A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
experience—revolution, repression, danger—and does so through a relatively unfamiliar fixed form. The poem's sinister quality lies in its fragmentary quality, and in its not quite complete regularity. Although it is an exotic piece, it echoes traditional English ballads and folk songs, and the use of those traditional forms by Wordsworth, Stevie Smith, and James Fenton. Its focus on uncertainty, danger, and betrayal is not, of course, exotic, but is part of universal human experience. The ghazal invokes the ballad, and all that ballads are about.
D. S. Marriott, “The Wreck of the Mendi” (2008) (Marriott 2008, 98–101)
The poem uses the traditional genre of the elegy to mourn the 616 Black South African soldiers drowned when their ship sank in the English Channel in 1917. The poem's epigraph is a dedication to these soldiers, and it and the text proper refer to the documented circumstances of the sinking and the deaths. The subject matter is presented in three sections: sections I and II offer complementary narrative accounts of the sinking and the conduct of the soldiers as they meet death; section III views the event from the speaker's present, looks at the result of the disaster, and ends in a (traditional) memorial for those lost at sea. Each section begins with a long sentence, stretching over several three‐line stanzas, followed by shorter ones.
The speaker of the poem is unnamed, and, indeed (unlike the speaker in Hopkins's “The Wreck of the Deutschland”—to which the poem's title and subject matter clearly refer), makes no appearance within the poem. Unlike Hopkins's text, too, the poem is written in what is effectively free verse. The three‐line stanzas have lines of quite substantially varying lengths. Main stresses, too, vary, although only from two to four. The piece is unrhymed. Relatively short lines allow a focus on the constituent phrases of the text, for example, in the second stanza of section II: “the hull breached, overrun / men in the wrack / gasping in a peopled darkness.” This appears to be the only function of such division.
However, the poem is marked by a far from prosaic linguistic strategy. There is a degree of lexical and consequently semantic mystery to the text. For example, “instress” is used twice (in I.5 and II.8), but not in any sense that Hopkins would recognize. Equally unusual is the use of the word “burls” (a burl is a growth on a tree with a deformed grain) in II.1. (“Burl” occurs in a similar metaphorical sense in “The Wreck of the Deutschland.”) The word “reeved” (twined, twisted) is used in II.7—and it is used in “The Wreck of the Deutschland” too. The word “tain” (a French word—not strictly an English one—for the silvering used on mirrors) occurs in II.5, along with “dredges” as a plural noun (this last is very obscure, unless the meaning of a mixture of grains, like the mixture of the South African dead, is being activated).
Further, there is a marked degree of opacity of reference in many phrases. It is very hard to gloss I.9. The relevance of the phrase “less the lash” in II.1 is not clear. (Is it a reference to slavery or indentured labor, but, if so, why is it here? Is it a reference to Hopkins's verse?) It is difficult to paraphrase II.7 and II.8. While the general import of III.1 can be intuited—the “black load‐bearers” are the dead—but who is the “him” that they carry? One certainly must work to unpick the complexities of III.5—the “unaccounted‐for blood,” prayers silvering the “dredges.” However, this is not incompetence, but an essay at a vatic dignity—and one that recalls Hopkins's verbal strategy in “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” The substantially forgotten, marginalized Black soldiers (abandoned to their fate by the vessel that sank the Mendi) are recalled into a dignified mystery. Introductory sentences are suitably grand, references are to a canonical English poem, and the dead are reshaped in numinous mystery. They are themselves, South Africans of many peoples, who meet a cruel end nobly, but the poem's ending locates them as some of the British maritime war dead who “have no grave but the sea” (quoting from the Tower Hill Memorial). They are at once marginal to and yet assimilated to and instated in a national memory.
3.
