1The “Covid 19” was at the heart of preoccupations and conversations on a world scale, at the heart of literary productions as well, as it prompted the telling of one’s own experience which was extraordinarily made quite similar to that of almost everyone else. The pandemic hence fuelled obsessions for what it was—a potentially fatal virus—for what it meant and involved politically, economically, and socially, basically for what it did to people around the world. The virus found its place in poetry as well: both novice and prominent poets were inspired by the unexpected and unprecedented experiences of the lockdown, of fear, of global uniformity, of immobility, and they published poems online that, quite ironically, went “viral” as well (Giovanelli 2023: 212).
2The whole world was frozen: “Enforced quarantine, physical isolation, confinement to home, border closures, shutdowns of business, workplaces, schools and universities [were] instituted in initial government responses to containing the spread of the virus” (Lupton and Willis 2021: 5). And yet, the virus kept circulating. Each of us, immobilised, observing the effects of an unseen moving virus, became a spectator of a show whose peculiarity was that its main performer was invisible. As with strong winds, what was manifest was not the main agent itself, but the multifarious spectacular damage it produced for months.
3This article will analyse poems by Simon Armitage, Deborah Harvey, Keith Hutson, Greg Rappleye, Jacqueline Saphra, Alan Shapiro and David Tait. They all look from a spatial distance at specific effects of the Covid, a distance that was normatively imposed by political decisions and by the cessation of all movement. The individual, immobilized in the narrow area of their home and immediate neighbourhood, was reduced to the role of an observer forbidden to go beyond the lines.
- 1 “La santé c’est la vie dans le silence des organes”
4We will first see how, within the lines of the poems here selected, the viewers look at ambulances: they helplessly, yet quite empathetically, observe the highly regulated and urgent performance of here noisy, there unexpectedly silent vehicles which race throughout the cities, keeping secretly within its doors patients affected by the at once omnipresent and obscure virus. The odd spectators, whose identification with the unseen patient was made unprecedently easy, look at “care” from a distance, from the outside. For, during the pandemic, when everything was elsewhere suspended, exceptional movements were taking place in hospitals. But hospitals, where all main actors—the virus, patients and health professionals—converged, were not accessible. People were locked out of them. Only ambulances were visible and somehow appeared as the externalized organs of the healthcare institution. We will first see how some poems suggest the powerful meaning concentrated in the ambulance, and we will then highlight how the latter participates in a peculiar process of metaphorization. While the ambulance windows block visual access, other types of screens are designed to give access to the Covid crisis. This is what will finally be analysed through the close reading of two poems (one by Jacqueline Saphra and another by Vicki Feaver) that in fact propose another type of distant point of view on care as they focus on hospital settings/environments via TV or phone screens. Images appear, irrupt before one’s eyes as when an ambulance turns up, framed by the boundaries of the screen, flashing like the loud lights of the ambulances. Throughout, the analysis of the poems will reveal how both situations, looking at an emergency vehicle from one’s window or at hospital on a screen, lead to a mixture of catharsis, sympathy, fear and, to some degree, aestheticization. We will see how poets have managed to spectacularize the impossible spectacle, and to exploit the time limits imposed by these experiences—an ambulance flashes by, a hospital bed appears and disappears from the TV screen—and evoke the furtive events in a form characterized by its economy of words and self-imposed discipline. In a time period that was stretched by monotony, weariness and objectively by the repeated extensions of lockdowns, these poems render the sudden tension produced by the metonymic irruption of the virus. René Leriche, a French surgeon, famously declared in 1936 that “health is life in the silence of the organs”1 (Leriche 1936). If one follows his statement intentionally too literally, one may hence propose that the outbreak of any disease is characterized by bodily noises, that the crisis leads to pain, rashes, coughs, a heart beating too fast, too hard, etc. The body is no longer silent. But the noises of Covid-affected patients were hardly perceptible, since social distancing and various measures of isolation had, if not silenced the sick body nor the irrepressible coughing, at least kept it at a distance, invisible and inaudible by others. One was no longer allowed to provide care for a sick relative, to bedsit a dying grandmother and to listen to her moans or final breathing. Each suffering body, whose organs were, following Leriche, no longer “silent”, turned out to be unheard by others. The poems that will be read here show how these silent invisible bodies loom behind ambulance opaque windows or in the borders of the framed screens.
