Poem of the week: The Human Voice from a Distance by Judith Willson
The oldest recording of a human voice:
a machine invented by a typographer.
an April day in 1860 and for twenty seconds
a man sings Au clair de la lune
as if he threw again his head in a burnt-out metropolis
and lifted his palms to the sky. He sings
Pierrot répondit into onrushing wind.
Great timber are torn down in the boulevards.
His voice is etched into lampblack
and now his track is a black-sailed ship
bearing its burden by breaking waves
bearing on by the night time.
O mon ami Pierrot what awaits us in the darkish?
Give me your pen
give me soot from your lantern
to write our passing into air.
We rock in our small boats
singing like a storybook in the moonlight
Ma chandelle est morte
Je n’ai plus de feu.
Our wake widens into ocean behind us
till we see solely particles
floating on oily water.
This week’s poem is from Judith Willson’s spectacular second assortment, Fleet. Central to the assortment is the determine of a Nineteenth-century Londoner, Eliza S, who was taken to courtroom and accused of deserting her two youngsters, a cost she denied. Eliza’s husband could have been implicated. An Italian migrant, described as “a dealer in foreign birds” he’s sympathetically handled: his story, too, is a vital imaginative supply for Willson.
Eliza was given a brief jail sentence, “with hard labour”. Nothing extra is thought about the couple, nor the destiny of the youngsters. Willson is the form of author who has a reward for bringing analysis alive, and infuses sparse details with thriller and pathos.
From this central exploration, ripples develop and overlap, the outcomes together with this haunting and multilayered poem. Willson’s first stanza locates us. The printer Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville made a “phonautograph” recording of Au Clair de la Lune in 1860, after what he described as “the imprudent idea of photographing the word”.
Willson finds tragic resonance in the ghostly and unstable sound of the recording, and in the fragments of the track she selects for citation. The full textual content and English translation of Au Clair de la Lune are included here.
In stanza two, the “burnt-out city”, the reply of Pierrot “into onrushing wind”, and the timber “torn down in the boulevards” recommend, variously, revolution and battle, pure catastrophe and the deliberate act of demolition. A darkened future is mirrored in the mysterious transformation of the track into a “black-sailed ship” – maybe a reference to the delusion of Theseus and his father Aegus. As it struggles on, “bearing its burden through breaking waves / bearing on through the night”, the ship additionally involves symbolise the overloaded boats through which present-day migrants so usually danger and lose their lives.
The migrants develop into the singers in the fifth stanza, after the properly judged doubled stanza-break: “We rock in our small boats / Singing like a storybook in the moonlight / Ma chandelle est morte / Je n’ai plus de feu”. But at the identical time, a metaphorical, ecological shipwreck is implied, through which humanity runs out of assets and the solely hint of us is “debris / floating on oily water”. The near-rhyming of “morte” and “water” quietly emphasises the disaster.
Fleet is a vital e book: it seeks to get better misplaced voices and sharpen our consciousness of imperial cruelty and exploitation, whereas unveiling a future through which the as soon as strongest species is itself endangered.
