Enhancing allusions in two poems by Constantine and Holland-Batt

I want to mention apparent allusions that have struck me in two recent poems.

One is in A Bird Called Elaeus, David Constantine’s brilliant book of versions from The Greek Anthology. The first quatrain in his Coda of Anthology-inspired original poems is called ‘Laws of War’:

We too had laws of war: don’t poison wells
Don’t fell the olive trees (they take so long to grow)
Don’t bomb the schools, don’t bomb the hospitals …
Stranger seeking our monument, look around you.

There are actually two apparent allusions here – one to Wren’s epitaph in St Paul’s Cathedral, the other to W B Yeats’ ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, where he writes

We too had many pretty toys when young;
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays …

Though Constantine’s last line, recalling Wren’s epitaph, is the most powerful and haunting in itself, it’s the reference to Yeats that seems to me most telling as an allusion. Minds will go in different directions, of course. To me, it implies a fierce indictment of the blatant double standards great powers bring to international affairs, the hollowly rhetorical way in which concepts like ‘rule-based order’ are applied, the way the objective application of international law is hamstrung by security council veto. In a larger way, Yeats’ despair at how the Black and Tans’ violence dissolves illusions about human nature resounds through the poem. And though Constantine speaks in a quieter voice than Yeats, I think it’s fair to say that if the destruction of olive trees, schools and hospitals is actually a systematic policy, as it seems to be, what’s being done in Gaza and the West Bank is a much more powerful cue to such despair than the atrocities of ‘a drunken soldiery’.

I also wanted to mention the echo of Robert Lowell’s ‘A Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’ at the beginning of Sarah Holland-Batt’s hauntingly mysterious ‘Athenian Jar’. ‘Night strangles the island, cousin, / Yet we play on and on’ reminded me of the beginning of the third section of Lowell’s poem: ‘All you recovered from Poseidon died / With you, my cousin, and the harrowed brine / Is fruitless on the blue beard of the god’. On a verbal level the echo may seem slight, and perhaps Holland-Batt didn’t consciously intend it. However, though Achilles and Ajax were cousins in myth I can’t remember much being made of the fact in the Iliad, and it’s hard to see why Ajax makes a point of calling Achilles ‘cousin’ in the poem except in order to evoke Lowell’s lament. More to the point, the reference to fruitlessness in the lines I’ve quoted and the unforgettable image of illusory vitality in death in the first section of ‘A Quaker Graveyard’ seems almost startlingly appropriate to imagery and ideas of strangulation, helplessness and futility not only in ‘Athenian Jar’ but scattered through the poems of Holland-Batt’s The Jaguar. Here’s Lowell’s opening:

A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket –
The sea was still breaking violently and night
Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,
When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light
Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,
He grappled at the net
With the coiled hurdling muscles of his thighs:
The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites,
Its open staring eyes
Were lustreless dead-lights
Or cabin windows on a stranded hulk
Heavy with sand.

Here’s ‘Athenian Jar’, memorable line after line whose energy that to challenge the hopelessness it describes:

Night strangles the island, cousin,
yet we play on and on. Absence thickens
my throat. In its hollow your spear
clinks on marble, moonlit
rats scatter like obols, and a ring
of mesh gleams at your neck.
The house rocks its tusks in silence
as our hands fall and fall. Funeral games –
now all we fought for is dead.
Throw the dice again, Achilles,
feel the years tumble
from your fingertips
like bones.

 

 

 

 

One Response to “Enhancing allusions in two poems by Constantine and Holland-Batt”

  1. Poetry Blog Digest 2025, Week 3 – Via Negativa said:

    Jan 20, 25 at 10:39 pm

    […] Edmund Prestwich, Enhancing allusions in two poems by Constantine and Holland-Batt […]


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