5The poems selected here were published in Poems from Pandemia (ed. Patrick Cotter 2020), and on the website initiated by Carol Ann Duffy during the pandemic, called Write Where We Are Now.2 A couple of other poems were written during or very shortly after the lockdown. These poems are not retrospective outlooks, nor recollections in tranquillity; they read as snapshots seized at the heart of the crisis.
6Lockdown measures imposed stillness and isolation. In the unusual ambient quietness, the irruption of an ambulance could not go unnoticed, as a phenomenological event first and as a more profound symbol as well. An ambulance transports one existence, one body, a unique life. This basic quantitative and qualitative definition of what the vehicle transports through the streets of the city actually contributes to our perception of the ambulance as a metonymy for the patient lying inside. Passers-by know that one life is at stake, or at least vulnerable, and the mere presence of an ambulance rouses a form of curiosity, even empathy sometimes. Decades before the Covid pandemic, in 1964, Philip Larkin published his poem “Ambulances”, in which he subtly describes people’s silent reaction when seeing someone towed inside an emergency vehicle: a form of familiar indifference towards the vehicles that “thread / Loud noons of cities” (ll.1-2) blends with an intense feeling of compassion for the anonymous patient, briefly seen (“a wild white face” (l.10)) before the locking of the doors: “Poor soul, they whisper at their own distress” (l.18). This “feeling with,” at the root of sympathy, is induced by the mere vision and loudness of the vehicle and by the power of imagination that leads the viewer to picture themselves in the ambulance: our shared humanity is a shared vulnerability. The ambulance then becomes a sort of complex phenomenological, emotional and ontological sign whose presence in a poem forces the reader to face their own finitude. Furthermore, the growing consciousness that the Covid was to do with “embodiment and interembodiment” (Lupton and Willis 2021: 6), made people aware that anyone could end up lying in an ambulance. The role of the patient was getting viral.
7The ambulance hence appears as simultaneously a practical motorized device, a metonymy for the unique patient it transports, and a symbol for the vulnerability of our shared existence. As such, it produces a peculiar effect when it furtively flashes in a scene or a poem, for it is a material and symbolic reminder of the urgency of our finite existence. This complex vehicle drives through Alan Shapiro’s poem “Today” (Cotter 2020: 82):
I saw an ambulance
speed through a five-way intersection
without the siren blaring,
while its lights flashed red and yellow pantomimes
over plate glass and brick
which shrugged them off
like something they were just about to think
and then thought better of. (ll.9-16)
- 3 While the poem follows its own pattern and delineates itself according to the linearity of the writ (...)
8The ambulance is unexpectedly silent. Yet, though negated, the mere mention of “blaring” does sound in the poem, at the end of the line, and its focal position retrospectively alters the “without” of the beginning. This deliberate silence of the ambulance seems to suggest that people know. There is no need, here, to be loud about the urgency. The virus is on common grounds, in all minds, and converges in all of “the five way[s of the] intersection”. Only speed and lights, here, signal the emergency in a hence muted “pantomime” that turns the “ambulance” into a spectacular, even picturesque, reflection on the building walls: a funny colourful show whose mission is to help moribund people breathe a little longer, to give them a little bit of extra life. But buildings remain indifferent to the show, all too aware that this pantomime is one among so many. In this poem, Alan Shapiro reveals the complexity of feelings produced by the furtive presence of the “ambulance”, at once constantly expected and each time unsettling, for each time it forces into the bystanders’ eyes the evidence of the pandemic and of the increasing death rate: two stanzas down, the speaker/persona declares that there are “less of us / and those who remained / were disappearing” (ll.26-7). The ambulance thus passes silently in the streets and noisily in the middle of the poem.3
9In “Social Distances” (Cotter 2020: 103), Greg Rappleye likewise brings the “ambulance” into a scene that repeats itself every other day: the speaker and an old man have grown used to looking at the ambulances passing by. Kept apart by the street and the compulsory social distancing measures that fundamentally redefined the social rules around the body, their eyes meet at a common focal point.
