Sing, Words

Here is the first poem in Mark Granier's Fade Street (Salt, 2010):

SING, WORDS

That you may survive

those star-grazed years after I've 

gone back to where I'm going: air

of a song, dead air, my dark star 

set in the glimmerless hush, 

cool enough to touch.

Sing, that something remain

of these epic, mundane

conversations hoofing it down my back

clicketty clack—

that you may hit or miss

with a flourish, a backdraught, a hiss

like intaken breath. Life itches to get out 

of its mildewed coats,

glint with the motes turning

in a slanted beam—O sing

the slow schoolboy's daydream

counting them in.

*

The Swiss critic Peter von Matt has argued that poems want two things: to be beautiful and to be immortal. There's a long history of poems that stake their immortality precisely on their beauty. Here, the poem's speaker directly appeals to the poem's words to "sing"—to be beautiful—as a way to make it possible for them to "survive"—to be immortal. 

If the poem's own immortality is not an issue, this poem's opening rhyme juxtaposes the words' immortality with the speaker's own death in such a way that the speaker can live on in the rhyme itself: "I've" may be followed "gone" in the phrase "when I've / gone," but it is also contained in "survive". By admitting his future death into the poem in this way, the speaker allows his own self, his "dark star," to continue to shine even in the "glimmerless hush" of a cooling universe. This is a world of grand drama on a cosmic scale.

But a few lines later, the poem's second strong rhyme approaches the issue of survival from a different direction: "Sing, that something remain / Of these epic, mundane / conversations …" "Remain" picks up on the desire marked by "survive" in the poem's first line, but now it is not the speaker's self that may survive through the poem's singing. Instead, it is the speaker's down-to-earth, everyday experience of "mundane / conversations". This is an everyday world on the scale of human dialogue.

Yet before they are called "mundane" (and even before they are named as "conversations"), these everyday experiences are also called "epic". And of course the opening appeal to "sing" in a poem comes from the great epics about "great" issues like war and the founding of nations (or the grand cosmic drama of this poem's first appeal that its words "sing"). The contrast between "epic" and "mundane" both contests the idea of "greatness" as a necessary feature of the "epic" and elevates the "mundane"—in this case, everyday conversation—into something worthy of the immortality represented by great epic poetry.

The epic poem bases its appeal to immortality on the beauty of its presentation of "great" themes. This small poem also appeals to immortality through beauty, but after appealing to the grand drama of the universe through its opening images of stars, it calls for the mundane to be seen as beautiful as well.

The poem does not close with that image, though; it moves on to acknowledge the desire to escape the mundane: "Life itches to get out / of its mildewed coats". Yet this escape does not aim for the stars; this "itch" can be realized in "the slow schoolboy's dream" as he tries to "count the motes turning / in a slanted beam." This schoolboy, slow as he is, does not aspire to the greatness of the epic hero; his escape from the mundane world of "mildewed coats" is much simpler than the grand journey of an Odysseus—and this schoolboy's private dream can also be sung. And insofar as it is sung, it, too, aims for the epic, for survival, for immortality, and for beauty.

In the end, "Sing, Words" does not privilege one of these ways to escape the limitations of life over the others. They are all modes in which the words of a poem may "sing" beyond the life of the poet and beyond the lives represented in a poem. Grand cosmic drama, everyday discussions, childhood dreams—these are the matters that poems address, "hit or miss". And all of them can miss, but all of them can, sometimes, hit, when the words listen to the poet's exhortation and begin to sing.

*

I could leave it at that, but I can't help but mention how I love this line in particular:

of a song, dead air, my dark star 

Any fan of the Grateful Dead will love that play of "dead air" and "dark star."

"Click Here": Rae Armantrout's "Results"

Here is the first poem in Rae Armantrout's Versed (Wesleyan, 2009):

RESULTS

1

Click here to vote

on who's ripe

for a makeover

or a takeover

in this series pilot.

Votes are registered

at the server

and sent back

as results.

