Silkworms Work and Love Till Death
He kept a list of poems there were to write,
A personal list, imperative and sour –
Beyond his windows all was digital,
The nominative unpleasantness of thought
Recurred, he reasoned, every day in speech.
He feared the public knew the thing he was,
And one of those who would not be alone.
In blood one day he framed a strategy,
The curt unpitied sadness of a sage
He read about at some South China Court
Who slated certainty and cut up sights
To keep them small – Of course you must still write,
The Master wrote, but little that you mean:
Your paper should not die to prove your words.
Since the Scorpion Press brought out his first collection, Once Bitten, Twice Bitten, in 1961, the publication of a new Peter Porter collection was a regular event to look forward to. His latest, Chorale at the Crossing, is posthumous, but it doesn’t seem so. The energy of these uncollected later poems is palpable, even if the tone is mellower than in the “twice bitten” era. For a moment, you forget that the octogenarian word-spinner has no more magic books up his sleeve.
But Peter Porter died, aged 81, in the spring of 2010, and the warm, clever, conversational voice is with us no longer. Even the previous collection, The Rest on the Flight: Selected Poems came out a month after the poet’s death.
These days, few poetry collections count as events. They are just too numerous – the good ones as well as the mediocre. Young poets anxiously check out one another; older poets look even more anxiously over shoulders to see what the kids are getting up to now. Peter Porter belonged to what may be the last generation in which there were poets who, by general agreement, had earned positions of cultural authority, whose publications were not only noticed, but were imitated, learned from, revered and occasionally rebelled against by any younger aspirant who took poetry seriously.
This week’s poem, Silkworms Work and Love Till Death, begins with its title – and the wry grin behind the almost mock-heroic claim. Naturally, for “silkworms” most of us would read “poets” and for poets, Peter Porter. If this unrhymed sonnet seems partly a throwaway, moderately bitter ars poetica for the artist as an old man, it is also a celebration of the determination to keep writing (the loving is intrinsic to that). As often, Porter’s work satisfies some further appetite additional to the hunger for brilliant, memorable poetry. You get the sense of a man relishing his vocation. But here the relish will be cautious: the art recommended in stanza two is clearly one of self-restraint.
Why silkworms? They may eat a lot of mulberry leaves, but that doesn’t quite count as work, or love. On the other hand, their relentless but selective appetite may suggest the appetite of poets for the experiences that make poems. And, also like poets, they’re busy self-revisionists. They regularly slough their skins. They spin a precious material, and frequently get boiled alive for their efforts. While inhabiting their silk cocoons, if the ruthless sericulture allows, they metamorphose, and will hatch as short-lived silk moths whose single purpose is, of course, to procreate.
Another Australian poet, the New Zealand-born Douglas Alexander Stewart, wrote a fine poem about silkworms, his focus being the pathos of the fact that the silk moth cannot fly. Perhaps this poem was at the back of Peter Porter’s mind. There’s frustration in Porter’s poem, too; the silkworm poet is in a sort of captivity in the first stanza, with his to-do list, “imperative and sour”, and the sense of an alien public world beyond his room.
This world is “digital” (a threatening word in this context) but, even in daily speech, the “nominative unpleasantness of thought” is sovereign. Derogatory name-calling might be suggested: perhaps thought itself is unpleasant, since, unlike, say, music, it depends on naming names. These lines are opaque, not because of their intellectual reach, but because they belong partly, I think, to self-description and partly to allegory. The speaker, like the cocooned silkworm, is covertly metamorphosing from senex, ashamed of his shortcomings and the categorisation they elicit (lines six to seven) to the poet-sage of the new septet. (The “why silkworms?” question is definitively answered, now, by the sonnet’s second, Chinese, theme.)
Did Porter have any particular Master in mind? He might almost have been thinking of Li Ch’ing-Chao in her moment of sober self-reflection: “Although I’ve studied poetry for thirty years / I try to keep my mouth shut and avoid reputation.” But the advice that Porter quotes, or seems to quote, is more didactic. It might be the directive of the master to a pupil or a fellow poet, although perhaps it’s more likely to be his memo-to-self: “Of course you must still write, / … but little that you mean: / Your paper should not die to prove your words.”
The “less-is-more” paradigm, opposing “certainty” and thinking small and imagistically (line 11) is an intriguing one: does it form part of a projected new aesthetic, or is it the fantasy of how one might go about acquiring a self-protective shield, a defence against the “nominative unpleasantness” of the critics? If the “strategy” is “framed in blood” and expresses “curt unpitied sadness” it’s not mere play-acting. Self-betrayal might be implied. The admonition to write “little that you mean” is not, after all, the same as a warning not to lay all your cards on the table. And perhaps that’s a clue as to how we should read this sonnet. Haunted by the traditional forms it partially evades, and haunted by a concept of writing that seems at odds with the poet’s own, Silk Worms Work and Love Till Death obeys its admonition: it says something it doesn’t wholly mean. Making meaning is intrinsic to the work of poetry. The proof of the poem is in the book.
Newcomers to Peter Porter’s work will find a generous representation on Clive James’s website. Here, to launch you on your explorations, is one of the “greats” among the early poems, John Marston Advises Anger. Bon voyage!
• Silkworms Work and Love Till Death is taken from the collection Chorale at the Crossing by Peter Porter, published by Picador at £9.99.