The Greatest Living Poet’s recent volumes
are in a stack at your left hand – what do you do
in between getting on with your journalism?
Go back to his earlier and more spritely days
cool along your face, when you decided,
notwithstanding your resistance, as you claimed,
to literary fashion, that this intransigent
dandy got the world into his impure verses
as almost no responsible rival did –
so much so indeed that a jaunty episode
among the Check-Out Sylphs, an Ode to a Torpedo,
or some sort of squirrel-hounded sexual outing
in the Allegheny Mountains seemed, as you read it,
a calm reflection worthy of Matthew Arnold
minus his Rugby gloom and moral nimbus.

Welcome to the Vale of Indirectness.

I think I am like Schubert’s ‘unglückliche Atlas’
carrying the world’s weight on my shoulders,
which might be glossed as resenting my banker neighbour
walking heavily across the floor above my head,
not for the noise he makes but because he’s
a reminder of the glare of truth which first
intruded on my childish sight – there is no money in poetry
but there’s great poetry in money – ask Robert Browning.
My neighbour dresses for the City in decent grey,
with perhaps a dash of scarlet in socks and tie,
and at weekends is seen in jeans and sneakers,
unlike Matthew Arnold whose Victorian raiment
flares only in the gorgeous blood-wrap
of his death-wish. How could he
and Clough have been such friends? Easy, says
the melancholy of dark days, they shared a cosmos
of despair; the one sought some relief in loss of faith,
the other in not ever having known it.
And they had a colleague in the syntax
of their language. That’s where you must go
if you would find the secret of Victorian Art,
a Mad Hatter’s plethora of logic
and dementia, a railway-carriage molestation.

Like their buildings, Victorian Poets’ works
were bogus Miltonics for backstreets,
facades not just for Tennyson but Sex-
Tourism. To please the death-god in their sewers
they transported hope beyond the harbour mouth
to meet with dengue on the Irrawaddy or murder
on the gold fields. What we have today
is a collage of the various inappropriatenesses,
an inventory of style which knows
so little about living and far too much
about excitement. Then, at least, let the latest
of us make utilitarian and cluttered screens
to hide the fact that no-one’s here. Arnold’s shy metaphors
are growing tendrils: when we find ourselves
on beaches we should offer up a prayer
to a seriousness engraved like coffin-lids.