The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

want a good crowd of us�Gus looks gorgeous�

BERNARD [Aghast.] The newspaper! [He grahs something like a bishop's mitre4 from the basket and pulls it down completely over his face.]

[Muffled.] I'm ready! [And he staggers out with VALELNTINE and CHLOE, followed by HANNAH.

1. Explanatory comment. tle Bo-Peep, subject of an eighteenth-century 2. Person excessively concerned with minor nursery rhyme. details. 4. Bishop's ceremonial headdress. 3. English novelist (1775-1817). "Bo-Peep": Lit

.

2816 / TOM STOPPARD

A light change to evening. The paper lanterns outside begin to glow. Piano music from the next room.

SEPTIMUS enters with an oil lamp. He carries Thomasina's algebra prim

er, and also her essay on loose sheets. He settles down to read at the

table. It is nearly dark outside, despite the lanterns.

THOMASINA enters, in a nightgown and barefoot, holding a candle

stick. Her manner is secretive and excited.] SEPTIMUS My lady! What is it? THOMASINA Septimus! Shush!

[She closes the door quietly.]

Now is our chance! SEPTIMUS For what, dear God?

[She blows out the candle and puts the candlestick on the table.] THOMASINA D O not act the innocent! Tomorrow I will be seventeen!

[She kisses SEPTIMUS/MZJ on the mouth.]

There! SEPTIMUS Dear Christ! THOMASINA Now you must show me, you are paid in advance. SEPTIMUS [Understanding.] Oh! THOMASINA The Count plays for us, it is God-given! I cannot be seventeen

and not waltz. SEPTIMUS But your mother� THOMASINA While she swoons, we can dance. The house is all abed. I heard

the Broadwood. Oh, Septimus, teach me now! SEPTIMUS Hush! I cannot now! THOMASINA Indeed you can, and I am come barefoot so mind my toes. SEPTIMUS I cannot because it is not a waltz. THOMASINA It is not? SEPTIMUS No, it is too quick for waltzing. THOMASINA Oh! Then we will wait for him to play slow. SEPTIMUS My lady� THOMASINA Mr Hodge!

[She takes a chair next to him and looks at his ivork.]

Are you reading my essay? Why do you work here so late? SEPTIMUS To save my candles. THOMASINA YOU have my old primer. SEPTIMUS It is mine again. You should not have written in it.

[She takes it, looks at the open page.]

THOMASINA It was a joke. SEPTIMUS It will make me mad as you promised. Sit over there. You will have us in disgrace.

[THOMASINA gets up and goes to the furthest chair.]

THOMASINA If mama comes I will tell her we only met to kiss, not to waltz.

SEPTIMUS Silence or bed.

THOMASINA Silence!

[SEPTIMUS pours himself some more wine. He continues to read her essay. The music changes to party music from the marquee. And there are fireworks�small against the sky, distant flares of light like exploding meteors.

.

ARCADIA II.7 / 28 1 7

HANNAH enters. She has dressed for the party. The difference is not, however, dramatic. She closes the door and crosses to leave by the garden door. But as she gets there, VALENTINE is entering. He has a glass of wine in his hand.]

HANNAH Oh . . . [But VALENTINE merely brushes past her, intent on something, and half-drunk. ]

VALENTINE [TO her.] Got it!

[He goes straight to the table and roots about in what is now a considerable mess of papers, books and objects, HANNAH turns back, puzzled by his manner. He finds what he has been looking for�the 'diagram '.

Meanwhile, SEPTIMUS, reading Thomasina's essay, also studies the diagram.

SEPTIMUS and VALENTINE study the diagram doubled by time. ] VALENTINE It's heat. HANNAH Are you tight,' Val? VALENTINE It's a diagram of heat exchange. SEPTIMUS So, we are all doomed! THOMASINA [Cheerfully.] Yes. VALENTINE Like a steam engine, you see�

[HANNAH fills Septimus's glass from the same decanter, and sips from it. ]

She didn't have the maths, not remotely. She saw what things meant, way

ahead, like seeing a picture. SEPTIMUS This is not science. This is story-telling. THOMASINA IS it a waltz now? SEPTIMUS No .

[The music is still modern. ]

VALENTINE Like a film. HANNAH What did she see? VALENTINE That you can't run the film backwards. Heat was the first thing

which didn't work that way. Not like Newton. A film of a pendulum, or a

ball falling through the air�backwards, it looks the same. HANNAH The ball would be going the wrong way. VALENTINE You'd have to know that. But with heat�friction�a ball breaking

a window�

HANNAH Yes. VALENTINE It won't work backwards. HANNAH Who thought it did? VALENTINE She saw why. You can put back the bits of glass but you can't

collect up the heat of the smash. It's gone. SEPTIMUS So the Improved Newtonian Universe must cease and grow cold. Dear me. VALENTINE The heat goes into the mix.

[He gestures to indicate the air in the room, in the universe.]

THOMASINA Yes, we must hurry if we are going to dance. VALENTINE And everything is mixing the same way, all the time, irreversibly . . . SEPTIMUS Oh, we have time, 1 think.

5. Drunk.

.

281 8 / TOM STOPPARD

VALENTINE . . . till there's no time left. That's what time means. SEPTIMUS When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning,

we will be alone, on an empty shore. THOMASINA Then we will dance. Is this a waltz? SEPTIMUS It will serve.

[He stands up.]

THOMASINA [Jumping up.] Goody! [SEPTIMUS takes her in his arms carefully and the waltz lesson, to the music from the marquee, hegins.

BERNARD in unconvincing Regency dress, enters carrying a bottle.] BERNARD Don't mind me, I left my jacket . . .

[He heads for the area of the wicker basket.]

VALENTINE Are you leaving? [BERNARD is stripping off his period coat. He is wearing his own trousers, tucked into knee socks and his own shirt.]

BERNARD Yes, I'm afraid so. HANNAH What's up, Bernard? BERNARD Nothing I can go into� VALENTINE Should I go? BERNARD No, I'm going!

[VALENTINE and HANNAH watch BERNARD struggling into his jacket and adjusting his clothes.

SEPTIMUS, holding THOMASINA, kisses her on the mouth. The waltz lesson pauses. She looks at him. He kisses her again, in earnest. She puts her arms round him.]

THOMASINA Septimus . . . [SEPTIMUS hushes her. They start to dance again, with the slight awkwardness of a lesson.

CHLOE bursts in from the garden.] CHLOE I'll kill her! I'll kill her! BERNARD Oh dear. VALENTINE What the hell is it, Chlo? CHLOE [Venomously.] Mummy! BERNARD [To VALENTINE.] Your mother caught us in that cottage. CHLOE She snooped! BERNARD I don't think so. She was rescuing a theodolite. CHLOE I'll come with you, Bernard. BERNARD No, you bloody won't. CHLOE Don't you want me to? BERNARD Of course not. What for? [To VALENTINE.] I'm sorry. CHLOE [In furious tears.] What are you saying sorry to him for? BERNARD Sorry to you too. Sorry one and all. Sorry, Hannah�sorry, Her-

mione�sorry, Byron�sorry, sorry, sorry, now can I go? [CHLOE stands stiffly, tearfidly.] CHLOE Well . . . [THOMASINA and SEPTIMUS dance.] HANNAH What a bastard you are, Bernard. [CHLOE rounds on her.]

.

ARCADIA II.7 / 2819

CHLOE And you mind your own business! What do you know about anything? HANNAH Nothing. CHLOE [TO BERNARD.] It was worth it, though, wasn't it? BERNARD It was wonderful.

[CHLOE goes out, through the garden door, towards the party.] HANNAH [An echo.] Nothing. VALENTINE Well, you shit. I'd drive you but I'm a bit sloshed.

[VALENTINE follows CHLOE out and can he heard outside calling 'Chlol Chlo!']

BERNARD A scrape. HANNAH Oh . . . [She gives up.] Bernard! BERNARD I look forward to The Genius of the Place. I hope you find your

hermit. I think out front is the safest.

[He opens the door cautiously and looks out.]

HANNAH Actually, I've got a good idea who he was, but I can't prove it. BERNARD [With a carefree expansive gesture.] Publish! [He goes out closing the door.

SEPTIMUS and THOMASINA are now waltzing freely. She is delighted with herself. ]

THOMASINA Am I waltzing? SEPTIMUS Yes, my lady.

[He gives her a final twirl, bringing them to the table where he bows to her. He lights her candlestick.

HANNAH goes to sit at the table, playing truant from the party. She pours herself more wine. The table contains the geometrical solids, the computer, decanter, glasses, tea mug, Hannah's research books, Septimus's hooks, the two portfolios, Thomasina's candlestick, the oil lamp, the dahlia, the Sunday papers . . .

Gus appears in the doorway. It takes a moment to realize that he is not Lord Augustus; perhaps not until HANNAH sees him.] SEPTIMUS Take your essay, I have given it an alpha6 in blind faith. Be careful

with the flame. THOMASINA I will wait for you to come. SEPTIMUS I cannot. THOMASINA YOU may . SEPTIMUS I may not. THOMASINA YOU must. SEPTIMUS I will not.

[She puts the candlestick and the essay on the table.]

THOMASINA Then I will not go. Once more, for my birthday. [SEPTIMUS and THOMASINA start to waltz together.

GUS comes forward, startling HANNAH.]

HANNAH Oh!�you made me jump. [GUS looks resplendent. He is carrying an old and somewhat tattered stiff-backed folio fastened with a tape tied in a bow. He comes to HANNAH and thrusts this present at her.]

6. An A grade.

.

2820 / LES MURRAY

Oh . . .

[She lays the folio down on the tahle and starts to open it. It consists only of two hoards hinged, containing Thomasina's drawing.]

'Septimus with Plautus'. [To GUS.] I was looking for that. Thank you. [GUS nods several times. Then, rather awkwardly, he hows to her. A Regency how, an invitation to dance.]

Oh, dear, I don't really . . .

[After a moment's hesitation, she gets lip and they1 hold each other, keeping a decorous distance between them, and start to dance, rather awkwardly.

SEPTIMUS and THOMASINA continue to dance, fluently, to the piano.] END

1993

LES MURRAY

b. 1938 Leslie Allan Murray was born at Nabiac on the north coast of New South Wales, Australia, and grew up on a dairy farm at nearby Bunyah. He was educated at Taree High School and the University of Sydney, where he studied modern languages. After military service with the Royal Australian Naval Reserve, he worked as a translator in the Australian National University, Canberra, and as an officer in the prime minister's department. Since 1971 he has been a full-time writer.

Remaining true to his roots in the Australian "outback" (despite the global shuttling expected of a major poet in the late twentieth century), Murray has emerged as a powerful celebrant of the natural world and agricultural work. His substantial Collected Poems (1998), dedicated "to the glory of God," bears witness to a staunch and highly individual Roman Catholicism. His celebration of nature includes human nature and reveals a sensibility generously attuned to the hopes and fears, hurts and happinesses of ordinary lives.

Murray seems intent on proving that the provincial farmer living at the margins of the former British Empire can write poetry as learned, authoritative, and technically virtuosic as any from the metropolitan center. The language of his poetry startles and amuses, reveling in the fecundity and elasticity of English. In poems of metaphorical lushness and sonic opulence, he plays on the eddying reflections of homonyms and rhymes, alliterations and consonances, to suggest a profound interconnectedness among things. As Derek Walcott has said of Murray's work: "There is no poetry in the English language so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and conversational."

.

ON REMOVING SPIDERWEB / 2821

Morse

Tuckett. Bill Tuckett. Telegraph operator, Hall's Creek, which is way out back of the Outback, but he stuck it, quite likely liked it, despite heat, glare, dust and the lack of diversion or doctors. Come disaster you trusted to luck,

5 ingenuity and pluck. This was back when nice people said pluck, the sleevelink and green eyeshade epoch.1

Faced, though, like Bill Tuckett with a man needing surgery right on the spot, a lot would have done their dashes. It looked hopeless (dot dot dot) Lift him up on the table, said Tuckett, running the key hot

io till Head Office turned up a doctor who coolly instructed up a thousand miles of wire, as Tuckett advanced slit by slit with a safety razor blade, pioneering on into the wet, copper-wiring the rivers off, in the first operation conducted along dotted lines, with rum drinkers gripping the patient: d-d-dash it, take care, Tuck!

15 And the vital spark stayed unshorted. Yallah!2 breathed the camelmen. Tuckett, you did it, you did it! cried the spattered la-de-dah jodhpur'-wearing Inspector of Stock. We imagine, some weeks later, a properly laconic convalescent averring Without you, I'd have kicked the bucket . . .

20 From Chungking to Burrenjuck,4 morse keys have mostly gone silent and only old men meet now to chit-chat in their electric bygone dialect. The last letter many will forget is dit-dit-dit-dah, V for Victory. The coders' hero had speed, resource and a touch. So ditditdit daah for Bill Tuckett.

1983

On Removing Spiderweb

Like summer silk its denier but stickily, oh, ickilier, miffed bunny-blinder, silver tar, gesticuli-gesticular,

5 crepe when cobbed, crap when rubbed, stretchily adhere-and-there and everyway, nap-snarled or sleek, glibly hubbed with grots to tweak: ehh weakly bobbined tae yer neb,

io spit it Phuoc Tuy! filthy web!

1990

1. I.e., the nineteenth century. "Sleevelink": cuff knee to ankle. link. 4. I.e., from southwest China to southeast Austra2. God be praised! (Arabic). lia. 3. Long breeches for riding, close-fitting from

.

282 2 / SEAMUS HEANEY

Corniche1

I work all day and hardly drink at all.2

I can reach down and feel if I'm depressed.

I adore the Creator because I made myself

and a few times a week a wire jags in my chest.

5 The first time, I'd been coming apart all year, weeping, incoherent; cigars had given me up: any road round a cliff edge I'd whimper along in low gear then: cardiac horror. Masking my pulse's calm lub-dub.

It was the victim-sickness. Adrenaline howling in my head, 10 the black dog was my brain. Come to drown me in my breath was energy's black hole, depression, compere0 of master of ceremonies the predawn show when, returned from a pee, you stew and welter in your death.

The rogue space rock is on course to snuff your world,

sure. But go acute, and its oncoming fills your day. 15 The brave die but once? I could go a hundred times a week,

clinging to my pulse with the world's edge inches away.

Laugh, who never shrank around wizened genitals there

or killed themselves to stop dying. The blow that never falls

batters you stupid. Only gradually do

20 you notice a slight scorn in you for what appals.

A self inside self, cool as conscience, one to be erased

in your final night, or faxed, still knows beneath

all the mute grand opera and uncaused effect�

that death which can be imagined is not true death.

1996

1. Coastal road. poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985): "I work all day, 2. Cf. the opening of "Aubade," by the English and get half drunk at night." SEAMUS HEANEY

b. 1939 Seamus Heaney was born into a Roman Catholic family in predominantly Protestant North Ireland (or Ulster), and he grew up on a farm in County Derry bordered on one side by a stream that marked the frontier with the largely Catholic Irish Republic (or Eire) to the south. He won scholarships first to St. Columb's College, a Catholic boarding school, and then to Queen's University in Belfast. There he became one of an extraordinary group of Northern Irish poets from both Protestant and Catholic backgrounds, including Michael Longley and Derek Mahon, who read, discussed, and spurred on one another's work. He taught at Queen's University, before moving in 1972 to the Irish Republic, where he became a citizen and full-time writer. He has

.

SEAMUS HEANEY / 282 3

been Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard and Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and in 1995 won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

With "Digging," placed appropriately as the first poem of his first book, Heaney defined his territory. He dug into his memory, uncovering first his father and then, going deeper, his grandfather. This idea of poetry as an archaeological process of recovery took on a darker cast after the eruption of internecine violence in Northern Ireland in 1969, culminating in the 1972 Bloody Sunday killing of thirteen Catholic civilians by British paratroopers during a civil rights march in Derry. Across several volumes, especially North (1975), Heaney wrote a series of grim "bog poems," about well-preserved Iron Age corpses discovered in the peat of Northern Europe and Ireland. In these poems he sees the bog as a "memory bank," or unconscious, that preserves everything thrown into it, including the victims of ritual killings. He views contemporary violence through the lens of ancient myths, sacrifices, and feuds, an oblique approach that gives his poetry about the Troubles an unusual depth and resonance. He had discovered emblems for the violence in Northern Ireland in The Bog People, a book by the Danish archaeologist P. V. Glob, published in translation in 1969, "the year the killing started." Heaney wrote of it:

It was chiefly concerned with preserved bodies of men and women found in the bogs of Jutland, naked, strangled or with their throats cut, disposed under the peat since early Iron Age times. The author . . . argues convincingly that a number of these, and in particular, the Tollund Man, whose head is now preserved near Aarhus in the museum of Silkeburg, were ritual sacrifices to the Mother Goddess, the goddess of the ground who needed new bridegrooms each winter to bed with her in her sacred place, in the spring. Taken in relation to the tradition of Irish political martyrdom for the cause whose icon is Kathleen Ni Houlihan [mythic figure emblematic of Mother Ireland], this is more than an archaic barbarous rite: it is an archetypal pattern. And the unforgettable photographs of these victims blended in my mind with photographs of atrocities, past and present, in the long rites of Irish political and religious struggles. ("Feeling into Words")

In the bog poems Heaney reflects on the poet's responsibilities to write about the dead, yet to do so without prettifying or exploiting them. He probes the vexed relations between lyric song and historical suffering, "beauty and atrocity": the need to be true to his calling as artist, but also to represent the irredeemable carnage of modern political violence�"the actual weight / of each hooded victim / slashed and dumped" ("The Grauballe Man"). The result is a tough-minded witnessing, an ethically scrupulous and self-aware mourning of collective loss and sectarian murder. (For more on the Troubles, see "Imagining Ireland" at Norton Literature Online.)

Since the late 1970s Heaney has continued to elegize victims of the Troubles, such as his acquaintance Louis O'Neill, in "Casualty," as well as more personal losses, such as the natural death of his mother, in "Clearances." He has also written poems about domestic love, such as "The Skunk" and "The Sharping Stone." Heaney is thus both a private poet�skillfully kneading grief, love, and wonder into poems about his family and his humble origins�and a public poet, affirming his affinities with the Catholic civil rights movement, which has struggled against British and Protestant domination. Even in his public poetry he refuses slogans, journalistic reportage, and political pieties, scrutinizing instead the wellsprings of collective identity, the ambivalences of individual response to history.

An Irishman writing in the language of the British Empire, he has translated Gaelic poetry and renewed specifically Irish traditions, such as the aisling, or vision poem, but he is also steeped in the English literary canon, drawing on British poetry from Beowulf (his prize-winning translation appears in volume 1 of this anthology) to the works of William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Ted Hughes. Straddling in his verse a multiplicity of divisions, transubstantiating crisscross feelings into unex

.

282 4 / SEAMUS HEANEY

pected images and intricate sonorities, Heaney has been embraced by popular audiences for his accessible style and yet also admired by poets and academic critics for his lyric subtlety and rigorous technique.