Three, maybe five times
a week, the shiny blue ambulance that serves
those who live north of the lift-bridge hustled by, siren
wailing, red, white-and-amber lights awhirl, and turned
into the group-home parking lot. It became the habit
of an older man from the rental cottages across the way
to stand on his side of the road, in a wool overcoat
and surgical mask, hand over his heart, waving
a small flag as the ambulance raced back toward the bridge
and the ventilators that chuffed beyond.
One terrible day, after the ambulance made the last
of three deadly runs (it’s said that only two of ten
who went on the vents survived), I called over to him… (ll.4-16)
10The successive enjambments formally translate the uncontrollable repeated appearance of the ambulance. This recurrence arouses odd expectations among passers-by who have even measured the periodicity and thus revealed a mixture of familiarity and unease, apprehension, even fear. The ambulance’s garish lights and hustle, poetically rendered by parataxis and alliterations ([w] and [s]), offer the spectators an unsettling synesthetic performance produced by a surfeit of noise, of movement and of lights. While social distancing rules impose that each body must be scrupulously separated from others, therefore must not be seen, touched, smelt, kissed, and heard (but from a safe distance), the vehicle, a go-between on various levels, somehow provides an exaggerated imitation of this missing physical, social interaction as it summons several senses at once. Echoing the pantomimes of Shapiro’s poem, the colour-producing ambulance here verges on the spectacular and becomes a performance for an old man (himself observed by the poetic voice). In contrast with the enjambment of the poetic lines and with the “turn[ing]” and “rac[ing]” of the ambulance, each spectator remains static and safely goes through the experience of an odd catharsis while witnessing a peculiar form of tragedy. In thus submitting to the rules of traffic, of normative social distances and of theatrical conventions, they somehow at once submit to hospital discipline outside the hospital walls (or the normative social rules imposed by the Covid policy is quite in keeping with hospital regulation): with the “surgical mask” on (formerly a device found only in hospitals), the spectators let the medics operate, circulate, control the tempo of events around, just like in a hospital. The pandemic has extended hospital discipline outside its building.
11The ambulance breathlessly rushes towards the “ventilators” expected to be found soon after in hospital, as though prompt to relieve the vehicle itself whose pace has been far more intense than usual. The “ventilators”, too, are overactivated, as they likewise breathlessly “chuff”. There is exhaustion in the repetition. And if the old man and the persona do persist, others disappear.
12These ambulances that hastily drive throughout the city remain secret. What takes place inside is at once unknown and so repeatedly commented upon in the media that it becomes a fantasized object of rumours. The parenthetical comment (ll.15-6) formally reproduces the gossip that circulates as quickly as the ambulance itself, and within the brackets the poetic voice reports what “is said” to be taking place within the ambulance and within hospitals: deaths. Yet, deaths remain at bay, locked inside, out of reach for fearful spectators still untouched by the virus. This spatial fragmentation that isolates specific zones from others, that quarantines the fragile or the elderly while it sets falsely free the others whose life is supposedly safe, addresses the issue of time as much as space. In this poem, within the space of a few lines, the poet brings together the time of emergency with a racing vehicle which shows that each minute counts; the time of priority, that of the patient’s life; biological time, that of the virus progression in the patient’s lungs; the timed routine of the observer who measures his existence by counting the ambulances; and the time of existence whose finitude is noisily, garishly, pointed out by the irruption of the ambulance.