2

Click here to transform

oxidation

into digestion.

From this point on,

it's a lattice

of ends

disguised as means:

the strangler fig,

the anteater.

3

I've developed the ability

to revise

what I'm waiting for

so that letter

becomes dinner

gradually

while the contrapuntal

nodding

of the Chinese elm leaves

redistributes

ennui

The poem begins with instructions: "Click here to vote." You are sitting at a computer, and you can use the mouse and its clicking to participate in an online vote. The clicks of all the users will be tallied up in "the server" to produce results. This server is a classic "black box," its input and output clear, but its internal processes unknown. The voters apparently given the power to determine something must have faith in "the server" that is supposed to be "serving" their empowerment; in fact, at the very moment when they participate in the production of power, they surrender their power to that "server."

This is not a political vote but a trivial bit of entertainment; the voters here are being given a sense that they are participating in the production of a television show. Their votes will supposedly determine which character is "ripe / for a makeover // or a takeover." As a characterization of a maturation process, "ripe" naturalizes the highly technological voting procedure as organic growth, and the illusion of empowerment is matched by an illusion of naturalization.

All this is done for a "series pilot," which makes the whole thing even more trivial: it's not even an established series but just a test run for a new program. If this whole process produces "results," their object is trivial, their provenance is obscure, and the participants' empowerment is illusory, as is any sense that this highly technologized procedure has anything "natural" about it. This may not be explicitly about politics, but as a critique of the role of voting in the production of spectacles, it ends up also being a critique of the reduction of voting to a spectacle.

When the second section then begins with an echo of the first ("Click here to transform ..."), what follows is immediately subject to the first section's critique of "clicking." So the transformation that follows is as subject to doubt as the "makeover," the "takeover," or the processing of results by "the server." In the transformation here of "oxidation / into digestion," a chemical process becomes a biological process. As one feature of digestion is oxidation, this transformation involves making a process more complex when you "click here." The complexity thus produced is that of evolution: out of chemistry comes biology. In this version of evolution, then, life is created by a "click." But given the illusionary nature of "clicking" in the poem, this turns out to be a critique of one approach to the theory of "intelligent design," in which the "intelligent designer" sets things going but then does not intervene in the evolutionary process anymore.

So "from this point on," once "oxidation" has been transformed "into digestion," evolution takes place without further intervention, without any more "clicks." The "lattice" makes evolution a network rather than the familiar "tree of life," while also associating it with the "clicking" used to navigate the World Wide Web. If this whole lattice is read backwards from one point in time, then "ends" will be seen as being "disguised as means": evolved characteristics may look like "means" used by evolution to develop later ends, but they are actually "ends" in themselves, the "results" of a random process of natural selection without the will to transformation represented by "clicking."

The unusual forms of the two organisms mentioned emphasize the unintentional quality of evolution, in which the evolutionary "end results" at any given moment will look like they followed from earlier "means" that were actually also just momentary stages in a nontelelogical process. "The strangler fig" picks up on the image of the "lattice," as such plants create a "lattice" of roots and branches overlaying the trees they "strangle." The "anteater" evolved in a unique and unpredictable fashion in response to its environment, ending up with an especially unusual appearance. In both cases, the "just-so stories" of a popular understanding of evolution depict the shapes of organisms as the "results" of an interplay of "ends" and "means," but those stories and the "results" that they explain are as illusory as the spectacle of "voting" to produce "results" earlier in the poem. This second section, then, extends the poem's critique of the illusion of "results" to the common misunderstanding of the theory of evolution as a teleological process.

The third and final section is quite different from the first two. It begins not with the imperative "click" but with the first-person: "I've developed the ability ..." There's no dependence on a black-box here, or on a process that runs itself after an initial input. A first person takes center stage and engages in a process with a clear result, a positive product whose agent can legitimately claim to have produced.

