A message from Shelley

River of chains – photograph by Liz Mathews

‘Vessels of heavenly medicine’ and ‘balloons of knowledge’ are a poet’s prescription for a nation in need of enlightenment, and a description of the eccentric means by which Shelley sent out his Declaration of Rights two hundred years ago. The ‘vessels’ were messages in bottles, or boats made out of waxed boxes, floated out into the sea or along a river. The ‘balloons’ were miniature Montgolfiers, hot air balloons to fly the revolutionary tracts inland.

(There were the inevitable practical problems to these unorthodox methods of political dissent; the home-made hot air balloons sometimes caught fire, the vessels were washed back in again, or sank.  However, it was all successful enough to cause some local alarm to the repressive Hanoverian regime.)

This imaginative, indeed poetic, approach to communication, conjures up irresistable images.  Imagine, if you were a milkmaid strolling along a dusky lane, or a shepherd sheltering under a tree, and a flaming beacon appeared in the sky, glowing orange like a Hallowe’en pumpkin, or a Chinese paper lantern hung in a garden tree.  As it comes closer, you realise it’s a hot air balloon, lit up by its own flame – but below the wick, where the basket should be, a scroll dangles instead.  As it slowly descends – the light dim now, spluttering – you chase it, catch it, pluck it out of a maybush or fish it from a cowpond.  The paper, this celestial greeting, roughly printed, all smudged and singed, is (so long as you could read) an invitation to think differently.

Of course, some of the declarations would have drifted down into the sea, or on empty land miles from anywhere, or in a place where no one was literate, and the meaning remained a mystery forever.  But others might have landed where someone would find them inspiring, a message from another world.  I like to think of the commonsense pleas for freedom and equality striking a chord among random readers; in a workhouse or debtors’ prison, a religious board-school, a gypsy encampment or a remote farmhouse.

No man has a right to monopolize more than he can enjoy… No law has a right to discourage the practice of truth… The present generation cannot bind their posterity. The few cannot promise for the many… No man has a right to do an evil thing that good may come.

One night earlier this year, dozens of lantern-balloons appeared in a royal blue sky, flying over London from the northern hills in a constellation of golden spheres, like physalis’ origami-paper blossoms.  The higher ones winked as distant beacons, the lowest drifted close by like floating footlights in a surreal flight; perhaps they crossed the river, reflected in its dark water, plunged down into parks or caught on chimneytops.  Everyone in the street stopped to stare up at the magical sight, and then someone exclaimed ‘Look, it’s a message from Shelley!’

A matter of luck

The view from the hill – photograph by Liz Mathews

For National Poetry Day, one of my own poems. I wrote Sicilian Avenue many years ago; it was awarded a York Poetry Prize by Michael Donaghy, in the early 1990’s.  At the ceremony, where all the prize poems were read, and cheques given out to the winners, he was extremely gracious. (He was also very patient when his audience seemed to prefer it when he played traditional Irish music on the tin whistle, rather than read his own work.)  

But although he was encouraging to me, as a young writer, indeed complimentary about the poem and ‘…the simplicity and intimacy of the narrative and great closure of the last line’, I was also aware that sentiment had played a part in all of his selections.  Not that he chose any poems that seemed to me to be unworthy, but they all had a particular reason to appeal to him.  Mine had that extra ingredient because it evoked a place he knew in London, and of which he was fond.  

(And after all, who would want to read a poem without bringing their own associations to the words, or aligning their own experiences to the work?  What an impossible task it would be to try and ‘judge’ between poems impartially, when the very existence of poetry is the opposite of a measurable or quantifiable state.) 

At the time, I felt slightly uncomfortable at this discovery. Now I realise that it’s merely the element of luck that’s always needed in the competitive process, but also makes that process almost meaningless, so far as grading a work of art ‘best’ or ‘unplaced’.  Inevitably, the results are a matter of the reader’s taste; sometimes one sort of writer is in luck, sometimes another.  I was fortunate that this poem appealed to such a poet.

