Poetry at Kilbixy
Brian McLoughlin
It’s for Hospice. Kilbixy is the far side of Ballynacargy. From Mullingar you travel the full length of Main Street, Ballynacargy. Near the end, your turn right on to the R393, the main road meandering left, and you follow the cars if you do it around 6.50pm on Friday, 26 August, because the poetry starts at 7pm that night, but you need to come early to park in the grass verge in the avenue leading up to the church.
It’s on in the entrance lobby to the church and there for one night, poetry is prayer and you listen to many poems. If you want to read, you can read your own poem, or you can read someone else’s poem or indeed read a famous poem… like WH Auden’s, which is a funeral poem:
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves.
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
That poem is read in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral, read beautifully at the one funeral. To many, it’s the most memorable two minutes of the film, inducing the tears.
Is poetry dead because it dares to go there? Emily Dickinson dared to go there:
Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality.
Death is the gateway to Immortality. Poetry, it seems, has been submerged these times by music. Lyrics in music are often poetic. Musician Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Song is more the signature of sadness than spoken word. But what is poetry anyway? TS provides a perspective. ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.’
So poetry is escapism, according to Eliot. An escape from the throes and trials of being human, living out a death sentence. Perhaps poetry’s particular niche is to dare to grapple with the fleetingness of time and suggest something of the majesty of the mystery – the unknown – in Emily’s word: Immortality.
Enough of that highbrow stuff. Poetry, to be accessible, must offer a gateway where the ‘ordinary’ listener is aroused and in that moment access the ‘out of ordinary’. But isn’t that what love is about? Where would we be without the Romantic poets? Percy Shelley for one.
See the mountains kiss high heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?
So, poetry, I would say, is a metaphysical kiss, given with just words and the silence between the words. Of course the poetry deliverer will not reject an actual kiss after delivering a poem. And that can happen because poetry is about putting your heart and soul into the poem.
Come to Kilbixy on Friday 26 August at 7pm and be moved.
Brian McLoughlin is a member of Inklings Writing Group, who meet on Tuesdays at 10.30am in the Annebrook House Hotel.