Yet the ability the speaker develops is "the ability / to revise / what I'm waiting for." The confidence of the first line continues, but not as an assertion of agency as a source of power and control. This is an adaptive agency that adjusts to developments; the ability the speaker has developed is the ability to develop while "what I'm waiting for" changes. There is a result here, but it's about sidestepping the expected, about changing one's mind, and about doing so consciously, with a full understanding of what is going on. This first stanza of the third section shifts away from a critique of results to a depiction of how to escape the desire for results.

The rest of this third and final section develops this shift from mechanisms that produce the illusion of results to an agency that relinquishes the need for that illusion. The second stanza introduces a letter-changing game in which one changes one letter in a word to produce another word, with some other particular word as a final goal. (As in this sequence: letter, latter, batter, banter, banner, tanner, tinner, dinner.) This may be a result that the person doing the puzzle desires, and such a puzzle does in fact generate an illusion of empowerment like that found in the first stanza, but it is an illusion that is recognized as an illusion from the start. Such puzzles allow for the assertion of agency without the risk of deception; they may be as inconsequential as internet voting about a spectacle (with its potential implications as a figure for politics), but the inconsequentiality is not hidden away inside a "server" that obscures the disempowerment of the agent.

The evolutionary images of the second stanza are also reworked here: evolution becomes "development," "revision," and "redistribution" that take place "gradually" and "contrapuntally." The strict determination of "results" in the first two stanzas is replaced by an emphasis on process and an image not of linear development but of the weaving together of line in counterpoint. This approach to development even allows "ennui" to be "redistributed" as one stops waiting for anything in particular and accepts what comes.

The poem's "result" is a depiction of an alternative approach to process that is not fixated on "makeovers," "takeovers," and "ends disguised as means." Still, such a result is subject to the very critique of results developed in the first two sections of the poem. From this perspective, the poem reads as if it were oriented toward the goal of not being goal-oriented. If it escapes its own critique of results, it is able to do so because "click here" is not "read here": the process of reading the poem to develop the implications of its critique of results and its proposed alternative to their illusions involves the reader as an active agent. When we read this poem, we are not just "clicking here" in an illusion of participation; we are engaging in a gradual, contrapuntal process full of revisions as we try to find our way from "letter" to "dinner." 

As depicted in this poem, the ambitions of poetry are vast. Poetry aims to displace the naturalized illusions of politics, society, and even religion not with its own naturalized spectacle but with the self-conscious and self-confident artificiality of the puzzle or the Bonsai tree (so often made with Chinese elms). In its puzzling quality, it takes the risk of becoming another "server" that obscures how its output is related to its input. But as the puzzle pieces fit together, it reveals itself completely. 

Ahnen und Ergründen

Since I have so many books of poetry that I can barely imagine reading them all, I have started reading the first poem in every poetry collection I own. In each case, I make a little note about whether the poem makes me want to read the rest of the book or not, and in a few cases, I have begun blogging about these "first poems." The first two cases were my recent posts on poems by Fleur Adcock and John Agard. The third poem that I read in this project and wanted to blog about is the poem by Henning Ahrens below. I tried writing my comments in English, but it was too complicated, so I've written this post in German. (And no, I don't want to translate it into English. At most summarize it, perhaps, if anyone is interested.)

Now that I've mentioned the project publicly, I'll have to see if I continue ... In any case, here's the German discussion of Ahrens's poem "Montag, du":

*

Hier ist das erste Gedicht aus Kein Schlaf in Sicht von Henning Ahrens (Fischer 2008).

MONTAG, DU

Die Maus liegt da, von der Falle erschlagen.

Das Kätzchen schleckt die Milch vom Teller.

Ich schau auf dem Boden nach, suche im Keller,

durchstöbere Schuppen und Wäschekammer,

aber du bist verschwunden. Die Puschen

im Flur sind noch fußwarm, dein Mantel

riecht regennass, und in der Dusche

liegen drei dunkle Haare. Das Kätzchen,

inzwischen gesättigt, schlüpft schnurrend

in mein Bett—o Mann, mir war immer

blümeranter ... Ich lösche die Lampen,

stolpere unterbelichtet durchs Zimmer,

ahnend: Man kann nicht alles ergründen.

