A Small, Good Thing

   Hearing the news of Derek Mahon's passing a few weeks ago, I drew out his Collected Poems from an obscure bookshelf in the summer house to see if I was justified in my grandiloquent estimate that he'd been perhaps the greatest living poet of our disunited isles. Opening it I came upon the short poem 'Everything is Going to be All Right', for long a favourite of mine; and then remembered that during lockdown it had become something of a meme, much-posted and forwarded as a talisman for hope and perseverance, its title and last line a reassurance that this precarious state of affairs would not last forever (albeit our current cliff-edge teeter over the prospect of a second lockdown seems to render the measured optimism of even a few months ago premature.) 

    No wonder, Mahon's astonishing little poem reminds us, people turn to poetry in times of crisis, as to the "small, good thing(s)" of Raymond Carver's story, where eating rolls of newly-baked bread can at least restore a grief-stricken couple to the immediate present; at least (as we say) keep them going. Poetry can encapsulate many-sided, hard-to-grasp, difficult-to-swallow truths in a kind of bullet-point form that goes straight to our innards through the music of its implicit concision, the flyaway chaff of words we hear all around us somehow transmuted into a lasting formula, an incantatory charm against despondency or surrender.

  Mahon's poem has this quality of being at once off-the-cuff, scrawled on the back of an envelope ("the lines flow from the hand unbidden") but also locked into its form, its loosely-rhyming pentameters and syntax unfolding with an inevitability that is in itself reassuring towards the final line's "brief stay against confusion", an example of what Frost called "sentence-sound" in the way it patches a commonly-spoken sentence onto an accentual-syllabic line that balances its trochaic first half with the assertive double-thud of the final spondee (perhaps this is why Mahon prefers the two word "all right" over the more frequently used "alright"). 

   Somehow the line no longer sounds like a commonplace platitude, said to placate anxiety or jitters in others or in oneself; its rhythmic context lifts it to the level of lyric epiphany although this is heavily qualified by what's gone before. "There will be dying, there will be dying" announces the dreadful, repetitious imminence of death (like the daily Covid toll on the 6 o'clock news), only to be countered by a sensory immersion in the moment which can only ever be transitory and provisional: it's all we can hold onto, after all, just as the 12-line lifespan of the poem also fleetingly runs its course. 

   But there's another reason why we keep returning to poems like Mahon's, why they "stay news" well beyond, say, the government's current spin-feed of "number theatre", bungled schemes and contradictory scientific advice. The more memorable and resonant a poem is, the more it becomes unfinishable to the reader, constantly open-ended and porous to re-discovery and reinterpretation. To paraphrase Roland Barthes, the richness of poetry is not that a hundred readers can find the same meaning in a certain text, but that a certain text can yield a hundred meanings to the same reader, perhaps at different points throughout her or his life. 

  An example of this arose when my own memory of 'Everything is Going to Be All Right' abutted against how I was inclined to read it now. I had the impression that the scenario of the poem was a man/the poet lying in bed with his wife or partner and their small children, huddling together the morning after a stormy falling-out or estrangement. I took it to be a poem of reconciliation and togetherness after a difficult period, a "rocky patch" maybe, the last line a semi-joyful sigh of relief that things were back on track and the family had been restored to unity, at least until they have to go downstairs for breakfast.

  But on reinspection I can see there's really nothing to support this reading, no mention of partner or children or even family. The narrator could just as easily be alone in bed, "glad to contemplate" the simple fact of waking into his own space: perhaps he has even come through a painful separation (a theme of several mid-period Mahon poems) and is now "in spite of everything" embracing his own solitude and the opportunity to start writing again ("the lines flow...") 

  Surely it would be reductive to regard my previous reading as wrong, though, or this more recent interpretation as somehow right? The terms seem misapplied in the context of reading and re-reading poems. I can see now that my original envisioning was as much to do with my own turbulent home-life at the time I first came across the poem as it was to do with anything Mahon had moulded into his beautiful 12 lines, just as my recent revisioning says something of the calmer, somewhat more settled place I find myself in these days, as well as of the sequestered spaces we've all been waking into this year. 

  It makes me wonder again at the extent to which we create our own versions of important poems as we progress through life, elaborating different meanings in a complex dialogue with the formal properties and significations of the original text, meeting the poet halfway as they come forward from the page to meet us. This creative collusion can also happen on a broader level when a notable poem is reinterpreted to suit a national mood or set of circumstances and a whole new array of readers can rediscover a piece of writing stitched together some forty years ago as though it were a new poem made for this moment of tremulous uncertainty and - "in spite of everything"- tentative hope.