'History' - John Burnside

Title: “History”

• deliberately ambiguous → big? localised?

“St Andrews: West Sands, September 2001”

• location crucial to the emotions of the poem

  • symbolically isolate

  • epigraph

“Today”

• only word the on the line

• creates a visual disruption + disjointedness to the poem - represents the disruption in their lives

“as we flew the kites”

Idea of being tethered to your geographical location → the news scares us into getting involved in international affairs

“the sand spinning off in ribbons along the beach / and that gasoline smell from Leuchars gusting across the / golf links”

enjambment = lack of separation between the natural world and the gasoline smell

olfactory imagery pervading tactile qualities of the ribbons of the sand

name of “Leuchars” → location very important

Leuchars → nearby town with a Royal Air Force base

“the tide far out / and quail-grey in the distance”

• symbolic disconnection

• speaker concerned with untethered connection

  • stanza literally detached

“people / jogging, or stopping to watch / as the war planes cambered and turned / in the morning light”

• war planes are incongruous to the peaceful tranquillity of the beach

• not that there are more war planes, only that people are noticing more

• planes = vessel of movement, connecting continents

today / / - with the news in mind, and the muffled dread / of what may come -

“today” = again, in uncomfortable isolation

“and the muffled dread” = subordinate clause → grammar parallels the muffling of this dread, pushed to the back

the stanzaic form of the poem mirrors…

the ebbing and flowing of the sea !

“I knelt down in the sand / with Lucas”

enjambment forces father and son apart

repetition of “today”

speaker tries to stay temporally grounded, but ends up getting caught up in the sky + the world far away from him

“gathering shells / and pebbles / finding evidence in all of this / driftwork”

• speaker laments the absence of communication → as seen in the dislocated poetic lines

  • “evidence

“snail shells; shreds of razorfish; / smudges of weed and flesh on tideworn stone.”

“tideworn” = neologism → the speaker manipulates language to represent the manipulability of time and connection?

fragments of life "

“smudge of weed” → smudge = imperfected, impure

“flesh” → the speaker meditates on the fragmented + overstretched nature of humanity

“At times I think what makes us who we are…”

iambic pentameter! the speaker finds metrical balance in ruminating on peaceful nature of humanity → cohesion

“neither kinship not our given states / but something lost between worlds”

Burnside rids of plain language, and adopts a more poetic and elevated language → represents more elevated humanity of art + the past…?

“something lost between the world we own / and what we dream about behind the names / on days like this”

ambiguous → speaker dwells in ambiguity + lack of precision?

“something lost” → can’t even place what they lost

“on days like this” → plural → generalised

speaker doesn’t directly engage with the terrorist attacks, they only hover in the background

“our lines raised in the wind / our bodies fixed and anchored to the shore”

contrasting images placed side by side → “lines raised in the wind” → high-wired and anxious about the world, even though they are physically “anchored” to the shore

Burnside rejects

grand narratives → looks at history as non-linear, with effects that gradually take place”a

“and though we are confined by property”

property historically seen as a liberating thing → speaker posits is as suffocating → capitalism, consumerism, and material gain

“what tethers us to gravity and light / has most to do with distance and the shapes / we find in water”

ambiguous, although tangible ideas → nature as an emotional connector

“reading from the book / of silt and tides”

conflation of intellectualism + the natural world, rather than the media

“the rose or petrol blue / of jellyfish and sea anenome”

“rose or petrol blue” - syntactically equating natural world and industrialisation

meter of “of silt and tides / the rose and petrol blue”

technically one line of iambic pentameter → split into halves: hemistichs → wholes been split into halves

“jellyfish and sea anemone / combining with a child’s first nakedness”

reminder that humans are inextricably a part of the natural world → nakedness symbolising purity + innocence, → lack of aesthetics → child blatantly part of the natural world

link to Genesis + prelapsarian innocence?

“Sometimes I am dizzy with the fear / of losing everything - “

innocence of the child provokes the speaker’s protective instincts

regains coherence when talking about human + natural connection → feels Edenic!! prelapsarian unity

“- the sea, the sky, / all living creatures, forests, estuaries”

Edenic + asyndetic listing → swept away by scenery

caesura → manifestation of the gap between the present fractured world and a natural, societyless existence?

“we trade so much to know the virtual / we scarcely register the drift and tug of other bodies”

MARX → reification and the futility of transactional exchange

“trade” and “virtual” = the speaker recognises a new form of capitalism: a digital one, where exchanges aren’t even materialised.

“drift and tug” → verbs dominated by liquidness + natural movement?

“other bodies” = egocentric individualism! created by capitalism?

“scarcely” diacope

repetition → speaker registers the scarcity of human connection now, saturated with distance + miscommunication?

“the moment as it happens; shifts of light / and weather / and the quiet forms of local history”

speaker depicts intangible things, like atmosphere → “shifts” → laments the loss of the immaterial?

“local history” → in this moment the title becomes more certain → the speaker meditates on the intersection of ‘big’ and ‘small’ history

“the long insomnia / of ornamental carp in public parks / captive and bright”

“long insomnia” → drawn-out → spondee, metrically adding weight to the slowness of local history

“ornamental carp” → the speaker awards grandeur to the carp → little history is big history

“hung in their own / slow-burning / transitive gold: / jamajars of spawn”

“slow-burning transitive gold” → this little piece of history isn’t flashy or political, it’s a slow burn piece of existence. Mirrored in the molossus of “slow-burning” → weighty → and the literal lengthy time it takes to descend down the three chopped up pieces of line

“goldfish carried home / from fairgrounds / to the hum of radio”

vintage imagery → fairgrounds → localised history

preposition “to” indicates a travelling, from local fairgrounds to digitized radio

whereas the fairground comes to the town, the radio allows people to travel across the world from their own home. The speaker laments the eradication of geographical boundaries.

after radio = caesura → breaks up artificiality and humanity

final few broken up stanzas abandons

normative grammar → speaker takes a complex + fragmented appreciation of the natural world

“in all this gazed-upon and cherished world / and do no harm”

“gazed-upon” - gaze = quite passive, and relaxed? normalisation of constant surveillance?

“a toddler on the beach…”

toddler is fascinated by only what is right in front of him → in comparison to his parents, who are distant and “plugged into the sky”

“sifted wood and dried weed / …. pattern on a shell”

the toddler is engrossed in the mundane normalities of an underwhelming beach → but they are at least real, whereas his parents are engrossed in distant troubles

“his parents on the dune slacks with a kite / plugged into the sky”

“kite” = synecdochic of being constantly connected to intangible worlds - and worlds that would be ignored without technology.

“the sky” = deliberately vast compared to the trivial people; people become detached from their own mundane realities

“all nerve and line / patient; afraid; but still, through everything / attentive to the irredeemable”

juxtaposes toddler’s curiosity with the parent’s incessant anxiety

concentration of punctuation enacts their hesitancies

“all nerve and line” = hypallage? describing the kite but actually about the parents? kite, and technology, as a vessel for anxieties that they could be free from

irredeemable = again, Genesis + the local beach being prelapsarian?

themes:

• capitalist critique

• concern towards emotional disconnect

• laments local history + blissful ignorance?

  • laments adult connectedness → child is happier

what are the 3 ‘sections’ of History?

1. “Today” → Overcast anxiety about seismic world events

2. “At times” → distracted by Edenic surroundings

3. “Sometimes” → existential meditation

the setting in ‘History’ replicates the speaker’s

psychological and emotional displacement