The Presence of Poetry – Welcome, Unwelcome, and at your Funeral

A poem's presence in a film or a book or a play can do wonderful things for its reputation.  Dante, Hegel and Goethe might all have declared poetry as the supreme art form - two of them may have been biased - but in the modern age poetry's cultural reach is, sadly, limited.  A helping-hand then is most welcome.  This is best exemplified by the impact that Four Weddings and a Funeral had on W.H. Auden's 'Funeral Blues'.  Such was the chatter surrounding it that even my youngest brother – no great reader of poetry – insists that he will recite it at my funeral.  Aside from the implication that I will die first, John Hannah's wonderfully emotive reading of the poem at the funeral of his dead lover struck a real chord with the general public.

I for one would never complain about this kind of exposure.  It shows, despite its departure from day-to-day conversation, that poetry still matters.  It is still able to raise itself from deepest slumber, speak to us directly and eloquently, and lodge itself with astonishing power into our consciousness.  Sometimes though, there are side-effects to this profile-raising.  One of my own favourite poems finds its way, at first pleasingly, into Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan's superb Booker Prize winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North. 

Unrequited love, the Second World War, and a red camellia 

First off, a little background about this novel.  Whilst reading, it becomes an interesting exercise to compare it to Eric Lomax's The Railway Man.  Both concern themselves with the horrors of the Burmese Death Railway: Flanagan's a work of mesmerising and melancholy fiction, Lomax's a powerful memoir.  Whilst the latter gives us a direct account of that horrific episode in human history, it is also an essay in forgiveness, a triumph of one man's eventual capacity to move beyond the brutality that has been inflicted upon him and discover a common humanity in a despised enemy.  Flanagan's book is far more slippery, and in many ways allowed you to see Lomax's eventually uplifting story as, perhaps, the exception to the rule ('thank heavens' for these exceptions).  As Flanagan's story ends you are left without any of Lomax's uplifting closure; instead feelings of futility, mystery and sadness abound.  The common ground that is eventually discovered between Lomax and his Japanese torturer Takashi Nagase is not found between the Australian military surgeon Dorrigo Evans and one of his own tormentors, the drug addled Colonel Kota.  There will be no reckoning and middle-aged meeting between these two. Only the drift towards lonely death and the conclusion of flawed lives lived. Strange then, that the real life memoir seems unreal, whilst Flanagan's work of the imagination crackles with truth.   

I first read this in the middle of the Indian Ocean

Let's stay with Flanagan's novel though.  Here poetry is very much to the fore.  Both Dorrigo Evans and Colonel Kota are voracious readers and are taken to quoting poetry out loud and from memory.  One such moment is what I am concerned with.  Colonel Kota's choice of verse, doesn't so much as raise a particular poem to new heights, but rather deforms and brutalises it.  His 're-writing' of one of Matsuo Bashō's most beautiful haiku violently sears itself into your consciousness, rendering it impossible to ever read again, certainly with the sense of delicate calm and sadness that it had initially engendered.  

The first appearance of this 17th-century haiku in the novel is actually promising.  The cliché of the monster who can still take pleasure from the finer cultural aspects of life is set out as Colonel Kota discusses Japanese literature and haiku - 'this supreme Japanese gift of portraying life so concisely, so exquisitely" - with Nakamura, a fellow officer:   

Even in Kyoto 

When I hear the cuckoo 

I long for Kyoto.

But then we are wrong-footed. In the midst of this informative literary discussion, Kota suddenly begins to talk about the deep satisfaction that he gets from closely examining the necks of prisoners of war prior to savagely lopping off their heads with his sword.

'It can't be helped, Nakamura said.
No, Colonel Kota replied, stepping backwards and flipping open his Kuomintang cigarette case to proffer another cigarette to Nakamura. Of course not.
As the major lit up, Colonel Kota said -
Even in Manchukuo
When I see a neck
I long for Manchukuo
He snapped the cigarette case shut, smiled and, clenching his fist, turned and left, his strange laughter vanishing with him into the noise of the monsoon night.'

The cuckoo is replaced by a neck. Indeed, such was the savagery and jolt of Kota's paraphrasing, it is only now, when I'm writing this post, that I see the irony of a displaced cuckoo. The haiku, that exquisite form that celebrates springtime and rebirth, is channeled into something horrific and brutal, pervaded by the stench of violent death. This is no welcome re-reading of a much loved poem, rather a reading that you wish you had never come across. The plaintive sound of Bashō's cuckoo will never return, or at least not without the horrific image of sadistic decapitation accompanying it. Flanagan's novel appropriates this haiku, and will never give it back.

The horrors of the Burmese Death Railway

Maybe I would not have minded Bashō's cuckoo haiku finding its way into the conclusion of my (touch wood) far-away funeral.  A lovely balance of the mysterious and secular that I, an atheist who permits the mystical, would want at what I hope will be a Humanist affair.  But then you don't always get what you want.  Although I'm not sure my grandma would have minded me reading out the closing stanza of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets at her funeral - "What we call the beginning is often the end ..." - I certainly had second thoughts when the exact same passages were featured in the Order of Service for the funeral of Margaret Thatcher a year or so later. 

A cuckoo cries / and through a thicket of bamboo / the late moon shines

Instead I think I should like another poem, one that also dominates Flanagan's novel, for my requiem.  In the lines of Tennyson's 'Ulysses' Dorrigo Evans finds rules to live by.  Apt that he constantly quotes this poem throughout his life, a life that always seems to be on the cusp of resignation and death.  Apt, because despite it ostensibly being the poem of an ageing man, it was written by a grief-stricken twenty-two year old who had lost his best friend, Arthur Hallam, a few weeks previously.  

Not that anyone should listen to me. As poetry should be read in the midst of life and not just confined to the close, funerals - or so I am told - are for those who are left behind. Nevertheless, take note, family and friends!

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.