Formally, his poetry ranges from strenuous free verse�the clipped lines and unrhymed quatrains of the bog poems�to more traditional forms, such as the modified terza rima of "Station Island" and the sonnet sequence "Clearances." His poems are earthy and matter-of-fact, saturated with the physical textures, sights, smells, and sounds of farm life, and they are also visionary, lit up by hope and spirit, enacting penitential pilgrimages and unbridled imaginings. That Heaney's poetry is both earthbound and airborne, free and formed, public and private helps explain why he is seen by many as the most gifted English-language poet of his generation.

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: 5 My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm through potato drills1 Where he was digging.

10 The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft Against the inside knee was levered firmly. He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep To scatter new potatoes that we picked Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

15 By God, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf2 in a day Than any other man on Toner's bog. Once I carried him milk in a bottle

20 Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up To drink it, then fell to right away Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods Over his shoulder, going down and down For the good turf. Digging.

25 The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But I've no spade to follow men like them.

1. Small furrows in which seeds are sown. 2. Slabs of peat that, when dried, are a common domestic fuel in Ireland.

.

THE GRAUBALLE MAN / 2825

Between my finger and my thumb 30 The squat pen rests. I'll dig with it.

1966

The Forge

All I know is a door into the dark. Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting; Inside, the hammered anvil's short-pitched ring, The unpredictable fantail of sparks

5 Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water. The anvil must be somewhere in the centre, Horned as a unicorn, at one end square, Set there immoveable: an altar Where he expends himself in shape and music,

io Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose, He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows; Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.

1969

The Grauballe Man1

As if he had been poured in tar, he lies on a pillow of turf and seems to weep

5 the black river of himself. The grain of his wrists is like bog oak, the ball of his heel

like a basalt egg.

io His instep has shrunk cold as a swan's foot or a wet swamp root.

His hips are the ridge and purse of a mussel, 15 his spine an eel arrested under a glisten of mud.

1. A body exhumed from a Danish bog and photographed in P. V. Glob's book The Bog People.

.

282 6 / SEAMUS HEANEY

The head lifts, the chin is a visor raised above the vent

20 of his slashed throat

that has tanned and toughened. The cured wound opens inwards to a dark elderberry place.

25 Who will say 'corpse' to his vivid cast? Who will say 'body' to his opaque repose?

And his rusted hair,

30 a mat unlikely as a foetus's. 1 first saw his twisted face

in a photograph, a head and shoulder 35 out of the peat, bruised like a forceps baby,

but now he lies perfected in my memory, down to the red horn

40 of his nails,

hung in the scales with beauty and atrocity: with the Dying Gaul2 too strictly compassed

45 on his shield, with the actual weight of each hooded victim, slashed and dumped.

Punishment1

I can feel the tug of the halter at the nape

2. Roman marble reproduction of a Greek bronze naked in the hole in the peat, a bandage over the sculpture depicting a wounded soldier of Gaul, eyes and a collar round the neck. The band across whose matted hair identifies him as a Celt, in the eyes was drawn tight and had cut into the neck Rome's Capitoline Museum. and the base of the nose. We may feel sure that it 1. In 195 1 the peat-stained body of a young girl, had been used to close her eyes to this world. There who lived in the late 1st century C.E., was recov-was no mark of strangulation on the neck, so that ered from a bog in Windeby, Germany. As P. V. it had not been used for that purpose." Her hair Glob describes her in 77le Bog People, she "lay "had been shaved off with a razor on the left side

.

PUNISHMENT / 2827

of her neck, the wind on her naked front.

It blows her nipples to amber beads, it shakes the frail rigging of her ribs.

I can see her drowned

body in the bog, the weighing stone, the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at first she was a barked sapling that is dug up oak-bone, brain-firkin:0 small cask

her shaved head like a stubble of black corn, her blindfold a soiled bandage,

her noose a ring

to store the memories of love. Little adultress, before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired, undernourished, and your tar-black face was beautiful. My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you

but would have cast, I know, the stones of silence. I am the artful voyeur

of your brain's exposed and darkened combs,0 valley's your muscles' webbing and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb when your betraying sisters, cauled� in tar, wrapped, enclosed

wept by the railings,

of the head. . . . When the brain was removed the adulterous women by shaving off their hair and convolutions and folds of the surface could be then scourging them out of the village or killing clearly seen [Glob reproduces a photograph of her them. More recently, her "betraying sisters" were brain].... This girl of only fourteen had had an sometimes shaved, stripped, tarred, and hand- inadequate winter diet. .. . To keep the young cuffed by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to the body under, some birch branches and a big stone railings of Belfast in punishment for keeping comwere laid upon her." According to the Roman his-pany with British soldiers. torian Tacitus, the Germanic peoples punished

.

282 8 / SEAMUS HEANEY

who would connive in civilized outrage yet understand the exact and tribal, intimate revenge.

1975

Casualty

I

He would drink by himself And raise a weathered thumb Towards the high shelf, Calling another rum

5 And blackcurrant, without Having to raise his voice, Or order a quick stout0 strong dark beer By a lifting of the eyes And a discreet dumb-show

10 Of pulling off the top; At closing time would go In waders and peaked cap Into the showery dark, A dole-kept1 breadwinner

15 But a natural for work. I loved his whole manner, Sure-footed but too sly, His deadpan sidling tact, His fisherman's quick eye

20 And turned observant back. Incomprehensible To him, my other life. Sometimes, on his high stool, Too busy with his knife

25 At a tobacco plug And not meeting my eye In the pause after a slug0 gulp of liquor He mentioned poetry. We would be on our own 30 And, always politic And shy of condescension, I would manage by some trick To switch the talk to eels Or lore of the horse and cart 35 Or the Provisionals.2

But my tentative art His turned back watches too: He was blown to bits Out drinking in a curfew

1. I.e., receiving unemployment benefits. 2. The Provisional branch of the IRA.

.

CASUALTY / 2829

40 Others obeyed, three nights After they shot dead The thirteen men in Derry. PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said, ROGSIDE NIL.3 That Wednesday

45 Everybody held His breath and trembled.

2

It was a day of cold Raw silence, wind-blown Surplice and soutane:4

50 Rained-on, flower-laden Coffin after coffin Seemed to float from the door Of the packed cathedral Like blossoms on slow water.

55 The common funeral Unrolled its swaddling band,5 Lapping, tightening Till we were braced and bound Like brothers in a ring.

60 Rut he would not be held At home by his own crowd Whatever threats were phoned, Whatever black flags waved. I see him as he turned

65 In that bombed offending place, Remorse fused with terror In his still knowable face, His cornered outfaced stare Blinding in the flash.

70 He had gone miles away For he drank like a fish Nightly, naturally Swimming towards the lure Of warm lit-up places,

75 The blurred mesh and murmur Drifting among glasses In the gregarious smoke. How culpable was he That last night when he broke

so Our tribe's complicity?6 'Now you're supposed to be An educated man,'

3. This graffito records�in the form of a soccer uary 30, 1972. match score�that the British Army's Parachute 4. Vestments worn by Roman Catholic priests. Regiment had killed thirteen people; the Roman 5. Long cloth in which babies were once wrapped Catholic inhabitants of Derry's Bogside district, to restrain and warm them. none. The IRA bombing occurred after the killing 6. The Roman Catholic community's agreement of Catholic demonstrators on Bloody Sunday, Jan-to obey the curfew (of lines 39^10).

.

283 0 / SEAMUS HEANEY

I hear him say. 'Puzzle me The right answer to that one.'

3

85 I missed his funeral, Those quiet walkers And sideways talkers Shoaling out of his lane To the respectable

90 Purring of the hearse . . . They move in equal pace With the habitual Slow consolation Of a dawdling engine,

95 The line lifted, hand Over fist, cold sunshine On the water, the land Banked under fog: that morning I was taken in his boat,

IOO The screw0 purling, turning propellor Indolent fathoms white, I tasted freedom with him. To get out early, haul Steadily off the bottom, 105 Dispraise the catch, and smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt Somewhere, well out, beyond . . .

I IO Dawn-sniffing revenant,7 Plodder through midnight rain, Question me again.

1979

The Skunk

Up, black, striped and damasked like the chasuble1 At a funeral mass, the skunk's tail Paraded the skunk. Night after night I expected her like a visitor.

5 The refrigerator whinnied into silence. My desk light softened beyond the verandah. Small oranges loomed in the orange tree. I began to be tense as a voyeur.

7. One returned from the dead. brating Mass, its color regulated by the feast of the 1. Sleeveless vestment worn by the priest cele-day. "Damasked": woven with elaborate designs.

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STATION ISLAND / 283 1

After eleven years I was composing

10 Love-letters again, broaching the word 'wife' Like a stored cask, as if its slender vowel Had mutated into the night earth and air

Of California. The beautiful, useless Tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence. 15 The aftermath of a mouthful of wine Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow.

And there she was, the intent and glamorous, Ordinary, mysterious skunk, Mythologized, demythologized,

20 Snuffing the boards five feet beyond me.

It all came back to me last night, stirred By the sootfall of your things at bedtime, Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer For the black plunge-line nightdress.

1979

From Station Island1

12

Like a convalescent, I took the hand stretched down from the jetty, sensed again an alien comfort as I stepped on ground

to find the helping hand still gripping mine, 5 fish-cold and bony, but whether to guide or to be guided I could not be certain

for the tall man in step at my side seemed blind, though he walked straight as a rush upon his ash plant,2 his eyes fixed straight ahead.

10 Then I knew him in the flesh out there on the tarmac" among the cars, blacktop surface wintered hard and sharp as a blackthorn bush.

1. Station Island is a sequence of dream encounters with familiar ghosts, set on Station Island on Lough Derg in Co. Donegal. The island is also known as St. Patrick's Purgatory because of a tradition that Patrick was the first to establish the penitential vigil of fasting and praying which still constitutes the basis of the three-day pilgrimage. Each unit of the contemporary pilgrim's exercises is called a 'station,' and a large part of each station involves walking barefoot and praying round the 'beds,' stone circles which are said to be the remains of early medieval monastic cells [Heaney's note]. In this last section of the poem, the familiar ghost is that of Heaney's countryman James Joyce. Cf. the stanza form and encounter with a ghost in

T. S. Eliot's "Little Gidding." 2. Walking stick made of ash, like the one carried by Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's Ulysses. (See the opening paragraphs of "Proteus," p. 2200.) Joyce was almost blind.

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283 2 / SEAMUS HEANEY

i 5His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers3 came back to me, though he did not speak yet, a voice like a prosecutor's or a singer's, cunning,4 narcotic, mimic, definite as a steel nib's downstroke, quick and clean, and suddenly he hit a litter basket 20with his stick, saying, "Your obligation is not discharged by any common rite. What you must do must be done on your own so get back in harness. The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night 25 dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here. And don't be so earnest, 30let others wear the sackcloth and the ashes.5 Let go, let fly, forget. You've listened long enough. Now strike your note." It was as if I had stepped free into space alone with nothing that I had not known already. Raindrops blew in my face 35as I came to. "Old father, mother's son, there is a moment in Stephen's diary for April the thirteenth, a revelation set among my stars�that one entry has been a sort of password in my ears, the collect of a new epiphany,6 40 the Feast of the Holy Tundish."7 "Who cares," he jeered, "any more? The English language belongs to us. You are raking at dead fires, 45a waste of time for somebody your age. That subject0 people stuff is a cod's0 game, infantile, like your peasant pilgrimage. colonized /fool's

3. The Anna Livia Piurabelle episode of Finnegatis Wake (p. 2239) resounds with the names of many rivers. 4. "The only arms I allow myself to use�silence, exile, and cunning" (Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). 5. As worn by penitents in biblical times and later. 6. Manifestation of a superhuman being, as of the infant Jesus to the Magi (Matthew 2). In the Christian calendar, the Feast of the Epiphany is January 6. "Epiphany" was also Joyce's term for the "sudden revelation of the whatness of a thing." "Collect": short prayer assigned to a particular day.

7. See the end of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Yoitng Man [Heaney's note]: "13 April: That tundish [funnel] has been on my mind for a long time. I looked it up and find it English and good old blunt English too. Damn the dean of studies and his funnel! What did he come here for to teach us his own language or to learn it from us? Damn him one way or the other!"

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CLEARANCES / 283 3

You lose more of yourself than you redeem doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent. When they make the circle wide, it's time to swim

out on your own and fill the element 50 with signatures on your own frequency, echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements,

elver-gleams8 in the dark of the whole sea." The shower broke in a cloudburst, the tarmac fumed and sizzled. As he moved off quickly

55 the downpour loosed its screens round his straight walk.

1984

Clearances

in memoriam M.K.H.,1 1911-1984

She taught me what her uncle once taught her: How easily the higgest coal hlock split If you got the grain and hammer angled right.

The sound of that relaxed alluring blow, 5 Its co-opted and obliterated echo, Taught me to hit, taught me to loosen,

Taught me between the hammer and the block To face the music. Teach me now to listen, To strike it rich behind the linear black.

1

io A cobble thrown a hundred years ago Keeps coming at me, the first stone Aimed at a great-grandmother's turncoat brow.2 The pony jerks and the riot's on. She's crouched low in the trap

15 Running the gauntlet that first Sunday Down the brae� to Mass at a panicked gallop. stee-p slope He whips on through the town to cries of 'Lundy!'3

Call her The Convert'. 'The Exogamous4 Bride'. Anyhow, it is a genre piece 20 Inherited on my mother's side

8. Gleams as of young eels. Lundy knew that Derry (or Londonderry) would be 1. Margaret Kathleen Heaney, the poet's mother. invaded by the English, but failed to prepare ade2. Heaney's Protestant great-grandmother mar-quate defenses. ried a Catholic. 4. Married outside the group. 3. I.e., traitor. In 1688 the Irish colonel Robert

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592 / SEAMUS HEANEY

And mine to dispose with now she's gone. Instead of silver and Victorian lace, The exonerating, exonerated stone.

Polished linoleum shone there. Brass taps shone.

25 The china cups were very white and big� An unchipped set with sugar bowl and jug. The kettle whistled. Sandwich and teascone Were present and correct. In case it run, The butter must be kept out of the sun.

30 And don't be dropping crumbs. Don't tilt your chair. Don't reach. Don't point. Don't make noise when you

It is Number 5, New Row, Land of the Dead, Where grandfather is rising from his place With spectacles pushed back on a clean bald head

35 To welcome a bewildered homing daughter Before she even knocks. 'What's this? What's this?' And they sit down in the shining room together.

When all the others were away at Mass I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.

40 They broke the silence, let fall one by one Like solder weeping off the soldering iron: Cold comforts set between us, things to share Gleaming in a bucket of clean water. And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes

45 From each other's work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying And some were responding and some crying I remembered her head bent towards my head,

50 Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives�Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

4

Fear of affectation made her affect Inadequacy whenever it came to Pronouncing words 'beyond her'. Bertold Brek.5

55 She'd manage something hampered and askew Every time, as if she might betray The hampered and inadequate by too Well-adjusted a vocabulary. With more challenge than pride, she'd tell me, 'You

Bcrtolt Brecht (1898-1956), German playwright.

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CLEARANCES / 283 5

60 Know all them things.' So I governed my tongue In front of her, a genuinely well- adjusted adequate betrayal Of what I knew better. I'd now and aye And decently relapse into the wrong

65 Grammar which kept us allied and at bay.

5

The cool that came off sheets just off the line Made me think the damp must still be in them But when I took my corners of the linen And pulled against her, first straight down the hem

70 And then diagonally, then flapped and shook The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind, They made a dried-out undulating thwack. So we'd stretch and fold and end up hand to hand For a split second as if nothing had happened

75 For nothing had that had not always happened Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go, Coming close again by holding back In moves where I was x and she was o Inscribed in sheets she'd sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.

so In the first flush of the Easter holidays The ceremonies during Holy Week Were highpoints of our Sons and Lovers6 phase. The midnight fire. The paschal candlestick.7 Elbow to elbow, glad to be kneeling next

85 To each other up there near the front Of the packed church, we would follow the text And rubrics0 for the blessing of the font.8 rides As the hind longs for the streams, so my sold . . ,9

Dippings. Towellings. The water breathed on.

90 The water mixed with chrism1 and with oil. Cruet2 tinkle. Formal incensation And the psalmist's outcry taken up with pride:

Day and night my tears have heen my hread.3

7

In the last minutes he said more to her

95 Almost than in all their life together. 'You'll be in New Row on Monday night And I'll come up for you and you'll be glad When I walk in the door . . . Isn't that right?'

6. Novel (1913) by the English writer D. H. 8. Receptacle for holy water. Lawrence (1885�1930) that largely centers on the 9. Psalms 42.1. oedipal relationship between a mother and son. 1. Mixture of olive oil and balsam. 7. Large candle lit during a ceremony on Holy Sat-2. Small vessel for wine or water. urday, which precedes Easter. 3. Psalms 42.3.

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283 6 / SEAMUS HEANEY

His head was bent down to her propped-up head.

100 She could not hear but we were overjoyed. He called her good and girl. Then she was dead, The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned And we all knew one thing by being there. The space we stood around had been emptied

105 Into us to keep, it penetrated Clearances that suddenly stood open. High cries were felled and a pure change happened.

8

I thought of walking round and round a space Utterly empty, utterly a source

no Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place In our front hedge above the wallflowers. The white chips jumped and jumped and skited4 high. I heard the hatchet's differentiated Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh

115 And collapse of what luxuriated Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all. Deep planted and long gone, my coeval5 Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole, Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,

120 A soul ramifying and forever Silent, beyond silence listened for.

1987

The Sharping Stone1

In an apothecary's0 chest of drawers, pharmacist's Sweet cedar that we'd purchased second hand, In one of its weighty deep-sliding recesses I found the sharping stone that was to be

5 Our gift to him. Still in its wrapping paper. Like a baton of black light I'd failed to pass.

�

Airless cinder-depths. But all the same, The way it lay there, it wakened something too . . . I thought of us that evening on the logs,

10 Flat on our backs, the pair of us, parallel, Supported head to heel, arms straight, eyes front, Listening to the rain drip off the trees And saying nothing, braced to the damp bark. What possessed us? The bare, lopped loveliness

15 Of those two winter trunks, the way they seemed

4. Shot off obliquely. 1. Whetstone for sharpening metal blades. 5. Of the same age.

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THE SHARPING STONE / 283 7

Prepared for launching, at right angles across A causeway of short fence-posts set like rollers. Neither of us spoke. The puddles waited. The workers had gone home, saws fallen silent.

