Skip to main content
Read page text
page 16
poem. It is about to be the very first sonnet. He labours on a further draft, then pauses. Acaso le ha llegado del porvenir y de su horror sagrado un rumor de remotos ruiseñores. To paraphrase, ‘Perhaps he has sensed, radiating from the future, a rumour of far off nightingales’. Of things to come, even of impending clichés. The modern poet asks in the sonnet’s sestet: ¿Habrá sentido que no estaba solo y que el arcáno, el increible Apolo le habia revelado un arquetipo, un ávido cristal que apresaría cuanto la noche cierra y abre el dia: dédalo, laberinto, enigma, Edipo? (Had he detected he was not alone, that the cryptic, the inconceivable Apollo had disclosed to him an archetypal pattern, a greedy crystal that would detain, as night arrests day and then lets it go: Dedalus, labyrinth, the riddle, Laius’s son.) For Borges the future weighs on this long-ago present, much as the past will come to do: in looking back, we see something aware of our gaze, returning it. This prolepsis, this analepsis, arrests the quill of the ur-­sonneteer. It is a momentous little moment, a defining one. It’s a moment many poets experience when they find a sonnet on their page. Those inherencies! Less a promise than an earnest. Once the sonnet is recognised by a labouring poet, not as a discovery but as a thing given by ‘the inconceivable Apollo’, once it is in language, as it came to be for Giacomo da Lentini in the thirteenth century Italian, it becomes part of something larger, in being successfully itself. This first sonnet, like those included in New Poetries VI, works with memory. Borges’s poet, suspended between a classical then and a modern now, mediates. Our poets, too, mediate. A poet developing ‘received forms’ cannot but collaborate with the poems that came before and those that will come after. A sonnet never belongs xiv New Poetries VI
page 17
exclusively to its author. When it has what Seamus Heaney calls wrists and ankles rather than hinges and joints, it is always new in its familiar, its familial movement. It pays its respects but has its own work to do. A headline in the Guardian on 16 March 2015 proclaimed, ‘Poems of the Decade anthology swaps Keats for modern masters’. The word ‘masters’ is used loosely to describe the one hundred poets whose post-2000 poems have been commended for the Forward Prize. Keats suggested himself to the headline writer because the anthology has been adopted as an Edexcel A-level text in 400 schools and Tim Turnbull’s ‘Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn’ was presented as displacing Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ in the curriculum. ‘Hello! What’s all this here? A kitschy vase’, Turnbull begins. The third of his ode’s four ten-line stanzas ends, ‘Each girl is buff, each geezer toned and strong, / charged with pulsing juice which, even yet, / fills every pair of Calvins and each thong, / never to be deflated, given head / in crude games of chlamydia roulette.’ ‘Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn’ may mark the distance between Keats’s reflections and the contemporary world. Fair enough, though it devalues neither Keats nor his Ode, even in an age of compulsory ‘relevance’ in school texts. Daljit Nagra’s ‘Look We Have Coming to Dover!’ does not quite displace its equally superannuated parent poem, Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’. The poetry in Poems of the Decade ‘will force a  change in the way pupils view poetry,’ says the Guardian. The subject-matter of poetry has been extended to include ‘full-fat milk, Post-it notes, joy-riding, using guns’. This will be ‘shocking […] after dwelling on nightingales and Grecian urns’. 2014 marked the centenary of the beginning of the First World War and 2015 the fiftieth anniversary of the death of T. S. Eliot. The Guardian journalist is caught in a cliché, a narrow Romantic time-warp, unaware of Whitman’s Drum-Taps, Rosenberg’s ‘Dead Man’s Dump’, The Anathemata, ‘The Waste Land’, the work of Auden, of Larkin and Plath, Ginsberg, Harrison and much else. Triumphalist ignorance sets out to ‘challenge easy assumptions about what is and is not “literary”’, portrays Keats as irrelevant, classical, conservative, disposable, and with him all the elitist, irrelevant clutter of past poetry and what it gives in terms of form, ear, living semantics. At last kids have ‘poems for pleasure, not just for homework’—because the last thing a reader gets from Keats is pleasure. Time for some radical cultural cleansing. Enter New Poetries VI with its— sonnets… Sonnets and other forms. The volume is characterised by a sensual, patient probing of and with form ‘as jester or saboteur’, as Adam Crothers, Preface xv

Page Text

View plaintext

poem. It is about to be the very first sonnet. He labours on a further draft, then pauses. Acaso le ha llegado del porvenir y de su horror sagrado un rumor de remotos ruiseñores.

To paraphrase, ‘Perhaps he has sensed, radiating from the future, a rumour of far off nightingales’. Of things to come, even of impending clichés. The modern poet asks in the sonnet’s sestet:

¿Habrá sentido que no estaba solo y que el arcáno, el increible Apolo le habia revelado un arquetipo,

un ávido cristal que apresaría cuanto la noche cierra y abre el dia: dédalo, laberinto, enigma, Edipo?

(Had he detected he was not alone, that the cryptic, the inconceivable Apollo had disclosed to him an archetypal pattern,

a greedy crystal that would detain, as night arrests day and then lets it go: Dedalus, labyrinth, the riddle, Laius’s son.)

For Borges the future weighs on this long-ago present, much as the past will come to do: in looking back, we see something aware of our gaze, returning it. This prolepsis, this analepsis, arrests the quill of the ur-­sonneteer. It is a momentous little moment, a defining one. It’s a moment many poets experience when they find a sonnet on their page. Those inherencies! Less a promise than an earnest. Once the sonnet is recognised by a labouring poet, not as a discovery but as a thing given by ‘the inconceivable Apollo’, once it is in language, as it came to be for Giacomo da Lentini in the thirteenth century Italian, it becomes part of something larger, in being successfully itself. This first sonnet, like those included in New Poetries VI, works with memory. Borges’s poet, suspended between a classical then and a modern now, mediates. Our poets, too, mediate. A poet developing ‘received forms’ cannot but collaborate with the poems that came before and those that will come after. A sonnet never belongs xiv New Poetries VI

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content