Mort's mythic poem of the sea is a story of creation overshadowed, a world where language cannot yet be trusted
This week's poem "The Fetching" is by Graham Mort and comes from his 2007 collection, Visibility. His most recent volume, Cusp, was published in 2011, preceded in 2010 by a debut-collection of stories, Touch, which won the Edge Hill prize for short fiction. Mort is also a playwright and lecturer, and works on development projects in Africa as director of the Transcultural Centre for Writing and Research at Lancaster University.
"The Fetching" is the first poem in Visibility, and can therefore be read as a prelude to the whole five-volume span of the collection. Mort is a poet finely attuned to his varied locations, with an eye for the telling detail. "The Fetching" has an unusually mythic quality, and its positioning as an entry-point raises the pitch for both reader and writer. It's like a portal or archway, which we enter not to leave the everyday world behind but to re-learn its intensity.
The poem's eloquent, authoritative voice has a complementary visual presence. On the page it looks sturdy and traditional – and a traditionally rhymed couplet starts it off. Subsequently there's a more complex sound-stitching, with internal rhyme featuring in seven of the nine couplets. Usually, the penultimate word (and final stress) of the first line rhymes with the last word of the second (wind/rind, stars/tears, souls/pools, etc). This first line is often foreshortened to three beats, resisting closure until the second four-beat line. Full rhymes are used sparingly. So the poem moderates its forcefulness: wrapped up in the textured syntax of each unit, the rhymes avoid facile or too-obvious cadence. The larger grammatical patterning also allows variety, alternating the declarative "I was at the fetching …" with a more casual and abbreviated follow-up, "Then the fetching …" The speaker's continual presence is implied without the heavy hand of repeated assertion.
The poem is like a creation-myth, but the "I" seems to be a participant or witness rather than originator. The processes witnessed are elemental. "Fetching," itself, is a powerful word, particular in its faintly archaic form as a gerund – "the fetching". It suggests a ritual of bringing something into the world, and also of controlling what is brought in. The myth begins with "the fetching of the sea" and its dangerously "white waves," and moves on with "the fetching of the wind" which is already the sea's accomplice. Interestingly, one of the dictionary's definitions of the noun "fetch" is "the distance in the direction of the prevailing wind that waves can travel continuously without obstruction before reaching the coast."
In line four, the wind's rind-licking connects it to the "wolf" metaphor of stanza five. The third stanza's linking of stars and tears recalls Blake's "The Tyger". Mort's stars seem to introduce the concept of time into world and so "salt our tears". The "bitter pools" and "beached souls" may foreshadow the catastrophe hinted in a poem further on in the collection, "Morecambe Bay". Despite the imagery of the sea's destruction, there's a biblical resonance to "the fetching of the souls," as if redemption followed disaster. But the important fifth stanza takes "fetching" to a new malignity with the splendidly rhymed "fetching of the Gulf that/ brought the oil that loosed the wolf".
The poem's broken song encapsulates another myth – that of poetic inspiration. It might evoke Caedmon's hymn, revised as a hymn for the present-day, the glory of creation overshadowed. The "Gulf/ wolf" rhyme is a turning point. No souls are redeemed. Through "the fetching of the war" they are permanently destroyed.
End-rhyme returns in stanza seven, marrying plural (times) with singular (lime), and thus still evading full rhyme. The simile comparing the decay of trust to that of "flesh in lime" is shocking and unexpected. Those simple words which are often politicians' cynical playthings – trust, fears, dark – add the contemporary note of flat dissonance to the song. Almost inevitably, in the final couplet, the poem turns on itself. The speaker seems to be reviewing the poet's part in the act of creation. He has fetched the words, and found them wanting. The dramatic assertion of the last stanza's first line ("The fetching of words is worse") is emphasised by the colon's caesura, like an intake of breath, before the conjunction, "since."
Formally, we've heard notes of a difficult celebration, but the message, in contrary motion, advises caution, with a bitter reminder that language is compromised. Is the poem "cursed" because it can't tell the truth any more, or because it isn't trusted by its hearers to do so? I think the latter, and suspect that many poets share something of the feeling. Nevertheless, the Caedmon of modern times hasn't much option but to go on singing of "created things" – even if it's a corrupted creation, with only a corrupted language to keep the hint of truth or vision alive. So we go through this poem's archway and on into the book – the site where, word by word, language and trust in language are carefully being restored.
The Fetching
I was at the fetching of the sea:
it brought white waves to harry me.
Then the fetching of the wind that
brought the sea to lick earth's rind.
I was at the fetching of the stars that
brought the years to salt our tears.
Then the fetching of the souls the sea
had beached in bitter pools.
I was at the fetching of the Gulf that
brought the oil that loosed the wolf.
Then the fetching of the war that
lost those souls for evermore.
I was at the fetching of the times
when trust decayed as flesh in lime.
And so the fetching of the fears that
brought the dark that still is here.
The fetching of words is worse: since
killing tainted them the poem is cursed.