20 And next thing down we lay, babes in the wood, Gazing up at the flood-face of the sky Until it seemed a flood was carrying us Out of the forest park, feet first, eyes front, Out of November, out of middle age,

25 Together, out, across the Sea of Moyle.2

Sarcophage des epoux.3 In terra cotta. Etruscan couple shown side by side, Recumbent on left elbows, husband pointing With his right arm and watching where he points,

30 Wife in front, her earrings in, her braids Down to her waist, taking her sexual ease. He is all eyes, she is all brow and dream, Her right forearm and hand held out as if Some bird she sees in her deep inward gaze

35 Might be about to roost there. Domestic Love, the artist thought, warm tones and property, The frangibility of terra cotta . . . Which is how they figured on the colour postcard

(Louvre, Departement des Antiquites)4

40 That we'd sent him once, then found among his things.

He loved inspired mistakes: his Spanish grandson's English transliteration, thanking him For a boat trip: 'That was a marvellous Walk on the water, granddad.' And indeed

45 He walked on air himself, never more so Than when he had been widowed and the youth In him, the athlete who had wooed her� Breasting tapes and clearing the high bars� Grew lightsome once again. Going at eighty

50 On the bendiest roads, going for broke At every point-to-point5 and poker-school, 'He commenced his wild career' a second time And not a bother on him. Smoked like a train And took the power mower in his stride.

55 Flirted and vaunted. Set fire to his bed. Fell from a ladder. Learned to microwave.

So set the drawer on freshets0 of thaw water surges And place the unused sharping stone inside it:

2. Channel between the northwestern coast of 4. Department of Antiquities, Louvre Museum, County Antrim in Ireland and the southwestern Paris, in which this Etruscan funerary statue, coast of Scotland. known as The Cerveteri Couple, is to be found. 3. Coffin for a married couple. 5. Horse race over jumps.

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2838 / J. M. COETZEE

To be found next summer on a riverbank

60 Where scythes once hung all night in alder trees

And mowers played dawn scherzos6 on the blades,

Their arms like harpists' arms, one drawing towards,

One sweeping the bright rim of the extreme.

1996

6. Vigorous light and playful musical compositions. J. M. COETZEE b. 1940 John Michael Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa. His mother was a schoolteacher; his father, a lawyer who became a sheepherder after losing his job. When Coetzee was eight, his family left the provinces, and he chronicles this and other parts of his childhood in third-person memoirs, Boyhood: Scenes from a Provincial Life (1997) and Youth: Scenes from a Provincial Life II (2002). Coetzee was educated in Cape Town and then lived in London for a few years, working as a computer programmer, before earning his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, where he wrote a dissertation on the fiction of Samuel Beckett�a major influence along with Kafka and Dostoyevsky, on Coetzee's fiction. He was appointed, first, assistant professor and, subsequently, Butler Professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1984 he returned to South Africa as professor of general literature at the University of Cape Town, and since 2002 he has lived in Australia. Coetzee is the first novelist to win the prestigious Booker Prize twice, and

in 2003 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The central concern of Coetzee's fiction�the oppressive nature of colonialism� made its appearance with his first book, Dusklands (1974). This consists of two novellas, one set in the U.S. State Department during the Vietnam War, the other in southern Africa two hundred years earlier. The protagonists of these seemingly different stories�Eugene Dawn, an expert in psychological warfare, and Jacobus Coetzee, an explorer and pioneer�are engaged in similar projects, each leading to oppression and murder. Coetzee's subsequent novels include In the Heart of the Country (1977), a feminist anticolonial fable in the voice of a mad South African farmwoman; Life and Times of Michael K (1983), about a homeless man trying to survive in war-torn Africa; Foe (1986), a retelling of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe from the perspective of a female castaway; The Master of Petersburg (1994), a fictionalized account of Dostoyevsky's life; Disgrace (1999), about sexual harassment, rape, and race relations; and Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003), which blends essay and fiction. His many essays and works of criticism have concerned censorship, the rights of animals, South African history, and other themes.

Coetzee is at once a passionate political novelist and an intensely literary one, both qualities emerging in his most compelling indictment of colonialism, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). This novel takes its title and theme from a well-known poem by the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863�1933), which ends (in Rae Dalven's translation):

. . . night is here but the barbarians have not come.

Some people arrived from the frontiers,

And they said that there are no longer any barbarians.

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WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS / 2839

And now what shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.

In Coetzee's novel the rulers of the unnamed empire claim it is threatened by barbarians, but the barbarian threat is, at least in part, a fantasy concocted by the empire to hold itself together. The narrator is a magistrate in charge of a frontier post, poised uneasily between the harmless inhabitants of the region and the empire's rut Mess officials, and unable to protect either the natives or himself from his brutal colleague, Colonel Joll. Imprisoned and stripped of his duties, the magistrate becomes increasingly skeptical of the empire's motives. When the imperial army arrives to subdue supposed insurgents, its vicious treatment of prisoners calls into question the relation of "civilization" to "barbarism" and demonstrates, in harrowing scenes of abuse and torture, the ethical dangers of one people's dominance over another. In this medley of realist particularism and allegorical parable, Coetzee leaves the landscape and time of the novel hauntingly unspecified, suggesting that colonialism's degradation and coercion, violence and moral corruption can occur anywhere, at any time.

From Waiting for the Barbarians

First there is the sound of muskets far away, as diminutive as popguns.1 Then from nearer by, from the ramparts themselves, come volleys of answering shots. There is a stampede of footsteps across the barracks yard. "The barbarians!" someone shouts; but I think he is wrong. Above all the clamour the great bell begins to peal.

Kneeling with an ear to the crack of the door I try to make out what is going

The noise from the square mounts from a hubbub to a steady roar in which no single voice can be distinguished. The whole town must be pouring out in welcome, thousands of ecstatic souls. Volleys of musket-shots keep cracking. Then the tenor of the roar changes, rises in pitch and excitement. Faintly above it come the brassy tones of bugles.

The temptation is too great. What have I to lose? I unlock the door. In glare so blinding that I must squint and shade my eyes, I cross the yard, pass through the gate, and join the rear of the crowd. The volleys and the roar of applause continue. The old woman in black beside me takes my arm to steady herself and stands on her toes. "Can you see?" she says. "Yes, I can see men on horseback," I reply; but she is not listening.

I can see a long file of horsemen who, amid flying banners, pass through the gateway and make their way to the centre of the square where they dismount. There is a cloud of dust over the whole square, but I see that they are smiling and laughing: one of them rides with his hands raised high in triumph, another waves a garland of flowers. They progress slowly, for the crowd presses around them, trying to touch them, throwing flowers, clapping their hands above their heads in joy, spinning round and round in private ecstasies. Children dive past me, scrambling through the legs of the grownups to be nearer to their heroes. Fusillade after fusillade comes from the ramparts, which are lined with cheering people.

One part of the cavalcade does not dismount. Headed by a stern-faced young corporal bearing the green and gold banner of the battalion, it passes through

1. The magistrate, narrator of the novel, listens from the prison in which the empire has incarcerated him.

.

2840 / J. M. COETZEE

the press of bodies to the far end of the square and then begins a circuit of the perimeter, the crowd surging slowly in its wake. The word runs like fire from neighbour to neighbour: "Barbarians!"

The standard-bearer's horse is led by a man who brandishes a heavy stick to clear his way. Behind him comes another trooper trailing a rope; and at the end of the rope, tied neck to neck, comes a file of men, barbarians, stark naked, holding their hands up to their faces in an odd way as though one and all are suffering from toothache. For a moment I am puzzled by the posture, by the tiptoeing eagerness with which they follow their leader, till I catch a glint of metal and at once comprehend. A simple loop of wire runs through the flesh of each man's hands and through holes pierced in his cheeks. "It makes them meek as lambs," I remember being told by a soldier who had once seen the trick: "they think of nothing but how to keep very still." My heart grows sick. I know now that I should not have left my cell.

I have to turn my back smartly to avoid being seen by the two who, with their mounted escort, bring up the rear of the procession: the bareheaded young captain whose first triumph this is, and at his shoulder, leaner and darker after his months of campaigning, Colonel of Police Joll.

The circuit is made, everyone has a chance to see the twelve miserable captives, to prove to his children that the barbarians are real. Now the crowd, myself reluctantly in its wake, flows towards the great gate, where a half-moon of soldiers blocks its way until, compressed at front and rear, it cannot budge.

"What is going on?" I ask my neighbour.

"I don't know," he says, "but help me to lift him." I help him to lift the child he carries on his arm on to his shoulders. "Can you see?" he asks the child. "Yes." "What are they doing?" "They are making those barbarians kneel. What are they going to do to them?"

"I don't know. Let's wait and see."

Slowly, titanically, with all my might, I turn and begin to squeeze my body out, "Excuse me . . . excuse me ... " I say: "the heat�I'm going to be sick." For the first time I see heads turn, fingers point.

I ought to go back to my cell. As a gesture it will have no effect, it will not even be noticed. Nevertheless, for my own sake, as a gesture to myself alone, I ought to return to the cool dark and lock the door and bend the key and stop my ears to the noise of patriotic bloodlust and close my lips and never speak again. Who knows, perhaps I do my fellow-townsmen an injustice, perhaps at this very minute the shoemaker is at home tapping on his last, humming to himself to drown the shouting, perhaps there are housewives shelling peas in their kitchens, telling stories to occupy their restless children, perhaps there are farmers still going calmly about the repair of the ditches. If comrades like these exist, what a pity I do not know them! For me, at this moment, striding away from the crowd, what has become important above all is that I should neither be contaminated by the atrocity that is about to be committed nor poison myself with impotent hatred of its perpetrators. I cannot save the prisoners, therefore let me save myself. Let it at the very least be said, if it ever comes to be said, if there is ever anyone in some remote future interested to know the way we lived, that in this farthest outpost of the Empire of light there existed one man who in his heart was not a barbarian.

I pass through the barracks gate into my prison yard. At the trough in the

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WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS / 284 1

middle of the yard I pick up an empty bucket and fill it. With the bucket held up before me, slopping water over its sides, I approach the rear of the crowd again. "Excuse me," I say, and push. People curse me, give way, the bucket tilts and splashes, I forge forward till in a minute I am suddenly clear in the frontmost rank of the crowd behind the backs of the soldiers who, holding staves between them, keep an arena clear for the exemplary spectacle.

Four of the prisoners kneel on the ground. The other eight, still roped together, squat in the shade of the wall watching, their hands to their cheeks.

The kneeling prisoners bend side by side over a long heavy pole. A cord runs from the loop of wire through the first man's mouth, under the pole, up to the second man's loop, back under the pole, up to the third loop, under the pole, through the fourth loop. As I watch a soldier slowly pulls the cord tighter and the prisoners bend further till finally they are kneeling with their faces touching the pole. One of them writhes his shoulders in pain and moans. The others are silent, their thoughts wholly concentrated on moving smoothly with the cord, not giving the wire a chance to tear their flesh.

Directing the soldier with little gestures of the hand is Colonel Joll. Though I am only one in a crowd of thousands, though his eyes are shaded as ever, I stare at him so hard with a face so luminous with query that I know at once he sees me.

Behind me I distinctly hear the word magistrate. Do I imagine it or are my neighbours inching away from me?

The Colonel steps forward. Stooping over each prisoner in turn he rubs a handful of dust into his naked back and writes a word with a stick of charcoal. I read the words upside down: ENEMY . . . ENEMY. . . ENEMY . . . ENEMY. He steps back and folds his hands. At a distance of no more than twenty paces he and I contemplate each other.

Then the beating begins. The soldiers use the stout green cane staves, bringing them down with the heavy slapping sounds of washing-paddles, raising red welts on the prisoners' backs and buttocks. With slow care the prisoners extend their legs until they lie flat on their bellies, all except the one who had been moaning and who now gasps with each blow.

The black charcoal and ochre dust begin to run with sweat and blood. The game, I see, is to beat them till their backs are washed clean.

I watch the face of a little girl who stands in the front rank of the crowd gripping her mother's clothes. Her eyes are round, her thumb is in her mouth: silent, terrified, curious, she drinks in the sight of these big naked men being beaten. On every face around me, even those that are smiling, I see the same expression: not hatred, not bloodlust, but a curiosity so intense that their bodies are drained by it and only their eyes live, organs of a new and ravening appetite.

The soldiers doing the beating grow tired. One stands with his hands on his hips panting, smiling, gesturing to the crowd. There is a word from the Colonel: all four of them cease their labour and come forward offering their canes to the spectators.

A girl, giggling and hiding her face, is pushed forward by her friends, "Go on, don't be afraid!" they urge her. A soldier puts a cane in her hand and leads her to the place. She stands confused, embarrassed, one hand still over her face. Shouts, jokes, obscene advice are hurled at her. She lifts the cane, brings it down smartly on the prisoner's buttocks, drops it, and scuttles to safety to a roar of applause.

.

2842 / J. M. COETZEE

There is a scramble for the canes, the soldiers can barely keep order, I lose sight of the prisoners on the ground as people press forward to take a turn or simply watch the beating from nearer. I stand forgotten with my bucket between my feet.

Then the flogging is over, the soldiers reassert themselves, the crowd scrambles back, the arena is reconstituted, though narrower than before.

Over his head, exhibiting it to the crowd, Colonel Joll holds a hammer, an ordinary four-pound hammer used for knocking in tent-pegs. Again his gaze meets mine. The babble subsides.

"No!" I hear the first word from my throat, rusty, not loud enough. Then again: "No!" This time the word rings like a bell from my chest. The soldier who blocks my way stumbles aside. I am in the arena holding up my hands to still the crowd: "No! No! No!"

When I turn to Colonel Joll he is standing not five paces from me, his arms folded. I point a finger at him. "You!" I shout. Let it all be said. Let him be the one on whom the anger breaks. "You are depraving these people!"

He does not flinch, he does not reply. "You!" My arm points at him like a gun. My voice fills the square. There is utter silence; or perhaps I am too intoxicated to hear.

Something crashes into me from behind. I sprawl in the dust, gasp, feel the sear of old pain in my back. A stick thuds down on me. Reaching out to ward it off, I take a withering blow on my hand.

It becomes important to stand up, however difficult the pain makes it. I come to my feet and see who it is that is hitting me. It is the stocky man with the sergeant's stripes who helped with the beatings. Crouched at the knees, his nostrils flaring, he stands with his stick raised for the next blow. "Wait!" I gasp, holding out my limp hand. "I think you have broken it!" He strikes, and I take the blow on the forearm. I hide my arm, lower my head, and try to grope towards him and grapple. Blows fall on my head and shoulders. Never mind: all I want is a few moments to finish what I am saying now that I have begun. I grip his tunic and hug him to me. Though he wrestles, he cannot use his stick; over his shoulder I shout again.

"Not with that!" I shout. The hammer lies cradled in the Colonel's folded

arms. "You would not use a hammer on a beast, not on a beast!" In a terrible

surge of rage I turn on the sergeant and hurl him from me. Godlike strength

is mine. In a minute it will pass: let me use it well while it lasts! "Look!" I

shout. I point to the four prisoners who lie docilely on the earth, their lips to

the pole, their hands clasped to their faces like monkeys' paws, oblivious of

the hammer, ignorant of what is going on behind them, relieved that the

offending mark has been beaten from their backs, hoping that the punishment

is at an end. I raise my broken hand to the sky. "Look!" I shout. "We are the

great miracle of creation! But from some blows this miraculous body cannot

repair itself! How�!" Words fail me. "Look at these men!" I recommence.

"Men!" Those in the crowd who can crane to look at the prisoners, even at the

flies that begin to settle on their bleeding welts.

I hear the blow coming and turn to meet it. It catches me full across the face. "I am blind!" I think, staggering back into the blackness that instantly falls. I swallow blood; something blooms across my face, starting as a rosy warmth, turning to fiery agony. I hide my face in my hands and stamp around in a circle trying not to shout, trying not to fall.

What I wanted to say next I cannot remember. A miracle of creation�I

pursue the thought but it eludes me like a wisp of smoke. It occurs to me that

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WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS / 284 3

we crush insects beneath our feet, miracles of creation too, beetles, worms, cockroaches, ants, in their various ways.

I take my fingers from my eyes and a grey world re-emerges swimming in tears. I am so profoundly grateful that I cease to feel pain. As I am hustled, a man at each elbow, back through the murmuring crowd to my cell, I even find myself smiling.

That smile, that flush of joy, leave behind a disturbing residue. I know that they commit an error in treating me so summarily. For I am no orator. What would I have said if they had let me go on? That it is worse to beat a man's feet to pulp than to kill him in combat? That it brings shame on everyone when a girl is permitted to flog a man? That spectacles of cruelty corrupt the hearts of the innocent? The words they stopped me from uttering may have been very paltry indeed, hardly words to rouse the rabble. What, after all, do I stand for besides an archaic code of gentlemanly behaviour towards captured foes, and what do I stand against except the new science of degradation that kills people on their knees, confused and disgraced in their own eyes? Would I have dared to face the crowd to demand justice for these ridiculous barbarian prisoners with their backsides in the air? Justice: once that word is uttered, where will it all end? Easier to shout No! Easier to be beaten and made a martyr. Easier to lay my head on a block than to defend the cause of justice for the barbarians: for where can that argument lead but to laying down our arms and opening the gates of the town to the people whose land we have raped? The old magistrate, defender of the rule of law, enemy in his own way of the State, assaulted and imprisoned, impregnably virtuous, is not without his own twinges of doubt.

My nose is broken, I know, and perhaps also the cheekbone where the flesh was laid open by the blow of the stick. My left eye is swelling shut.

As the numbness wears off the pain begins to come in spasms a minute or two apart so intense that 1 can no longer lie still. At the height of the spasm I trot around the room holding my face, whining like a dog; in the blessed valleys between the peaks I breathe deeply, trying to keep control of myself, trying not to make too disgraceful an outcry. I seem to hear surges and lulls in the noise from the mob on the square but cannot be sure that the roar is not simply in my eardrums.

They bring me my evening meal as usual but I cannot eat. I cannot keep still, I have to walk back and forth or rock on my haunches to keep myself from screaming, tearing my clothes, clawing my flesh, doing whatever people do when the limit of their endurance is reached. I weep, and feel the tears stinging the open flesh. I hum the old song about the rider and the juniper bush over and over again, clinging to the remembered words even after they have ceased to make any sense. One, two, three, four .. . I count. It will be a famous victory, I tell myself, if you can last the night.

In the early hours of the morning, when I am so giddy with exhaustion that I reel on my feet, I finally give way and sob from the heart like a child: I sit in a corner against the wall and weep, the tears running from my eyes without stop. I weep and weep while the throbbing comes and goes according to its own cycles. In this position sleep bursts upon me like a thunderbolt. I am amazed to come to myself in the thin grey light of day, slumped in a corner, with not the faintest sense that time has passed. Though the throbbing is still there I find I can endure it if I remain still. Indeed, it has lost its strangeness. Soon, perhaps, it will be as much part of me as breathing.

So I lie quietly against the wall, folding my sore hand under my armpit for

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comfort, and fall into a second sleep, into a confusion of images among which I search out one in particular, brushing aside the others that fly at me like leaves. It is of the girl. She is kneeling with her back to me before the snow- castle or sandcastle she has built. She wears a dark blue robe. As I approach I see that she is digging away in the bowels of the castle.

