Consolation Fills Your Hole

Can a man’s life be counted out in his heartbeats?

A heart beats a hundred thousand times in one day.

If one man dies after just thirty two years on this earth, did the heart in his chest take only one point two billion beats?

One point two.

Billion.

A billion heart beats today seems so few.

Even less so just thirty two.

Years.

Joseph Young Lynch was born in 1895 and in 1927 beneath the waves of Sydney Harbour his heart stopped

beating.

The heart of his mate Kenneth Slessor took a further forty million beats before he laid down his pen on Joe’s elegy. When it was done, it was done in the spaces timed between heartbeats and he called it ‘Five Bells’ and the bells marked Joe’s passing.

In 1916 the martyred Irish hearts of four friends were stopped

by gunshot

from an English executioner.

William Butler Yeats promptly measured out the lives of his friends in the quiet throb of the heartbeat. But what is in the silences between the unheard gunshots of ‘Easter, 1916’?

In discussing William Butler Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’ and Kenneth Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’‒ picking apart the who and the what and the attitudes and the attainment or otherwise of consolation…

I have found myself drawn to what is contained within the silences between the words and lines of the poems. To read an elegy is to imagine the presence of its subject, once alive on this earth and now an absence. To listen to an elegy read aloud however, is to take note of the spaces between words and lines. John Ciardi said that “the poetic structure releases its "meaning"; it does not say it.”  The manner in which the poem is read can fill the quiet breaks – the absences – with meaning not immediately obvious from the surrounding verse. Of course, once a space is filled it becomes a presence, situated within the poem in its own right.

I want to explore what is present in the silences of these two poems; absences that mark the holes left behind by those who once occupied them: MacDonagh, MacBride, Connolly, Pearse and Lynch. If the spaces are now marked, do the holes remain to be filled? Is it in the filling of the spaces that consolation is found?

Elegy is not eulogy and the differences may lay in when and how a breath is taken. For elegy is verse and eulogy is prose; as Yeats said when reading aloud his own poems: “it gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get [them] into verse...and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.” Yeats signifies the importance of rhythm to the structure of ‘Easter 1916’. He “write[s] it out in verse” and all is “changed, utterly”. It beats out the change to come – for Yeats, for the martyrs and for Ireland ‒ as a fist pounding into an open palm. The alliterative line “a terrible beauty is born” must be spoken as a march. Between each advancing step is a brief moment as hope and dead martyrs are recalled, as one marks out theirs and one’s own existence - another and another and another. To read such a poem as prose would be to deny the advancing nature of death by making it mundane and pedestrian. Rather, the enjambments of verse spread across lines imply shudders of grief taken with each breath.

Similarly the liminal spaces embedded within Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’ are as much a statement about death and loss as the verse’s clamorous discourse. According to Watkin an elegy should be “an example of how poetry can disclose being through a close contact with death but without actually dying”.

In ‘Five Bells’ Slessor depicts a noisy Sydney Harbour, filled with the clamour of boats and birds and bells reflected upside down in the water, whilst below it all lays the quietude of death. “Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats/In the air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.” Just as Kings Cross is suspended in the waves, so too is Joe suspended in the depths, frozen in time for Slessor as a pastiche of images. Slessor brings the reader close to death – and so to Joe – without actually dying.

Throughout ‘Five Bells’, Slessor can be heard striving to reach Joe in the gaps and eventually he finds him there – or places him there – where Joe may be recalled as need demands. Ciardi describes a poem as “one part against another across a silence.” Slessor strains to hear Joe’s voice “Are you shouting at me, dead man,” and in the silences that unite the enjambed lines, ghostly whispers may be heard. “Your echoes die, your voice is dowsed by Life”. Even this is a simulacrum of Joe’s voice, drowned out by the noise of the harbour: “... but all I heard/Was a boat's whistle, and the scraping squeal/Of seabirds' voices far away, and bells”. So while consolation can be found, it is found not in daily life but in the silences, between the bells: “Five Bells. Five bells coldly ringing out. Five bells.”

The form of both poems are themselves so filled with the clamour of life and living that the subjects of the elegies could almost be lost – if not for the poets’ quiet insistence on stamping out a beat that reminds one with every breath, that these men too were once alive. Just as, like them, one too will soon enough be dead. However, poet and reader need not surrender to despair;

consolation may be found between the beats.

JOHN OLSEN (Australia, England, Spain, Portugal 21 Jan 1928 – )  

Five bells, 1963, oil on hardboard. Art Gallery NSW.

Bibliography

Ciardi, J. (1958). The Silences of Poetry. The Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review, 64(21), pp.85-104.

elegy, n. (2015). In: OED Online, 1st ed. [online] Web: Oxford University Press. Available at: http://www.oed.com.ez.library.latrobe.edu.au/view/Entry/60350?redirectedFrom=elegy#eid [Accessed 6 May 2015].

eulogy, n. (2015). In: OED Online, 1st ed. [online] Web: Oxford University Press. Available at: http://www.oed.com.ez.library.latrobe.edu.au/view/Entry/60350?redirectedFrom=elegy#eid [Accessed 6 May 2015].

Kennedy, D. (2009). The beyond of the subject – mourning, desire and the uncanny. Textual Practice, 23(4), pp.581-598.

Slessor, K. (1963). One hundred poems, 1919-1939. 9th ed. Sydney: Angus and Robertson ltd.

Slessor, K. (2012). Reading of Five Bells (1937) by Kenneth Slessor, by Robert Menzies. [video] Available at: https://www. onetube.com/watch?v=2F6RUGVmhAw [Accessed 5 May 2015].

Watkin, W. (2009). Taking steps beyond elegy: poetry, philosophy, lineation, and death. Textual Practice, 23(6), pp.1013-1027.

Yeats, W.B. (2007) [1939]. W.B.Yeats Reading His Own Verse. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2FT4_UUa4I [Accessed 10 May 2015].

Yeats, W. (2015).[1916] Easter, 1916 by William Butler Yeats : Poem Guide : Learning Lab : The Poetry Foundation. [online] Poetryfoundation.org. Available at: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/247616#poem [Accessed 5 May 2015].