- 1 The karroo, sometimes spelt ‘karoo’, is the wide sandy plateau that covers much of South Africa, fr (...)
1The relationships between poetry and power are considerably closer and more complex than modern poetics would have us believe. In this short essay I would like to look at power as a source of poetry, first in terms of patronage, then in terms of inspiration, in order to arrive at the question of poetry’s relationship with power, the forces at work in political poetry. The discussion will be centred on a poem by Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), entitled ‘Bridge-Guard in the Karroo’, which was first published in the Times on June 6, 1901 and appeared as the thirtieth poem in The Five Nations (1903). Although not a well-known poem, it is vintage Kipling: a ballad of 64 lines organized into 16 stanzas of 4 lines, which sings the story of sunset falling on the karroo,1 the coming of night and the brief halt of a night-train, seen through the eyes and heard through the ears of a small detachment of lonely soldiers sent to guard a railway-bridge.
2The poem was written in the context of a struggle for power in southern Africa, between the Boer republics of Transvaal and Orange Free State, and the British settler colonies of the Cape and Natal. Ostensibly, Britain went to war to obtain the franchise for the British subjects working in the Boer republics, but the underlying reason was to obtain better access to the rich gold mines of the Rand. By June 1901, when the poem entered the public debate, the war in South Africa was reaching its final and longest stage. After the initial period involving a number of humiliating defeats, the British forces under Lord Roberts had relieved the sieges of Kimberley, Ladysmith and Mafeking, and had occupied the two Boer capitals of Bloemfontein and Pretoria. At that point most people thought that the war was over, but such was the success of the guerrilla resistance of the Boer commandos that in fact the war was to continue for another eighteen months, becoming increasingly unpopular as Kitchener’s scorched earth policy and the herding of farm hands, Boer women and children into concentration camps grew more ruthless. The ‘bitter-enders’ did not finally sign the Peace of Vereeniging until May 1902.
3Events in South Africa were reflected in a highly partisan war of words in Great Britain, in which Rudyard Kipling, though by no means uncritical of public policy, was unequivocally on the side of those in power. His first contribution to the public debate about the reasons justifying or not Britain’s going to war was a poem published by his friend Moberly Bell in the Times on September 29, 1899. ‘The Old Issue’ argued, in (significantly) convoluted verse, that this war would conform to a pattern, that of the struggle for the freedom of the common man, championed by the British since Magna Carta. Once war had been declared, on October 11, 1899, Kipling lost no time in making what turned out to be a substantial financial contribution to the war effort. ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’ was written to raise money for the families of soldiers fighting in South Africa, and indeed, sold as a pamphlet printed on mugs or sung or recited in music-halls, it had by the end of the war raised more than £250,000. The ‘Absent-Minded Beggar Fund’ was run by the Daily Mail, one of the new breed of popular newspapers, launched by Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliff) in 1896. The masthead of the Daily Mail proudly displayed its support for ‘the power, the supremacy, and the greatness of the British Empire’. This patriotic stance helped to more than double its sales during the war.
4Kipling himself waived copyright for these two poems, and indeed for any that he considered a direct contribution to the war effort. He did accept royalties from later poems intended to criticize government policy and to prepare the way for army reform, poems such as ‘The Lesson’ (29 July, 1901), ‘The Reformers’ (12 October, 1901) and the poem which raised a storm of protest, ‘The Islanders’ (4 January, 1902). But his quarrel was not with the imperialist war itself, merely with the conduct of the war. In order to be able to publish such poems as these Kipling, while constantly hobnobbing with the powerful, lunching with the likes of Joseph Chamberlain and Alfred Milner, remained anxious to keep some sort of an independent stand. For this reason he refused the knighthood that he was repeatedly offered. Several biographers have commented on Kipling’s ambivalent status, as a writer whose position both inside and outside the Establishment was in many ways that of the privileged journalist.
- 2 Significantly, these short stories, ‘Folly Bridge’, ‘The Outsider’, ‘A Burgher of the Free State’ a (...)
5It is important to note the variety of work that Kipling did during the war and the different outlets that Kipling deliberately chose for this work, according to the impact he wanted it to have: some work aimed at the ruling classes, some at the leisure class, yet other work at a popular readership. Nor did his war writing confine itself to poetry. It included open letters, to the Times to defend Cecil Rhodes, to the Daily Express to defend Milner against Afrikander critics. ‘The Sin of Witchcraft’, a pamphlet warning against the treachery of the Cape Dutch, was published in the Times of March 15, 1900 and four short stories2 criticizing the conduct of the war were published in the Daily Express in June 1900.