She becomes aware of me and turns. I am mistaken, it is not a castle she has built but a clay oven. Smoke curls up from the vent at the back. She holds out her hands to me offering me something, a shapeless lump which I peer at unwillingly through a mist. Though I shake my head my vision will not clear.

She is wearing a round cap embroidered in gold. Her hair is braided in a heavy plait which lies over her shoulder: there is gold thread worked into the braid. "Why are you dressed in your best?" I want to say: "I have never seen you looking so lovely." She smiles at me: what beautiful teeth she has, what clear jet-black eyes! Also now I can see that what she is holding out to me is a loaf of bread, still hot, with a coarse steaming broken crust. A surge of gratitude sweeps through me. "Where did a child like you learn to bake so well in the desert?" I want to say. I open my arms to embrace her, and come to myself with tears stinging the wound on my cheek. Though I scrabble back at once into the burrow of sleep I cannot re-enter the dream or taste the bread that has made my saliva run.

Colonel Joll sits behind the desk in my office. There are no books or files; the room is starkly empty save for a vase of fresh flowers. The handsome warrant officer whose name I do not know lifts the cedar- wood chest on to the desk and steps back.

Looking down to refer to his papers, the Colonel speaks. "Among the items found in your apartment was this wooden chest. I would like you to consider it. Its contents are unusual. It contains approximately three hundred slips of white poplar-wood, each about eight inches by two inches, many of them wound about with lengths of string.2 The wood is dry and brittle. Some of the string is new, some so old that it has perished.

"If one loosens the string one finds that the slip splits open revealing two flat inner surfaces. These surfaces are written on in an unfamiliar script.

"I think you will concur with this description."

I stare into the black lenses. He goes on.

"A reasonable inference is that the wooden slips contain messages passed between yourself and other parties, we do not know when. It remains for you to explain what the messages say and who the other parties were." He takes a slip from the chest and flicks it across the polished surface of the desk towards me.

I look at the lines of characters written by a stranger long since dead. I do not even know whether to read from right to left or from left to right. In the long evenings I spent poring over my collection I isolated over four hundred different characters in the script, perhaps as many as four hundred and fifty. I have no idea what they stand for. Does each stand for a single thing, a circle for the sun, a triangle for a woman, a wave for a lake; or does a circle merely stand for "circle", a triangle for "triangle", a wave for "wave"? Does each sign

2. Over the years the magistrate has conducted archaeological digs outside the city, unearthingthesepoplar slips and other artifacts.

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WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS / 284 5

represent a different state of the tongue, the lips, the throat, the lungs, as they combine in the uttering of some multifarious unimaginable extinct barbarian language? Or are my four hundred characters nothing but scribal embellishments of an underlying repertory of twenty or thirty whose primitive forms I am too stupid to see?

"He sends greetings to his daughter," I say. I hear with surprise the thick nasal voice that is now mine. My finger runs along the line of characters from right to left. "Whom he says he has not seen for a long time. He hopes she is happy and thriving. He hopes the lambing season has been good. He has a gift for her, he says, which he will keep till he sees her again. He sends his love. It is not easy to read his signature. It could be simply "Your father' or it could be something else, a name."

I reach over into the chest and pick out a second slip. The warrant officer, who sits behind Joll with a little notebook open on his knee, stares hard at me, his pencil poised above the paper.

"This one reads as follows," I say: " 'I am sorry I must send bad news. The soldiers came and took your brother away. I have been to the fort every day to plead for his return. I sit in the dust with my head bare. Yesterday for the first time they sent a man to speak to me. He says your brother is no longer here. He says he has been sent away. "Where?" I asked, but he would not say. Do not tell your mother, but join me in praying for his safety.'

"And now let us see what this next one says." The pencil is still poised, he has not written anything, he has not stirred. " We went to fetch your brother yesterday. They showed us into a room where he lay on a table sewn up in a sheet.' " Slowly Joll leans back in his chair. The warrant officer closes his notebook and half-rises; but with a gesture Joll restrains him. " 'They wanted me to take him away like that, but I insisted on looking first. "What if it is the wrong body you are giving me?" I said�"You have so many bodies here, bodies of brave young men." So I opened the sheet and saw that it was indeed he. Through each eyelid, I saw that there was a stitch, "Why have you done that?" I said. "It is our custom," he said. I tore the sheet wide open and saw bruises all over his body, and saw that his feet were swollen and broken. "What happened to him?" I said. "I do not know," said the man, "it is not oh the paper; if you have questions you must go to the sergeant, but he is very busy." We have had to bury your brother here, outside their fort, because he was beginning to stink. Please tell your mother and try to console her.'

"Now let us see what the next one says. See, there is only a single character. It is the barbarian character war, but it has other senses too. It can stand for vengeance, and, if you turn it upside down like this, it can be made to read justice. There is no knowing which sense is intended. That is part of barbarian cunning.

"It is the same with the rest of these slips." I plunge my good hand into the

chest and stir. "They form an allegory. They can be read in many orders.

Further, each single slip can be read in many ways. Together they can be read

as a domestic journal, or they can be read as a plan of war, or they can be

turned on their sides and read as a history of the last years of the Empire�

the old Empire, I mean. There is no agreement among scholars about how to

interpret these relics of the ancient barbarians. Allegorical sets like this one

can be found buried all over the desert. I found this one not three miles from

here in the ruins of a public building. Graveyards are another good place to

look in, though it is not always easy to tell where barbarian burial sites lie. It

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2846 / J. M. COETZEE

is recommended that you simply dig at random: perhaps at the very spot where you stand you will come upon scraps, shards, reminders of the dead. Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear, you can hear them echoing forever within the second sphere. The night is best: sometimes when you have difficulty in falling asleep it is because your ears have been reached by the cries of the dead which, like their writings, are open to many interpretations.

"Thank you. I have finished translating."

I have not failed to keep an eye on Joll through all this. He has not stirred again, save to lay a hand on his subordinate's sleeve at the moment when I referred to the Empire and he rose, ready to strike me.

If he comes near me I will hit him with all the strength in my body. I will not disappear into the earth without leaving my mark on them.

The Colonel speaks. "You have no idea how tiresome your behaviour is. You are the one and only official we have had to work with on the frontier who has not given us his fullest co-operation. Candidly, I must tell you I am not interested in these sticks." He waves a hand at the slips scattered on the desk. "They are very likely gambling-sticks. I know that other tribes on the border gamble with sticks.

"I ask you to consider soberly: what kind of future do you have here? You cannot be allowed to remain in your post. You have utterly disgraced yourself. Even if you are not eventually prosecuted�"

"I am waiting for you to prosecute me!" I shout. "When are you going to do it? When are you going to bring me to trial? When am I going to have a chance to defend myself?" I am in a fury. None of the speechlessness I felt in front of the crowd afflicts me. If I were to confront these men now, in public, in a fair trial, I would find the words to shame them. It is a matter of health and strength: I feel my hot words swell in my breast. But they will never bring a man to trial while he is healthy and strong enough to confound them. They will shut me away in the dark till I am a muttering idiot, a ghost of myself; then they will haul me before a closed court and in five minutes dispose of the legalities they find so tiresome.

"For the duration of the emergency, as you know," says the Colonel, "the administration of justice is out of the hands of civilians and in the hands of the Bureau." He sighs. "Magistrate, you seem to believe that we do not dare to bring you to trial because we fear you are too popular a figure in this town. I do not think you are aware of how much you forfeited by neglecting your duties, shunning your friends, keeping company with low people. There is no one I have spoken to who has not at some time felt insulted by your behaviour."

"My private life is none of their business!"

"Nevertheless, I may tell you that our decision to relieve you of your duties has been welcomed in most quarters. Personally I have nothing against you. When I arrived back a few days ago, I had decided that all I wanted from you was a clear answer to a simple question, after which you could have returned to your concubines a free man."

It strikes me suddenly that the insult may not be gratuitous, that perhaps for different reasons these two men might welcome it if I lost my temper. Burning with outrage, tense in every muscle, I guard my silence.

"However, you seem to have a new ambition," he goes on. "You seem to want to make a name for yourself as the One Just Man, the man who is prepared to sacrifice his freedom to his principles.

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WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS / 284 7

"But let me ask you: do you believe that that is how your fellow-citizens see you after the ridiculous spectacle you created on the square the other day? Believe me, to people in this town you are not the One Just Man, you are simply a clown, a madman. You are dirty, you stink, they can smell you a mile away. You look like an old beggar-man, a refuse-scavenger. They do not want you back in any capacity. You have no future here.

"You want to go down in history as a martyr, I suspect. But who is going to put you in the history books? These border troubles are of no significance. In a while they will pass and the frontier will go to sleep for another twenty years. People are not interested in the history of the back of beyond."

"There were no border troubles before you came," I say.

"That is nonsense," he says. "You are simply ignorant of the facts. You are living in a world of the past. You think we are dealing with small groups of peaceful nomads. In fact we are dealing with a well organized enemy. If you had travelled with the expeditionary force you would have seen that for yourself."

"Those pitiable prisoners you brought in�are they the enemy I must fear? Is that what you say? You are the enemy, Colonel!" I can restrain myself no longer. I pound the desk with my fist. "You are the enemy, you have made the war, and you have given them all the martyrs they need�starting not now but a year ago when you committed your first filthy barbarities here! History will bear me out!"

"Nonsense. There will be no history, the affair is too trivial." He seems impassive, but I am sure I have shaken him.

"You are an obscene torturer! You deserve to hang!"

"Thus speaks the judge, the One Just Man," he murmurs.

We stare into each other's eyes.

"Now," he says, squaring the papers before him: "I would like a statement on everything that passed between you and the barbarians on your recent and

unauthorized visit to them."

"I refuse."

"Very well. Our interview is over." He turns to his subordinate. "He is your

responsibility." He stands up, walks out. I face the warrant officer.

The wound on my cheek, never washed or dressed, is swollen and inflamed. A crust like a fat caterpillar has formed on it. My left eye is a mere slit, my nose a shapeless throbbing lump. I must breathe through my mouth.

I lie in the reek of old vomit obsessed with the thought of water. I have had

nothing to drink for two days.

In my suffering there is nothing ennobling. Little of what I call suffering is even pain. What I am made to undergo is subjection to the most rudimentary needs of my body: to drink, to relieve itself, to find the posture in which it is least sore. When Warrant Officer Mandel and his man first brought me back here and lit the lamp and closed the door, I wondered how much pain a plump comfortable old man would be able to endure in the name of his eccentric notions of how the Empire should conduct itself. But my torturers were not interested in degrees of pain. They were interested only in demonstrating to me what it meant to live in a body, as a body, a body which can entertain notions of justice only as long as it is whole and well, which very soon forgets them when its head is gripped and a pipe is pushed down its gullet and pints

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of salt water are poured into it till it coughs and retches and flails and voids itself. They did not come to force the story out of me of what I had said to the barbarians and what the barbarians had said to me. So I had no chance to throw the high-sounding words I had ready in their faces. They came to my cell to show me the meaning of humanity, and in the space of an hour they showed me a great deal.

1980

EAVAN BOLAND

b. 1944 Eavan Boland was born in Dublin, the youngest daughter of an Irish diplomat and a painter, but as recalled in "Fond Memory" and other poems, she was displaced as a six-year-old from Ireland to London, where her father was Irish ambassador, and then to New York, where he was his country's representative at the United Nations, before finally returning to Ireland in adolescence. She attended convent schools in these various locations. In Ireland she studied�and then taught�English at Trinity College, Dublin, and since then she has taught at University College, the University of Iowa, and Stanford University.

Boland said in a 1994 lecture, "I am an Irish poet. A woman poet. In the first category I enter the tradition of the English language at an angle. In the second, I enter my own tradition at an even more steep angle." The great puzzle of Boland's career has been how to embrace Irish identity while rejecting certain male-centered assumptions that have long dominated Irish literary culture. For Boland as a young woman writer, the frozen, mythical images of the Irish nation as an idealized woman� Mother Ireland, Dark Rosaleen, Cathleen Ni Houlihan�were inhibiting and insufficient. To bring into Irish verse a national narrative, a "herstory" that interweaves private life and public life, Boland seized on an alternative tradition to that of Irish male poets�namely, the example of American women poets such as Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich. Her eye for symbolic detail, her ear for musical structure, her use of form to mirror content have served her well in her effort to recover and vivify Irish women's historical experiences, including domestic labor, motherhood, famine, prostitution, and emigration.

Fond Memory

It was a school where all the children wore darned worsted;0 woolen fabric where they cried�or almost all�when the Reverend Mother announced at lunch-time that the King1 had died

peacefully in his sleep. I dressed in wool as well, ate rationed food, played English games and learned how wise the Magna Carta was, how hard the Hanoverians2

1. King George VI of the United Kingdom died in 2. Family of English monarchs who reigned from 1952. Boland's father was a diplomat, and she 1714 to 1901. "Magna Carta": charter of English spent much of her childhood in London. liberties granted by King John in 1215.

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THA T TH E SCIENC E O F CARTOGRAPH Y I S LIMITE D / 284 9 had tried, the measure and complexity of verse, the hum and score of the whole orchestra. At three-o-clock I caught two buses home 10 where sometimes in the late afternoon at a piano pushed into a corner of the playroom my father would sit down and play the slow islilts of Tom Moore3 while I stood there trying not to weep at the cigarette smoke stinging up from between his fingers and�as much as I could think� I thought this is my country, was, will be again, this upward-straining song made to be our safe inventory of pain. And I was wrong. 1987

That the Science of Cartography1 Is Limited

�and not simply by the fact that this shading of forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam, the gloom of cypresses is what I wish to prove.

5 When you and I were first in love we drove to the borders of Connacht2 and entered a wood there.

Look down you said: this was once a famine road.

I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass

10 rough-cast stone had disappeared into as you told me in the second winter of their ordeal, in

1847, when the crop3 had failed twice, Relief Committees gave 15 the starving Irish such roads to build.

Where they died, there the road ended

and ends still and when I take down the map of this island, it is never so I can say here is

20 the masterful, the apt rendering of

the spherical as flat, nor an ingenious design which persuades a curve

3. Irish poet and singer (1779�1852). 3. Of potatoes, staple diet of Irish peasants in the 1. Mapmaking. 19th century. Over a million people died in the 2. Western province of Ireland. Irish Famine of 1845�49.

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285 0 / EAVAN BOLAND

into a plane, but to tell myself again that

25 the line which says woodland and cries hunger and gives out among sweet pine and cypress, and finds no horizon

will not be there.

1994

The Dolls Museum in Dublin

The wounds are terrible. The paint is old. The cracks along the lips and on the cheeks cannot be fixed. The cotton lawn1 is soiled. The arms are ivory dissolved to wax.

5 Recall the Quadrille.2 Hum the waltz. Promenade on the yacht-club terraces. Put back the lamps in their copper holders, the carriage wheels on the cobbled quays.

And recreate Easter in Dublin.3

io Booted officers. Their mistresses. Sunlight criss-crossing College Green. Steam hissing from the flanks of horses.

Here they are. Cradled and cleaned, held close in the arms of their owners. 15 Their cold hands clasped by warm hands, their faces memorized like perfect manners.

The altars are mannerly with linen. The lilies are whiter than surplices.4 The candles are burning and warning:

20 Rejoice, they whisper. After sacrifice.

Horse-chestnuts hold up their candles. The Green is vivid with parasols. Sunlight is pastel and windless. The bar of the Shelbourne5 is full.

25 Laughter and gossip on the terraces. Rumour and alarm at the barracks. The Empire is summoning its officers. The carriages are turning: they are turning back.

1. Usually fine linen, but also, as here, fine cotton. Dublin and an Irish Republic was proclaimed from 2. A square dance and the music for it. the General Post Office. See W. B. Yeats's "Easter, 3. What became known as the "Easter Rising" 1916" (p. 2031). began on Easter Monday, 1916, when over sixteen 4. White linen vestments worn over cassocks. hundred Irish Nationalists seized key points in 5. Large Dublin hotel.

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TH E LOS T LAN D / 285 1 30Past children walking with governesses, Looking down, cossetting their dolls, then looking up as the carriage passes, the shadow chilling them. Twilight falls. 35It is twilight in the dolls' museum. Shadows remain on the parchment-coloured waists, are bruises on the stitched cotton clothes, are hidden in the dimples on the wrists. 40The eyes are wide. They cannot address the helplessness which has lingered in the airless peace of each glass case: to have survived. To have been stronger than a moment. To be the hostages ignorance takes from time and ornament from destiny. Both. To be the present of the past. To infer the difference with a terrible stare. But not feel it. And not know it. 1994 The Lost Land I have two daughters. They are all I ever wanted from the earth. Or almost all. I also wanted one piece of ground: 5 One city trapped by hills. One urban river. An island in its element. So I could say mine. My own. And mean it. Now they are grown up and far away 10 and memory itself has become an emigrant, wandering in a place where love dissembles itself as landscape: 15Where the hills are the colours of a child's eyes, where my children are distances, horizons: At night, on the edge of sleep,

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I can see the shore of Dublin Bay. 20 Its rocky sweep and its granite pier.

Is this, I say how they must have seen it, backing out on the mailboat at twilight,

shadows falling

25 on everything they had to leave?

And would love forever?

And then

I imagine myself at the landward rail of that boat 30 searching for the last sight of a hand.

I see myself

on the underworld side of that water,

the darkness coming in fast, saying

all the names I know for a lost land:

35 Ireland. Absence. Daughter.

1998

SALMAN RUSHDIE

b. 1947 The most influential novelist to have come from South Asia in the last fifty years is Ahmed Salman Rushdie, whose dynamic narratives�stories of magic, suffering, and the vitality of human beings in the grip of history�have helped generate the literary renaissance flowering in India today. "I come from Bombay," Rushdie has said, "and from a Muslim family, too. 'My' India has always been based on ideas of multiplicity, pluralism, hybridity: ideas to which the ideologies of the communalists are diametrically opposed. To my mind, the defining image of India is the crowd, and a crowd is by its very nature superabundant, heterogeneous, many things at once." Rushdie was educated at Cathedral School, Bombay (now Mumbai), and from the age of thirteen, at Rugby School, Warwickshire, and King's College, Cambridge. After living briefly in Pakistan, where his prosperous family had moved, Rushdie eventually settled in England, working as an actor and as a freelance advertising copywriter (1970-80)!

His first novel, Grimus (1979), passed unnoticed, but his second, Midnight's Children (1981), announced the arrival of a major writer. Taking its title from those who were born�two months later than its author�around midnight on August 1 5, 1947, when the independent state of India was born, Midnight's Children is a work of prodigious prodigality, a cornucopia as richly fertile in character, incident, and language as the subcontinent that is its setting. The book's triumphant progress across the world culminated in its being judged "the Booker of Bookers," the best novel to have won Britain's premier fiction prize in its first twenty-five years. Rushdie has said

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SALMAN RUSHDIE / 285 3

that "we're all radio-active with history," and the books that have followed Midnight's Children have again shown a form of "magical realism"�learned from Latin American writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez�deployed in the service of a powerful political-historical imagination.