Aber am Freitag werd ich dich finden.

Der vorletzte Vers dieses Gedichts lebt von der Spannung zwischen "ahnend" und "ergründen". Stereotyp kann man das so auslegen: es gibt Gefühle (Ahnungen), die nicht rational zu erklären sind, und wenn sie rational erklärt werden, dann sind sie keine Gefühle mehr. Dieses Gedicht zeigt aber mit seinen Bildern, dass Gedichte eine solche stereotype Gegenüberstellung untergraben können.

Dieser vorletzte Vers beginnt mit "ahnend" und endet mit "nicht ... ergründen". Das Ergründen erscheint aber zuerst im Gedicht (ab dem dritten Vers), das erst später (ab etwa dem elften Vers) mit dem Ahnen anfängt. Ab dem dritten Vers sucht das Ich das Du. Die Suche führt "auf den Grund", in dem sie immer in die Tiefe und in abgelegene Plätzen im Haus führt: Boden, Keller, Schuppen, Wäschekammer. Das Ich "ergründet" also das Verschwinden des Dus, indem es auf verschiedene Arten auf "Gründe" geht. Die Zeilen sind eine Beschreibung des Ergründens und gleichzeitig eine poetische Darstellung eines Auf-den-Grund-Gehens.

Nach der Feststellung, dass das Du tatsächlich nirgends zu finden ist, sucht das Ich nach einer Erklärung für sein Verschwinden und findet Spuren von seiner Anwesenheit in den Puschen, im Mantel und in der Dusche. Alles deutet darauf hin, dass das Du erst vor kurzem verschwunden ist, aber sie lassen keine Erklärung zu, was mit ihm passiert ist. Wenn das erste Teil dieser bildlichen Ergründens eine räumliche Erfahrung des "Auf-den-Grund-Gehens" darstellt, erscheint hier das Ergründen mit der "Fusswärme", dem Geruch und den drei Haaren in der Dusche als eine körperliche Erfahrung.

Nach einem kurzen Intermezzo mit dem Kätzchen kommt eine poetische Darstellung des Ahnens: "Ich lösche die Lampen, / stolpere unterbelichtet durchs Zimmer". Das Ahnen erscheint hier vor seiner expliciten Erwähnung am Anfang des nächsten Verses (bzw. des letzten Zweizeilers) wieder als eine räumliche und körperliche Erfahrung (der Dunkelheit bzw. des Stolperns), die gleichzeitig eine Selbstentwertung mit sich bringt: man fühlt sich "unterbelichtet"—unfähig also, die Situation zu ergründen.

Bevor das Gedicht also zu der Schlussfolgerung über Ahnen und Ergründen kommt, hat es schon die Bewegung von Ergründen zum Ahnen in der Bewegung vom Ich durch das Haus poetisch dargestellt. Nur danach wird die Ahnung festgestellt, dass ein vollständiges Ergründen nicht möglich ist. Die Bildlichkeit des Gedichts beweist aber gleichzeitig das Gegenteil: mit poetischen Mitteln kann man Ergründen und Ahnen gleichermassen darstellen, und somit die Spannung zwischen den beiden sowohl ausnutzen wie auch aufheben. 

Aber die letzte Zeile fängt mit einem "Aber" an, das gleichzeitig das "aber" am Anfang dieses Satzes ist, ein "Aber" gegen diese Auslegung von Bildern von geahnter Unergründbarkeit und ergründeter Ahnung. "Aber am Freitag werd ich dich finden" ist nicht "Ahnung" sondern eine Feststellung, als ob das Ich eigentlich wissen würde, dass das Du nur von Montag bis Freitag verreist ist. Erst kippt das Gedicht vom Ergründen ins Ahnen (das aber durch seine Bildlichkeit auch ergründet wird), dann kippt es "aber" wieder in die Sicherheit von dem, was man weisst, und nicht nur ahnt.

