Mr and Mrs Anon.

To return to the theme of the 'mute inglorious' Mr and Mrs Miltons so despised by Kingsley Amis (see my September posting, Commoners' Rights to the Heroic Quatrain).
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2011/09/commoners-rights-to-heroic-quatrain.html
The defence of Anon must be for me a recurrent fixation because I'm reminded I touched upon it in my Elegy from a Locked Drawer in Sister Morphine (2008), where my youthful protagonist's flirtation with Toby Freemartin takes this turn ...

It was clear we were hitting it off.
    'What is your favourite colour?' he asked.
    'Iridescence,' I answered quickly (paying homage to Marianne Moore).
    'And your favourite poet?'
    'Anon.'
    His smile was wary. I suspected he was more than a little stuck on me but puzzled by the immature elusiveness I often contrived to make myself more fetching.

-

So, evidently, my views haven't changed since my teens.  And certainly my notebooks record any number of memorable sayings, saws and proverbs whose authors are Anon, yet whose utterances, like folk tunes, cling fast to the mind with a grip fiercer than that of any named poet.

Look. Here. I've just this minute taken eight random folk sayings and arranged them in two 'found stanzas' ...

Thought lies in Bed and is beshatten.
Mope-eyed for living so long as a Maiden,
She cannot leap an Inch from a Slut
Yet can correct the Magnificat.

They say Old Maids lead Apes in Hell.
The Body is the Socket of the Soul
Put together with a hot Needle and burnt Thread. 

Then ask: Would you know her Secrets? Who’s to know who’s a Good Maid?

Remember, Sir Kingsley, the ballad, the proverb, the inventive oath, the cautionary tale, owe their origin to Mr and Mrs Anon.

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)