5 - Lost Bearings: Christopher Middleton

Summary

Interpreting the world

Christopher Middleton's poetry of the 1960s and '70s returned repeatedly to the theme of the displaced person – individuals and groups snatched from their proper lives and flung into the nightmare of history, to deportation, ethnic cleansing, concentration camp, ultimately to individual execution or mass murder. The figures of this poetry are frequently caught unawares, at some moment of vulnerability and unpreparedness, by a history which will not be kept waiting. As he spelt out in one of his most overtly political works, from torse 3, ‘Five Psalms of Common Man’, in a world where ‘The orders revolve as improvisations against fear’, to live in history is to live perpetually in the shadow of such brutal interruptions of supposed normality, where displacement is an ontological condition, the ultimate version of which is genocide:

Nights broken before they end, interrupting the millennia of my vigilance, saith man. The nights of past time never slept to the end re-enact themselves in the existing order of fear. (pp. 78–82)

History in this reading is a succession of catastrophes, announced by ‘the stranger at the door, who did not knock’ of the poem ‘The King of the Chaldees’ from torse 3 (p. 70). ‘Glaucus’, also in torse 3 (pp. 68–69), presents a succinct vision of what Middleton was to call, in a 1964 interview, his ‘catastrophic view of history’, warning that ‘The silent reaper comes, not asking who’, in a process which dissolves all individual selves into a collectivised anonymity.