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Note
on
The
Pain of Helena Nagel
This
is a sequence of four rhymeless, syllabic sonnets: the ten-syllable line
need not always be iambic. I’ve
attached the feelings and remonstrance here to a woman who is, I claim,
a composite of characters from real life and imagination; but what is
she mainly, a fiction or someone I knew?
Monologues are spoken in the first person, so they also have an
air of autobiography. Food
for thought there. (back)
In (1), the
neighbour’s cutting of the honeysuckle suggests the neighbour herself
may have caused the errancy of Helena Nagel’s man.
A poem can be fuelled with any emotion, real or pretended.
The stress on authentic experience was tiresome in its day, and
I’m happy to drop it from my own toolbox.
Writers do research. The
very idea implies lack of first-hand experience.
Fiction, even when it gets facts about the world wrong, cannot
help but be a category of truth, in that like a dream it exists.
Sources mix. And I digress. (back)
In
(2) Helena takes her children for a day in the woods.
For her, ‘damned love is dead’.
If there’s irrationality here, like rash pledges to sup with
the Devil, isn’t that what’s it’s like when you’re hurt and
angry? Satanas: an
archaic form of the word Satan, and hence of the concept. (back)
In
(3) Helena continues the forest games with her children, inventing
animals like the Stinking Ponda. Each
step is deeper into fantasy, into her own childhood by sharing her
children’s games, to escape the bleakness of the present betrayal.
(back)
In
(4) the childish make-believe games continue to hide hurt. I’ve imported a chunk of a holiday with Crispin and my
father in Alverstoke, hence the Solent, since the particularities have
to come from somewhere. I
felt at a loose end, with Lise and Undine away in Finland.
Neither of us can remember why we’d done it this way.
It has nothing to do with this poem. (back)
Alan
Marshfield
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