re really into this thing from the beginning, right… When I started out, it was an act of will, you know. But as you go along, what this teaches you is how to listen. And as you go along, you learn how to listen. And that’s an amazing gift of a life, right? So that’s what I’ve learnt to do, is to witness and receive, right? But I don’t write autobiographical poems. I don’t name-check my dead because I realise my story is everyone’s story.

And the thing is, my journey, Mark, in poems and in life, and it’s, you know, not easily won, it’s taken a life, is that I want to be the right size. I don’t want to be bigger or smaller than anyone or anything. I just want to be tuned. I want to be the right size.

Mark: When you talk about being tuned, I mean, one of the things I really like about your work is your ability to have so many different registers within a single poem. I mean, we’ve got ‘the codes, / a litany of survival. / Thus spoke the silvered asphodel / next to the factory ruin.’ And then a few lines later you’ve got the humour of ‘to take umbrage at what a tree can do.’ I assume there’s a pun there on shadow. And then we get very kind of…

Peter: We get ‘thou’.

Mark: We get ‘thou’, right!

Peter: That’s massive.

Mark: And then after thou, we’ve got very American demotic. ‘It was kinda real and kinda not./ Can’t see it today.’ Some poets would have a filter, and they’d say, ‘Well, this language needs to go in this poem, and this one can go in this poem.’ but you evidently, you don’t tidy things up.

Peter: I don’t know what my problem is. It’s just how it is for me because… You know, I was thinking about this. People have been asking me this recently, I mean, and throughout my life. But I’m not saying this is a… I’m not, like, writing this in stone about how I work, but you know what I’m beginning to imagine, a nice way to phrase it, is that I am interested in the relocation of the high lyric voice. I’m interested in relocating it into everyday demotic speech. And yet, I don’t want to lose that incredible depth that I am working in the most profound, gifted art of the human record, which is sacred to me. And I don’t want to let any of that go either. It’s important to me to always understand that I am within this medium, which, in fact, Mark, is deathless. And I’m just a piece of this massive song. And what an incredible privilege that is.

Mark: Yeah. I mean, through this, throughout the whole collection and obviously the previous volumes of your work, I don’t think anyone could be in any doubt of the seriousness of intent and the ambition and the sensitivity and the… I don’t know, there’s that indefinable lyric quality that shines through. And yet I love the fact that it can coexist. It can have – ‘It was kinda real and kinda not. / Can’t see it today.’ – that this actually is part of daily life and daily speech as well.

Peter: Poetry is part of daily life, you know. To me, Mark, poetry is the art of being closer. It’s an intimate art. It’s a human art, right? And to me, like, reading a poem that I didn’t quite get at 17 that I keep reading my whole life and I get more and more from it, it’s like poetry is like friendship. It happens one poem at a time over a life. Nobody gets it all at once. I certainly haven’t.

And I’m still learning from this art. I haven’t written in over a year, by the way, or even more. And sadly, that’s my practice. It’s embarrassing to say, but I really don’t know how to write a poem anymore. I’m totally lost. I’ve forgotten. And, it’s embarrassing, right? Because if I were a violin player, I’d just pick it up and play. Sadly, my practice is ungainly and perhaps untutored and a little homespun. But what that means to me is, what I’ve learnt to accept that is when I get that poem that begins a book, I’m starting all over again from the beginning. So what it means is, I guess, the benefit of it, it keeps me green. It keeps me constantly beginning. I’ve learnt to think that’s an okay place to be.

Mark: Yeah. I took a class with Don Paterson once, and he said he spends most of his time not writing poetry.

Peter: Yeah, that’s true.

Mark: And it’s a weird thing about poetry. That’s the thing you can be known for and yet spend… And he said, the other thing is, the better you get at… once you get an idea at knowing how to follow through and capture that, the less time it takes.

Peter: Perhaps, yeah.

Mark: But what I think I’m hearing from both of you as important is to be alive to that moment, not to try and churn it out and fake it at other times but to be absolutely honest.

Peter: Because you know when you fake it, you know when you fake it. I mean, the poetry I read, why do I read it? There’s a wager there. There’s an honesty, there’s a striving, there’s a reaching, and… Can I continue on this thought?

Mark: Yeah, please do. Yeah.

Peter: Okay. So what I’ve come to learn is that all the poets that I love, the action for them is just ahead of them. That’s right. They’re just ahead of period style, they’re just ahead of what they can manage, they’re ahead of authorial intention. It’s just ahead of them. They’re reaching, right? They want surprise, they’re discovering something. So in fact, what I’ve come to realise is tradition’s not behind me shoring me up, it’s ahead of me. Tradition is ahead of us. That’s where it lives, that’s where the action is. It’s always just ahead of us. And if I subscribe in this model, which I’ve learnt to do, it means that, for me, writing is just an occasion to rise to.

Mark: I like that. I mean, we’ve got T. S. Eliot’s famous essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent.’ He liked to say that when a new poet comes along, they reconfigure all the poets of the past. But you’re even going further than that. You’re saying those poets from the past are actually ahead of us.

Peter: Always.

Mark: And that we should be looking ahead.

Peter: And that’s what’s beautiful.

Mark: Right? And trying to follow. That’s a lovely way of looking at it.

Peter: You know, I have a poem in Threshold Songs that’s called ‘Tradition & the Indivisible Talent.’ Yeah, it’s riffing off of… I mean, Eliot is someone you encounter when you’re young, correct? And in the beginning, you’re in high school, they always give you ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ And as a 17-year-old, you’re like, ‘This is weird. I’m trying to tough this out.’ You know, now I read it, I’m like, ‘I don’t really like this poem anymore. It’s okay. It’s a period piece.’

What I really love of Eliot is the Four Quartets. Now there he came to something so magnificent. You know why? He let go. It was no longer ‘T. S. Eliot’. He let go. When he’s young and making that poem, he’s aware of what he’s doing. That’s what I’m saying. It’s an act of will. But where he went is transcendence. It spoke through him. He took anonymous pastoral verse, and he kept it anonymous. He kept it transcended. Now that’s where that gentleman found his art. And I speak as a practitioner of 40-plus years. I do know what I’m speaking about. Now, people can argue with me, I know I’m right.

Mark: Amen to that. No argument here. Four Quartets is one of the cornerstones, but one of those you keep coming back to, as you say.

Peter: Oh my God, yeah.

Mark: And okay. So focusing a little bit more on the formal choices you’ve made here. You’ve got these very short lines, and that’s quite characteristic of several poems in the collection. Could you say something about that choice? Was that there from the beginning? Did that evolve as you were draughting it?

Peter: Well, it’s interesting. That’s the only question I ever get asked in England. Now, America, they never ask that question. Here, all the time. Okay. So what I favour about that particular line, A, it’s my instrument, it’s how it comes to me, it comes to me in lines. Everybody wants me to write a memoir. If I told you my life, you’d be like, ‘Wow, you should really write a memoir.’ It’s not my art. And thought comes to me in pieces, in fragments, right? It comes to me with the constituent parts of the world of seeing and feeling, and then I begin to put them into a rhythm, in a sequence that’s bigger than what I want. It’s bigger than me. Poetry is bigger than me.

And I love that, that it’s deathless. And somehow, I found my way into this magnificent achievement of the human record. What a gift, what a privilege. You know, it’s great about the prize. I’m very happy, deeply surprised, but it’s kind of, like, a happy accident. It’s not why I do this, right? I do it for this other way of being in the world. It’s such a privilege to be a poet.

Let’s go back. You want me to stay talking about form? Okay. So what happens with a shorter line, right, is that you can take a long thought, a long idea, and by breaking it in this way, it creates momentum. It creates rhythm. It becomes percussive. It becomes physical, and through that physicality, becomes human presence, becomes a body. And so I like that it becomes… it keeps turning, it’s more curvy, it’s more like how consciousness exists in our mind, right, as opposed to this perfect soliloquy. Again, I just combed it all out for you. And then what am I? I’m bored out of my mind. That’s not what I’m interested in. But yeah, I favour that line.

Now, why is it a British question and not an American question? Very simply. This is a lesson for your listeners here as a pedagogical moment from an old poet. Okay. So 1922 is the tsunami of modernism with The Wasteland, tsunami, right? But there’s a doctor in his early thirties practising medicine as a paediatrician in Rutherford, New Jersey. And that happens to be the great William Carlos Williams, one of the cornerstones of modernity, master. He had a problem with The Wasteland. He couldn’t stand Eliot, right? But that’s a good thing because that’s called the unavoidable rivalry of contemporaries. And that’s a really useful tool because if somebody writes something that puts you on notice, that’s a good thing. Why? The whole art goes up.

When people write low-bar autobiographical, poor-me bullshit, then nobody’s learning anything. It’s just all about me, right? That’s not what poetry is. That’s what I’m saying, when it’s finally not about your story. Okay. All right. That’s another thing.

But Williams reads it, has a problem with it, and then he writes a book called Spring and All, which comes out in 1923. It’s published in 300 copies, printed in Dijon, France, by Robert McAlpin for Contact Editions. Many of them were destroyed at the border. It’s a paperback book from 1923. And the line that all American poetry lives on is not The Wasteland. It’s Spring and All. When he breaks into that idiomatic American line, which is short and staccato, it’s like a miracle.

You know what they do in history? ‘On this day in history…’ Well, on this day in history, William Carlos Williams, a paediatrician in his third floor, invented what would become contemporary poetry. So I call 1923 the Quiet Revolution of Poetry, as opposed to the tsunami. Does this make any sense?

Mark: Thank you. I love that.

Peter: Was that a clear moment for your listeners?

Mark: Yes, yes. It will be. And I’m sure the American listeners will be more familiar than the British ones, but it’s really… you’re absolutely right because with Williams, what you get is much closer to actual speech.

Peter: And yet what he’s writing about is just out there. Yeah. Yeah. And the other guy I love in ‘23 is Wallace Stevens with Harmonium, another cornerstone. It’s interesting. Those two stateside modernists, a doctor and a lawyer, had everything to do with the shaping of American poetry. It’s interesting. But the gateway drug for me, I’m just going to admit, was Ezra Pound. That was my gateway drug into poetry.

Oh yeah. I mean, that’s a whole other conversation, but I’m just going to say very clearly, he can write. Everyone agrees. Everyone that likes him or not, everyone agrees. And that includes T.S. Eliot. What he writes about Pound is beautiful. He gets it. He sees the achievement despite his insanity, you know. And his unfortunate political views as he got older, that, to me, if you actually read the transcripts or read his time in St. Elizabeth’s, the madhouse they put him into, he is completely paranoid schizophrenic. He’s out of his mind, right? He really is insane. People have Hitler complexes, they have Napoleon complexes, they have Christ complexes. You know, it manifested him in an ugly way, but you know, we live in this age of neurodivergence. We have so much room for PTSD. How about the First and Second World War broke him? How about the fact that he lost his mind?

Plus, his project is so mad, it’s so massive, nobody could contain it. But we need to have a little sympathy for people losing it, right, as opposed to judging them, you know, in this moment of, like, ‘I don’t want to read that person because I didn’t like their politics.’ I’m like, ‘Okay. Don’t read them, don’t like their politics. And now you’re just going to let go a whole era and not know about it,’ because we don’t know what the cobbler or the baker or the butcher thought in their era. We know about these people because they were public.

Mark: Well, we would be letting go…

Peter: Sorry, I’ve left the building here. Yeah, go ahead.

Mark: No, we’d be letting go of a lot of poets if we had to put them through that filter.

Peter: And then the real question I tell my students is, what are they going to say about us, Mark? We know that 49% of the planet lives on less than $5 a day. That’s, like, 3.4 billion people. I have shelter, I have food, I have heat, I have mobility, right? That’s not true for the majority of the world. What the hell am I doing about it? I said, ‘What are you doing about it?’ How about nothing? We are all on the wrong side of history, just saying.

I just want to say, Mark, I’m very delighted that you have this podcast and you take the time to really consider what a poem and what poetry can be in our lives. You know, that’s a great service that you’re doing for all of us. And what I would say to your listeners is don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. Step into the poem and find a new world. Find a new world in yourself and in others. It’s an amazing tool for opening. So when I say ‘fierce elegy,’ I like to say that the elegy is a mode that can take a broken heart in a fierce world and turn it into a fierce heart in a broken world.

Mark: Thank you, Peter, for sharing your poetry, your world and your passion with us today.

Peter: Thank you for having me.

Mark: It’s been a real eye-opener listening to you just as it is reading the book, Fierce Elegy. So let’s listen again to the poem you read for us today, ‘Findspot Unknown.’

Thus far we have spoken
only the codes,
a litany of survival.
Thus spoke the silvered asphodel
next to the factory ruin.
Sound carries on water.
My subject is the wind.
To take umbrage at what a tree can do,
watching one single birch
become lightning stunning the sky.
Landscape is a made thing,
to see the mind seeing itself.
To see thought, a wing
in night, the long brooding.
Take it, listen, the night is orchestral
when the power’s on.
Everything disporting.
A furred wand upon nothingness.

I get it, it was good to leave the world,
to find myself in thou.
There’s a lot to be said
for seeing in the dark,
and more to the light
when there’s nothing to see.
If I write about the moon,
it’s because it’s there.
I am landlocked, surrounded
by rivers and lakes, pills and leaves.
I saw a better life, it was far off ,
sun on moss next to a friend,
the softening air, the dandelion fluff .
It was kinda real, and kinda not.
Can’t see it today.

And out of nothing, breath.
A beast-like shadow in the glass.
If I brought back every feeling I had
where would I put them,
what could they mean
to this world on the floor?

It was best to let the moon unravel
and focus the truth of the music.
It was best to let the music
unravel and focus the truth of night.
Like when I found you
in the back of my mind.
I am talking about people
and the night.
People inside the night.
The night and what we are made of.
The things and the people.
The signal and its noise.

‘Findspot Unknown’ is from Fierce Elegy, published by Penguin UK.

Fierce Elegy is available from:

The publisher: Penguin UK

Amazon: UK | US

Peter Gizzi is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Fierce Elegy (2023) Winner of the Massachusetts Book Award; Now It’s Dark (2020); and Archeophonics (2016), a Finalist for the National Book Award; all published in the United States by Wesleyan. In 2024 Penguin UK published an edition of Fierce Elegy which was awarded The T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2018 Wesleyan published In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi. He is the series editor of the four volume of The Collected Works of Jack Spicer. He teaches Poetry and Poetics in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. 

Photo © Carol Lollis 2025

This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday.

You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favourite app.

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The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman.

A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant.

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Episode 84 Alchemy by Gregory Leadbetter  Gregory Leadbetter reads ‘Alchemy’ and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.This poem is from: The Infernal Garden by Gregory LeadbetterAvailable from: The Infernal Garden is available from: The publisher: Nine Arches...

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Mark McGuinness reads and discusses a passage from ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning.

Robert Browning

Mark McGuinness

By Robert Browning

Into the street the Piper stept,

First of all today, we interrupt our usual programming for a little good news. I’ve just discovered this week that last year, The Guardian newspaper included A Mouthful of Air in a list of five of the best poetry podcasts, with a nice review.

I’m not sure how I missed it at the time, but it’s always nice to see something like this, as a sign that I’m making some progress in my mission to bring poems to the world. Obviously, reviews aren’t my main motivation for doing the show, that’s always been about finding a poem I love and sharing it with you and seeing if you like it too. But what a review does do is let me know that the podcast is getting out there in the world and connecting poems with listeners in the way I want it to.

So before we move on, I would like to congratulate you on your good taste in listening to A Mouthful of Air, and to thank you for listening and helping me get the poems out there. And thank you also, if you have liked or reviewed or shared the podcast in any shape or form, it is tremendously helpful in finding new listeners to the show.

