What day was supposed to be poetry day? Monday was it? Well, never mind. I am, as Krusty the Klown once said, a lazy, lazy man, so I’ll do my poetry thing whenever I can muster the initiative. This may be often, or it may be never, only time will tell. This week though, I’m all poetry’d up. To business then:
William Empson is probably better known as a critic than as a poet, his most famous work, “Seven Types of Ambiguity??? being something of a classic for those who care about such things. Not being one of these people, I am more concerned with his poem “Missing Dates??? which has been haunting me since I first read it a few weeks ago.
It is written in the Villanelle form, which comprises six three-line, ABA-rhymed stanzas, with the first and last lines of the first stanza acting as refrains in alternate verses. The use of two refrains provides a whirling musicality to the poem, redolent of the in-out-round-round pattern of a set dance. Perhaps the best known poem in the Villanelle form is Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night“. In Missing Dates, Empson addresses the same grave subject, but from an arresting and original perspective.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
It is not your system or clear sight that mills
Down small to the consequence a life requires;
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
They bled an old dog dry yet the exchange rills
Of young dog blood gave but a month’s desires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
It is the Chinese tombs and the slag hills
Usurp the soil, and not the soil retires.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills.
The complete fire is death. From partial fires
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
It is the poems you have lost, the ills
From missing dates, at which the heart expires.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
For Empson, life is not an essence or a vitality that slowly is used up. Rather, it is an organic thing, a bloodstream or a body that is polluted and killed off by waste: “It is not the effort nor the failure tires, The waste remains, the waste remains and kills” Like a cancer, our missed opportunities eat away at us, bringing us closer to death, “the consequence a life requires???. We never truly leave our failures behind, for they live (or die?) on within us, like slag heaps, or tombs. A darkand pessimistic poem on first reading, “Missing Dates??? yields a more hopeful message on further reading. The key is the title: the poison can be avoided, if one lives properly and fully, if one strives to avoid missing dates. For if “It is the poems you have lost, the ills from missing dates, at which the heart expires???, then surely a life lived well and wholeheartedly must not only both defy but also forestall death? It is cheering to think so.
1 Comment
Thank you, Fergal,for this succinct appraisal of a poem which has been with me, not just for weeks, but decades. Bravo for your optimism in the face of this melancholy, but the melancholy remains and kills, I’m afraid.