These coming additions to the blog will be produced by Elisha Carter, Fiona Hill, Efe Imoyin-Omene, Thea Dawson and Alexander Stephenson.

Every Monday, a new literary critique will grace you, courtesy of the crew, followed by a Friday post of an Author Spotlight, Book Recommendation, or a piece of our own writing. 

We hope that you find our commentaries useful.

• The Editorious

PLAN

Key Words/Final aim: greater significance (metaphorical or global), small moments, times, the themes of the nautical and the motif of the seas representing times (erosion), style (academic in Journal ‘paraphernalia’, often quite loose in History. Andrew Motion and John Burnside. The beach.

• The sea/coastal setting/motif and how it represents greater things – erosion breaking down, sense of inevitability.  
• Loneliness in the poems and Fixed Narrator, Still Narrators.
• Style and Form and how it is used to show a lack of understanding in both J and H.

INTRODUCTION

Throughout their poems, John Burnside and Andrew Motion use small moments to symbolise events of great global or societal significance. In ‘History’, Burnside builds the image of a parent watching over his child on a beach within the backdrop of his fear and worry about the 9/11 attacks. In ‘The Journal of a Disappointed Man’ (Journal), however, Motion writes though the conduit of a journaling man, who writes down the proceedings of some men trying to fix a pile to secure the pier. The men are unsuccessful in their quest. Ultimately, both writers draw their poems around the central idea of meaning, and how meaning is often lost to underthinking.

ANALYSIS

Firstly, both poets use a coastal setting and the motifs of the sea and the coast to present a sense of inevitability and universality, even though both poems have unities of place. In History, the narrator writes that he and his son ‘flew the kites… along the beach.’  Here, the noun ‘kites’ may be emblematic of childhood and innocence, just like ‘the beach’. Throughout the poem, the kite motif could suggest this awkward balance between the dueling ideas of freedom and family, yet it is still something that is tethered, that must be held back, or it will be lost. This small moment could imply that we, too, as humans have the misconception of being free, yet are ultimately held down and burdened by both internal burdens and the pressures that exist in the world around us. In some of the final lines of the poem, the narrator later remarks on a ‘kite plugged into the sky’. The speaker’s new understanding of this burden and the misconception of freedom in our lives is epitomised here with this still, unwavering image of the kite being ‘plugged’. The kite-flying has now shifted, even though the narrator is focusing in on the same moment, to a pessimistic experience, and almost a degrading one, in which he has given up on romanticism and even hope for his child’s future.

In both History and Journal, our speakers place us in a coastal area. Just like for the narrator’s changing perspective, the beach may represent change in both poems. In Journal, men group together to replace a ‘pile’ on a pier, and are unsuccessful, leaving ‘the pile in mid-air’. Perhaps this could imply that both the masculinity of the ‘massive’, described as almost neanderthal by the journaling man, and the academic masculinity of the speaker are not the cure to solve the modern crisis of toxicity within masculinity. Motion seems to pin-point that these failures are caused by how ingrained stereotypical roles are hierarchies are within us.

Within moments of analysing the team, the journaling man creates a hierarchy between them. Because he has this literary dominance over the ‘monsters’, he creates this societal microcosm through his observation. Perhaps Motion is educating his reader on the inevitability of these concepts, that this cycle will constantly manifest itself. Even within the short viewing time, the observer already creates these constructs – they are innate within us. This problem, Motion dictates, is irredeemable. It is interesting that Motion picks the beach, the pier, the meeting of land and sea, as the symbol for this place and brokenness. Just like Burnside, Motion could be using the beach as an almost surreal place, adding to the sense of liminality and also the constant of change. The sea weathers away the frail and unstable forms of masculinity, as well as eroding innocence and childhood in History. This all engages with the sense of inevitability. How we will grow old, how we have to accept that men cannot always be strong, cannot always be beacons. The beach is a place where both the speakers do not go, but merely observe ‘on the dune slacks’ or watching from home. In History, the beach seems to represent a place where the adults can never return to, an innocence that they can never access again, even though the speaker may long to be given back those taken pieces of himself that he sacrificed for freedom and adulthood long ago.

Burnside speaks poignantly here about how ‘irredeemable’ our past is, and how we can only open it by pessimistically watching our children flying kites, and reliving the same experience as we have, only to end up one day by themselves watching on the ‘dune slacks’, the larger things in life watching over us in eerie dread as minutiae are lost to history and only the planes crashing into skyscrapers remains, and how surely all meaning and optimism and hope is lost to those things that people decide warrant a larger international stage, though all beauty might be lost. Perhaps Motion’s speaker does not go to the beach because, despite his verbosity, his casual utterance of ‘paraphernalia’ – though all he means is “stuff to do with stuff” –, he himself does not understand even the base levels of the present war on masculinity, so he covers up his inability to comprehend by not helping the men on the beach, by sitting in judgement of what he calls ‘monsters’ with his loquaciousness and academia and by forming his elaborate diacope around them. Ultimately though, he himself, just like the parents ‘on the dune slacks’ is left alone by the men, left ‘disappointed’. ‘That left… me of course.’ are the final words, and how his academic masculinity, just like what he perceives as the brutish masculinity, will be left behind by the turning time and the certainty of tides.      

CONCLUSION

To conclude, the minutiae of our lives give greater meaning to our existence, and both poets use the failure or inability to truly understand that as the reason for cynicism, in the forms of pessimism in History and mockery or academic prejudice in The Journal of a Disappointed Man. Burnside and Motion both try to curve the trajectories or their readers into realigning their perspective with truth and the discovery of meaning through the use of the little things that colour our dreams and detail our lives, though, in the end, we must face up to the inevitability that we will all be lost to ‘History’.

Alexander Stephenson