In 1988 Rushdie found himself at the perilous center of a real, rather than a magical realist, political-historical storm. His novel The Satanic Verses provoked riots in India, Pakistan, and South Africa, and was judged by senior religious figures in Iran to have blasphemed the Prophet Muhammad (called by the offensive name "Mahound" in the novel), founder of the Muslim faith, and a fatwa, or legal decree, calling for his death was pronounced. He was obliged to go into hiding, and for almost a decade lived under round-the-clock protection from British Secret Service agents, while governments argued for and against the lifting of the fatwa, and the author himself became symbolic of the vulnerability of the intellectual in the face of fundamentalism. The lifting of the fatwa in 1998 allowed Rushdie to reappear in public, but it is seen as irrevocable by some religious groups, and so his life remains under constant threat. He has defended his book in the essay "In Good Faith" (1990), while defining the irreverently pluralistic vision behind his "mongrel" aesthetic�a vision that has repeatedly resulted in the burning or banning of his books by political nationalists and religious purists in South Asia and other parts of the world:

If The Satanic Verses is anything, it is a migrant's-eye view of the world. It is written from the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis (slow or rapid, painful or pleasurable) that is the migrant condition, and from which, I believe, can be derived a metaphor for all humanity.

Standing at the centre of the novel is a group of characters most of whom are British Muslims, or not particularly religious persons of Muslim background, struggling with just the sort of great problems of hybridization and ghettoization, of reconciling the old and the new. Those who oppose the novel most vociferously today are of the opinion that intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin their own. I am of the opposite opinion. The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is haw newness enters the xvorld. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love-song to our mongrel selves.

An earlier story, published the same year as his groundbreaking Midnight's Children, had invoked the Prophet uncontroversially. Like Midnight's Children, the story "The Prophet's Hair" buoyantly fuses Standard English with an exuberantly Indianized English, peppered with words of Hindi, Persian, Sanskrit, and Arabic origin� among the many languages that have been used in the extraordinarily polyglot Indian subcontinent. Like The Satanic Verses, "The Prophet's Hair" risks playfulness, satire, caricature, and whimsy in its treatment of the religion of his youth (though Rushdie has indicated he was brought up not as a believer but within a relaxed Muslim climate, almost secularized by the variety of other religions surrounding it). The story is at once a moral fable in the tradition of The Thousand and One Nights and a magical realist extravaganza, packed with incident, poetic detail ("water to which the cold of the night had given the cloudy consistency of wild honey"), and humor, all brilliantly interwoven at breakneck speed.

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2854 / SALMAN RUSHDIE

The Prophet's1 Hair

Early in the year 19�, when Srinagar2 was under the spell of a winter so fierce it could crack men's bones as if they were glass, a young man upon whose cold-pinked skin there lay, like a frost, the unmistakable sheen of wealth was to be seen entering the most wretched and disreputable part of the city, where the houses of wood and corrugated iron seemed perpetually on the verge of losing their balance, and asking in low, grave tones where he might go to engage the services of a dependably professional burglar. The young man's name was Atta, and the rogues in that part of town directed him gleefully into ever darker and less public alleys, until in a yard wet with the blood of a slaughtered chicken he was set upon by two men whose faces he never saw, robbed of the substantial bank-roll which he had insanely brought on his solitary excursion, and beaten within an inch of his life.

Night fell. His body was carried by anonymous hands to the edge of the lake, whence it was transported by shikara3 across the water and deposited, torn and bleeding, on the deserted embankment of the canal which led to the gardens of Shalimar. At dawn the next morning a flower-vendor was rowing his boat through water to which the cold of the night had given the cloudy consistency of wild honey when he saw the prone form of young Atta, who was just beginning to stir and moan, and on whose now deathly pale skin the sheen of wealth could still be made out dimly beneath an actual layer of frost.

The flower-vendor moored his craft and by stooping over the mouth of the injured man was able to learn the poor fellow's address, which was mumbled through lips that could scarcely move; whereupon, hoping for a large tip, the hawker rowed Atta home to a large house on the shores of the lake, where a beautiful but inexplicably bruised young woman and her distraught, but equally handsome mother, neither of whom, it was clear from their eyes, had slept a wink from worrying, screamed at the sight of their Atta�who was the elder brother of the beautiful young woman�lying motionless amidst the funereally stunted winter blooms of the hopeful florist.

The flower-vendor was indeed paid off handsomely, not least to ensure his silence, and plays no further part in our story. Atta himself, suffering terribly from exposure as well as a broken skull, entered a coma which caused the city's finest doctors to shrug helplessly. It was therefore all the more remarkable that on the very next evening the most wretched and disreputable part of the city received a second unexpected visitor. This was Huma, the sister of the unfortunate young man, and her question was the same as her brother's, and asked in the same low, grave tones:

'Where may I hire a thief?'

The story of the rich idiot who had come looking for a burglar was already common knowledge in those insalubrious4 gullies, but this time the young woman added: 'I should say that I am carrying no money, nor am I wearing any jewellery items. My father has disowned me and will pay no ransom if I am kidnapped; and a letter has been lodged with the Deputy Commissioner

1. The Prophet Muhammad, founder of the Mus- 2. Capital of the state of Kashmir, lim religion, was born in Mecca about 570 and died 3. Long swift Kashmiri boat, in 632. 4. Unhealthy.

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THE PROPHET'S HAIR / 2855

of Police, my uncle, to be opened in the event of my not being safe at home by morning. In that letter he will find full details of my journey here, and he will move Heaven and Earth to punish my assailants.'

Her exceptional beauty, which was visible even through the enormous welts and bruises disfiguring her arms and forehead, coupled with the oddity of her inquiries, had attracted a sizable group of curious onlookers, and because her little speech seemed to them to cover just about everything, no one attempted to injure her in any way, although there were some raucous comments to the effect that it was pretty peculiar for someone who was trying to hire a crook to invoke the protection of a high-up policeman uncle.

She was directed into ever darker and less public alleys until finally in a gully as dark as ink an old woman with eyes which stared so piercingly that Huma instantly understood she was blind motioned her through a doorway from which darkness seemed to be pouring like smoke. Clenching her fists, angrily ordering her heart to behave normally, Huma followed the old woman into the gloom-wrapped house.

The faintest conceivable rivulet of candlelight trickled through the darkness; following this unreliable yellow thread (because she could no longer see the old lady), Huma received a sudden sharp blow to the shins and cried out involuntarily, after which she at once bit her lip, angry at having revealed her mounting terror to whoever or whatever waited before her, shrouded in blackness.

She had, in fact, collided with a low table on which a single candle burned and beyond which a mountainous figure could be made out, sitting cross- legged on the floor. 'Sit, sit,' said a man's calm, deep voice, and her legs, needing no more flowery invitation, buckled beneath her at the terse command. Clutching her left hand in her right, she forced her voice to respond evenly:

'And you, sir, will be the thief I have been requesting?'

Shifting its weight very slightly, the shadow-mountain informed Huma that all criminal activity originating in this zone was well organised and also centrally controlled, so that all requests for what might be termed freelance work had to be channelled through this room.

He demanded comprehensive details of the crime to be committed, including a precise inventory of items to be acquired, also a clear statement of all financial inducements being offered with no gratuities excluded, plus, for filing purposes only, a summary of the motives for the application.

At this, Huma, as though remembering something, stiffened both in body and resolve and replied loudly that her motives were entirely a matter for herself; that she would discuss details with no one but the thief himself; but that the rewards she proposed could only be described as 'lavish'.

'All I am willing to disclose to you, sir, since it appears that I am on the premises of some sort of employment agency, is that in return for such lavish rewards I must have the most desperate criminal at your disposal, a man for whom life holds no terrors, not even the fear of God.

'The worst of fellows, I tell you�nothing less will do!'

At this a paraffin storm-lantern was lighted, and Huma saw facing her a grey- haired giant down whose left cheek ran the most sinister of scars, a cicatrice

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285 6 / SALMAN RUSHDIE

in the shape of the letter sin in the Nastaliq5 script. She was gripped by the insupportably nostalgic notion that the bogeyman of her childhood nursery had risen up to confront her, because her ayah6 had always forestalled any incipient acts of disobedience by threatening Huma and Atta: 'You don't watch out and I'll send that one to steal you away�that Sheikh7 Sin, the Thief of Thieves!'

Here, grey-haired but unquestionably scarred, was the notorious criminal himself�and was she out of her mind, were her ears playing tricks, or had he truly just announced that, given the stated circumstances, he himself was the only man for the job?

Struggling hard against the newborn goblins of nostalgia, Huma warned the fearsome volunteer that only a matter of extreme urgency and peril would have brought her unescorted into these ferocious streets.

'Because we can afford no last-minute backings-out,' she continued, 'I am determined to tell you everything, keeping back no secrets whatsoever. If, after hearing me out, you are still prepared to proceed, then we shall do everything in our power to assist you, and to make you rich.'

The old thief shrugged, nodded, spat. Huma began her story.

Six days ago, everything in the household of her father, the wealthy moneylender Hashim, had been as it always was. At breakfast her mother had spooned khichri8 lovingly on to the moneylender's plate; the conversation had been filled with those expressions of courtesy and solicitude on which the family prided itself.

Hashim was fond of pointing out that while he was not a godly man he set great store by 'living honourably in the world'. In that spacious lakeside residence, all outsiders were greeted with the same formality and respect, even those unfortunates who came to negotiate for small fragments of Hashim's large fortune, and of whom he naturally asked an interest rate of over seventy per cent, partly, as he told his khichri-spooning wife, 'to teach these people the value of money; let them only learn that, and they will be cured of this fever of borrowing borrowing all the time�so you see that if my plans succeed, I shall put myself out of business!'

In their children, Atta and Huma, the moneylender and his wife had successfully sought to inculcate the virtues of thrift, plain dealing and a healthy independence of spirit. On this, too, Hashim was fond of congratulating himself.

Breakfast ended; the family members wished one another a fulfilling day. Within a few hours, however, the glassy contentment of that household, of that life of porcelain delicacy and alabaster sensibilities, was to be shattered beyond all hope of repair.

The moneylender summoned his personal shikara and was on the point of stepping into it when, attracted by a glint of silver, he noticed a small vial floating between the boat and his private quay. On an impulse, he scooped it out of the glutinous water.

5. A Persian cursive script, characterized by 6. Child's nurse (Anglo-Indian, from Portuguese). rounded forms and elongated horizontal strokes. 7. Chief (Arabic). "Cicatrice": scar of a healed wound. 8. Rice and lentils cooked together (Hindi).

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THE PROPHET'S HAIR / 285 7

It was a cylinder of tinted glass cased in exquisitely wrought silver, and Hashim saw within its walls a silver pendant bearing a single strand of human hair.

Closing his fist around this unique discovery, he muttered to the boatman that he'd changed his plans, and hurried to his sanctum,9 where, behind closed doors, he feasted his eyes on his find.

There can be no doubt that Hashim the moneylender knew from the first that he was in possession of the famous relic of the Prophet Muhammad, that revered hair whose theft from its shrine at Hazratbal mosque the previous morning had created an unprecedented hue and cry in the valley.

The thieves�no doubt alarmed by the pandemonium, by the procession through the streets of endless ululating1 crocodiles of lamentation, by the riots, the political ramifications and by the massive police search which was commanded and carried out by men whose entire careers now hung upon the finding of this lost hair�had evidently panicked and hurled the vial into the gelatine bosom of the lake.

Having found it by a stroke of great good fortune, Hashim's duty as a citizen was clear: the hair must be restored to its shrine, and the state to equanimity and peace.

But the moneylender had a different notion.

All around him in his study was the evidence of his collector's mania. There were enormous glass cases full of impaled butterflies from Gulmarg, three dozen scale models in various metals of the legendary cannon Zamzama, innumerable swords, a Naga spear, ninety-four terracotta camels of the sort sold on railway station platforms, many samovars,2 and a whole zoology of tiny sandalwood animals, which had originally been carved to serve as children's bathtime toys.

'And after all,' Hashim told himself, 'the Prophet would have disapproved mightily of this relic-worship. He abhorred the idea of being deified! So, by keeping this hair from its distracted devotees, I perform�do I not?�a finer service than I would by returning it! Naturally, I don't want it for its religious value . . . I'm a man of the world, of this world. I see it purely as a secular object of great rarity and blinding beauty. In short, it's the silver vial I desire, more than the hair.

'They say there are American millionaires who purchase stolen art masterpieces and hide them away�they would know how I feel. I must, must have it!'

Every collector must share his treasures with one other human being, and Hashim summoned�and told�his only son Atta, who was deeply perturbed but, having been sworn to secrecy, only spilled the beans when the troubles became too terrible to bear.

The youth excused himself and left his father alone in the crowded solitude of his collections. Hashim was sitting erect in a hard, straight-backed chair, gazing intently at the beautiful vial.

9. Private room. 2. Apparatuses for making tea (Russian for self1. Howling. boilers).

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285 8 / SALMAN RUSHDIE

It was well known that the moneylender never ate lunch, so it was not until evening that a servant entered the sanctum to summon his master to the dining-table. He found Hashim as Atta had left him. The same, and not the same�for now the moneylender looked swollen, distended. His eyes bulged even more than they always had, they were red-rimmed, and his knuckles were white.

He seemed to be on the point of bursting! As though, under the influence of the misappropriated relic, he had filled up with some spectral fluid which might at any moment ooze uncontrollably from his every bodily opening.

He had to be helped to the table, and then the explosion did indeed take place.

Seemingly careless of the effect of his words on the carefully constructed and fragile constitution of the family's life, Hashim began to gush, to spume long streams of awful truths. In horrified silence, his children heard their father turn upon his wife, and reveal to her that for many years their marriage had been the worst of his afflictions. 'An end to politeness!' he thundered. 'An end to hypocrisy!'

Next, and in the same spirit, he revealed to his family the existence of a mistress; he informed them also of his regular visits to paid women. He told his wife that, far from being the principal beneficiary of his will, she would receive no more than the eighth portion which was her due under Islamic law. Then he turned upon his children, screaming at Atta for his lack of academic ability�'A dope! I have been cursed with a dope!'�and accusing his daughter of lasciviousness, because she went around the city barefaced, which was unseemly for any good Muslim girl to do. She should, he commanded, enter purdah3 forthwith.

Hashim left the table without having eaten and fell into the deep sleep of a man who has got many things off his chest, leaving his children stunned, in tears, and the dinner going cold on the sideboard under the gaze of an anticipatory bearer.4

At five o'clock the next morning the moneylender forced his family to rise, wash and say their prayers. From then on, he began to pray five times daily for the first time in his life, and his wife and children were obliged to do likewise.

Before breakfast, Huma saw the servants, under her father's direction, constructing a great heap of books in the garden and setting fire to it. The only volume left untouched was the Qur'an,5 which Hashim wrapped in a silken cloth and placed on a table in the hall. He ordered each member of his family to read passages from this book for at least two hours per day. Visits to the cinema were forbidden. And if Atta invited male friends to the house, Huma was to retire to her room.

Ry now, the family had entered a state of shock and dismay; but there was worse to come. That afternoon, a trembling debtor arrived at the house to confess his inability to pay the latest instalment of interest owed, and made the mistake of

3. Area of certain traditional Indian houses in 4. Servant. which Hindu or Muslim women live secluded from 5. Muslims' sacred hook: collection of the Prophet the sight of men outside their family circle. Muhammad's oral revelations.

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THE PROPHET'S HAIR / 2859

reminding Hashim, in somewhat blustering fashion, of the Quran's strictures against usury. The moneylender flew into a rage and attacked the fellow with one of his large collection of bullwhips.

By mischance, later the same day a second defaulter came to plead for time, and was seen fleeing Hashim's study with a great gash in his arm, because Huma's father had called him a thief of other men's money and had tried to cut otf the wretch's right hand with one of the thirty-eight kukri knives6 hanging on the study walls.

These breaches of the family's unwritten laws of decorum alarmed Atta and Huma, and when, that evening, their mother attempted to calm Hashim down, he struck her on the face with an open hand. Atta leapt to his mother's defence and he, too, was sent flying.

'From now on,' Hashim bellowed, 'there's going to be some discipline around here!'

The moneylender's wife began a fit of hysterics which continued throughout that night and the following day, and which so provoked her husband that he threatened her with divorce, at which she fled to her room, locked the door and subsided into a raga7 of sniffling. Huma now lost her composure, challenged her father openly, and announced (with that same independence of spirit which he had encouraged in her) that she would wear no cloth over her face; apart from anything else, it was bad for the eyes.

On hearing this, her father disowned her on the spot and gave her one week in which to pack her bags and go.

By the fourth day, the fear in the air of the house had become so thick that it was difficult to walk around. Atta told his shock-numbed sister: 'We are descending to gutter-level�but I know what must be done.'

That afternoon, Hashim left home accompanied by two hired thugs to extract the unpaid dues from his two insolvent clients. Atta went immediately to his father's study. Being the son and heir, he possessed his own key to the moneylender's safe. This he now used, and removing the little vial from its hiding-place, he slipped it into his trouser pocket and re-locked the safe door.

Now he told Huma the secret of what his father had fished out of Lake Dal, and exclaimed: 'Maybe I'm crazy�maybe the awful things that are happening have made me cracked�but I am convinced there will be no peace in our house until this hair is out of it.'

His sister at once agreed that the hair must be returned, and Atta set off in a hired shikara to Hazratbal mosque. Only when the boat had delivered him into the throng of the distraught faithful which was swirling around the desecrated shrine did Atta discover that the relic was no longer in his pocket. There was only a hole, which his mother, usually so attentive to household matters, must have overlooked under the stress of recent events.

Atta's initial surge of chagrin was quickly replaced by a feeling of profound relief. 'Suppose', he imagined, 'that I had already announced to the mullahs8 that

6. Curved knives broadening toward the point 8. Muslims learned in Islamic theology and sacred (Hindi). law. 7. Musical improvisation (Sanskrit).

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286 0 / SALMAN RUSHDIE

the hair was on my person! They would never have believed me now�and this mob would have lynched me! At any rate, it has gone, and that's a load off my mind.' Feeling more contented than he had for days, the young man returned home.

Here he found his sister bruised and weeping in the hall; upstairs, in her bedroom, his mother wailed like a brand-new widow. He begged Huma to tell him what had happened, and when she replied that their father, returning from his brutal business trip, had once again noticed a glint of silver between boat and quay, had once again scooped up the errant relic, and was consequently in a rage to end all rages, having beaten the truth out of her�then Atta buried his face in his hands and sobbed out his opinion, which was that the hair was persecuting them, and had come back to finish the job.

It was Huma's turn to think of a way out of their troubles.

While her arms turned black and blue and great stains spread across her forehead, she hugged her brother and whispered to him that she was determined to get rid of the hair at all costs�she repeated this last phrase several times.

'The hair', she then declared, 'was stolen from the mosque; so it can be stolen from this house. But it must be a genuine robbery, carried out by a bona-fide thief, not by one of us who are under the hair's thrall�by a thief so desperate that he fears neither capture nor curses.'

