Poem Of The Week: 'Instead Of A Journey' By Michael Hamburger (1924-2007)

Michael Hamburger’s poem of love and restoration is insinuated seamlessly into a pattern of rhythm which grows and contracts like the beating of a heart. Formal conditions are absorbed into meaning as though the feeling of dizzy abandonment and recovery could be held in harness by words alone. The poet’s skill is clear but somehow undisclosed: the languid rallentando of the fourth and fifth lines, which are deliberately slowed by the weight of alliteration, makes of the preceding ‘accelerate’ a palpable onomatopoeia, as if the figure to whom the poem is addressed were spinning into glimmering infinity.

‘Instead of a Journey’ is an artfully-crafted poem. Amongst the locators of reorientation – the process is adroitly rendered as ‘walls assume their meaning’ and a sense of ‘return’ is tasted at the open window – we are obliged to consider that the object of gentle veneration is elderly. The daily drowsing, the suggestion of ‘bright metal’ dusted with age give notice of a slow decline. But the return to the stillness of the day is also a focus for reflection: the ambiguity of the final lines might also yield the possibility of a journey to the past, conjured, perhaps, in the clouds at ‘vision’s rim’.

The power of love is a constant here, as durable as the ‘weather and season’, and where, in the bewildering whirl of the first lines, its early vigour is briefly revivified, we find, in an associative metaphor, love’s corollary in age: the steel is now tempered, the grindstone upon which it is whetted transforms the gleaming metal into the ‘gladness’ of final contentment.

‘Instead of a Journey’ is taken from The New Poetry: Selected and Introduced by A. Alvarez, and is published by Penguin Books.