The Critics' Chorus

Or, What The Poem Lacked

*“How he got to the point of thinking this sort of thing was a poem is a good and appalling question…” — Donald Davie

Of course they were right:
The poem lacked a certain tightness
Its inventions were chaotic.
    In the bleak farmhouse Rimbeaud
    remembering the jewelled spider webs
    The smoking pond, the banished sideshows.

Of course they were right:
The poems were not fit to be taken seriously,
Mere candyfloss, the efforts of a stablehand.
    In Rome coughing up the rose-shaped phlegm
    Keats taking the final opiate,
    the nightingale suddenly obsolete.

Of course they were right:
He could have found all he wrote
In the dustbins he emptied.
    Where's Hyatt now?
    Still drinking the blind wine?
    Ghost-junk still flowing in ghost-veins?

Of course they were right:
So much of what she wrote was doggerel,
mere child's play.
    In a London suburb Stevie,
    Blake's grandchild,
    fingering a rosary made of starlight.

Of course they were right:
In all the poems something went astray,
Something not quite at home in their world,
something lost.

It was something to do with what the poem lacked
saved it from oblivion,
a hunger nothing to do with the correct idiom
In which to express itself

but a need to eat a fruit far off
from the safe orchard,
reached by no easy pathway
or route already mapped.

Brian Patten