Critical insights into a poetic legacy

By Prof. Y. Gooneratne

“Fall of Icarus” by Breughel

Elegy for My Son
There must be some terrible power
In the earth and wind and sunshine
How else could the young tree,
A favourite of these three
Sicken in a single day and die?
And I who took some pride over
Planting and tending it
And caught its assent to life
The sun’s and wind’s keen sponsorship of
This fine young tree, more admiring than proud.
There must be some strange excess of love
In earth and wind and sun that
With notice of just a little day
Took such a fine young tree away.
Whenever I stand in the empty place, thoughts
Brandished wildly sigh and sing in memory.
Earth, wind and sun go about their work
As if nothing has occurred,
Calm as conspirators after the deed
Driving me to almost believe nothing
Has happened.I am the tree that’s gone,
That tree and I being one.

Patrick Fernando (1931 – 1982)

When approaching for the first time a poem that is unfamiliar, readers may find it useful to remind themselves from the very start of the difference between ‘Prose’ and ‘Poetry’. While both forms of writing use the English language, drawing on the huge vocabulary available to us in English, the two forms are different from each other, and are used for different purposes. Prose is essentially the language of clear, clean, uncluttered statement. A school text-book, for example, will inform its reader that

The sun is the centre of the solar system.

Language

In doing so, it is using the language of scientific statement, the language of prose. If this prose sentence is spoken aloud, the reader would become aware that certain sounds in the sentence are repeated – the ‘s’ sounds of sun, centre, solar and system.

This repetition would be called alliteration if we had encountered it in a poem, but in a prose sentence such repetition adds nothing to the meaning of what is being stated. The sentence states a scientific fact about the natural world, and all that it tries to do is to convey information as unequivocally as possible.

If readers were now to compare this with the following lines from John Donne’s poem “The Sun Rising”,

Busy old fool, unruly Sun, Why dost thou thus, Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ? Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run ?

They would find that the poet appears to be talking to the sun – the same sun they encountered in the ‘prose’ sentence above – but in an entirely different manner.

He appears to be questioning the sun, challenging the sun, insulting the sun by calling it names as though it were an interfering old ‘busybody’, demanding answers as if, while rising in the sky and waking him up by shining in through his window-curtains, the sun would hear him and reply. In the world of scientific fact – of prose - this does not make sense. But in the world of poetry, it does.

Poetry

Why should this be so? Because the world of poetry uses the language of metaphor, while the world of prose uses the language of statement. In the world of prose, there is no ambiguity, no ‘double-meaning’; but in the world of poetry, meaning is many-layered.

Poets make use, in all kinds of ways, of the multiple meanings of English words, the various meanings embodied in the sounds the words make, and in the images they create in our minds.

By doing so, poets make it possible for what might seem on the surface to be a simple factual statement about some thing to function at the same time as something else.

Why should they want to do this? What is the point of using the ‘language of metaphor’? Because writers of poetry need to get beyond the world of scientific fact, and into the world of emotion and imagination. Metaphors give them the means to do it. Metaphor, in whatever form they use it – exploiting similar sounds as alliteration, for instance, or visual phenomena, as images – helps them discover truths of various kinds, about human experience, about life, and about themselves.

If Patrick Fernando’s poem ‘Elegy For My Son’ is read without notice being taken of the word ‘Elegy’ in its title, the poem seems to make a simple statement in a quiet, conversational manner, about a young tree that had been growing in the poet’s garden, and had apparently been doing well until, unexpectedly and for no apparent reason, it withered and ‘died’. Any observer of the real world around us, especially of the beautiful trees in our streets and gardens, knows that healthy, flourishing vegetation does not suddenly ‘die’.

If it has not been deliberately cut down in the interests of ‘development’, we surmise that something in nature (an insect, perhaps, or a plant-disease) has been silently eating away the life of what had seemed, until today, to be a perfectly healthy tree. Alternatively (being (superstitious?) Sri Lankans, taught from childhood about the destructive effects of the so-called ‘Evil Eye’), we might imagine that the admiration or envy of some neighbour or passer-by has blighted it.

Metaphor

The poet, whose beloved son has died, finds in the dead tree a metaphor with which to explore his feelings about his loss. He speaks in the character (or persona) of a narrator, the “I” of the poem, who is evidently a keen gardener. The narrator has felt both love and admiration for ‘the fine young tree’ growing in his garden, feeling himself to be so closely connected with it that it had become a part of him. He is attempting to understand the reasons for its sudden exit from existence, and trying to come to terms with the significance (for himself) of the empty space it has left behind in his garden.

