Towards the End of the Feast
The best way to bear
that flaming pud
signalling the latter stages of our feast
is not Kenneth McKellar’s rictus grin
nor the fugitive grimace
that passes for a smile among men.
The best way to carry
between steamer and table
the dark fruit of our last course:
let slip the clay-white platter
and in the moment before
the mess on the floor,
the crash, the stricken faces,
know to your fingertips
the joy of letting go,
lightness rushing up
to greet you like an old pal.
Thus did my father on his last Christmas,
from hands that once had eased
many a bairn into the world,
look up at us, with the smile of a child.
ANDREW GREIG
****
That the family Christmas might be some kind of an endurance test rather than a cosy intergenerational exchange of Santa-patterned socks and carol-singing viruses is implied by the opening stanzas of this week’s poem. Its tone and rhythmical terseness register the sense of an ordeal that’s almost beyond irony. The verb “bear” in the first line strongly suggests “grin and bear it”, while “flaming” in “that flaming pud” cannot simply mean a gush of successfully ignited liquor. It signals an imprecation – “flaming” in the colloquial sense (polite version). Christmas puddings aren’t universally loved, after all: they might be seen as a heavy embellishment of “the latter stages of our feast” – as heavy and demanding as old age.
Background entertainment doesn’t help: the singer’s “rictus grin” emphasises performance, and the “fugitive grimace / that passes for a smile among men” is audience-response at its bleakest. The short “I” sounds that predominate heighten the tight-lipped effect.
The third stanza seems to start the poem again, as if it had girded itself for another attempt to get past angry disappointment and voice the difficult-to-celebrate. This time, “bear” is explained as “carry”, and “the dark fruit of our last course” asserts a clearly metaphorical reach.
Preceded by a colon, the fourth tercet acquires an imperative ring, almost as if the speaker were issuing an instruction to the carrier of the pud, to “let slip the white platter”. It’s now that the poem picks up in mood. There’s release for the narrator, liberation for the miscreant.
We may wonder if, in the moment just before the plate falls, the perpetrator foresees the result (“the mess on the floor, // the crash, the stricken faces”). The order of events, beginning with the mess rather than the crash, suggests how they might occur in the imagination rather than real time, although it’s not impossible that the mess, at least some of it, would precede the crash. The faces round the table register dismay: they are “stricken”. No one laughs.
For the speaker, any shock or embarrassment is held at bay. The accident is transformed by anarchic self-discovery: “know to your fingertips / the joy of letting go, // lightness rushing up / to greet you like an old pal”. The speaker is talking about his father, as we now find out, and witnessed the event at the father’s “last Christmas”.
All the pathos of growing old and losing skills and identity touches the last phase of the anecdote. We learn that the father has delivered or helped deliver babies in his time (“many a bairn” is the warm and homely phrase): he was deft, gentle and precise. Now there’s fulfilment of the earlier metaphorical prefiguration of death: even “clay-white platter” now suggests the cold clay of mortality. So a deeper mood-dip occurs with the emphasis on the contrast between the younger man’s useful life and his present decline.
The father is unaware of the change, however. He simply appreciates the new “lightness” – possibly sensing the freedom from the demands of maturity, the escape from the propriety represented by those grimacing, stricken faces. The poem ends with his uninhibited smile. Perhaps it would be too sentimental to say the spirit of Christmas has been liberated, but this elderly man’s smile, unselfconscious as a young child’s, is rendered innocent and triumphant. The smile and the narrator’s response to it are genuine and open-hearted. Against the odds, a good memory has been made.
Andrew Grieg is one of Scotland’s leading senior poets; he is also a novelist, musician and mountaineer. Towards the End of the Feast is from his most recent collection, Later That Day.