Commoners' Rights to the Heroic Quatrain

I wonder who remembers now Kingsley Amis's reactionism* in citing Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard as 'a great Rightie poem; no work of literature ever argued more persuasively that the poor and ignorant are better off as they are.'

So that's all right, then, 'some mute inglorious' Mr Milton or Mrs Milton are better off laid to rest with our dismissive thought that no lyrical utterance ever passed those illiterate villagers' lips in their lifetime, or profound or original observation ever struck their minds! Absurd!

I was reminded of Amis's idiotic snidery when I came across this poem by David Sweetman the other day. This is the truest, purest, refutation I have yet encountered of Amis's fascistic authoritarian contempt for the People, literate or otherwise, and of his 'kingsley' assumption that metaphor and simile do not figure in the spiritual lives of ALL subjects of the realm.


Cold Beds

Thirty years she had waited for disaster
and when they told her he had drowned
she nodded. Like things seen in Holy prints

there had been signs: the greengrocer
piling bound asparagus as if to burn a saint
made her cross herself quickly.

And when she took flowers for Bob
a dead gull lay on the boy's grave,
plump and grey as the shell that killed him.

So now the father’s gone, after thirty years
on a bed too big for one, she sees it all:
the sails becalmed at the window,

her Madonna for a prow, the moonlight
that gives their walnut cupboard the pattern
of waves closing over his head.

David Sweetman
From ‘Looking into the Deep End’ (Faber, 1981)

* For Amis’s shamefully reactionary remarks, see page 320, ‘The Amis Anthology: A Personal Choice of English Verse’ (1988)