On Exquisiteness in Poetry

Louis MacNeice's Snow
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Saroja

There are poems only a dollop of prolonged inspiration can produce. The idea unfurls by itself, already made, already complete, layer by neatly laid layer. Images follow one another, each one finer than the earlier, enhancing the development of the poem and mining from the germ a self-nourishing process of growth like leaf sprouting on leaf to make a perfectly formed plant.

Take Louis MacNeice’s 'Snow', for instance:


SNOW

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.


The poem is built out of a small handful of images -- snow, roses, tangerine and fire. But their careful interlinking spins a web of sensations. The characterization of the room as ‘suddenly rich’ and the sense of lavishness conjured before the eye by the ‘the great bay window’ are offset ingeniously by the sparing selection of what creates the richness the poet speaks of – the snow and the pink roses. A richness that is not ostentatious for its abruptness, but quiet and elegant, that adds a dash of cheer to the room. White against delicate pink. Muted colours, ‘soundlessly collateral’, almost accidental. ‘Incompatible’ they may be with respect to the season, but the image, with its suggestion of carefully chosen colour and texture, indicates early on a hidden sense of congeniality between these diverse phenomena.

"World is suddener than we fancy it."

The last line expresses both wonderment and knowledge. The occurrence is astonishing, but the ability of the world to spring such mottled surprises is nonetheless expected. The charm of the line is of course in the use of ‘world’ without an article. It is an instance of those small decisions that result in the exquisiteness of a well-crafted poem. Trivial details these may be, but they make a world of difference.

There is more sound, more clamour in the second stanza. It drops the careful approach and orderliness of the first stanza to give in, so to speak, to the ‘craziness’ and the ‘incorrigibility’ of plurality in nature. One may call forth numberless clichés about the sensory appeal of poetry, and yet the imaginative synesthetic effect remains as inexplicable and as immediate as joy’s grape bursting on the palate fine. Notice the delicious lingering on ‘peeling’ and ‘portioning’ the tangerine followed by the monosyllable and consonance of ‘spit’ and ‘pips’ to capture the overpowering moment of intoxication. Time is suspended in this single moment, itself 'drinking' in the shock of the tangerine's flavour.

The room is transformed by the lurking spite and mirth of the fire, which is in counterpoint to the tranquility of the snow and the flowers. In a way, the poem is not about the diversity, craziness or suddenness of the world but the human awakening to these. As the awareness comes rushing in, the contraries impose themselves physically on the speaker, with a sense of unimpeded urgency -- "[o]n the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands".

The last returning line contains both mystery and an impression of completeness. The roses are 'huge', mind you. A new perspective is introduced in looking at them. And there is something as seemingly insubstantial as transparent glass between the snow and the roses -- a piece of detail stored away for the end of the poem. Of course, the presence of the glass suggests that what was pictured as an unexplained skill of nature -- 'spawning' snow and roses at once -- may in reality have had a human hand in its arrangement. Yet, we are convinced by now that amidst the most innocuous of surprises is a hidden, bubbling clash of uncontainable variety. All is tender, quiet and beautiful to sight, but there is always more than meets the eye.

Distilled Delight

Gerald Durrell's Birds, Beasts and Relatives

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Saroja

We took a last glass of wine with Katrina and Stephanos and then made our way sleepily through the olive groves, silvered by a moon as large and as white as a magnolia blossom. The scops owls chimed mourfully to each other, and the odd firefly winked emerald-green as we passed. The warm air smelled of the day's sunshine, of dew, and of a hundred aromatic leaf scents. Mellow and drugged with wine, walking between the great hunched olives, their trunks striped with cool moonlight, I think we all felt that we had arrived, that we had been accepted by the island. We were now, under the quiet, bland eye of the moon, christened Corfiotes. The night was beautiful, and tomorrow, we knew, another tiger-golden day lay ahead of us. It was as though England had never existed.


'Luscious' is the first word that occurs to me when I read the prose of this naturalist and humourist. Everything Durrell describes teems abundant with life. But what gives rise to the tickling, rollicking humour of his writing? Characterisation is what most would say. Or dialogues, perhaps. And... can you believe all those incidents he narrates? So intrinsically comic!