Okay, on with the poetry! Today’s piece is another poetic version of a traditional story that proved to be very influential. A couple of episodes ago, we looked at Ovid’s retelling of the story of Daedalus and Icarus in his Metamorphoses. This time we have Robert Browning and his 1842 version of the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Like Daedalus and Icarus, this is almost certainly a tale you’re already familiar with, so once again, the pleasure we derive from the poetic version comes from seeing what the poet does with the material.

Starting with the legend itself, I looked into this, in preparation for the podcast. And amazingly, it turns out that the story of the Pied Piper does seem to have a basis in an actual historical event in the town of Hamelin in Lower Saxony in Germany. Numerous accounts from the Middle Ages onwards attest that in 1284, something occurred in the town that resulted in the loss of 130 children. One of the oldest texts is inscribed in Latin on a house in the town of Hamelin. It states:

‘In the year 1284, on the day of Saints John and Paul, on 26th of June, 130 children born in Hamelin were lured by a Piper, clothed in many colours, to Calvary near the Koppen, and lost.’

‘Calvary near the Koppen’ refers to a local hill or mountain, and this is just one of many accounts from the Middle Ages onwards that records the same date and the same number of children being spirited away from the town. Interestingly, the part of the story where the Piper gets rid of the rats is a later addition, and doesn’t appear until 1559.

So something does seem to have happened in Hamelin in the 13th century that meant the town lost a significant number of children. and scholars and historians are still investigating and debating exactly what could have led to this very strange and unsettling legend. Explanations include illness, possibly the plague. Or St. Vitus’ Dance, the dancing mania that swept Europe in the late Middle Ages, and there is a documented case of a group of children jumping and dancing about 12 miles between the German towns of Erfurt and Arnstadt, in 1237. Another possible explanation is a landslide or sinkhole that may have swallowed up some of the town’s citizens.

One theory that seems to hold quite a bit of scholarly credence is the idea of emigration to Eastern Europe. In this explanation, ‘children of the town’ wouldn’t necessarily have meant young children; it could simply have meant people who were born in the town. So, in this scenario, it may well have been young adults who were persuaded by a government recruiter whose job was to encourage Germans to emigrate to Eastern Europe, for political and economic reasons.

There’s some quite interesting research by one scholar who started with the surnames in Hamelin town records from the 13th century and then searched telephone directories in 20th-century Poland, and found quite a few names occurring in both places. So it’s possible the exodus from the town involved people who went willingly, lured by the promises of a recruiter. As we know, whether you’re recruiting for the military or for overseas expeditions or timeshares in holiday homes, these are typically pretty smooth and charming people. So it’s perhaps not a huge leap to see how a persuasive recruiter could be transformed into the Pied Piper of legend.

So that’s the possible historical basis. And of course, Hamelin is an actual town, and if you go there today, apparently they really embrace the legend for the benefit of tourists. You can go and see the ‘Bungelosenstrasse’, the street where no drums are played. Apparently, it’s a local by-law that you’re not allowed to play drums or make music on this street.

Looking at it purely as a legend, Browning’s poem was based on an early 17th-century version of the story, which included the rats. I’ve just read you an excerpt from his longer poem.

So to refresh our memories: the tale begins with the citizens of Hamelin being very distressed and by a rat infestation in their town. And just as the Mayor and the Corporation are debating what on earth they can do about it, the Piper appears. He is wearing pied colours – mixed red and yellow in Browning’s version, obviously very reminiscent of a jester. He promises to rid the town of the rats if they will pay him a thousand guilders. The Mayor says, ‘Well, if you can do that, absolutely, we’d even pay you fifty thousand!’ So, quick as a flash, the Piper goes out into the street and plays his pipe to lure away the rats, in the passage we’ve just heard.

After the rats are gone, he returns for payment. But of course, the Mayor and the Corporation are rather loath to pay up, especially as the rats are all dead. They say, ‘Well, he’s not exactly going to bring them back to life, is he?’ So instead of a thousand guilders, they say, ‘Come, take fifty.’ And the Piper is having none of this. He insists, and threatens consequences if they break their promise:

But the Mayor stupidly replies, ‘Do your worst’. Whereupon the Piper goes out into the street again and starts piping once more. And this time, of course, it’s the children of the town who fall under the spell of his music, who are lured away, and vanish into a hole in the mountainside, along with the Piper.

We get a version of the immigration theory at the end of Browning’s poem, where he says that the children emerged from the mountains into Transylvania, where their ‘outlandish ways and dress’ marked them out as different to the locals.

So that’s the story, and whatever its historical basis, I think it’s pretty clear that the Piper in the legend is an archetypal figure: a trickster, an envoy from the otherworld. A bit like the Green Knight in Gawain and the Green Knight, who appears at King Arthur’s court and challenges the knights to a Christmas game. Or indeed, like the many fairies and witches and other magical beings who appear to humans in fairy stories, extract a promise of some kind, and then take revenge when the humans break their promise.

And Browning does a wonderful job of evoking the strangeness of the Piper, when he introduces him in an earlier part of the poem:

Another interpretation of the poem sees the Piper as the archetypal artist who, as we know, often has a lot of trouble getting paid. You know, for all the praise, gratitude, and superlatives society likes to shower upon great artists, it’s amazing how often it struggles to pay them enough to eat. One scholar even links the story to Browning’s own sense of grievance over an unpaid invoice. Sometimes the most mundane things can inspire the most magical poetry.

But I don’t think we need to pin down the Piper too narrowly. To me, what makes him such a compelling figure is his strangeness, his unwillingness to fit into the usual categories of common sense and daily life.

And I think we can agree that Browning’s poem is a wonderfully vivid and magical version of the story. It’s characteristic of him in being a very entertaining poem. These days, I think Browning is a little bit overlooked as a poet, certainly in comparison to Tennyson, who is probably our go-to major male Victorian poet. But Browning is a really enjoyable poet to read. He does a lot of storytelling and dramatic monologues, and his poems are very often very entertaining. They are page-turners. It’s a bit of a sad comment on our image of poetry that it’s remarkable when a poet is considered entertaining, but it’s certainly true of Browning.

This was one of the most famous poems in his collection, Dramatic Lyrics. It was published nearly three decades after the Grimm’s Fairy Tales version – the Grimms’ version came out in 1816, Browning’s in 1842. But Browning’s poem has been even more influential than Grimms’ Fairy Tales in popularising the story, at least in the English-speaking world.

And listening to this excerpt, about the trick the Piper plays on the rats, I think we can see why. It is an absolutely entrancing poem, which, of course, is entirely appropriate, given that the subject of the poem is entrancement or enchantment.

Right from the beginning of this passage, and indeed throughout the poem, the rhyme and the rhythm are integral to the poem’s effect. Let’s listen again to the opening lines:

These lines are characteristic of his method throughout the whole poem. We start with five lines of interlocking rhymes: ‘stept,’ ‘smiled,’ ‘slept,’ ‘while,’ ‘adept.’. And then we have a run of three rhymes together: ‘wrinkled,’ ‘twinkled,’ and ‘sprinkled.’ Not only three rhymes in a row, but three double rhymes, rhyming on two syllables. And the effect is heightened by the fact that the third rhyme is in a line that contains that lovely image of his eyes twinkling like a candle-flame when salt is sprinkled on it.

Even in 1842, this kind of rhyming would have been considered a bit much, over-egging the pudding. I think one way Browning gets away with this is that it’s a children’s fairy story, so maybe adults are more likely to be indulgent of such ‘jingling’ rhymes, to use Milton’s word. Obviously, Milton would have shuddered in horror listening to this poem.

And it’s not just rhyme that creates the trancelike effect – this also comes from the rhythm. Browning’s metre is rather unusual for 19th-century English literary poetry in that it’s not written in syllable stress metre, where there is a relatively fixed pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, like iambic pentameter, which we’ve heard a lot on this podcast, which goes ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM.

‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ is written in stress metre, which means there are a regular number of stresses in a line, but there can be a varying number of syllables. It was relatively rare in literary verse, but it’s a very common metre in traditional ballads, which makes it appropriate for a legend like this.

And Browning is absolutely masterful in the way he can speed up or slow down at different points in the action, for dramatic effect. Most of the lines in this poem have four stresses in the line, but the length of the line can vary a lot, from the very short:

This line has only eight syllables, and we can really feel the Piper stepping slowly and carefully into the street. But a few lines later, when the rats are on the loose, we find these two longer lines, with eleven syllables each:

So those extra syllables prompt the reader to pick up the pace, almost leaping from stress to stress, like the rats leaping and tumbling into the street.

Another way Browning varies the rhythm is by occasionally using a line with only three stresses. So listening again to the opening four lines:

The first three lines establish the four-stress rhythm, and then when we get to ‘quiet pipe the while,’ there are only three beats:

And of course, this is the moment when the Piper pauses before he starts to play. So that missing beat creates a wonderful little dramatic pause, before the action gets under way. Then there’s the amazing moment when the rats make their entrance:

Listen again to these two lines: the first one has only three stresses, then the next one has four:

Can you hear that? Isn’t the way the line grows longer wonderfully mimetic of the sound of the rats growing louder and louder? And of course it’s no coincidence that this is another run of three double rhymes – ‘grumbling’, ‘rumbling’ and ‘tumbling’. Browning is using all the sound effects and technical wizardry at is disposal. And for me, this scene is as good as anything in a Disney movie. It continues with this fantastic description of the rats:

What we’ve got here, of course, is a list, which is a technique that Browning employs repeatedly and very effectively in this poem. As I’ve said before on the podcast, poets love lists – they’re a kind of verbal cornucopia, that allows them to express the abundance and diversity of life. And of course in this case, it’s a mesmerising vision but also a horrifying one, since the multiplication of the rats is precisely what the townsfolk are so keen to avoid.

So we’ve got this amazing description of all the rats tumbling through the streets of the town and into the river:

Notice that we’ve got another three-beat line here:

Because this is another dramatic pause, as we contemplate the rats drowning in the river. And then the next line starts with a dash, because the camera’s zooming in on the solitary rat who escapes to tell the tale:

And in case you were wondering about my pronunciation of the river’s name: in German, of course, it should be ‘VAYzer’, but Browning is obviously rhyming it with ‘Caesar’, and he is clearly not a man for half-rhymes, so I’m going with ‘VEEzer’.

So the rat is taking his ‘commentary’ home to ‘Rat-land’. It’s like the classic battlefield sadism, where an entire army is wiped out, but the victorious general spares one soldier from the carnage, so he can go and tell the folks at home what happened to their loved ones.

And the rat’s commentary opens a magic portal inside what was already a very magical poem. The rat tells us what it was like for the rats to hear the Piper’s music:

What do we find here? Not two, not three, but four full rhymes in a row: ‘pipe,’ ‘tripe’, ‘ripe’ and ‘gripe’. As the magic takes effect, the poetry gets more and more densely woven. In fact the magic is so strong, the lines start rhyming at both ends, because we have four lines starting with the same syntactic pattern: ‘And a moving…’ ‘And a leaving…’ ‘And a drawing…’ ‘And a breaking…’

And this is another delightful list. It’s also a really wonderful imaginative leap that Browning takes, showing us what the rats must always be focusing on: they’re listening out for sounds of food being left out, of doors being left ajar, of flasks being uncorked, of apples being squeezed in a cider press. It’s a sign of a great storyteller, a really imaginative writer, to be able to enter into the consciousness of a rat in this way, its ‘interiority’, as the scholars would say.

And then we get, another magic portal inside the magic portal of the rat’s consciousness, as we hear the imagined voice of the rat describing the imagined voice he hears in the piper’s music:

Notice that this section begins with another three-stress line – And it seemed as if a voice – which creates another dramatic pause before the rats’ final frenzy of hunger. And the fact we’re now listening to the imagined voice of the music described by the imagined voice of the rat inside the imaginary world of the story means we’re are several layers deep in imagined realities.

I’ve talked about the technique of nested story loops before, in Episode 76 about Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’, and about the hypnotic effect they have on a reader or listener, which I know about from my days as a hypnotherapist. So Browning has taken us really deep down the rabbit hole – or rather the rat hole!

And as we reach the climax of the sequence about the rats, not only does the rhythm speed up and the syntax get shorter and choppier; not only do we get ‘psaltery’ and ‘drysaltery’ rhyming on three syllables, which is borderline absurd; not only do we get the internal rhymes, rhymes within the line, of ‘munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,’; but we also get a run of four rhyming lines in a row, with every rhyme a full double rhyme, rhyming on two syllables:

And the effect of this verse is intoxicating for us as readers and listeners, just as the rat is intoxicated by its feverish hunger. And it’s at this moment of orgiastic frenzy, when the rat seems to hear a barrel, a puncheon, inviting it to bore through it with his teeth, that he teeters over the brink and into the river:

And that was the end of all the rats but this one, who survived to tell the tale.

And then the poem goes on with the villagers ringing the town bells with joy, and then the argument between the Mayor and the Piper, and of course, the Piper taking his terrifying revenge.

Here is the rest of the poem, do go and read it all. Because the description of the Piper spiriting away the children is just as vivid and entrancing as the sequence with the rats, but it’s also heartbreaking, because none of us really worry about the rats, however much we hear about their interiority. But of course, none of us would want the children to be spirited away.

And by the time it ends, ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ is a really haunting poem. Like any good folktale or fairy tale, it mixes darkness and light. It begins with the shining, jingling rhymes, the fun, the vividness of the storytelling, and yet it leaves us, just like the Piper’s music, in a very pensive state.

We don’t feel the grief of the townsfolk as fully as they do, but I do think we are left with the feeling, ‘there, but for the grace of God, go I’. There’s something deeply troubling about this poem, a sense that those of us living in civilised comfort can be challenged by a voice or a figure or a melody, a piece of art that comes from the otherworld, that speaks of magical, mysterious things. And we can be challenged by this, with a sense that our comforts are bought a little too cheaply, and there may be a payback we don’t anticipate.

I also think there’s a part of us that wants to hear the sound of that music, and that maybe longs to answer the call, to be spirited away in search of something we’re missing, in spite of everything we leave behind.

OK let’s have another listen to the Piper enticing the rats away. And I for one will be listening to this with envy as well as pleasure, because if I’m honest this is a poem that I really wish I’d written myself. I’m really in awe of Browning’s skill, and I doff my cap to the poet as well as the Piper.

By Robert Browning

Into the street the Piper stept,

Robert Browning was an English poet who was born in 1812 and died in 1899.  His early works were met with mixed reviews, but he later achieved critical acclaim with collections like Men and Women and Dramatis Personae. Hew as renowned for his mastery of dramatic monologue and psychological insight. He was married to the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, forming one of literature’s most celebrated partnerships. When he died in Venice, his body was returned to England where he was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. 

This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday.

You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favourite app.

You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email.

The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman.

A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant.

You can listen and subscribe to A Mouthful of Air on all the main podcast platforms

Episode 85 From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge  Mark McGuinness reads and discusses a passage from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.Poet Samuel Taylor ColeridgeReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessFrom...

Episode 84 Alchemy by Gregory Leadbetter  Gregory Leadbetter reads ‘Alchemy’ and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.This poem is from: The Infernal Garden by Gregory LeadbetterAvailable from: The Infernal Garden is available from: The publisher: Nine Arches...

Episode 83 Sir Walter Raleigh to His SonMark McGuinness reads and discusses ‘Sir Walter Raleigh to His Son’ by Sir Walter Raleigh.Poet Sir Walter RaleighReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessSir Walter Raleigh to His Son By Sir Walter Raleigh Three things there be...

The post From The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning appeared first on A Mouthful of Air.

Stephanie Burt reads ‘Poly Beach House’ by Tonee Mae Moll and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.

Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after Stonewall

Super Gay Poems is available from:

The publisher: Harvard University Press

Amazon: UK | US
Bookshop.org: UK | US

a thin film floats over the weekend

an unerotic tension of sucked stomachs
and bathroom breaks snuck in while
the rest stroll on the boardwalks

and one of us allows her ache for tasting
every­ thing to overwhelm the ever-­ present
whisper of the end of the season

and one of us says nothing as she slips
out to watch the sun rise
over an ocean that loathes us

and one of us says ­ they’re scared
the undine inside ­ won’t be seen
before the moon collides with the sea

and all of us feel it. ­ After a swim
I carve εσχατος in the sand and my body
wishes I had the time to cover up my bad

tattoos—O apocalypse, we just want
a summer. When ­ wasn’t The End
hiding ­ behind the sun?

Mark: Stephanie, welcome to the show.

Stephanie: Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.

Mark: Well, I’m very happy you’re here. And just as a note to the listener, if you’re a regular…

Stephanie: [Sings]

Mark: If you are a regular…

Stephanie: That was a note to the listener!

Mark: [Laughter] – Oh, very good! – regular listener to the show, you will notice we’re starting slightly differently to usual, because normally my first question is to the poet who wrote the poem, where did the poem come from? But today I’m very pleased to welcome Stephanie Burt, who is an esteemed poet, but she’s also here today in her capacity as an editor.

So this poem is from an anthology called Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after Stonewall. Now, if you follow contemporary poetry, particularly in the US, then Stephanie will need no introduction to you, but if you are relatively new to poetry, then she is a poet and critic and the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. She has published several poetry collections, the latest of which is We Are Mermaids. She has a book about Taylor Swift coming in the fall, aka the autumn. And for me personally, she’s also been an inspiring guide to the contemporary US poetry scene. So for all of those reasons, I am delighted to welcome you to the show today, Stephanie.

Stephanie: Thank you. I like being here. Thank you for having me.

Mark: So before we home in on this particular poem that you’ve read, could you give us a little bit of an introduction to the new anthology, Super Gay Poems, and just tell us what you’re trying to achieve with this book.

Stephanie: So a lot has happened in the lives and the cultures and the possibilities for what we now call LGBTQ+ people since the late 60s, since the Stonewall uprising in 1969, which is a convenient marking point, it’s a well-publicised inflexion point for the visibility and literally the pride of queer people, especially in the rich Anglophone countries from which the majority of poetry in English is still coming. And like any major change in what’s available in a large group of people’s lives, that change gets reflected and considered and refined and reshaped by poets and in putting together a sort of big box of, it was originally going to be 30, but it turned out to be 50, and then 51, we can pretend it’s 50, but maybe like round numbers.

Mark: Fifty-ish.

Stephanie: Fifty-one poems from all over the English speaking world, or, at least many parts of it that reflect many ways of being queer, many kinds of queer joy and queer grief and queer friendship and queer eroticism and queer child care and queer elder care. I hoped to put together at once a book of poems I really like that have a lot of internal variety, that are fun to read and rewarding to read and rewarding to reread and reread, and a collection of ways to see queer lives, queer means of flourishing and recovering and continuing and being ourselves, which also means learning our history, and in some cases, commemorating our dead. And these are poems that do all of those things.

And this book, if I did it right, connects several generations of queer poets. It connects, thematically and emotionally, several different ways of writing. It offers ways to put into memorable language many different ways of living in the world, some of which seems specifically queer, and some of which are just interesting ways of living, engaging ways of living that happen to include queer people, right?

And together, it’s all super gay. It’s also international, which is a different fish from the last time I wrote a book with a structure, and that book was entirely American. This book is extremely not entirely American.

Mark: So it’s a very ambitious book in its scope and in its variety. And zooming in on the poem that you’ve read for us today, ‘Poly Beach House’ by…

Stephanie: Zoom! We zoomed in, sorry, zoom, we zoomed in.

Mark: We zoomed in… by Tonee Mae Moll, what attracted you to this poem? What do you think it brings to the book?

Stephanie: I mean, I love it. I love the affect. I love the ambivalence. I love the way that it combines the erotic potential of, ‘Let’s get our whole polycule together in a beach house and see who wants to go to bed with whom’, and the less often described and quite interesting, at least to me, aspects of: what do you do the next morning? What do you do with day three or day five of your holiday? What is it like to make a life with multiple adults, all of whom have their own daily wishes and needs and sort of velleities?

I also love the way that it handles the multiplicitous feeling of impending apocalypse that many of us have had over the past 10 or 15 years, which is not limited to queer people, but which at least some queer people and some trans people feel in a notable way, which is, what do we do with the sense that we might be at the end? What do we do with the way we want to go on with our lives together, maybe need to go on with our lives together, maybe should go on with our lives together?

Taking a stroll on the beach with someone we’re into, making toast, watching the sunrise, going on holiday, coming home, doing our jobs. But then it can feel like our world is ending, or the whole world is ending. The sea will swallow the sand, the sea will swallow your city, the sea will swallow your state. The political end of things like the rule of law may swallow you personally. How do you represent in a way that is not balanced, but comprehensible and available and even sociable and conversational? How do you balance the feeling that everything is going to end, maybe soon, with our wish to maintain our friendships and our romances in our daily life?

Which, let’s be honest, there is a temptation to throw away everything and walk into the sea if you are terrified of the apocalypse. And there’s a temptation to try to be Superman or Jean Grey or some other superhero with absolutely unlimited power and try to hold back the apocalypse yourself.

And the truth is, even if you have powers, even if you have social and intellectual and financial power, you probably don’t have Superman-level power, or Jean Grey-level power. If you don’t know who Jean Grey is, she’s from the X-Men, and there are other podcasts for that. And if you do what you can to, try and help your friends and try to make your microclimate and your workplace and your conurbation a better place to be, good for you, but you still need a holiday. You still want to maintain your friendships and your romances. And you’re not going to be able to hold back the apocalypse by yourself.

And I love the way that this poem hauntingly, dejectedly even, presents those mixed feelings about the idea that everything is maybe going to be over soon, but you still have your romances and your friendships and your loves and your life. There are a couple of other things I love about it, if I can go on. Shall I?

Mark: Yeah, please do.

Stephanie: Okay. So it’s also a poem that has some really lovely free verse tercets. It is a poem that has one line at the beginning, ‘A thin film floats over the weekend,’ which is a complete independent clause. It could be a sentence if you want it to be, and then a bunch of unrhymed tercets. The rest of the poem comes in three-line units, three or four pieces of free verse. So it’s maybe a little bit… When you have tercets, it’s always a little bit of an allusion to Dante’s Divine Comedy, which comes in three-line units and is about a guided tour from hell all the way to heaven. It is the reverse. It’s the upside-down version of a number of famous poems, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ about trying to face a coming apocalypse. Shelley’s poem ends, ‘If winter comes, can spring be far behind?’

Mark: I know. Wonderful. Actually, I did Shelley’s Triumph of Life on the podcast as a way of talking about terza rima before, because he was just amazing at that. And again, that’s another apocalyptic poem.

Stephanie: Yes. Yeah. And I think, yeah, this is an apocalyptic poem, but it’s also an ironic apocalyptic poem that treats the apocalypse as just another day. When wasn’t it an apocalypse, right?

Mark: Yeah. It’s got a wonderful, like you say, mixed tone, mixed feelings, mixed perspectives from the setup of ‘Poly Beach House.’ And you think, ‘Okay, great, weekend away. Romantic, erotic implications of that.’ And then, we’re in the prosaic reality of sucked stomachs and bathroom breaks. And then this extraordinary ending.

Stephanie: Yeah. There’s a lot of things I wanted to sort of highlight about the poem before we even get back to the ending, one of which is that it’s also a regional poem. Tonee Mae Moll grew up in Reno, Nevada, and then served in a number of different places in the US military in the early 2000s, and has written a memoir about that, which is described in Super Gay Poems, but has made her adult life after her military service in greater Washington, D.C., in D.C., and Maryland and Delaware.

And this is almost certainly set in the beaches and resorts of the Atlantic coast in Maryland and Delaware. And my guess is it’s at Rehoboth Beach, which if you think about Brighton, if you’re in Britain, it’s not quite Brighton, but it is a nightclub, nightlife-friendly, queer-positive space where you can take in the Atlantic and go for a swim. And it’s also that entire shoreline is quite threatened by global climate change and sea level rise.

So the humming, I mean, it’s already here, the present catastrophe of sea level rise is not abstract the way it would be in, I don’t know, Denver, perhaps. It’s visible. So it is a poem that is both a regional poem and a poem about sea level rise and climate change. And it’s also, of course, a poem about the practicalities of a polyamorous life. And polyamory, which, if you haven’t encountered the word, it just means having or being open to having multiple committed or long-term or regular romantic and sexual partners.

It is a bit different in most of its meanings from being a swinger or having an open marriage, which means that you’ve got one partner, and maybe you take somebody else to bed, and it is different from just sleeping with lots of people and staying connected to no more than one of them, which is also fine if that’s something you want to do. That doesn’t appeal to me.

What has turned out, for me, and this is a bit personal, the poem spoke to me personally in a way that some of the other poems I love that didn’t go into Super Gay Poems did not speak to me personally. The poem is a bit personal to me because I’m from the Washington, D.C., area, and I am personally familiar with the delights and the emotional rewards and the practical, often comedic difficulties of having and, keeping and being really loyal to multiple romantic partners.

And one of the running jokes, if you move in poly communities, is that your most important romantic partner is Google Calendar. You’ve probably heard that before. If not, you will. And the practicalities and the emotional reward and the friendships and solidarity that comes out of being part of a polycule, which is a term you can probably guess what it means, and especially out of being in the kind of polycule where you do things with and you hang out with your metamors – a metamor is your partner’s partner, your girlfriend’s boyfriend or your girlfriend’s girlfriend or whatever. That’s a metamor. Not all of us want to be or get to be friends with our metamors, but I think it’s better if you can, and that’s the kind of situation that’s here.

And there’s so much companionship and so much feeling in the mostly unerotic, as Moll says, sense of community in this beach house, where you go out of the beach house, and the sun is rising. And as we move through the poem, we go from the practicalities of living with and waking up next to your loved ones, and from the sociability of this kind of party scene, like something in Frank O’Hara, to the temporary solitudes that have always been associated with lyric poetry.

And as we get those solitudes, one per stanza in the second and third and fourth stanzas, we watch the sunrise, which is supposed to be romantic and welcoming, and then the sense that the world hates us. And I love ‘All the things over an ocean that loathes us’ can mean. It can mean sea level rise is going to be destroyed. Rehoboth Beach eventually. It can mean the sea has reason to resent humanity for polluting it and killing marine life, or endangering marine life. It can also mean that being queer, and especially at this moment, being trans, means regarding your own social group and your own community as a defence against a larger world that’s trying to kill us. A lot of us feel that way.

And then that last stanza about how one of us feels, ‘one of us says they’re scared / the undine inside won’t be seen’. If you don’t know, an undine is a water spirit, a spirit associated with a body of water in a way that a dryad, for example, might be associated with a tree. And so an undine can be regarded as akin to, or can be regarded as a kind of mermaid. Part human and girl or woman and part water creature. It is a very familiar and common – and I’ve written about it elsewhere and elsewhere in Super Gay Poems – trope where trans girls and trans women identify or over-identify with mermaids.

In fact, that’s the basis of the leading, ‘Let’s help trans people charity’ in the UK, right, Mermaids. They do a lot of good work, Mermaids gender. That’s not a coincidence. That’s not just because somebody saw The Little Mermaid Disney movie and liked it. For a number of reasons, there’s a very strong cross-generational identification that appears to arise spontaneously in separate populations between trans femmes and mermaids. And someone who says they’re ‘scared / the undine inside won’t be seen / before the moon collides with the sea’, that may seem bizarre or hard to interpret or idiosyncratic in the way that, for example, a lot of Dylan Thomas is idiosyncratic.

And honestly, Tonee Moll at her best has some things in common with Dylan Thomas, not least the interest in water. But if you’re used to seeing mermaids and thinking trans girls, and you know what it looks like to see the moon over the ocean, that is a fairly transparent line. One of us is afraid that she won’t get to live visibly in public as herself before the end of the world or the end of her world. And the end of the world or the end of her world could mean sea level rise destroys our city or destroys civilisation, or it could mean the end of her life because we all have finite lifetimes. Or it could mean a kind of social and political apocalypse, which seems closer now for Americans, especially those in and near Washington, D.C., than it would have, let’s say, 10 years ago. So that’s a thing.

So there’s this fear of being erased or destroyed or crushed along with all of us at the beach, along with the sociability and the mixed feelings that come from going on a vacation with your polycule and waking up feeling like you might have cling film over your mouth because you have morning breath. ‘Poly’, of course, can refer to polymers and plastics. It’s such a good pun. And then we get to the end. Shall I go on?

Mark: Yes, because it’s quite an ending, isn’t it?

Stephanie: I know. It’s okay to go in the ocean. We are mermaids. Tonee Moll or her sort of avatar goes for a swim and just delightfully carves in the sand, writes in the sand, where it will not last, where it will be erased, a Greek word that means the end or the end of everything. Eschatology is the study of the end times or the end of the world. And the word εσχατος / eschatos, which sometimes appears in English as eschaton, which is just another form of the same Greek word, has particular associations with the Christian apocalypse, as in the Book of Revelation.

So carving eschatos in the sand is an extraordinarily, I almost want to say, satirical gesture. You are inviting the end to itself be erased, but you’re also showing that you can’t stop thinking about the apocalypse in the way that the most famous writer of things on sand in English, Edmund Spenser, in his sonnet sequence ‘Amoretti,’ says that he can’t stop writing his beloved’s name in the sand.

And then by the end, we get a turn from the reader and the self, the people we might assume that this poem addresses, to the apocalypse itself. ‘Oh, apocalypse, we just want a summer.’ And again, it’s Shelley. And, ‘The trumpet of a prophecy! Oh Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ But Shelley actually rather thinks that he has the authority to speak to the forces of nature because he’s Shelley and he’s full of himself, as wonderful as he is.

Tonee Moll has some modern doubts. ‘I just wanted a summer.’ It’s like that punk song from the 80s, ‘I only wanted a Pepsi.’ And the wonderful polyvalent end where Moll actually capitalises ‘The End’, ‘When wasn’t The End / hiding behind the sun?’ It reminds us that it always feels like the end of the world. It has felt like the end of the world many, many times. We have survived and lived through so many emergencies. Maybe we’ll get through this one too. And there’s always going to be another eclipse, and there’s always going to be a night that follows day.

Oh, so we’ve just heard from her via email. And it turns out, and this appears to be new, that Tonee Mae, although there is a space in it, is the complete first name, and she should be referred to where possible as Tonee Mae, rather than Mae being the middle name.

Mark: Right. I’m wondering if eschatos, it’s a wonderful idea, writing a word in the sand. And to me, I was thinking, is this a bit of uplift, the fact that it’s a word from a dead language that has survived?

Stephanie: Yes, it absolutely is.

Mark: And Tonee Mae is writing. She’s a writer. I mean, isn’t our ambition that our words will live? And is there a flicker of hope there that eschatos has survived?

Stephanie: There absolutely is a flicker of hope there. And I want to say that the hope comes not so much from the fact that classical Greek is a dead language. People don’t speak the kind of Greek that you learn to, read Sappho or Plato anymore. Because, of course, modern Greek is very alive, and it’s not that different. We know that classical Greek is intended because of the diacritics. But it’s not that, it’s just that the concept of the eschaton has survived a change almost from one civilisation to the next.

And something of poetry and poetics and culture and experience and erotic attachment and friendship, the poem suggests, will survive this apocalyptic moment, just as it has survived prior apocalyptic moments.

Mark: Thank you, Stephanie, for a really eye-opening take on an eye-opening poem. I mean, it’s one that you can read at first and think, ‘Okay, I think I’ve got what I’ve got from that.’ But like all good poems, when you go back, there’s layer upon layer in it, and you’ve really done a wonderful job, as you always do, of showing us the extra layers within this poem. So thank you so much, Stephanie.

