It’s funny
how you can arrive at something via many different paths or a path for which
you did not plan. That’s how it was for
me with the poem Five Bells by
Kenneth Slessor. I remember saying in an
earlier post, quite emphatically, that Five Bells was too full of hidden
meaning for me to appreciate. I know
they study the poem at school and it’s considered Slessor’s best work, but for
the times I had tried to read and understand it, the thing forever seemed too
difficult – “Deep and dissolving
verticals of light Ferry the falls of
moonshine down; Why thieve these
profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought anchored in time? …………?”
And that’s
how Five Bells might have remained for me.
Except, I’m driving home from work a couple of weeks back listening to
Radio National and they’re playing a track from a newly released album – a collaboration
between the Australian National Academy of Music and singer song writer, Paul
Kelly. I like Paul Kelly’s work. The experience gets better – the album is
called, Conversations with Ghosts, and
it’s a collection of poetry from a number of known poets where Paul Kelly sings
their poetry set to modern classical music.
Each poem has a, talking to the dead, reflection, bells or ghost
experience about it, so you’ve got poets like W. B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson, and
of course, Kenneth Slessor with Five
Bells. Hearing the words from Five Bells being sounded out made a big
difference to my interest in the poem. I
could hear that it had something to do with the ringing and sound of a ship’s
bell – that also got my interest. I did
some research to find out why the poem was written and who it was about. Essentially, Slessor is looking out on Sydney
harbour at night while reminiscing about a friend and work colleague of his
(Joe Lynch) who went missing off the back of a ferry, presumed drowned, because
they never found the body – controversy over whether he fell or jumped. It does help in understanding the poem if you
do some background reading on Joe Lynch.
His biography is pretty much followed throughout the poem – the drowning
in the first couple of verses; mad drinking sessions; walking out to a friends
place at Moorebank; living and working in Melbourne as a cartoonist on Punch
magazine; back to Sydney working on Smith’s Weekly; drinking and partying
(reports say Joe sunk because he was wearing an overcoat weighed down with
bottles of beer he was taking to a party on the North Shore); his father, a
fiddle player and stone mason carving graveyard headstones for a living.
Another aid
to understanding Five Bells is to
have knowledge of the maritime tradition of ringing a ship’s bell to denote
time. The title Five Bells is a direct
reference to the maritime time-keeping system, so here it is. A ship’s daily routine is broken up into 6, four-hour
watches:
Midnight to
4am (middle watch);
4am to 8am
(morning watch);
8am to
12noon (forenoon watch);
12 pm to
4pm (afternoon watch);
4pm to 8pm
(dog watch – usually split into 2, two hour watches); and
8pm to
midnight (first watch)
During each
four hour watch, the ship’s bell is struck sharply on each half hour (8 ‘bells’
in total). To signal a complete hour,
the bell is struck in a quick ‘double’ bell movement (ding-ding!) and the half hour is signalled by an
additional ‘single’ bell movement (ding-ding! …….. ding!). So ‘Five Bells’ indicates it is two and a
half hours into a watch (ding-ding!
ding-ding! …….. ding!). The question is, in
which ‘watch’ is Slessor’s Five Bells
rang out? It must be either the first
watch (10.30pm) or the middle watch (2.30am) because it is definitely at night –
‘Night and water Pour to one rip of
darkness ………. ‘, ‘I look out my window in the dark ………. ‘, ‘ ………. in the moon’s
drench ….. ‘. It is unlikely to be
the middle watch because the bell is not normally rung in harbour at night at
this time in the morning (disturbs the neighbours). So we imagine Slessor is sitting up around
10.30pm, pondering upon the settling lights and night sounds of dark harbour
…….
Five Bells
(Kenneth Slessor, 1901
- 1971)
Time that is moved by little fidget wheels
Is not my Time, the flood that does not flow.
Between the double and the single bell
Of a ship’s hour, between a round of bells
From the dark warship riding there below,
I have lived many lives, and this one life
Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells.
Deep and dissolving
verticals of light
Ferry the falls of
moonshine down. Five bells
Coldly rung out of a
machine’s voice. Night and water
Pour to one rip of
darkness, the Harbour floats
In air, the Cross
hangs upside-down in water.
Why do I think of
you, dead man, why thieve
These profitless
lodgings from the flukes of thought
Anchored in
Time? You have gone from earth,
Gone even from the
meaning of a name;
Yet something’s
there, yet something forms its lips
And hits and cries
against the ports of space,
Beating their sides
to make its fury heard.
