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our words never be
Ends in
themselves, but means to unbind us
(Keir Hardie Street 34)
Toward the end of Down and out in Paris and London Orwell
says: 'The English are a conscience-ridden race, with a strong sense of the
sinfulness of poverty. One cannot imagine the average Englishman deliberately
turning parasite, and this national character does not necessarily change
because a man is thrown out of work.' Something of that 'national character'
that makes the English a 'conscience-ridden race,' imbued with 'a strong
sense of the sinfulness of poverty,' we see in Alan Morrison's Keir Hardie
Street
which has three poems: 'Keir Hardie Street'; 'Widdershins Edwardiana?' and 'Clocking-in for the
Witching Hour'.
I'll begin by saying that it is not fashionable any longer to talk about
poverty or the working classes. The corporate-based publishing industry in
the past two or more decades has effectively erased any possibility of a
serious response to the plight of those whom we traditionally referred to as
'workers.' The power of Morrison's book partly emerges from the fact that it
takes a clear stand by opening with Oscar Wilde's quotation from The Soul
of Man under Socialism which declares: 'With the abolition of private
property ... we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism.'
Modernist influences especially Pound and Eliot can be observed in how
Morrison uses the technique of evoking history through places to suit the
central argument of the poem.
I commuted
along the City and South London;
Not
retreating, digressing, a mental pilgrimage
In
electric-flickered carriage underground
To find new
perspectives on the glum city above,
Alighted at
the ghost station of my haunted conscience
In shadows of
Progress' echoing tombÉ
Followed the
stations on the curved roof carriage:
MOORGATEÉOLD
STREETÉANGELÉ.KING'S CROSSÉ (19)
If modernism resolved the problem of thought versus emotion, the so-called
'dissociation of sensibility' that set in like an illness from the late 17th
century onward to the 20th century; something of that resolution,
a unified sensibility, an emotional experience that appeals to the mind and
not just dissipate into empty, vacuous sentimentalism opposed to 'true'
individualism, that intellectual feeling or emotional thought gives the poems
a sense of thematic unity and despite the demands it makes on readers, Keir
Hardie Street is guided by passionate conviction; although like a true
modernist Morrison never sacrifices form to content.
How movingly Morrison recreates the vision of a socialist world where
individualism blossoms as embodied in the life and personhood of the
legendary Keir Hardie (1856-1915), one of the founders of the Labour Party,
and someone who contributed to the legacy of British socialism - a vision of
an egalitarian society that is uniquely 'English,' rooted in the cultural
experiences of Renaissance humanism and a defiant working class with a strong
sense of the recognition of human dignity and its connection to labor.
Born in a
haunted corner of Scotland, of kelpie-
Humped lochs
and Pan-piped galloping woods,
Close to
Claverhouse's groomed dragoons;
Illegitimate
son of a servant-girl from Legbrannock,
Step-sired by
an atheist carpenter,
Schooled in
obscurity's cramped one-roomed house,
Raised on
porridge oats and Robbie Burns --
'Lines on Seeing A Wounded Hare'
Fuelled him
on compassion's damp-steaming anger --
Fired in the
pit of his belly's grumbling brogue,
Conscience-lit by spark of injustice at first hand
As a
brow-crowded child, a Little Father Time
Gifted burning vision, he cast off Calvinism,
Its
hair-shirt's thorny tag of predestination
For Saved
elects, Damned masses -- abject castes,
Eschatological parallels to class --
Into the
mind's abyss, anathema as gallow hills
And donned
the spun Baptist overalls,
Marched with
the miners to massed Annbank brass,
Learnt to
speak in temperance meetings, teetotal of tongue,
Soap-box for
a pulpit, tugged himself up rung by rung,
From
blacklisted collier to collared correspondent
For the
Airdrie District -- editor of The Miner... (30-31)
British Socialism is as much British as it is socialism. Its unique character
can be seen in the personality and work of Johnson, Blake, Dickens, Wilde,
Chaplin and John Lennon. The poem recreates the spirit of British socialism
that is about believing in a conscience and awakening it through a politics
of what is right as opposed to what is wrong. The ethical comes before the
political and in fact one cannot be separated from the other.
British socialism combines conscience with a class-based understanding of
history. But, unlike Marxism which is restricted to a materialist analysis of
the past, what we see in Karel Kosik's Dilaectics of the Concrete, the
language of protest on the English socialist landscape appeals to the sense
of justice of its audiences. In the films of Ken Loach we see it distinctly -
on the one hand, it is anti-extremism as in The Wind That Shakes the
Barley
dealing
with Irish independence, while on the other hand its sympathies are fairly
clear as in the character of the Scottish bus driver George Lennox who goes
to Nicaragua to encounter a different kind of reality in Carla's Song.
Something of Blake's indignation in 'Holy Thursday' combined with Swift's
bitter irony can be seen in lines like the ones below.
Q: I say, I
say, I say:
What creature
goes on four legs in the morning;
Two legs
during the day
And three
legs in the evening?
The worker
who begs on all fours for a job;
Gets up
onto two to paw for his pay;
And limps
with a stick when forced into leaving. (86)
The refusal to accept life as it is along with the possibility that it could
be different is the mood that dominates the poetry. While reality forces
itself upon the sensitive mind - 'Life is, was, will be, had always been /
One languorous-long shelf bookended end-to-end --' (33); these lines are
immediately followed by the fact that there is a language that stands for
suffering humanity: 'for words / Were always meant as wings to lift Humanity,
Or prolong Its spiritual hesitation -- /
What hope for us without imagination?Ó (33)
The paradox of making an existential choice is built into a narrative of hope
filled with 'spiritual hesitation'; to Auden, mourning the death of Yeats,
'poetry makes nothing happen' - life does not catch up with the artist, it is
the artist who has to catch up with life; for the Marxist poet in Nazim
Hikmet's Human Landscapes the choice is a reality, you either
choose to take the side of the powerless or you embrace the cynicism of a
life devoid of meaning; imagination brings with it hope, but not hope as in
'nostalgia' or 'wishful thinking' but hope as in social and political change
that is the very essence of imagination itself. Hope therefore can only be
ironic and irony is what the language of protest is all about, a 'means to
unbind us.'
Socialism
(now there's a thing --
partly of
nostalgia
as well as
wishful thinking);
requires too
much concentration,
and doesn't
work, apparently.
Capitalism?
Unquestionably,
at least for
the majority,
after all
those dispossessed
aren't worth
accounting for anyway...
Éare they?
(86)
©
Prakash Kona 2010
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