Stephanie: Thank you. And I’m so glad I was able to include this poem, and I’m so glad that you let me talk both about the representation of kinds of persons in Super Gay Poems, right? I really wanted something about queer poly relationships and about the variety of kinds of attitudes and feelings because poems are not … if they’re worth rereading, they’re not just representations of their demographics, they’re representations of ways of living in the world and feeling and using language. Thank you so much for having me.

Mark: It’s a pleasure. And with such a terrific and I think well-timed anthology, Stephanie, that’s Super Gay Poems from Harvard University Press. So let’s have a listen once more to Tonee Mae Moll’s poem, ‘Poly Beach House’, and I, for one, will be hearing new things in it this time around.

a thin film floats over the weekend

an unerotic tension of sucked stomachs

and one of us allows her ache for tasting

and one of us says nothing as she slips

and one of us says ­ they’re scared

and all of us feel it. ­ After a swim

tattoos—O apocalypse, we just want

‘Poly Beach House’ is from Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after Stonewall edited by Stephanie Burt, published by Harvard University Press.

Super Gay Poems is available from:

The publisher: Harvard University Press

Amazon: UK | US
Bookshop.org: UK | US

Dr Tonee Mae Moll is a queer and trans writer and educator in Baltimore. Her debut memoir, Out of Step, won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award, and was featured that year on the American Library Association’s annual list of notable LGBTQ+ books. Her latest poetry collection, You Cannot Save Here, won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Tonee Mae holds a PhD in English from Morgan State University and an MFA in creative writing and publishing art from University of Baltimore. Her scholarly work explores feminist pedagogies and epistemologies, poetry, and punk. She is a Gemini.

Stephanie Burt is Donald and Catherine Loker Professor of English at Harvard. She writes, co-writes, and assembles books of poems and literary criticism, as well as writing about pop music, comic books, nonrealist fiction, mermaids, and queer joy: she’s here to talk about Super Gay Poems, out now from Harvard University Press. Her book about Taylor Swift will appear in October. The most recent book of her own poems is We Are Mermaids.

Photo: Jessica Bennett

This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday.

You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favourite app.

You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email.

The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman.

A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant.

You can listen and subscribe to A Mouthful of Air on all the main podcast platforms

Episode 85 From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge  Mark McGuinness reads and discusses a passage from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.Poet Samuel Taylor ColeridgeReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessFrom...

Episode 84 Alchemy by Gregory Leadbetter  Gregory Leadbetter reads ‘Alchemy’ and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.This poem is from: The Infernal Garden by Gregory LeadbetterAvailable from: The Infernal Garden is available from: The publisher: Nine Arches...

Episode 83 Sir Walter Raleigh to His SonMark McGuinness reads and discusses ‘Sir Walter Raleigh to His Son’ by Sir Walter Raleigh.Poet Sir Walter RaleighReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessSir Walter Raleigh to His Son By Sir Walter Raleigh Three things there be...

The post Stephanie Burt reads Poly Beach House by Tonee Mae Moll appeared first on A Mouthful of Air.

Mark McGuinness reads and discusses Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Ovid, translated by Arthur Golding

Mark McGuinness

Translated Arthur Golding

As soon as that the worke was done, the workman by and by
Did peyse his bodie on his wings, and in the Aire on hie
Hung wavering: and did teach his sonne how he should also flie.
I warne thee (quoth he), Icarus, a middle race to keepe.
For if thou hold too low a gate, the dankenesse of the deepe
Will overlade thy wings with wet. And if thou mount too hie,
The Sunne will sindge them. Therfore see betweene them both thou flie.
I bid thee not behold the Starre Bootes in the Skie.
Nor looke upon the bigger Beare to make thy course thereby,
Nor yet on Orions naked sword. But ever have an eie
To keepe the race that I doe keepe, and I will guide thee right.
In giving counsell to his sonne to order well his flight,
He fastned to his shoulders twaine a paire of uncoth wings.
And as he was in doing it and warning him of things,
His aged cheekes were wet, his hands did quake, in fine he gave
His sonne a kisse the last that he alive should ever have.
And then he mounting up aloft before him tooke his way
Right fearfull for his followers sake: as is the Bird the day
That first she tolleth from hir nest among the braunches hie
Hir tender yong ones in the Aire to teach them for to flie.
So heartens he his little sonne to follow teaching him
A hurtfull Art. His owne two wings he waveth verie trim,
And looketh backward still upon his sonnes. The fishermen
Then standing angling by the Sea, and shepeherdes leaning then
On sheepehookes, and the Ploughmen on the handles of their Plough,
Beholding them, amazed were: and thought that they that through
The Aire could flie were Gods. And now did on their left side stand
The Iles of Paros and of Dele and Samos, Junos land:
And on their right, Lebinthos and the faire Calydna fraught
With store of honie: when the Boy a frolicke courage caught
To flie at randon. Whereupon forsaking quight his guide,
Of fond desire to flie to Heaven, above his boundes he stide.
And there the nerenesse of the Sunne which burnd more hote aloft,
Did make the Wax (with which his wings were glewed) lithe and soft.
As soone as that the Wax was molt, his naked armes he shakes,
And wanting wherewithall to wave no helpe of Aire he takes.
But calling on his father loud he drowned in the wave:
And by this chaunce of his those Seas his name for ever have.
His wretched Father (but as then no father) cride in feare:
O Icarus, O Icarus, where art thou? tell me where
That I may finde thee, Icarus. He saw the fethers swim
Upon the waves, and curst his Art that so had spighted him.

This is a very well-known story – the tale of Daedalus and Icarus. I’m sure you were familiar with it even before I read this version, and it would have been equally familiar to the earliest readers of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, written around the time of Jesus. The first recorded references to Daedalus, the master craftsman, engineer, and artificer of the ancient Greek world, go back to about 1400 BC, so by the time Ovid wrote the Metamorphoses, the story of Daedalus was already very old.

Ovid – full name, Publius Ovidius Naso – was a Roman poet born into a wealthy family at a time when the Roman authorities were particularly keen on poetry. Augustus was the first Roman emperor, and his regime used poetry as a tool for political propaganda and cultural consolidation. It saw poetry as a way of legitimising Augustus’ rule and celebrating Roman values, emphasising the stability of his reign after years of civil wars. That’s why the poets of this era are known as Augustan poets.

So this was a time of great opportunity for poets, but, as Ovid learned the hard way, it was a fine line to walk. While having the authorities’ attention was great if you were saying what they wanted to hear, crossing the line could land you in big trouble.

Which is exactly what happened to Ovid: at the height of his fame he was exiled to what Romans considered the barbarian wastes of Moesia, a province on the Black Sea. The exact reason for his exile remains a mystery to this day. According to Ovid himself, in one of his poems, it was due to ‘a poem and a mistake’. There’s been much speculation about what the mistake was, but the poem in question was almost certainly the racy and explicit Ars Amatoria, (The Art of Love).

And we get a sense of a poet walking a fine line all the way through the Metamorphoses. On the one hand, it’s a poem written in the grand epic style – Ovid was clearly aiming to compete with Virgil, who had already produced his great Augustan epic, The Aeneid. So this is a high-flown compendium of famous and supposedly edifying myths from ancient Greece.

But on the other hand it’s a, highly entertaining collection of tales that are not only dramatic and exciting, but also, dark, violent and disturbing. As well as lots battles, betrayals and deceptions, there is an extensive catalogue of sexual crimes and transgressions.

Now fast forward 1,500 years, and we find this poem being translated by Arthur Golding, an English gentleman born in the 1530s. Golding was a keen translator, like many of his contemporaries. Sixteenth-century England was a time of great enthusiasm for rediscovering Greek and Roman literature, just as the artists of Renaissance had been rediscovering the sculpture and visual art of the ancient world. So this translation is very much part of that broader cultural trend.

At the time, knowledge of Latin and Greek literature was considered something an educated person really ought to have. Which is how a book like the Metamorphoses, despite its X-rated content, ended up as a standard set text in grammar schools across England. Any child lucky enough to receive that kind of education would have learned Latin, and very likely encountered Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

One such student was a William Shakespeare, at the grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon. He would have had enough Latin to read the original, but it’s also clear he knew Golding’s version extremely well, and it was one of his favourite books, providing source material for his poems and plays. So when I read this translation, it feels like I’m reading over Shakespeare’s shoulder.

And it wasn’t just Shakespeare. The Metamorphoses is one of the most influential books in European culture. If you walk into any gallery of paintings from the 16th to the 19th century, it’s like stepping into a lavishly illustrated edition of the Metamorphoses, scenes from the poem are all over the walls.

And the poem continues to be a source of inspiration for poets. In 1998 Ted Hughes published his versions of the Metamorphoses, Tales from Ovid – it’s one of his best books, definitely worth checking out. Around the same time, there was also an anthology called After Ovid: New Metamorphoses, featuring versions of Ovid’s stories by some of the best-known poets of the nineties.

So what kind of poem is the Metamorphoses? It’s a huge anthology of stories, organised around the theme of metamorphosis – an ancient Greek word meaning ‘transformation’. That’s Ovid’s great insight. He looked at all these ancient Greek myths and realised the common thread running through them was change – people, gods and other beings transformed from one shape into another.

And that becomes the organising principle of the poem. It’s a sequence of tales of transformation – ‘Of shapes transformed to bodies strange’, in the very first line of Golding’s translation. That’s the central theme of the poem. It’s also the big theme of life, is it not? You and I are not the same as we were a few years ago, and we’ll be very different a few years from now. The world will be different too. So yes, it’s a cliché – and it was a cliché even in Ovid’s time – but one that still rings true: change is the only constant.

Zooming in on today’s story, Daedalus and Icarus, I deliberately chose one you’d already know, so that we can share the same experience as its first readers: that moment of recognition – ‘Ah, I know this one’ – followed by curiosity to see what Ovid does with it.

And what strikes me is that in the modern imagination, when we think of the story of Daedalus and Icarus, we tend to focus on Icarus as the symbol of hubris – a Greek word meaning pride and presumption, ambition that oversteps the mark, when he flies too high and gets too close to the sun. And then of course the wax melts, the wings disintegrate, and Icarus plummets into the sea.

But in this version it’s Daedalus who is the focus of the cautionary tale. It’s his ambition, as a craftsman, as an artist, as an engineer, that is under scrutiny. He’s the one who creates the plan, designs the wings, devises the escape – and it’s his hubris, his daring to meddle with nature, that ultimately leads to tragedy.

An apparently this was an innovation in Ovid’s version of the story – earlier Greek versions focused on Icarus’ disobedience in ignoring his father’s advice. But in Ovid, Icarus is a passive, almost peripheral figure. He doesn’t speak. We’re told that he cries out to his father as he falls, but we don’t hear his voice. He’s introduced a little earlier in the narrative – just before the passage I read – and described simply as ‘Icarus, his son, a pretty lad’. Later on, he’s referred to as ‘his little son’. And when we see Icarus fly, it’s only as a follower, Golding uses the words ‘follower’ and then ‘follow’ to describe him, within four lines of each other, so it’s clear what his role is.

In the earlier part of the story, before the passage I’ve just read, both Daedalus and Icarus are prisoners of King Minos on Crete. Daedalus has been engaged by Minos to built the labyrinth to house the Minotaur. And once the job is finished Minos, doesn’t want to let such a valuable asset walk free. But Daedalus looks up at the sky and thinks, ‘Well, Minos may control the sea and the land, but he can’t rule the air.’

And then we get this wonderful passage describing Daedalus’ construction of the wings out of feathers and wax:

to uncoth Arts he bent the force of all his wits

His skill is described as an’ uncouth art’ used ‘to alter nature’s course by craft’. And the implication is that this is not a good thing. It’s unnatural in the pejorative sense – he’s interfering with the order of nature, bending it to his will. He’s crossing a line. And in doing this he is just one of many characters in the Metamorphoses who try to imitate the gods or to compete with their abilities, like Ariadne, who dared to claim she was a better spinner than the goddess Minerva, or King Pentheus who mocks the worship of Bacchus and refuses to recognise him as a god. It’s a recurring theme of the poem – mortals who are foolish and daring enough to challenge the gods, and then come unstuck.

And because this is such a familiar tale, we all know Icarus is going to die when the wax holding his wings together melts in the sun. And that allows Ovid to foreshadow the tragedy, to point the finger first at Daedalus, whose ‘uncouth art’ was altering nature. And then, just before the passage I’ve read for you, theres is a really unsettling description of Icarus playing with the very wings that, as we know, are going to bring about his death:

There stoode me by him Icarus, his sonne, a pretie Lad.

So here’s Icarus playing in his father’s workshop, while his dad hammers and glues and whistles. Icarus is just playing with the wings. He doesn’t know he’s holding his own destruction in his hands. He’s blowing the feathers to and fro with that smiling mouth, and with his thumbs, he’s rubbing the wax. And, of course, we know that it’s the wax that’s going to kill him.

The sense of foreboding gets stronger when Daedalus gives Icarus the lecture before they set off:

I warne thee (quoth he), Icarus, a middle race to keepe.

And this is every parent ever, isn’t it? Giving their child instructions before they set off on a journey: ‘Don’t talk to strangers. Always keep your ticket handy. Do what the teacher says.’ That sort of thing. It’s Polonius in Hamlet, talking to Ophelia and warning her about the dangers of men and the big bad world. And again, it’s poignant because we know that this is exactly the fate that is awaiting Icarus. It’s foreseen, foreknown, foreshadowed – and yet utterly inescapable.

Then we get the Daedalus’s final farewell to his son before they take flight:

He fastned to his shoulders twaine a paire of uncoth wings.

And after that, Ovid expands on the moment with this slightly ridiculous but also oddly moving image of the mother bird flapping her wings, trying to teach her fledglings how to fly:

And then he mounting up aloft before him tooke his way

Note that phrase: ‘a hurtful Art’. The art that is going to hurt, that’s going to kill his son.

And then they’re off! They’re up in the sky. It’s like the moment in the famous animation of The Snowman, when they take a few steps forward and suddenly they’re walking in the air. And we get this great description of their flight through the eyes of people on the ground: a fisherman, a shepherd and a ploughman:

The fishermen

This is terrific isn’t it? Like a movie shot where the camera pans across a crowd of onlookers, looking up in wonder at Superman flying overhead. And they think that those flying through the sky must be gods. And this is another way of highlighting the ambition – the presumption – of Daedalus, daring to compete with the gods.

Let’s take another look at that ploughman on the ground – because you may well have seen him before, even if you’ve never read Ovid’s poem. If you’re an art enthusiast, you probably thought of Bruegel’s famous painting of Icarus – depicting the boy plunging into the sea while a large and ploughman in 16th century dress drives a horse-drawn plough in the foreground.

And if you’re a poetry enthusiast, then you may remember that same ploughman in W. H. Auden’s famous poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’. Auden writes about how, in Bruegel’s ‘Icarus’, ‘the ploughman may / Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, / But for him it was not an important failure’.

So what we have here is an intriguing artistic lineage: Ovid’s poem provides the best known version of this well-known story. Bruegel paints the scene, probably in the late 1550s. About ten years later, the story is translated into English by Arthur Golding, but Golding has almost certainly not seen the painting. Then in the 1930s Auden writes his poem about the painting, where the ploughman appears again.

