| What can we do with
this? Not much; there’s an Ozymandias feel to the ebony totem
(though where these ebony sands might be is anybody’s guess),
and the visual picture is fairly clear, but the phrases around the
central images threaten to cast the whole scene into shadow. “Stark
carcass” I understand; “bare winding carcass” I cannot
imagine. “Crisp flax squeaks tall reeds/make a circle of grey/in
a summer way” seems to have its own internal sense of what it’s
talking about, and can be felt if not explained, but what about the
subsequent “around
man/stood on ground”? There’s nowhere to go from there.
The picture, which hasn’t even begun to move (with the possible
exception of those creepy flies scooping up meat: Barrett’s gift
for a tight phrase being quite intact), is unraveling before its creators
eyes. And this perhaps is why the reedy, slightly tremulous singing
voice of the young Roger Keith Barrett, whose faculties are leaving
him even as his genius flares up like a fire built on the beach at
Brighton as defense against the cold of an early Spring evening, suddenly
addresses a nameless, faceless, unidentifiable person, unrelated to
the vague proceedings that have left us with a clear image lacking
what Hollywood calls a “back-story”-- a context in which
to place the image so as to assign value to it -- and keens like a
son for his father lost at sea. I'm trying, I'm trying -- to find you, to find you |