Tom Leonard is one of Scotland’s leading poets. Early
in his career, Leonard was influenced by R.D. Laing, particularly
his book, The Divided Self. He was interested in Laing’s
attempts to let the voice of the mentally ill be heard. In Laing’s
opinion, official psychiatric discourse led to the patient being
treated as an object, rather than a person with a particular
viewpoint.
Just as the mentally ill were denied a voice,
so, Leonard contended, people who did not speak in a certain manner
were ignored or considered as inferior. In his poetry he has
concentrated on the people from his own background, that of working
class Glasgow. He has deliberately written many of his poems in the
Glaswegian vernacular to emphasise the neglect by official
discourse of “non-standard” English modes of expression. Leonard
has questioned underlying assumptions about the innate superiority
of “standard" English.
However, in the poem entitled, “A Priest came
on Merkland Street”, Leonard does not employ the Glasgow vernacular
and here the focus is on using language to reflect the narrator’s
inner turmoil. The poem is described as “being a canonical penance
for sufferers of psychosomatic asthma”, and it gives a compelling
account of the symptoms of anxiety, obsessional rumination and
panic. The action takes place on the Glasgow Underground, which is
known locally as “the clockwork orange”, because of the colour of
the trains and because they run a comparatively short distance in a
circle round the city. They resemble toy trains, which are wound up
like clockwork.
The narrator is sitting in one of the train
carriages when a priest gets on. This provokes a panic attack in
the narrator, because it brings to the surface his ever-present
fears about death. Religion, guilt and sex are all caught up in his
anxieties. He tries desperately to manage his distress by
attempting to distract himself from his disturbing thoughts. The
claustrophobic nature of the Underground only adds to his
disquiet.
The poem begins:
oh no
holy buttons
sad but dignified
and sitting straight across from me
This immediately brings out avoidance tactics
in the author:
a bit of Mahler’s Seventh might drown him
dah dum, dad um dah dee,
dah dah dah DAH dah ah
da DAH, dah DEE da da da
DUM DUM dah dee
But to no avail. The narrator’s fundamental
fear comes to the fore:
when I’m dead
when I think I’m dead
and I’m in my box
and it’s all dark
and I’m wondering where the air’s coming
from
I’ll see this curtain
and it will move to the side
and your great horrible leering face
how many times my son
and how long ago was this
bless me father for I am
tinned
The theme of the “box” or coffin returns
throughout the poem as the narrator battles with his recurrent,
intrusive thoughts of death. He refers to his use of alcohol - “I
am tinned” - to combat his fears. He tries to ingratiate himself
with the priest by smiling at him, in fact, giving him “the nicest
smile in the world”. But he is careful to emphasise that there will
be “absolutely no sex”. Then he imagines that he and the priest are
five years old:
we will both be five years old
and we’ll go to school together
play at weekends together
and you’ll climb inside my box
laughing
lying together in the dark
innocent as hell
like after lights out in a school
dormitory
cosy but exciting
However he is unable to sustain this childhood
reverie. Thoughts of death intrude once again:
and maybe God will look round the curtain
hello there
softly as God would say it
and we’ll all go away together
away through the door
for ever
amen
I always spoil it
The narrator then imagines that he and the
priest are mechanical, and are wound up, like “the clockwork
orange”. But this doesn’t help either, and he is back in the box.
He thinks of Shelley’s famous poem, “Ozymandias”, which warns that
even the powerful have to die and that their achievements will be
reduced to ruins one day. Leonard relocates Ozmandias, who in
Shelley’s original poem is to be found in the sands of an “antique
land”, to a working class district of Glasgow:
my name is Ozymandias
king of Leithland Road
Pollok
Glasgow SW3
The post code adds a prosaic and decidedly
unheroic detail to the narrator’s circumstances. However, he thinks
about obtaining help from the local psychiatric services, from “the
Lansdowne Clinic for Functional Disorders”, “the Southern General
Hospital Department of Psychological Medicine”, or “Leverndale
formerly known as Hawkhead Asylum”. He considers writing to a
psychiatrist:
dear sir
my name is Ozymandias
king of Leithland Road
and then there’s the box
yours sincerely
maybe faithfully would be better
And he adds in a PS: “I don’t know what people
are for”, a line which seems to capture the narrator’s existential
bewilderment. He is so overwhelmed by thinking about the world,
that he is unable to act. He tries to devise cognitive strategies
to manage his obsession with death:
Maybe I think about the box too much
Maybe nobody else thinks about the box at
all
At least not for long
Not more than five minutes a day
Or maybe ten minutes at the weekend
… maybe I should do the same
I could draw up a plan
I could up a list of things to think about
Everything but the box
And I’d think about them all day
I wouldn’t think about the box at all
But he suspects that this wouldn’t work
either. From here onwards the narrator progressively loses control
over his anxiety and this is reflected in the increasing
disintegration of the structure of the poem. Themes of being a
child, a clockwork mechanism and Ozymandias interrupt each other.
There are snatches of Mahler and the narrator repeats his mantra,
“I’m going to die”. The poem ends with the lines, “tick tock
tick”. Is this the relentless passing of time as it moves ever
closer to death? Is it the clockwork train? Is it the narrator,
reduced to mere mechanism? Is it all three, and more? Leonard has
produced a striking poetical rendering of acute anxiety and managed
to do so with great humour.
Allan Beveridge