A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
odd attractiveness of his instruments, and the seeming impossibility of exit at the end. Indeed, the whole visit is overlaid with mythic overtones—the devilish suggestion (he shows her “All the kingdoms”—compare Matthew 4.8 and Luke 4.5), and also the way in which the underground capture of the speaker reflects the myth of Hades and Proserpina (the speaker's inability to return from the shadows to a green world is telling).
This sinister and mythological transformation of the everyday is embodied in highly accessible verse. It is free verse without rhyme, with only local sound effects, in no fixed form, and with no fixed line length. There is little enjambment; a line is usually a complete sense unit. It is a poem—at a certain level—passing itself off as a piece of everyday speech. The language is neither unduly formal nor informal, but of an educated neutrality. The language, too, is mostly literal, although it does become nonliteral at times, for example, lines 16–21, line 26, and the powerful concluding lines 31 and 32, in which the doctor/devil/lord of the underworld reveals his lures, “The honey of his systems underground.” The everyday visit, in its relatively everyday language, in its accessible verse, is transmogrified into the minacious and improper.
Robert Sheppard, “Fucking Time: Six Songs for the Earl of Rochester” (Dated 1992) (Sheppard 2004, 24–27)
This appears to be, on one level, a quite Rochesterian piece—it is lewd throughout—and, on another, not at all, for it seems quite disorderly—an antithesis to Rochester's polished pentameters. Ambiguity is embedded in the title. The songs for Rochester do not look Rochesterian or like songs. The first part of the title is triply ambiguous: “fucking time” means time for fucking; it means contemptible and vexatious time; and it means that this poem is messing about with, screwing over, kicking the butt of time.
Although the sequence as a whole is made up of the same number of stanzas with the same number of lines, the layout of the piece is nontraditional and certainly non‐Rochesterian. Lines are centered. Although there is a degree of similarity, lines are of substantially varied lengths and have varied numbers of principal stresses. There is much enjambment—for example, of the 12 lines of the first song, 7 run on, including the lines that end and begin all the stanzas (apart from line 1, that is). There is little rhyme, apart from that in stanza 1 in poem 6. Song 2 has metaleptic deletions. Nothing could be more different from Rochester's neoclassical technique.
But the subject matter is overtly Rochesterian, revolving around sex, physicality, disease, corruption, the bestial, and use of the body and others for advancement and sordid delectation. Even the fountains piss (song 2, line 1). There is much of dildoes, dog turds, and restless mares (song 3). Indeed, there is a kind of deviant ordering to the poem. The presence of local alliterations and consonance is unignorable. Most lines only vary between two and three main stresses. Forty five of the sequence's 72 lines end in unstressed syllables; trochees occur in 34 lines. The alliteration is part of Rochester's patterning in his verse, but the profoundly non‐iambic rhythm is not. This poem is at once a telling hommage to the great seventeenth‐century libertine poet, and yet a piece couched in a modern, innovatory idiom, yet with its own sly and disruptive patterning.
Val Warner, “England, Our England” (From Tooting Idyll [1998]) (Warner 1998, 37)
The poem is made up of the address of a homosexual lover to his partner, in which he reflects on and faces up to the outbreak of war in 1939. The title, seemingly propagandistic, is not, in fact, so. The speaker's and his partner's England is a gay one, criminalized, despised. It mutates sadly into a homophobic “England, their England” in line 12.
The organization of the subject matter is complex. In lines 1–4, the speaker wishes simply to live and die in the moment. Lines 4–7 offer the addressee's vision of appropriate conduct: to make a last stand in hell's mouth. Lines 8–10 offer a conditional “If,” in which no one goes to war. In lines 10–12, England is seen as a garden facing destruction, but in lines 12–14, this England is seen, correctly, as a place that imprisons homosexuals. Lines 14–17 offer at best a limited resolution: the addressee will side with the “workers,” who spit at gay men.
The poem presents movements of thought and feeling, which interweave. Different subjects melt into each other in the same line. There is much enjambment. Stanza length is irregular. One has a clear sense of a mind coping with personal, historical, and national complexities.
This sense of a mind speaking to itself is marked in the informal lexis and syntax (see ll. 1–2; note the recurrent ellipsis points, as the speaker pauses). This sense is augmented by a lack of rhyme, although all lines but line 4 have 10 syllables and four or five main stresses. Stanzas, too, are of irregular lengths, thus suggesting natural, formally unconstrained reflection. There are patterns of alliteration, to be sure (/h/ in lines 1 and 2, /l/ in lines 13–16), but these are local, and suggest intensity rather than technical shaping. One striking feature of the poem, which surely bears semantic weight, is the presence of compound lexis: “live‐long,” “mayfly‐like” (which is doubly compounded), “blue‐sky,” “last‐stand,” “wheelchair,” “twilight,” “speedwell,” and “birthright.” Here, the whole subject of the poem—are we together, are we together with the country that disowns us?—is foregrounded. Various kinds of history (national, personal, sexually oriented) come together in a carefully realized enactment of uncertainty.
David Constantine, “Visiting” (2002) (Constantine 2004, 305)
The title points to an everyday experience and one that is a mainstay of lyric verse—a visit to a place associated with the speaker's past, in this case, a childhood garden seen from an adult perspective (ll. 5–8). However, this experience—often disturbing enough in itself—is turned into something sinister, sorrowful, and macabre.
The text is divided into three sections (of eight lines, six lines, and two lines). The first section is an account of a visit to a garden known from childhood and of the speaker's (who is not present as a personal pronoun here) response to change. The second section reveals that there are ghosts within the garden, and in it the speaker (now an “I”) considers how he might wait to encounter them, perhaps until death, the “time of the naked soul” (line 11). The final two lines form a most ambiguous conclusion. The ghosts are thin, but the “I” is infinitely thin. Is the speaker a ghost forever banned from return, from reunion with the others whom he seeks to embrace?
The shift from the quotidian to the metaphysical, from the everyday to myth is embodied in a linguistic movement. The “old way in” becomes a “locus” (line 3). The visitor becomes “naked somnambule” (no article). The garden has “iron gates” and a “pitbull” (line 4), dark lexis that contrasts with memories of pleasure in a suburban garden (“cricket,” “bonfire,” “snowman” [line 7]). The garden is utterly de‐suburbanized and estranged in the “bars” (line 12), “the foul dog” (line 13), and the insubstantial “multitude” who throng it (line 13). The garden becomes the underworld, guarded by Cerberus, haunted by the untouchable shades.
Indeed, the whole poem is marked by unsettling movement on various other levels too. On the level of form or genre, one must ask whether this is any kind of sonnet. The main body of the poem is divided into an octave and a sestet. The final couplet pushes one to wonder if it is a 16‐line sonnet. There is certainly a rhyme scheme, but it is fragmented and odd. There is no space to go into this here in detail, but a poem that rhymes “somnambule / pitbull” (ll. 3–4), or “there” (l. 6) with “enter” (in the distant line 11), is advertising its fragmentary inconclusiveness. The final line endings “I” and “infinity” court rhyme without achieving it. Line length is similarly disorderly: sections 1 and 2 have lines from 8 to 1 sections 1 and 2 syllables in length; the final couplet is made up of a six‐syllable line and a 10‐syllable line.
Rhythmically, the text is certainly marked by a recurrent caesura, although it divides each line nonsymmetrically. It is certainly not an iambic poem. Line 12 is the only clear example of a predominantly