Imagination At Play In A Shadowy World
The Age
Friday April 7, 1995
MILLENNIAL FABLES, By Peter Porter, Oxford University Press, $17.95.
A LONG time ago, Peter Porter wrote of reading A Midsummer Night's Dream at school. His latest book has the epigraph from that play, ``The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them." In the meantime, Porter has been observing from within the enormous, equivocal schoolroom of the world.
His poems continue a lifelong project of inspecting the shadow-play, a task more delicate in that he is vividly conscious of the shadowiness of consciousness itself.
Lines from Porter bear out one's sense that improvisatory alertness is both his preferred mode and, as he might say, his non-God-given vocation. Here, for instance, are some of his vestiges: ``The only child.
Is cramming all disguises in one smile."
and.
``years later in a park I saw a pair.
of birds like us she streamed, he had to weave.
hopalong goose who thought.
himself a swan."
and.
``Our language lacks George.
Herbert's nerve.
His more can only make ours less.
And yet we cross his lines and swerve.
To happiness".
and.
``The hard conclusion must be reached.
That art is indignation bleached.
And urgent works of edification.
Survive as texts in education . . .".
Porter's first love was music, and although he is properly sceptical about analogies between the one art and the other, it is fair to say that ``pitch" is constantly an issue in his writing pitch both tone and as the pitch he makes to the reader. Each of the fragments I have just quoted takes a large part of its meaning from its context, as does each of our own organs; but as is true in the work of one of Porter's mentors, Auden, what might be called tonal trace-elements run through any one of his poems. The tone changed, a great deal more than the tone is changed.
I mention this because I suspect that various disaffected toyers with Porter's work think that a comprehensively Annotated Porter there are notes at the back of the present volume would change everything for them. This would be a mistake. True, Porter is ardently attached to many persons, places and things, and he is certainly not short of opinions. But his poems are not mainly exercises in The Higher Reportage. They are re-keyings, and recalibrations, of our ability to attend imaginatively at all.
This is the respect in which he continues to be a confrere of poets sizeably influential on him, and to each of whom he alludes, in differing ways, throughout Millennial Fables: Shakespeare, Herbert, Browning. The second part of the book is called Homage to Robert Browning, but one remembers that homage is the salute precisely of one who is his own man, as well as another's, and if Browning's mingled sense of the world as theatre and the mind as actor has served Porter well, it has not usurped his distinctiveness. I do not know of any poet who would write in the exact fashion of the lines I have quoted.
Titles are not everything in any poet, but they are often powerful for ``keying" in Porter. The present book offers Nil by Mouth, which works beyond hospitals; and Happiness, which a Porter-watcher might expect to be entirely ironic, but which proves to be a mortality- haunted but comradely salute to Herbert; and Goes Without Saying, which doesn't, but which faces unblinkingly how many of us do; and The Blond Arm of Coincidence, a title which is and isn't just to do with something noticed in a Venetian bar by a man accused, in effect, of having a deathly mouth ``that the girl/ Who served us in the bar that time had long/ Gold tresses and blond hairs along her arms/ Glistening as she passed our drinks to us."
Of ``millennium", the dictionary says, ``period of good government, great happiness"; it also says, ``figurative". Porter notes, ``. . .
approaching the Millennium needs to be deplored as well as noticed".
In the deploration of Millennial Fables, though tears are unstinted, the eyes are open.
Peter Steele has a personal chair at the University of Melbourne.
© 1995 The Age