So liegt der Schluss nahe, dass das Gedicht doch die beschriebene Situation "ergründet". Nach dieser Lesart bildet das Gedicht ab, wie man doch "alles ergründen kann", wie man eigentlich sicherer sein kann, als man ahnt—und wie Ahnen selber eine Art Ergründen ist. Aus dieser Sicht hat die Lyrik eine ungeheuere Kraft, die hier gefeiert wird: mit ihren eigenen Mitteln ergründet sie den Graben zwischen Gefühlen (Ahnen) und Vernunft (Ergründen), indem sie die beiden Seiten des Grabens verbildlicht. Rationale Erklärung kann genausogut in Bildern dargestellt werden wie die Gefühle, die sonst als das Thema für Lyrik verstanden wird.

Aber es muss noch einmal ein Aber her, da diese Lesart Maus und Kätzchen ignorieren muss. Man kann die Abwesenheit des Dus ergründen, indem man genau liest, wie das Ich die Situation beschreibt, und zum Schluss kommen, dass das vollständige Ergründen durch die Poesie doch möglich ist. Aber die tote Maus und das Kätzchen sind der Ausgangspunkt des Gedichts, und das Kätzchen erscheint später wieder. Die Tiere sind so beschrieben, dass man sie nicht als Bilder des Ahnens lesen kann. Aber sie sind auch nicht als Bilder des Ergründens zu deuten. Die tote Maus in der Falle, das Milch schleckende Kätzchen, später das "inzwischen gesättigte" Kätzchen, das "schnurrend in mein Bett schlüpft"—diese sind keine Bilder, die in der Spannung zwischen Ahnen und Ergründen zu verstehen sind. Die Bilder, die mit dem Verschwinden des Dus zu tun haben, sind alle innerhalb dieser Spannung auszulegen, aber das Gedicht als Ganzes enthält diese anderen Bilder, die der berauschenden Macht dieser Lesart widerstehen.

Wenn das heisst, das man nur ahnen kann, warum Maus und Kätzchen hier überhaupt vorkommen, dann ist man wieder beim Vers gelandet, womit diese Auslegung angefangen hat: "ahnend: man kann nicht alles ergründen." Damit hätte man aber die Tierbilder doch ergründet ...?

Talking to Plants

This is the first poem in John Agard's Alternative Anthem: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2009):

TALKING TO PLANTS

Always talk to your plants.

Sit back and watch them flourish.

Good advice. Of course we presume

that all plants speak English.

Speak slowly, watch them bloom.

If necessary shout each syllable.

Their little ears are ready vessels

for a shower of the Queen's vowels.

Never mind if it's a China rose

or an African violet.

Better yet, recite a bit of English lit.

See abundance spring at your fingertip.

So I spoke like an Oxford don

to my wilting rhododendron.

It wilted more. As for my drooping shrub,

my words only seem to draw more slugs.

O plants, what is it that makes you grow?

I watch my immigrant neighbour's patio

with a sense of distant envy.

Tell me, plants, must I address you in Punjabi?

My first approach to this poem is quite simple: Agard makes fun of "talking to plants" by considering various issues about how to go about doing it (the appropriate language and volume, for example). It's a neat bit of mockery of a rather silly idea.

Given that one person who is associated with the idea is Prince Charles, this poem also takes a poke at him, whose speech is relatively close to "the Queen's vowels" (though not necessarily the same as that of an "Oxford don," who may or may not be from Britain these days). This part of the poem's humor is taken further by the contrast with the "immigrant neighbour," who is a better gardener than the speaker. That is, the poem touches on issues about what it is to be British, and what characteristics the British can be said to have. The immigrant speaking Punjabi turns out to be more connected with the environment he lives in than the speaker is, with his efforts to speak like the elite. Agard, himself an immigrant from Guyana, turns this poem about a silly idea into a serious reflection on identity, nation, and location that disrupts the standard conception of the relationship between those three categories.