Are you shouting at
me, dead man, squeezing your face
In agonies of speech
on speechless panes?
Cry louder, beat the
windows, bawl your name!
But I hear nothing,
nothing . . . only bells,
Five bells, the
bumpkin calculus of Time.
Your echoes die, your
voice is dowsed by Life,
There’s not a mouth
can fly the pygmy strait –
Nothing except the
memory of some bones
Long shoved away, and
sucked away, in mud;
And unimportant
things you might have done,
Or once I thought you
did; but you forgot,
And all have now
forgotten – looks and words
And slops of beer;
your coat with buttons off,
Your gaunt chin and
pricked eye, and raging tales
Of Irish kings and
English perfidy,
And dirtier perfidy
of publicans
Groaning to God from
Darlinghurst.
Five bells.
Then I saw the road,
I heard the thunder
Tumble, and felt the
talons of the rain
The night we came to
Moorebank in slab-dark,
So dark you bore no
body, had no face,
But a sheer voice
that rattled out of air
(As now you’d cry if
I could break the glass),
A voice that spoke
beside me in the bush,
Loud for a breath or
bitten off by wind,
Of Milton, melons and
the Rights of Man,
And blowing flutes,
and how Tahitian girls
Are brown and
angry-tongued, and Sydney
girls
Are white and
angry-tongued, or so you’d found.
But all I heard was
words that didn’t join
So Milton became melons, melons girls,
And fifty mouths it
seemed, were out that night,
And in each tree an
Ear was bending down,
Or something had just
run, gone behind grass,
When, blank and
bone-white, like a maniac’s thought,
The naphtha-flash of
lightning slit the sky,
Knifing the dark with
deathly photographs.
There’s not so many
with so poor a purse
Or fierce a need,
must fare by night like that,
Five miles in
darkness on a country track,
But when you do,
that’s what you think
Five bells.
In Melbourne ,
your appetite had gone,
Your angers too; they had leeched away
By the soft archery of summer rains
And the sponge-paws of wetness, the slow damp
That stuck the leaves of living, snailed the mind,
And showed your bones, that had been sharp with rage,
The sodden ecstasies of rectitude.
I thought of what you had written in faint ink,
Your journal with the sawn-off lock, that stayed behind
With other things you left, all without use,
All without meaning now, except a sign
That someone had been living who was now dead:
“At Labassa. Room 6 x
8
On top of the tower; because of this, very dark
And cold in winter.
Everything has been stowed
Into this room 500 books all shapes
And colours, dealt across the floor
And over the sills and on the laps of chairs;
Guns, photos of many different things
And different curioes that I obtained . . . . “
In Sydney
by the spent aquarium-flare
Of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper,
We argued about blowing up the world,
But you were living backward, so each night
You crept a moment closer to the breast,
And they were living, all of them, those frames
And shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth,
And most your father, the old man gone blind,
With fingers always round a fiddle’s neck,
That graveyard mason whose fair monuments
And tablets cut with dreams of piety
Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men
Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment
At cargoes they had never thought to bear,
These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.
Where have you gone?
The tide is over you,
The turn of midnight water’s over you,
As time is over you, and mystery,
And memory, the flood that does not flow.
You have no suburb, like those easier dead
In private berths of dissolution laid –
The tide goes over, the waves ride over you
And let their shadows down like shining hair,
But they were Water, and the sea-pinks bend
Like lilies in your teeth, but they are Weed,
And you are only part of an Idea.
I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in,
The night you died, I felt your eardrums crack,
And the short agony, the longer dream,
The nothing that was neither long nor short,
But I was bound, and could not go that way,
But I was blind, and could not feel your hand.
If I could find an answer, could only find
Your meaning, or could say why you were here
Who now are gone, what purpose gave you breath
Or seized it back, might I not hear your voice?
I look out of my window in the dark
At waves with diamond quills and combs of light
That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand
In the moon’s drench, that straight enormous glaze,
And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-bouys
Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each,
And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard
Was a boat’s whistle, and the scraping squeal
Of seabirds’ voices far away, and bells,
Five bells. Five
bells coldly ringing out.
Five bells.
