It's been good to see so many affectionate and admiring obituaries for Barry Humphries, who surely deserved them all. Many make reference to the generation of talented young Australians who headed for our shores in the Fifties and Sixties: Clive James, Robert Hughes and Germaine Greer are always mentioned, but rarely if ever the poet Peter Porter (about whom I have written many times on this blog). So this would be a good time to resume my one-man crusade to keep the name of this fine, abundantly talented poet alive. It also happens to be Wittgenstein's birthday (born on the same day in 1889 as Anita Loos, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, fact fans), so I'll share this one, in which Wittgenstein, nearing his death, reads himself to sleep, and dreams. The first stanza is obscure, especially the third and fourth lines, but press on through and the poem yields its rewards. The six six-line stanzas are, as gradually becomes apparent, in the palindromic rhyme scheme ABCCBA, the same as Browning's 'Meeting at Night'...
Wittgenstein's Dream
I had taken my boat out on the fiord,
I get so dreadfully morose at five,
I went in and put Nature on my hatstand
And considered the Sinking of the Eveninglands
And laughed at what translation may contrive
And worked at mathematics and was bored.
There was fire above the sun in its descent,
There were letters there whose words seemed scarcely cooked,
There was speech and decency and utter terror,
In twice four hundred pages just one error
In everything I ever wrote – I looked
In meaning for whatever wasn't meant.
Some amateur was killing Schubert dead,
Some of the pains the English force on me,
Somewhere with cow-bells Austria exists,
But then I saw the gods pin up their lists
But was not on them – we live stupidly
But are redeemed by what cannot be said.
Perhaps a language has been made which works,
Perhaps it's tension in the cinema,
Perhaps 'perhaps' is an inventive word,
A sort of self-intended thing, a bird,
A problem for an architect, a star,
A plan to save Vienna from the Turks.
After dinner I read myself to sleep,
After which I dreamt the Eastern front
After an exchange of Howitzers,
The angel of death was taking what was hers,
The finger missed me but the guns still grunt
The syntax of the real, the rules they keep.
And then I woke in my own corner bed
And turned away and cried into the wall
And cursed the world which Mozart had to leave.
I heard a voice which told me not to grieve,
I heard myself, 'Tell them,' I said to all,
'I've had a wonderful life. I'm dead.'
"but press on through and the poem yields its rewards" - you really hit the nail on the head about Porter. How many, many times have I pressed on through and ended up wondering, "Is it really worth it?" You have on the one hand among Porter's near contemporaries the brilliant diversions supplied by Clive James and Humphries, plus Gwen Harwood and Philip Hodgins (yes, much younger), all infinitely less hard work than him and at least two of them great poets, and on the other Les Murray, also sometimes requiring a bit of "pressing on through" but so infinitely more worth it in his startling perception and originality. Porter, to me, is the successor of A.D. Hope, not to be dismissed but requiring much hard work and providing in return how much joy? I suppose it all comes down to whether literature is greater for being a little inaccessible.
ReplyDeleteWell, I agree about the one and only Les Murray, who is in a league of his own – but I do find Porter gives me pleasure, even joy, whether or not 'pressing on through' is required. Perhaps it's his lightness of touch, and his use of pleasing traditional forms. There's something of 'light verse' about much of his work – and he can be disarmingly straightforward, as in most of the poems in The Cost of Seriousness.
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