6War work also took the form of action. In the context of the defeats of ‘Black Week’ in December 1899, Kipling helped raise a volunteer corps in his Sussex village of Rottingdean. In May 1900 he joined in the wild enthusiasm of the local Mafeking celebrations. October 1900 found him opening a rifle range in the village and campaigning for the Conservative candidate at Tisbury during the ‘Khaki’ election. He was also active in the local Navy league and in building a drill hall for future recruits.
7Most important of all, he had firsthand experience of life and imperial policy in South Africa, some of which pre-dated the war. He had stopped off at the Cape during his voyage to Australia in 1891, and he had spent the months of January to April 1898 there, at the invitation of his friend Cecil Rhodes. It was during this visit that he had met such arch-Imperialists as Sir Alfred Milner, the architect Herbert Baker, and the Rand millionaire Sir Abe Bailey. At one point he took ‘the northbound train’ to visit Matabeleland, touring Bulawayo on a hired bicycle with yet another of the great figures of Empire, the railway engineer Sir Charles Metcalfe.
- 3 In 1900 the family stayed in The Mount Nelson Hotel on the slope of Table Mountain. For the other s (...)
- 4 Thomas Pinney, ed., The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, volume 3, 1996, p. 12.
- 5 Julian Ralph working for the Daily Mail, Howell Gwynne of Reuter’s, Perceval Landan of the Times, a (...)
8In the winter of 1900 (20th January-11th April) began the first of eight successive (English) winters spent in South Africa for the sake of the family’s health.3 The first few weeks were spent ‘dancing among hospitals and running from one end of Capetown to the other trying to be of some use’.4 He travelled by hospital train to the Modder River, visiting the main military camp at Stellenbosch with Cecil Rhodes, distributing tobacco, food, clothes and medical items to the wounded troops. In March 1900, he responded to an invitation by Lord Roberts to help edit an Army magazine, the first of its kind, called the Friend. Kipling went to Bloemfontein to join the other journalists5 and for two weeks threw himself into the task of writing and sub-editing with gusto. ‘A Song of the White Men’ and ‘Joubert’ were published in this newspaper.
9The two following winters of the war were less eventful. During the winter of 1901 (8th December-17th April) Kipling’s distrust of the Bond, the Afrikaner party active in Cape Colony, and his appreciation of the need for radical army reform, increased. The winter of 1902 (21st December-16th April) was dominated by Kipling’s anxiety lest the peace negotiations turn out to be a betrayal of the war effort, and the death of his hero, Cecil Rhodes, on March 26th, for which he wrote a poetic tribute, ‘The Burial’.
10When he returned to England in the summer of 1901 to find that events in South Africa were looming less and less large in the public mind, Kipling decided to renew his campaign to prick British complacency. It was in that state of mind that he sent ‘Bridge-Guard in the Karroo’ to be published in the Times. In it he returns to the point of view of his early poetic successes, the Tommy Atkins of Barrack-Room Ballads, rueful soldier and loveable rogue. ‘Bridge-Guard’ sees the war through the eyes of a detail of soldiers sent to guard an isolated railway bridge:
Few, forgotten and lonely,
Where the empty metals shine—
No, not combatants—only
Details guarding the line.
- 6 H. G. Wells, The New Machiavelli, 1911, chapter 4.
11The poem relates the events of the night-watch through the soldiers’ perceptions, using the narrative device of free indirect speech. Thus, for example, the mountain ranges that dominate the bridge are ‘the aching Oudtshoorn’, not just features with an alien and indeed enemy name on a map, but places that conjure up the backache of slogging on foot with a heavy backpack. Kipling’s writing is justly celebrated for ‘its lyric delight in the sounds and colours, in the very odours of empire’,6 and here we find all the boredom and strain of night-duty among the refuse of rations, the beef and the biscuit-tins, and in the eerie sounds that detach themselves from the silence, the herders and the sheep, the steel contracting in the cold, the jackals and the morsel of dry earth falling into the ravine. And we are given the marvellously Kiplingesque touch of the very detail that would comfort isolated soldiers, the ‘voices/of women talking with men’.
