A little more poetry - on sex, marriage and a guilty conscience

A bit of poetry again. This one is a dark peace, but although I haven't felt the feelings it tells about in a long time, I cannot resist the supreme verses, rhymes and the mood it creates.

Tony Harrison - The White Queen, I. Satyrae, V

Northwards two hundred miles, an emptiness
As big as Europe; Sah'ra; Nothingness.
South six hundred, miles of churning sea
Make of the strongest swimmer a nonentity,
Bleaching the blackest flesh as white as spray.
The sea makes no demands but gets its way.

The campus wants its pep- and sleeping pills.
It's not the diseases, but the void that kills,
The space, the gaps, the darkness, that same void
He hears vibrating in clogged adenoid
And vocal cords. Through his cool stethoscope
He hears despair pulsate and withered hope
Flutter the failing heart a little, death
Of real feeling in a laboured breath.
He knows with his firm finger on a pulse
It is this Nothingness and nothing else
Throbs in the blood. Nothing is no little part
Of time's huge effort in the human heart.
There's love. There's courage. And that's all.
And the itus et reditus of Pascal.

He's not asked out to drinks or dinner much.
He knows how the slightest sweatrash on the crutch
Scares some and with good reason, whose child's whose,
Whose marriage depends on sjamboks, and who screws
In Posts & Telegraphs, and reads instead
His damp-stained Pensées on their double bed.
The Nothingness! Lisa - she couldn't stand
The boredom and packed off for Switzerland.
She sends him a postcard of a snowblown slope:
Boris, ich bin frei ... und friere. He can't cope
Here alone. There's nothing for a sick MO
Sick of savannah, sick of inselberg,
Sick of black Africa, who cannot go
Ever again to white St Petersburg.

The speaker here is an Englishman, placed for duty in Africa. Harrison himself spent some years in Nigeria and Senegal, and has met several colonists - people who earlier or at the time worked for the British Empire. As a poet he was interested in their experiences and lives, but due to his political outlooks he always remains critical towards such characters and the lives they lead as colonizers and (often) abusers of the locals.

The speaker of the poem is a doctor giving a parallel speech: he talks at the same time about his own loneliness and seclusion in the small place far from England where he has to work, and where his wife has left him, and at the same time commenting on the more general feeling of being isolated, lonely and desperate.

Still, he perceives his own situation as worse than that of others: he does not even have a family to care for, nor can he find pleasure in bodily joys as do others.

At the end he cites a line from a letter sent by her (ex- ?) wife: the woman writes to him about how free she feels (we can only guess whether this is due to being back in Europe or rather to having left her husband and their boring life behind). Also, she seems to tease her with adding in her letter: "und friere", meaning in English she is freezing. This suggests both that she feels alive, she experiences strong physical sensations, and mental ones as well, since she gets a noteworthy experience of her being in Switzerland. It is also taunting: it points to the never-changing heat and dryness his husband has to endure.

(And also: you can find here a short recommendation of his reissued Selected Poems.)