The incident has overturned his earlier ideas about Nature as a force that encourages health and growth, for ‘Earth and wind and sunshine’, which had formerly combined their influence to make the little tree grow and flourish, seem to have suddenly demonstrated a ‘terrible power’, an ability, indeed an intention, to destroy. Why has this happened? Any true gardener must be concerned when something of this kind occurs.

Alternatively, there may be a mystical explanation: it might be that ‘earth and wind and sunshine’, natural forces that the gods of the ancient classical world deified and made legends about, have deliberately taken the tree away. The final line of the poem, ‘That tree and I being one’ confirms something of which the poem’s title has provided a hint, that the tree is more to the poet than merely a beloved plant in his garden. It is, in fact, a metaphor, the master image in a poem of mourning, written in memory of a beloved child.

Patrick Fernando (1931 – 1982), a Sri Lankan who was educated in English at, first, St Joseph’s College, and later, at the University of Ceylon, read Western classical literature for his B.A. degree. Fernando, who was a devout Roman Catholic in addition to being a classicist, seeks some meaning, some divine intention, in the death of his son. Given his intellectual and spiritual background, it is very natural that he turns to the Classics and to the teachings of the Catholic Church for guidance.

Mythology

Most of us, Christian and Catholic or not, have heard the old saying, ‘Those whom the gods love die young’. We may not all know where it comes from. The saying originates in Greek mythology. According to the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, Trophonius, a son of Erginus, built Apollo’s temple at the oracle at Delphi with his brother, Agamedes. Once the building was finished, the oracle told the brothers to do whatsoever they wished for six days and that, on the seventh day, their greatest wish would be granted. They did as they were told, and were found dead on the seventh day. The saying, “Those whom the gods love die young”, comes from this story, which is very well known to students of the Western classics.

Patrick Fernando, a deeply serious poet, and one committed to the writing of English poetry as a craft, was well-versed, not only in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome that he studied as a university undergraduate, but also in the best poetic writing of the 20th century, which he read for pleasure and instruction throughout his life. The final stanza of his Elegy for My Son looks back to Musée des Beaux Arts.

W.H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”

‘Breughel’s Icarus’?

Auden’s poem was inspired by a 16th-century Dutch painting that he had seen in a Museum of Fine Arts About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course.

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Earth, wind and sun [have gone] about their work
As if nothing has occurred,
Calm as conspirators after the deed
Driving me to almost believe nothing
Has happened.

Literature

According to a legend that is famous in the literature of the West, Daedalus, a talented Athenian craftsman, attempted to escape from his exile in the palace of Knossos, Crete, where he and his son Icarus had been imprisoned at the hands of King Minos, the king for whom he had built the Labyrinth to imprison the Minotaur (half man, half bull). Daedalus, the superior craftsman, was exiled because he gave Minos’s daughter, Ariadne, a clew (or ball of string) in order to help Theseus, an enemy of Minos, survive the Labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur.

Daedalus fashioned two pairs of wings out of wax and feathers for himself and his son. Before they took off from the island, Daedalus warned his son not to fly too close to the sun, nor too close to the sea. Overcome by the exhilaration that flying lent him, Icarus soared through the sky, but in doing so he came too close to the sun, which melted the wax. Icarus kept flapping his wings but soon realised that he had no feathers left and that he was only flapping his bare arms. And so, Icarus fell into the sea, and was drowned in the area which bears his name, the Icarian Sea near Icaria, an island southwest of Samos.

Inquiry has not yielded information as to what actually caused the death of Patrick Fernando’s young son in September 1980. (One source has suggested that he died in a street accident on the Galle Road, but that is not confirmed.) There is no doubt that the poet never got over the depression and melancholy caused by his loss. His own death (in 1982) could be said to have followed from it. (Cf. Yasmine Gooneratne, ‘”Unhelpful isolation”: The literary correspondence of Patrick Fernando’, in ACLALS Bulletin, Seventh Series, No. 2, National University of Singapore 1985, pp. 95 – 105. ) Interestingly, a prayer in verse that Patrick Fernando wrote for a memorial prayer card printed for his son employs the same poetic image that he has used in the Elegy, of a ‘sapling’ or young tree:

Quickly, in the quiet, sapling day
You called me, Lord, and I leaving
All I loved have come, believing
Love prospers best in your will, and pray
Let my admission, like your summons,
Be a matter of Love’s impatience.

In titling this poem an ‘Elegy’, Fernando ‘places’ it within a well-established tradition of poetic writing that English poets adopted from Greek and Roman literature. The form of poetry that is called an ‘elegy’ began as an ancient Greek metrical form. It was (and is) traditionally written in response to the death of a person or group. Though similar in function, the elegy is distinct from the epitaph, the ode, and the eulogy. The epitaph is (or should be) very brief; the ode solely exalts; and the eulogy is most often written in formal prose.