- 4 “the tenor” is “the underlying idea of principal subject which the vehicle or figure means” (Richar (...)
13To some extent, the ambulance hence appears as a metaphor not for life in general, but for “one life”. And the Covid made it virally possible to identify with this “one life”. In each of the scenes here poeticized, the ambulance stands in the place of one unseen existence: it represents—or presents—the patient’s body. Following I.A. Richard’s conception of the metaphor4 as a combination of “trope” with “vehicle”, it would actually be handy to take the ambulance as the “vehicle” for “one life”. We will now see how the poems by David Tait, Keith Hutson, Simon Armitage and Deborah Harvey keep this metaphor (the ambulance as “one life”) alive.
14David Tait, who wrote from Shanghai during the lockdown, concludes his poem “The Virus at my Window” with an ambulance passing by:
and then
the distant mewling of an ambulance siren.
It’s heading this way, and everyone on the street
stops to watch it pass. It’s passing but it isn’t slowing down.
The people on the street sigh, then keep walking. (ll.12-5)
15Seen at the window, the ambulances are framed as if on a painting or a photo, again securing the spectator at a safe distance and somehow granting them a form of aesthetic quality. And again, the panoptic vision of the persona who (like in Rappleye’s poem) looks at once at the ambulance and at the people looking at the vehicle, concentrates the moment on the ambulance which, again, incarnates movement and the emergency of time passing. “Passing” but not “slowing down”. Time is counted, at once suspended in the vehicle and intensified by its urgent race. People around, as in Philip Larkin’s poem, “sigh”, assuming words would be useless for they are all too aware of the ailment conveyed by this signifying vehicle. They remain distant, safe and sound. For, as another poet, Keith Hutson, seems to impart in “Thought for the Day”, when this safe distance from the ambulance narrows, one becomes seriously aware of one’s critical condition. Hutson, whose poem is a running commentary on what was heard daily on the radio about the Covid, concludes his poem with: “Stay safe! Imagine it’s the last thing you / will hear before the ambulance arrives” (ll.13-4). If the ambulance is admittedly the go-between, the ambulatory hospital that brings care to the vulnerable patient, here, it signals the end of safety, almost the funeral procession. This too hasty perception of the ambulance’s siren as the death knell reveals how in people’s mind the ambulance can also sometimes function as a “vehicle” for the dying body.
16Simon Armitage also dedicates a poem to the irruption of an ambulance in the midst of the lockdown, “The sky stretched thin….”:
The sky stretched thin
over the frame
of day.
Downdraft and throttle -
the air ambulance carving
its high yellow arc,
the millpond ronkled, jittery,
wood pigeons rousted
out of the wood,
an embarrassed fox
in its winter coat,
flushed from the copse.
Night hunched
in the east, ready
to fill in the gaps.
I’m watching all this
through
bullet-proof glass.
- 5 “Windows on the world: pandemic poems by Simon Armitage, Hollie McNish, Kae Tempest and more”, The (...)
