An Eclogue, by Bill Hughes

Preface

This eclogue forms part of a longer poem which, in part, meditates on the deaths of people close to me and on my own hospitalisation. I was contemplating the fragility of the human body and the paradox that it is only through that fragility that we can be truly human, as our material existence is the foundation of all our pleasure as well as pain.

The poem alternates between these private, lyrical modes and essayistic segments, mostly in blank verse, that situate those personal musings in a more universal context; thus concerns with genre arise. That wider context is human mutuality, particularly the care and co-operation of a beleaguered NHS threatened by a distorted rationality, an instrumental reason perverted from a caring rationality. The whole poem, with its diverse essays in genre including elegy and mock-epic, is tied together with themes from the world of music and dance, which figure as images of supreme human artifice, of co-operation, of bodily pleasure, and of the negation of instrumentalism.

In contrast to the essayistic, even didactic, monologues and lyrical episodes elsewhere, this eclogue emerged in the midst of a self-consciously pastoral section, with opposing voices in a dialogue where I try to avoid being partisan. I found myself spontaneously rhyming and a strict stanza form came about by accident. The tight form, rather than restraining, opened up the dialogue and spurred the doubly essayistic conversation. It also summoned up the concerns with genre elsewhere in the poem; proved an ideal vessel for the themes of musicality, artifice, reason, and material nature; and brought to light my sense that such artifice, far from being conservative, is an emancipatory force.

1: An Eclogue

This landscape ignites thought:
An ardent swain and his spritely wench,
Dialectically in debate,
Across the oaken picnic bench
Smiled quarrelsome as they ate.
‘What next?’, cries Damon, gesturing; a bright
Tomato flourished fierce in indignation,
‘Eating strange fruit for which we’re not designed;
Oncomice, resistant rice, carnations
Streaked and scarred with reckless radiation.
Such hubris: to ignore—it can’t be right—
Our natural role, to which we’ve been assigned
As Nature’s shepherds, not wolves to bring her blight.
‘Two-headed sheep and fish that glow in the dark;
Alien spores and freakish miscegenation:
What bastardised growths bred in consumerism’s
Dung from restless lust for innovation?
Foul plagues new-summoned now infest our nation.
Our sick corrupted tastes and passions dark,
The pustules of our greedy narcissism,
May even scourge one day this healing park.
‘What next? Will slaves be cast from rot and mould:
An undead, mindless zombie population—
Steel-bolted necks? Or clones of Hitler quickened
By pathological imagination?
These toxic plots imposed by corporations
To whom our nature is enslaved and sold.
All art, humanity, and love falls sickened
From the strange enthralling lust for gold.’
Rosalynde replies, ‘There’s no pre-scored design;
Designer, none: our sung imagination
Forges nature: that which dwells outside
And that which stirs within. Our innovations
And healing powers, through mutual disputation,
Resolved and harmonised, can be aligned
With the current of our lusts as we decide
To fly from warps to which we were resigned.’
Damon:
‘Those lusts and human pride smite Earth with wounds—
Can you not see the diseased desecration
Your arrogance wreaks? Your fantasy’s no answer:

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Your boasted social ratiocination,
Your wild Promethean imagination.
Now with discord all the world resounds,
The balance thrown, our bodies wracked with cancers
While morbidity of soul abounds.’
Rosalynde:
‘We’ve blasted realms of life that should delight,
It’s true—a bitter fruit of alienation
(Though cancers simply thrive through longer lives).
But balm for ours and nature’s restoration
Is only bred in passionate conversation
Where our nature, improvised, takes flight
Into spaces vast that free our drives
To recompose the world in human light.
‘There is no balance, all is process flowing,
Often lawless: but reasoned orchestration
Can valve this stream—the lottery of dead things
Transcended. Attuned and fruitful penetration
Of the veiled world recuperation
Of that world enables. Then, a knowing
Luminosity will bloom. We’ll sing
In choir, upon the earth rebirth bestowing.’
Damon:
‘This pimped-out world of artifice, deranged
With fakery; staining love, imagination,
The intellect you prize—it’s all for sale:
Make-up paints fake flush of consummation;
Bodies bartered. Science’s equations
Reduce all life to cash, all things made strange;
Nature ground in mills like tortured whales,
Anointing ersatz beauty deaf to pain.’
Rosalynde:
‘All human life is artifice, composed.’—
She touches up her lipstick—‘In fascination,
I recreate myself; I take delight
In playful change of form, in aspirations
To shift shape and kind, or celebration
Of myriad genders—’
D: ‘Genders!?’
R: ‘Yes! I impose
My art upon the dull, flat mould for bright
Excitements, or sweet indolent repose.
‘As I like it, nature I shall change,

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While serving rational communication
In harmony with enlightened human ends.’
D: ‘I see. But then your art is masturbation—
Perverse, unnatural, selfish defloration.’
R: ‘My art the world more marvellous makes, less strange.’
D: ‘This ecocide’s art’s swansong and our end.’
R: ‘I sing the promise of a world arranged
With loving care, discerned in bright discourse
And sculpted from a treasury of forms.’
D: ‘Art is organic spontaneity;
Your mechanisms choke vivacity.
Cold pastoral contrivances have raped
This Earth, our host, and riven it with sores.’
R: ‘But nature’s shelter fails us, not least when shaped
By us but sloughed off to obey strange laws:
Such alien power, like the bear, tongue-formed,
Devours the would-be shepherd in its jaws.
‘I dream in golden light the world transformed:
Reinvigorated forms of word,
The hand alive to trace the fancies heard;
A chorus of intersubjective wills
Domesticates and quells tempestuous ills.
And these strange visions I’ve half-postulated
Of nature’s accidentals modulated
Through our own creating nature will
Emancipate us from the grinding mills
And liberate in voice an intellect enhanced
That still evokes the pulses of our fleshly dance.’
A masque of strange and hybrid kinds
Appears to weave with lust and grace;
Concerted bodies, consort of minds:
Virtues and substance interlace.