Spell
Only this morning you swore you saw
something swift and white fly through the night
and land on the gate in the dark.
And now you’re saying you think you saw
a bluebell begin to realise what it was among the many
which is a singular but not a special part.
Why am I not surprised.
We always think beyond what we can see.
Like now, I think I know what you’re thinking:
that it feels like a curse or some sort of spell
that we can’t seem to tell how things are
from how we make them out to be?
What’s real – touch me and you’ll know
I’m just another thing pushing up
out of the earth to claim its one mortal place
wanting to hear again what you believe
came flying through the night
with its wide open face.
From Greta Stoddart’s newly published fourth collection, Fool, Spell lifts off from a remembered conversation, one which is re-established and continues to wind through the poem. We’re not told the identity of the “you”, but the voice that stands out clearly in the first stanza sounds like that of a child, excited to impress on the listening adult the truth and strangeness of a recent experience. What is the “something swift and white” which flew out of the night to land on the gate? A ghost, a bird? We’re kept guessing. A further tale is about to unfold: that this happens frequently is suggested by the idiomatic combination of “Only this morning” followed by, “And now”.
We find ourselves in the second stanza in a different and more demanding mental space. This childlike interlocutor represents the kinds of inquiry a poem might make. Alongside the receptivity and willing entry into mystery is the questioning and ordering intellect. What if the bluebell that looks the same as all the others in the plot wants to see itself as distinctive?
The speaker’s response is a carefully measured and precise encapsulation of the puzzle: “you think you saw / a bluebell begin to realise what it was among the many / which is a singular but not a special part.” Consciousness of individuation is accompanied by the acknowledgment of restricted scope and opens the poem outwards and inwards. It first shows the reader a vividly physical scene – the massed bluebells, the particular bluebell among them, on the edge of a cluster, perhaps – and then moves into areas of philosophical and political reverberation. The insight is larger than one would expect from a child. But the speaker’s question, “why am I not surprised”, shorn of its question mark, refuses to view the account as extraordinary.
What is knowable, and how things are known, are themes of the collection. The Fool, a figure whose consciousness it often explores, may see more clearly through a gaze uncluttered by received ideas. Another poem, Performance, shows us poems “waving their inky little hands in the air!”: they know more than their writer. In Spell, the observation “We always think beyond what we can see” makes a similar claim, and sees it as a natural attribute.
The possibilities of “knowing” and “thinking we know” expand towards knowing what someone else is thinking. In this case the speaker imagines the interlocutor’s continuing perplexity contains a sense of the magical. The indivisibility of “how things are” and “how we make them out to be” isn’t a bothersome philosophical problem, but, for the fresh explorer of reality, a power-attracting force, “a curse or some sort of spell”. An unexpected question mark at the end of stanza four indicates a gentle respect for the interlocutor: the insight into their thoughts and emotions isn’t simply presumed.
The poem resolves the distressing problem of “what’s real?” by suggesting “touch me”, and almost transforms the speaker into the thinking plant encountered earlier, “pushing up / out of the earth to claim its one mortal place”. Only now the newly imagined bluebell has the courage of its self-worth. And the storyteller, the child or poet, is urged to go on with the story. The image of the flying nocturnal creature from the first stanza with its “wide open face” is the image of receptivity, connecting with the theme of the whole collection, with its readiness to know through not knowing, whether as clown, fool, child or poet.
Subtle rhymes in Spell reveal trace elements from the ritualistic “genre” which gives it its title. The concluding place/face rhyme sounds especially tender and reassuring. Always attentive to the thoughts and feelings of the interlocutor, Spell turns its own “wide open face” to the addressee and to the reader, and works its unostentatious magic on our perceptions.
Fool by Greta Stoddart (Bloodaxe Books Ltd, £10.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