As I came to the end of the first chapter in this sequel to the classic My Family and Other Animals, the author's portly shape and laughing face remembered from the documentary Himself and Other Animals kept coming back to my mind. Blithe as his own image is his writing. Not from ironic distortions, not from comic tolerance of human foibles, the sparkle of Durrell's prose stems from his vast and unbridled enthusiasm for all that is living. To travel through Durrell's work is to encounter zoo after zoo of life forms, human and otherwise, often indistinguishably so.

They were grouped, like a pride of moody lions, round a fire so large and flamboyant that there was immediate danger of its setting fire to the chimney. My sister Margo had just added to it by the simple method of dragging in the carcass of a small tree from the garden and pushing one end into the fireplace, while the remainder of the trunk lay across the hearth-rug.

(To be contd.)

Bubble-making...

Context, they say, matters nought. Historical. Biographical. Nought! The author, they say, is dead. The text is yours to fancy-weave meanings out of it as you choose.

I find people finding pleasure in this. I do not.

I have been studying something I keep safe distance from generally. Poetry. English poetry, to be specific. Indian English poetry, to be even more specific. I have been studying it for my M.A. exam. As I am going through my course material (prepared by the JNU professor and littérateur in his own right, Makarand Paranjape), I am pausing, thinking, wondering. Time and again he stresses on how open poetry is to meanings and interpretations. When he goes a little further along the making-sense path, he inserts the “at least to me” qualifier. He openly admits that many of the famed, esteemed, popular even, poets can often be very vague. You see the symbolism but try as you might it can prove hard to find a coherent meaning behind it. Connecting lines, finding out how one idea progresses into another from stanza to stanza and how they relate in the process can be quite a task too, and not always a fruitful one. So in the absence of that coherence, the reader is supposed to have full freedom at interpretation. THIS is what bothers me. I understand that words, thoughts, ideas cannot be straitjacketed but isn't there a line, a line of reason, one should not (ideally) cross?! How fanciful can our fancy really be! Imagination is the food of art (or in more un-Shakespearean lingo, the life-blood) but can it have any real sense or be wholly satisfying if "reason" totally departed from the scene?

I can see what a volatile field of argument this is and how fuzzy the boundaries, but I have always had a compulsive need to “understand” things before I can truly appreciate them, even if my senses lead me on. So it bothers me. This ambiguity, this unsettled state of affairs, these contradictions.

In the end, I can only cling to very basic and very personal lines, which do not suit me, but which is all I have. And those lines do not let me indulge in fancyweaving. They barely let me reach down to the subcutaneous layer. Beyond that, I like not to go. My universe asks for some definiteness. And this is why “context” is not nought for me. For me, it is that which can help me in sifting through this... umbrella of meanings, and follow the one that the poet might have intended to convey. It does not follow that what the poet tried to convey is the ultimate in meaning. Because what was tried might not have been as successfully achieved. But that is another debate altogether. The intended meaning, successful or not, can yet light my path of interpretation.

A friend of mine writes poetry very seriously. She must have her own literary ambitions but “ambition” is less in her case. It is more a way of self-expression for her, a deeply personal exercise, almost a similar outlet as diary-writing is for some of us. So her circle of readers is small and private. She sometimes urges me to read some of her compositions. My deadened-to-poetry mind does not always get her imageries and symbolic representations, but sometimes I do, and when I do, I try to think as she might have thought. Knowing her and her style in writing poems, I can direct my analystic beam of light (*poker face*) accordingly. I need not fear that I will produce far-fetched stuff.

In a similar way, when made to read poetry, it helps in finding a pattern of the poet's thoughts and expressions. I need not distrust myself so much then in making sensible sense.

I would like to contribute a small point to Sujata’s text on Blindness below. She said:

A reviewer at the Amazon website commented that this style of punctuating paralleled the reader's experience with that of the blind characters.

That would make it seem that Saramago contrived such a punctuating system for this particular novel, with a particular view in mind. But the same idiosyncratic punctuation is found elsewhere in his earlier work (for instance, in passages of Baltasar and Blimunda) and also in later novels. According to the author, his parsimonious use of punctuation marks “is related to what, in musical terms, is called the tempo, or the measure [of speech]. It is less the rhythm than the measure and the tempo. It is related to how the sentence itself is built”; he adds, furthermore, that “when we speak, we don’t use punctuation marks”. Rather than a local contrivance calculated specifically for the blind, Saramago’s peculiar punctuation is part of a more general attempt to approximate the qualities of real speech on the page.