*

My second approach to this poem involves how it does its work. Its five quatrains are quite regular in shape, but they never settle down into an established rhythm, nor do the end-rhymes establish a pattern like ABAB or ABBA. It does have a shape, though, that one could even imagine writing further poems in. It involves the pattern of words that develop the poem's "argument." The basic frame of the pattern involves the words "Always" (in line 1), "So" (13), and "O" (17): first comes a description of a situation (with "always"), then comes a consequence of the situation (with "so"), and then comes a final commentary on the situation, in the form of an exclamation (with "O"). This could be an exercise in a writing workshop: use these three words as the starting points of three parts of a poem; the parts need not be the same length. In fact, it's important here that the parts do not have the same length: insofar as this poem is a joke, it depends on its comic timing for its effect, and the brevity of the last two parts (the last two quatrains) is essential to its timing.

The first part of the poem's argument has internal details that are important as well: the expressions "Of course" (3), "Never mind" (9), and "Better yet" (11) relate the parts of the description of the situation to each other. In fact, they make it clear that calling this the poem's "argument" is perfectly appropriate; these are, after all, the kinds of phrases that one might use in an argument (or a speech) to develop one's points. Again, this could be the basis of a writing exercise (whether a poem or an essay): begin three successive points or perspectives with these phrases.

The argumentative structure of the poem thus looks like this (with a few more things highlighted that I have not discussed):

Always talk to your plants.

Sit back and watch them flourish.

Good advice. Of course we presume

that all plants speak English.

Speak slowly, watch them bloom.

If necessary shout each syllable.

Their little ears are ready vessels

for a shower of the Queen's vowels.

Never mind if it's a China rose

or an African violet.

Better yet, recite a bit of English lit.

See abundance spring at your fingertip.

So I spoke like an Oxford don

to my wilting rhododendron.

It wilted more. As for my drooping shrub,

my words only seem to draw more slugs.

O plants, what is it that makes you grow?

I watch my immigrant neighbour's patio

with a sense of distant envy.

Tell me, plants, must I address you in Punjabi?

*

A third approach to the poem involves looking at some of its verbs. Among others, the first stanza contains "talk," "watch," and "speak." The rest of the poem runs through variations on talking and watching: "speak," "watch," "shout," "recite," and "see" appear before the turn at the beginning of the fourth quatrain, many of them in the imperative (appropriately, since this is a set of instructions, and instructions are often given in the imperative). If the seeing theme is not as explicit in the last two quatrains (only "watch" in line 18 is a verb of seeing), the speaking theme continues to be central with "spoke" (13), "tell" (20), and "address" (20).

All this relates to the poem's titular theme: talking to plants. When one talks to plants, one wants to see results. More generally, the poem considers speech and language as having possible effects, as working a bit of magic, as it were. The content of what is said to the plants is not as important as the fact of saying something at all, and the possibility that the act of speaking can produce the desired effect. From this perspective, the poem is about "how to do things with words." And how one does things with words is related to social, political, and cultural hierarchies: it is the voice of authority (of "the Queen's vowels" and an "Oxford don") that is supposed to be able to produce the desired effects, along with "a bit of English lit."

Yet the poem undermines this authority; after all, the "proper" voice does not help the plants "flourish." Only Punjabi appears to do so—an underprivileged language, at least in a British context. Still, the poem does not privilege Punjabi as some kind of mystical "other" that actually does have the magical qualities attributed to language by the idea of talking to plants. If Punjabi were being celebrated here, it would ruin the joke by reducing the poem to a bit of exoticism.

In the end, it's necessary to remember that the poem is primarily making fun of talking to plants. By extension, it also makes fun of the beliefs behind the hierarchies it touches on: the royal family as privileged figures, contrasted with immigrants; the Oxford don and English lit as representatives of privileged culture; prestigious varieties of British English contrasted with Punjabi, an immigrant language. Insofar as these hierarchies represent sites of sociopolitical tension, the poem does not propose ways to resolve such tensions. Instead—to use a Britishism—it takes the piss out of the idea that they can be defused if we just figure out the right way to talk about them.

