Eight Sevens are Seventy-Two

[vagantes]

I speak this in memory of my mother,
Who died this day some one and forty years ago.
Standing deaf amidst the clattering looms,
Then trudging home through the dark
To read her books behind the thick drawn curtains
And in her head a golden diadem-strewn dream.

On Palm Sunday that year the snow came down,
Lying acres-deep across the trampled mire.
So many dead from the battle red caked the white.
When it thawed, blood rushed along furrows and ditches.
And an earl caught on the beach, held over the boat,
Then knives sawed at his flesh until he screamed his death,
Hearing the swift, shallow breaths of his killers
As they lost their footing in the soft gentle sand.

(Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno).
No-one would talk about it, being deterred by the horror.

[PrinceMyshkin]

This is an extraordinary poem - at least the first verse is, and the rest of it which is also so elegant in manner, might mean more to me if I could make the leap from the eulogy to your mother, to this quote from the Aeneid, which I had to look up, and which is possibly best known to an English-speaking audience because of its use in Enoch Powell's racist speech to parliament.

I do hope you will choose to elucidate the connection, perhaps after others have attempted their interpretations.

[vagantes]

The quote is as you rightly say from Virgil and is the prophecy given to Aeneas by the Cumaean Sybil, where she predicts that through discord and bloodshed will come an imperial power. Eliot, for one, thought this was of great importance for "Aeneas is egregiously a man of destiny, since upon him the future of the Western World depends". He went on to say that "time has not proved Virgil wrong when he wrote nec tempora pono: imperium sine fine dedi".

Discord then provides greatness which is the theme of my poem which moves from the discord my mother suffered in her working life to the battle described in the poem where the blood rushes down into the rivers and the butchery of a peer of realm. The greatness comes in the mind as described in the first verse.

The contrast is with the title which comes from an interview given by Enoch Powell in 1977:

" A classical scholar .... is like a man , who knows the times-table, compared with people who don't ... he knows that eight times seven are seventy-two".

It may well be that Powell was alluding to the speech given to his local political association on 20 April 1968 when he misused the Latin quote from Virgil by suggesting that the Sibyl's prophecy was invoking bloodshed and horror as ends in themselves. He encouraged social discord in the name of preventing it and thus seeks to destroy the value of language which my poem speaks against through invoking the memory of my mother who died the same year Powell made his speech.

[PrinceMyshkin]

The quote is as you rightly say from Virgil and is the prophecy given to Aeneas by the Cumaean Sybil, where she predicts that through discord and bloodshed will come an imperial power. Eliot, for one, thought this was of great importance for "Aeneas is egregiously a man of destiny, since upon him the future of the Western World depends". He went on to say that "time has not proved Virgil wrong when he wrote nec tempora pono: imperium sine fine dedi".

Discord then provides greatness which is the theme of my poem which moves from the discord my mother suffered in her working life to the battle described in the poem where the blood rushes down into the rivers and the butchery of a peer of realm. The greatness comes in the mind as described in the first verse.

The contrast is with the title which comes from an interview given by Enoch Powell in 1977:

" A classical scholar .... is like a man , who knows the times-table, compared with people who don't ... he knows that eight times seven are seventy-two".

It may well be that Powell was alluding to the speech given to his local political association on 20 April 1968 when he misused the Latin quote from Virgil by suggesting that the Sibyl's prophecy was invoking bloodshed and horror as ends in themselves. He encouraged social discord in the name of preventing it and thus seeks to destroy the value of language which my poem speaks against through invoking the memory of my mother who died the same year Powell made his speech.

Many thanks for this lucid exposition. I've re-read the poem in the light of it - although each half of it, as I maintain below - is well worth rereading again and again.

My quarrel is still with my perception that the first part is so finely drawn, so lovingly focussed on your late mother and the effect on you of her passing, that one experiences an element of whiplash in leaving her behind in that equally fine, but more public declaration of the remainder of the poem. I think, in brief, that there are two very powerful poems here, each in its own right, but that neither gains by being offered as one.

[vagantes]

I can understand the difficulty in connection.

Suppose we put the two halves of the poem against a background of a theory to do with "the use of words", which is the title of a work by a writer called Austin.

One important form of speech is that called the performative which is where the issuing of an utterance is also the performance of an action, eg : "Let there be light and there was light". A performative is thus neither true nor false but simply an entity. Powell who was a reductive thinker tried to obliterate meaning by using a debased form of the constative which must prove that something is true or false and is thus the opposite of the performative. His basis for thought was that 8 x7=72.

Imaginative thinking seeks to expand thought rather than limit it.

The poem is trying to compare one with the other.

The first verse deals with the truth of an imaginative thinker who limits the outside world to discover the inner.

The second verse is false and leads to horrors which cannot be spoken, though these are real events.

[PrinceMyshkin]

I can understand the difficulty in connection.

Suppose we put the two halves of the poem against a background of a theory to do with "the use of words", which is the title of a work by a writer called Austin.

One important form of speech is that called the performative which is where the issuing of an utterance is also the performance of an action, eg : "Let there be light and there was light". A performative is thus neither true nor false but simply an entity. Powell who was a reductive thinker tried to obliterate meaning by using a debased form of the constative which must prove that something is true or false and is thus the opposite of the performative. His basis for thought was that 8 x7=72.

Imaginative thinking seeks to expand thought rather than limit it.

The poem is trying to compare one with the other.

The first verse deals with the truth of an imaginative thinker who limits the outside world to discover the inner.

The second verse is false and leads to horrors which cannot be spoken, though these are real events.

Thanks again for taking the trouble to lay out the aesthetic that governed the poem. I do think however that your mind is a lot more comfortable than mine is with abstract thought. The closest I can come to comprehending the poem as a whole is to postulate that there was a single, unitary perception on your part that could only or best be expressed by approaching it from two seemingly disparate angles, the very personal of the first verse, the more detached, philosophical of the rest of the poem.

Out of (irrelevant?) curiousity: was the whole of the poem first-drafted in one continuous sitting or did you pause after writing the first verse and come back to it later (which would be my guess)?

[vagantes]

Curiously enough I write on-line ie I think with my cursor.

[PrinceMyshkin]

Curiously enough I write on-line ie I think with my cursor.

In other words you actually compose your poems ab ovo in the open space after you click on "New Thread"? That's remarkable - and would be even for a poem 1/10 as good as this one is! (Or, as I maintain, these two are!)