The Progress of Poetry

Third-century BCE papyrus fragments of Sappho's "Tithonus" poem

"I saw a Gardener with a watering can

Sprinkling dejectedly the heads of men

Buried up to their necks in the wet clay."

—Christopher Caudwell (Christopher St. John Sprigg), “The Progress of Poetry”

Caudwell's Wikipedia page lists his occupations: "Journalist, author, machine gunner.”

He perished in Spain fighting Francisco Franco's Falangists,

in “the year of ’37,”

when what they call the Yezhovshchina

raged in the USSR,

Stalin wiping out his buddies the Old Bolsheviks one by one,

then going on, it seemed, for, could it be? everyone—681,692 executions,

okay, give or take a few.

Yezhov himself, top killer that year,

got his own Genickschuss too.*

Defending his post to shield the retreat of the British Battalion of the International Brigades in the Jarama River Valley

Caudwell, “a leftist poet of the comfortable classes,”† and member of the CPGB,‡

fought bravely to the death,

but should have saved his breath:

today, in 2O24, eighty-seven years on,

Franco and the Falangists are long gone;

it's the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE)

that rags Catalonia now, you see,

as Madrid all these many years has done

while in Russia, Stalin the Little spills blood.

The dejected Gardener still waters human heads stuck in the mud.

Poetry does not progress,

but streaks eternal, old and new,

assuaging, as it might hope to do,

clingy lichen’s sapient screams.

Its honeyed words soothe doggy Cerberus, pay for boatman Charon’s hire, and lobby Hell's King Rhadamanthus'

for royal mitigation.**

Immortal Sappho sings sweet as ever

behind the veils that language dreams

up, accessorizing taboo conversation.

* Genickschuss, a shot in the nape of the neck, the Stalinist preferred method of execution.

† Selected Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid, ed. Duncan Glen (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), 90.

‡ Communist Party of Great Britain.

** Cf. Christopher Caudwell, “Classic Encounter,” in The Oxford Book of

Twentieth-Century English Verse, chosen by Philip Larkin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), where his “The Progress of Poetry” can also be found.

L'addition: A Modest Proposal

"A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout."—Anon. [Jonathan Swift], A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick (1729)

Three hundred and forty thousand pigs are slaughtered each day in these United States, or about 236 a minute

as are twenty-two million chickens, or about 15,278 a minute.

These statistics are merely approximate, of course,

and omit the numbers for the cattle, sheep, turkeys, and other beings

who also daily die that upright apes may live.

Tell me again, You there, standing in that dock,

Just what is it, exactly, that you have to offer?

I suggest you gaze with caution on the Animal Clock.†

They die humanely, though, you claim?

We have to eat! I’m not to blame!

But life will blame you all the same.

Do we split the tab, go Dutch? There are all too few innocents in this addition.

Wouldn’t want to put you in a false position!

† https://animalclock.org/

Strambotti

For Frank Prince

What feelings might encapsulate a soul

Or render into verse some scrap of sense?

Remembering love was your own cherished goal,

But you and she have both departed hence.

How should the dead return to speak in tongues?

It does no good, if good there be to make.

Music forgotten sets forgotten songs.

The waiting dreamer gives himself a shake.

I’m with you there, in what you felt that day.

I'll seek to speak—if something’s left to say.

***

I now exist, as you once did before.

We neither chose to run the rapids here

Or were consulted at the open door.

An end approaches, be it far or near.

This estrabot to deny might serve

What doom awaiting at the coming swerve?

What nonsense, though, to make a final wish!

Life’s not a meal in which dessert’s a dish.

Cf. F. T. Prince, The Doors of Stone: Poems 1938–1962 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963), "Strambotti," I–XVII.

This verse form became popular in the fifteenth century in Italy, where Sir Thomas Wyatt discovered it, who introduced it in England. The word strambotto derives from the Occitan (Provençal) term estrabot.