{"id":2666,"date":"2023-03-30T11:18:18","date_gmt":"2023-03-30T11:18:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2666"},"modified":"2023-03-30T11:18:18","modified_gmt":"2023-03-30T11:18:18","slug":"james-fenton-wind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2666","title":{"rendered":"James Fenton, ‘Wind’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s a link to the text and the poet\u2019s reading of James Fenton\u2019s superb short poem \u2018Wind\u2019 on the Poetry Archive: https:\/\/poetryarchive.org\/poem\/wind\/<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a poem that brings tears to my eyes when I read it. Paradoxically, I think it does so at least partly by the serene beauty of its composition and the lightness with which it touches its matter. This lightness is reflected in the poet\u2019s reading, which is thoughtful and tinged with sadness but never heavily emotive.<\/p>\n

Despite its being so short, I would call it a great poem. Its point of view, its subject matter, is epic, dealing with the movement of peoples, with sweeps of space and time and processes of cultural change as vast as those in Saint-John Perse\u2019s Anabase<\/em>. It\u2019s able suggest these things so briefly and with such elegantly uncluttered swiftness because of what is at one level its extreme abstraction, the god\u2019s eye overview it presents. BUT \u2013 and this is crucial \u2013 all through the poem this god\u2019s eye view is held in tension and made to interact with a humanly immersed one. It starts with the startling leap between perspectives in the first two lines, the close-up, immersive one immediately followed by the long shot \u2013<\/p>\n

This is the wind, the wind in a field of corn.
\nGreat crowds are fleeing from a major disaster<\/p>\n

The humanly immersed way of thinking and feeling is kept alive by little touches throughout the poem. For example, \u2018green swaying wadis\u2019 miraculously combines the vivid, immediate impression of the wind blowing through green corn with a god\u2019s eye or epic cinema view looking down over migrating crowds and herds through valleys. So much is going on in the phrase. Evoking the Middle East by means of the Arabic word \u2018wadis\u2019, the phrase may make us think of Cecil B. DeMille\u2019s fifties epic of the Jews\u2019 flight from Egypt as well as of modern wars and famines. \u2018Swaying\u2019 most vividly evokes the way corn bends to and fro under a changing wind but also suggests the tottering of exhausted refugees and the swaying of camels\u2019 burdens. And I\u2019m reminded of Tennyson\u2019s evocation of geological change in In Memoriam<\/em> 123:<\/p>\n

The hills are shadows, and they flow
\nFrom form to form, and nothing stands;
\nThey melt like mist, the solid lands,
\nLike clouds they shape themselves and go.<\/p>\n

So perhaps it was misleading to talk about abstraction. Such breadth of reference, seeming to transcend all limitations of time, might normally come at the cost of abstraction but here it\u2019s brilliantly combined with concrete immediacy.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t make up my mind whether \u2018Down through the beautiful catastrophe of wind\u2019 or the final stanza seems more heartbreakingly lovely. In both cases, the beauty and the heartbreak depend on the way such different perspectives tug at the same words. But the final stanza has the special weight of the way it gathers things together and resolves the whole. The sudden move into distance of \u2018And somewhere<\/em> they will sing: \u2018Like chaff we were borne \/ In the wind\u2019 \u2013 made more decisive by the preceding full stop \u2013 brings things to rest on the remote perspective, detaches us, as it were, from contemplating disaster in an immediate way. \u2018Sing\u2019 suggests the surmounting of horror by turning it into art. \u2018Like chaff we were borne \/ In the wind\u2019 has an Authorized Version Biblical resonance. But most beautiful and intangible is the way the tonal and emotional weight of \u2018This is the wind in a field of corn\u2019 has been transformed by everything that\u2019s come between the poem\u2019s opening and its close.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s a link to the text and the poet\u2019s reading of James Fenton\u2019s superb short poem \u2018Wind\u2019 on the Poetry Archive: https:\/\/poetryarchive.org\/poem\/wind\/ It\u2019s a poem that brings tears to my eyes when I read it. Paradoxically, I think it does so at least partly by the serene beauty of its composition and the lightness with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-james-fenton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2666"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2666"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2668,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2666\/revisions\/2668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}