Poem Appreciation #5 - God, A Poem (James Fenton)
 

God, A Poem
by James Fenton

A nasty surprise in a sandwich,
A drawing-pin caught in your sock,
The limpest of shakes from a hand which
You'd thought would be firm as a rock,

A serious mistake in a nightie,
A grave disappointment all round
Is all that you'll get from th'Almighty,
Is all that you'll get underground.

Oh he said: 'If you lay off the crumpet
I'll see you all right in the end.
Just hang on until the last trumpet.
Have faith in me, chum - I'm your friend.'

But if you remind him, he'll tell you:
'I'm sorry, I must have been pissed-
Though your name rings a sort of a bell. You
Should have guessed that I do not exist.

'I didn't exist at Creation,
I didn't exist at the Flood,
And I won't be around for Salvation
To sort out the sheep from the cud-

'Or whatever the phrase is. The fact is
In soteriological terms
I'm a crude existential malpractice
And you are a diet of worms.

'You're a nasty surprise in a sandwich.
You're a drawing-pin caught in my sock.
You're the limpest of shakes from a hand which
I'd have thought would be firm as a rock,

'You're a serious mistake in a nightie,
You're a grave disappointment all round -
That's all you are, ' says th'Almighty,
'And that's all that you'll be underground.'


Comments:

I consider Fenton to be the best English poet alive. I mean English, as opposed to American or Australian. I am not setting him up against Les Murray or my friend Sam Gwynn or Alicia Stallings. But he is OUR best. Yes, even better than me. There are other fine poems – In a Notebook is the only poem about Vietnam I've ever read which is any good. But I've chosen this one because it is funny. Let's hear it for funny poems, people, because it is masterly in its handling of rhyme and metre, and because it is memorable. Perhaps I ought to say that I tend towards wishy-washy Christianity, the Chrch of England type, and it is entirely possible that Fenton does too, though I'd reckon he's a Catholic, or was at least. It's only Romans that get so ANGRY about God, particularly if he does not exist. All that pain.all those Hail Marys and he doesn't have the good manners to EXIST.

Fenton seems to me to have mapped out the way English poetry ought to have gone thirty years ago. But it didn't. His verse buddy is John Fuller, the son of Roy. They have written poems together. But poetry has gone another way, a wrong way.

Or perhaps it is two wrong ways, represented in my mind by Geoffrey Hill and the Poet Laureate. Hill writes stuff which is quite incomprehensible unless you have a Doctorate in something inscrutable. And the Poet Laureate writes political stuff about being a woman and being gay. She's write it about being black if she was. Fenton is a leftie type, or at least he WAS, New Statesman and all that, but he keeps that out of his poetry. Poems do NOT 'make things happen' at least not here, now. Auden thought that they did, but came to see that they didn't. I haven't done any lit crit on this poem, because I'm no good at that, but somebody else is welcome to have a go. I will say that Fenton seems to have learned a lot from Lewis Carroll, one of the great poets of the Nineteenth century.

He seems to have scanned the penultimate line wrong. Even Fenton nods.

Distinguished Guest Amit Majmudar's comments:

A change from yesterday's Traherne--religious poetry--only bluntly atheistic. Or is it? This one's grave play may have to do with an apparently nonexistent entity telling you he doesn't exist. Thereby implying that he actually does exist, at least enough to have a voice and speak in rhyme. The circularity is dizzying. Maybe this poem's metaphysic ain't so blunt after all.

I am with the commenter about light verse. About Duffy writing "about being a woman and being gay" and how she would write about "being black if she was," my first instinct was to let that go unaddressed. Leaving aside "left" or "right," I think people write about things that define them and matter to them. And unless that thing is somehow made universal in literary form, it doesn't get anywhere. There are thousands of writers writing about being gay or black or this or that, and they aren't elevated to poet laureate just for their choice of subject matter. It's only when that identity-detail is made universal and immediate through words for those who don't necessarily share it that the truly literary or poetic effect is attained; where a kind of (literary) Communion takes place.

Question for the congregation: How is a "wrong way" in poetry defined?

The first thing this particular thread demonstrates is that you can set up all the cut-offs and screens and measures to guarantee a blind submission that you want, and there are still blind submission and there are blind submissions, and if people insist on having their own particular style and sense of humor, well that defeats it, doesn't it? So the 500 pound Duke of Fensterwald award for being the first one to identify the submitter of this thread has been cancelled, and the fact that I'm not sure whether pounds and guineas still exist, or it's all Euros now, is only part of the reason.

If it turns out there is a God, I will definitely feel a good deal better about it if it turns out that he (the poem makes it clear that this particular God is a guy, which is a great comfort to us traditionalists) is as deft with rhyme and meter and language as this deity. Any God who says, "I'm a crude existential malpractice/And you are a diet of worms," is my kinda God, and worth a dozen smiters. Delicious poem.

A perfectly delightful poem I've not read for a dozen years or so. Yes, Michael, no award for guessing the submitter. For my money though, Dick Davis is way better than Fenton.

