James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Into the Hearts of the Poor

Into the Hearts of the Poor

This PEN anthology, like most of its kind, smells of the laundry. A clutter of old socks and undergarments, with the occasional flowered apron thrown in: the trouble is that such collections are not of the best of any given writers, but are rather an assemblage of poems written between fixed dates. It is too haphazard a method. There are some good poems here – a couple by the New Zealander, Fleur Adcock, who has never been known to write poorly (perhaps because she works slowly like a sculptor of words and feelings); a very funny poem called ‘Married to Proteus’, by Hilary Corke; and an outrageously open and flamboyant poem called ‘The White Queen’, by Tony Harrison. The last poem is the imagined monologue of an ageing white-skinned homosexual, a bit of flotsam left by the retreat of the British Empire from the new African countries. Such gifts are welcome; and they show that the Victorian logjam is undeniably broken. But they are not enough to justify the whole selection.

How different it is to read Neruda, even in translation, as it must be unless we are given the power to read other languages without learning them! This South American poet, born in Chile in 1904, makes his long flowing verses move like a river, carrying with them all that he knows and does not know. Perhaps it is his constant awareness of death which gives him his enormous passive strength. That may be part of it, but I suspect that the South Americans take an indigenous poet to their hearts and nourish him with interchanges of thought and feeling as we narrow Anglo-Saxon ladder-climbers will never do for any of our poets. I wish I could quote the whole of his poem to Cristobal Miranda, a shoveller of nitrate at the Chilean port of Tocopilla . . .

I met you on the broad barges
in the bay, Cristobal, while the sodium nitrate
was coming down, wrapped in a burning
November day to the sea.
I remember the ecstatic nimbleness,
the hills of metal, the motionless water.
And only the bargemen, soaked
with sweat, moving snow.
Snow of the nitrates, poured
over painful shoulders, dropping
into the blind stomach of the ships . . .

Neruda speaks of the way the gases and acids penetrate the lungs of the bargemen and slowly kill them. Then he ends the poem . . .

Enough of that, Cristobal, today
this bit of paper remembers you, each of you,
the bargemen of the bay, that man
turned black in the boats, my eyes
are moving with yours in this daily work
and my soul is a shovel which lifts
loading and unloading blood and snow
next to you, creature of the desert . . .

If this kind of poem were wholly grasped and absorbed and understood by the social opponents of Marxism, they might not become pro-Marxist, certainly – but they would have entered the chamber of the soul where a necessary revolutionary spirit has its beginning and would lay aside guns in favour of negotiation. Neruda, though he was a consul for his country, is probably nearest in thought to the Spanish anarchists. He distrusts system because it invariably falsifies. His strength is that, alone with a jungle luxuriance of symbol and metaphor, his poems go as if through an open door into the hearts of the poor.

1969 (580)