12Biographers and critics have often remarked that Kipling had a natural empathy with the ordinary soldier and the junior officer, and this characteristic was certainly in evidence during the war in South Africa. The accuracy of Kipling’s depiction of what it was like for the ordinary soldier to fight for the Empire can be tested by comparing this poem with an extract from an actual diary kept during the war. This is an extract from the war diary of Private J. W. Milne, a volunteer in the Gordon Highlanders:
Friday 23rd March
Reveille 5am. Striked our tents, bundled them up and carried them down to the station and put them into wagons. Breakfast at 7.45am. Got on to the train about 11am, got some bully beef and biscuits and started for Norvals Pont, which took us 4 hours. All along the line we could trace the destruction which the Boers had done and for the first time I realised that we would have a chance of a fight with the Boers yet, for we still thought that the fighting would be all done without us getting a chance of firing a shot. We arrived at Norvals Pont in the afternoon and got our tents off the train and pitched just before it came on rain.
Saturday 24th March
Reveille 5am. Paraded at 6am and marched to the Station for fatigue unloading wagons of sleepers and rails etc until 11am without any breakfast, the rest of the Company carrying stones to make a service bridge for the trains to get up with supplies for the Troop in Bloemfontein. In the centre of the bridge the engineers were working. They put planks across the centre, which the Kaffirs carried, and stones at the sides. The Kaffirs also carried stones all day on their heads. There was also an aerial tramway across the old bridge which was carrying across stores to the other side driven by an electric wire across the river. The bridge had 13 spans, 5 of which had been blown up in the centre. We got a glass of rum that night.7
- 8 The 29th stanza of 70 in the first of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome (1842).
13With its insistent focus on common soldiers sent out on a lonely mission, ‘Bridge-Guard on the Karroo’ might not at first sight seem a defence of those in power but, as we shall see, the soldiers are in fact a variation on that favourite Imperial theme of ‘the Chosen Few’. By using the same metre as that of ‘Horatio at the Bridge’, the poem that every Victorian schoolboy knew by heart, Kipling implies that his bridge-guard have inherited the legendary courage of that Roman soldier. Macaulay’s poem had versified the story told by the historian Livy of how when Rome was threatened by the Etruscan army, Horatio and two companions valiantly save the bridge by holding it long enough for it to be destroyed. One stanza8 may suffice to suggest the poetic affiliation between the two sets of humble soldiers:
Haul down the bridge, Sir Consul,
With all the speed you may;
I, with two more to help me,
Will hold the foe in play.
In yon strait path a thousand
May well be stopped by three.
Now who will stand on either hand,
And keep the bridge with me?
- 9 Henry V, Act IV, scene 3, line 60.
14In addition, the ‘few, forgotten and lonely’ are the humble descendants of those who fought on St Crispin’s Day at Agincourt, ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers’.9 In Kipling’s own mythology, as expressed in ‘Song of the English’ and elsewhere, these few are chosen because they come from a higher breed of men, those who obey the Law, taking up their appointed stations in a solid and structured world ‘Framed by the iron arches/banded and barred by the ties’.
- 10 Luke 12: 35–38. Other references to this parable in Matthew 24: 45–46, and I Peter, 1: 13.
- 11 Keats’s sonnet ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ is itself a prophetic celebration of the awe (...)
15The bridge-guards not only have a fine military pedigree, but their humble task of guarding a railway bridge takes on heroic proportions because it has both biblical and Imperial associations. We owe these patient soldiers a respect which is derived from the Biblical parable of the reward due to the watchful servants10 and from the echo of the last line of Milton’s sonnet ‘On His Blindness’: ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’ Finally, the reference to Keats11 reminds us that these ‘watchers of the skies’, have a part, however humble, to play in the far grander scheme of Empire.
16In addition to being on the side of the powerful, Kipling’s poetry in general offers a celebration of power, the benevolent despotism of the British Empire. This is most obviously seen here in the dramatic importance given to the ‘wonderful north-bound train’. No doubt but that the Age of Empire (1870–1914) was built on the Age of the Railway (1830–1914). Imperialists were, and still are, fond of pointing out the material benefits that Imperialism brought to primitive peoples, in the form of railways and bridges, improvements comparable to the roads and monuments which the Romans left behind. In Kipling’s poem, the train is heading north, in the direction of the source of civilization and progress. It is also heading towards the front line, situated on the other side of the ‘ramparts of slaughter and peril’, where the real military action is taking place.