So the ploughman is emblematic of the conversation between artists and poets that is being carried on over thousands of years. When people talk about ‘artistic tradition’, it can sound dry and academic. But to me it’s more accurate and more fun to think of it as a conversation or maybe a ball game – Ovid booting the ball upfield to Bruegel, Bruegel tossing it to Auden, and Golding racing up on the other side of the pitch. And if you’re a poet or an artist yourself, then maybe you too can join in the game…

OK, so Daedalus and Icarus fly past a series of islands and it’s all going swimmingly, until the boy, ‘with honeyed thoughts’, catches a ‘frolic courage’, a playful urge, and suddenly breaks away. He can’t resist flying higher and higher, and he forsakes his guide. ‘Of fond desire to fly to heaven, above his bounds, he stide.’ – and that’s it, that’s his downfall. The nearness of the sun melts the wax. And as soon as the wax is softened, ‘his naked arms he shakes’ – he’s flailing, with nothing to keep him aloft, like a cartoon character who’s run off a cliff and suddenly realises there’s nothing beneath him. He calls out for his father, but he’s too far gone – ‘he drowned in the wave’.

Then the perspective shifts to Daedalus:

His wretched Father (but as then no father) cride in feare:

That line – ‘His wretched father (but as then no father) cried in fear’ – is devastating. The main clause is ‘His wretched father… cried in fear’, but inserted into it is that haunting parenthetical phrase: ‘but as then no father’; from that moment, he was no longer a father. He had been a father, but now the child is gone. I can’t speak to the Latin original, but in Golding’s English, the syntax does so much emotional work. Sometimes, grammar can bring a tear to your eye.

Another notable aspect of Golding’s translation is his use of rhyming couplets, which are a great tool for maintaining momentum and knitting the poem together. And Golding takes his place in a long line of poets who have used rhyming couplets for narrative poetry, from Chaucer before him and to later poets such as Andrew Marvell and John Dryden, and eventually to the great master of the English couplet, Alexander Pope.

And some of these couplets provide moments of wit or even poignancy – like the couplet describing Daedalus’ reaction to Icarus’ death:

He saw the fethers swim

The feathers swim – but Icarus, does not. That contrast is brutal. The very invention Daedalus has been so proud of is what kills his son. The wings survive, the feathers float, but the boy is gone. So I think Golding’s use of rhyme here is superb.

There’s also something very interesting going on in the metre of Golding’s translation. You may have noticed when I read the poem aloud, and you’ll certainly notice it if you look at the text on the website, that the lines are very long. For example, let’s go back to the beginning of the passaged I read:

As soon as that the worke was done, the workman by and by

That’s one line. And then:

Did peyse his bodie on his wings, and in the Aire on hie

That’s another line.

Now, if you’re a regular listener to this podcast, you’ve heard a lot of poetry written in iambic pentameter – ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM – five beats to the line, typically ten syllables. But Golding’s lines are much longer than that, they are in iambic heptameter, meaning they have seven iambic feet: ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM.

Did peyse his bodie on his wings, and in the Aire on hie

This line is normally called a ‘fourteener’, because it typically has 14 syllables. The extra syllables give the line a roomier feel, like ordering a grande coffee, or flying business class and enjoying the extra legroom.

Why did Golding choose the fourteener meter instead of iambic pentameter? One reason is that he didn’t feel a pressure to use the pentameter the way later poets would. By the end of the 16th century, iambic pentameter would become a popular metre in England, and a dominant one in the 17th century. But in Golding’s time, English poetry was still finding its way. Poets were experimenting with different metres and verse forms. For example, this was the time when the sonnet form, which was an Italian import, became popular among English poets, beginning with Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey. Blank verse first appeared in English in Howard’s translation of Virgil; he wrote this about 1540, but it wasn’t published until the 1550s, and it was only in the 1560s that blank verse was used for plays on the London stage. Which meant it would have been a new and experimental form when Golding translated Ovid in the 1560s.

So this was a time when poets were trying out different metres and seeing what English poetry could do. And Golding wouldn’t have felt the same pressure to conform to iambic pentameter as he might have done a hundred years later.

Another reason Golding uses fourteeners is that the metre used by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, dactylic hexameter, is also a pretty capacious line. In Latin, the metre was based on long and short syllables rather than stressed and unstressed syllables in English, so they don’t map across exactly. And translators sometimes struggle to compress the amount of information in the six feet of a typical Latin hexameter into the five feet of an English pentameter. By using fourteeners, Golding gets a little more room to play with the language and stay true to the expansive feel of the Latin original.

I think there’s also an element of personal taste in his choice. Golding’s style in his Metamorphoses is lush, expansive, and sensuous, it’s as though his Muse likes a little extra room to breathe, and the fourteener gives that room.

Yet another influence on Golding’s meter comes from English ballad metre, which we heard back in Episode 22 with the traditional ballad ‘The Unquiet Grave’. Now, at first this might seem counterintuitive, because ballads and fourteeners look very different on the page. But listen to the opening lines of today’s passage:

As soon as that the worke was done, the workman by and by

Can you hear it? The seven beats of the fourteener are starting to fall into groups of four beats, then three beats – four beats, then three beats. So these are two lines of heptameter, but they could easily be read as four lines of a ballad stanza, which alternates lines with four beats, then three. Like this stanza from ‘The Unquiet Grave’:

‘Cold blows the wind to my true love,

And gently drops the rain,

I never had but one sweetheart,

And in greenwood she lies slain.

This is a natural quirk of English poetry: once you go beyond five feet, the line has a tendency to break into two smaller parts. You may remember Episode 58, where we looked at a sonnet by Sir Philip Sidney, which was written in iambic hexameters, and the six feet in each line sounded like they were breaking into two shorter lines of three beats each.

So, in many of Golding’s fourteeners, we can hear that four-beat and three-beat pattern:

As soon as that the worke was done, *comma* the workman by and by

This pause within a line is known as a caesura, and many lines in Golding’s Metamorphoses follow the same pattern, with the caesura after the fourth beat. Which means he’s tapping into the English ballad tradition, which would have been very familiar to English readers and listeners at the time, as a metre associated with storytelling.

Golding does make an effort to vary the pattern. For example, sometimes the pause occurs earlier in the line, like in this one:

Hung wavering: and did teach his sonne how he should also flie.

And in that line we looked at earlier, we can hear two pauses, before and after that heartbreaking phrase ‘but as then no father’:

His wretched father (but as then no father) cried in fear

So it looks like Golding was aware of the dangers of slipping too comfortably into the four-three pattern. And I think we can see why other poets have found the fourteener a bit tricky to handle. It’s like driving a car where the steering feels a little off or the gearbox is a bit sticky – you have to keep compensating for it if you want to have a smooth ride.

But Golding was certainly not the last person to use the fourteener. A great example is George Chapman’s translations of Homer later in the 16th century, which we’ll probably explore in a future episode. The fourteener has even survived into niche corners of modern culture, such as in the video game Dragon Quest XI, where Queen Marina, one of the characters, speaks exclusively in fourteeners. So it’s a meter that still pops up in surprising places!

So let’s take one more listen to Ovid’s version of the story of Daedalus and Icarus, and appreciate the gorgeousness, the energy, and the emotional resonance that Golding brings to his translation.

Translated Arthur Golding

As soon as that the worke was done, the workman by and by
Did peyse his bodie on his wings, and in the Aire on hie
Hung wavering: and did teach his sonne how he should also flie.
I warne thee (quoth he), Icarus, a middle race to keepe.
For if thou hold too low a gate, the dankenesse of the deepe
Will overlade thy wings with wet. And if thou mount too hie,
The Sunne will sindge them. Therfore see betweene them both thou flie.
I bid thee not behold the Starre Bootes in the Skie.
Nor looke upon the bigger Beare to make thy course thereby,
Nor yet on Orions naked sword. But ever have an eie
To keepe the race that I doe keepe, and I will guide thee right.
In giving counsell to his sonne to order well his flight,
He fastned to his shoulders twaine a paire of uncoth wings.
And as he was in doing it and warning him of things,
His aged cheekes were wet, his hands did quake, in fine he gave
His sonne a kisse the last that he alive should ever have.
And then he mounting up aloft before him tooke his way
Right fearfull for his followers sake: as is the Bird the day
That first she tolleth from hir nest among the braunches hie
Hir tender yong ones in the Aire to teach them for to flie.
So heartens he his little sonne to follow teaching him
A hurtfull Art. His owne two wings he waveth verie trim,
And looketh backward still upon his sonnes. The fishermen
Then standing angling by the Sea, and shepeherdes leaning then
On sheepehookes, and the Ploughmen on the handles of their Plough,
Beholding them, amazed were: and thought that they that through
The Aire could flie were Gods. And now did on their left side stand
The Iles of Paros and of Dele and Samos, Junos land:
And on their right, Lebinthos and the faire Calydna fraught
With store of honie: when the Boy a frolicke courage caught
To flie at randon. Whereupon forsaking quight his guide,
Of fond desire to flie to Heaven, above his boundes he stide.
And there the nerenesse of the Sunne which burnd more hote aloft,
Did make the Wax (with which his wings were glewed) lithe and soft.
As soone as that the Wax was molt, his naked armes he shakes,
And wanting wherewithall to wave no helpe of Aire he takes.
But calling on his father loud he drowned in the wave:
And by this chaunce of his those Seas his name for ever have.
His wretched Father (but as then no father) cride in feare:
O Icarus, O Icarus, where art thou? tell me where
That I may finde thee, Icarus. He saw the fethers swim
Upon the waves, and curst his Art that so had spighted him.

Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) was a Roman poet who was born in 43 BC and died sometime around 17AD. Born in Sulmo, he was educated in Rome and initially trained for a legal career before turning to poetry. His most celebrated work, the Metamorphoses*, is a sweeping mythological epic spanning the world’s creation to the deification of Julius Caesar. Composed in dactylic hexameter, it blends myth, history, and transformation into a unified vision of change. Though immensely popular, Ovid was exiled by Augustus in 8AD for reasons still debated. His Metamorphoses profoundly influenced the development of Western art and literature.

Arthur Golding was an English translator who was born in 1536 and died in 1606. Educated at Cambridge and the Inner Temple, Golding moved in prominent Protestant circles and was half-brother to Lord Burghley, chief adviser to Elizabeth I. Though he translated over a dozen works, his 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses became his legacy, shaping English Renaissance literature with its vivid storytelling. While Golding’s Puritan leanings might seem at odds with Ovid’s pagan myths, his version balances both literary artistry and a desire for moral instruction.

This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday.

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Jude Rosen reads ‘Desire Path’ and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.

Reclamations from London’s Edgelands

Reclamations from London’s Edgelands is available from:

The publisher: Paekakariki Press

Through this green swathe, how many feet have gone?

Mark: Jude, where did this poem come from?

Jude: Well, I think it came from the coming together of a number of different experiences. First of all, I was walking the Lammas lands, which are ancient open green spaces. Lammas lands were originally where commoners, people without power or property, had customary rights to graze their animals after the harvest. And I was part of an artistic collective that was resisting the Olympic encroachment onto the marshlands, the green wild that we still have it in Hackney and Walthamstow and Stratford.

Mark: Right. And this was the 2012 Olympics in London?

Jude: This was the 2012 Olympics in East London. And it was really destroying the wild ecology of this place through concreting over and fencing off and evictions of people, particularly marginal people and students and asylum seekers and people on low income who lived on the edge. And it also destroyed the one of the last industrial villages. So in a way I was involved, and walking was both a sort of poetic and political practice. It was kind of contemplative and reflective. So observing and actually going through these spaces, experiencing them as part of everyday life.

And so the whole sequence of the book, but in this poem, it’s all in blank verse, or it’s largely in blank verse, which is the sort of the rhythm of walking and breathing. And it’s, predominantly, it has this unrhymed five beat line.

Mark: Great. So long time listeners will, of course, recognize blank verse as being unrhymed iambic pentameter, ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM, the five iambic beats. Because we did a whole mini-series on it from Marlowe through Shakespeare and Milton and Wordsworth. So it’s great to hear that you are continuing that grand tradition, Jude. And like Wordsworth, you’re doing it via walking.

Jude: I think that’s really important because it’s really poetry coming out of the body, not just the mind, but actually walking and breathing and words being somehow all integrated. And some of that is the influence of psychogeography, which I was also somewhat immersed in at the time.

Mark: Which is?

Jude: Psychogeography really is the idea that the geography, the physical environment is also imbued with spiritual and emotional and cultural power. It’s not simply grass and trees and leaves and plants. The idea is that there’s actually a kind of cosmic energy and ley lines, they’re called.

The point for me is not really a kind of New Age notion. For me, it’s really the embodiment of history and language and the historic presence of people who’ve gone before our predecessors in the landscape, and particularly in the marshes, because the marshes have been like a sponge absorbing waves of immigrants, and they’ve got different signs and different kinds of burial grounds, and they’re places where rubbish is, full of pits and waste and recycling. So it’s this whole remaking, which is like an ongoing historical process.

And if you walk in it, you see it and you’re part of it. And in a way that’s. I think one of the impulses in ‘The Desire Path’ is that by walking it, you’re also remaking it. You’re leaving a light imprint. The path, the idea of the desire path, is often that it’s an alternative path to that imposed by authority, by the state. It’s not about ordinance, maps and official signage, so they’re often short cuts or the ways round, and they express something of the autonomy of walkers and of people using that path. And in a way that’s that’s one of the strongest impulses in the poem is about how we can read the design. By walking it, we participate in it and we walk in the path of our predecessors.

Mark: Wonderful. So it’s like that brown stripe across a lawn or a field where people have forged their own path. And I hadn’t realised until I read your poem that that actually had a name, that that is the desire path.

Jude: And the one I was walking was right across the Lammas meadow. And it is a diagonal right through the hay meadow. Of course, when there’s no hay, the hay is gone.

And so that’s how it came. And a phrase came to me from a poem called ‘Grass’ by a Bulgarian poet, who is very, very famous in Bulgaria, Blaga Dimitrova: ‘I’m not afraid that they trample me. The trampled grass soon becomes a path.’

Mark: Wow. What a line.

Jude: Yeah. And she wrote, I think in the context, both of male oppression, of being downtrodden or trampled by men, because she was quite a powerful politician in Bulgaria after the fall of the Soviet Union after 1989. And also I think it was more broadly, I suppose, against state oppression. So that idea of it goes from the individual body to something much bigger. ‘The trampled grass soon becomes a path.’ It only soon becomes a path by other people following in your footsteps. So it becomes an image really from individual resistance to collective resistance. So that also that that rang in my mind as I was walking. So I think that’s where the poem came from.

Mark: It’s wonderful. And I love the way you linked the act of poetry and the rhythms of walking, the rhythm of the body with the rhythm of metre, which has always been one of my arguments for it, is that if you really want to feel a poem in your bones, then you need some rhythm. But also, you know, I love the title of your book, Reclamations from London’s Edgelands. So the poems themselves are reclaiming the land.

Jude: Yeah.

Mark: I know that the edgelands, the marshlands, have got a long history of being claimed and reclaimed from the sea and from various human groups. But it’s really interesting that you say even in a kind of a what is ostensibly a nature poem here or a poem about going for a walk, that there’s a political aspect to this for you.

Jude: Yes, but a different kind of politics to what is usually assumed to be politics. It’s not polemical. It’s not messaging through a poem. It’s not using the poem as a vehicle. It’s actually through the practice of both walking and writing. So as a sort of forms of resistance to a certain kind of – well, specifically, it was against the sort of Olympic machine that got going and has redeveloped the whole area and privatized land and done many things and claimed many things which it wasn’t responsible for.

But yeah, I think I think that was the main impulse behind the poem and behind that it wasn’t an idea to, you know, a concept to attack the state. It was through an alternative way of being and of practice – challenging and retrieving language. Because a lot of the book is there – there are a number of verbatim poems in it, which come from redundant workers, from residents who were displaced. So I wanted to, in a way, make the marshes have a kind of chorus of different voices and have that in the in the book as well.

Mark: Yeah, those are really terrific monologues because I think the material came from interviews, some of which you had conducted.

Jude: Yes.