Unfortunately, she added, the theft would be ten times harder to pull off now that their father, knowing that there had already been one attempt on the relic, was certainly on his guard.

'Can you do it?'

Huma, in a room lit by candle and storm-lantern, ended her account with one further question: 'What assurances can you give that the job holds no terrors for you still?'

The criminal, spitting, stated that he was not in the habit of providing references, as a cook might, or a gardener, but he was not alarmed so easily, certainly not by any children's djinni9 of a curse. Huma had to be content with this boast, and proceeded to describe the details of the proposed burglary.

'Since my brother's failure to return the hair to the mosque, my father has taken to sleeping with his precious treasure under his pillow. However, he sleeps alone, and very energetically; only enter his room without waking him, and he will certainly have tossed and turned quite enough to make the theft a simple matter. When you have the vial, come to my room,' and here she handed Sheikh Sin a plan of her home, 'and I will hand over all the jewellery owned by my mother and myself. You will find .. . it is worth . . . that is, you will be able to get a fortune for it .. . '

It was evident that her self-control was weakening and that she was on the point of physical collapse. 'Tonight,' she burst out finally. 'You must come tonight!'

No sooner had she left the room than the old criminal's body was convulsed by a fit of coughing: he spat blood into an old vanaspati1 can. The great Sheikh,

9. In Muslim demonology a spirit (genie) with 1. Vegetable fat used as butter in India, supernatural powers.

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THE PROPHET'S HAIR / 2861

the 'Thief of Thieves', had become a sick man, and every day the time drew nearer when some young pretender to his power would stick a dagger in his stomach. A lifelong addiction to gambling had left him almost as poor as he had been when, decades ago, he had started out in this line of work as a mere pickpocket's apprentice; so in the extraordinary commission he had accepted from the moneylender's daughter he saw his opportunity of amassing enough wealth at a stroke to leave the valley for ever, and acquire the luxury of a respectable death which would leave his stomach intact.

As for the Prophet's hair, well, neither he nor his blind wife had ever had much to say for prophets�that was one thing they had in common with the moneylender's thunderstruck clan.

It would not do, however, to reveal the nature of this, his last crime, to his four sons. To his consternation, they had all grown up to be hopelessly devout men, who even spoke of making the pilgrimage to Mecca some day. 'Absurd!' their father would laugh at them. 'Just tell me how you will go?' For, with a parent's absolutist love, he had made sure they were all provided with a lifelong source of high income by crippling them at birth, so that, as they dragged themselves around the city, they earned excellent money in the begging business.

The children, then, could look after themselves.

He and his wife would be off soon with the jewel-boxes of the moneylender's women. It was a timely chance indeed that had brought the beautiful bruised girl into his corner of the town.

That night, the large house on the shore of the lake lay blindly waiting, with silence lapping at its walls. A burglar's night: clouds in the sky and mists on the winter water. Hashim the moneylender was asleep, the only member of his family to whom sleep had come that night. In another room, his son Atta lay deep in the coils of his coma with a blood-clot forming on his brain, watched over by a mother who had let down her long greying hair to show her grief, a mother who placed warm compresses on his head with gestures redolent of impotence. In a third bedroom Huma waited, fully dressed, amidst the jewel-heavy caskets of her desperation.

At last a bulbul2 sang softly from the garden below her window and, creeping downstairs, she opened a door to the bird, on whose face there was a scar in the shape of the Nastaliq letter sin.

Noiselessly, the bird flew up the stairs behind her. At the head of the staircase they parted, moving in opposite directions along the corridor of their conspiracy without a glance at one another.

Entering the moneylender's room with professional ease, the burglar, Sin, discovered that Huma's predictions had been wholly accurate. Hashim lay sprawled diagonally across his bed, the pillow untenanted by his head, the prize easily accessible. Step by padded step, Sin moved towards the goal.

It was at this point that, in the bedroom next door, young Atta sat bolt upright in his bed, giving his mother a great fright, and without any warning� prompted by goodness knows what pressure of the blood-clot upon his brain� began screaming at the top of his voice:

'Thief. Thief. Thief'

2. Asian song thrush.

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286 2 / SALMAN RUSHDIE

It seems probable that his poor mind had been dwelling, in these last moments, upon his own father; but it is impossible to be certain, because having uttered these three emphatic words the young man fell back upon his pillow and died.

At once his mother set up a screeching and a wailing and a keening and a howling so earsplittingly intense that they completed the work which Atta's cry had begun�that is, her laments penetrated the walls of her husband's bedroom and brought Hashim wide awake.

Sheikh Sin was just deciding whether to dive beneath the bed or brain the moneylender good and proper when Hashim grabbed the tiger-striped swords- tick which always stood propped up in a corner beside his bed, and rushed from the room without so much as noticing the burglar who stood on the opposite side of the bed in the darkness. Sm stooped quickly and removed the vial containing the Prophet's hair from its hiding-place.

Meanwhile Hashim had erupted into the corridor, having unsheathed the sword inside his cane. In his right hand he held the weapon and was waving it about dementedly. His left hand was shaking the stick. A shadow came rushing towards him through the midnight darkness of the passageway and, in his somnolent anger, the moneylender thrust his sword fatally through its heart. Turning up the light, he found that he had murdered his daughter, and under the dire influence of this accident he was so overwhelmed by remorse that he turned the sword upon himself, fell upon it and so extinguished his life. His wife, the sole surviving member of the family, was driven mad by the general carnage and had to be committed to an asylum for the insane by her brother, the city's Deputy Commissioner of Police.

Sheikh Sin had quickly understood that the plan had gone awry.

Abandoning the dream of the jewel-boxes when he was but a few yards from its fulfilment, he climbed out of Hashim's window and made his escape during the appalling events described above. Reaching home before dawn, he woke his wife and confessed his failure. It would be necessary, he whispered, for him to vanish for a while. Her blind eyes never opened until he had gone.

The noise in the Hashim household had roused their servants and even managed to awaken the night-watchman, who had been fast asleep as usual on his charpoy3 by the street-gate. They alerted the police, and the Deputy Commissioner himself was informed. When he heard of Huma's death, the mournful officer opened and read the sealed letter which his niece had given him, and instantly led a large detachment of armed men into the light-repellent gullies of the most wretched and disreputable part of the city.

The tongue of a malicious cat-burglar named Huma's fellow-conspirator; the finger of an ambitious bank-robber pointed at the house in which he lay concealed; and although Sin managed to crawl through a hatch in the attic and attempt a roof-top escape, a bullet from the Deputy Commissioner's own rifle penetrated his stomach and brought him crashing messily to the ground at the feet of Huma's enraged uncle.

From the dead thief's pocket rolled a vial of tinted glass, cased in filigree silver.

3. Light Indian bedstead.

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ANNE CARSON / 2863

Th e recovery of the Prophet's hair was announced at once on All-India Radio. On e month later, the valley's holiest me n assembled at the Hazratbal mosque and formally authenticated the relic. It sits to this day in a closely guarded vault by the shores of the loveliest of lakes in the heart of the valley which was once closer than any other place on earth to Paradise.

But before our story can properly be concluded, it is necessary to record that when the four sons of the dead Sheikh awoke on the morning of his death, having unwittingly spent a few minutes under the same roof as the famous hair, they found that a miracle had occurred, that they were all sound of limb and strong of wind, as whole as they might have been if their father had not thought to smash their legs in the first hours of their lives. They were, all four of them, very properly furious, because the miracle had reduced their earning powers by 75 per cent, at the most conservative estimate; so they were ruined men.

Only the Sheikh's widow had some reason for feeling grateful, because although her husband was dead she had regained her sight, so that it was possible for her to spend her last days gazing once more upon the beauties of the valley of Kashmir.

1981

ANNE CARSON

b. 1950 Anne Carson was born in Toronto, Canada, and grew up in Ontario, and she received both her B.A. and her Ph.D. in classics from the University of Toronto. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she has taught classics at McGill University and the University of Michigan, among other schools. Along with poetry, she has published books of criticism on classical literature; translations from Greek; and a novel-inverse, Autobiography of Red (1998).

In her poetry Carson braids together the ruminative texture of the essay, the narrative propulsion of the novel, the self-analysis of autobiography, and the lapidary compression of lyric. In "The Glass Essay," a long poem that reflects on the dislocations of identity through time, love, and madness, she vividly narrates the end of a love affair, a visit with a difficult mother, and the degeneration of a father with Alzheimer's in a nursing home. Into this semiautobiographical tale she weaves commentary on the writings of Charlotte and Emily Bronte, whose works function�like the classical texts she often incorporates into her poetry�as oblique and remote points of comparison for the poet's experience. Both personal and impersonal, Carson's poetry bridges the gap between private narrative and philosophical speculation, between self- excavation and literary-critical analysis. Tightly wound with crisp diction, studded with striking metaphors, etched with epigrams and ironies, her poems are lucid in feeling and intense in thought. They are as intellectually crystalline as they are emotionally volcanic.

.

286 4 / ANNE CARSON From The Glass Essay Hero I can tell by the way my mother chewswhether she had a good night and is about to say a happy thing or not. her toast 5 Not. She puts her toastYou know you can down on the side pull the drapes in of her plate. that room, she begins. ioThis is a coded reference to one of our oldest arguments, from what I call Th e Rules Of Life series. My mother always closes her bedroom drapes tight before going to bednight. at I open mine as wide asI like to see everything, What's there to see? possible. I say. 15Moon. Air. Sunrise. All that light on your face in theI like to wake up. morning. Wakes you up. At this point the drapes argument has reached a delta and may advance along one of three channels. There is the Wha t You Need Is A Good Night's Sleep channel, 20 the Stubborn As Your Father channel and random channel. More toast? I interpose strongly, pushing back my chair. 25Those women! saysMother has chosen Women ? my mother with an random channel. exasperated rasp. Complaining about rape all theI see she is tapping one furiouslying beside the grape jam. time� finger on yesterday's newspaper 30Th e front page has a small feature about a rally for International Women's Day � have you had a look at the Sears Summe r Catalogue? Nope. Why , it's acut way up disgrace! Those bathing suits� to here! (she points) No wonder! 35 You're saying wome n deserve to get raped because Sears bathing suit ads have high-cut legs? Ma, are you serious?

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THE GLASS ESSAY / 2865

Well someone has to be responsible. Wh y should wome n be responsible for male desire? My voice is high. Oh I see you're one of Them.

One of Whom? My voice is very high. Mother vaults it. An d whatever did you do with that little tank suit you had last year the green one? It looked so smart on you.

Th e frail fact drops on me from a great height

that my mother is afraid.

She will be eighty years old this summer.

Her tiny sharp shoulders hunched in the blue bathrobe

make me think of Emily Bronte's little merlin hawk Hero

that she fed bits of bacon at the kitchen table when Charlotte1 wasn't

around.

So Ma, we'll go�I pop up the toaster

and toss a hot slice of pumpernickel lightly across onto her plate�

visit Dad today? She eyes the kitchen clock with hostility.

Leave at eleven, home again by four? I continue. She is buttering her toast with jagged strokes. Silence is assent in our code. I go into the next room to phone the taxi.

My father lives in a hospital for patients who need chronic care

about 50 miles from here.

He suffers from a kind of dementia

characterized by two sorts of pathological change

first recorded in 1907 by Alois Alzheimer.2

First, the presence in cerebral tissue

of a spherical formation known as neuritic plaque,

consisting mainly of degenerating brain cells.

Second, neurofibrillary snarlings

in the cerebral cortex and in the hippocampus.3

There is no known cause or cure.

Mother visits him by taxi once a week

for the last five years.

Marriage is for better or for worse, she says,

this is the worse.

So about an hour later we are in the taxi

shooting along empty country roads towards town.

Th e April light is clear as an alarm.

1. Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), English novel-with Emily Bronte's. ist, author of Jane Eyre, and sister of Emily (1818� 2. German neurologist (1864-1915). 1848), author of Wuthering Heights. Throughout 3. Parts of the brain. Neurofibrils are nerve fibers. "The Glass Essay," the poet compares her own life

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286 6 / ANNE CARSON

As we pass them it gives a sudden sense of every object 75 existing in space on its own shadow. I wish I could carry this clarity with me

into the hospital where distinctions tend to flatten and coalesce. I wish I had been nicer to him before he got crazy. These are my two wishes.

so It is hard to find the beginning of dementia. I remember a night about ten years ago when I was talking to him on the telephone.

It was a Sunday night in winter. I heard his sentences filling up with fear. 85 He would start a sentence�about weather, lose his way, start another. It made me furious to hear him floundering�

my tall proud father, former World War II navigator! It made me merciless. I stood on the edge of the conversation,

90 watching him thrash about for cues, offering none, and it came to me like a slow avalanche

that he had no idea who he was talking to. Much colder today I guess. . . . 95 his voice pressed into the silence and broke off,

snow falling on it. There was a long pause while snow covered us both. Well I won't keep you,

he said with sudden desperate cheer as if sighting land. IOO I'll say goodnight now, I won't run up your bill. Goodbye.

Goodbye. Goodbye. Who are you? I said into the dial tone.

105 At the hospital we pass down long pink halls through a door with a big window and a combination lock (5�25�3)

to the west wing, for chronic care patients. Each wing has a name, i IO The chronic wing is Our Golden Mile

although mother prefers to call it The Last Lap. Father sits strapped in a chair which is tied to the wall in a room of other tied people tilting at various angles.

.

THE GLASS ESSAY / 2867

My father tilts least, I am proud of him. 115 Hi Dad how y'doing? His face cracks open it could be a grin or rage

and looking past me he issues a stream of vehemence at the air. My mother lays her hand on his. Hello love, she says. He jerks his hand away. We sit.

120 Sunlight flocks through the room. Mother begins to unpack from her handbag the things she has brought for him, grapes, arrowroot biscuits, humbugs.0 hard candies

He is addressing strenuous remarks to someone in the air between us. He uses a language known only to himself, 125 made of snarls and syllables and sudden wild appeals.

Once in a while some old formula floats up through the wash� You don't say! or Happy birthday to you!� but no real sentence

for more than three years now. BO I notice his front teeth are getting black. I wonder how you clean the teeth of mad people.

He always took good care of his teeth. My mother looks up. She and I often think two halves of one thought. Do you remember that gold-plated toothpick

135 you sent him from Harrod's4 the summer you were in London? she asks. Yes I wonder what happened to it. Must be in the bathroom somewhere.

She is giving him grapes one by one. They keep rolling out of his huge stiff fingers. MO He used to be a big man, over six feet tall and strong,

but since he came to hospital his body has shrunk to the merest bone

house� except the hands. The hands keep growing. Each one now as big as a boot in Van Gogh,5

they go lumbering after the grapes in his lap. 145 But now he turns to me with a rush of urgent syllables that break off on a high note�he waits,

staring into my face. That quizzical look. One eyebrow at an angle. I have a photograph taped to my fridge at home.

4. Department store. 5. Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Dutch postimpressionist, painted A Pair of Boots (1887).

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286 8 / PAUL MULDOON

150 It shows his World War II air crew posing in front of the plane. Hands firmly behind backs, legs wide apart, chins forward.

Dressed in the puffed flying suits with a wide leather strap pulled tight through the crotch. 155 They squint into the brilliant winter sun of 1942.

It is dawn. They are leaving Dover6 for France. My father on the far left is the tallest airman,

with his collar up, 160 one eyebrow at an angle. The shadowless light makes him look immortal,

for all the world like someone who will not weep again. He is still staring into my face. Flaps down! I cry.

165 His black grin flares once and goes out like a match.

1995

Epitaph: Zion1

Murderous little world once our objects had gazes. Our lives Were fragile, the wind Could dash them away. Here lies the refugee breather Who drank a bowl of elsewhere.

2000

6. Port on the English Channel. homeland; in Christianity, a heavenly or ideal city 1. In the Hebrew Bible the eastern hill of Jerusa- of faith, lem. In Judaism it came to symbolize a promised

PAUL MULDOON

b. 1951 Paul Muldoon was born in Portadown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland. His mother was a schoolteacher; his father, a farm laborer and mushroom grower. He grew up in, as he put it, "a little enclave of Roman Catholics living within the predominantly Protestant parish of Loughgall, the village where the Orange Order was founded in 1795." Despite inheriting strong Republican sympathies, he depicts the Catholic Church unsympathetically, even going so far as to state that there is "a very fine line between organized religion and organized crime." He was educated at the primary school in Collegelands (where his mother taught); St. Patrick's College, Armagh; and Queen's University, Belfast, where he was tutored by Seamus Heaney and came to know other poets of the "Belfast Group," such as Derek Mahon and

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MEETING THE BRITISH / 286 9

Michael Longley. He worked as a radio and television producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation in Belfast until, in the mid-1980s, he became a freelance writer and moved to the United States, where he teaches at Princeton University.

Muldoon's first published poems were written in Irish, and although he soon switched to English, Irish words and phrases continued to appear in his work. As with many other Irish poets, America soon loomed large in his imagination. Excited by American films, he adapted cinematic techniques in hectic, hallucinatory long poems. Other poems, such as "Meeting the British," parallel the plight of American Indians with that of Northern Irish Catholics. Still others, such as "The Grand Conversation," turn his marriage to the American Jewish writer Jean Korelitz into a densely specific yet allegorical poem about identity and intercultural experience. His earliest literary influence was, he said, Robert Frost's "strong, classic, lyric line. But the most important thing . . . was his mischievous, shy, multi-layered quality under the surface." It would be hard to improve on that last sentence as a description of Muldoon's own mature style, the expression of an omnivorous imagination that�in "Milkweed and Monarch," for example�mixes his parents' Collegelands grave with other geographically scattered memories into a kaleidoscopic pattern that is at once moving, musically satisfying, and a brilliant postmodern variation on the ancient poetic form of villanelle (with the repetition of its first and third lines).

Meeting the British

We met the British in the dead of winter. Th e sky was lavender

and the snow lavender-blue. I could hear, far below,

5 the sound of two streams coming together (both were frozen over)

and, no less strange, myself calling out in French

across that forest10 clearing. Neither General Jeffrey Amherst 1

nor Colonel Henry Bouquet could stomach our willow-tobacco.

As for the unusual scent whe n the Colonel shook out his hand-

I. Commander-in-chief of British forces in the French and Indian Wa r (1754�63); fought against France and its Native American allies. During Pontiac's Rebellion (1763-64), led by Ottawa chief Pontiac in the Great Lakes region, Amherst wrote to the British officer Colonel Bouquet, "Could it not be contrived to Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians?" Bouquet replied, "I will try to inocculate the Indians by means of Blankets that may fall in their hands, taking care however not to get the disease myself," to which Amherst responded, "You will Do well to try to Innoculate the Indians by means of Blanketts, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execreble Race." Apparently as a result of this and similar plans of other British officers, many Native Americans in the area, never having been exposed to smallpox, were killed by the disease in 1763�64. Pontiac concluded a peace treaty with the British in July 1766.

