The end of the world

Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet, whose marvelous collection of essays The Redress of Poetry I like to reread, wrote that W.H. Auden’s elegy for Yeats was “a rallying cry that celebrates poetry for being on the side of life, and continuity of effort, and enlargement of the spirit.” Heaney believed that one function of poetry is to act as a counterweight to hostile and oppressive forces in the world: he called this “the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.” This is what he called “redress”, whereby “the poetic imagination seems to redress whatever is wrong or exacerbating in the prevailing conditions,” offering “a response to reality which has a liberating and verifying effort upon the individual spirit….tilting the scales of reality towards some transcendent equilibrium….This redressing effect of poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances.”

I believe that is finely put. However the overwhelming majority of people ask the question – in our “real” world what is poetry’s relevance? In such tumultuous, oppressive times as these what is the point of poetry? For myself I am convinced about a good poem’s value as “a glimpsed alternative” to so much in the world that is a denial of enlightened humanity. But at the end of the day what I get most out of good poetry is pleasure, pure enjoyment in what Coleridge called “the best words in the best order,” a feeling of intense contentment and lasting satisfaction that I have discovered a perfect expression in words of some fact about the world or feeling or thought which once I have experienced it there seems no other way it could have been written or said, an inevitable achievement of the human imagination to be savoured and remembered.

Here are two poems which give me that intense shock of recognition whenever I make a good discovery in poetry. Both poems are about “the end of the world” but they are completely different.

The first is a poem by Peter Reading the sardonic, completely anti-romantic English poet, whose work on the whole I find too sour and disillusioned but this despairing poem I like for some grim reason, probably because it is so true.

Lucretian

Each organism achieves its acme of growth then declines,

the vigour and strength of its prime slipping to age and decay –

copious ingestion of food cannot keep pace with the surge

of fecal exudation.

Every thing ends when its innards

ebb, and it cedes to the blows with which it’s assailed from without.

So do the walls of the world presently start to implode.

Earth, which engendered so much, is unable, now, to support us, possessed of more shit than nutriment.

Ploughs are eroded, the ploughmen whinge that they’ve wasted their time, envy the farms of their forebears whose smallholdings yielded more bushels per hectare than any do now.

Worldlings are loath to acknowledge that the planet, like all other bodies, is subject to senile attrition.

The second poem is by one of the very greatest poets of recent times, Czeslaw

Milosz. It was written when he was a young man, trapped in Warsaw in 1944, when not only his world but all civilization seemed to be collapsing.

A Song on the End of the World

On the day the world ends

A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering

net.

Happy porpoises jump in the sea, By the rainspout young sparrows

are playing

And the snake is gold-skinned as

it should always be.

On the day the world ends Women walk through the fields

under their umbrellas, A drunkard grows sleepy at the

edge of a lawn,

Vegetable peddlers shout in

the street

And a yellow-sailed boat comes

nearer the island,

The voice of a violin lasts in the

air

And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder

Are disappointed.

And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps

Do not believe it is happening now.

As long as the sun and the moon are above,

As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,

As long as rosy infants are born No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet

Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,

Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:

There will be no other end of the world,

There will be no other end of the world.

Milosz wrote that beautiful poem in the midst of death and destruction. Whatever our circumstances, there is always beauty – and there is always good work to do, mending the nets, binding the tomatoes.