- 12 Ut pictura poesis, a poem is like a painting. Horace, Ars Poetica, 361.
17In Imperialist mythology the train is a powerful symbol of the ‘forward view’ and at this point, appropriately, Kipling’s poem manages to suggest a sense of movement. In the first four stanzas of the poem, we have a static painting12 of the landscape, in which the military detail is also an artistic detail throwing into relief the Turneresque sunset. In stanzas 11–14, on the other hand, the ‘far track humming’, the gathering and waiting for the train, the meetings and greetings and the snatched newspapers create suspense and then excitement by a more emphatically rising, anapaestic rhythm.
- 13 The extension of this line to the Victoria Falls in 1903, to Lusaka and Broken Hill in 1909, and to (...)
18Most of all, the train is part of the New Imperialists’ vision of Empire, the Dark Continent opened up by the railway. Cecil Rhodes’s illustrious ‘Cape-to-Cairo’ project had been inspired by the railway engineer Sir Charles Metcalfe, whose article in the Fortnightly Review of April 1889 had looked forward to the construction of ‘the iron track that must ultimately join the Cape with Cairo and carry civilization through the heart of the Dark Continent.’ By the time of Rhodes’s death in 1902, the project was well under way. In 1899 Kitchener had joined Wadi Halfa with Khartoum, the railway built by Indian labour had joined Mombasa to Nairobi by 1899, and Nairobi was linked to Lake Victoria by 1901. Our poem is concerned with the South African stage of the project, which by 1897 ran northwards from Cape Town through Kimberley to Bulawayo.13
- 14 Conrad’s story had been published in three instalments in Blackwood’s Magazine in February, March a (...)
19Metcalfe’s project of bringing light into darkness was made into a powerful metaphor by Joseph Conrad in his novella ‘Heart of Darkness.’14 Conrad and Kipling take the light/darkness metaphor in very different, but equally interesting directions. In Kipling’s poem the frightening absence, or near-absence, of natural light is contrasted with the comforting, but temporary, presence of artificial light. In the first four stanzas, the dazzling and aggressive Karroo sunset, a ‘raw glare’, ‘blazing’ is succeeded by the sun dying in a grey sky. As well as dipping his brush into the grey palette of the South African landscape, Kipling is suggesting that the British Empire is not, as many think, at its zenith. With the death of Queen Victoria, the imperial sun was setting. Recalling the warnings of the more famous ‘Recessional’, the poet subtly reminds us that the British Empire may be doomed to go the way of the once-proud Zulu kings, defeated by the Boers at Blood River in 1838.
- 15 Kipling admired this work and made a point of visiting Olive Schreiner in 1898.
20This suggestion of the twilight of the Gods continues throughout the first half of the poem. The light fails, ‘the twilight swallows the thicket’, masking the familiar natural landmarks. What is celebrated is the sublimity of the karroo, that peculiarly South African landscape, which seems to have caught the English imagination after the publication of Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm in 1883.15 The first chapter of this autobiographical novel, entitled ‘The Watch’, is set at night and begins:
The full African moon poured down its light from the blue sky into the wide, lonely plain. The dry, sandy earth, with its coating of stunted karroo bushes a few inches high, the low hills that skirted the plain, the milk-bushes with their long, finger-like leaves, all were touched by a weird and an almost oppressive beauty as they lay in the white light.
21Kipling’s poem recreates this ‘weird and oppressive beauty’, then goes further by introducing an original twist to the light into darkness theme. While the starlight remains distant and hostile: ‘the solemn firmament marches’, ‘the hosts of heaven rise’, ‘the monstrous heaven rejoices’, the works of man are a source of hope and comfort. The railway tracks shine, the train’s headlight shines plain, the tracks hum and the brief stop of the train brings ‘meetings, greetings and voices’.
22In other words, Kipling is not just addressing the loneliness of a few soldiers on an outpost of Empire; he is addressing the essential loneliness of man. The bridge-guard against ‘the lean track overhead’, against the Boer enemy, is also Man’s watch against Death. In the context of the end of the nineteenth century and the final ebbing of the sea of Faith, Kipling’s poem heralds a new age of Humanism. In the face of the indifference of God and the hostility of the natural world, man’s only hope is the companionship of other men and the mechanical inventions that man will invent to overcome disease and natural disaster.