(Readers of Portuguese may check his declarations here: http://www.usinadeletras.com.br/exibelotexto.php?cod=5081&cat=Ensaios&vinda=S)

BLINDNESS, José Saramago

We humans have a great propensity for getting habituated and taking things for granted. Sometimes the most cardinal things of our life. Probably this is what makes José Saramago's Blindness unique and succeed in jolting our senses.

An unnamed country is struck by an inexplicable epidemic of blindness, a blindness that is contagious. People stop seeing all of a sudden, but contrary to the usual darkness that envelops the blind their worlds turn all white. The government goes on high alert and quarantines the first batch hoping to keep the rest of the populace safe till a cure is found. But the medical world succeeds in finding no answers and steadily people keep turning blind across the country. Panic rises, chaos reigns, until a time when the whole nation goes blind and when it becomes a struggle for individual existence, basically a struggle to find food and live on from day to day.

Amid but aside from all these is a horrifying chain of events unfolding inside one of the quarantine camps. An abandoned mental hospital where the first batch of blind men and women had been sent. In that first batch is an opthalmologist and his wife. As inexplicable as the blindness is the opthalmologist's wife's retaining her vision. She is the only person known in the novel to thus remain unaffected. Initially she fakes blindness to be with her husband but later on as things escalate inside the hospital it is this lone woman – this eye-witness to the grotesque reality – who holds out some hopes of survival for a small group of people, the group which takes the core story forward.

The novel has some striking authorial touches. The country is unnamed and so are the characters. The first might only just facilitate placing the story in an universal context but the second really has a role to play. We have the doctor, the doctor's wife, the first blind man, the boy with the squint, the girl with dark glasses, the old man with the eye patch and so on... but no names. Not once. In a world peopled by blind men and women, this is really significant. Names give us individuality. Names mark us out. But in the world of the blind, what means individuality and of what use such markings! The other marked stylistic peculiarity is the near absence of punctuation marks other than the comma and the period and the complete absence of quotation marks. The continued flow of dialogue without quotations sometimes blurs the difference between two speakers. A reviewer at the Amazon website commented that this style of punctuating paralleled the reader's experience with that of the blind characters. With the demarcations between speakers removed, the reader has to grope his way forward just like the blind. This I consider a bit of an extreme reading. To me it seems more like an experimental ploy on the author's part. It definitely symbolises some of the confusion, but it does not go farther than that. Commas come at all the right pauses and once one gets into the flow of the story there are only a handful of places where one is brought to a confused halt.

" When the doctor and the old man with the black eyepatch entered the ward with the food, they did not see, could not see, seven naked women and the corpse of the woman who suffered from insomnia stretched out on her bed, cleaner than she had ever been in all her life, while another woman was washing her companions, one by one, and then herself."

Saramago's brilliance is in his leaps of imagination and his grasp of humanity. How often do we stop to think of what makes us humane, what bases our civilized state and how fragile is that basis? Saramago draws us deep down into an abyss where human dignity is crushed relentlessly. Robbed of the primary 'sense', life soon turns into an animalistic existence... living to eat and eating to live. But even in this world, polarities occur. Inside the hospital, we have the crooks who are still in the grips of greed and power-hunger and extort the other inmates and cruelly deprive them of food. In the end, when there is nothing of material worth left to be extorted, the women become victims of their base savagery. At the other end, we have the central characters who show true grit and sensitivity even when their world has been turned upside down. Thus even as Saramago keeps piling on the horror and accentuating the sense of nausea, he does not let the tragic circumstances spin out of control. The turn of events remain logical (even when stretched to their extremities), the horror remains believable, and instead of being paralysed by the grotesque spectacle, we are left shaken and stirred.

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Timothy Mo, SOUR SWEET


A kaleidoscope of Chinese cuisine and terror families with a generous helping of humour, Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet is a fine picture of multi-cultural England. Now, if that last comment sounds like a cliché, it deserves to be taken as a true compliment because the novel succeeds in transmitting the sights, sounds and even smells of the city’s colourful streets while treating that much-talked about phenomenon of multi-culturalism as a serio-comic experience.

