What's your Genre? (Or, what do you write?)

This is the 'Tony, guest' of 7 January again:
It is probably a common experience, but the realization has only in recent years settled upon me, that there is often a particular passage within a piece of literature that continues to resonate clearly after the rest of the work is consigned to the fading memory cells of something once read.

For me, one example is the verse in Macaulay’s ‘Horatius’ that reads:



‘But the Consul’s brow was sad,

And the Consul’s speech was low,

And darkly looked he at the wall,

And darkly at the foe’.



I am in no position to criticize great literature as this poem surely is, but is this verse even particularly good poetry? And yet this nondescript stanza and its curious aura, for me at least, though simple and repetitive, stands tall in retrospect, in clear memory above the rest of the poem. I can’t believe I am the only one this verse resonates with and it is something I come back to time and again. Since I came to recognize this strangeness, the phenomenon has become apparent in other works of poetry too, including my own. It is like a face in a crowd that you continually come back to without knowing why.



Another long-treasured verse is from Hillaire Belloc (‘The South Country’):



‘I will hold my house in the high wood,

Within a walk of the sea

And the men that were boys when I was a boy

Shall sit and drink with me.’



I’m not sure that kind of nostalgia, pondering all that might be, or might have been, and all has been lost, may not be just as insidiously damaging as other drugs.

I am an inveterate perambulator of old churchyards. It was while prowling Shipley (Sussex) churchyard one warm summer afternoon long ago, that perchance I stumbled upon Belloc’s memorial stone there – he had died in 1953.



To scholars of poetry, of which I was never one, this is probably a well explained phenomenon – for all I know done to death with repeated analysis. To me, still laboring with my natural-born ignorance, it suggests that literature tends to work on us, and in us, on different unconnected levels at the same time. This must be why sometimes, with a tale having an indifferent storyline, one continues to read - because mysterious unexpected stuff is continually popping to the surface, and perhaps too because of the satisfying way the words and phrases flow - something akin to the way one may find oneself bemusedly interrogating an abstract painting for minutes on end, enraptured and enthralled by it, without really knowing how the work came to be, or what it’s all about – or even needing to know.


I thought a little eccentric blather might entice other members of this group to throw in their three ha’penceworth to redress the balance back to the norm.




PS. I’m sorry I won’t be able to make The Crabtree this evening (sorry on several levels).