17Armitage here offers a lockdown scene again based on the contemplation of the outside, from the inside behind a window. The poem then reads as a sort of imbrication of various framed spaces, starting with the “frame / of day” (ll.2-3), the enclosed space of the moving “air ambulance”, the “arc” that draws a line in the sky, the window through which the scene is being observed, and the poem itself. Throughout, the gaze moves down and closer, from the distant high skies to the woods, to the immediate “bullet-proof glass”, hence in keeping with the reader’s eyes that move down a very vertical poem. The preterit used for the description of the ambulance and its effect inscribes the event in time, in duration, in the time that irrepressibly elapses and therefore translates the sense of emergency materialized by the ambulance: each minute counts. In The Guardian, Armitage commented on the scene outlined in this poem: “I saw it as a token of the emergency that’s going on, but also the fact that it’s slightly anonymised for a lot of people. There’s both a sense of something urgent happening and being somewhat detached from it.5” The shift to present tense in the last stanza evokes more detachment than immediacy. The present continuous catches the “I” in the middle of the process of “watching”, somehow suspended, with no reference to the beginning nor the end of the process. Time has stopped: the lockdown has turned the present into a vague safe space of homogeneous continuity where there is no urgency. Minutes are not counted, and the glass seems “time-proof”. From that safe zone outside finite time, from behind the shielding “bullet-proof glass” (ll.16-8), the irruption of the ambulance takes on a warlike aspect. It terrifies the fauna and “throttles” even the poem, forced to take a short break (marked by “ – ” (l.4)). “Wood pigeons” (l.8) are forced to leave their homes: reversed echoes to human individuals, they are now locked out. Unlike Shapiro’s poem where the sudden presence of the ambulance makes the urban setting indifferent, here, the fox is “embarrassed” by this “air ambulance” that pierces the quietness of Nature as well as that of the first stanza. The opening tercet is indeed wrapped up, closed by a comforting full stop. And yet, the appearance of the air ambulance in the second stanza is foreshadowed in the first stanza with an Eliotian intertext. The “sky stretched thin” evokes the opening of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table (ll.1-3)
18The intertextual echo to what is probably the most creative and striking simile of Modernist poetry, introduces the patient in the evocation of the sky. But while in the 1917 poem, the etherized patient is merely a powerful element of comparison and is therefore absent from the scene, in Armitage’s poem both sky and patient are present and actually meet. Against the Eliotian background of a stretched, or spread, sky, the air ambulance de-metaphorizes, or rather re-materializes, Eliot’s “patient etherized upon a table”. The unseen anonymous patient is imagined by the viewer-poet as “stretch[ing] thin”, like the sky (a reversed process of the Eliotian comparison).
19The trajectory of the air ambulance is freed from obstacles, not caught in “five-way intersection” (Shapiro), nor constrained by “the lift-bridge” (Rappleye) or any other urban infrastructure. It sketches a regular “yellow arc”, “carv[ed]” in the sky like a scar neatly performed by the surgeon on the body of an etherized patient. The homophony of “arc” with “ark” transforms the ambulance into a vehicle that strives to save humanity from the floods of a pandemic—yet leaving animals behind.
20This complex scene which mixes images of war, evocation of a biblical disaster, with echoes to a poem written during the First World War that brings together a sense of urgency and the stillness of the moment, poeticizes the conflicting effects of the sudden appearance of an ambulance: its both deterring and fascinating feature; its power of freezing all actions around and its performance of a spectacular, explosive show; its frightening effect and its fundamentally relieving and rescuing function.
21The distance marked by Armitage between the observer and the etherized patient is reduced by the power of imagination and by the poem itself. The ambulance is at once remote and central in this poem, and it takes precedence over the “thin” sky of the title. It is here and there; it is material, its function is material and it means more than its material presence. This distant proximity of ambulances, especially during the pandemic when they were omnipresent, subtly appears in Deborah Harvey’s “Mapping the Lockdown Foxes”, in which she follows the traces left by various types of foxes, living or dead, in the immediate surroundings. The poem’s end leads the reader to surmise that such cartography may have been a vivid dream.