Chen is a waiter in a Chinese restaurant who has been living in Britain for four years. His wife Lily is the daughter of a sifu, a slain fighter from Kwangsi. Till the age of ten, Lily, unlike her older sister Mui, has been trained in the complex and demanding techniques of traditional combat. So when we see her as the clever, yet solicitous wife of a waiter in London, we are a little surprised, so to speak. Son, or Man Kee (whose charm is enhanced by the fact that his head is disproportionately matched with his torso) is naturally the apple of his mother’s eyes, and for Chen, a future restaurateur who shall own a flourishing business:

Son was the most valuable long-term investment they possessed. On maturity the realisation of this asset could be worth far more than the business would ever return.

Elder sister Mui is for Lily, on various occasions, a help, an accomplice, and a rival for Man Kee’s affections. The sisters can deprive themselves of food, even as they overfeed Chen, but not for any stinginess on the part of harmless, good, kind Husband, poor soul. There is silent complicity between the pragmatic sisters who devoutly respect the place of the family head Chen, and any silent manoeuvres they make only seem to be intended at keeping the vital balance between Yin and Yang. They prove to be exceptionally smart and resourceful; Chen, taken by surprise, decides to allow that the women are far more capable than he has hitherto admitted. Supple, practical and charmingly unscrupulous Lily is soon perched at the counter of their own little food business as hard-working Mui runs around and Chen cooks behind the hatch connecting the seating room and the kitchen. Even clever Son starts contributing.

‘Now, Son, how much brown cash equals one green cash?’
‘Twice ten shillings is one pound.’
‘Son!’
‘Ah Mar-Mar, we play buying things at school…’
‘Clever Boy’. Kiss.

Mo’s eye for the comic is unfailing. Humour arises out of situations, speech and attitudes, leavening the narrative with a lightness that by itself makes the book unputdownable.

Lily burnt a whole series of prophylactic incense sticks in front of God… God was quiet black with smoke now but as ferocious as ever and the mantle of soot surely was appropriate, bearing in mind he was an adoptive Londoner.

The Chens' little eatery is named the ‘Dah Ling’ restaurant where sour and sweet pork is served to truck drivers and the naughty, giggling English girls whom Lily looks down upon with disdain. Strangely, the customers display great jollity in repeating the name of the restaurant and even use it to address the girls! :D

In Lily’s attitude Mo finds much to laugh at. Her mistrust of “foreign devils” and her horror at their condemnable habits reveal the prejudices immigrants nurture about the natives. But Mo is not interested in cultural politics: whatever is funny attracts his attention and it ever so subtly brings out the ludicrous in every stereotypical view.

Lily needs to convince herself of the superiority of Chinese culture and makes repeated attempts to drill this idea into Son's mind:

Really, there was no question how superior Chinese people were to foreign devils… They all looked the same to her. And how quickly their pink skins aged. How few types of face there were compared to Cantonese physiognomies: rascally, venerable, pretty, raffish, bumpkin, scholarly.

But when Grandpa is given free acupuncture treatment, Lily, who misses no opportunity to express shock at the English society’s treatment of old people, is forced to take a more considerate view of the foreign devils.

Intersecting with this innocent story of the enterprising family is the equally riveting tale of the other Chinese family, the Hung family mafia or the ‘Triads’. When the four disjointed histories of ‘Red Cudgel’, ‘White Paper Fan’, ‘Night Brother’ and ‘Grass Sandal’ appear without warning early in the book, the narrative threatens to break up. But this spell of incomprehension does not last long as Mo deftly weaves detailed descriptions of the meetings, plans and offensives of the Triads with simple sketches of the Chen family. As a trained boxer, Mo can visualise and describe fighting tactics as though he were writing the screenplay for a Jackie Chan movie. He also reveals close understanding of the innumerable stratagems and rituals that go on within the underworld where tradition and loyalty are invoked to trap pawns in ruthless games.

Mo’s style changes effortlessly from humorous to solemn, pidgin to poetic, always retaining the twin flavours of combat and cuisine.

So, again, the household changed (that amoeba), presented with change and challenge, shuddered like jelly on impact with the obstacle, but jelly-like suffered no damage, poured itself around the problem, dissolved what it was able to and absorbed what it could not. And went on its amoeba way.

If any sinister threat looms large, it is postponed repeatedly as people are given a few more -- and again a few more -- moments to watch television, water plants, listen to loud Chinese opera, drive a car without licence, crazily twist on a swing, chase a turkey across the backyard or make coffins for living friends. It is hence than when tragedy approaches on stealthy footsteps, it is absorbed into the story like all those foregone days of playing with life.

A thriller for those who like action and a heart-warming story for those who are fond of the humane. Sour-sweet indeed!