Mark: And we really do hear these voices from the past coming through, who worked in and on the river and then the factories and some of the scrapes they got into, the stories behind the area are fascinating. And also this – so I’m looking again now at this phrase right at the end where you talk about, ‘Strange how walking / has changed the course of grass and repossessed / the Lammas lands – the right to graze’ – that phrase is jumping out at me now – ‘the right to graze surpassed / by the right to roam, pass through, reflect, pass on.’. So that right to graze was the old common land, right?

Jude: Yes.

Mark: Everyone had the right to graze their sheep or their cow or their pig or whatever they had on the common land. Was it towards the end of the 18th century, it really gathered pace that there was enclosures by private landlords? And that became very controversial politically. And it’s interesting, you know, linking the right to graze with the right to roam.

Jude: Yes. I mean, those lands, the Lammas lands were actually taken over by what was then the district boards, and then it became the London County Council, and then district council, that Hackney actually took over the Lammas lands and made them the marshes that were given ‘in perpetuity’ to the people of the borough, for their recreation and enjoyment. And it’s those rights which were passed down from customary grazing rights from medieval times, to becoming common lands which were under the local authority, they were supposed to be securing forever, really for recreational purposes, rather than development roads or housing. And it also has been very vital in being part of the protection of the green lungs of London, for the air quality and general health of the population. And it’s those rights and those lands that are continually being encroached on.

And so that’s part of the – the Olympics was one very particular, but there have been many others, I know there will be future – attacks really on our common wild greens on which we all depend for life.

Mark: So this is wonderful, Jude. I mean, I used to live in East London, and I know this part of the city, and I think you’ve caught the atmosphere of it really wonderfully throughout the whole book. It’s like going for a going for a walk with a really well-informed guide because you’re seeing the landscape and the cityscape through your eyes and you can see all the little, you know, the ‘tar or gravel scar churning up the past’. You really bring it alive in the poetry. And zooming in a bit more on this particular poem, how did you know it began with that walk? And you’ve got the rhythm of the blank verse. I mean, how did that evolve into the form you have now?

Jude: Well, the form is an Italian sonnet but without the formal rhyme endings. You’ve probably talked about the sonnet before in other podcasts.

Mark: We had Mimi Khalvati talking about the Italian sonnet. She read her sonnet on the fried egg.

Jude: Yes. Well, the Italian sonnet came rather naturally because it’s sort of philosophical and meditative and this is really a meditation on time and desire. So I think it just came out like that, literally. But I think this very important, what makes the poem really more than anything is, is the two aspects. There is a sound pattern that comes from this ‘Ah’, which to me is the sound of desire that infuses the whole poem.

Mark: Right.

Jude: And I think the sound pattern is based on that long ‘Ah!’. So you have ‘Ah!’, ‘path’, ‘after’, ‘pasture’, ‘after’, ‘tar’, ‘scar’, ‘past’, ‘grass’, ‘surpassed’, ‘pass’. And I think that’s one aspect of the sound pattern. And then it’s got this consonant, this hiss of these hard ‘s’s, evoking a sort of squelch of feet on grass, I think.

Mark: For me it also suggested the wind in the grass.

Jude: Then you’ve got ‘grass’, ‘pasture’, ‘course’, also ‘surpassed’, ‘pass’ again – those ‘s’s. But then along with that. ‘Ah!’ and those ‘s’s you’ve got this ‘m’, the ‘m’s which are also of desire, you know, ‘mud makes’ but it’s really the ‘trampling – ‘trampled’, ‘whim’, ‘Lammas’, ‘emerald’, ‘immersed’, ‘roam’. And so I think the whole poem in sound you know, combines a sort of ‘ah-ing’and ‘umming’ [laughter]. And I think that sound, that ‘Ah!’, suggested them. So that in all the possible choices of words, I was I think, drawn to those long ‘ah’s. And then that ‘m’. I don’t that was conscious, but I think it was dictated in a way, by that long ‘ah’ and that ‘m’.

Mark: In the second line. ‘Ah, the difference the trampling to mud makes.’ That’s like the tuning fork for the whole poem, isn’t it?

Jude: Yeah. You know, trampling mud you don’t usually think of as a positive thing. And I think this was kind of saying that, that when we make a mark, we put down a mark like that. It’s a suggestion for everybody.

I mean, one of the things that came to mind, if I can give another metaphor, is when you walk in a cathedral and you go on the steps of a cathedral and they are bowed in the middle where so many feet have passed and the hard thing has worn away as Brecht would say. I get a little tingle. When I think of all the people who have gone before me and those who will come after. And I think that’s the other thing that comes together in this poem, that the first and last lines end on the same rhyme.

Mark: Yes!

Jude: ‘how many feet have gone’, and ‘pass on’. And in a way, it bookends it. It frames it. And I think that is another movement in the poem, which is about the meditation on time, that we participate in something. And we in a way, in that sense actively relate to our environment by walking and observing and engaging with the space. But also we leave something behind and it’s also about passing something on. And so there’s a kind of awareness of history as the present, but also a moment on a path, you know, and going on into the future.

Of course, it sort of touches on death but not in a negative sense, but this participating in something and always aware of history in the present so that we’re aware of our predecessors as we move forward or we move on. And I think that’s partly why – the lyric poem is always about time and love and death.

Mark: Great subjects!

Jude: And I suppose this poem is really focuses on our participation in something bigger than ourselves, but in which we all have a place. That’s the thing about common lands and the and the ecology of our lives. The desire path is a path we can make, we can remake and leave for others. So it’s a sort of metaphor for – also treading lightly. You know, it’s leaving a single line ‘without a tar or gravel scar’. It’s it’s a different kind of passing through than a road or the extension of the M11, which which was also fought over in that area.

Mark: I absolutely love what you’ve done with that first and last line. I mean, it’s a really bold move to have the rhyming couplet enclosing the entire sonnet. That’s quite unusual. But what you’ve done, I think, is marvellous because you’ve got like you say, you’ve got ‘Through this green swathe, how many feet have gone?’ Those are the feet from the past. And then at the end, as you say, this is us now with ‘the right to roam, pass through, reflect, pass on’. So you’ve got past and future. You’re kind of neatly joining there. And it’s only, as you talked about it just then that I picked up on the triple meaning of ‘pass on’.

Jude: Yes.

Mark: You’ve got ‘pass on’ as ‘moving on’, but you’ve also got ‘pass on’ as ‘leaving something behind, passing it on for other people’, and also, heartbreakingly, ‘pass on’ as in ‘dying’.

Jude: But I think. I think it makes it a lovely, I think it makes death something positive, rather than just negative or a tragedy, because if you pass on and are able to pass on something beautiful and healthful and – it’s like passing on breath, you know, to be able to breathe fresh air. I think that’s rather wonderful.

Mark: And I think that’s exactly what you’ve done with this poem. You’ve passed on something beautiful for the rest of us to enjoy.

Jude: I hope so. That’s very kind of you

Mark: Well, let’s listen and savour that. And maybe listen out for those sound patterns that Jude was just talking about so eloquently. So thank you very much, Jude, for sharing this from a wonderful collection, Reclamations from London’s Edgelands.

Jude: Thank you.

Through this green swathe, how many feet have gone?

‘Desire Path’ is from Reclamations from London’s Edgelands by Jude Rosen, published by Paekakariki Press.

Reclamations from London’s Edgelands is available from:

The publisher: Paekakariki Press

Jude Rosen is a second generation immigrant of the Jewish East End, former historian and urban researcher who now works with refugees. As a poet, she explores the relationship of language to place, drawing on archival and oral histories, local ecology and etymology discovered through walking. Her pamphlet A Small Gateway, was published by Hearing Eye in 2009. Reclamations from London’s Edgelands, (Paekakariki, 2024) grew out of artistic resistance to Olympic redevelopment. Poems from the collection are performed on poem and living history walks (poemwalks.wordpress.com). She is currently revising a long poem of refugee journeys and a sequence on Gaza.

This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday.

You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favourite app.

You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email.

The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman.

A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant.

You can listen and subscribe to A Mouthful of Air on all the main podcast platforms

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Nick Makoha reads ‘Self Portrait 1981 Self Portrait of the poet as Cassius Clay 1982’ and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.

The New Carthaginians

The New Carthaginians is available from:

The publisher: Penguin

Amazon: UK | US

Bookshop.org: UK

If I’m going to sing like someone else,
then I don’t need to sing at all. – E. Faga

1 1981
That midsummer and the D’Angelo concert is sold out at Brixton. Fuck! I can’t tell you what he whispered to security but here’s a picture of Icarus and me backstage with two press cards pinned to our chests. And to think four hours ago I was clocking off work. They have only just let in the crowd. You can hear the hum through the tannoy. The thing about Icarus is he has a microchip for a mouth. You say it he

will name it. You name it he will play it. Once after his dad had died I caught him beating his chest after a month of fasting and prayer. They were more like songs really – the way the words fell away from his bones. Anyway, he is calling Keyon Harrold, the trumpet player from The Vanguard, ‘Kenya’. Asking him things like How do you create an open field in the band and if he believes in the equation of the Freedom Principle

even in light of the Palestine situation. D’Angelo has popped two cassettes into a deck. Icarus calls him Smoke. My bladder is about to cut loose. When I return, they are huddled around the tape deck like tribesmen eating jerk chicken, listening to a jamming session from the morning’s rehearsal in silence. Smoke must have taken the picture because he is the only one not in it. Icarus is in the centre with his wings fanning and closing.

2 the Poet as Cassius Clay 1982

To forgive someone requires two incidents in your life. The most obvious is the incident that like fire must be redeemed by fire. Here’s the match. A young journalist is speaking to camera – but her eyes struggle to find the centre. She is talking about my country the way a wino pees Pepsi into a can. This is being broadcast round the world. Except for the countries she is in. Hmm! She’s using her diaphragm to say things outside the range of her common experience. We are what you talk about before you cut to the news desk for an update on the Olympics. The only part you will remember is that the Queen’s daughter

has qualified for the British riding team. And not that the body on the ground belonged to another body. And that he fought to stay alive the way the journalist fights with her mic or fights to beat the falling darkness or fights away a pair of mosquitoes that hover between her breast and right eye – hover between her lip and right breast. The cameraman has the engine running and is using the back of the pickup as a tripod while he rolls himself a smoke. Watch his lens searching for the sweetness of death. If only the dead could awaken. The lighter belongs to the body on the ground, so do the smokes, and

so does the country in which we watch him. The mosquitoes know this – that is why they are unhinged – and now so do you. The second point of forgiveness sits in the future like the woman I will one day love and the country in which I will one day live. Forgive me. My heart is a vicious wolf that moves like the cloud of God searching for
the true shape of history searching for the weight of a love lost. My mother was a river, my father was a boat – both separated by a sack of light

Mark: Nick, where did this poem come from?

Nick: So this poem came from a series of poems that I was working on that – the term is called ekphrasis when you take a piece of art and you use poetic language not necessarily to describe the painting, but the connection between the painting and yourself and the artist. And the particular artist that I was looking at was Jean-Michel Basquiat and initially that wasn’t intentional. It’s just that I’d gone to see his work at the Boom for Real retrospective at the Barbican, and I was so moved by the work, I cried, I burst into tears. I’ve never done that before in public. Just seen a painting or a bunch of his paintings and burst into tears one after the other and literally weeping.

At the time I didn’t know what to make of it. I wasn’t trying to write any poem. I was literally just coming, I’d done a workshop with a friend of mine and I was just coming well, given free tickets and I was just observing the painting. I’d never seen a Basquiat painting before in person in my life, but when I started actually working on this collection that at the time wasn’t even called The New Carthaginians, it was called The Welcome Table, I knew I needed three characters, of which I would be one of them as the poet. I didn’t know that the second character would be Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the third character would be Icarus.

And what I wanted to do was what he does with paintings. He turns paintings into poetry, so I wanted to turn poetry into a painting. And so these there are actually two titles in the one title. So the first part of it is Self Portrait 1981, which is one of his paintings, and the second one is Self-portrait of the Poet as Cassius Clay, which is another painting. And what I wanted to do was the self-portrait of the Black body. So one of them is a Self portrait of the poet as Cassius Clay. One of them is this kind of self portrait, of course. But because they’re using Basquiat, they’re also, it’s also a portrait of him, if that makes sense. And that was what I was trying to achieve.

And they’re basically two poems that sit side by side with each other and they work as what I call a new form called the footnote poem. And so you read part one of the poem and then the story elevates to another register, and you read part two. So I didn’t think of this at the time. So it sounds very ‘Oh, you know what you’re doing’. I didn’t, I was just writing from just kind of this raw emotion.

And what I did before I wrote these poems is actually I’d been to the retrospective. But then I decided to go to another retrospective that was put on by his sisters in New York, and that was called King Pleasure. And so I had to go back to see the paintings again and other works. And I was again moved and then I had about 40 poems that I really liked. I mean, 40 paintings call them poems, but 40 paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat that I really liked. And then from those I would I would, I would just day by day write a poem. And then some of them connected as these two do. So I didn’t make them initially connect, but I saw parallels.

I thought, okay, what if I was to find a way to connect them in the way that Basquiat that he did these diptychs and triptychs. So diptychs and triptychs are moments in time. So a triptych is three scenes, one that represents the past, one that represents the present and one that represents the future. And so when you put them all together, the past, present and future, you have the time all of time happening at once. And one of the things I wanted to do was play with time. So technically there are two poems here, but when you put them together, there’s a third poem. So that is the past, the present and the future. Once again, I’m not as clever as it sounds! At the time I didn’t know what I was doing. These were just creative instincts that I was playing with.

And part of that, yeah, part of the problem was, and the reason I was playing with this is because I was, I was trying to tell a story. So this, The New Carthaginians is my life story.

I’m looking at my life story. I’m from Uganda originally, and with my first book I was looking at the Amin regime and I was trying to look at like the eight years or nine years of that regime. I wrote a play called The Dark, which looked at one day, which is the day that my mom smuggled me out of Uganda. And then for some reason, the curiosity was still there.

So I wanted to look at a specific seven days and there’s seven days of history in Uganda that’s called the Entebbe hijacking. And I wanted to parallel that with all the important moments of history in life, to look at the world through that, particularly the African lens but particularly the East African lens and more particularly the Ugandan.

So that’s what I was trying to achieve with the whole collection. And those three characters myself, the poet myself from Michel Basquiat, the painter and the Black Icarus, all live in present time. And I’m using them to move through time and how they talk about different histories to kind of understand my exile life here in the UK and also to give a voice to the East African voice, if that makes sense. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. So there’s a lot going on in this poem and also in the in the whole book. And, if you’re listening to this and feeling a little bit overwhelmed right now, that’s actually, I think, overwhelmed in a good way is part of the experience of this book. There’s so much richness with so many different perspectives and things going on. And so there’s a lot for us to unpack.

But before we do that, Nick, in terms of your poem, I’d like to go back to that experience when you first encountered the Basquiat painting face to face. Looking back, what do you think it was about those painting things that was so powerful for you?

Nick: I mean, there’s. I mean, there’s so many ways to answer why Basquiat’s paintings mean so much to me. I think I want to say this humbly. I think if I had known him, he would have been my friend. And I’m not saying that because he’s famous. It’s just the many things that I realized that he was into I was into when I went to the King Pleasure retrospective in New York, and I was looking through his collections, many of the books he read, I’d read, the music he was into, I was into.

And he kind of reminds me that he’s a collage of several of my friends in many ways. So I was like, you’d be the sort of guy, I’ll probably go check out a concert and eat some food, talk. I might not see him for a while because he’s famous, but it would be like that. I’m not saying, I’d see him every day I’m not trying to elevate myself to some kind of status, but he just seemed like a friend on some level.