22In Harvey’s poem, relations are cancelled by the juxtaposition of “fence panels blown down in the storm” (l.1) with “two foxes [who] pause to listen” (l.8), or “a dead fox [that] lies / where the footpaths fork” (ll.22-3), or “a furloughed worker pulls down a fence / positions a rotting fox head / on top of next door’s compost” (ll.34-6). The mandatory cessation of movement, of work (“furloughed”) and contact is inscribed in this very paratactic form coupled with a disunited layout on the page. Among these images of fragmentation, an ambulance appears:
A pair of geese fly overhead
faint smell of musk by the railway cutting
a chaffinch plinks from tree to tree
An ambulance flickers past in silence
Marauders tear at heaped-up bags
scatter contents (ll.10-15)
23The “musk” is a trace of animal presence, and the ambulance a trace of the pandemic in the landscape. The silence of the ambulance is disturbed by the internal rhyme “ambulance”/“silence” that literally resounds in the poetic line, yet both rhyming syllables are unstressed (in a feminine rhyme), as though to smother the noise. Moreover, the echo between “in silence” and “in the storm” (l.1) makes “silence” spatial and material. The urgency of the ambulance is translated in the isolated nature of the line that makes its appearance furtive, and in the resultative clause where the “flicker” results in immediate disappearance. This silent flash in the landscape leads to “the hospital on the horizon” (l.29) that is “always there” (l.28). Unlike the swiftness of the ambulance, the hospital is still, yet remote, at a distance, patiently waiting for the urgent cases to arrive.
24The poems analysed so far have all ventured into the aestheticization of the unseen Covid patient who is being taken care of almost in the public view. Yet the vehicle is keeping their identity and their whole being away from exhibition. The viewers then, allured and deterred at once, worried and also relieved that they are only spectators of the show, stand helplessly still. The distance between them and what goes on inside the vehicle is partly filled by poetic references to the ambulance, by vague (and tacit) imagination, by empathising, by thinking of its real and metaphorical destination. By submitting to the constraints of the poetic form, to the limitations set by the lockdown and social normativity, and to the deontologically constrained curiosity of passers-by, the poems analysed here have managed to turn the “ambulance”, its movements and performance, into a complex dramatic experience. Its critical appearance is each time expected as an unsurprising habit and loudly claiming that each life is vulnerable and could be taken in by this “vehicle”.
25Other poets have chosen not the opaque window of the ambulance to evoke our limited access to the omnipresent virus, but the phone or television screen. Shots of patients affected by the Covid were flooding into our devices, and therefore concurrently revealed and limited all visual access. Gazes were at once allured and frustrated.
26Unlike the remote or opaque window of the ambulance, the screen shines close to one’s eyes. The ambulance window keeps secret, while the screen shows and brings news. The observer of the ambulance relies on their imagination and makes up what may be going on in the vehicle. The viewer passively receives the images. In both cases, the window into the real is limited by a frame. What is outside the camera’s angle remains mysterious.
27During the lockdown, poet Jacqueline Saphra set herself the task of writing a sonnet a day, for a hundred days. In this collection, she puts together fragments of her own life and opens to the political dimensions of the event. Her “Sonnet LXVII – 28th May 2020” starts with the description of what appears on her screen:
The nurse unfolds the white dividing screen;
and disappears behind it. Hers is a final face,
a final hand to hold in this last stopping place.
Amid the blue-tinged loss, a chaplain recites
the last balm of the dying: There is no god
but God. I turn off to shop online for light.