23Kipling’s poem is able to move from an individual to a political to an existentialist anxiety because it is a poem. The juxtaposition of the terms ‘poetry’ and ‘power’ suggests not just a relationship between poetry and power, but also the power peculiar to poetry. It is a power derived from magic, a primitive quality of poetry that is pre-rational, that appeals to emotions and not to reason. It is not that ideas are not present in poetry, but the listener/reader is seduced, mesmerized, fascinated, by these ideas, not led to question them by pursuing them to their logical conclusion. This magical power has been felt particularly strongly in relationship to Kipling’s poetry, which is often referred to as casting a spell. To take just one instance among many:
- 16 Chris Brooks & Peter Faulkner (eds.), The White Man’s Burdens (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, (...)
Powerful as much of the poetry is, this is the Kipling of imperialist incantation, conjuring a vision of empire from a highly dubious mix of race, religion and romance.16
- 17 T. S. Eliot, A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (London: Faber & Faber, 1941) 7.
- 18 Despite the sound military adage that wars are won by knowing your enemy.
24The phrase ‘imperialist incantation’ encapsulates the widespread unease felt by Kipling’s critics. The problem is that poetry, ‘incantation’ is felt to be at the service of partisan ‘imperialist’ politics. Kipling’s poetry stands condemned on two counts: it is partisan and it is political. As T. S. Eliot wisely observed, ‘Poetry is condemned as ‘political’ when we disagree with the politics’.17 In these postcolonial times imperialism is equated with jingoism and dismissed out of hand.18
- 19 Letter to J. H. Reynolds, 3 February 1818.
25In fact, the uneasiness about political poetry largely pre-dates post-colonialism, nor is it confined to the poetry of Kipling only. Almost all modern critics and many modern poets distrust political poetry per se. Keats’s famous remark, that ‘We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us’,19 has become axiomatic. Over the years, poetry with political designs has been turned into a veritable contradiction in terms. This trend became particularly marked during the Second World War. Louis MacNeice put the matter most succinctly:
- 20 Louis MacNeice, ‘The Poet in England To-day: A Reassessment’ in Alan Heuser (ed.), Selected Literar (...)
Art, though as much conditioned by material factors as anything else, is a manifestation of human freedom. The artist’s freedom connotes honesty because a lie, however useful in politics, hampers artistic vision. Systematic propaganda is therefore foreign to the artist in so far as it involves the condoning of lies. . . . This means that in the long run a poet must choose between being politically ineffectual and poetically false.20
26Put more simply (without, I hope, simplifying) poetry and politics cannot mix because the political viewpoint hampers the poetic vision.
- 21 W. H. Auden & John Garrett, preface to The Poet’s Tongue, 1935.
27In such a perspective, Kipling’s poetry can only be experienced as an uncomfortable paradox, for it is undoubtedly political and demonstrably poetical. One way out of the paradox is to argue that Kipling’s poetry is not really poetry, but something else, ‘great verse’ according to T. S. Eliot or ‘good bad poetry’ according to George Orwell. But this line of argument is not really satisfactory, as these critics themselves half-admit, because it begs the question of what poetry, or at least good poetry, is. Personally, I have never read a better definition of poetry than that given by W. H. Auden: ‘Of the many definitions of poetry, the simplest is still the best: “memorable speech”’.21 By that definition, Kipling is the last person to be accused of not writing poetry.
28There is another way out of the paradox, and it involves thinking about the power specific to poetry. One has to begin by dismissing the premise that poetry and politics are poles apart. On the contrary, the methods which both employ are dangerously close. Neither is more ‘honest’ than the other in that both make an appeal to the emotions, rather than rational thought. If, as is generally agreed, the power of poetry is derived from magic, then it should be recalled that the way magic works is by seduction, by distracting the audience from what is really happening, by focussing its senses on something else. Poems and political speeches alike succeed by sleight of hand. Kipling’s poetic celebration of Imperialist power reveals some realities of that power, while hiding others. In general, as George Orwell pointed out, Kipling’s poetry hides the realities of the economic exploitation which was behind the Imperialist ideal. In this particular poem, the celebration of the humble servants of Empire masks the political, economic and social fact that for the colonized peoples, this military guard are not servants but masters.
