Dialectics

Was it the double of my dream
The woman that by me lay
Dreamed, or did we halve a dream,
Under the first cold gleam of day?
~W. B. Yeats

DREAMS of a city slumbering
Under a sallow, thunderous sky:
Beneath the pitiless neon
People live, love and die.

Dreams of pearl-grey islands
Strung on a shimmering sea;
Quietly cicadas chafe,
Amongst ancient olive trees.

And though our dreams grow distant,
Never utterly apart;
Drawn close by an inconsistent,
Ambiguous heart.

Such overt, desperate brightness
—Voracious need concealed:
Such deliberate reticence
—A stifled voice revealed.

You wake in the empty hours,
To the city's quiet commotion—
Hear traffic swish through a sudden shower,
Fear an overwhelming ocean.

I walk on the darkening headland,
Through cool, moonlit pinewoods—
In the shiftless sea and shivering trees:
Hear restless multitudes.

I wrote this around September or October 2000. Although the quote is from Yeats, the poem really reflects just how much Auden I'd been reading at the time. I still really like the way it hovers between the iambic and trochaic;  it achieves a cool, understated clarity; a natural, naive style which these days I would struggle to recapture.

Psychologically at the time I was such a mess; maybe the extent of male menopausal angst is sufficiently masked by the form, but it is a poem about estrangement, confused desires and  the heart's inconsistencies. I wrote it, or at least the first draft of it, on scrappy bits of paper on a campsite in Losinj, an island just off the Istrian coast.

In 2000 you still had to take special motor insurance out to drive in Croatia. We spent two wonderful weeks camped on Losinj  overlooking 'pearl-grey islands'. It was lovely, but I was morose quite a lot of the time, a lost soul. For the first time in 20 years I had insistent voices in my head, giving me words and phrases. There was stuff I just had to write down. It did not accord with my  bourgeois, professional life. Hey! I was having a good old fashioned 1970's style identity crisis, thirty years too late.

 The version above made it into my chapbook, but originally there was more, a part two -

Insurrection in the city,
Red flags fly from the barricades,
While hollow eyed, the vanquished
Stare through wire palisades.

Banished to this bare island,
The magician's beautiful daughter
Dreams of a bigger, braver world
Across the 'brimming water'.

Prospero in his niggardly cell,
Amongst barren hills, a stunted grove,
Invokes a conceited, callous spell,
Wreaking revenge through love.

When nothing remains to gain or prove
Might then may we come to know
A simple, unequivocal love;
And in this savage, sunny shore
Find it's guiltless metaphor?

Of course the poem does work better without this, but from a personal point of view I still like it. In the year 2000 you could still sense the  shadow of war in Croatia; the conflict had ended less than five years before. In the car park by the beach there were vehicles from all over Eastern Europe - Hungary, Bulgaria, Macedonia, even Russia; but in two weeks we did not see a single Serbian car. I was waiting in the shower block one morning, a short and slightly portly man emerged from the cubicle wrapped in nothing but a precariously small stripey towel. 'You Breeteesh?', he snapped at me. I confirmed that this was indeed the case. His face broke into a huge but somewhat dentally challenged smile, 'Tank you', he said, 'fora freedom'.

I think the famous photograph from 1992 must have been in my mind when I wrote the first stanza.



Some months into my Sonnet Board adventure I attempted to re-write all of this.

Then I thought of a slumbering city,
Neon-bright beneath a low sallow sky;
and  people, without delight or pity
consigned behind a suburban door, to die.

In dreams who crosses the desolate dune
As a rip-tide curls across the bay?
Beyond the beach, beneath the waning moon
Cicadas chafe; dawn glints pearly grey.

In the rush hour's quiet commotion,
You sense huge, tempestuous seas
While on the edge of a placid ocean
I hear a multitude rise in the breeze.

Am I the figure from your imagined shore:
You, the perfect stranger, dreamt outside my door?

I really did struggle at first with the demands of the form. It was clear even to me that this did not work, I don't recall ever posting it for critique. The second stanza and the couplet, although I did not realise it at the time were actually the starting point of a different poem altogether.