I need it. Don’t we all want to be seen,
Beloved and delivered, held and blessed? (ll.1-8)
28The iambic pentameter of l.1 translates the solemnity of the nurse’s routinized gestures—a routine that finds its poetic equivalent in Saphra’s ritualized daily sonnet. On the white page of the poem appears the nurse’s “white dividing screen”— still another type of screen, one that stands between hospital beds. This “screen”, a final stressed syllable, sustains the reader’s attention and raises an obstacle before their eyes. The nurse disappears behind it as early as l.2. The virus, the dead patient and the nurse are thus hidden, and the hiding device separates those safely sitting in front of their TV or other electronic device from those afflicted with the Covid. An obvious sense of an ending is then foregrounded by references to “a final face” (l.2), “a final hand” and “this last stopping place” (l.3). The chaplain, who offers solace in the absence of the loved ones and faith representatives, is not described beyond his function and his voice. The scene ends with “I turn off” (l.6). But even when it was on, that screen offered a mirage of revelation as it merely unveiled another “screen”, that is, a sign that death lies behind (just like inside an ambulance). In this sonnet, Saphra points out the omnipresence of unseen death by referring to its untouchable reflections: death hangs in the air as a “blue-tinged loss” (l.4), an absence that has no colour nor agency but is “tinged” by a mysterious agent; and death is made present by the echo of the chaplain’s voice. The Covid is annihilating people who disappear from the screens, behind other screens. The mediatized images, though “turned off”, leave the observer with her thoughts that waver among “the dead [who] arrive at darkened morgues; unreal / too real, cold in their berths of shining steel” (ll.13-14). Even in her imagination no full light is projected on the dead: the morgues are “darkened”. The Covid is everywhere unseen. Decades before the pandemic, in 1982, the German sociologist Norbert Elias published The Loneliness of the Dying in which he shows how, in our modern civilization, death has become a private event. Yet the Covid crisis has unsettled this privacy: for a year almost, death by Covid was a topical issue on the news, and the unprecedented use of various new media further heightened this focus. But death was not shown and, more importantly, for hygienic reasons, it could not be seen. What Elias was writing in 1982 could not have been truer than during the pandemic:
Never before in the history of humanity have the dying been removed so hygienically behind the scenes of social life; never before have human corpses been expedited so odourlessly and with such technical perfection from the deathbed to the grave. (Elias 1982: 23)
29In Saphra’s poem, the dead is likewise “behind the scenes”. What is displayed on her screen is the masking of the show—a frustrating show that she then herself decides to “turn off”, as though she were putting an end to the impossibility of seeing, a behaviour that can be likened to the passers-by that “keep walking” (Tait) when the ambulance appears.
30Life goes on for the observers who are left with their imagination and their potential fears.
31A poem by Vicki Feaver is worth analysing here as it likewise addresses this issue of seeing bits of the Covid framed by a limited camera angle: viewers can only furtively see apparently trivial elements that may sometimes happen to swell to wider human dimensions. In “The Turquoise Slipper”, the persona is watching images of the Covid ward on television. The screen artificially reduces the distance between the viewer and the realistic scene, a narrowing that is rendered by the way the poem makes the ward very immediate. In the news, the poetic voice spots by a hospital bed a “turquoise slipper” that promptly catches her attention and triggers her imagination.
As the death toll rose
of mostly the old
the turquoise slipper
peeping from the edge
of the screen in news film
of a covid ward
lodged in my head:
a talisman to hang on to
for its bold colour.
Among the rows
of prone patients
attached to machines
I imagined a woman
who younger, her legs
supple and strong,
loved hill-walking
and wild swimming.
Sure she wasn’t ready to die
I pictured her easing her feet
into turquoise slippers
then shuffling
to an open window,
breathing lungfuls
of sweet spring air.
- 6 “Punctum c’est aussi; piqûre, petit trou, petite tache, petite coupure – et aussi coup de dés. Le p (...)
