Clive James

ou plutôt les chanter Recite your lines aloud, Ronsard advised, Or, even better, sing them. Common speech Held all the rhythmic measures that he prized In poetry. He had much more to teach, But first he taught that. Several poets paid Him heed. The odd one even made the grade, Building a pretty castle on the beach. But on the whole it’s useless to point out That making the thing musical is part Of pinning down what you are on about. The voice leads to the craft, the craft to art: All this is patent to the gifted few Who know, before they can, what they must do To make the mind a spokesman for the heart. As for the million others, they are blessed: This is their age. Their slapdash in demand From all who would take fright were thought expressed In ways that showed a hint of being planned, They may say anything, in any way. Why not? Why shouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t they? Nothing to study, nothing to understand. And yet it could be that their flight from rhyme And reason is a technically precise Response to the confusion of a time When nothing, said once, merits hearing twice. It isn’t that their deafness fails to match The chaos. It’s the only thing they catch. No form, no pattern. Just the rolling dice Of idle talk. Always a blight before, It finds a place today, fulfills a need: As those who cannot write increase the store Of verses fit for those who cannot read, For those who can do both the field is clear To meet and trade their wares, the only fear That mutual benefit might look like greed. It isn’t, though. It’s just the interchange Of showpiece and attention that has been There since the cavemen took pains to arrange Pictures of deer and bison to be seen To best advantage in the flickering light. Our luck is to sell tickets on the night Only to those who might know what we mean, And they are drawn to us by love of sound. In the first instance, it is how we sing That brings them in. No mystery more profound Than how a melody soars from a string Of syllables, and yet this much we know: Ronsard was right to emphasize it so, Even in his day. Now, it’s everything: The language falls apart before our eyes, But what it once was echoes in our ears As poetry, whose gathered force defies Even the drift of our declining years. A single lilting line, a single turn Of phrase: these always proved, at last we learn, Life cries for joy though it must end in tears.

Facing the wind, the hovering stormy petrels Tap-dance on the water. They pluck the tuna hatchlings As Pavlova, had she been in a tearing hurry, Might once have picked up pearls From a broken necklace. Yellowfin drive the turbine of sardines Up near the surface so the diving shearwaters Can fly down through the bubbles and get at them. Birds from above and big fish from below Rip at the pack until it comes apart Like Poland, with survivors in single figures. The krill, as singletons almost not there But en masse like a cloud of diamond dust Against the sunlit flood of their ballroom ceiling, Are scooped up by the basking shark’s dragline Or sucked in through the whale’s drapes of baleen— A galaxy absorbed into a boudoir And nullified, a deep-space mass extinction Watched only by the Hubble telescope. Make your bones in a shark family if you can. If not, be tricky to locate for sheer Translucence, a slick blip that will become— Beyond the daisycutter beaks and jaws— A lobster fortified with jutting eaves Of glazed tile, like the castle at Nagoya Hoisted around by jacks and cranes, an awkward Mouthful like a crushed car. That being done, Crawl backwards down a hole and don’t come out.