Free Poetry Notebook by Clive James Page B

they surely must, will find that Edgar is unusually sensitive to science and technology. They increase his vocabulary, which is lyrically precise over a greater range of
human activity than anyone else’s I can think of, with the possible exception of his senior compatriot Les Murray. More of a city boy than Murray, Edgar has fewer words for evoking life on
the land. But for all other realms he has whole dictionaries in his head:
    And for the first time ever I think now,
    As though it were a memory, that you
    Were in the world then and alive, and how
    Down time’s long labyrinthine avenue
    Eventually you’d bring yourself to me
    With no excessive haste and none too soon –
    As memorable in my history
    As that small step for man on to the moon.
    And this, suddenly and unexpectedly, is another realm, the realm of personal emotion. One of Edgar’s favourite strategies is to set up an area of public property, as it
were, before bringing in the personal relationship: a way of spreading inward from the world. The effect, especially acute in this case, is to dramatize his isolation. But as yet we don’t
know that the isolation will mean loneliness. Perhaps he and ‘you’ are still together. The portents, however, are ominous. For one thing, she is probably younger than he. She was in the
world then, but the wording suggests that she might not have been so for very long. She was on her way to him, down a ‘long labyrinthine avenue’ that sounds as if it has passed through
the mind of Philip Larkin. Edgar is fond – sometimes too fond – of echoing Larkin, but he is usually, as here, careful to echo only the cadences, not the wording. Larkin often used a
monosyllabic adjective before a polysyllabic one, with no separating comma. The sonorous glissando of the device was useful to give the pathos of passing time. But Edgar undercuts the evocation of
inevitability by giving the loved one an air of caprice. She brings herself (good of her) with no excessive haste (what kept her?) and none too soon (finally she deigns to turn up).
    On a fine point of technique, rather than a larger point of tactics, the way that the poet, in the penultimate line quoted, gives ‘memorable’ and ‘history’ their full
syllabic value recalls Auden, and in the final line of the octet we can hear Empson, as we can always hear him when trochees are laid over an iambic pattern to give a spondaic tread. Since Edgar
obviously weighs his words with care, it is safe to assume that he knows Neil Armstrong blew the script. Armstrong should have said ‘one small step for a man’. When he fluffed it and
said ‘one small step for man’, he ensured that ‘man’ and ‘mankind’ would mean the same thing and that the sentence would be deprived of its intended contrast.
But Edgar seems to be saying that even the giant step for mankind is small – small enough, at any rate, to be matched by the moment in his own history when he and the loved one met:
    How pitiful and inveterate the way
    We view the paths by which our lives descended
    From the far past down to the present day
    And fancy those contingencies intended,
    A secret destiny planned in advance
    Where what is done is as it must be done
    For us alone. When really it’s all chance
    And the special one might have been anyone.
    Here again, a whole argument is bridged over two stanzas, and this time with only a single terminal comma, so that the effect of a lot being said at once is reinforced by the
technical fact of compressed syntax. The word ‘inveterate’ gets a hypermetric emphasis, making it sound important enough for us to figure out exactly what it means here, or to look it
up if we’ve never seen it. (If we do look it up, we find that the current meanings of something long established and settled by habit are underpinned by a historic meaning of something
hostile – an undertone which soon turns out to be appropriate.) In the last line of the stanza we have to deduce, in