It's an incredibly difficult poem to excerpt from, Candice, in part because
it's a narrative poem which deepens its individual - and very fluid -
symbolism as it progresses. One thing which is breathtaking about it is
the way Oliver works its technical aspects, bringing that mediaeval poetic
into totally contemporary language. It reminds me in a lot of ways of
Blake's epic works.
Anyway, for what it's worth, a few stanzas from part X, which give a
flavour of it. But you really have to read the whole thing.
X
On that street sex was one-sided and sterile,
an inversion of self-image on its own image
as Dante was drawn through the dark navel
of Satan. My face froze frig-
idly like a demonic id whose idol
is itself in its stony enjoyment of rage.
My stomach tried to turn over to tell
me it was a happy puppy, but the passage
turned me entirely, eventually to emerge
at the woman's front, facing her, faint
with despair to have done such self-damage.
She said softly, 'Follow your saint."
In the following instant I thought that the fortune-
hunter's blonde hair had
become a rich red and that Rosine
herself, whom _I'd_ been hunting, now stood
before me, her russet robe a ruin,
her face all frowns, her fair eyes sad
at the vicious violation of virtue in
my pretended acts of love, my perverted
rape of the rosy pearl whose red
was talismanic - a truth without taint.
In this single instant I realised what she'd
suffer if I followed the feet of my Saint.
For my blood flowed upward to beat on the barrier
of the spiritual; and I saw into Rosine's soul -
it screamed like an oyster in hysterics, the inner
sanctum slimy. But a shining idol
lay within the lining, tiny, dreamier
than Buddha; it was the beaming baby mongol
_Ignorance_. Immediately, I felt calmer.
The rosy saint of all sexual, all social
polity had appeared in her soul. The pearl
seed of her Socialism was this subnormal infant.
The soul was screaming, suffering my evil
violation, but the voice said, 'Follow your Saint.'
>Picking up on Alison's mention of _The Infant and the Pearl_, I did a web
>search and discovered what Douglas Clark would probably have posted had he
>not been off visiting his Scottish cousins: Doug Oliver's own commentary on
>the poem in the _Long Poem Group Newsletter_ #5
>(http://www.bath.ac.uk/~exxdgdc/1pgn/1pgn52.html). It would be wonderful if
>someone (Alison?) could post an excerpt from the poem, about which Doug
>speaks so instructively, on so many levels of life and literature, here:
>
>My anti-Thatcher poem, _The Infant and the Pearl_ (1979-83), attacks
>monetarism's harsh social effects while lamenting socialism's inability to
>control financial liquidity or to create economic energy. (These are, of
>course, the problems Mr Blair now wrestles with.)
>
>Form and title went together. 'Infant' here means a Down's Syndrome child as
>symbol for all the socially disadvantaged. John Hall had been reminded by my
>first novel of the medieval _Pearl_ poem because of the role a child plays
>in it (my late mentally-handicapped son, Tom). That struck a chord because
>just before my daughter Kate was born on a snowy January night in Cambridge,
>our front door was flung open and an immense midwife announced: "I'm Pearl."
>'Margaret' of Margaret Thatcher is Greek for pearl.
>
>The 14th century _Pearl_ has a more com0plex metrics than, perhaps, any
>other English poem. Its 101 12-line stanzas (100 for perfection, one for
>unity), are each rhymed as closely as an Italian sonnet. Their first lines
>contain a key word, their last line is a refrain, and these change at
>five-stanza intervals. The four-stress lines all alliterate up to four
>times. The form and title linked my life-experience to a prosody capable of
>accommodating many different tones.
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
Masthead
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
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