Hi Arthur,
Yes, I get the meaning of your description! I sense he is/was a (scuse 
cliche, but this ain't the poem) "farmer's boy". But the words (rosy cheeks, 
blue eyes, etc) can be replaced by other words that give the same image but 
don't seem as borrowed from cliched description... (I'm playing now: apple 
cheeked, bright cheeked, or whatever... gives a similar picture but the 
words ain't as familiar when slotted into the poem.). He can still come 
across as a stereotypical farming youth without the reader thinking the 
words are too familiar already. I guess I'm wanting all the words to feel 
like your words, feel they quietly and unobtrusively belong in the poem.
It's interesting that you say you're wanting to portray his "mask" and then 
show what's there when the mask slips... That's what I'm wanting to happen 
too. But he can wear his own face mask, not a mask made up of cliches... I'm 
sure the poem will still work as you want it to with Arthur's words not 
Arthur's borrowed-weary-words.
Bob


>From: Arthur Seeley <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Pennine Poetry Works <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: New Sub: November 1956 ( Grassie, Gary, Bob)
>Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2004 10:40:39 -0000
>
>Thanks for reading and taking time to comment. I am grateful.
>I do not like to have to explain what I have tried to do in a poem because
>that means that I have failed somewhere in the poem to make my point clear.
>But, Bob, you say that the description is clichéd and I have to say , " Of
>course it is .That is the point." and when I have repeated it at the end of
>the poem it is with certain qualifiers that I hoped were relevant. The rosy
>cheeks and quiet smile were a  'mask'. He was not what he seemed. I thought
>I knew the man, we had talked lots and I knew about his background on the
>farm. We were 19. I had never been more than 10 miles from home in my life
>until then. I knew nothing.But I had a monitor or censor internal to me 
>that
>allowed me to understand appropriate and inappropriate behaviour, where the
>boundaries are, as it were. His handling of body pieces crossed the line 
>for
>me. On reflection I think either the enormity of the horror we were stood 
>in
>had robbed him of his censor, I hinted at this by the 'circle of stunned
>boys' reference, or he never had had lines drawn for him and maybe watching
>animals slaughtered in his own backyard had robbed him of any of his
>sensibilities, I am not sure. I have as Grassie mentioned written about 
>this
>before how it had stayed with me all my life. I have looked at it as a rite
>of passage in my coming of age. I wondered at the lad's action all my 
>life.I
>have however learned that despite how I may feel about things there is a
>remarkable lack of sensitivity in the world and that lad's was and is only 
>a
>small part of that. Why do people drive to look at disaster sites?? How do
>teenagers burn someone to death and then cut the body up.I read such 
>horrors
>everyday and the lad's is a landmark for me.His mind had no guiding
>principles it seemed to me, no landmarks, a land without horizons. Like the
>fields he hoed. I dunno its where the poem is anyway.
>I sometimes run spellchecks Grassie and the American version sometimes 
>makes
>me unsure of my own. I have to retain masks and blazing for the reasons
>cited to Bob although I shall think on it.
>Gary, no he was not retarded in anyway. In those days all the retards were
>conscripted into the Army. The Navy got the best. The RAF the next or
>volunteers like me.That's what I always understood to be the way of it.
>Thanks again to you all Arthur.
> >
> >
> > > November 1956
> > >
> > > He was a good sort of feller.
> > > The soft burr of the Fens was on his tongue,
> > > and in the smoke and stale odors of the billet
> > > his rosy cheeks shone
> > > around a quiet smile and pale blue eyes.
> > > He moved away from foul language
> > > and brute mouths, without judgment
> > > of their struts and boasts and wide wet lips.
> > > He read, darned his socks,
> > > wrote letters home or snoozed.
> > >
> > > Before our time there,
> > > he had worked his father's fields,
> > > hoed the long rows of kale
> > > through rods of rain
> > > or helped around the yard
> > > but brought here now
> > > to bend over engines, plugs and pistons
> > > and the warm reek of oily steel.
> > >
> > > Sometimes he'd cock his head
> > > and follow with his spanner
> > > the flight of swallows
> > > over waves of wheat.
> > >
> > > But we found each other out,
> > > he and I,
> > > one gray afternoon in November
> > > when a Canberra fell from the sky.
> > >
> > > A circle of silent boys,
> > > stunned by enormity,
> > > enclosed the huge pit in the mire.
> > > We moved, slow as grazing deer, over the shambles,
> > > flicked muck over torn bits of people.
> > >
> > > He moved beyond me,
> > > lost in echoes of the yard
> > > pealing with the protests of a roped sow;
> > > poked with a broken spar a thigh bled pale as pork.
> > > It rocked and sucked in the mud, slid to his persuasions.
> > >
> > > He turned his mask of quiet smile and rosy cheeks
> > > and blaze of pale blue eyes upon me
> > > as I stumbled down the bleak perspectives of his mind;
> > > a land of no horizons.
> > >

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