The Desire to Identify
by and published in Edition Eleven of Pomegranate
‘Don’t bend down in front of me, it’s more than I can take’ – the opening words of ‘Absent Friends’, the first song on 2009’s ‘I Worked On The Ships’ by the Scottish band Ballboy, known for the lovelorn lyrical sensitivities of singer-songwriter Gordon McIntyre. It’s a striking image, and in some ways a disturbing one, that raises questions as profound for poetry as they are for pop music, if not more so; for poetry written by men, at any rate. Namely, in this kind of poetic narrative (in brief, the kind of lyric where a frustrated male narrator pleads with, cajoles, harangues or attempts to win over a disinterested female love interest), who really has the power, the control, or the ownership? And where should – or do – our sympathies lie?
The focalising frame suggests that we’re on the singer’s side. That’s not to say an unreliable narrator isn’t a possibility, but as with a lot of poetry descended from ideas of courtly love we are placed firmly on one side of the unrequited love divide; the singer of this song, as with the speaker of many pre-modern poems of the ‘you torture me with your eyes’ variety, is our man, and the presumably female addressee is only constructed for the listener in terms of the ordinary things she does, like smiling and getting her hair cut, which cause him emotional pain and distress. The character, as far as we can tell from scant detail, is fundamentally likeable; he is sad, and wants to be happy, and feels there is only one way that this can happen. We are told he is in love with a certain woman, and our natural inclination (mine, at least) is to want him to get her; or in other words, for her to give in. But where is she in all of this?
Not speaking, for one thing. Not being insulted either, but simply silent while the speaker adopts narrative authority and directs our sympathies. To look at another case, less interiorised, Antony Dunn’s third person account of a besotted butterfly collector ‘Lepidopterist’, from his third collection, ‘Bugs’ introduces us to a man who’d ‘like to unfold her from that lab coat’, who’d ‘like the creature cocooned in his chest/to stop turning over – to burst from his mouth/on unspeakable wings’; and, finally and comically, ‘like to say something/that she’d understand, but can’t pin it down.’ Unlike a poem in the first person, there’s no impetus to associate Dunn with any of the ideas or attitudes the character expresses, but I think that, although something does bug us about this lepidopterist – the scientific dryness of his imaginary seduction, the slightly violent implications of verbs like ‘unfold’ and ‘pin down’ – we never entirely lose the desire as readers to identify ourselves with his desire.
The recurrent phrase ‘he’d like’ has a gentle intensity, a fundamental niceness (as opposed to, say, ‘he wants’) that steers us towards wanting him to get the things he’d like, even if his list of not-quite-demands becomes a little worryingly comprehensive. It’s a poem that’s honest about desire, and as such I think it’s hard not be on the desirer’s side; taking a step back, however, it’s a little odd for us to want a woman we haven’t met to sleep with a man we have. We know what he’d like, but we don’t know what she’d like, and though both are equally valid our reception is, I’d argue, preconditioned to let one take precedence over the other.
In his introduction to the Everyman anthology of ‘Elizabeth Sonnets’, Maurice Evans refers to this type of lyric as ‘the poetry of frustration’; I’m not sure quite how effective it would be if to a certain extent we didn’t want that frustration to be positively resolved – of course it’s possible to read Sidney’s ‘Astrophel and Stella’ thinking Astrophel is sad, deluded, creepy, or just, in one friend’s summary, ‘a bit of a cock’, but such a reading prevents the text from attaining any tragic power. Despite his moderately illegal kiss-stealing antic however, Astrophel isn’t the most questionable sonnet-speaker in the collection; in Michael Drayton’s 8th sonnet the unfulfilled narrator lists the physical attributes of his beloved Idea that will inevitably decline in the detail of a medical dismemberment.
He requests ‘that lovely, arched, yvorie, pollish’d Brow,/Defac’d with Wrinkles, that I might but see’ and goes on with the violence of language to tear ‘thy Pearly Teeth out of thy Head so cleane’. His conclusion: ‘these Lines that now thou scorn’st, which should delight thee,/Then would I make thee read but to despight thee’, a mocking sing-song rhythm and neatness of rhyme making the concept caustic. And what are we expected to want the response of the addressee to be? There’s something repellent about the rhetoric, and running through all of this anger is the obvious fact that the persuasive technique, such as it is, won’t work; no matter how good he is at poetry, or how angry, or how badly age will wither her, she won’t be gathering these particular rosebuds because she simply doesn’t want to sleep with him. The poem therefore enacts a possession which in its speaker’s fictional ‘real life’ is impossible; the woman who won’t speak to him is here, in a sense, spoken for. We don’t have to support the speaker’s goals, by any means; but if we do, I’m slightly uneasy as to what it says about us.
One escape route from this dilemma might be to view art as a space outside morality, as in Oscar Wilde’s famous dictum about there being no moral and immoral books; only good and bad ones. But this is something of a dodge; is it possible that we just don’t want to think – myself included – about what an acceptance of this male poetic tradition entails? Because to an extent these are the kind of poems I write, in which a male speaker is often features attempting to persuade a female addressee both by rhetorical force and imagistic suggestion that a romantic relationship might be a good idea. And I’m certainly not as vehement as Michael Drayton, but neither do I think I’m wholly free from the pedestal model of female superiority which elevates the object of desire while the poem itself subordinates them to a certain suggestion that the correct path of action is doing what the speaker wants.
Another potential solution, and one I’ve personally tried in the past, is to make the poem of desire and persuasion reflects at least as much on the speaker, transferring it slightly into the grounds of self-analysis. It’s been claimed that all of John Donne’s love poetry is essentially about himself, based on the primacy of rhetorical persuasion and the fact we very rarely know what any of these women even look like; but then again, none of this can absolve him from long-standing charges of misogyny. I don’t want to go down the same path, and I don’t think I’m a misogynist – and just to clarify, I’m definitely not tarring Antony Dunn with any kind of gender-political brush – but at the same time, I wonder if participation in a tradition of which one of the main themes seems to be a bemoaning of the lack of female acquiescence might make it hard to simultaneously admire or write the poetry of desired requital, in which the poem’s expectations often devour the individuality of its female subject, and stay signed up as a full-on feminist.
What’s troubling about texts like this isn’t, or isn’t primarily, the fact that the addressee won’t sleep with the narrator; it’s the suggestion that they should, and a certain coded assumption of the right to possession that can be utilised mentally, intellectually, linguistically, even in the context of its evident physical failure. These are poems and lyrics in which men construct a certain idea of women – as tyrants, temptresses, or simply unresponsive – and exert some amount of rhetorical control which encodes an impossible expectation; even a demand. None of which means I’ll never write another love poem; but, like Gordon McIntyre’s speaker, I’d rather not spend too much more time questioning the underlying assumptions of this writing. It might be more than I can take.
Richard O'Brien
Richard O’Brien is one of Pomegranate’s two submissions editors. He likes to think of himself as Charlotte Geater’s glamourless assistant.
He was born in Peterborough in 1990 and has returned only for weddings and funerals since starting at Brasenose College Oxford in 2008. He has also returned for holidays.
His first pamphlet, ‘your own devices’, was published by tall-lighthouse press in 2009, and his first play ‘Instead of Beauty’ was the winner of the 2010 OUDS New Writing Festival. He enjoys the humiliation of directing autobiographical musicals. Other interests include travel, museums, travelling to museums, and walks on a long beach.