Lost
(A Satire)
Lost…lost…lost…
In the sands of Poetry,
Not knowing which way to turn,
Confused, I go.
I am amazed,
Distressed to see,
Everywhere, prose praised
As poetry
Whilst lyric lines — in beauty dressed —
Intelligible, skilfully
Designed to please
Both heart and head,
Are thrown into the rubbish bins
Of cold rejection’s scornful waste!.
In place of what I hoped to find,
What do I see?.
What do I hear?.
Nothing but formless, shapeless tracts —
Like these
Satirical lines
Deliberately fashioned
In the styleless style of Modernist
Prosaic banality! —
And incoherent clamourings
Of dissident severity
Borne on the thoughtless winds!.
What should I see?.
What is it I desire?.
Refreshing draughts of excellence,
Clear pools of thought, beauty’s designs,
Embodied in true poetry’s skilled metric forms
By vibrant inspiration’s alchemy!.
But these are lost —
As I am lost —
Amidst pervasive an-
archy and featureless
Asymmetry of form.
So I am lost
In this uncharted desert of Modernity.
I can see
Few oases of seeming rationality
Where I might find
Solace and be at ease in peace of mind;
And most of them may be more
Mirages of grim deceit —
Where slack, ambiguous, ill-fash-
ioned, ill-conceived assemblages of
Prosy words and flat phrases
Flatter their authors’ inflated self-esteem —
That would distract me from the safe
Path to authentic
Poetry. whilst they erode our art’s perfections
As the wind-blown desert sand-grains
Carve rocks and wadis
Into bizarre shapes
That seem to be replete with mystic mess-
ages and esoteric symbolisms, but
Are deliberately meaningless,
Arhythmic, ungrammatical
Artefacts intended to mislead
Unwary poetasters.
Though I am peaceable by nature —
Liberal in toleration of peoples’ personal beliefs and practices,
Where they do not impinge
On others freedoms —
My passion for poetic beauty
In both prosody and form,
Compels me to revolt against bar-
baric Modernism’s worst excesses.
You poets and true connoisseurs
Of culture who, like me, deplore
The ravages wreaked by these
Modern heretics of art!.
Come, join me in this new Crusade
Of conservation!. Help me
Repulse repulsive ten-
dencies that are destroying poetry
By suffocating it beneath
The smothering sands of ignorant
Malpractices and dusty dreams
Of novel concepts, arid
As Saharan desert wastes in times
Of drought.
(Can flowers flourish in waterless
Environments?. Or date-palms fruit?.
Is poetry, needing the rain
Of inspiration
To flower and to fruit, not
Similar to these?).
Lend me your aid before it is too late!.
The critical assassins who sup-
port the Modern arnarchists,
Will try, with poisoned phrases, to
Silence me before I can impede their schemes.
If you will not join me,
And soon,
Then I shall struggle on alone — with
All the risks that are entailed
Due to my inexperience —
Attempting to impede the on-
ward progress of these sterile,
Unimaginative dunes,
Of stultifying incompetence that,
(Like dry floods of shifty wind-blown sands),
Already threaten to overwhelm
Those few remaining oases
Where fresh poetic flowers,
Watered by inspiration’s limpid streams,
Still bloom.
It is not for myself alone that I
Now cry out here, amidst this hostile desert’s
Featureless terrain.
Chiefly I cry
For our great national heritage —
A cultural wonder of beauty and grace! — that now
Is menaced by
These anarchistic Modernists
Who would destroy it.
And I cry from fear
That this most beautiful,
Most eloquent of arts —
Authentic poetry —
May not survive to bless the lives
Of future generations.
But, as I write,
I am just one weak voice
In these poetic sands,
And
I am
Lost…lost…lost…!.
[ Afternote: This screed — which I would call prosaic versification, rather than authentic poetry, because it intentionally uses several of the aberrant Modernist devices about which it complains — was written in 1952, (when I was only 16 years old), and was collected, some 32 years later, in Clouds of Glory and Other Poems.]
