By Ian McDonald
Which of us does not every now and then wonder about time, what is it, how can it possibly be described, what is a moment of it, what is an eternity of it? Saint Augustine in his Confessions tries to puzzle it out: “So what is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I want to explain it to a person who asks, I do not know any more and yet I affirm with certainty that, had nothing passed, there would not be past time – had nothing happened there would not be future time – had nothing existed, there would not be present time.”
One of the deep emotions I gain in reading good poems is that they fix events and people in time like vivid frames in the sequence of a film which you find hard to forget. Paul Cézanne said it about art but he could have said it about poetry: “Right now a moment of time is fleeting by. Capture its reality in paint! To do that we must put all else out of our minds. We must become that moment, make ourselves a sensitive recording plate… give the image of what we actually see, forgetting everything that has been before our time.”
An important theme of poetry is the evanescence of human life, the fundamental futility of human effort; the “vanity of vanities” which Ecclesiastes urges us to remember in all our grabbing and grasping for life’s favours. Not good, certainly, to be obsessive about this but not bad, either, to preserve a salutary detachment from any strong belief that what we are constantly striving to do and get is all that important. I like this poem by Charles Wright.
The Woodpecker Pecks, But The Hole Does Not Appear
It’s hard to imagine how unremembered we all become,
How quickly all that we’ve done
Is unremembered and unforgiven,
how quickly
Bog lilies and yellow clover flashlight our footfalls,
How quickly and finally the landscape subsumes us,
And everything that we are becomes what we are not.
This is not new, the orange finch
And the yellow-and-dun finch
picking the dry clay politely,
The grasses asleep in their green slips
Before the noon can roust them,
The sweet oblivion of the everyday
like a warm waistcoat
Over the cold and endless body of memory.
Cloud-scarce Montana morning.
July, with its blue cheeks puffed out like a putto on an ancient map,
Huffing the wind down from the northwest corner of things,
Tweets on the evergreen stumps,
Swallows treading the air,
The ravens hawking from tree to tree, not you, not you,
Is all that the world allows, and all one could wish for.
But also another theme of poetry is the priceless value of all life, not ever to be taken for granted or underestimated or in any shape or form belittled or neglected – and another theme is love and the grief that can grow out of love remembered and never dying though it was so long ago and so instantly gone. I have for long been moved by the American poet Brad Leithauser’s poem:
Son
Memory buries its own,
And of what now forever must be
The longest day of his life
What mostly remained was a blur
Under too bright lights – so he
Could scarcely tell if the things
Sharpest in his mind were
Nothing but fantasies, sewn
Afterwards, out of grief,
And guilt’s imaginings.
Yet it seemed memory called up
(After the interminable birth,
As his finger stroked the arm
Of a child who would not last
Even one whole day
And all of its time on earth
Ministered to by vast
Machines that couldn’t mend the harm
In a single transcription slip
In reams of DNA)
A look so haunted, so
Haunting, he would not confess
(Not even later, to his wife)
How it stayed with him, on him: the slow
Flicker in a watery eye,
The mute call – through all
The exhausted hopefulness
The condemned come to know
In the end – from animal to animal,
Imploring, Please save my life.
