March 2009 : Feature
Guest Columnist: Nigel Beale
George Murray
Hunter
The forest lies quiet immediately before the axe,
the desert gives up accelerating the wind.
Across the earth game birds and salmon go still,
deer and bison and hoary goats freeze instantly.
It is he who stepped on a lizard’s throat and called it
a dragon, he who defeated a mountain village
and named it a kingdom, he who hung for a night
and bled song from his wounds, he who chases
the chariot sun across the sky and never catches it.
Let us retreat to a time of less and more sin, he says.
Let us entreat our wives and sisters to birth monsters,
let us return to the roots of our earliest prophecies.
As a fisherman he cast his line over and again into
the sea, coming away with only Gilgamesh, Jonah,
Grendel. As a farmer he has set innumerable seeds
and nuts into runnels of earth and has only managed
to grow Nefertiti, Helen, Guinevere. As a hunter
he has run his knife between the ribs of countless ermines,
grizzlies, and blue foxes, yet has never spilled
a drop of blood that wasn’t that of Pythagoras,
Ptolemy, Copernicus. He is a man who would tip
the earth, sip from the edge of a continent
as though the sea bed were the bowl of a goblet.
Reincarnation, he tells us when we beg,
was removed from the list of reasons not to kill
when we reached the point of more people
alive on the planet than have ever lived
and died in all of history and story. He moves
among us on his beasts, he travels the boar-runs
of the forest without the slightest snap
of twig or branch, he walks across the waters
of our moats and seas, slides between the cracks
in our windowsills, lifts the sheets of our beds,
climbs our bodies to the throat
and lets loose springs of life to course down
the topography of our testament to living.
It is he who stands squinting into the blowing dust
and sand as though tired after a long chase,
he who looks upon us fondly as though
recently given over to love after years spent
in doubt, he who raises the standard
that bears an emblem none of us expected.
For consolation he tells of the buzzard
that has lit on his shoulder where a falcon should,
how he’s forced to remind it constantly
with a mailed fist that he is still alive,
just barely. In this world, he says, every thing will be
claimed by the sand. In this world we are
always wandering the desert. In this world the desert
is the Promised Land. In this world the Promised Land
is still just over the horizon. In this world, he says,
drawing a blue blade with a shriek that runs shivers
up and down the mountainsides,
the horizon is what you see when you look up.
In great poems, chosen words combine in ways which confer unique meaning memorably with resonance and power. The scent they produce infiltrates the mind, like body chemistry. I have good chemistry with this poem.
This poem starts with a blow which jolts the reader urgently from peace to panic. It is delivered by a narrator who says ominously ‘hush, this lion sleeps tonight.’ The wind no longer blows. A sombre, yet tense, insistent tone is set. The reader’s attention is dramatically gained; the opening is intriguing. Why the frozen stillness?
This early tone grows loud with tension as the poem progresses. Good is set against evil; life against death; aridity, fecundity; forests, deserts; past , future. These juxtapositions serve to engage and delight the mind, to incite more questions. For example, many creatures roam these stanzas. Deer, bison, hoary goats, grizzlies, and blue foxes connote life, innocence, the pristine that faces destruction, death, humankind. Man himself, the rational savage, behaves stupidly.
A narrator describes ‘him’ to us; ‘he’ speaks directly in words biblical. Yeats’s apocalyptic vultures and falcons appear from The Second Coming; as do mythic references. Perhaps ‘he’ is a fearsome, pitiless, post-war desert beast with the body of a lion and the head of a man, who, though slouching, barely alive, speaks in the poem a hopeful prophesy, of a promised land, in language memorable both on its own, but also in its resonance, in its connection with the past.
The poem works then because it attaches itself to canonical words, pushes through intriguing sets of thin, thought-provoking binary opposites, looks at the horizon, and formulates a complicated commentary both on the globe’s future physical environment, and humankind’s perilous rejection of wise thinking in favour of greedy consumption. In short, the poem’s complex ambiguity invites engagement: it’s not too late to save the world from ignorant human behaviour. Alternatively, Murray himself has described the Hunter as angry, and the poem’s ‘Promised Land’ can just as easily be interpreted ironically, apocalyptically, as it can hopefully.
The poem succeeds because neither it, nor its central character is static. He changes, like most of us do, over time. The ‘he’ in the poem evolves from a dissatisfied beast into an insatiable destroyer, from a threatening spirit, to, in the end, a loving hopeful human being struggling simply to stay alive who is intent, possibly, on creating a better world—or at least on trying to save this one. Godlike, beaten, but not dead. Not yet, at least while there is still the capacity to ‘look up’, to hope, despite a barren landscape. Resurrected. Mail fisted.
Murray’s repetition of the word ‘he’ (17 times in total) is hypnotic. It demands attention with an authoritative, almost accusatory voice: ‘He’ did it! I’m not sure the unrhymed couplets add to the poem’s meaning, but they do compound its message. They may also serve to present and emphasize all of the things ‘he’ says, in italics, and has done, out of them. Their consistent pattern belies and contradicts in an interesting way the change that occurs within ‘him.’ Toward the end of the poem, ‘he’ repeats “In this world” four times, with emphatic persuasive force. It is this world we must concern ourselves with.
From this height, however, there is a step down to “Reincarnation, he tells us when we beg, was removed from the list of reasons not to kill when we reached the point of more people alive on the planet than have ever lived and died in all of history and story;” the sole flaw I think on this poem’s path: too much information it seems is crammed in here; too much of the directly rational, political and polemic. In a turn however we are back to beauty, walking on moat water and sliding over windowsills.
A blended sense of anger at humanity’s stupidity, fear for the future of a cherished planet and the hope that exists to save it, result from the Hunter’s powerful use of imagery. We feel a cold desolate desert, a hopeful horizon glimpsed at from a pool of spilt blood.
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