'History' John Burnside

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John Burnside, 'History'

In the days after the terrorist attacks on 11th Septemeber 2001, the poet is on the beach with his wife and his son Lucas. The beach is on the east coast of Scotland near an RAF base in Leuchars. Above them, 'warplanes' fly, presumably on training manoeuvres. The poet has a 'dread / of what may come' after the attacks. His son is rock-pooling, looking for interesting shells and fish. The family also files a kite. Burnside reflects upon the best way to live in the world 'and does no harm'. He is sceptical of notions of race and nation-states. He concludes tentatively that we should be aware of the ever-changing environment around us, and pay attention to the thing which cannot be saved.

Commentary- In many ways, this is the most ambitiously philosophical poem in the anthology- it asks big questions about how to be at home in the world in the face of the vast, impersonal and destructive forces of history. The poem is also located in the Romantic tradition in its appreciation of the transient beauties of the natural environment at risk from mankind.

The title 'history' is grand and general. It announces the philosophical concerns of the poem, but it is undercut quickly in two ways: the specificity of the subtitle and the contrast with the first line of the poem, which is a singular word, 'Today; Already there is a tension at play between general and local.

The poet on the beach with his family is reminded of the dread of the wider world and the forces of history as the 'warplane' from the nearby RAF base 'a cambered and turned / in the morning light'. Even a gasoline smell from the military base can be smelt 'gusting across'. Burnside along with others on the beach is filled with a 'muffled dread/of what may come' global politics and nation-states are shown to be intruding on the personal and private. interestingly, the poet in a symbolically religious act kneels in the sand with his son in a quiet but resilient gesture. In contrast to the war panes, the poet and his family are trying to find 'evidence of life' and hope, rather than destruction. Although all he finds are fragment - 'driftwood', 'smudges of weed' and 'shred of razorfish'.

However, Burnside argues that these fragments- things which are always changing and are 'irredeemable' - are where we must look to survive spiritually. Therefore the poem is threaded with such images as it embodies what it is arguing it is being attentive to the immediate world. The sand is described metaphorically as 'spinning off in ribbons' - shifting, moving and impossible to pin down. We have also 'distance and the shapes/ we find in water', where water's formless qualities become a playful space for the imagination. The 'sit and tides' and are always changing, pulled invisibly by the 'drift and tug of celestial bodies. We are unable to live in the moment and notice the 'shifts of light' because Burnside argues we are 'confined by modern notions of 'property' and the 'world we own'. Our perspective on the world is narrowed and weighed down to merely the material things that we possess or that we think belong to our nation-state.

The notion of fragments finds its embodiment in perhaps the most distinctive aspect of this poem its form. Lines are frequently short and irregular as though they are suspended in space. Individual lines, such as 'gathering shells', 'transitive gold' and 'all nerve and line' are given a very delicate vulnerability a sense that they will be lost in the space which seems about to wash over them. These lines are also fragments in their own right, and therefore complement the patterns of fragmentary images. The form, with the frequent line breaks working against the logic of syntax, might also suggest something about the difficulty of articulation, of what we try to 'dream about behind the names', behind the words.

Interestingly, the poem becomes more regular when it is being reflective rather than descriptive. In places, 'History' is in fact, highly formal with a regular metre. The following three lines, for example, are all in iambic pentameter:

"at time I think what makes us who we are

is neither kinship nor our given states

but something lost between the world we own"

This is the stately blank verse of Shakespeare or Wordsworth, a traditional - historical? form which serves as a contrast to the free verse of other parts of the poem. It is perhaps no coincidence that these reflective rather than descriptive lines are themselves exploring 'traditional' notions of a nation's history. The overall effect of these formal shifts from regular to irregular, from the complete to the fragmented, resonates with the flux and flow of the landscape being described.

Although the poem has very physical and highly specific setting there is also searching perhaps yearning for the metaphysical 'beyond'. Being attentive as the poem is, to the ever changing environment is in itself a kind of prayer to the natural world. However the key metaphysical symbol in the poem is kite-flying. It appears three times, and helps to give the peom a cohesion. When flying a kite, their bodies are 'fixed and anchored to the shore' and also, in an interesting metaphore, 'plugged into the sky' by an invisible wind - a powerful visual symbol of the poems search for metaphyscial answers.

Children are another important symbol in the poem. The son, Lucas, represents an innocent ideal, a common idea in Romantic poetry. Buurnside kneels down to join him in the search for life. But it towars the end of th epeom where the symbolic value of th echild is made claer. burnside wonders how we can live in the world and do no harm. Prephaps he says we should aim to gain the innoncence and attentive joy of 'a toddler on a beach' fascinated by the 'pattern on a shell'

The tone of 'History' is pensive and solemn and suits the overall seriousness of the poems ideas. This relatively long lyric peom consists of only three sentences which perhaps helps to establish this tone. With such long, complex syntax, our attention is drawn naturally towards the full stop. The word that precedes the pause is therefore given emphasis. This fulls stop, this pause, is used to great effect at the very end of the poem - the syntax is manipulated cleverly as the long sentence builds towards the powerful concluding couplet, which beautifully encapsulates the poem's ideas:

"patient afraid;but still, through everything

attentive to the irredeemable"