Poetry

Judgement 31

When Titian used to start a work in oil

He stretched the canvas, then put down some lines,

Just light and dark, in red and black and pale -

Masses and abstract shapes which made no sense

Until they pleased his vision for a while.

Pleasing but dumb. The anxiety remains

That these unfinished inchoate masses

Though they be meaningless, still have some promise.

Then he would turn the blocked out canvas round,

And leave it there for months, forgetting it

To do some other work. When he returned

He used those shapeless ghost forms as the net

On which great beauty would have a steady ground.

He set about to paint those intricate

And wonderfully coloured images

Which started life as mess and dark blotches.

That’s how a painter works upon your eye,

Intuitively laying down emotion

Making no effort, in anxiety,

To start with formless shade, and work thereon.

The kind of thing those who can barely see

In almost perfect blindness live among.

That’s what I saw there, on that Good Friday

All unformed chaos seen indistinctly.

And not for us the Earth, its daily spin

Of three hundred and sixty one degrees,

Required to make it turn toward the sun

(The extra bit of turn required because

It has moved on through space), and thus at noon

Our place on earth directly turned towards

The source of light and heat. All that was gone

There was just mass and dark moving outline.

A man came near and sat down next to us,

One from that triumph, peeled off by and by.

“My ‘Peter Bell’ is about your ancestors,”

He said, “De Quincy and Coleridge and I

Studied the middle and the low orders

Of people round the Lakes. As a schoolboy

I knew Benoni Rigge at Hawkshead school

And how his mother died when she fell ill.

“Benoni’s father left her at the birth

And broke her heart,” he said. “That’s a sad tale,”

I answered him, then said: “You are Wordsworth.”

“It’s sad, alright,” he answered. “Typical.

And God himself has lived upon the earth,

And died, and suffered first, and known it all.

Jesus’s body lies nearby right now

In proof that God himself really does know.

“He was in pain so bad he didn’t care

About his mission or such divine stuff.

A man can’t think when he suffers torture.

He was afraid, indifferent to love.

In pain a man cannot control his fear.

He was not sure there is an afterlife.

For Jesus was entirely human being

He was afraid because he was a man.

“His arms were tightly pulled out to his sides

The nails were hurting him. He arched his spine

To use his legs and push himself upwards,

But still that overwhelming human pain.

The feelings could not be put into words,

Except: ‘Father, why have you left your son?’

He wished he was not God, and to go home,

But went on sweating, in the sun, the same.

“At God’s death on the Cross order decays.

It is the moment when a new world rises

World without death or pain. But first, chaos.”

“I know what happens when men have suprises,

I have seen the open mouthed and far off eyes,”

I said, “How the uncanny surfaces.

In boys who find themselves, at last, in war

For whom the world has changed for evermore

“The eyes wide open in a fire fight,

Who cannot understand how this has happened.

The unexpected battle in the night

In which the entire world becomes uncanny;

The troubled look of one who has been shot

And cannot move, and calls out for his ‘Nanny’.

God knows these feelings, just like most of us.

Please tell me more about that friend of yours.”

I asked him to relate the things he knew

About my ancestor from his home land.

He said: “Benoni’s father left the two,

The son and mother, leaving them behind.

Mary died broken hearted when the boy

Was barely sixth months old, I understand.

At Hawkshead school I made myself his friend.

In London he set up some factories

Importing perfumes, to the Prince of Wales,

“At New Bond Street. And to Victoria.

Benoni’s daughter married Mr White,

A man who was hanged for arson that year

At Newgate. She gave it another shot

With someone else, when back in Cumbria,

She got engaged before she tied the knot

With Swainson, cousin to the Machel line

The Lords of Krackenthorpe and De Dalton.

“But, with an assumed name, she fled to Chester,

Escaping him, though he came following.

That man is in the Handbridge cemetery

There by the Greek church, where you used to sing.

But not before he killed her, so they say,

The police inquest could not prove a thing.

Her son was living in a Newtown terrace

A joiner, Swainson, in the 1860s.

“Two generations then, of manual labour

As carpenters and train workers, follow.

Which gave rise to your grandfather down there

At Queen’s Park, Wrexham, by River Gwenfro

Where he held onto life nor rich nor poor,

On trains, in mines, at steelworks, working so

That you could see the light and never starve

And educate yourself under his roof.”

The story ended. All the blurry shapes

From which we are made had been before my mind,

In what he said. An English saint, perhaps,

Is how we should have understood his kind,

That teacher who reversed England’s collapse

For years at least. But nothing could withstand

The divine will which wanted to create

The new eternal world, our future state.