Daft Patter
If anyone knows about sullen loneliness, you do
Yet there’s a grin in the wind, heartless and cold
There’s dark in the darkness, beauty of streams
I low my beams to you, from tunnel to tunnel
as if the frozen air had a distinct personality
Standing at the lonnen head, holding leeks, you
sawed my glance in half with yours. What keen eyes!
Such strange, out-dated clothes. What’s inside counts.
Leaning into the tall grass grandness of your alert stance
towards the west and the brilliant beauties of Ireland.
I know now why you took the sickle hook
backing the beasts into their shutdown shed
You chopped the gate for want of sound
but you had sound, all sound, my purr mistress
my fantastic slavver merchant, when we peeled the sky
together we had water and silence and fire and togetherness
the lights of all you didn’t say knots my life and all dreams.
• From Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965-2000 by Barry MacSweeney (Bloodaxe Books, 2003)
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This week, a late poem by Barry MacSweeney (1948-2000) recalls, and seems at first to revise, the ecstatic, leaping praise-songs that fill his 1995-7 collection, Pearl. It was originally published in Pearl in the Silver Morning (Poetical Histories, No 49, Cambridge 1999). The new selected poems also includes a substantial number of the earlier Pearl poems, and this context makes Daft Patter all the more moving.
Although MacSweeney wrote it towards the end of his life, the reader soon discovers it is not some throwaway, self-mocking, self-pitying, alcohol-heavy exercise in nostalgia. “Daft” of course means “silly” and “patter” is a word we connect most frequently with the comedian’s clever shtick. It’s a title ostensibly shrugging off the lure of romanticism, and at first the gloom deepens as MacSweeney summons Pearl’s own “sullen loneliness”. There’s a kind of reduced pastoral, as if the Northumbrian landscape were stripped of its earlier physical and emotional riches. “Yet there’s a grin in the wind …” The defiant assonance (grin/wind) already warms what is “heartless and cold”. Affirmation begins to ironise the irony of the title.
The diction throughout is a reminder of the vivid idiolect of the MacSweeney voice. It doesn’t use the full Geordie dialect, but is steeped in vernacular colour. This poem asks to be read aloud. The punctuation is purposefully erratic: the rhythmic exchanges of pause and flow are always audible. A grammatical “slip” in the last line (“the lights of all you didn’t say knots my life and all dreams”) works brilliantly to multiply the light and the knots.
Darkness becomes visible in the witty tautology of the third line, and what I think is the metaphorical vehicle for the speaker’s work of difficult remembering, mining. His hands-on process is luminously enacted in the line “I low my beams to you, from tunnel to tunnel”. The transitive use of the verb “low” instead of the conventional “lower” reminds the ear of the mournful sound of cattle, and jogs the eye to see an act of deep stooping, a humbly adoring “bow”. The presence who emerges, or surfaces, “as if the frozen air had a distinct personality” seems at this point to be both the speaker and the addressee. “Pearl” has been identified with the young woman who, deaf and unable to speak, was taught by a very young MacSweeney to read and write. The proud and sturdy assertion against his lover’s muteness, “But you had sound / all sound”, gains from our knowing that background.
Pearl’s looks and sounds clarify through brief observations, tenderly amused comments, and a tone of lovely, forthright realism. The mood intensifies, the diction glows. And sounds, sharp, heavy, hard, and very unlike the ripple of “patter”, form into one epiphany after another: “You sawed my glance / in half with yours”, “I now know why you took the sickle hook / backing the beasts into their shutdown shed”. The narrator also rejoices in the sounds the woman makes with her own mouth and tongue – “my purr mistress / my fantastic slavver merchant”. The dialogue shared by the lovers fuses his (so-called) “patter” and her “slavver”. There’s also a dialogue between the colloquial and the slightly more literary voice, the latter influenced perhaps by a much earlier Pearl.
MacSweeney ends by building a crescendo of affirmation. Another tautology adds a subtle chord: the couple are “together”, and “together” they possess “togetherness”. One of those flaky, dullard words, “togetherness” is seriously redefined and made honest.
As the poem gains energy, it tells us that intense experience may take shape in the mind again and again: it’s never lost. Memory, for ever young and volatile, stamps its immediacy on to the hesitation and disintegration time and suffering bring. While hints of struggle can be felt in the poem’s efforts both towards and against logical structure, the voice comes through, fiercely plain despite the orchestration of sound, triumphantly alive in the “frozen air”.
The 20th anniversary of Barry MacSweeney’s death will fall in May this year. It’s high time for a new generation to discover his work.
• The copy was amended on 25 February to change the spelling of “slaver” to “slavver”.