The Darkling Plain
The Darkling Plain
A new year begins
Well, here we are. About a couple of weeks into 2025. As we reached the Quarter Century out came the fireworks. Hurray! Auld Lang Syne, Peace and Goodwill, ring out the bells and all that. An opportunity to listen calmly to wise words from highly regarded world leaders offering us hope and optimism for the future and reassuring us that we are safe under their watch.
Oh, sorry. No chance of any of that. Whatever were you thinking?
Racing to the bottom
Listen instead to the grating sound of people yelling and screaming and twittering at each other. Look at the rich, entitled and powerful who are taking offence at the smallest perceived slight as they desperately seek attention. Watch as people leap onto bandwagons and make pompous and abusive statements about things that they know nothing about and care even less. And notice how addressing the suffering in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan and elsewhere is now much less important than the priorities of various Tweedledums and Tweedledees scrapping over their nice new toys.
This relentless negativity takes its toll, focusing as it does on the worst. It can affect us badly, causing anxiety, fear and hopelessness.
Perhaps we can ignore it and force ourselves, through gritted teeth, to summon up a morsel of enthusiasm for the year ahead. It’s not easy though, when the Oxford word of the year for 2024 is ‘brainrot’.
In the search for words that can help us contemplate the year ahead in a more balanced way, we can avoid the cheap verbal confetti spewed out in the headlines. Let’s look instead to those who care profoundly about words and who turn their gaze on humanity with a clear eye that has nothing to do with profit, or deadlines, or the number of ‘likes’ that they attract. Let’s consider the perspectives that poetry can offer.
When a poem doesn't work, the first question to ask yourself is, 'Am I telling the truth?' - Wendy Cope
This is not a question that Elon Musk is ever likely to ask himself, but we can swat him aside and look more profitably at a few examples of poetry written at times of uncertainty and upheaval.
On Dover Beach
This is nothing to do with small boats (another issue that generates sound and fury and little else). No, this is a poem written by Matthew Arnold, published in 1867 – and it is very possible that you have come across it.
The poet is standing on the pebble beach and looking across the English Channel. There is a profound sense of melancholy at the state of humanity:
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night
But there are also glimmers of hope – a twinkling light across the channel, the sweetness of the night air, the sense of being with someone he loves. And that wonderful word Darkling, rarely used now except in fantasy and sci-fi, evokes something that is neither dark nor light but unknown and mysterious.
Which takes us to another extraordinarily powerful poem about the possibility of hope in the midst of darkness and despair.
The Darkling Thrush
Written by Thomas Hardy and dated December 29, 1900, the poet is leaning on a gate in a grey, bleak, and desolate landscape, abandoned by human beings. He describes it as the ‘Century’s corpse.’ And then he hears a song-thrush, a little scruffy bird, battered by the wind, which had:Chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom
At the end of the poem, the poet questions why the thrush can sing so wonderfully in this dismal, empty place. The poet cannot see or feel it, but the thrush, another species, has:
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
What poetry does
In both these poems there is a melancholy and a sadness about the human condition; a sadness that many of us are feeling today. But each poet offers a possibility of hope in words that cannot be expressed in any other medium. Adrienne Rich, the American prize-winning poet and feminist, who died in 2012, was admired for her ferocious honesty, her learning, and her humanity. She described how poetry can affect us:
….when poetry lays its hand on our shoulder we are, to an almost physical degree, touched and moved. The imagination’s roads open before us, giving the lie to that brute dictum,’There is no alternative’
So, although the ‘darkling plain’ of 2025 stretches before us, awash with lies, misinformation and abuse, there are alternatives and there are poetic voices from the past and present, helping us to think carefully, see clearly and know what it is to be human. Adrienne Rich puts it much more succinctly:
‘Throughout the world, transfusions of poetic language can and do quite literally keep bodies and souls together’
Finally, and perhaps to lighten the mood a little, let’s return to the notion of ‘truth’. Emily Dickinson, in this short poem, suggests that telling the truth should be a gradual process, so that people don’t get too shocked by it.
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Success in circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm delight
The truth’s superb surprise
As lightning to the children eased
With explanation kind
The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind
Unfortunately, I don’t think this will quite work on Elon Musk.
A few suggestions
All good bookshops will have a poetry section – often hidden away upstairs. But if you are keen to start exploring more poetry, why not try a poetry app, or one of the organisations like poets.org or the Poetry Foundation who will freely email a daily poem to your inbox. It’s an interesting way to discover poets past and present in all their diversity.
Alternatively, a quick search in any second-hand bookshop will turn up a selection of poetry anthologies, like Collins Albatross book of verse, or early Penguin and Faber collections. Just dive in and enjoy language at its absolute best and at a relatively low cost.
JANUARY UPDATE ON THE MK FAWCETT CAMPAIGN FOR A SAFER, HEALTHIER, FAIRER MILTON KEYNES
- We have circulated background papers with baseline evidence of the need for making MK Safer, Healthier and Fairer
- Following preliminary meetings with all three MPs for Milton Keynes (Emily Darlington, Callum Anderson and Chris Curtis) we are now preparing for our next meeting with them, to take place in February this year
- We participated in a meeting with the Milton Keynes Youth Cabinet in November 2024 and have discussed our work with them
- We are organising meetings with MKCC party leaders, the first of which is scheduled to take place this month
- We are keeping records of our meetings and plan to report back as widely as possible
- We are monitoring and collecting further evidence to support our campaign
We will include an update in every blog. Thank you for supporting us in our campaigns for gender equality and women’s rights.
To see the papers we have produced, or if you have any queries, please contact us at miltonkeynesfawcettgroup@gmail.com