Well, since I can't feel smug about having identified the appreciator, I'll just have to feel smug for not having had any trouble scanning the last line: "and that's ALL that you'll BE underGROUND." (The poet's just dropped the first syllable of the initial anapest in most of the other lines, see?)

I love the way that the recycling of the poem's beginning at its end might be taken as a sort of wry profession of faith that humankind bears God's image, after all.

Oh, and I just love the obvious pleasure that the poet took in the odd-numbered lines' silly feminine rhymes--feminine rhymes are just a lot more fun, aren't they?--and in the juxtaposition of jawbreakers like "soteriological" with the bitter monosyllables of dejection and disappointment.

As for the definition of how poetry goes wrong...well, the only rule for poetry going right is "Don't be boring." That said, we are all entitled to develop our own criteria for what is and is not boring.

For me, from my lofty vantage on the aesthetic and moral high ground of abstraction, "boring" generally has more to do with the poet's treatment of subject matter than the poet's choice of it. I am not gay, or black, or male, or a brain surgeon, or a skydiver, but I would hope that these accidents of fate don't prevent me from finding something of value in poems written from those perspectives. Then again, I'd be a liar if I didn't admit that they sometimes do. Such as when a heterosexual man of a certain age writes YET ANOTHER poetic whine about how very, VERY unfair it is that young women no longer flirt with him. Yawn....

That said, I understand that a different audience for a poem that bores or irritates me may find the same poem wonderfully expressive of a "universal" (i.e., personally meaningful to those particular readers) truth.

What a terrific poem, and what a fearless and clear-thinking appreciator! I'm with Julie on those feminine rhymes; they might be the the element that tips this over from clever fun to brilliant fun (or fun brilliance). Apparent trivialitiy and apparent profundity, and all memorable, and memorizable, too.

Yup, Julie. You're right about the scansion. And the grumpy appreciator should take back all that rude stuff about Carol Ann. She's written some fine poems. He must have eaten something that disagreed with him.

Yup too about Dick Davies being good.

James Fenton has a unique voice - as distinctive as Jeremy Prynne's; and considerably more able to use that voice for genuine communication than Prynne has ever been. But Fenton's output is tiny, and even then he manages to include large sections of incomprehensibly modernist esoterica (such as the conversation with Emily Dickinson about her feet in the Manila Manifesto).

This is a wonderful poem, and everybody ought to know it. But you can't blame English poetry for neglecting a poet so deliberately costive of output; I'm not even sure it is fair to contrast Fenton's accessibility with Geoffrey Hill's patricianism (Hill's September Song is easier to decode than - say - The Ballad of the Shrieking Man).

Fenton is often a difficult poet. When he isn't (and sometimes when he is) he can also be a mighty poet. The same is broadly true of Geoffrey Hill.

God captures a lot of Fenton's ability to be very serious while simultaneously staying utterly trivial. The first preposterous rime enjamb (sandwich / hand which) shakes me out of the complacent piety which I usually deploy for eschatological poems, enjamb rimes after that (tell you / bell you) just remind me that Fenton is the kind of poet so far in control of his craft that he can pass me distressing truths while making me laugh at the way he phrases them.

The mis-scansion of the penult has always seemed to me precisely right:

That's ALL YOU ARE [ - ] says Th'Almighty

It isn't difficult to make a missing unstressed syllable audible in a reading - Chaucer does it in the first line of the Canterbury Tales - and I can hear God's sigh of exasperation clearly in the void.

I think I can also hear it in Spoken Verse' memorable delivery of the piece:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE8h-j6upeY&feature=plcp

I'm surprised at how many of my favourite poets have already turned up in these selections - perhaps my taste in contemporary poetry isn't quite as eccentric as I had feared.

My dear Mr. – Uh, dear anonymous poster:

Fenton is a leftie type, or at least he WAS, New Statesman and all that, but he keeps that out of his poetry. I’m not so sure. No one writes better political poetry than Fenton has: Cut-Throat Christ, Tiananmen, The Ballad of the Imam and the Shaw, Out of the East, Blood and Lead, his going after Vendler, and Jerusalem (“The pious Christians burned the Jews alive”)—all from the same collection.

I like the “diet of worms,” which was very much a political body.

And the Poet Laureate writes political stuff about being a woman and being gay.

Well, as you know, Fenton is certainly gay. The most beautiful love poem by a living poet in our language that I have yet read is Fenton’s I'll Explain. Though a gay man wrote it the poem is genderless so anyone in love or who has been in love will directly relate to it. Which is kind of the point. Always political, that James.

Don

Oh, I've always loved this one. Fenton at his most Hardy-esque, I think. (Though the atheism/nihilism is more pungent than in Hardy, and the overall tone less serious/tortured and more flippant.)

Something I've wondered about: Is the title a reference or allusion to something in particular? How do people take it?

I mean, the only thing I might connect it to would be those sorts of faintly pretentious or wispy titles for novels, followed by "A Novel." Is that it? Or is there something else going on with it?