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Crystal Palace

THE TECHNOLOGY OF CONJUNCTIONS

On October 15th 1851,

a Wednesday, in Hyde Park, London,

the Great Exhibition – official sponsor

Schweppes – closed. In Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace

of glass and wood and cast iron – incorporating

untouched the park’s trees, and itself perhaps

the chief exhibit – amid the palms and the lamps

and the rest of the world’s ingenuity,

the best of Britain’s design, engineering,

and manufacture had been displayed:

for example, Minton’s majolica

from Stoke, a papier maché piano

from Birmingham. Among the visitors

were Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson

and Lewis Carroll. Enclosing the park’s trees

had a cost. Sparrows flew as freely

as ever, despoiling all stands equally:

from Samuel Colt’s breech-loading revolvers

to Mathew Brady’s daguerreotypes.

Queen Victoria was concerned. ‘Sparrow Hawks,

Ma’am!’ advised the Duke of Wellington,

the veteran of diverse battlefields.

 

In London, three days later, the Saturday,

Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick or The Whale’

was published: that Odyssean tale

of an illimitable zealotry

and self-hatred, and of optimism.

‘I thought I would sail about a little

and see the watery part of the world.

It is a way I have to drive off the spleen…’

 

Is the closeness of significant events

zeitgeist, or merely haphazard happenstance –

human affairs, like leaves, falling where they may?

Making connections (as the Iron Duke did

and Schweppes), like the making of metaphors,

has made us even more successful than rats.

 

Here is a tale of the technology

of conjunctions: somewhere south of the Azores

the only sounds are the lap of the swell

on the clinkers, and the shearwaters mewing,

circling above…the harpoon readied…

the rope’s end lashed tight to the foot of the mast…

the men still, their breaths long, slow, pulses high…

waiting for the leviathan to rise

with its capitalist bounty – the oil

rendered from its blubber – the carcass

becoming noisome jetsam, brief pickings

for frenzies of seabirds…

 

 

CONFUSED ALARMS

One of my favourites poems is Dover Beach.

I read it first at school when I was fifteen.

It seemed a fine thing to have written –

evocative, erudite, sonorous,

personal. Matthew Arnold, the advocate

of ‘sweetness and light’, honeymooned abroad

the year of the Great Exhibition.

Returning to England they stayed the night

at the Lord Warden Hotel – before taking

the train to London – no doubt to recover

from the paddle steamer that ferried them

across the English Channel, a craft,

though independent of the wind, tossed

by the waves, whose swaddled passengers travelled

au dehors. The poem begins ‘The sea

is calm tonight.’ From his window he can see

across to the French coast where a light gleamed

briefly. He calls his wife to his side,

and they listen to ‘the grating roar’ of the tide,

the unceasing waves shifting the pebbles.

 

For Arnold Great Britain was not the land

of ingenuities the Crystal Palace

hymned but of Blake’s dark factories. ‘…the world

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain…’

What would he have thought of us who measure

this country’s wealth in Costa coffee spoons,

eschew the Europe whose cultural heritage

is ours, make dishonour a virtue,

and still send tens of thousands of children

hungry to shared beds in inadequate rooms!

‘And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.’