Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     We’ve received a lot of interest in this new feature, in which we ask people to write a personal response to a poem without knowing who wrote it. This time we have asked some friends to give us their ideas on the anonymous poem printed below, ‘At This Moment of Time’. See what you make of the poem before checking out the details, which appear on the last page of the magazine.

AT THIS MOMENT OF TIME

Some who are uncertain compel me. They fear
The Ace of Spades. They fear
Love offered suddenly, turning from the
     mantelpiece,
Sweet with decision. And they distrust
The fireworks by the lakeside, first the spuft,
Then the coloured lights, rising.
Tentative, hesitant, doubtful, they consume
Greedily Caesar at the prow returning,
Locked in the stone of his act and office.
While the brass band brightly bursts over the water
They stand in the crowd lining the shore
Aware of the water beneath Him. They know it.
     Their eyes
Are haunted by water.

Disturb me, compel me. It is not true
That ‘no man is happy,’ but that is not
The sense which guides you. If we are
Unfinished (we are, unless hope is a bad dream),
You are exact. You tug my sleeve
Before I speak, with a shadow’s friendship,
And I remember that we who move
Are moved by clouds that darken midnight.

John Lancaster

     After many readings, this poem still grabs me with its beginning. It startles by challenging convention, the notion of what love is supposed to be. At the heart of the poem’s idea is the confrontational: ‘they fear/Love offered suddenly, turning from the mantelpiece,/Sweet with decision.’ I was affected by this; I want feeling to be unconstrained. But who will respond, given our conditioning?

     The first seven lines are direct and forceful though you could lose the ‘Ace of Spades’ cliché. Then I felt the poem lost its immediacy, as if the poet was not content with the spare inventive use of language (liked ‘spuft’) to create the imagery but felt the need to go for the big poetic image - ‘Caesar at the prow …’ The sign of the academic, the Eng. Lit. poet? Should poetry only be for those acquainted with classical language and literature? Do you need a knowledge of it to understand this poem? But I think that the reference detracts rather than enhances. In fact I don’t think the last six lines of the first stanza say anything that hasn’t already been said. Excluding this redundancy would also get rid of the trite alliteration of the tenth line.

     The second stanza brings the poem back to life and the shift from ‘they’ in the first stanza to the second person ‘you’, addressing the reader or someone unknown, had the powerful effect of drawing me even more into the piece. Again I felt unattracted by the poeticism of the last two lines. But perhaps this is not a contemporary poet, more early 20th century with 19th century influences?

     The poem still speaks to me. I’ll want to read more of this poet though I’ve no idea who it is (American from ‘colored’?). But in true Blind Date fashion, I think it’s a woman who likes a lot of casual sex. If so, my phone number is … (Oh Christ, I fear love offered suddenly after all.)

Myra Schneider

     On a first reading of this poem I was excited by the drama of its imagery especially Caesar ‘locked in the stone of his act and office’, ‘Their eyes are haunted by water’ and the marvellous ‘Love offered suddenly, turning from the mantelpiece,/Sweet with decision’ which contains the one indoor detail among various outdoor references. I was carried along too by the way uncertainty was contrasted with certainty, the insistance of ‘compel’ in the first line of each stanza and the drive of the argument even though I had difficulty in grasping its substance. All this made me want to fathom out the poem’s meaning.

     It wasn’t hard to work out the connections in the first stanza. The graphic images describe the reactions of doubters to the thought of death, love, a strong ruler, God. The second stanza I found much more of a problem. It develops ideas about belief but however I interpret it I end up wondering about the identity of ‘you’. I find it clogged with half-expressed ideas,clumsy in syntax and unrhythmic in line 4.

     From the syntax as well as the spelling of ‘colored’ I’d say the poem is American, perhaps written much earlier this century. I suspect it has contempoary references. The meaning of the splendid word ‘spuft’ (not in my dictionary) is very clear. But these points bring me no nearer to unravelling that second stanza. In the end I felt tantalised and dissatisfied because I couldn’t follow through the line of thought behind the compelling images.

James Keery

     I can follow the first section, and understand a fascination with figures who find authority, love and triumph bewildering. There is a vaguely early-Eliotic air to the thing (not just Prufrock: fear of offered love recalls ‘Portrait of a Lady’, and cf ‘Compelled my imagination many days’ and ‘troubled midnight’ from ‘La Figlia Che Piange’), but I don’t find the images of timidity all that convincing. The sinister enjambement - ‘They fear … They fear … And they distrust’ - seems forced, and ‘Love offered suddenly, turning from the mantlepiece’ surely belongs in Victorian melodrama. Anyone over the age of six who distrusts fireworks really is in bad shape, and as for Caesar, though the image is intriguingly developed, I’m pretty ‘doubtful’ myself about the way he is metamorphosed (by a twist of the kaleidoscope, that capital ‘H’) into Christ walking on the water - sublimated power worship perhaps? It’s rather reminiscent of Spender falling on his face before ‘The [unspecified] Truly Great’ (‘I think continually of those who were truly great…’), and in turn of Gunn’s cruel parody of ‘the most embarrassing line of English verse’:

I think of all the toughs through history
And thank heaven they lived, continually.
I praise the overdogs from Alexander
To those who would not play with Stephen
Spender.

     ‘Tentative, hesitant, doubtful’ is a choice tautology, and please no prac. crit. special pleading about ‘enacting its own meaning’ or ‘subtle mimesis’! ‘Greedily Caesar at the prow returning’ bothered me for several days, and it was only when I heard myself muttering ‘at the prow with slaves’ that I traced it back to ‘Samson Agonistes’: ‘Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves’ (I was just getting into the bath, if you must know). I don’t know what to make of that, but I did warm to the author a little for nicking a cadence from Milton - it’s nice to know he’s still alive and popping up in poems!

     I can’t get on the wavelength of the second section at all, though. I wouldn’t have thought ‘no man is happy’ was worth quoting, even to refute (‘Call no man happy before his death’ was never my idea of brilliant wisdom, but at least it has a paradoxical sparkle) and it seems a particularly clumsy way of conveying ‘the sense which guides you’ (misery, presumably), leaving aside the double negatives. And how can hope be a bad dream? Then again, if ‘you ‘is one of the ‘uncertain’, as the repetition of ‘compel’ suggests, how are we to take ‘exact’? The first ‘we’ is contrasted with ‘you’, while the second can be read as comprising only ‘you’ and ‘I’, if not actually identifying them as self and shadow. The ending could then, I suppose, be interpreted as a coy confession that one belonged oneself among the ‘uncertain’ all the time, and thus that it is really oneself that one finds so compelling. I take ‘we who move’ as a rather smug trope for ‘we poets’, i.e., we who move others, having been moved ourselves by ‘clouds that darken midnight’ and suchlike profundities. But the thing seems carefully contrived to give nothing away, living up to the promise of the dead-pan ironic-cliché title. ‘A good poem about failure is a success’, according to Larkin, and it stands to reason that a good poem about timidity would be a triumph. But this isn’t it, at least not for my money.