That was one. I think the other thing I learned when I went travelling across America looking at Basquiat paintings across these different museums in New York and LA and Atlanta is I realized that the thing about Basquiat is that he centres the Black body in time in history. And that’s kind of what I was trying to achieve. So I realized the crying – he’d given me a codex or a key into how I could write these poems, because the struggle was, I mean, every poet has this. But I, particularly as a writer of colour, as a Black poet, as an African poet, you always question: How will they – will they even have interest in my story? How do I make it relevant to contemporary time? Because the story is not in the news. The stories that they have of my country are not the ones that I’m trying to tell.

So that was I think when I saw that it’s almost like I’d seen a pathway that would allow me to navigate my narrative in a way that was both interesting to the reader, but also interesting to me, to move the reader and move myself. Because if it doesn’t move me, there’s no point in me writing it. And if it doesn’t move the reader there’s no point me saying it, you know?

Mark: So one thing that struck me, Nick, looking at Basquiat’s – you picked up on the phrase ‘exploded collage’, I think, from one of his critics, to describe what he does, which is, when you look at those images, they are overwhelming. They mix images, they mix words, they have crossed out words. They have all kinds of interesting and playful stuff going on.

And I think your book is very much in that spirit. I mean, even in this poem that you’ve read today, for instance, as you said, you’ve got the three different characters, you’ve got the poet Basquiat and Icarus, who seem, at some stages in the book to be the same person, at some stages different people. You’ve also got that coming out formally, in the fact that you use footnotes extensively, so that there’s at least a two-level text going on, which is what happens with footnotes.

So again, if you’re listening to this and you want to see this, go and have a look at the website, you’ll see the poem and you’ll see which bits are footnotes and which bits are the ‘main text’, in inverted commas. On the one hand footnotes can seem a bit academic. But on the other hand, I think the way you’re using them is anything but. Could you say something about that formal decision?

Nick: The footnote is a device used in academic settings, but that’s not what I was trying to do. What I was trying to do is enter a level of surrealism. I was trying to signify another body or human experience. There is what is happening in the world. And then there’s what we’re experiencing, particularly as a Black body. You live an Afro-Surreal life in the sense that there’s the world that you are in. And then there’s the truth that I mean, for example, if you think about George Floyd, I had an Afro-Surreal experience when I saw what happened to him in the sense that I saw a Black man being killed for literally having $5 in his pocket and people not believing that. And so I have as a Black body, I have to think, Oh, my God. Should I not carry £5? Should I tell the truth?

So that surrealism means that there is a narrative that is happening in the world and then there’s a narrative I have to accept as a Black body. And so the footnote kind of allows two worlds to exist at once. And I wanted that parallel track, and I wanted it in a way that was more than just a series of poems, or these are connected poems. I wanted to play with time. I wanted to be able to move you into the future, but also feel that you’re in the present, but also feel like you’re in the past and feel, no disconnection with either one and feel no kind of disorientation. So that’s what the footnote poem did. But I also found that by accident, so that it was it was me trying to answer that that question was like, how do I bring all of this history together?

The other thing about Basquiat, what you said about the exploded collage is that he was trying to – he actually said in a quote, “I’m trying to put the whole of history onto one page”. And I mean, I have a sequence in the book called ‘Codex’, for example, and I was trying to do the same thing even before I’d met Basquiat. I’d actually gone to see Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Arundel at the British Library. And I had this idea in my head before, I’d actually even seen a Basquiat painting. And the idea was, I wondered if I could put the whole of my emotions, my history, my life, my, my loves into one poem. So I started these poems just called ‘Codex’.

And then I went, I guess, when I saw Basquiat, then I realized he was doing the same thing, that the tears were this kind of kinship. This way I say to you, he feels like a like a friend. Not because I’ve never met him, but there were so many things that we were trying to do the same. And I feel that he achieved them and he was kind of almost like a like a spirit guide in that kind of way. And that’s what I was trying to do. So when you feel you feel these poems, you’re moving through time, you’re moving through space, you’re moving through histories, you’re moving through bodies for understanding, for recognition, if that makes sense.

Mark: Yeah. And that chimes very much with my experience of reading this book. Because it is, really, it’s one long poem. It’s made up of several sequences, but it’s – sometimes you read a poetry collection and you read a poem and you read another poem, and it’s like there’s a space between them, and you can dip in and dip out. But I sat down and read this all the way through It was more like the feeling of reading a novel. You know, where you’re just totally absorbed in that world for the duration of the book. It’s got that level of intensity, but also capaciousness. Like you say, it includes a lot of history and culture, different time zones, lots of elements of your own life, but also the history of Uganda.

And if we can just zoom in on how that plays out in this particular poem, maybe we could just start to talk about the two parts of the poem and how they talk to each other. So on the one hand you’ve got this D’Angelo concert, Brixton – I assume this is the Brixton Academy?

Nick: Yeah.

Mark: Getting into the venue when it’s sold out. And that whole sequence with Icarus who on the one hand is a mythical creature, but somehow he’s right there in the photo with his wings. And then the second part is much more centred around the public reporting and portrayal of the Entebbe hijacking. So, I mean, how do you see the relationship between these two?

Nick: I mean, there are many doors in, but I’ll try and give you a few! So basically, Basquiat, Icarus and myself are the new Carthaginians. And there are two paintings by Turner that are called, well, there there are actually ten paintings from Turner that deal with Carthage. And the reason I’ve chosen Carthage is, going back to that episode where I told you why I burst into tears at looking at the Basquiat retrospective. In The Aeneid, Aeneas does the same thing when he looks at the frescoes on the Temple of Juno. He bursts into tears when he sees the whole of his history on the wall.

Mark: Oh yes.

Nick: So he’s seeing his life in the present, but he’s seeing what’s happened in the past, and he’s also seeing the future in the forming of Carthage. And so in many ways, through those three characters, the new Carthaginians and in my vision, Icarus is alive. He’s Black, but he didn’t die the way it’s depicted in myth. He has a different myth. So I’m also creating a new myth.

So that’s the context of these poems. One of them is dealing with, I’ve played with the timeline, but one of them is dealing with a concert I went to and trying to generate that. And that is kind of, I guess, relatively present time. But it’s also dealing with when I’m in these spaces and how the past of Uganda floods back in and how they sit parallel with each other. So it’s looking at how a lot of times the reportage or the way that my country’s reported on, the way it is seen through the Western gaze, and I’m holding it up to the light, trying to give it an African gaze.

And the reason I did that is, when we when they talk about the Entebbe hijacking, which is a horrible thing to happen in any in any situation, but whenever they talk of that situation, they never actually talk of the people of Uganda. So, if we parallel that to sadly, what happened at 9/11 or 7/7, when you think 9/11 they talk of the people of New York, it is their story. And we have compassion for that. When it was 7/7, they talk of the people of London and it is it is their story and we have compassion for that. But they never talk of the people of Uganda in that way. And so I just wanted to turn the camera, if that makes sense, so that they can see the people. So I am one of those people.

So even though I might be at the D’Angelo concert enjoying myself, and even though you might turn to the news and see something else, I’m one of those people. And I’m one of the people who I guess is here, but they are the people who will not be part of history because they’re not even looked at. That’s what the portrait is. It’s a way of centring that story rather than having it towards the periphery of the painting. And you said something that actually touches me. And it means in many ways – I mean, I hope the book goes on to do very well, but it’s one of my secret passions for the book was I wanted it to read, even more than a novel, like it’s one big mural. It’s one painting.

And when Basquiat was creating his work, a lot of times he would work on several paintings at once. And that’s how I worked on these poems. I was working on them as if it was one. I would go from one to the next to the next. When one idea fades, I’ll jump into another poem, one other, and I would keep that energy going. So it really means a lot that you feel the arc of the book.

Mark: Yeah. I mean, it’s an intense experience. I heartily recommend it, but you’ve really got to be able to sit down and give it the time and attention it deserves. So picking up on what you were just saying, it sounds like, in your use of the footnotes and multiple perspectives here, the background becomes the foreground. The people of Uganda, the lives, the cause. So the Entebbe hijacking, there’s a lot of movie versions aren’t there? And they usually centre on how it seems from the outside. So the original hijack was in Athens. Could you just walk us though that?

Nick: Yeah. So I mean, it’s really important what you’re saying there. So when, when you talk about the Entebbe hijacking there, that there are several components. It was a plane that left Tel Aviv, then went to Athens. That was it. And then it was supposed, I think I think was supposed to go to I don’t know if it was Paris or New York, one or the other. But anyway, some hijackers got on and then it was diverted to Benghazi. And then at Benghazi, they refuelled, they were allowed to refuel, and then they asked many African countries if they could land on the tarmac.

And the only country that was willing to accept that was Uganda, because Idi Amin was in charge at the time and the plane was there for seven days. Hence the seven-day focus that I’m looking at for many reasons. One is because of the way the world related to Idi Amin and Uganda changed after that and understandably so. But then what happened is, what is usually in the films, there was this great rescue by the Israeli Defence Force. Their leader, Yoni was killed and a few others were injured. Some of the hostages were killed. I think all the hostages were killed. Some civilians were killed.

And they always tell the story. But whenever they tell the story, the only real Black gaze is on Idi Amin and his villainy. But there’s nothing about how it impacted the people of Uganda. So my concern isn’t what people already know – the Western gaze, the Western reportage, the Western heroism. It’s more about: what about the people of Uganda? Even though it happened on Ugandan soil, there is no Ugandan story, which is which I wanted to deal with, that erasure. But not just that. I also wanted to deal with the impact. Because of that situation I had to leave the country. You know, there’s a part of me thinks that I might not have even been a poet if I hadn’t had to leave my country because I needed a language in which my whole self could be expressed.

Mark: Really?

Nick: You know, in poetry, I’m fully the person I need to be. Whereas in the world, when I step into the West, I’m a Black. I have to identify as a Black body and I’m usually an ‘other’. I’m usually a minority. When I go back to my country, I’m seen as if I’ve left. So I’m never fully myself. But in poetry land, inside of the new Carthaginians, my whole self is realised. And so this is a contemporary inquiry into exile, into that that fracture and into the banality and into that metic. When I say metic, it means, you know you’re a citizen, but you don’t feel fully integrated, not for any choice of your own, but in the way that the world receives you and perceives you.

Mark: So, the personal and the political, if you like, are nested one inside the other. There’s these two different perspectives or multiple perspectives, on the world stage but also in your life, you embody that.

Nick: Yes, absolutely. You say it better! Come with me. And we can explain this a lot easier! Yeah. [Laughter]

Mark: I don’t think I’m as articulate as you about this Nick! And so the hijacking was 1976. So how old would you have been then?

Nick: In 1976, I would have only been 2 at the time. I left in 1979. So thats when my mom, she was actually doing a PhD here and she had to come back and she smuggled me out and I’ve retold that as a play that happened that taught in the UK in 2019. But I wanted to not just look at that. That is like a focal point, but it isn’t the whole story. What I really wanted to look at was this enquiry into exile from an East African body. So I’m looking at my life and parallel history. So Basquiat’s history, Greece’s history, Carthage, and other moments in time. So I’m looking at them and seeing what is the impact of this on me in exile and through the different gaze of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Icarus and myself.

Mark: And so if the reader’s feeling disoriented on entering the world of the book, actually, that’s really mirroring your disorientation that you’re describing, that, you’ve been living through?

Nick: If they’re feeling disorientated, it means that they understand. If it’s clear to them, then it probably means that they’ve probably gone through some of the experiences I’m talking about.

Mark: Right.

Nick: But if they’re disorientated, that’s part of it. I think that’s part of the achievement of the book. And I hope I’ve done it in a way that doesn’t seem like you think, ‘Oh, he doesn’t know what he’s doing’. You think, ‘Oh’ – I’m I hope that when they’re going through the disorientation, you’re going through an understanding, of not just yourself, but also of me and not just me, but other people or other types of existence, you know?

Mark: I always felt I was in good hands in this book. I felt like you were taking me somewhere and you had an instinct for where that was, even if maybe, as you said, you hadn’t articulated it all consciously. There’s a real drive to the narrative to take us through.

And clearly there’s a lot of hurt in this experience. You know there’s a lot of hurt in the depiction of your country. There’s a lot of hurt in your own experience of exile and prejudice and being an outsider and so on. But, the second part hinges on forgiveness, doesn’t it? And you say , ‘To forgive someone requires two incidents in your life. The most obvious is the incident that, like fire, must be redeemed by fire.’. And that wonderful phrase, ‘Here’s the match.’. That’s the cue for the journalist and that’s the hurt. But towards the end, you come in with the second point of forgiveness. So I’m really curious about how that hinge of forgiveness works.

Nick: Yeah. I mean, it’s something I look at a lot, just on my own personal self-development, is this idea of forgiveness.

I mean, if you think about the first part of the poem which is dealing with war, but also the second one, which is dealing with relationship, forgiveness is the hardest thing to do. And I’m talking from a personal perspective. I’m not looking outward, I’m looking inward. And so I really want to inquire that. And, this is just my rudimentary thinking. You realize that forgiveness is a gift of God. And to be able to forgive someone is, is not only, a blessing on one level, but it’s also a release or a cleansing.

And I think in many ways that was my ambition for myself, is like I don’t want to just look at this and it be another book about exile. I wanted to kind of interrogate it with a sense of purpose to kind of, I guess, heal myself, bring myself closer to who I am. I have some deep understanding, but it would mean that I’d have to look at things that hurt me outwardly and inwardly, or ways in which I’ve hurt other people, outwardly and inwardly. And so I was trying to get as close to the fire of that as possible, no pun intended. But I was really trying to – I was like, in this idea of the codex, I was trying to put everything into one poem. I was like: could I confront myself and tell the truth for myself without trying to sugar-coat it? Could I confront my history without trying to be manipulative or sit, on one side?

And the only way I could enter into that authenticity was through this passage of forgiveness.

Mark: I think that’s a beautiful description. And it’s really hard to paraphrase this book or reduce it to a political position. You know, however much politics is in the air in it. And I think it comes across as a very human book, both in the experience you describe and the spirit that comes through it. Because after all the suffering, all the dislocation, whatever, it’s also a very beautiful book. And I would really encourage the reader to check out, to just sit down and read the whole book through and savour the beauty as well as the dislocation, the suffering and so on.

Nick: Thank you. Okay, so before we wrap up, I just want to say thank you. I’ve really enjoyed, I mean, I can’t wait to hear it back, but I’ve really enjoyed this and regardless of the technical difficulties, that was a beautiful interview. Thank you.

Mark: Well, thank you, Nick. And yes, behind the scenes you’re listening to the cleaned up edited version. But we did have some technical challenges and Nick was super patient with that. So let’s hear the poem again and appreciate the multifaceted world of Nick’s poetry.

If I’m going to sing like someone else,
then I don’t need to sing at all. – E. Faga

1 1981
That midsummer and the D’Angelo concert is sold out at Brixton. Fuck! I can’t tell you what he whispered to security but here’s a picture of Icarus and me backstage with two press cards pinned to our chests. And to think four hours ago I was clocking off work. They have only just let in the crowd. You can hear the hum through the tannoy. The thing about Icarus is he has a microchip for a mouth. You say it he

will name it. You name it he will play it. Once after his dad had died I caught him beating his chest after a month of fasting and prayer. They were more like songs really – the way the words fell away from his bones. Anyway, he is calling Keyon Harrold, the trumpet player from The Vanguard, ‘Kenya’. Asking him things like How do you create an open field in the band and if he believes in the equation of the Freedom Principle

even in light of the Palestine situation. D’Angelo has popped two cassettes into a deck. Icarus calls him Smoke. My bladder is about to cut loose. When I return, they are huddled around the tape deck like tribesmen eating jerk chicken, listening to a jamming session from the morning’s rehearsal in silence. Smoke must have taken the picture because he is the only one not in it. Icarus is in the centre with his wings fanning and closing.