Slessor wrote
Five Bells in 1937, ten years after Joe Lynch drowned. In an interview published in the Daily
Telegraph, 31st July, 1967 (Bread & Wine, Kenneth Slessor, Angus
& Robertson, 1970), Slessor said part of his inspiration for Five Bells came from an old Arabian
fairy-tale where a man dips his face in a basin of magic water and between the
time he dips his head in and withdraws it (5 seconds, 5 bells), he dreams he
has lived another life - sailed many voyages, been shipwrecked and captured by
pirates, married a princess, fought in battles and finally executed. The fairy-tale suggests the life the man
experiences as vision is just as real as his actual life except it was lived on
another time-scale (who’s to say it wasn’t for ‘real’?).
In
reminiscing, Slessor realises he can imagine, replay in memory, the whole span
of Joe Lynch’s human life (or a human life) in the interval between the
strokes of a ship’s bell (ding-ding!
ding-ding! …….. ding!).
Five Bells is written with the
two time-scales interposed upon each other – the mechanical time-scale of five
bells being rung out in three to five seconds, and a memory time-scale that
compresses the thirty years of Joe Lynch’s life into the same five seconds
(note the words, Five Bells repeated
three times throughout the poem – 3 seconds of the ship’s bell; 3 decades of
Joe Lynch’s life). The words remind the
reader that at that particular point in the poem a lengthy period of time has
advanced along the time-scale of Joe Lynch’s life, but it has only occupied a
few moments on the mechanical time-scale of the ship’s bell.
The
construction of the poem gets us thinking about time and the mystery of time in
relation to memory, ‘the flood that does
not flow.’ What is memory? It comes in a chronological order but it does
not advance or ‘flow’ in the same
pace or manner as real time. It can be
held in a compressed form. We
mechanically measure real time by it’s passage, but time may simply be this
moment, nothing more than now. Anything in front of now does not exist. Anything behind is compressed in memory, mystery ….
“The turn of midnight
water’s over you,
As time is over you,
and mystery,
And memory, the flood
that does not flow.”
I’ve dug up
another old poem of mine as a link to this post. Father
Ashley is my midnight reflection on another man’s life. A man who lives in my memory, who lives in
the compressed time-scale of memory, between the double check that the cars are
locked and the single throw of the front door latch before I go to bed, at Five Bells ……..
1992. Living in Sydney, in the
Catholic faith, I met an old priest during frequent visits to Melbourne .
At the time it seemed an odd friendship.
Little insights and understandings came much later; Father Ashley
insights. How important is it that other
people hold us in their minds? What
happens when there’s nobody to pray for us?
What is life without prayer?
Father Ashley
Father
Ashley, you must be dead now.
When
was it? ’76 or ’77?
Did you
think I was a visionary convert?
Did you
think I knew what you knew?
You
pursued me.
I felt
you took an interest in me that wasn’t encouraged.
And I,
like always, to all people,
Dealt
with you at arms length.
Remember
4/187 West Street ?
I
cooked us a meal there more than once.
You
would visit Sydney ,
And
stay at the North
Sydney Jesuit
College .
I would
look you up there and drive you to my place.
There
was one time when you were in the city,
At that
little old church at the western end of George Street ,
Almost
going into Parramatta Road .
It
never dawned on me to remember why you were there.
You
always knew when I was in Melbourne .
I don’t
think I got in touch.
I think
others used to do that for me.
You
were a priest put out to pasture,
At Campion College ,
Kew .
Your
stationary showed an embossed crest,
Oh,
that’s right, there was the occasional letter.
Why
didn’t I keep them?
Were
you lonely?
Is that
why you sought out my company?
Did you
want to talk?
But
what could I possibly say that you would want to hear?
Were
you expecting to hear me speak of discovering the Truth, maybe?
When I
didn’t even know I was looking for it?
Couldn’t
you see me for what I really was?
Were
you so easily fooled?
Looking
back I’m ashamed to admit,
I did
think you were a bit of a fool,
A
little man.
You
always wore your black coat and wide clerical collar,
Manacled
about loose skin.
You
giggled and fussed and shuffled and shook a little
Because
you were old.
I
wondered why the hell I was with you at all.
Father
Ashley, I remember only one thing you ever said,
You
asked me seriously if I prayed.
“Do you
pray”? you said.
I
remember I struggled with the answer,
I
didn’t really know if I did but I thought I didn’t but should’ve.
I said
yes, hoping that would be the end of it.
You
seemed satisfied with the answer, remember,
For you
were quite serious again when you asked,
“Will
you pray for me”?
Couldn’t
you see me for what I was?
Couldn’t
you see through me?
Were you so easily fooled?
J. O. White
Really enjoyed this poem-and helps to explain 'Five Bells' to some extent. Thanks
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