29Furthermore, it needs to be admitted that all poetry is political. By that I mean that all poetry has a political dimension. Poetry is fundamentally three-dimensional, working on an individual, a local and a universal level. A poem exists by appealing to the reader’s co-operation as an individual, as a member of a particular society and as a member of the human race. To call some poems (or poets) ‘political’ and others not is to mistake nature for what is merely a question of degree. Kipling is a political poet in that his most immediate appeal is to the reader as a member of a group. The peculiar power of Kipling’s poetry comes from his drawing on the intrinsic power of poetry to compel the reader to adopt the poet’s point of view (political and otherwise), by combining the different powers of music and the written word, and from his use of the ballad form.
- 22 Derek Attridge, The Rhythms of English Poetry, 1982.
30Kipling’s enunciative use of ‘we’ requires his readers to include themselves in these ‘few, forgotten and lonely’. Further, the ballad form incites them to sing along or at least join in the chorus of stanzas 5, 12 and 16. This is because the ballad form uses accentual metre, in which (unlike the iambic pentameter) the natural stress of intonation and the abstract pattern reinforce each other, thus creating a space for the collective voice.22
- 23 One wonders if Kipling, fascinated as he was by all new inventions, had seen ‘L’arrivée d’un train (...)
31The power of the poetry comes from it being written at a time when the oral tradition had not quite died out and the written tradition was only just beginning. Kipling is thus able to make full use of both traditions, drawing on what Eliot called ‘the inspiration and refreshment of the living music-hall’ to produce a highly rhythmical poem (suitable for recitation or, if set to music, singing) in which sounds constantly imitate sense. The ballad form offers possibilities for narrative and dramatic effect, and perhaps even announces an early verbal imitation of cinematographic effect. The poet-narrator’s eye moves over the bridge-guard scene like a camera: ranging over the desert landscape lit by the last rays of the sun, panning in on the men stumbling into their places in the gathering gloom, then panning out again into the darkness, out of which the train arrives and departs.23
32At the same time the poem creates other meanings by drawing on the many resources of the printed page. This can be seen in the use of punctuation in the choral stanzas. In stanzas 5 and 12 the bridge-guard speak in parentheses, as though they were somehow offstage, thus betraying their peripheral status in the main drama. The parentheses disappear in the final stanza, allowing the non-combatants to emerge, as it were, into the limelight of a final rousing chorus. Moreover, in the chorus itself we see the poet using another resource of written poetry: the line-break after ‘only’, which creates the double sense, both deprecating and defensive, of ‘guards as well as combatants’ and ‘not combatants but guards’.
33On the other hand, poetry that was merely political would not be poetry. ‘Bridge-Guard in the Karroo’ is a poem, not a manifesto, because it can be read in the other two dimensions. Although Kipling hides behind the mask of his chosen Few, the poem can be read autobiographically, as a product of his life as well as his times. It can also be read transcendentally, in terms of protest against the human predicament. Read politically, the poem celebrates the courage of those isolated on the frontiers of Empire. Read individually, the poem evokes loneliness, as this spontaneous, contemporary reaction shows:
- 24 From a letter from Sarah Orne Jewett to Sara Norton, dated August 28, 1901, letter no. 101 in Annie (...)
This morning I have been copying Mr Kipling’s ‘Bridge-Guard’ poem with great delight. Someone lent me his copy from the Times, and I had not succeeded in getting hold of it before. Don’t you think it very fine? Don’t you feel the same wonderful self-consciousness in it as in ‘For to admire and for to see’. One sees and feels that lonely place in a wonderful way. If you were here now, how we would talk about it!24
34‘That lonely place’ is not only the imperial outpost, it is also the isolation of the individual speaker and the individual reader and, ultimately, the cosmic loneliness of man. Communion with others is possible but temporary. The small space of time that the train stops in the station, the precious but fleeting companionship of ordinary human voices are an echo of the Venerable Bede’s metaphor of the life of man:
- 25 Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731) Book II chapter 13.
The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and 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 out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant.25
- 26 W. B. Yeats, Essays (1924). ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel w (...)
35Pace Yeats, poetry writes not only of man’s quarrel with himself, and of men’s quarrel with others,26 but also of mankind’s quarrel with the common and utterly implacable enemy, Death. Some lines from a Jamaican poet writing in the 1980s spring to mind:
- 27 Dennis Scott, Dreadwalk (London: New Beacon Books, 1982).
No. See the flesh? It is cave, it is
stone. Seals every I away from light.
Alone. Man must chant as Man can
gainst night.27
36What unites poets as radically different individually and politically as Rudyard Kipling and Dennis Scott is the shared knowledge that, except for poetry, Man is ultimately powerless.