THE BOX

bumpkin version,

by Roger Maioli

Here is the box in my hands at last. Uncle U is dead these three days, and he left it to me. So odd, I was in this very hammock, it is tooenty years since, when Uncle U told me about the box, that he would someday quit all, and now indeed the box is be-quitted. Post-tomb-ously. It is a fine box, all endowed with corners, and guess: you throw it up, down it comes again. Ha ha ha. What is inside? That Uncle U didn’t tell. What do you expect, he was so meagre with words, never spoke much except it was to ask Mom, when will I leave the hammock and get myself into a job? I never approved much of his sowing ideas into Mom’s head, for then she grew full inquisitive herself, and I had to tell her, imperial tone, that this was between me and the hammock, adding some un-complementary reflections on Uncle. And then Mom said I was too hard on him, and if only I could see through him, but I was such a chap. But then Uncle was such a chap, you couldn’t have enough of his leaving you alone. He was the sort of person who would wake up of a morning and go tiptoeing to your bedside and watch you sleep, scrutinising you all over with great mirth while you were slumbering and drooling, all helpless. How does one like such an intermeddlesome fellow, even if one is his Heir Nominee? Furthersides, he was so puzzling, so fond of riddles, one of his most favourite was, A ghoul does boo and a cow does moo, what does a cockatoo doo? I told him I wouldn’t know a cockatoo if I found one in my porridge, and so he might as well tell me, what does it doo? And he only grinned and never told, and I was so provoked. He was such a chap, I am glad he died. But I keep my peace, for Mom would be wondrous pissed if she heard me abuse the dead. And then there is the box. What is inside? I am curious, I will soon open it. There is them stories when one receives a like box and one never stops talking philosophie despite we only want to know what is in the damn box. I read one such story, with all them long words, and what do you think but that the box was never opened? I was so provoked, I remember I gave poor Chummy a whomp, despite he was not to blame, the fault was an Irish lady’s: Miss O’Jajee, I gather. You don’t mess with mee, Sarah O’Jajee! Ha ha ha I gather I should write poetree: I have such a way with words, never saw the like. But later, now I am wondrous busy with this here box. I even told Mom to keep her mop company in the meanwhile. But before I set about opening it, I would fain know if it is worth the trouble. What can be inside? The only thing I would want now is Catherine Z. Tajones, and it is not her. I know it because I pressed my ear against the cardboard and called, Is it you, Miss Tajones?, and waited a good many minutes with no answer coming. Ha ha ha, as if she would fit in this here box, I deserve a whomp myself. Serious, the only thing I would want now is a beer, one of those that go fzzzz when one opens it, but then the fzzzz gets gone so soon, I don’t believe it would stand tooenty years in the box. Uncle U, if he died some nineteen years ago, at least there would be some chance that I had opened it and Lo, there is the beer, what with I am dying in this heat. But then nineteen years ago I was all for candies and little Laura Lee. Not that I am less fond of Laura Lee now, but beer, I found it stank so. Die whenever Uncle might, seems this box just can’t satisfy. But then, Uncle U was forever disappointing me. There is Aunt, she is damn pretty, I wonder what she saw in Uncle. He was short of one foot, and had such a gap between his teeth, he might spit a chestnut at you and never lower his jaw. Ha ha ha, this was huge funny. Where is Chummy, I need tell him this, he will laugh his molars out. Item: if anyone is peeking into these my loo cabrations, Chummy is my nephew, I am his uncle. I am an uncle of sorts too, but of a superior sort than Uncle U. I think I might be called Uncle Double U, just like George Bush and George Double U Bush. That is an improvement, I gather. But I was prosopopondering on Aunt: I would get a crush on Aunt if she was not Aunt, but then she was and what is one to do? The most I did was to watch her bow down to pick up her shoes, she sported such charming underthings, with stars, balloons, pandas, altocumuli, flagships, tango dancers, Eiffel towers, walruses. I once told Uncle to buy her shoes very sticky and hard to pick up, and he only grinned and never bought them, he was such a chap. But if aunts are sacrossacred, a cousin is only a lass who shares your aunt’s zip code. They are famous to practice kissing with, and so one prefers them pretty. And since Aunt was so looring, you might bet I would have the prettimost cousins in all Gloomystershire. But my cousins, if they had Aunt’s columns and arc-boutants, their façade was all ruined by Uncle’s brand of front teeth. But then I’ve already told you that Uncle was forever