Elegy

The elements of a traditional elegy mirror three stages of loss. First, there is a lament, where the speaker expresses grief and sorrow, then praise and admiration of the idealised dead, and finally consolation and solace. These three stages can be seen in many deservedly honoured English poems written through the centuries, notably John Milton’s Lycidas (1637)an elegy written in memory of the young Milton’s fellow-poet Edward King.

In a broader sense, an elegy may be a poem of melancholy reflection upon life’s transience or its sorrows, as in Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751), and W. H. Auden’s classic In Memory of W. B. Yeats,The Fisherman Mourned by his Wife and Obsequies for Antonio Pompirelli, Bishop. Another elegiac poem of his writing, which verges on t

IN MEMORY OF W.B. YEATS

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

W.H. Auden (1907 – 1973)

Patrick Fernando has written other poems of mourning that could be called ‘elegies’. They include The Fisherman Mourned by his Wife and Obsequies for Antonio Pompirelli, Bishop. Another elegiac poem of his writing, which verges on the satiric, is

THE LATE SIR HENRY

Behind the usual friends and callers, Death
Slunk in and took this fine knight unawares,
Yet self-possessed he lies though robbed of breath,
And reft of horses, mills and gilt-edged shares.
Two candles light the still impressive head
Two more the feet, once of a scampering boy.
Sustained with eau-de-cologne the daughters shed
Tears wrung from memories of childhood joy.
We watched distinguished mourners congregate,
The hall being full, beneath a blooming tree,
And lighting their cigarettes speculate
Beyond the meagre margins of mortality.
Like disciples before Resurrection –
Bankers, brokers, objective though distraught,
Assessed the impact of the sudden loss upon
Politics, trade, industry, Church and sport.
At the graveyard boys were trying to sell
Icecream and oranges to cool that crowd
Arrived in thousands to observe how well
Sir Henry had assumed his sudden shroud.

Alliteration

We can perceive poetic double-meanings in ‘self-possessed’ and ‘gilt/guilt-edged’. Alliteration, the device that repeats the initial sounds of certain words in English verse to link the ideas and concepts they represent, can be easily recognised here too, in ‘bankers, brokers’, ‘good manners for grief’, and ‘sudden shroud’.

Also immediately evident are certain literary ‘presences’: one of these is Andrew Marvell, a 17thc poet whose ode ‘To his Coy Mistress’ teases a stand-offish young woman by reminding her of the inevitable decay that awaits her in the tomb; another is the Biblical warning against laying up (hoarding) treasure in this world, where thieves ‘break in and steal’. In every case, these poetic devices enhance the reader’s sense of Sir Henry’s funeral as social ritual, rather than religious rite.

With good manners for grief, every man in place,
And the weather fine, the rank chemistry
Of the flesh seemed foolish in this case,
Unthinkable the worm’s brief ministry.
No wonder then the bell seemed shy to toll,
And priest apologetic as he sang
A final plea for the departed soul,
And dropped the first clod with a nervous hand

(First published in New Ceylon Writing 1970, p. 27, reprinted in ‘The English Poetry of Sri Lanka’, p. 164)

Other Sri Lankan poets besides Patrick Fernando have written deeply felt elegies in memory of persons close to them. For purposes of comparison, here is a recently published poem by Shelagh Goonewardene, written in memory of a talented daughter who, like Patrick’s son, died young.

SONGS OF SILENCE

“Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorl’ed ear”
Wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins, the priest poet,
Remembered now from my student years
As I reflect on the silence in this house
Which sings to me as I remember you,
And gather memories to treasure in my heart.
There is no expectation now of hearing your key
Clicking open the back door,
Your light footfall in the passage
As you come to your room opposite mine,
Or a sudden ‘phone call when you are out, “It’s me.”
Only the hiss of the gas heater in the sitting room
A distant drift of voices from the school playground near our home
The sudden patter of rain on the roof in the night
And the early morning bird song outside my bedroom window.
In another fifty years or much less
When your brothers and I no longer inhabit this house
Our voices, our sounds will be gone forever
And those of another family will enliven the silence.
I hope the invisible footprints we leave behind
Our voiceless vibes that fill the spaces
Will speak of joys and sorrows deeply felt
Of pain and difficulty bravely borne
But most of all, of patient and enduring love.

Shelagh Goonewardene 2010

Note: No part of this essay may be reproduced without the author’s permission, except for purposes of scholarly reference. All quotations from the text or its sources must be accurately and adequately cited.