Helen Dunmore on William Blake and childhood innocence; Moniza Alvi and Kate Clanchy on W. B. Yeats and nationality.
In a recent radio series for the BBC World Service, The Lyrics, producer Amber Barnfather and poet Kate Clanchy looked at classic poems about things that touch most of our lives - childhood innocence, bereavement, love found and love lost, our sense of nationality and of religion. In each programme they asked a leading contemporary poet to talk first about a classic lyric poem, and then about a new poem of their own, written in response. In these extracts from two of the programmes, Helen Dunmore talks and writes about the theme of childhood, and what The Chimney Sweeper, one of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, says to her about it; and Moniza Alvi explores with Kate Clanchy the sense of belonging to one or more countries or nations, as they look together at.the W.B. Yeats poem, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, and some of the poetry they have both written on the subject.
First, Helen Dunmore, on childhood innocence, and what William Blake says about it in THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER.
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry “‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!”
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curled like a lamb’s back, was shaved; so I said,
“Hush, Tom! Never mind it, for when your head’s bare
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.”from THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER by William Blake
Helen Dunmore: I first came across The Chimney Sweeper when I was about 16. And reading the Songs of Innocence, I was very moved by them, and also angered: there is a kind of purity, but also I kept thinking, why does this child acquiesce in his fate? And then I thought, Ah! there’s something more going on here - there’s something more complicated.
I loved it - I was very drawn to the rhythm and the movement and the simplicity, but I think it’s a poem that pulls you deeper all the time.
[In my own poem about childhood, I wanted to explore] the idea of children’s vulnerability; of their liability to harm. That was one idea that came to mind very strongly and insistently, and the idea that even those who are closest to the child are not always able to prevent this. In Blake’s poem the mother dies, taking away one source of support, then the father sells the child, which may have been and probably was an act of desperation. And therefore I wanted to write something which suggests again the powerlessness sometimes of parents to protect their children from threat: that much as you would wish to do so, you cannot always do that.
But I’m also looking to give a voice to a child’s experience, and I’m looking to give that experience stature in the way that Blake does. Because very often the experiences of children are reported as if they are objects, and we don’t really get much sense of the stature, of the moral being, of the integrity of the child. And I think that’s a very interesting subject, because it is often removed. In The Chimney Sweeper, Blake talks about children who are not treated as if they are moral beings, they are treated as if they are objects; and he is restoring their humanity: the poem is a restorative act. He’s trying to say: We are human - not only human, but also spiritual, also divine.
The subject of my poem came from a recent child abuse case. A man was on trial and was then jailed for causing the death of a child who was not his own, but he was living in the household. And the brutality was so great. But what really frightened me, and made me want to write the poem, was the fact that the little girl’s mother was in the same flat and he had exercised such control that he had managed to keep them apart, even when the mother must have been aware and terrified, and the child was terrified. It is this thing of the man appointing himself as the head of the household in a particularly sinister way that I wanted... and the idea that she had done something wrong, and that was why he unleashed this violent fury on her.
I do feel very strongly about children and violence and about this kind of moment where a person is captured in some way. It doesn’t have to be a child but it’s a captured individual who is completely subjected to whoever chooses to injure them. I think it’s hard to imagine, because we don’t want to imagine it, we prefer not to - very naturally, you can’t dwell on suffering or cruelty all the time. But I see it particularly with children. You look at a class of children, and you know that perhaps one or two out of those is suffering at home in some way, either through mental cruelty or physical cruelty. And how is it possible to create a door out of that enclosure, out of that closed locked world of suffering which often the child blames itself for? I felt very powerfully moved by this particular child and it brought up for me a lot of ideas about other children and other voiceless people, who actually have got voices if you just listen to them.
WITHOUT REMISSION by Helen Dunmore
Because she told a lie, he says,
because she lied
about the hands not washed before shopping,
she had to learn,because he wanted her to learn
the law that what he said, went,
and that was the end,
and because she was slow
she had to learn
over and over.He was an old-fashioned teacher,
he taught her hair to lie straight,
he taught her back to bend,
he taught silence
but for the chink of coathangers
stirring in the wardrobe.He kicked the voice out of her.
There were no words left to go
with the seven-year-old girl
soiled and bleeding,
marched along the corridorby this man, rampant
with all he had learned.
Later, locked up once more
she called through the door to her mother
“It’s all right, Mum, I’m fine.”
But she was lying.
Now Moniza Alvi and Kate Clanchy on nationality, the sense of belonging, as they have experienced it, and written about it, and how they feel about W.B. Yeats and AN IRISH AIRMAN FORESEES HIS DEATH.
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
AN IRISH AIRMAN FORESEES HIS DEATH, by W.B. Yeats.