"They don't know that we know"

This is the first poem in Fleur Adcock's collection Looking Back (Oxford, 1997).

WHERE THEY LIVED

That's where they lived in the 1890s.
They don't know that we know,
or that we're standing here, in possession
of some really quite intimate information
about the causes of their deaths,
photographing each other in a brisk wind
outside their terrace house, both smiling
(not callously, we could assure them),
our hair streaming across our faces
and the green plastic Marks and Spencer's bag
in which I wrapped my camera against showers
ballooning out like a wind-sock
from my wrist, showing the direction
of something that's blowing down our century.

Who are "they"? Either they are famous people, or they are relatives of "us"; otherwise, "we" would not know the intimate details of "their deaths." The latter is more likely, as famous people might actually expect people a hundred years later to remember them; hence, they would "know that we know." So "they" are quite likely "our" ancestors.

The present tense in "they don't know that we know" is quite striking; a more straightforward version of the sentence would be this: "They didn't know that we would know." It's possible to object to that formulation; after all, people at least hope that their descendants will remember them, will be on familiar terms with them, will know "where they lived." But of course that hope is different than knowledge; to rephrase it again: "They couldn't know for sure that we would know."

The double present tense that Adcock actually uses, though, collapses a century into a moment of simultaneity, as if we and our ancestors live in the same moment, separated only by knowledge and ignorance: we know the rest of their lives, and all that has happened since, and they don't. This knowledge is vague in the poem; at two key moments (in lines 4 and 14), specifics are absent, replaced by "some" and "something." The "intimate information" is not specified, nor is the implicitly more public information "that's blowing down our century." In the frame of the poem (the first five lines and the last line-and-a-half), information is referred to but not spelled out.

In contrast, the scene involving "us" that begins in line 6 is much more specific. Even as "we" take photographs of each other, the poem itself becomes much more like a photograph, with the visual details of the terrace house, of hair and faces, and of the elaborately described plastic bag. The house and the wind in "our" faces are images "they" might have experienced when they lived here; these images confirm the double present tense that connects them and us. But the plastic bag separates ancestors and descendants, as something the former would not have known. The camera is more ambiguous, as cameras were invented much earlier in the 19th century, but the camera of the late 20th century (even if not yet digital) had become an object with quite a distinct set of associations than it would have had in the 1890s. Even though Eastman Kodak was founded in 1889, the personal camera was certainly not yet an everyday object back then, the kind of thing anybody would have had available to take along when going to look at "where they lived." (Marks & Spencer, by the way, was founded in 1884.)

These traces of social and technological development put some content into the distinction between then and now made in the conclusion by the phrase "something that's blowing down the century"—it is a century of plastic and images. The very vagueness of the phrase makes it somewhat sinister, too—it is the "long twentieth century" in which the world of the 1890s was rent asunder. This undertone, combined with the wind, connects the poem with Walter Benjamin's Angel of History (see part IX of "On the Concept of History"), its back turned toward the future, its wings caught in the wind blowing from the past, the ruins of the past piling up in front of it.

But Adcock's poem is not as ark about the progression of history from past into future. There is a wind blowing, but it is "brisk," not stormy and threatening, and we are smiling (and "not callously"). And as line 2 suggests, "we" are not wholly separated from "them" by time; in fact, the poem as a whole traces the complex ambiguity of being both connected and separated at once. We do not see anything that specific when we look back, but it is also not ruins that we see. The Angel of History may be around the corner, and even the aura of Benjamin's understanding of photography might be hovering around the pictures taken in the poem, but the present is vivid here, both in itself and in its relationship to the past.

"Where They Lived" does not deny that the "something" of the last line has a sinister side, but it does not reduce the century to that. We know things they don't know, but our knowledge of their ignorance does not make their world either a ruin or even something to be nostalgic about. We are here, sympathetically aware of the past, while also enjoying the present, as the time in which we live.