Socrates

 Love made me journey as often as I could

from Birkenhead to Birmingham by steam train

in 1962 – from Woodside’s glazed roof

to Snow Hill’s canopy of girders –

stopping at Chester, Chirk, Gobowen,

Oswestry, Shrewsbury, and, through the Marches,

via Wolverhampton to the ‘Workshop of the World’:

a landscape of fields, canals, small market towns

becoming blackened terraces of cobbled streets.

 

That year I had opted to study

Ancient Greek Philosophy. The journey

would be a couple of hours of silent reading.

Aristotle’s treatise on ‘Coming To Be

And Passing Away’ fitted the rackety-

rack of the wheels, the odd spouts of steam,

the curvetting of telephone wires,

and the colours of weathers and seasons.

But Plato’s Republic, with its heavy

humour, ponderous dialogue and smart-arse

front-man, Socrates, had me counting the sheep,

and admiring the sepia views of Rhyl

and Scarborough above the seats opposite.

 

Perhaps Socrates was dyslexic. He left,

as far as we know, nothing in writing.

Untutored in the classical authors

I had thought his historical fame

dependent on the puppet master alone

until, this year, I came across a piece –

in Practical Mechanics, I think it was –

about his young friend Xenophon: rebel

mercenary, military strategist,

kindly trainer of horses, writer.

Each morning, for exercise, Xenophon

describes how Socrates on his verandah

would dance, a cappella, as it were.

No doubt it was the old man’s tripping

of the light fantastic that prompted

Athens’s Watch Committee to accuse him

of corrupting the youth of the city.

 

Somewhere in Wolverhampton, on the end

of a terrace overlooking a canal,

was painted in white, with a sign writer’s

precision, ‘ETERNITY! Where will you spend

ETERNITY?’ As we passed I would smirk,

as young poets in love are wont to do.

 

Woodside station has gone, and, everywhere,

the steam and the smoke and the soot, of course,

but maybe the graffito, weathered,

is still there, a ghost. Socrates chose

to drink the hemlock rather than self-exile,

as his friends and followers urged. More dangerous

dead and chronicled, he must have guessed,

than forgotten on some sparse islet,

dribbling into his wine.