Sibelius
It’s January. A swan’s wing overhead
reminds you of his Fifth
but also of his death, that skein
breaking away to circle him
as if to announce what year it was.
At this age, every instinct shouts
behind you – as it did at the panto
for the ghost – and there’s an old man
at a lake still counting wild birds
who hasn’t even noticed the time.
January is Janus’s month. We should look
both ways. The geese have put their diversion
signs in the sky, but the sun holds up
its lollipop as if a young hero might
cross, find an egg, tie a knot in it.
****
John Greening’s latest collection, The Silence, begins with this week’s poem, Sibelius, and concludes with the title sequence, a long, mesmeric fusion of biographical narrative and meditation, structured in formal quatrains. It centres on the Finnish composer’s last 30 unproductive years, a period frequently referred to as “the silence of Järvenpää”. The three stanzas of Sibelius are like the prelude to the majestic fugue of The Silence: they focus on themes of creative renewal and mortality from a more personal perspective.
The landscape is appropriately bare and bird-encircled. As the opening statement emphasises, this landscape is not simply physical: it’s also that of a year that has just begun. Greening, born in 1954, gives the date of the poem as 2015, a significant date marking 150 years since the composer’s birth in 1865, and also reflecting, perhaps, Greening’s own closeness in age to Sibelius at the time of “the silence”.
While “a swan’s wing overhead” signifies the triumphant Fifth Symphony, with its famous third-movement “swan motif”, Greening picks up the para-rhyme of “fifth” with “death” and revises an anecdote from the Sibelius biography. While out for his morning walk, the composer saw a flock of cranes, one of which broke away from the others and circled over the composer’s family house, Ainola. (In the poem, it’s a “skein” rather than one bird.) Sibelius seems to have viewed this as an omen: in fact, he died a few days later.
The more general premonitions of mortality receive partly comic treatment in the second stanza. That famous pantomime phrase, traditionally shouted by the audience (“it’s behind you!”) takes on a different meaning in the absence of inverted commas or italics. “At this age, every instinct shouts / behind you – as it did at the panto / for the ghost”. We might think that “it” is death. At the same time, grammatically, it’s also that “every instinct” is located “behind you” – another very alarming thought. And perhaps there’s an ambiguity, too, about the ghost. In the pantomime scene, the intruder, not always a ghost, steals up behind the character who’s trying to escape it. Greening’s phrasing suggests that the ghost might be haunted by a live pursuer. Briskly moving on (this poem is fast on its feet) the ghost leads us to “the old man” and a pleasantly reassuring portrait of the artist “at a lake still counting wild birds / who hasn’t even noticed the time”.
The last stanza further opens up the concept of time, and invites us to participate in the forward movement. The road-safety advice, based on the doubled Janus-face, is to “look both ways”. The “diversion signs” of the geese, and the “lollipop” sun are visually effective, and also cut things down to size – as the “young hero” is cut down to size in having to wait at the school crossing. A strange, mythologically inflected image adds a final lift to the poem’s mood. To “find an egg” and “tie a knot in it” suggests the creative process in magical microcosm. It recurs in The Silence as an image of Sibelius’s hoped-for but finally unavailable renewal. In the formal structure of The Silence lies one illustration of the way a poet ties the knots that sustain imaginative vitality without strangling it. Sibelius (the poem) shows us another way, via the movement of fleet-footed images.
The composer Sibelius had been expected to produce his eighth symphony during his time at Järvenpää. He may have written the symphony but, if so, it was among the compositions he later burned. The critic in him may not necessarily have been right.
“Make beauty of disaster // and tragedy of utter bliss” advises the composer’s voice to himself in The Silence, “take the turn of the year with you”. This last is a compelling thought.
Contemporary poets are luckier than famous national composers, perhaps. The ghost behind them is only time after all, and less scary than the audience of promoters and fans impatiently awaiting the new great work.
May January 2021 bring optimism and a new start for all of us.