.

287 0 / PAUL MULDOON

kerchief: C'est la lavande, une fleur mauve comme le del.2

They gave us six fishhooks and two blankets embroidered with smallpox.

Gathering Mushrooms

Th e rain comes flapping through the yard like a tablecloth that she hand-embroidered. My mother has left it on the line. It is sodden with rain.

5 The mushroom shed is windowless, wide, its high-stacked wooden trays hosed down with formaldehyde.1 An d my father has opened the Gates of Troy2 to that first load of horse manure.

10 Barley straw. Gypsum.3 Dried blood. Ammonia.

Wago n after wagon blusters in, a self-renewing gold-black dragon we push to the back of the mind. We have taken our pitchforks to the wind.

15 All brought back to me that September evening fifteen years on. Th e pair of us tripping through Barnett's fair demesne0 domain like girls in long dresses after a hail-storm.

20 We might have been thinking of the fire-bomb that sent Malone House4 sky-high and its priceless collection of linen sky-high. We might have wept with Elizabeth McCrum .

25 We were thinking only of psilocybin.3 You sang of the maid you met on the dewy grass�

And she stooped so low gave me to know it was mushrooms she was gathering O.

He'll be wearing that same old donkey-jacket6

30 and the sawn-off waders. He carries a knife, two punnets,7 a bucket. He reaches far into his own shadow. We'll have taken him unawares and stand behind him, slightly to one side.

2. It is lavender, a flower purple as the sky ter of Paris. (French). 4. A mansion in Barnett Demesne, Belfast, 1. Formic-acid disinfectant. bombed in 1976. 2. City besieged by the Greeks in Homer's Iliad. 5. Hallucinogenic drug made from mushrooms. Its walls could not be destroyed from without, and 6. Strong jacket with leather shoulder patches. it was finally captured only by a trick. 7. Small shallow baskets for fruit or vegetables. 3. Hydrated calcium sulfate, used for making plas

.

MILKWEE D AN D MONARC H / 287 1 35 He is one of those ancient warriors 40before the rising tide. He'll glance back from under his peaked cap without breaking rhythm: his coaxing a mushroom� a flat or a cup � the nick against his right thumb; the bucket then, the punnet to left or right, and so on and so forth till kingdom come. 4550We followed the overgrown tow-path by the Lagan.8 Th e sunset would deepen through cinnamon to aubergine, the wood-pigeon's concerto for oboe and strings, allegro, blowing your mind. An d you were suddenly out of my ken, hurtling towards the ever-receding ground, into the ma w 55of a shimmering green-gold dragon. You discovered yourself in some outbuilding with your long-lost companion, me, though my head had grown into the head of a that shook its dirty-fair mane and spoke this verse: horse 606570Come back to us. However cold and raw, your feet were always meant to negotiate terms with bare cement. Beyond this concrete wall is a wall of concrete and barbed wire. Your only hope is to come back. If sing you must, let your song tell of treading your own dung, let straw and dung give a spring to your step. If we never live to see the day we leap into our true domain, lie down with us now and wrap yourself in the soiled grey blanket of Irish rain that will, one day, bleach itself white. Lie down with us and wait. 1983 Milkweed and Monarch As he knelt by the grave of his mother andthe taste of dill, or tarragon� he could barely tell one from the other� father 5filled his mouth. It seemed as if he might Wh y should he be stricken with grief, not for his mother and father, smother. 8. Mai n river in Belfast.

.

2872 / PAUL MULDOON

but a woman slinking from the fur of a sea-otter in Portland, Maine, or, yes, Portland, Oregon � he could barely tell one from the other�

10 and why should he now savour the tang of her, her little pickled gherkin, as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father?

He looked about. He remembered her palaver on how both earth and sky would darken� 15 "You could barely tell one from the other"�

while the Monarch butterflies passed over in their milkweed-hunger: "A wing-beat, some reckon, may trigger off the mother and father

of all storms, striking your Irish Cliffs of Moher 20 with the force of a hurricane." Then: "Milkweed and Monarch 'invented' each other."

He looked about. Cow's-parsley in a samovar.1 He'd mistaken his mother's name, "Regan", for "Anger": as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father

25 he could barely tell one from the other.

1994

The Grand Conversation

She. My people came from Korelitz1 where they grew yellow cucumbers and studied the Talmud.2 He. Mine pored over the mud

5 of mangold-0 and potato-pits a beet or flicked through kale plants from Comber3 as bibliomancers of old went a-flicking through deckle-mold.4

She. Mine would lie low in the shtetl'

io when they heard the distant thunder stolen by the Cossacks.6 He. It was potato sacks lumped together on a settle0 long wooden bed or bench

1. Russian tea urn. "Bibliomancers": people wh o predicted the future 1. Town, now in Belarus, once famous for its from the text in a book opened at random. cucumbers. During World Wa r II the Nazis largely 5. Former Jewish village-communities of Eastern massacred its population. Europe. 2. Collection of writings that constitutes the Jew-6. A Polish people known for their horsemanship, ish civil and religious law. they massacred perhaps a hundred thousand 3. Village in Northern Ireland. Polish Jews in 1648^19. 4. Rough edges of pages before they are trimmed.

.

CAROL ANN DUFFY / 2873

mine found themselves lying under, 15 the Peep O'Day Boys from Loughgall making Defenders7 of us all. She. Mine once controlled the sugar trade from the islets of Langerhans8 and were granted the deed 20 to Charlottesville." He. Indeed? city in Virginia My people called a spade a spade and were admitted to the hanse� merchant guild of pike- and pickax-men, shovels leaning to their lean-to hovels. 25 She. Mine were trained to make a suture after the bomb and the bombast have done their very worst. He. Between fearsad and verst9 we may yet construct our future 30 as we've reconstructed our past and cry out, my love, each to each from his or her own quicken-queach.1 She. Each from his stand of mountain ash will cry out over valley farms 35 spotlit with pear blossom. He. There some young Absalom2 picks his way through cache after cache of ammunition and small arms hidden in grain wells, while his nag 40 tugs at a rein caught on a snag. 2002

7. Eighteenth-century Catholic group in Ireland mile. "Fearsad": sandbank (Irish). that fought Protestants who called themselves the 1. "Queach": dense growth of bushes. Cf. T. S. Peep O'Day Boys. "Loughgall": village where Prot-Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": "Doestants formed a larger coalition, the Orange dare to eat a peach? /.. . I have heard the mer- Order, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. maids singing, each to each." 8. The groups of cells in the pancreas that pro-2. King David's son, killed leading a rebellion duce the hormone insulin, which regulates the against his father (2 Samuel). Riding his mule, he sugar level in the bloodstream. was accidentally hung up on a low branch and was 9. Russian land measure, roughly two-thirds of a thus made vulnerable to enemy spears. CAROL ANN DUFFY

b. 1955 Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow, Scotland, to an Irish mother and a Scottish father in a working-class Catholic family. After moving as a child to Stafford, England, she was educated there at St. Joseph's Convent and at Stafford Girls' High School, before studying philosophy at the University of Liverpool. She worked in television, edited a poetry magazine, and taught creative writing in London's schools, and since 1996 she has lectured at Manchester Metropolitan University.

A playwright as well as poet, Duffy is especially skillful in her use of dramatic

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287 4 / CAROL ANN DUFFY

monologue, fashioning and assuming the voices of mythological, historical, and Active characters, such as Medusa or Lazarus's imaginary wife. Such poetic ventriloquism is well suited to her feminist revisions of myth and history: it enables her to dramatize a silenced or marginalized female perspective, wittily playing on the ironic contrast between the traditional version of a narrative and her own. The biblical story of Lazarus's resurrection, for example, looks different from the perspective of his wife, who upon his miraculous return from the dead scoffs: "I breathed / his stench."

The author of love poetry and political satire as well as dramatic monologues, Duffy has a sharp eye for detail and uses it deftly in poems characterized by their sensuality, economy, and exuberance. Working in well-constructed stanzas, carefully pacing her rhythms, playing on half-rhymes, effectively conjuring the senses of touch, smell, and sight, she mobilizes the resources of traditional lyric and turns them to contemporary ends�the remaking of master narratives, the celebration of lesbian desire.

Warming Her Pearls

for Judith Radstone1

Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress bids me wear them, warm them, until evening when I'll brush her hair. At six, I place them round her cool, white throat. All day I think of her,

5 resting in the Yellow Room, contemplating silk or taffeta, which gown tonight? She fans herself whilst I work willingly, my slow heat entering each pearl. Slack on my neck, her rope.

She's beautiful. I dream about her

10 in my attic bed; picture her dancing with tall men, puzzled by my faint, persistent scent beneath her French perfume, her milky stones.

I dust her shoulders with a rabbit's foot, watch the soft blush seep through her skin is like an indolent sigh. In her looking-glass my red lips part as though I want to speak.

Full moon. Her carriage brings her home. I see her every movement in my head . . . Undressing, taking off her jewels, her slim hand reaching

20 for the case, slipping naked into bed, the way

she always does . . . And I lie here awake, knowing the pearls are cooling even now in the room where my mistress sleeps. All night I feel their absence and I burn.

1987

1. British political activist and bookseller (1925� with Radstone about the practice of ladies' maids 2001). According to Radstone's obituary in The increasing the luster of their mistresses' pearls by Guardian, the poem was inspired by a conversation wearing them beneath their clothes.

.

MEDUSA / 2875

Medusa1

A suspicion, a doubt, a jealousy grew in my mind, which turned the hairs on my head to filthy snakes, as though my thoughts

5 hissed and spat on my scalp.

My bride's breath soured, stank in the grey bags of my lungs. I'm foul mouthed now, foul tongued, yellow fanged.

10 There are bullet tears in my eyes. Are you terrified?

Be terrified. It's you I love, perfect man, Greek God, my own;

15 but I know you'll go, betray me, stray from home. So better by far for me if you were stone.

I glanced at a buzzing bee,

a dull grey pebble fell

20 to the ground. I glanced at a singing bird, a handful of dusty gravel spattered down.

I looked at a ginger cat,

25 a housebrick shattered a bowl of milk. I looked at a snuffling pig, a boulder rolled in a heap of shit.

30 I stared in the mirror. Love gone bad showed me a Gorgon. I stared at a dragon. Fire spewed

35 from the mouth of a mountain.

And here you come with a shield for a heart and a sword for a tongue and your girls, your girls.

1. In Greek mythology the mortal, snake-haired shield given him by Athena, Perseus cut off gorgon with the power to turn anyone who gazed Medusa's head as she slept, upon her into stone. Looking at her reflection in a

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287 6 / CAROL ANN DUFFY

40 Wasn't I beautiful? Wasn't I fragrant and young?

Look at me now.

1999

Mrs Lazarus1 5I had grieved. I had wept for a night and a day over my loss, ripped the cloth I was married in from my breasts, howled, shrieked, clawed at the burial stones till my hands bled, retched his name over and over again, dead, dead. 10Gone home. Gutted the place. Slept in a single cot, widow, one empty glove, white femur in the dust, half. Stuffed dark suits into black bags, shuffled in a dead man's shoes, noosed the double knot of a tie round my bare neck, isgaunt nun in the mirror, touching herself. I learnt the Stations of Bereavement,2 the icon of my face in each bleak frame; but all those months he was going away from me, dwindling to the shrunk size of a snapshot, going, 20going. Till his name was no longer a certain spell for his face. The last hair on his head floated out from a book. His scent went from the house. The will was read. See, he was vanishing to the small zero held by the gold of my ring. 25Then he was gone. Then he was legend, language; my arm on the arm of the schoolteacher�the shock of a man's strength under the sleeve of his coat� along the hedgerows. But I was faithful for as long as it took. Until he was memory. soSo I could stand that evening in the field in a shawl of fine air, healed, able to watch the edge of the moon occur to the sky and a hare thump from a hedge; then notice the village men running towards me, shouting,

1. Lazarus was the man raised from the dead by fourteen icons (pictures or carvings) correspond- Jesus (John 11). ing to the stages of Jesus' crucifixion and over each 2. Allusion to the Stations of the Cross, a series of of which a prayer is said.

.

MR S LAZARU S / 287 7 35behind them the women and children, barking dogs, and I knew. I knew by the sly light on the blacksmith's face, the shrill eyes of the barmaid, the sudden hands bearing me into the hot tang of the crowd parting before me. 40He lived. I saw the horror on his face. I heard his mother's crazy song. I breathed his stench; my bridegroom in his rotting shroud, moist and dishevelled from the grave's slack chew, croaking his cuckold name, disinherited, out of his time. 1999

.

Poems in Process

Poets have often claimed that their poems were not willed but were inspired, whether by a muse or by divine visitation, or that they emerged full-blown from the poet's unconscious mind. But poets' often untidy manuscripts tell another story, suggesting that, however involuntary the origin of a poem, vision has usually been followed by revision.

Writers have described the second thoughts recorded in their working manuscripts in a number of ways. Revision may be viewed as a work of refinement and clarification, a process revealing or bringing out more vividly a meaning the author always had in mind. In this account, revision involves the perfection of an original, singular intention. But this understanding of revision has not satisfied authors who reject a notion of identity as something given and unchanging and who might be inclined to see revision as a process that makes something new. As W. B. Yeats, a compulsive reviser, wrote in 1908: "The friends that have it I do wrong / Whenever I remake a song, /

Should know what issue is at stake: / It is myself that I remake." And people besides the poet can have a hand in the process of revision. As the "Publishing History, Censorship" section of our literary terms appendix outlines, many individuals participate in the labor that takes texts from the forms in which authors produce them to the forms in which they are presented to readers; in a similar if more limited way, revision, too, involves a range of collaborators, both institutional and personal, witting and unwitting. A revised text might, for instance, incorporate changes introduced by the amanuensis who recopies the draft so as to prepare a fair copy for the printer (a role women such as Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley often played in the nineteenth century�on occasion, Mary Shelley seems to have had primary responsibility for Lord Byron's punctuation). The second thoughts at stake in a revision might reflect the input of trusted advisors and editors, the poet's attempt to anticipate the response of hostile critics or readers, or (as was often the case with the revisions in which William Wordsworth and Yeats engaged) the poet's efforts to bring the political and aesthetic values of the poem into line with the changing times.

Although some earlier manuscripts have survived, it was not until the nineteenth century, when a relatively new conception of authorship as a career gained widespread acceptance, that poets' working drafts began to be preserved with any regularity. The examples from major poets that are transcribed here represent various stages in the composition of a poem, and a variety of procedures by individual poets. The selections from William Blake, Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are drafts that were written, emended, crossed out, and rewritten in the heat of first invention; while poems by William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Yeats are shown in successive stages of revision over an extended period of time. Shelley's "O World, O Life, O Time" originated in a few key nouns, together with an abstract rhythmic pattern that was only later fleshed out with words. Still other poems�Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott"; Yeats's "The Sorrow of Love"�were subjected to radical revision long after the initial versions had been committed to print. In these examples we look on as poets (no matter how rapidly they achieve a result they are willing to let stand) carry on their inevitably tentative efforts to meet the multiple requirements of meaning, syntax, meter, sound pattern, and the constraints imposed by a chosen stanza.

Ou r transcriptions from the poets' drafts attempt to reproduce, as accurately as the change from script to print will allow, the appearance of the original manuscript page.

A1

.

A2 / POEMS IN PROCESS

A poet's first attempt at a line or phrase is reproduced in larger type, the emendations in smaller type. The line numbers in the headings that identify an excerpt are those of the final form of the complete poem, as reprinted in this anthology, above.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Autograph Poetry1 in the English Language, 2 manuscript drafts; the Cornell Wordsworth, in vols., 1973, compiled by P. J. Croft, reproduces process, reproduces, transcribes, and discusses and transcribes one or more pages of manuscript various versions of Wordsworth's poems from in the poet's ow n hand, from the fourteenth cen-the first manuscript drafts to the final publitury to the late twentieth century. Volume 1 cation in his lifetime, and the Cornell Yeats, includes William Blake and Robert Burns; vol-also in process, does the same for Yeats. The ume 2 includes many of the other poets repre-Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, under the gensented in this volume of The Norton Anthology eral editorship of Donald Reiman, reproduces of English Literature, from William Wordsworth facsimiles of Percy Shelley's manuscripts. For to Dylan Thomas. Books that discuss the pro-facsimiles and transcripts of Keats's poems, see cess of composition and revision, with examples John Keats: Poetry Manuscripts at Harvard, ed. from the manuscripts and printed versions of Jack Stillinger, 1990. Jon Stalhvorthy, Between poems, are Charles D. Abbott, ed., Poets at the Lines: Yeats's Poetry in the Making, 1963, Work, 1948; Phyllis Bartlett, Poems in Process, reproduces and analyzes the sequential drafts

1951; A. F. Scott, The Poet's Craft, 1957; of a number of Yeats's major poems. Valerie George Bornstein, Poetic Remaking: The Art of Eliot has edited T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land: Browning, Yeats, and Pound, 1988; and Robert A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Brinldey and Keith Hanley, eds., Romantic Revi-Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, sions, 1992. In Word for Word: A Study of 1971, while Dame Helen Gardner has tran- Authors' Alteratiotis, 1965, Wallace Hildick ana-scribed and analyzed the manuscript drafts of lyzes the composition of prose fiction as w.ell as Eliot's Four Quartets in The Composition of poems. Byron's "Don fuan," ed. T. G. Steffan Four Quartets, 1978. and W. W. Pratt, 4 vols., 1957, transcribes the

WILLIAM BLAKE The Tyger1

[First Draft]

The Tyger

1 Tyger Tyger burning bright In the forestl of the night What immorlal hand or eye

Aw CUil 111 Plaine |hy fearful symmetry

Burnt in

2 III WLIAI distant deeps or skies

�MIL UUU Duilll LLIU firelof thine eyes On what wings dare he aspire What the hanJ dare sieze the fire 3 And what shoi der & what art Could twist th< sinews of thy heart And when thy eart began to beat What dread hai d & what dread feet

1. These drafts have been taken from a notebook man's edition of The Notebook of William Blake used by William Blake, called the Rossetti MS (1973) contains a photographic facsimile. The because it was once owned by Dante Gabriel Ros-stanza and line numbers were written by Blake in setti, the Victorian poet and painter; David V. Erd-the manuscript.

.

POEMS IN PROCESS / A3

Titiuin L! ITR funidLL deep i ill) Inn id i iljj dmo ctaiiip

�frntre weft of-� ingumc woe .In nlial vAd

JWoe thy oyes A IHl t i nlId

What the han mer w hat the chain

In what furna e was thy brain

dread grasp

What the anv 1 what Dare �Oiulll its deadly terrors clanp pros]* clasp

Tyger Tyger b ir "ning bright In the forests if the night What immorti hand & eye

frame

Dare forirr thy fearful symmetry

[Trial Stanzas]

Brhmt in distant deeps orgies The\ruel fire o\ thine eye,\ CoulcMieart descend or wings aspire What the hand dabe sieze theNfire

dare he smiln liunh

/

And did he laugh his work to see

ankle

What the sliuuldfLU'llkL Llie knee-

Dare

4 OitHhe who made the lamb make thee 1 When the stars threw down their spears 2 And waterd heaven with their tears

[Second Fidl Draft]

ityger Tyger burning bright , InVhe forests ofcthe night yS WhVt Immortal Band & eye / DareYrame thy fearful symmetry

And what shoulder & Vhat art

Could twist the sineyre qf thy heart

And when my he^ft begaio to beat

What dread \aria & what oread feet

When tHe stars fihrew down thoir spears

AncLwatcrd heaven with their tears

Din he smile his wWv to see \ /Did he who made tnfe lamb make tnfe?

