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Simon Armitage’s ‘Harmonium’: An Analysis-the scent of lost time?
Sometimes we can step into a special place and may enjoy the sudden certainty that we are caught up in spaces where linear or chronological measurements of time cease to be so defined or regulated. We are all ‘specks of time’ in so many ways: swirling about each other both in our heads and outside, coming together, departing and perhaps re-ecountering each other in many ‘else-wheres‘.
I have just come back from my Aunt’s funeral and as I walked in to the chapel and stood with my mother singing the first hymn, it was as if the chapel was spilling over with people from our lives, all shining with different shades of light upon their faces, all looking younger and more alive ironically than when we had last seen them.
Remembrance can be painful and healing both at the same time and alternately. Toni Morrison uses a lovely, visionary word in her marvellous novel, Beloved. She talks of ‘rememory’ and this trope on the act of remembrance communicates the possibility of memory being an act where thepast becomes animated enough to become tangible, to live again, even on its own terms perhaps, beyond us yet within us too.
This poem describes an intimate moment which condenses and ‘meets’ other moments from the past, and tenderly describes a temporary near epiphany between the poet and his father about the latter’s mortality. The former encourages the latter event. It is as if the very attentiveness and awareness of the ‘event’ of the situation, increases the possibility of other types of communication, communication that maybe precluded by the everyday habits of our often inattentive lives. For how really present are we to the present?
I say ‘near epiphany’ as the poet himself qualifies the recognition as he acknowledges his own failure to meet his father’s aside about his inevitable mortality with any real depth or presence. Yet the poet is brave enough to admit his lack, his feeling of inadequacy and to publish the poem so that we recognise that the poem’s admission of ‘failure’ is also an act of love. The poem avows the poet’s tender affection for his father and makes public his feelings forever, even if the harmonium is more directly communicative than they!
As I have just said, the catalyst to the exploration of unspoken feeling is the harmonium itself. The instrument is rescued from ‘death’ by the poet who wants to save it , an ironic mirror perhaps of the poet’s awkwardness around his father, whom he cannot save and who seems to be fragile and probably unhealthy.
The harmonium is the means by which father and son are reunited in their local church, a place where they and many other fathers and sons have played out their roles in the choir. The fact that the harmonium is a musical instrument suggests that music can manage forms of communication that ordinary language fails to deliver as it can transcend our human, awkward limitations. The ironical ‘song’ for which the poet acquires the instrument becomes the means by which he nearly finds a near elegy or requiem for the inevitable approach of his father’s death. The harmonium is thus an ‘event’ in both a literal and a metaphorical sense. It gives voice to the unspoken desires we have to connect with each other and to the our place in history as we repeat relationships with each other.
The harmonium has become worn by the passage of time. The sunlight that makes the church look beautiful yet it also causes the harmonium to age, to lose its original beauty and perfection. The homeliness of the organist’s socks makes the transcendent also part of the daily and humanises the instrument after the suggestion of personification with the ‘fingernails’ and the ‘tongue’. This is an instrument in harmony with those who visit the church, it is part of their worship and beliefs.
The ecstatic release of the’ gilded finches’ from the ‘throats’ of fathers and sons as they sing to the harmonics of the harmonium offers a powerful poetic metaphor for joy, for shared experience, for spirituality and release. It is ostentatiously poetic and is in contrast to the more practical aspects of the rest of the poem where the experiences of the harmonium are described in details suggestive of the physical or material world. It is the release of the song that heralds the entrance of the poet’s father in the poem. He has been one of the singers, releasing the special soaring bird song, transcending the limitations of their human groundedness. Perhaps this singing ability, perhaps this revelation of faith has been in the distant past, now the poet’s father is a less transcendent figure, focused here on the practical task of moving the harmonium, symbolically a connection between the two males as the younger attempts to save and rescue the condemned harmonium from the ‘skip’.
Nowadays the father is covered in smoke, fragile and aware of his life’s vulnerability. He joins the chapel’s narratives again as he predicts his own participation in repetition. The ‘next box’ will be his own he claims. This prediction is perhaps a test of his son’s relationship with him; for although it may be a joke or flippant comment, there is a recognition on the poet’s part that this is a comment the father has made before.
He wants to speak about death, his death, but his son finds such a conversation difficult. His inability to reply adequately is also a from of repetition and reveals the areas of their relationship where intimacy is hard to achieve or even maintain. They seem to ‘do’ things together rather than to express how they feel about each other.
Ironically the harmonium can say more than they can. it is a symbol of their connection and has a language unavailable to them. Perhaps the final irony is that they are less harmonious than the instrument, even when the instrument is itself rather out of tune in comparison to its original state.
A beautifully thoughtful, most moving poem. A natural elegy seems to arise out oft he ‘incident’ or ‘event’ of the harmonium.
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