A Poem

[Harry Rutherford]

I like the way this poem doesn't try to do anything clever with the repetends. And the fact that the title rhymes with the poem. And the fact that it's really good.

Jarrow
by Carol Rumens


Nothing is left to dig, nothing to make.
Night has engulfed both firelit hall and sparrow.
Wind and car-noise pour across the Slake.
Nothing is left to dig, nothing to make.
A stream of rust where a great ship might grow.
And where a union man was hung for show
Nothing is left to dig, nothing to make.
Night has engulfed both firelit hall and sparrow.

[Michael Collins]

and (apart from L6, Harry) there's a full stop after every line. Eight single sentences making a coherent whole. Kind of hard to do, successfully.

Mike
[SIZE=1]at least, it looks like you missed one[/SIZE]

[Michael Collins]

Right, I'll accept your silence, Harry, as a 'no, no full stops are missing'. Though it does feel like there should be a comma at least after 'show'.

I like the poem aesthetically, but I think it might be a little English specific-- is it about a specific incident involving the miners in northern(?) England?

Billy Bragg has a few songs about laws passed on fighting for unions, strikebreakers/scabs etc, but his songs are a little English specific also, leaving me a little in the dark on the matter; how it came about, and the end resolve.

Harry, would you care to critique the poem/enlighten me on the subject matter? And, completely off the subject, if you can be arsed to type, what is a Cossack-Lienz traitor?

That last one I don't seriously expect you personally to answer, but I'd really appreciate it if you'd fill me in on the poem.

Cheers

Mike

[Harry Rutherford]

Oops, sorry, I meant to reply.

The full-stops are as they appeared in the original.

I'm not sure about any specific incident where a union man was hanged, but Jarrow, in Northumbria, was once a great ship-building town. Ship-building, like most heavy industry, is now pretty much completely dead in Britain.

It's most famous because of the 1936 Jarrow Crusade (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/society_culture/protest_reform/jarrow_01.shtml), when 200 men marched rom Jarrow to London to protest against extreme poverty and unemployment.

It's also where Bede (http://www.ehsbr.org/faculty/houghtonj/medstud/bede.htm), the writer of The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, lived in the C7th-8th. He was a very interesting man (apart from the History, we was very important for his work on the calendar and establishing the date of Easter), but his direct relevance to this poem is a famous image that occurs in a passage (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/bede1.html) from the History about the conversion of Northumbria to Christianity -


Another of the king's chief men, approving of Coifi's words and exhortations, presently added: " The present life man, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter amid your officers and ministers, with a good fire in the midst whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door and immediately leaving by another, whilst he is within is safe from the wintry air, but after a short space of fair weather he immediately vanishes out of your sight into the dark winter from which he has emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space but of what went before or what is to follow we are ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.'

What I like about the poem is the way that this famous metaphor of the sparrow interacts with the ship-building bits; both as an image of transience, and because 'firelit hall' has industrial overtones.

I guess some of the specifics are probably going to be lost on non-British readers, but the fact that it's about an ex-industrial town should come through, and the Bede image is pretty famous.

Harry

'Cossack-Lienz traitor'? dunno.

[Michael Collins]

Thanks for getting back to me on this, Harry, will come back and have a solid read when I'm not so busy with work and getting troubles with flash floods.

Mike

[Harry Rutherford]

Oh, and the other thing - the themes of ruins, and lost glories, and a world in decline, and the transience of human wealth, are very Anglo-Saxon. The tone of this poem would be recognisable to Bede, even if he would be a bit freaked out by a visit to a C20th ship-yard.

So I guess what I like about it is that two themes (a dark ages theologian/historian and the decline of heavy industry in Britain) which appear to be linked only by a simple coincidence of geography are brought together into such a coherent whole, so that they complement and strengthen each other.

Harry