In this section, we wish to set out certain regularities and shared features of the texts discussed earlier. As always with such a proceeding, the question must arise as to whether these regularities have been generated only by the corpus of texts chosen, or whether they are of general application. Finally, we believe that the reader must decide. It is for her or him to disprove or endorse the account given here. It should also be stressed that these categories are not exclusive, and that poems not mentioned as part of one category could in some cases readily be included in another.
Very general categories can be observed. First, there are texts in which an interplay of order and disorder is constitutive of the poem's meaning. In general and beyond this corpus, a balance between order and disorder is apparent in many poems (although by no means all), but in some poems the concatenation of ordering and disordering devices is particularly prominent. From our corpus, we would include: Larkin's “An Arundel Tomb,” Harwood's “The Sinking Colony,” Heaney's “Requiem for the Croppies,” Stevenson's “A Love Letter,” Harrison's “Turns,” Adcock's “The Ex‐Queen Among the Astronomers,” Sheppard's “Fucking Time,” Muldoon's “Moy Sand and Gravel,” Khalvati's “Ghazal: The Servant,” and Marriott's “The Wreck of the Mendi.” Second, there are texts that (although this is a matter of interpretative balance) directly and relatively unambiguously present and enact their meanings.2 Here, we would include the analyzed poems by Harwood, Heaney, Montague, Joseph, Johnson, Davies, Warner, Kay, and Duffy. Marginal cases might be the poems by Stevenson and Duffy. Joseph's “Warning” is a difficult case. On one level, it is what it says it is—a warning to respectable society—but that social order will scarcely be shaken by the threatened behavior. Third, we observe a group of poems that are marked by self‐undermining and irony. This includes the pieces by Larkin, Hughes, Joseph (probably), and Adcock.
A secondary level of categorization can be observed in several poems. First, a varying engagement with varying traditions is apparent. The tradition is social in poems by Larkin, Heaney, Harrison, Johnson, and Marriott. There is clearly an antiestablishment and antimetropolitan tenor to all these texts, apart from Larkin's, although an aristocratic and established order is slyly undermined in that text. The engagement with tradition is literary (although that is not without social implications) in texts by Heaney, Harrison, Johnson, Muldoon, Sheppard, Khalvati, and Marriott. It is more exclusively social in Larkin's “An Arundel Tomb.” Second, fragments and ellipses organize texts by Harwood, Hill, Constantine, Muldoon, and Khalvati. Third, the demotic voice is apparent in several texts: in those by Hill, Harrison, Johnson, Warner, Kay, Duffy, and Marriott. These demotic voices have different implications and resonances (English varieties, Scots, Black English), but they do have a commonality that jars metropolitan linguistic norms. Fourth, mythological transformation of the everyday is present in a small number of poems: Davies's “The Ophthalmologist,” Constantine's “Visiting,” and Adcock's “The Ex‐Queen Among the Astronomers.” The degree to which Hughes's “Crow Tyrannosaurus” is a mythologization of the commonplace is open to discussion. It is our impression that the mythologizing category is underrepresented in our corpus (as is demonstrated by several essays in this volume). Fifth, women's voices (although far from unambiguous ones) are present in texts by women poets: Joseph, Stevenson, Adcock, Davies, Kay, and Duffy. It is interesting to note that Val Warner's poem does not focus on women's experience, although other poems in Tooting Idyll do.
Finally, two thematic focuses of poems in the corpus deserve to be stressed. First, the motif of impotence is rife among these texts: the figures on Larkin's tomb; Crow who is not a tyrannosaurus rex, but only a crow; Joseph's prefigured old lady, whose misdemeanors are limited in impact; Johnson's put‐upon immigrant; Davies's entranced and entrapped visitor to the eye doctor; Constantine's wretched revenant; Adcock's bitter ex‐queen; Warner's musing gay speaker; and Khalvati's concerned voice. This motif can be contrasted with the more active figures in Kay's text (though the speaker is still dependent on the inspector's goodwill), in Heaney's rebels (though they are defeated), in Montague's socially mobile farmer (though it all comes to naught in the end),