![]() ![]() “The Steeple-Jack” begins with a panoramic view of a New England whaling town much as Dürer might have painted it, before sliding into more uncertain, Van Gogh territory, where a storm on the land can “disturb” the stars in the sky, just as it disturbs the human-made star on the steeple. The / whirlwind fife-and-drum of the storm bends the salt / marsh grass, disturbs stars in the sky and the / star on the steeple it is a privilege to see so / much confusion.” For Marianne Moore, however, the need to shape and give order to raw and uncertain data is an occasion, not only of one of modernism’s most formally inventive poems, but of a new philosophical perspective: “You can see a twenty-five- / pound lobster and fish nets arranged / to dry. That the world “out there” was not fixed (and that it was mostly not “out there” at all) left too much to Coleridge’s “shaping spirit of Imagination” we had wanted certainty, order, progress. The real scientific discoveries of the last century (uncertainty, incompleteness, fuzzy logic) presented us with a freedom that, for some, was unwelcome, even unnerving. Photograph: Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo Marianne Moore, ‘The Steeple-Jack’ (1932) ![]() True, we note the passing reference to the reaper (a reference too playful to seem grim), but the main point, revealed both in the content and in the economy of form is that, while sidestepping morbidity or self-abnegation, the poem conveys a tranquil awareness that, in the larger scheme of things, the continuing adventure of life itself transcends any one individual, even as it celebrates, by implication, that individual’s most commonplace and fleeting sensations. ![]() “Farewell” (“Despedida” in Spanish) is not a work that demands much analysis. He continues: “The boy is eating oranges / (From my balcony I see him) / The reaper is cutting the wheat / (From my balcony I hear him)” before ending, with a simple finality, on a repetition of the first two lines. When Lorca writes “If I die / leave the balcony open…” he is affirming the here and now, the everyday, against the church’s myth of heaven. In Spain, the humanist poem – in which death is freely accepted as a part of the natural cycle – not only added to a great philosophical tradition, it also helped to undermine the tentacular influence of the Catholic church, an institution that, before the 1930s Republic, did so much to maintain the power of the feudal landowners and suppress working people. But who is this everyone? A group of soldiers celebrating the announcement of the Armistice? An entire village back home, or even England itself, raising its voice in hope, now that the “horror of years” is drifting away? In one sense, it does not matter in another it is all these things, as we come to see that community, like peace, cannot be constructed, or imposed, but can only emerge spontaneously from the dailiness of life: ‘Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted / And beauty came like the setting sun.’ That dailiness is what we mean by peace – and now that the horrors are over, Sassoon creates a lasting reminder of how much that peace depends on mutual understanding. “Everyone Sang” begins abruptly, as a flash mob does, with an impromptu choir’s improbable synchronicity: “Everyone suddenly burst out singing.” This is an arresting moment, and we might be tempted to charge Sassoon with allowing himself a personal epiphany here, but there is no Romantic ego at the centre of this experience instead, the speaker is “filled with such delight / As prisoned birds must find in freedom, / Winging wildly across the white / Orchards and dark-green fields, on – on – and out of sight.” The image Sassoon chooses to convey that sudden sense of freedom is, like the singing, a communal one: not a single bird that rises, symbolically, into a blue sky, but an entire flock that flies as real birds would. Yet he also produced the first great peace poem of the age, tempering powerful satire with tenderness and a sense of gratitude for community. Though the term was not coined until the 1960s, first world war poet Siegfried Sassoon always felt able to “speak truth to power”, lambasting incompetent generals and corrupt politicians as well as an ignorant public back home, sometimes at great risk to himself. Photograph: The Art Archive/REX/Shutterstock ![]()
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