On a Portrait of a Deaf Man

Hi folks,

Beautiful and solemn: Highgate Cemetery

We've bashed through a fair few poems recently. Make sure you've got your head around them by reading through the Bitesize notes on Casehistory: Alison, The Horse Whisperer and On a Portrait of a Deaf Man.

It's the last poem I want to blog about because it's a belter. Why do I like this grim little poem about death? Perhaps it's because truly great literature deals with universal themes. The Romantic poet, John Keats said: 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'. Cormac McCarthy, who wrote a novel about the end of the world ('The Road'), says that writing that is not about 'issues of life and death' is 'not literature'. What I love about this poem is that it presents the harsh truth of the reality of death without a sugary coating. We tend to live in denial about such things; great literature makes us confront these thoughts and deal with them. John Betjeman doesn't shy away from the darkest of thoughts in his grief. And he doesn't water his feelings down with euphemisms. But just like the dead wife in 'My Last Duchess', we are given a picture of the simple pleasures of life too: the food, the walks, the air. Perhaps part of the truth of this poem is that we cannot celebrate the beauty and joy of life without acknowledging the darkness of death. It's a poem of opposites.




There's so much more to this poem than initially meets the eye. It's very carefully constructed, and there's loads to say about structure. Here's a recap of key points about this poem, and perhaps a few things we didn't notice first time around:

• The poem is an elegy - a lament for the dead.
• It's written in ballad metre. That means that lines 1 and 3 of each stanza are tetrameters (four stressed syllables); lines 2 and 4 are trimeters (three). This creates the same rhythm that you'll know from all those carol concerts in O Little Town of Bethlehem. 
• The regular rhythm and rhyme creates various effects. It creates a sense of order and certainty - like the inevitability of death. It also makes the poem all the more blunt - even darkly comic.
• A key idea in the poem is that the speaker cannot think of the positive memories of his father without being reminded of death. Even the images of food remind us of this: think of the fragile 'egg-shaped head' and the wrinkly 'potatoes in their skin' which reminds us that the father has swapped places with the potato. Later, the 'soil' he loved the smell of is also a reminder of his burial.
• The poem is as much about the speaker's fear of death as it is about the father. Consider the 'loosely fitting shooting clothes' which become a 'closely fitting shroud'. A shroud is a burial cloth. The fact that they are now closely fitting is more a sign of the speaker's claustrophobia at the thought of burial than it is a description of the father's change in size.
• It's a sensual poem - only the sense of sound is missing as the father is deaf (long silent walks/not the song it sung)
• The oxymoronic description of a the tie, 'discreetly loud', reminds us that this poem is one of opposites: life and death, celebration and sorrow, faith and despair, freshness and decay. See the yin-yang symbol above. Perhaps it also tells us about the father's personality - confident, strong but understated.
• Part of the Chinese concept of yin-yang is that opposites are interconnected. This is true of this poem. Within each stanza, the positive memories tie up with sadness and even horror. Eg. 'shake hands' links to 'finger-bones'; eating a potato, eating clay; the rain-washed air he loved and the soaked earth of Highgate Cemetery.
• Remember, Carrara is an Italian town famous for its marble - often used for gravestones.
• The final stanza is full of bitterness, anger and confusion. We don't know how long ago the father died, but the emotions are still raw. The fact that the poem is inspired by a portrait suggests that time has passed but has not healed. 'Thus' and 'thus' may well refer to the father's deafness and his death. There is a sarcastic tone to 'save his soul and pray.' Despite the direct address to God and the respectful capitalisation of 'You', there is no mention of an afterlife: 'I only see decay.' The ending of the poem therefore presents us with ambivalent feelings about God (ambivalent means mixed, conflicting feelings about something). He's questioning his faith - but doing it directly at God. The poem, as we have seen, is full of ambivalence.

I hope this helps. Think about how it connects to:

• Casehistory: Alison (before/after; loss; faith)
• Medusa (bitterness, anger and ambivalence) 
• Brendon Gallacher (death, memory, loss)
• Les Grands Seigneurs (sudden, harsh transformations)
• Ozymandias (decay)
• My Last Duchess (life and death)
• The River God (nature, life and death)

Mr M


PS. Just had these two new thoughts about The Horse Whisperer:

1) Just like in Les Grands Seigneurs, the poems sudden transformation is shown in the verse form through sudden endings. In Horse, it is provided through a short final stanza; in Seigneurs, through short, skewed rhyming lines.

2) I mentioned how the images we get of horses are like close ups of small details ('shimmering muscles', 'eyes revolved') - I compared this to the early pages of the Gruffalo - before we meet him. This technique has a name: synecdoche (where a part of something is used to represent the whole: here specific parts of the horse are used to stand for the whole horse, effectively focusing the reader's attention.) Good, eh? If the Gruffalo passed you by, here's what I mean:

Now that's a cross-reference!

Mr M