Last week, thinking about poets and typography, I remembered a short poem by Denise Riley that I set in movable type — printing, that is, the old-fashioned way.
Piecing its lines together letter by letter was a new way to “close read”. When the poem also appeared online, I wrote a short commentary to accompany it, informed by discussions with colleagues — including my co-typesetter, Nathan Hamilton — and students; as a teacher of literature, it was exciting to be able to share an “unread” poem.
Reading this commentary again ten years later, I found myself thinking how I would add to, expand or alter it: poems change in the mind over the years, as do the ways we think about them. “After La Rochefoucauld” was also slightly revised for inclusion in Riley’s collection Say Something Back (2016). Here is that later version:
Lines starting with La Rochefoucauld
“It is more shameful to distrust your friends
than be deceived by them”: things in themselves
do hold — a pot, a jug, a jar, Sweet Williams’
greenshank shins — so that your eye’s pulled
clear of metallic thought by the light constancy
of things, that rest there with you. Or without.
That gaily deadpan candour draws you on.
Your will to hope quickens in their muteness.
And here is my commentary, with further comments.
Commentary (2014)
“It is more shameful to distrust your friends / Than be deceived by them”: the poem is “after” La Rochefoucauld, the seventeenth-century French nobleman and writer, because it begins by translating the eighty-fourth of his Maximes:
Il est plus honteux de se défier de ses amis que d’en être trompé.
Quotation may seem a rather impersonal way to begin a lyric poem. But the absence of explanation also implies some urgency or strong feeling, accentuated here by the recasting of the French maxim into a line-and-a-half of English iambic pentameter, broken at the loaded word “friends”.
The poetic metre and the stoic sentiment in combination might remind us of the unexplained cries of pain-in-love that characterise Shakespeare’s Sonnets, such as “They that have power to hurt and will do none”. We are thrown into a moment of emotion finding its first expression.
Commentary (2024)
“It is more shameful to distrust your friends / Than be deceived by them”: wondering how to begin these notes, I also turn to quotation, from John Wilkinson:
I am affected by decades of reading poems by Denise Riley; although there have been stylistic developments in her poetry, there’s a tone that I find unique to her work — at once compelled autobiographically and wryly self-disclaiming, with direct sentiment kept reserved within quotes, often from popular song.
This says a lot, economically. Quotation marks always have a quality of scrutiny in Riley’s work, as though the words were on a piece of paper produced from a pocket with an ironic look about the eyes. Here, though, because these are the first lines, there is no framing voice to establish irony — even the title restricts itself to plain explanation (“Lines starting with La Rochefoucauld”).
The sincerity of the quotation makes clear this is a serious reflection on something. What, though? The title gives us the poem’s literary starting point, but not any more personal occasion. Reading it in the context of Say Something Back as a whole, however, an unspoken story resonates. A number of the poems in the book, including Riley’s elegy for her son, “A Part Song”, are concerned with how hard it can be, in grief, to really believe death has happened. “Listening for lost people”, for example, examines the language that has to be used in order to continue among the living:
“They died” is not an utterance in the syntax of life
where they belonged, no belong — reanimate them
not minding if the still living turn away, casually.
This detached experience of the world after death is also the subject of Riley’s essay-memoir, Time Lived, Without Its Flow, which was first published in 2012, the same year as “A Part Song”. Reading the poem again now, this context seems all-important, but in my 2014 commentary I avoided it — perhaps because it felt inappropriate to a reading based on the internal evidence of the single poem, undertaken with and for a class of students; but also perhaps because, in 2014, I was still feeling the private relief of emerging from a period of grief and depression. To express that recognition publicly may have felt too direct. In any case, I reached for further allusions.
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