Poetry Notebook (8 page)

To speak of the poetic moment, and then of the rhythmic framework in which it is contained, brings us naturally to the rhythmic progress from moment to moment, and hence to the
question of how, in any poem that strikes us as being integrated, the effects seem joined up by an inexorable progression. From that progression, any poem that impresses us with its integrity is
likely to gain an extra poetic charge, sometimes to the point of convincing us that the way it goes is the secret of what it is. In the course of a lifetime there might be several times that a
reader comes across a poem that can’t be fully explained but can’t be left alone either. For me, two examples would be ‘Gone to Report’, by Brian Howard, and ‘War of
Nerves’ by Frederic Prokosch. Both poets were well-known literary names in the 1940s, and both of them are forgotten now, but each of them wrote a poem whose driving force of argument I still
can’t get out of my head even though I have spent half a century wondering about what the argument actually is. (I leave it to the reader to track those poems down. The search will be part of
the puzzle: Raiders of the Lost Text!) The Australian poet Francis Webb wrote several strangely beautiful poems whose authoritative coherence refuses to be reduced to ordinary comprehensibility:
but Webb was a mental patient. At times in modern poetic history the temptation to let go of rationality has risen to the status of a command, just as, in the history of modern painting, it became
compulsory to let go of the figurative. To ignore the results would be wilful obtuseness, yet surely, if only to secure a brief respite from the barely intelligible, it is forgivable to favour
those poets who show signs of knowing what they are saying. From them we might get, occasionally if not always, the poem that gains extra vitality from the way it has been made complete. Stephen
Edgar’s ‘Man on the Moon’ is just such a poem: clear from moment to moment, and clear in the way that one moment leads to the next, it accumulates so much clarity that you need
dark glasses to look at it.

On a second reading of a poem that has wowed us, we might grow even more interested, but we start to sober up. For my own part, initial admiration for a single poem often
tempts me into a vocabulary I would rather avoid. The Australian poet Stephen Edgar’s poem ‘Man on the Moon’ can be found in his collection
Other Summers
, or – more
quickly, and for free – in the selection devoted to his work in the Guest Poets section of my website, clivejames.com. With a single reservation, I think it is a perfect poem, although
‘perfect’ is an adjective I would rather not be caught using. The word just doesn’t convey enough meaning to cover, or even approach, the integrity of the manufacture. I knew that
already on a first reading. But on a second reading, I begin to know how I knew it:

Giotto is dreaming of indigo because he couldn’t get enough of it: in his time it was a pigment worth its weight in gold. Edgar is always good on facts like that. I could
write a commentary picking up on such points, but it wouldn’t say why the poem is perfect, or almost so. The obvious conclusion is that I don’t need to say that. But I want to, because
a task has been fudged if I don’t. There are plenty of poems full of solid moments, but the moments don’t hang together even by gravity. So why, in this case, do they cohere?

We can already see the moments cohering. The indigo sky of the first stanza has supplied the background for the moon, which has become two different things, one growing out of
another: the soap paring and the separated crescent of a fingernail, possibly the same fingernail that scratched the soap, but probably not, or he would have said so. These specific but
metaphorical details provide the warrant for a general but more abstract statement about hope. Out on its own, the abstract concept of hope could be the town where Bill Clinton was born, or a
mantra in a speech by Barack Obama. We don’t know what the poet’s hope is about yet, but here it looks planted securely on firm ground, because of the store of specific noticing that
has already been built up:

Now we see where hope was going: all the way to the moon. The
Apollo
mission landed there in 1969. Add a ‘full’ thirty-five years to this and we can
calculate that the poem was written in 2004 or perhaps the year after. Increase thirty-five years by a third and we find that the poet is about fifty-three years old at the time of writing. And he
was about seventeen at the time of the landing. So he was in high school, with Mr Langshaw for a teacher: a dedicated teacher, living alone in tight circumstances, here made tighter by the presence
of the whole class. The number of boys in the class is the only statistic we can’t work out, but it must have been a substantial number or the word ‘whole’ would not have been
used for effect.

Because these two stanzas form one unit, the first bridging syntactically into the next, we can see that the pace has picked up. The first two stanzas of the poem made one statement at a time,
but they were just the overture. This is the opera. Or at any rate the operetta: there is an air of lightness to it, mainly conveyed by ‘that memorable scene’, which is a knowing
allusion to a time-honoured line of poetry (from Marvell’s ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’), and is obviously put there on the assumption that we also
know it, or can at least guess that the heroic elevation of an archaic-sounding phrase is deliberately being used to say that this, too, is history. Those who remember the story of Marvell’s
poem will be glad to realize that this time nobody is getting executed. In Marvell’s poem, it is Charles I, and not Cromwell, who bravely faces death, and the diction is a token of the
poet’s generous scope of understanding. But to borrow the phrase is also a way for this later poet, Stephen Edgar, to say that literature now must make room for the machines. Readers who go
further into his work, as they surely must, will find that Edgar is unusually sensitive to science and technology. They increase his vocabulary, which is lyrically precise over a greater range of
human activity than anyone else’s I can think of, with the possible exception of his senior compatriot Les Murray. More of a city boy than Murray, Edgar has fewer words for evoking life on
the land. But for all other realms he has whole dictionaries in his head:

And this, suddenly and unexpectedly, is another realm, the realm of personal emotion. One of Edgar’s favourite strategies is to set up an area of public property, as it
were, before bringing in the personal relationship: a way of spreading inward from the world. The effect, especially acute in this case, is to dramatize his isolation. But as yet we don’t
know that the isolation will mean loneliness. Perhaps he and ‘you’ are still together. The portents, however, are ominous. For one thing, she is probably younger than he. She was in the
world then, but the wording suggests that she might not have been so for very long. She was on her way to him, down a ‘long labyrinthine avenue’ that sounds as if it has passed through
the mind of Philip Larkin. Edgar is fond – sometimes too fond – of echoing Larkin, but he is usually, as here, careful to echo only the cadences, not the wording. Larkin often used a
monosyllabic adjective before a polysyllabic one, with no separating comma. The sonorous glissando of the device was useful to give the pathos of passing time. But Edgar undercuts the evocation of
inevitability by giving the loved one an air of caprice. She brings herself (good of her) with no excessive haste (what kept her?) and none too soon (finally she deigns to turn up).

On a fine point of technique, rather than a larger point of tactics, the way that the poet, in the penultimate line quoted, gives ‘memorable’ and ‘history’ their full
syllabic value recalls Auden, and in the final line of the octet we can hear Empson, as we can always hear him when trochees are laid over an iambic pattern to give a spondaic tread. Since Edgar
obviously weighs his words with care, it is safe to assume that he knows Neil Armstrong blew the script. Armstrong should have said ‘one small step for a man’. When he fluffed it and
said ‘one small step for man’, he ensured that ‘man’ and ‘mankind’ would mean the same thing and that the sentence would be deprived of its intended contrast.
But Edgar seems to be saying that even the giant step for mankind is small – small enough, at any rate, to be matched by the moment in his own history when he and the loved one met:

Here again, a whole argument is bridged over two stanzas, and this time with only a single terminal comma, so that the effect of a lot being said at once is reinforced by the
technical fact of compressed syntax. The word ‘inveterate’ gets a hypermetric emphasis, making it sound important enough for us to figure out exactly what it means here, or to look it
up if we’ve never seen it. (If we do look it up, we find that the current meanings of something long established and settled by habit are underpinned by a historic meaning of something
hostile – an undertone which soon turns out to be appropriate.) In the last line of the stanza we have to deduce, in the absence of the poet’s spoken emphasis, that the word
‘intended’ is an adjective qualifying the noun ‘contingencies’. That’s one of the tasks fulfilled by the comma: to tell us that the contingencies aren’t about to
intend anything, but are, themselves, intended. The other task of the comma is to set up a development in which the contingencies amount to a destiny, which turns out to be the wrong idea.
‘Where what is done is as it must be done’ has a playful musicality, but the play is sad, because it isn’t true: determinism is an illusion. Chance rules, and when the repetition
in the line is matched by the repetition in the last line, the game is over. The poem, however, isn’t. Casting our eyes down we see that there is more of it to come, although not much more.
It’s going to have to cover a lot of distance in a short time if it is to bring these themes together:

This time the argument is confined to one stanza and has the effect of a summary. We know that there is more of the poem to come, but it could conceivably end here. The
separate trajectories of the mission and the moon successfully met each other according to plan, and the Apollo Lunar Module came down in the right spot. The separate trajectories of the poet and
the loved one met each other as well, but each of them kept going. Ecstasy (called ‘delirium’ in retrospect, as if it had been a fever) didn’t hold them together, and the return
of sobriety revealed that it couldn’t have. What was ‘lost’ was a big chance, but a chance was all it was. The under-punctuation is an indicator, telling us that he’s had
time to work this conclusion out, and that it can therefore be set down economically, as a given. The whole story can be seen in the turn of the second line into the third. The phrase ‘And
carried on’ comes out of the turn with a reinforced inevitability. (In the heyday of practical criticism, such an effect would have been called ‘enactment’, but when it was
eventually realized that almost any technical feature could be called enactment, the term thankfully went into abeyance.) The idea that if their two paths crossed they might stick together was a
wrong guess on his part. Was it the wrong wish? Well, separation seems to have been her decision, so perhaps she was the wrong woman. Maybe delirium wasn’t what she wanted. We are left free
to speculate about all those things as the poem spreads outwards again, and makes an end:

This is only the first stanza of a conclusion that spreads over two stanzas, but let’s break into the flow and see how it works. My own first judgement was that an
otherwise unstoppable advance had interrupted itself. On a second reading, I still think so. When I mentioned that I had only one reservation about the poem, the phrase ‘to quote
myself’ was it. He isn’t quoting any other part of the poem, so what is he quoting? Investigation reveals that he is quoting another of his poems: ‘Nocturne’, the second
part of a two-part sequence called ‘Day Work’, which was collected in his previous volume,
Lost in the Foreground
. A poet need not necessarily be asking too much when he asks us
to read one of his poems in the light of others in the same volume, or even in other volumes. In the later Yeats, to take a prominent instance, there are plenty of individual poems making that
demand. But when a poem has successfully spent most of its time convincing us that it stands alone, it seems worse than a pity when it doesn’t. It seems like self-injury: a bad tattoo. It was
the poem itself that made us wish it to be independent, so it has revised its own demand.