finding ways to plague me. When Loocy or Rapoonzel smiles, it seems it is Uncle teasing me by proxy. Now, redux: I am a superior sort of uncle. Chummy, he will have the prettifullest cousins, as soon as I manage to heighten Laura Lee’s opinion of my predicates. But it is safer for Chummy not to go about a-kissing, or I will have him whomped handsomely. I told him so the other day, and even procured him a sample, so as to render him watchful. I didn’t put too much emphasis on it though, for my purpose is disciplinastic, I am what they call a man of them worthy intentions. And I am fond of the brat, I own it. He has tooenty thousand freckles too much, but he is still the best thing Pam did. And I am his famous uncle. Now Uncle U, he could be a better uncle, hadn’t he been so morose and all. I gather he morosed down after he lost his foot back in the hazelnut festival, when one of them boisterous fellows who get by selling fireworks made a big show of his pyrotechnics, sending up a good many crackers, bangers, squibs, torpedoes, mortars, jack-of-all-devils and Old Cholmondeley’s gas station. Now Dad himself went rocketing over the parson’s roof and wasn’t any moodier for that, he even wore a placid countenance in his coffin. Uncle took it too much to heart, I say. I was only a boy (the dullest on sale), but I remember: before that he was a man-about-business, always talking masonry & roof-building, and I never heard he went about the place be-quitting boxes without Miss Tajones inside. And then he grew all laidback, and that is perhaps why he became in time so vociferous that such a one and such a one was jobless: I gather he wanted to hush down his own do-nothingness by trumpeting other fellows’. Mom says I am too hard on him, but then he took care to win her over: ever since Big Bang he took to visiting us religiously, bringing herrings and soap, and fixing small things, and sowing ideas into Mom’s head, and staring in silence, and it was then that he mentioned the box: that it would come to me after God took his other foot, as he put it. Now here is the box, and I never seem to get around to opening it. But Uncle U was such a chap, he gave me the creeps. Not that he was all funereal or that sort of thing: he grinned aplenty. But he had such ways. He would look at the birds and then look at you, and make you feel there is something wrong in not being up there with the buzzards. All shut up in himself, like this box. I tell you: I wouldn’t wonder if I found his lost foot in this box. That would be glamorous, and just like Uncle. (I might make Chummy deadly a-frightened with that foot, I say.) Or perhaps there is just a long letter, where he finally tells me what it is that a cockatoo does doo. That would be glamorous too, I wouldn’t mind some knowledge at this time of day. Talk of time, Mom is calling. The herrings are ready, the last herrings Uncle brought. They are splendiferous with butter, I will miss them. Will see to them in a minute, as soon as I am done with this here momentous business. Know what? In the end I am glad I have this box. Made me think of Uncle, I hadn’t really thought of him these many years, despite he was there so often, hop-hopping around and displaying a full Gibraltar at every grin, looking at them birds and sowing ideas into Mom’s mind. Such a chap. Perhaps he knew I would think of him. But then how would he know that, he didn’t have five ideas in that bald skull. The only way is, Uncle’s uncle left him a box too, and Uncle thought of his uncle then. The box may even have been the selfsame this one. There you have it. Wonder, I am full thoughtful today. Now, suppose this box is so prognostically entailed to mee, what is inside? I wonder if Uncle U knew. The way he was, it wouldn’t have occurred to him that boxes come with an inside, promising in contents. Go figure. Says Mom what she may, I never made head or tail of the old corpse. And I even tried, every Friday. But he gave me the creeps. Mom says it is time set people apart, it is generations. How come then Aunt and me were so pally? Here, peremptory and out loud: Uncle should have treated me better. He never realized I took exception to all his scrutinising and intermeddling. It is not generations, Dad was different after all. And I am myself different, a better sort of uncle, all open, a regular beeped. Chummy will tell you that. Ibid: he would. Good Chummy, I am so fond of the brat, above all now that Pam is gone for good with that rogue Fitzwilliam, if I set my hands on him he won’t hold a card before this full moon. But I am here for Chummy. I wonder if some day he will stop and think of what a famous uncle he had. I tell you: I know what I will do with the box. I will let it be. I will have the herrings & butter, and then I will call Chummy and talk business with him. Come one day I am off-hammocked (I really should write poetree), the box will descend to him. Then let him open it.

And see.