.

A4 / POEMS IN PROCESS

f"yger Tyger buhung"15right In mNJorestj^ffth^iight What ip>t^ortal hand Ss^eye DjP^TramtSlhy fearful syWnetry

[Final Version, 1794]2

The Tyger

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes! On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears And water'd heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger, Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH She dwelt among the untrodden ways

[Version in a Letter to Coleridge, December 1798 or January 1799]'

My hope was one, from cities far Nursed on a lonesome heath: Her lips were red as roses are, Her hair a woodbine wreath.

2. As published in Songs of Experience. deleting two stanzas, and making a few verbal 1. Printed in Ernest de Selincourt's Early Letters changes, Wordsworth achieved the terse published of William and Dorothy Wordsivorth (1935). By form of his great dirge.

.

POEMS IN PROCESS / A5

She lived among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A maid whom there were none to praise, An d very few to love;

A violet by a mossy stone Half-hidden from the eye! Fair as a star when only one Is shining in the sky!

An d she was graceful as the broom That flowers by Carron's side;2 But slow distemper checked her bloom, And on the Heath she died.

Long time before her head lay low Dead to the world was she: But now she's in her grave, and Oh! Th e difference to me!

tFinal Version, 1800]3

Song

She dwelt among th' untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A Maid whom there were none to praise An d very few to love.

A Violet by a mossy stone Half-hidden from the Eye! �Fair, as a star when only one Is shining in the sky!

She liv'd unknown, and few could know Whe n Lucy ceas'd to be; But she is in her Grave, and Oh! Th e difference to me.

LORD BYRON From Don Juan1 [First Draft: Canto 3, Stanza 9]

Life ij a pluy and men. All tragedies are finished by a death, All Comedies are ended by a marriage,

2. The Carron is a river in northwestern Scotland. 1. Reproduced from transcripts made of Byron's "Broom" (preceding line) is a shrub with long slen-manuscripts in T. G. Steffan and W. W. Pratt, der branches and yellow flowers. Byron's "Don Juan" (1957). The stanzas were pub3. As published in the second edition of Lyrical lished by Byron in their emended form. Ballads.

.

A6 / POEMS IN PROCESS

For Life caw go no furthor

There two form the last gasp of Pyimmn'r brinth

All furthor ic a blank�I rUcporpgc

Thut holy ifnfr�but cortainly beneath

Tho Sun�of human thingo �

Tin ii 11 ii in Ipyrllrri) and hnnmn hrrnth

e. TUunu piiii>h tin L|ii^uilli uf liummi IjlLJlll. Or nnv The future states of both are left to faith,

T :fj rnH " ' like nit to disparage

-Tin. For authors think description might disparage

fear

Ti- "t�p" thnt ]�t" nr � try tn ?]

With nith Jii III

lluil |||)I | I uf tlnj Cutliulii liiilli

.Moor go beyond unrl � l-..^ coo� ^ fli-�if| mifirrinrr So dramaj clooc M'ith death or rrnttlnimiiiit fot life V1111:1 � j

_T'-I '��� ' "-' �' � LLR

And lien describing lithu -

Jn MURB^AAJATTTNRN nf n iliinil MMJ* HI1 ..ill

A-'-'-�' ; u

The worlds to come of both�^for fall beneath, And frH" bufli tin nuildj would blomc thorn for miccnrringo

And then both worlds would punish their miscarriage�

-Go leaning buth with pi'ieat & prayerboult lead) *

So leaving f'lnrfl iimh n e

They say no more of death or of the Lady.

[First Draft: Canto 14, Stanza 95]

quote seldom

Alas! I opoalt by Experience�never yet X had a pjuinuui� Ulld I've had many� >l.l IIUI Jlliull

�Tu wlium I did nut Ldust. a deep regret� i gQjjg seasaB regret

For Whom�I did not feel myoelf a Zany� Alas! by all experience, seldom yet (I merely quote what I have heard from many) Ha d lovers not some reason to regret The passion which made Solomon a Zany.

I've also seen some wives�not to forget�

Th e marriage state�the best or worst of any �

were paragons

Wh o wa r the very pui agtin of wives, Yet made the misery of both uui lives.

rrt*at least two

.

POEMS IN PROCESS / A7

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

The three stages of this poem labeled "First Draft" are scattered through one of Shelley's notebooks, now in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California; these drafts have been transcribed and analyzed by Bennett Weaver, "Shelley Works Out the Rhythm of A Lament," PMLA 47 (1932): 570-76. They show Shelley working with fragmentary words and phrases, and simultaneously with a wordless pattern of pulses that marked out the meter of the single lines and the shape of the lyric stanzas. Shelley left this draft unfinished.

Apparently at some later time, Shelley returned to the poem and wrote what is here called the "Second Draft"; from this he then made, on a second page, a revised fair copy that provided the text that Mary Shelley published in 1824, after the poet's death. These two manuscript pages are now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the first page is photographically reproduced and discussed by John Carter and John Sparrow, "Shelley, Swinburne, and Housman," Times Literary Supplement, November 21, 1968, pp. 1318-19.

O World, O Life, O Time

[First Draft, Stage 1} Ah time, oh night, oh day N i nnl IRI HQ, HO ni- N i I HI ni na, ni no Oh life O death, O time Tim e a di �Mo u Tim e Ah time, j a time O-tim e [First Draft, Stage 2] O h time, o h night o h day �O day uli Hl^lit, alas -��Death time night otr- Oh , Tim e Oh time o night oh day [First Draft, Stage 3] N a na, n a n a n a n a N a n a n a n a na�n a n a N a n a n a n a n a n a N a n a n a n a n a a n a N a n a na�n a na�n a n a N a n a n a na�n a n a n a n a n a N a n a n a n a na. N a n a N a n a n a n a na

.

A8 / POEMS IN PROCESS

Na na Na na na na na " na!

Oh time, oh night, o day

alas

O day soronest, o day O day alas the day

That thou shouldst sleep when we awake to say

O time time�o death�o day

for

O day, o death life is far from thee O thou wert never free For death is now with thee

-And life io far fi'om � O death, o day for life is far from thee

[Second Draft]1 ^ ^ ^

Out of the day & night A joy has taken flight Fresh spring & summer & winter hoar Fill my faint heart with grief, but with delight No more�o never more!

Wi-.

�VTTt

O World, o life, o time

�Will yU" On whose last steps I climb Trembling at those which I have trod2 before Whe n will return the glory of yr prime No more Oh never more

Out of the day & night A joy has taken flight�

autumn

-Fl'ULIR Green spring, & JUIIIIIILI & winter hoar

[FAIR COPY]

O World o Life o Time On whose last steps I climb Trembling at that where I had stood before

Whe n will return the glory of yr prime? No more, o never more

1. Shelley apparently wrote the first stanza of this the poem. draft low down on the page, and ran out of space For this draft and information, and for the tranafter crowding in the third line of the second script of the fair copy that follows, the editors are stanza; he then, in a lighter ink, wrote a revised indebted to Donald 11. Reiman. form of the whole of the second stanza at the top 2. Shelley at first wrote "trod," then overwrote that of the page. In this revision he left a space after with "stood." In the following line, Shelley at first "summer" in line 3, indicating that he planned an wrote "yr," then overwrote "thy." insertion that would fill out the four-foot meter of 3. Not clearly legible; it is either "gra" or "gre." A this line, and so make it match the five feet in the difference in the ink from the rest of the line indicorresponding line of the first stanza. cates that Shelley, having left a blank space, later In the upper right-hand corner of this manu-started to fill it in, but thought better of it and script page, Shelley wrote "1 am despair"�seem-crossed out the fragmentary insertion. ingly to express his bleak mood at the time he wrote

.

POEMS IN PROCESS / A9

2

Ou t of the day & night A joy has taken flight Fresh spring & summer 4 & winter hoar Move my faint heart with grief but with delight No more, o, never more

JOHN KEATS From The Eve of St. Agnes1 [Stanza 26]

heart rorives�her payers said

-J^Jj^MeeJv pearled

strips her hat of all its * w realms pearl

jt soonall fvs heart revives�her prating done, itsVreathed \earl she stripV her hair he\ warmed jkwels one by atie

[HERE KEATS BEGINS A NE W SHEET]

Loosens h"r frngr int hnrH''''3 and doth harp

26

Anon

Dui !>uui* his heart revives�her praying done,

frees:

Of all its wreathe'd pearl her hair she stripo Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one

by degrees

4. This fair copy of the second draft retains, and poem contains additional changes in wording. even enlarges, the blank space, indicating that That published version also incorporates revisions Shelley still hasn't made up his mind what to insert introduced by other hands. Because Keats's friend after the word "summer." We may speculate, by Richard Woodhouse and his publisher, John Tayreference to the fragmentary version of this stanza lor, took alarm at the suggestion, made more in the second draft, that he had in mind as possi-explicit in one of the stanzas Keats added to his bilities either an adjective, "gray" or "green," or else original draft, that the pleasure of which Madeline the noun "autumn." Mary Shelley closed up this would dream would include sexual pleasure particspace when she published the poem in 1824, with ularly, they worked over Woodhouse's transcripts the result that editors, following her version, have of the poem and produced a less risque text that until very recently printed this line as though Shel-combined Keats's draft and his revised fair copy ley had intended it to be one metric foot shorter along with, as Jack Stillinger has conjectured, their than the corresponding line of stanza 1. ow n suggestions. 1. Transcribed from Keats's first draft of all but For a photographic reproduction of the page of the first seven stanzas of The Eve of St. Agnes; the the holograph manuscript of The Eve of St. Agnes manuscript is now in the Houghton Library, Har-containing the poem's stanza 30, see the color vard University. Keats's published version of the insert.

.

A10 / POEMS IN PROCESS

Loosens her fragrant boddice: inH rlnu n olipc Her sweet attire folio light omopo dum i by

creeps rusteling to her knees

Mermaid in sea weed

Half hidden lil i _i 'isn iTnf llm Bi r And nioiL inclodioua

dreaming

She stands awhile in a thought; and sees

on

In fancy fair Saint Agnes j/ t her bed But dares not look behind or all the charm is(ii/idead

[Stanza 30]

But

And rlill oho alept: An d still she slept an azure-lidded sleep In blanched linen, smooth and lavender'd While he from frorth the closet brough a heap

Of candied tift-fc LIU, uitli apple Quince and plumb and gourd creamed Wit h jellies soother than the dai^r curd tinct An d lucent "ymp-jjmnnth with ciannamon -And juguf'd datoc from thit nrr Fnphnitnr fnrd. 1 � 11 � ' ;j- -�--� Manna and daites in J in I ' i ('ill O i\ad Mann a wild and Bragantino � S 3 I sugar'd dates transferred � In Bi'ijj,a�tinc from TUL Fro m fez�and spiced danties every one From wmltliji Samarchand to cedard lebanon silken T o Autumn 2 Season of Mists and mellow fruitfulness Close bosom friend of the naturring sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless Th e Vines with fruit that round the thatch eves run To bend with apples the moss'd Cottage trees An d fill all furuits with sweeness to the core To swell the gourd, and plump the hazle shells Wit h a white kernel; to set budding more An d still more later flowers for the bees Until they think warn days with never cease For Summe r has o'erbrimm'd their clammy cells� 2. From an untitled manuscript�apparently idly, in a state of creative excitement. Keats made

Keats's first draft of the poem�in the Houghton a few further changes before publishing the poem Library, Harvard University. The many pen-slips in the form included in the selections above. and errors in spelling indicate that Keats wrote rap

.

POEMS IN PROCESS / A11

oft amid thy stores?

Wh o hath not seen thce?-fan' thy haunta ai'c many

abroad

Sometimes whoeever seeks fai1 tliot* may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floorr Thy hair soft lifted by the winnowing wind

Or on a half reap'd furrow sound asleep Dos'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers

-Spam fui auiiiL jluiubiuus minutes the IILA! swath;

An d sometimes like a gleans thost dost keep Steady thy laden head across the brook; Or by a Cyder-press with patent look

Tho u watchest the last oozing hours by hours

Wher e are the songs of Sping? Aye where are they? Think not of them thou hast thy music too�

barred bloom

While -a guld" clouds ^ildsihe soft-dying day

And with

�AflTf Touching LllU the stibble plains ^rosy hue� Then in a waiful quire the small gnats mourn Amon g the river sallows, eu the "borne afots Or sinking as the light wind lives and dies; And full grown Lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn, Hedge crickets sing, and now again full soft Th e Redbreast whistles from a garden croft:

I\IID HUH fiuuk Mill

And Gather'd Swallows twiter in the Skies�

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON From The Lady of Shalott1 [Version of 1832]

PART TH E FIRST.

On either side the river lie Long fields of barley and of rye, That clothe the wold, and meet the sky. An d thro' the field the road runs by

1. First published in Tennyson's Poems of 1832 of 1832. The final form of the poem reprinted in (dated 1833 on the title page). The volume was the selections from Tennyson, above, differs from severely criticized by some reviewers; partly in the revised version that Tennyson published in response to this criticism, Tennyson radically 1842 only in line 157, which in 1842 read "A corse revised a number of the poems, including "The between the houses high"; Tennyson changed the Lady of Shalott," before reprinting them in his line to "Dead-pale between the houses high" in Poems (1842). 1855. Parts 1 and 4 are reproduced here in the version

.

A1 2 / POEMS IN PROCESS

To manytowered Camelot. Th e yellowleaved waterlily, Th e greensheathed daffodilly, Tremble in the water chilly,

Round about Shallot.

Willows whiten, aspens shiver, The sunbeam-showers break and quiver In the stream that runneth ever By the island in the river,

Flowing down to Camelot. Four gray walls and four gray towers Overlook a space of flowers, An d the silent isle imbowers

The Lady of Shallot.

Underneath the bearded barley, Th e reaper, reaping late and early, Hears her ever chanting cheerly, Like an angel, singing clearly,

O'er the stream of Camelot. Piling the sheaves in furrows airy, Beneath the moon, the reaper weary Listening whispers, " 'tis the fairy

Lady of Shalott."

Th e little isle is all inrailed Wit h a rose-fence, and overtrailed Wit h roses: by the marge unhailed Th e shallop flitteth silkensailed,

Skimming down to Camelot. A pearlgarland winds her head: She leaneth on a velvet bed, Full royally apparelled,

Th e Lady of Shalott.

* $ >f PART THE FOURTH.

In the stormy eastwind straining Th e pale-yellow woods were waning, Th e broad stream in his banks complaining, Heavily the low sky raining

Over towered Camelot: Outside the isle a shallow boat Beneath a willow lay afloat, Below the carven stern she wrote,

THE LADY OF SHALOTT.

A cloudwhite crown of pearl she dight. All raimented in snowy white That loosely flew, (her zone in sight, Clasped with one blinding diamond bright,)

.

POEMS IN PROCESS / A1 3

Her wide eyes fixed on Camelot, Though the squally eastwind keenly Blew, with folded arms serenely By the water stood the queenly

Lady of Shalott.

With a steady, stony glance�

Like some bold seer in a trance,

Beholding all his own mischance,

Mute, with a glassy countenance�

She looked down to Camelot.

It was the closing of the day,

She loosed the chain, and down she lay,

Th e broad stream bore her far away,

Th e Lady of Shalott.

As when to sailors while they roam,

By creeks and outfalls far from home,

Rising and dropping with the foam,

From dying swans wild warblings come,

Blown shoreward; so to Camelot

Still as the boathead wound along

Th e willowy hills and fields among,

They heard her chanting her deathsong,

The Lady of Shalott.

A longdrawn carol, mournful, holy,

She chanted loudly, chanted lowly,

Till her eyes were darkened wholly,

An d her smooth face sharpened slowly

Turned to towered Camelot:

For ere she reached upon the tide

Th e first house by the waterside,

Singing in her song she died,

Th e Lady of Shalott.

Under tower and balcony,

By gardenwall and gallery,

A pale, pale corpse she floated by,

Deadcold, between the houses high.

Dead into towered Camelot.

Knight and burgher, lord and dame,

To the planked wharfage came:

Below the stern they read her name,

"The Lady of Shalott."

The y crossed themselves, their stars they blest,

Knight, ministrel, abbot, squire and guest.

There lay a parchment on her breast,

That puzzled more than all the rest,

Th e wellfed wits at Camelot.

"The web was woven curiously

.

A14 / POEMS IN PROCESS

The charm is broken utterly, Draw near and fear not�this is I, The Lady of Shalott."

From Tithonus2 [Lines 1-10]

[TRINITY COLLEGE MANUSCRIPT]

Ay me! Ay me! the woods decay & fall

The jtau blaiL uut 0. ULULI liji ii^uim �

the

Th e vapours weep their substance to ground Man ^ comes & tills the earth & lies beneath And after many summers dies the cooo swan Me only fatal immortality Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms: Here at the quiet limit of the world

e yet

A white-haired shadewroaming like a dream Th e ever-silent spaces^)f the East Far-folded mists & gleaming halls of morn.

[HEATH MANUSCRIPT]

Tithon

Ay me! ay me! the woods decay and fall, Th e vapours weep their substance to the ground, Man comes and tills the earth and lies beneath, And after many summers dies the rose. Me only fatal immortality Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms, Here at the quiet limit of the world, A white-haired shadow roaming like a dream Th e ever-silent spaces of the East, Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.

[AS PRINTED IN 1864]

Tithonus

Th e woods decay, the woods decay and fall, Th e vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Ma n comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many a summer dies the swan.

2. Three manuscript drafts of "Tithonus" are extant. Tw o are in Tennyson's Notebooks Nos. 20 and 21, at Trinity College, Cambridge; a third one, written 1 833, is in the Commonplace Book compiled by Tennyson's friend J. M. Heath, which is in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University. According to Tennyson's editor, Christopher Ricks, the Heath version is later than those in the Trinity Manuscripts. The transcriptions here of Tennyson's opening lines are from the first draft (Trinity College manuscript, Notebook 20), and from the Heath manuscript, where the poem is titled "Tithon." These are followed by the final version of "Tithonus" Tennyson published in 1864. As late as in the edition of 1860, the opening words had remained "Ay me! ay me!" and "field" (line 3) had remained "earth."

.

POEMS IN PROCESS / A15

Me only cruel immortality Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms, Here at the quiet limit of the world, A white-haired shadow roaming like a dream Th e ever-silent spaces of the East, Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.