This blog is written as a part of a thinking activity given by Dr Dilip Barad. This blog is about the poem lockdown written by Simon Armitage in which I am going to analyse the poem as suggested by sir.
- The pandemic has inspired people to pause and reflect :
Much is being written about this virus that “binds us, but holds us apart”. People have taken to verse to express their new realities and the internet abounds with poetry — on this new lifestyle that has taught us not to take anything for granted, this new quietude we are very unused to.
covid19 poetry is trending on social media. Instagram has poets’ communities from around the world versifying by the minute about the challenges the virus has thrown up — isolation, quarantine, sickness and loneliness. Many, however, also look at it as an opportunity to slow down and savour life, one day at a time.
Simon Armitage
English poet, playwright, novelist and DJ, Armitage has been Poet Laureate since May 2019. His strong concern with social issues has led him to create poetry such as Out of the Blue, focused on the tragic 9/11 attacks, and Lockdown, centred on the pandemic caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) disease.
After teaching as Professor of Poetry at the Universities of Sheffield (2011 – 2015) and Oxford (2015-2019), he is currently teaching at the University of Leeds and in 2019 he was appointed Poet Laureate, i.e. the official poet of Britain, expected to write poems celebrating official occasions, national events etc. As such he has written Conquistadores, to commemorate the 1969 moon landing, Finishing it, a 51-word poem engraved on a pill, written to aid cancer research, All Right as part of the suicide prevention campaign for Mental Health Awareness Week and many more, including the very recent and painfully topical Lockdown. He believes that poetry is “by definition consoling” because “it often asks us just to focus and think and be contemplative”. Thus he felt it his duty to say something about the here and now, addressing directly the coronavirus and the lockdown slowly implemented across the whole world.
" Lockdown " first published in The Guardian on 21 March 2020, is a response to the coronavirus pandemic and reference the Derbyshire " plague village "of Eyam, which self - isolated in 1665 to limit the spread of the Great Plague of London, and the Sanskrit poem " Meghaduta " by Kalidasa, in which a cloud carries a message from an exile to his distant wife.
- Lockdown by Simon Armitage :
And I couldn’t escape the waking dream
of infected fleas
in the warp and weft of soggy cloth
by the tailor’s hearth
in ye olde Eyam.
Then couldn’t un-see
the Boundary Stone,
that cock-eyed dice with its six dark holes,
thimbles brimming with vinegar wine
purging the plagued coins.
Which brought to mind the sorry story
of Emmott Syddall and Rowland Torre,
star-crossed lovers on either side
of the quarantine line
whose wordless courtship spanned the river
till she came no longer.
Confined at home in West Yorkshire, Armitage said that “as the lockdown became more apparent and it felt like the restrictions were closing in, the plague in Eyam became more and more resonant”. Thus the poem opens with a “waking dream” set in the Derbyshire village of Eyam, known as the «plague village» in the 17th century when a bale of cloth from London brought infected fleas there. The villagers selflessly quarantined themselves to limit the spread of the plague and among the measures they adopted was “the Boundary Stone,” a rock which acted as a marker between Eyam, widely infected, and nearby Stoney Middleton which had not been hit. The stone had “six dark holes” drilled into its surface “brimming with vinegar wine purging the plagued coins” offered by the villagers in exchange for food and medical supplies brought to them by the inhabitants of the surrounding villages. The themes of separation and distance emerge through “the sorry story” of “two star-crossed lovers on either side of the quarantine line” who met secretly at a distance “till she came no longer” having fallen foul of the disease…
and dreamt this time
of the exiled yaksha sending word
to his lost wife on a passing cloud,
a cloud that followed an earthly map
of camel trails and cattle tracks,
streams like necklaces,
fan-tailed peacocks painted elephants,
embroidered bedspreads
of meadows and hedges,
bamboo forests and snow-hatted peaks,
waterfalls, creeks,
the hieroglyphs of wide-winged cranes
and the glistening lotus flower after rain,
the air
hypnotically see-through, rare,
the journey a ponderous one at times, long and slow
but necessarily so.
The dream shifts from England to India when Armitage references Sanskrit poet Kālidāsa’s work, Meghadūta, in which an exile uses a passing cloud to send a message of comfort to his wife. The cloud is persuaded to take the message because of the amazing landscapes and scenery it will soar over: “fan-tailed peacocks, painted elephants, embroidered bedspreads of meadows and hedges, bamboo forests and snow-hatted peaks, waterfalls, creeks… "
A hopeful, romantic gesture, that of the cloud which makes the “meeting” between the exile and his wife possible, albeit only virtual, and opens the way to an optimistic ending for us, living the pandemic today: the journey we have unwillingly undertaken is certainly a “ponderous one at times, long and slow but necessarily so”. We need to accept and endure while we wait for the time in which it will be possible to meet again and exchange a real, physical embrace at long last.
Poetry is “by definition consoling” because “it often asks us just to focus and think and be contemplative”, said Armitage.
“Poetry is often about detail, even to the point where there’s just something sacramental in the ordinary descriptions of everyday life,” he said. “It’s unlikely that there’s going to be a book of poems that are consolation against catastrophe, but just in poetry’s nature, in the way it asks us to be considerate of language, it also asks us to be considerate of each other and the world. In the relationship with thoughtful language, something more thoughtful occurs.”
The two “vision[s] in a dream”, instead, recall S. T. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, not only in that both poems focus on fragments of something which is not yet complete or completed, dreamlike and hallucinatory in its tone, but also in the underlying message about human fragility and limits. Coleridge’s poem can be read as an extended metaphor about the power of creativity which is limited, fragile, and quickly lost while Armitage’s poem can be seen as an invitation to recognize man’s structural limits and frailties, today as in the past, here as elsewhere. We may act as if we are in control on the surface but we need to come to terms with our innate weaknesses.
A message of patience, as opposed to the frantic rhythm of life we are often used to, is what Armitage believes can be learned with regard to dealing with the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. “We need to take things slowly, be patient, respect and trust the Earth: only this way our society may emerge from the pandemic slightly slower, and a lot wiser, at the other end.” If what counts now is to trudge on and never give up, despite everything, once all this is passed it will be vital not to lose our memory of what we experienced, or, worse still, file it away and go back to where we were. If we want to make sense of this pandemic, this is the time to take the decisive step, to move from using and misusing nature to contemplating it, from shaping all our thinking around the economy to slowing down and reconnecting with our fellowmen.
( Word count: 1300 )
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