2 the Poet as Cassius Clay 1982

To forgive someone requires two incidents in your life. The most obvious is the incident that like fire must be redeemed by fire. Here’s the match. A young journalist is speaking to camera – but her eyes struggle to find the centre. She is talking about my country the way a wino pees Pepsi into a can. This is being broadcast round the world. Except for the countries she is in. Hmm! She’s using her diaphragm to say things outside the range of her common experience. We are what you talk about before you cut to the news desk for an update on the Olympics. The only part you will remember is that the Queen’s daughter

has qualified for the British riding team. And not that the body on the ground belonged to another body. And that he fought to stay alive the way the journalist fights with her mic or fights to beat the falling darkness or fights away a pair of mosquitoes that hover between her breast and right eye – hover between her lip and right breast. The cameraman has the engine running and is using the back of the pickup as a tripod while he rolls himself a smoke. Watch his lens searching for the sweetness of death. If only the dead could awaken. The lighter belongs to the body on the ground, so do the smokes, and

so does the country in which we watch him. The mosquitoes know this – that is why they are unhinged – and now so do you. The second point of forgiveness sits in the future like the woman I will one day love and the country in which I will one day live. Forgive me. My heart is a vicious wolf that moves like the cloud of God searching for
the true shape of history searching for the weight of a love lost. My mother was a river, my father was a boat – both separated by a sack of light

‘Self Portrait 1981 Self Portrait of the poet as Cassius Clay 1982’ is from The New Carthaginians  by Nick Makoha, published by Penguin.

The New Carthaginians is available from:

The publisher: Penguin

Amazon: UK | US

Bookshop.org: UK

Dr Nick Makoha is a Ugandan poet, winner of the 2021 Ivan Juritz Prize and the Poetry London Prize. In 2017, Nick’s debut collection, Kingdom of Gravity, was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and was one of the Guardian’s best books of the year. He was the ICA 2023 Writer-in-Residence. He was the 2019 Writer-in-Residence for The Wordsworth Trust and Wasafiri. He is a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow and Complete Works alumnus. He won the 2015 Brunel African Poetry Prize and the 2016 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Prize for his pamphlet Resurrection Man. The New Carthaginians is his latest collection, published in 2025.

NickMakoha.com

Photo © Dirk Skiba

This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday.

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Mark McGuinness reads and discusses ‘Jabberwocky’ by Lewis Carroll.

Lewis Carroll

Mark McGuinness

by Lewis Carroll

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
       Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
       And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
       The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
       The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
       Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
       And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
       The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
       And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
       The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
       He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
       Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
       He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
       Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
       And the mome raths outgrabe.

This is one of the most famous nonsense poems ever written. You’ve probably heard it already. And you probably already know that it’s famous for being full of invented words that dazzle and beguile its readers. Yet somehow, we are able to make sense of the nonsense.

But is it really full of made-up words? And is it really so surprising that we can follow it?

Imagine if the poem had begun with the second stanza:

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
       The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
       The frumious Bandersnatch!”

What would you make of this opening? You’d probably wonder what a frumious Bandersnatch was. But the rest of it would be pretty obvious from the context. The Jabberwock is clearly some kind of monster, with jaws that bite and claws that catch. The Jubjub bird is a species of bird – you wouldn’t know what kind, but unless you’re an ornithologist, there are plenty of exotic birds in this world that you’ve never heard of, so you’d mentally file it with the rest of them.

Out of the twenty-two words in the stanza, only four of them are invented. So the opening wouldn’t be hard to follow, even if you were curious to know more. The same goes for the next stanza:

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
       Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
       And stood awhile in thought.

Out of twenty six words, only three are invented. So the language wouldn’t be a showstopper: we might wander what a vorpal sword looks like, or exactly what makes a foe manxome, or how big a Tumtum tree is. But none of this would hinder us following the action. And the same goes for the next three stanzas – the invented words are eye-catching, but there aren’t that many of them.

So the secret hiding in plain sight is that most of ‘Jabberwocky’ isn’t that difficult to understand. No more difficult than a passage from Tolkien that mentions elves and dwarves and names like Mordor and Minas Tirith. If it weren’t for that spectacular opening stanza, the poem probably wouldn’t have such a reputation for outrageous use of language.

But I think you’ll agree it’s quite the opening:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
       Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
       And the mome raths outgrabe.

Out of twenty three words, there are ten invented words, and one dictionary word, ‘gyre’, that was such an obscure word in 1851, when the first version of the poem was written, that it might as well have been made up. It was certainly rare enough for Carroll to feel he needed to write a note explaining that it should be pronounced with a hard ‘g’. Later on it was a favourite word of W. B. Yeats, and I can’t help wondering whether Yeats first noticed it in ‘Jabberwocky’.

Anyway. That means there are 11 strange words out of 23 in this opening stanza, almost half the stanza, so no wonder it feels like it’s chock-full of strangeness. And in the other five stanzas, there are only 18 more invented words in total, so they are spread much thinner through the rest of the poem.

It’s like buying one of those sandwiches that has been cut in two: on the shelf, it looks like it’s chock full of delicious filling, but when you unwrap it you discover that the edges are mostly bread and butter.

And I want to stress, this isn’t a criticism. Well, it’s a criticism of the sandwich. But it’s praise for the poem. Because whatever else it is, ‘Jabberwocky’ is also an example of a master illusionist at work, using all the linguistic and imaginative resources he can muster to achieve maximum effect with minimal effort.

Having so many strange words in the opening stanza makes a first impression that is so ostentatiously rich and strange that it stamps itself indelibly on our memory, and influences our perception of the rest of the poem. And repeating the stanza at the end of the poem means that our final impression of the poem is the same as the first one – of a dense and beguiling forest of words that we have somehow managed to wander through without getting lost.

As a practising poet I am in awe of Lewis Carroll’s skill in creating this illusion. So let’s take a closer look at how he does it…

So firstly, the poem is very short. Just six stanzas, and one of them is repeated. So he only really has to dazzle us with one really dense and clever stanza. The rest of the poem can have just enough strangeness to maintain the illusion.

Secondly, the action is really simple: a hero goes into a forest, kills a monster and comes back in triumph. It’s an archetypal scenario that even children – especially children – are very familiar with, from fairy stories and legends. So there’s not much chance of us losing the thread of the plot.

On top of this, Carroll uses rhythm and rhyme in a skilfully entrancing way. It’s written in a kind of ballad stanza, with three tetrameters, four-beat lines, followed by a final trimeter, a line with only three beats. And there’s lots of alliteration (repeated consonants), assonance (repeated vowels) and internal rhyme (rhyme within a line instead of at the end of the line). All of which has a spellbinding effect, lulling our conscious mind into a perhaps false sense of lucidity. Clive James once said that W. H. Auden’s poetic skill could make anything sound ‘truer than true’, and I think there’s a similar effect going on here.

Another thing Carroll is very clever about is the types of invented words that he uses. In the first stanza there are two invented verbs, ‘gimble’ and ‘outgrabe’, and that unusual word, ‘gyre’:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
       Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
       And the mome raths outgrabe.

So because the verbs are so strange, it’s really hard to figure out exactly what’s going on in this stanza, and some scholars are still debating it. Which means the reader feels quite disoriented on reading this, but it doesn’t really matter, because nothing crucial is happening here. It’s what film directors call an establishing shot – a camera shot that sets the scene by showing us the environment in which the action will take place. It’s scenery. So it’s fine, in fact it’s desirable, that we feel a little disoriented and giddy, as if we’ve just stepped onto a fairground ride.

But when the action starts, Carroll doesn’t take this kind of risk. In the rest of the poem there are only three more invented verbs: ‘whiffling’, ‘galumphing’, and ‘chortled’, plus the obscure verb ‘burbled’, which are all pretty easy to understand from the context. So at the crucial moments in the action, the verbs make it nice and clear what’s happening: the hero ‘took’ his sword, he ‘sought’ the foe, he ‘rested’ by the Tumtum tree, he ‘stood’ awhile in thought, and he ‘left’ the Jabberwock dead.

Have a listen to the verbs in the central three stanzas:

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
       Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
       And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
       The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
       And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
       The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
       He went galumphing back.

It’s nice and clear what’s happening, isn’t it? Even ‘galumphing’ is close enough to ‘galloping’ to be understood at a first reading. There are still a decent number of strange words, but notice that these are mostly adjectives: the ‘vorpal’ sword, the ‘manxome’ foe, ‘uffish’ thought, the ‘tulgey’ wood. So even if we’re not sure what they mean, we never lose the thread because the nouns are all clear: a sword, a foe, the hero’s thought, and the wood.

There is of course one very important noun at the heart of the poem: ‘the Jabberwock’ itself. But we’re given a lot of information about the Jabberwock in plain English: it has jaws that bite and claws that catch and eyes of flame. So it’s obviously a monster of some kind, and as all monster movie directors know, the monster you don’t quite see is the scariest monster of all, because you fill in the details with your imagination.

There’s also a terrific piece of onomatopoeia, words designed to imitate sounds, at the climax of the action:

       The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

It’s like a cartoon, isn’t it? We really hear and see the sword despatch the Jabberwock with a swift one-two.

And there are also some wonderful invented words used to express the speaker’s delight at the hero’s success:

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
       Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
       He chortled in his joy.

So we’ve got another adjective here, ‘beamish’, and the connotations of ‘beaming’ are pretty obviously appropriate in this context. And then that delightful line:

       O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

So no problems here: these are wonderfully exuberant exclamations. And we’re all used to yelling strange words at moments of triumph, as anyone will attest who has ever shouted ‘yippee!’, ‘hooray!’, ‘yee-haw!’ or ‘hup hup huzzah!’.

We never find out who this speaker is, who first warns the hero to ‘beware the Jabberwock, my son’, and then celebrates his return. Perhaps it’s a proud parent, or perhaps ‘my son’ is just a term of affection. But dramatically of course, an audience is required for any self-respecting hero.

So Lewis Carroll is a very clever poet, not just in his ability to invent words, but also the way he artfully deploys these new words, front-loading the poem with lots of them, but measuring them out judiciously in the middle. And using invented verbs when he doesn’t mind confusing us, but mostly adjectives when he wants us to follow the action.

Another way he gets away with so much nonsense is in the delightfully suggestive sound of the words. We’ve got the onomatopoeia of ‘snicker-snack’, as well as ‘whiffling’, ‘burbled’ and ‘chortled’. And also words that are suggestive of other words: ‘slithy’, as Humpty Dumpty tells Alice, means ‘lithe and slimy’; ‘fruminious’, according to Carroll himself, combines ‘fuming’ and ‘furious’; ‘gimble’ suggests ‘nimble’; ‘mimsy’ suggests ‘flimsy’, and so on.

In his massive book about how poetry works, The Poem, Don Paterson talks about the role of phonesthemes in poetry. His definition of a phonestheme is ‘a point of sound-sense coincidence’. In other words, it’s where we find a cluster of words that sound similar, and which have similar or related meanings, even though there might be no etymological connection, in terms of the history of the words. For example, the sound ‘gl’ occurs in words describing sight or reflected light, such as glisten, glare, glow, glint, gleam, glass, glance, glitter and so on.

Poets love this kind of thing, because it gives them plenty to work with. One definition of poetry could be the art of marrying the sound of words with their sense. So Lewis Carroll was a highly skilled poet. And no wonder that when Alice comes across this poem in the novel Through the Looking-Glass, she says:

‘Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas — only I don’t exactly know what they are.’

Another aspect of language that I think Carroll exploits really well is the tendency of the human mind to fill in the gaps in perception to help us navigate the world, and gaps in language when we’re reading a challenging text.

You may recall the internet meme years ago, that pointed out that we can often understand words whose letters have been scrambled, as long as the first and last words are in the correct position. And we’re all familiar with the experience of reading a book and finding an unfamiliar word – do you bother to look it up? Or can you guess the meaning from the context? Often, guessing feels easier than the effort of looking it up.

This is part of the experience of learning to read, as I’m currently rediscovering in my quest to learn Japanese. I often find myself looking at a Japanese sentence with one or two words I don’t know. It reminds me of what it was like when I was a child and wanted to keep reading a story, rather than looking new words up in the dictionary, so I did my best to figure out new words for myself.

All of which is to say, that there are qualities inherent in language that make it possible for us to derive a kind of sense from even the weirdest of words, and Carroll knew this, or intuited it, and managed to tread the finest of lines between sense and nonsense when he wrote ‘Jabberwocky’.

Zooming out from individual words to the poem as a whole, we can see that the structure of the poem is also key to its effect. We’ve already noted the hypnotic effect of the regular metre and stanza form. And if we look at the content of the stanzas, we can see that they are neatly symmetrical:

Firstly, we have that establishing shot of the opening stanza:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
       Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
       And the mome raths outgrabe.

Then the mysterious speaker appears to warn our hero about the monster:

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
       The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
       The frumious Bandersnatch!”

Next we get three stanzas of action, right in the middle of the poem:

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
       Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
       And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
       The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
       And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
       The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
       He went galumphing back.

After that, the final two stanzas are a mirror image of the first two. So in the second-to-last stanza, the speaker of the second stanza reappears:

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
       Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
       He chortled in his joy.

And finally, as we know, Carroll repeats the first stanza, so that we end our journey where we began, as if the spell has been lifted, and we find ourselves in the same place where we began, but with the sense of having been somehow transported:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
       Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
       And the mome raths outgrabe.

Given that Lewis Carroll was the pen name of the mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, we can assume this symmetry is no accident. In fact, this kind of structure is quite common in storytelling, it’s called a nested loop, because different elements or storyline nested inside another, so that you go deeper into the structure, then back out again. It’s used in works as diverse as the movies Pulp Fiction and Inception, and the British children’s TV show Bagpuss.

I learned the technique when I was a hypnotherapist – because nesting different stories or levels of stories inside each other has a disorienting effect on conscious mind, so that with each new level, the subject goes deeper into a trance state. And there’s definitely something a little trancelike going on ‘Jabberwocky’. Especially when we remember that Carroll placed the poem inside a longer story, the novel Through the Looking-Glass.

Alice finds a book written in a strange script, and it’s only when she remembers that she’s in a looking-glass world that she realises it’s printed in reverse, so she needs to look at the pages in a mirror to read them. So what we have is a poem reflected in a mirror inside a story about a world inside a looking-glass that turns out to be a dream. And the poem itself is written in a symmetrical form where the beginning mirrors the end. Which makes it one more level in the seemingly endless levels of the Alice books.

So the cumulative effect of Carroll’s various techniques – inventing suggestive new words, placing them artfully where they will have the greatest effect, exploiting quirks of language and tricks of perception, structuring the poem and the novel like a hall of mirrors, and using rhyme and other sound patterns to heighten the effect – is of a master illusionist at work.

He uses music and misdirection and to a dazzling effect that is somehow also flattering to us as readers. On the one hand the poem is bafflingly strange, but on the other, we can somehow make perfect sense of it! Curiouser and curioser, as Alice might say. Or if you ask me, cleverer and cleverer.

And I really don’t intend to spoil the magic by point out the cleverness of the poem’s construction. Because for me at least, this is a magic trick that still works even when you know how it works. I’ve enumerated different techniques, but the real magic of the poem – and maybe of poetry itself – is the way they all work mysteriously together, and create something greater than the sum of its parts. Something that almost feels alive.

So let’s hear the poem again and enjoy the sensation of being lost in a forest of strange words, but somehow able to see the wood for the trees.

by Lewis Carroll

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
       Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
       And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
       The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
       The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
       Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
       And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
       The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
       And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
       The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
       He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
       Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
       He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
       Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
       And the mome raths outgrabe.

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an English author, mathematician, logician, and photographer who was born in 1832 and died in 1898. A lecturer at Oxford University, he excelled in mathematics and logic, publishing scholarly works under his real name. He is best known for his literary classics Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Carroll was also a pioneer in early photography and there is an ongoing controversy about some of his subject matter. He was a skilled writer of nonsense verse, and many of his poems appear inside his novels. His prose and verse are distinguished by a unique blend of logic and fantasy that has enchanted readers for generations. 

This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday.

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