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The Snow Party
By Peter Barry
The fall started during night prayers,
with driven flakes filling the darkness
of the chapel windows - and it didn’t stop.
At three in the morning the curator librorum
woke from a dream of wet incunabula
in the springtime melt, and sent a snow party
to clear the roof of the Bishops’ Library.
The six elect donned sea-boots and greatcoats
and climbed the wall-ladder inside the tower,
like sub-mariners escaping after a ping.
But the hatch into the storm above
was snow-caked and wouldn’t budge
till (papal) Bull heaved it with his Atlas shoulder
and its ice-toothed whale jaw opened skywards.
The lee was almost clear, but snow to windward
topped the parapet and hid the roof-tiles,
swirling thick against a copper sky,
where the masthead lights on Winter Hill
flickered in the distance. Two men flat-raked snow
from the apex, and the rest shovelled it over the side -
it hangs in air, then lands with a thump.
As they work, they glimmer like mystic Yeti,
shifting wave after wave of solid snow,
the flagpole twanging above them
like the battle-top of a cruiser.
And sometimes, when I dream,
I see them up there still, fighting the odds,
as the bow dips again, into the wall of white.
___________________________________
This one is about an entry in the Diary (a feature of the College magazine) which notes an incident during the war when there was a heavy snowfall, and during the night a ‘snow party’ was sent up to clear the roof of the library.
That is all I know about it, but the image always seemed rather haunting and it came back to me recently while walking home from work late on a dark evening – the poem seemed to slip out of the shadows like a cat and walked beside me, writing itself.
This is a fairly late draft, the stage at which (as Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch puts it) major activity has ceased, so that the elements in the poem are more-or-less stable, but there is still some fine tuning to be done.
With this kind of narrative writing, there is a tendency to sprawl, so originally I had a structure of four eight-line stanzas, each being a complete single sentence, to give it some binding. Trimming these down to seven seemed to tighten it further, but the step-out phase at the end needed slowing down a bit, so the last three lines are a new sentence.
I tried to use a doubled ‘held’ image as the backbone running all the way through, and it’s a composite of the maritime (ships and water) and the collegiate (snow and tower). This may seem a little contrived (well, it is contrived).
The other worry is whether the clauses seem to run in a natural order, and whether the overall effect is stronger (as it needs to be) than the individual verbal presence and effect of any of the clauses individually - this is something I think about quite a lot. Poems like this (for me) need an outside narrator who only knows how things look (that is, nothing is said directly about what anybody thinks or feels).
This is because even if the material is autobiographical, the events have to be re-imagined and re-created, for the self then is only available to the self now by a process something like Method acting. In fact, several of the poems use incidents from the period of the 1930s and 40s, when three of my uncles were at this Seminary.
Something like that is the case here – one uncle left the Seminary and immediately joined the Navy. He was on Arctic convoys in a destroyer a few months later – a ‘ping’ was what they called a hit from a shell or torpedo.
Another element is the need to maintain consistency of tone – there are jokey ironies in some of the details, typical of the institutional sense of humour which was characteristic of the place. I am very fond of these, but do they draw too much attention to themselves?
Overall, I’m fairly happy with it, but I sense that it isn’t really quite finished.
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