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     We asked David Morley, John Killick and Anna Adams to write a personal response to the poem on the previous page. ‘It Is Not Likely Now’, which was sent to them without the author’s name. See what you make of the poem before checking out the details, which appear on the last page of the magazine.

     We’d welcome suitable suggestions of other poems for what we hope may become a regular feature. Send us a choice of three poems from your selected (anonymous) poet, and we’ll do the rest. It should be a writer we’re likely to have heard of, without being too obvious.

David Morley

1. Ideas in poetry are like obstetrics: if you’ve got the tongs and the hot water, all you’re waiting for is the poem to start moving.

2. Sometimes the poem won’t budge. Then the bad poet starts in witb the Caesarean scalpel - Right, poem, you will have designs upon the reader!

3. What happens here? Without question the poem lives. It has energy and rather noble limbs. If its birth was difficult, why don’t we see it struggling? After all, the ideas are large and spanning. The poet checks out his/her Hopkins or Rilke or Yeats - and learns not to be blown off the big bridge of ideas.

4. Or learns to jump off bridges. Right, Mr Berryman?

5. ‘When the poem is finished - or abandoned - a poet believes he has made a statement, enacted a process or completed an experience which, properly or sensitively approached, will inform, affect, or act upon a reader in a specific way’ - Michael Schmidt

6. But the language won’t conform to specifics. It deals in the language of suffering, alienation, faith and no-faith. The key lies in the title, in the repetitive bell-toll that ‘nothing is likely’. Nothing: faith gone to the wall, love blasted to a whimper.

7. ‘Night is the flower of day’. Compare this with Thompson’s ‘The City of Dreadful Night’. Contrast ‘God’s darling … strides freshly forth’ with Yeats’ ‘rough beast’. Resurrection is enacted only through language. But, by the time the poem has ‘flung back the futile stone’, ‘again evening will have come’.

8. Thompson covers the same theme and decides on suicide. Berryman joins him on the bridge. Annihilation? Unendurable. Alienation? Intolerable. The rough beast?

9. ‘It Is Not Likely Now’ is an interesting poem, a poem of endurance. The poet survives because s/he makes language survive, Look at the imagery in the second stanza, or the brilliant use of enjambment in the final stanza, or the half-rhyme throughout: natural craft that carries the thematic weight. So, it lives and we live. It may encourage a reader to think better of our language.

10. Was it likely that a poem of this title should ever get past its first line, let alone thirty-two lines?

11. It does. It endures.

12. Now it’s your turn.

John Killick

     Spiritual states are difficult to convey with any accuracy in poetry, unless of course you have the sublime effrontery of an Emily Dickinson in rooting them in physical particularities. This applies whether the writer is trying to convey a state of grace or its lack. In this poem the author attempts to express a mood of in-betweenness: in between day and night, earth and sky, life and death, time and eternity. There is a sense of having come through a crisis; the pain and the agony have been such that nothing more is to be feared: ‘it is not likely now’ that the soul has worse to suffer. One is reminded of Eliot’s ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality’. This person is suffering from a surfeit; it is as if they have been traumatised by the experience.

     But numbness is not all in this poem. There is the positive vision of the ‘great fleet’: the wonderful image of the stars shining down on the black sea, and the yearning to be one of them. There is also the bitter irony of the close: the inability to count up to one, as memorable a way of characterising abandonment as one could imagine.

     For me the third verse is the most fascinating. The second line is particularly effective, with its alliteration and its introduction of the idea of innocence, shown to be so close to experience in the end. But the long lines tend to get lost in abstractions.

     By no means a perfect poem, then: too many rhetorical flourishes, too much personification, and it all adds up to an over-rich diet - one feels that ultimately a bareness of diction and imagery might have served the poet better. But the incidentals are a cause for wonder.

Anna Adams

     At first I thought I was in Waiting-for-Godot country, but then I found myself in the heart of Christianity. This might be forbidden ground to some, but not having been reared as a Christian I have never been in a position to renounce it, and I enjoy the magnificent imagery - ‘God’s lion’ and ‘the lion Christ’ - even though some of it might be considered to be ready-made: but for cliche-writ-large read archetype, and archetypes haunt all profound poetry. Then I realised, for one does not grasp a poem all at once, and in this case one is dazzled by a great fleet of stars and ‘the whole vast sea of midnight’, that the poet is in mourning, and that which ‘is not likely now’ is the return of the lost beloved, even in a dream.

     The second verse celebrates the freedom of released souls. ‘Who that could ride with that fleet would return / Here?’ From this the poet moves to think of the advantages of no longer having anything to care about in life, for despair, too, can be a ‘flawless freedom’. But the last verse enshrines reconciliation. The beloved dead live with us after all, and we too shall die.

     Rilke comes to mind, and Manley Hopkins, for this is not a poem by anyone reared in the Grey-Everyday-Reality-is-the-Stuff-of-Poetry school of thought. The fashionable word ‘quotidian’ does not spring to mind. It is not about the power-struggle between men and women, nor such claustrophobic questions as nationalism or class. It is about love and bereavement, and the longing for heaven, and it is in language worthy of its theme. The second lines of all its four verses, which open with conversational variants on ‘It is not likely now’, are all splendid. In succession they summarise the poem.

     Having read it attentively we have kept vigil with grief, and we have survived one of that dangerous sort of poem that takes on both the formidable subjects of poetry, Love and Death, at once.

     But poets need to be brave, or poetry can become a paltry thing.