[Michael Cantor]

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.