Sicilian Avenue

Enthroned behind his ziggurats of glass

displaying haberdashery embalmed

aeons ago in the prevailing fashion,

the old boy contemplates an aspic realm;

muffled in solid brass, mahogany,

drawers uniformly filled, precisely labelled,

in copperplate by alphabet and size.

His memory’s heraldic, crested, striped

with regimental and collegiate colours;

he doesn’t seem to think that we’re procuring

old school ties for improper purposes

(although we look like just the kind of women

to ridicule continued tribal marking).

‘Old Carthusians pre-1924′

requires a tremulous ascent of steps,

courteously refusing proffered help.

Something about us prompts him to remark

that ‘Amy Johnson came to us, you know,

to get her aviation things.  Oh, yes,

we did Ladies’ Colonial Wear then’.

He recites, in an archive record’s crackle,

the inventory of pith-helmets and veils,

and canvas carrying-skirts, so necessary

to keep one’s distance from the naked shoulders

transporting one across malarial rivers…

Here Amy Johnson, in the changing-room

trying on cashmere combinations (men’s,

designed to conquer an imagined arctic

not keep a woman warm above cloud-level)

broke down and wept, late, after closing time.

Her tears still echo in his anxious voice

condemning ‘all the things they said about her’

despite her triumphs, in the newspapers.

He found the warmest styles, the smaller sizes,

wished her the best of luck for her next flight,

wrapped the heroic underwear she’d usurped,

shook hands in homage to their odd alliance -

and still he flies her unofficial colours,

a favour filed in his anarchic system

above the patronage of baronets.

What so wild as words are?

Light, air, cloud – photograph by Liz Mathews

‘…it is not so necessary to understand Greek as to understand poetry. It is necessary to take that dangerous leap through the air without the support of words which Shakespeare also asks of us. For words, when opposed to such a blast of meaning, must give out, must be blown astray, and only by collecting in companies convey the meaning which each one is separately too weak to express. Connecting them in a rapid flight of mind we know instantly and instinctively what they mean, but could not decant that meaning afresh into any other words. There is an ambiguity which is the mark of the highest poetry; we cannot know exactly what it means…. The meaning is just on the far side of language.’

On not knowing Greek, Virginia Woolf, (The Common Reader)

This description of reading – the rapid flight of mind, the dangerous leap through the air – seems to me the perfect definition of why great poetry works as it does, for the enthusiast. It’s also an evocation of what it describes; the exhilaration of that unsupported leap of faith, beyond meaning, to the place where the words in their companies gather together to give expression to the unsayable. This surrender to instinctive reading, far from being anathema to the writer, is a necessity for her as a poetry reader. It is the acknowledgement that in such writing there is an element beyond, something that can’t be analysed and given an academic gloss; a mystery that can be recognised but not explained.

The danger, of course, is that the leap may fail, that we will fall flat – and sometimes we do fall in flames. But it’s a risk worth taking; one that Woolf frequently asks of her readers. Even when a writer seems to have completely failed to write without individual words, to blast them into their companies, the attempt is exciting. Not even Shakespeare (nor Woolf) could always achieve it, but the wish to write that undecantable language is always evident, an ambition that demands much from the reader, but rewards us with flight, sometimes.

(At its simplest, it’s a willingness to glide which can work so well for the contemporary audience of Shakespeare. The unfamiliarity of some parts of the language – among passages which are known by heart to many – is rarely a problem in performance; the staging carries the audience beyond merely getting the gist of the sense, to the deeper apprehension of that instinctive understanding. This is a way to read the dramatic lyric, too, as the mind soars over the words.)

For writers who are not necessarily hoping to write ‘the highest poetry’, but do seek to use words sometimes in some of the ways Woolf describes, there is a paradox. So much can be learned from reading like this, from thinking deeply about the ways of language and the techniques of working with it. But then, there is that other, mysterious element; the thing that can’t be learnt at writing school, can’t be defined, coerced, bought, sold or even named – only hoped-for, awaited, recognised.

(‘What so wild as words are?’ Robert Browning, A Woman’s Last Word.)