Moniza Alvi: I came to England when I was just a few months old with my family - originally we’d intended to live in Pakistan but my parents decided to make the move. And I think, looking back, it must have been quite a disruption for me as a baby and in The Laughing Moon I tried to put this in adult terms.
I had two pillows and one was England,
two cheeks and one was England.Pakistan held me and dropped me in the night.
I slid through
yesterday and tomorrow -An unknown country crept between
my toes, threw an ocean behind my eye.
I couldn’t tell whether the sky was red
or green, cotton or silk and if it would tear.I could see myself spinning like an important
message through a hole to the other side
of the world.
The first part of THE LAUGHING MOON, by Moniza Alvi.
Moniza Alvi: The Yeats poem did make me think about how people do form their identity - the airman didn’t identify with Britain, that’s for sure. He hardly seems to identify with Ireland - he identifies with Kiltartan Cross. And [as I prepared to write my poem in response] I was thinking of the sort of situation in Britain today where you might have a Muslim girl who was actually born here and has grown up here. And she’ll partake in different cultures, for instance the culture at school and the culture at home - and I wonder how she forms her identity.
Kate Clanchy: While we waited for Moniza Alvi’s poem to arrive, I thought about my own sense of national identity. My grandfather was Irish, just like W.B. Yeats, but he had to leave his home when he was young and my father was brought up in England. My mothers family on the other hand were Scottish and I grew up in Scotland, frequently visiting my English cousins. Now I mostly live and work in England but as the Scottish nationalist movement grows stronger, I find myself asking - Where do I belong? Am I Scottish, or English? When I go to Scotland I usually take the train to Edinburgh. The train winds up a beautiful part of the coast, and goes over the river Tweed, the historic border between England and Scotland. There I find myself asking “Where do I belong?” more intensely than ever. My poem, The Bridge over the Border, starts on that bridge and goes looking for home. But unlike W.B. Yeats’ poem, it doesn’t focus down to one point because I haven’t got an answer to my question. The poem shifts back through different memories, looking for the right place.
Here, I should surely think of home -
my country and the neat steep town
where I grew up: its banks of cloud,
its winds and changing, stagey light,
its bouts of surly, freezing rain, or failing that,the time the train stuck here half an hour.
It was hot, for once. The engine seemed
to grunt and breathe with us,
and in the hush, the busker at the back
plucked out Scotland the Brave. There wasa filmic, golden light and the man opposite
was struck, he said, with love.
He saw a country in my eyes.
But he was from Los Angeles,
and I was thinking of another bridge.It was October. I was running to meet a man
with whom things were not quite settled,
were not, in fact, to ever settle, and I stopped
halfway to gaze at birds - swallows
in their distant thousands, drawnto Africa, or heat, or home, not knowing
which, but certain how. Shifting on the paper sky,
they were crosses on stock-market graphs,
they were sand in a hoop shaken sideways,
and I stared, as if panning for gold.
THE BRIDGE OVER THE BORDER by Kate Clanchy.
Moniza Alvi: [My poem, Thoughts of a Pakistani Woman in an English Jail,] was prompted by newspaper articles I’ve read recently, and also over the past few years about Asian women being tried and imprisoned in England for crimes for which in a way they weren’t fully responsible - they felt that they had no choice. Often the crimes were committed against violent husbands, and particularly because of the culture of these women it would have been very shameful for them to have admitted what was going on - so things reached a terrible crisis.
In a way this is a kind of war poem, although not in the conventional sense. I think the Pakistani woman [in my poem] feels hounded in the first instance by Pakistan where men were treating her so badly, and this could often happen within that culture; and she also feels at war with England because she was imprisoned so unjustly and unsympathetically.
When I’d completed the poem, I felt I’d written in a way that perhaps wasn’t the way that other people would have written about this - a similar sort of situation - because there isn’t the violence and obvious anger in the poem that there might be. But I really want people to read between the lines and be able to think about the feelings that are nevertheless powerful.
What really struck me most forcibly was that some of these women, when they were interviewed in prison said that they were actually happier there in jail than they had been before, because they felt they were themselves for the first time in their lives, and not the goods and chattels of a man. And women were saying in the article I read that they actually found their voice in prison.
THOUGHTS OF A PAKISTANI WOMAN IN AN ENGLISH JAIL by Moniza Alvi
It’s true, I’m happier than before.
Here, for the first time I know I’m me,
not this man’s daughter, that man’s wife.My crime? I had no choice.
This wasn’t understood.My very own thoughts
swoop like birds around my cell,
almost slipping through the bars.Thankfully
they are not Asian birds, or English birds.
At night I count each brilliant feather.This feather is my will.
That feather is my right.
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