32The regular stanzaic form of this unrhymed poem reflects the framing by the TV screen as well as the regulation of hospital discipline. After setting the preoccupying global context in the first two lines, the poet abruptly moves to the minute detail of the image of a “turquoise slipper” furtively “peeping from the edge / of the screen”. The vision is in fact reciprocal, for the slipper is “peeping” at a spectator like behind a theatre curtain, while what the poem then unfolds is the effect of the vision of this trivial slipper on the viewer. While the news film was obviously not dedicated to that slipper, it is this detail that catches the viewer’s eye. It works like what Roland Barthes, in La Chambre Claire (1980), defines as the punctum; that detail on a photograph that pierces the viewer’s eye almost randomly, that is, with no previous intention by the artist or photographer. Barthes writes: “The punctum is also this: a sting, a little hole, a little speck, a tiny cut, and a cast of the dice. The punctum of a photograph is the accident which pricks me (but bruises me too, is poignant to me)”6 (Barthes 1980 : 49). In Feaver’s poem, the singular form of that punctum, “slipper”, evokes a double loss—that of the other slipper and that of the living foot that used to fit in it. The slipper hence reads as a trace of what the Covid has just annihilated; or, like the ambulance, a metonymic suggestion of the patient that used to slip her foot in it. The “turquoise” of that slipper that points out a loss echoes the “blue-tinged loss” of Saphra’s poem, as though the untouchable blue or bluish colour were poignantly underlining the absence. On the screen too, the viewer sees anonymous patients who are “prone”, attached to prosthetic “machines” that breathe for them and whose mere presence points out the failing organs. But at that point, the poem twists, as in the next four stanzas the viewer’s imagination resuscitates the patient. The poetic feet reactivate the patient’s feet whose balance is re-established with the now plural form “turquoise slippers” (l.21), and the anonymous Cinderella, no longer locked out of the world into the Covid ward, no longer bedridden, and no longer totally offscreen, is now pictured standing before an open window “breathing lungfuls / of sweet air”—autonomously, without prosthetic ventilators. Vicki Feaver astonishingly finds poetic inspiration on the very edge of a TV screen, safely distant from the Covid ward, allowing only her poetic feet to roam along with her imagination, not in the ward, but, significantly so, out, towards the “open window”.
33The poems discussed in this article contemplate the Covid from a distance, either from behind a window, a “bullet-proof glass”, a hospital screen or, for instance, standing on a pavement. And each time the patient who is admittedly afflicted by the Covid is in fact unseen, definitely out of reach, for either lying in a locked ambulance or synecdochically glimpsed at on a TV or phone screen. This irreducible distance that poets chose to suggest in their work reads as a translation of the normative imposed social distance. Poetry in fact turns out to be an apt form to render the traumatic experience of the lockdown which literally raised boundaries between people and between spaces. The layout of the poems, the separation between lines and stanzas, and the economy of form, are fitting when it comes to exposing the limitations of an existence transiently confined to reduced territories. Poems are almost like “windows” or frames that shed light on a limited portion of the pandemic. The poetic form, by its specific conciseness and by the prominence given to its sounding material, also aptly renders the lightning and loudness of the ambulance. And because in a poem each word counts— like each minute in an ambulance—the presence of a mere “slipper”, a hospital “screen”, or an “ambulance”, somehow acts like a punctum for the reader, that is words that mean far more than the trivial materiality to which they primarily refer. They are all perceived as traces of the vulnerability of existence, marks of the flimsy limits between life and death. In the context of the pandemic when the possibility of death was on every mind, at every street corner, on every screen, imagination may have become somehow collective, in spite of the sometimes extreme isolation imposed by the lockdown. While imagination by nature partakes in individual intimacy, that is in one’s unique capacity to use one’s being and experience to elaborate images in the privacy of one’s mind, we may surmise that the pandemic, for a while, came close to having levelled our imagination in a rather common sense of human vulnerability. Our imagination was for a while fed by viral images and news and by the reproduction of sameness: every day, people dying of the same virus, in the same conditions. Therefore, the poets whose poems have been analysed here prompt the reader to fill the informational gaps with shared, common images—Covid patients with respiratory ailments, here on the verge of death, there already dead.
34Imagining Covid patients offscreen, behind “screens”, or in distant ambulances, imagining the sounds of their coughs behind the sounds of the sirens, or the sound of their artificial breathing, imagining their feet no longer fitted in slippers, imagining the silence within the ambulance, all these moments described and prompted by the poems actually participate in the construction of sympathy, that is one’s capacity to imagine oneself in the shoes (or slippers) of someone else. The poems, therefore, in not showing Covid patients directly, but traces of the virus, metonymies, odd metaphors, glimpses on the limit of the frames, rely on our shared experience and simultaneously further activate imagination and fuel our sense of empathy, our awareness of our common vulnerability and finitude.