Paradise Retailed

For a bit of fun we were challenged by the Bournemouth Poet Laureate James Manlow to write a glosa.

The glosa is a poetic form developed in Renaissance Spain. The opening quatrain is taken from the work of another poet that we want to acknowledge.  This is followed by four stanzas, each of which is generally ten lines long, that elaborate or "glosses" on the cabeza chosen. Each ending line (10th line) of the four following stanzas is taken from the cabeza.  I’ll leave you to guess which poet I am paying tribute to. (The spelling is as in the original.)

Paradise Retailed

The World was all before them, where to choose

Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:

They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,

Through Eden took thir solitarie way.

That dewy morn among the endless shelves

Of Tesco, ASDA or that other one,

That adamantine chain with carpark dire

The dismal Situation waste and wilde

No light but rather darkness visible

Each hell more sulphrous than the other ones

As far remov’d from God and light of heav’n

As any fruit flown in from Afric’s shore,

They took the easy path through racks of booze

The World was all before them.  Where to choose?

Then pausing, sought a respite from the crush

But found Another hell with queues that stretched

Nine times the space that measures Day and Night.

The pimpl’d youth, he with his horrid crew

That witness’d huge affliction and dismay

Mixt with obdurate pride and stedfast hate:

Allowed them precious little time to choose

Designless from the list and thus they sate

And contemplating Eden side by side

Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:

Then back among the throng in effort wide

A struggle Just to snatch an apple from the shelf

Among the jars and jaffas and the jeans

Our parents’ parents struggled with the lines

For all the world like serpents at the tills.

They stood enrapt by horrid writhing scrums

With hundreds and with thousands trooping came.

They shook their heads and headed for the door.

Whilst others pushed and shoved just anyhow

They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,

At last had gain’d the portals of that place.

The outer world seem’d now a beauteous park

Like  paradise regain’d In contrast stark.

The gleaming chariots in lines array’d

To carry off the booty from the store.

Our Adam and his Eve from seeming hell

Had ’scaped th’eternal madness of that place,

Eschewed the driven path that others took,

Envelop’d in the blessed aer of day,

Through Eden took thir solitarie way.

The Illusion of Theatre

In the early nineteenth century it was generally agreed that playwriting was a bastard art form. Jane Austen regularly attended playhouses to delight in all manner of dramas, some of them we would regard as being fairly robust comedies and melodramas.   

     It was at this time the critic Leonard Smallpiece wrote an interesting diatribe against the practice of writing plays.  He described it as:  “The off spring of prose and poetry but a low, snivelling sort of story-telling donning showy rags and prancing about trying to catch the attention of the basest sorts of the populace.”

    That may be so but there is real skill and artistry in the writing of the play, an art that is so subtle that it goes unnoticed and is often relegated to tyros and tired executives who haven’t anything better to do with their lives.  But the whole art, that of manipulation of an audience’s awareness and expectation is far beyond what any novelist or poet can imagine. 

   Smallpiece goes on: “We persuade an audience to spend an hour or two in company of rogues and mountebanks who might as soon cut their throats as admit to their art.  These dissemblers pretend to be kings and princes.  The show themselves to be living in castles and airy palaces and they seek to convince their guests that they are attending great matters of state, battles, secret love trysts and are privy to plottings and all manner of knaveries.  And just when the watchers are about to lose patience and cast the tawdry game aside, our cheats essay an even greater illusion, removing them at once  to foreign lands and distant places.  All this with a few yards of lath and canvas, some moth eaten rags and the mesmerising power of words.

And not any words but words assembled with such care and contrivance that the watchers are unaware of how they are being directed; of how they may think this man to be a truth-speaker and this other one to be a liar; How of this woman we must be careful of because she poisons the ear of anyone she speaks to even though she is beautiful and finely dressed.

And sometimes these will come forward and say “we are but humble actors. Do not believe a word we say.” But again they are creating an illusion because they are not the actor you suppose them to be and may indeed, only be the local butcher or smith.  And when they remove their full bottom wigs and sit with you and tell you it is all a sham it is even more of a sham because that very revelation has been devised and rehearsed and practised.

   And the playwright is the most deceitful trickster of all.  He will tell you that this is so when it is manifestly not so and you will believe him. He is subtle because he will only show you what he wants you to see.  Why does he want you to witness this meeting, this passing of secrets and not another?  Why does he build your hopes only to dash them and then raise them again?  How does he engineer matters so that he asks you to consider a thing and then declares that there shall be a change of scene or, worse, an intermission so that your asking is held back and can only be answered in another way at another time.?

   And so the illusion is to make we, the watchers believe what we would not believe and to divert attention away from the very trick itself. It is the most underhand sleight worthy of any card-sharp. We are only shown what we are required see for the sake of the game even though we think it to be the whole world itself.”

   It amuses me to note that Smallpiece says “we” when referring to the audience.  He obviously enjoyed being hoodwinked as much as everyone else.

A lesson From History

It is always worth reminding  governments when their policies have become too egregious that the Middling Sort in Britain have, from time through history, said "Enough's enough"

Very soon the middling sort

Will rise against your arrogance

As we have done before:

Your fifth form economics,

Your bike-shed sniggering at the poor,

Your gradgrind education,

Founded on some mystic lore.

You believe your own ill-found

Stupidities. And now there’s more; 

You want to break the very things

We’ve worked a life-time for.

Poke the British lion and you

Will hear a muted British roar,

But be careful if you rouse the beast

Better scramble for the door

Be thankful we don’t bite off the heads

Of traitors any more.