Dannie Abse: poet and physician

Dannie Abse: poet and physician Michael ]. Collins " 'You're a peculiar fellow, Abse/ " says a pathologist in a poem called "Lunch and afterwards." He "knows by heart the morbid verse/ cf facts"—that " 'after death, of all soft tissues the brain's/the first to vanish, the uterus the last.' " His judgment of Abse comes after the poet's description of some primitive cannibal ritual at which the feasters " 'partial to women/ " have " 'left behind only the taboo food,/the uterus, inside the skeleton.' " This first part of the poem, "Lunch with a pathologist," links the practice of pathology with cannibalistic ritual: the pathologist carries on, in scientific terms, the religious and magical practices of the primitive world. The uterine taboo seems to have anticipated scientific discoveries about soft tissue and also to suggest an instinctive reverence for life the pathologist lacks. The quest for knowledge, for power, for control of the material world that primitive people sought in cannibalistic ritual is continued in the modern world by the methods of science. The pathologist's "morbid" facts about weight and duration, while dignified as the findings of science, make him, on second thought, at least as peculiar as the poet who recognizes a connection with cannibalistic ritual. "Lunch and afterwards" follows two poems about the illness and impending death of the poet's mother, and in the context of these poems particularly, it quietly but effectively satirizes the pathologist's chilling clinical detachment. Weighing out livers, lungs, and kidneys, picking "shredded meat from his canines," he can not see his own peculiar connection with the feasting cannibals (or, it seems, with ailing patients) and decides rather that Abse is " 'a peculiar fellow.' " And while the poem is finally more satiric than philosophical, it also suggests that 72 DANNIE ABSE: POET AND PHYSICIAN empirical facts do not necessarily bring wisdom or understanding and that the causal connections pathology makes may finally tell very little about the nature and cure of the diseases that afflict men and women. In the second part of the poem, "No reply," the poet tells why he dialed a telephone number when he went home. But his explanation seems only a random list of peculiar, plausible causes and becomes finally a parody of the ways we try to explain rationally the actions and choices of our lives. Causal analysis, in pathology or in life, gives at best partial answers. As Abse puts it in the second stanza of a humorous little poem called "Seekers after truth": Below, distant, the roaring courtiers rise to their feet—less shocked than irate. Salome has dropped the seventh veil and they've discovered there are eight. The sense of mystery, the sense of things beyond the knowing and control of the empirical, pervades the poems in Way Out in the Centre. In one called "Bedtime story," Abse begins with his father's playful description, in the "whisper of a spy," of "creatures/. . . before Adam," "angels botched/badly made, born to be vagrant." He then imagines them living in his own world, "perhaps . . . that unshaven derelict/at the bus station with an empty bottle." The poem ends with the poet's own "bedtime story": a description of the leader of this "flawed lineage" who can "sometimes in the last light of January,/in treeless districts of cities, in a withered/backstreet ... be glimpsed from trains." This motionless figure, "in long black overcoat/on spoilt snow" is an image of all that troubles our world and our attempts to understand it, of all that lies beyond the grasp of our rational and empirical ways of knowing. The vagrant leader haunts the poems in the collection and recalls throughout all that yet remains mysterious, inexplicable, uncontrolled in our scientific, technological age. While the pathologist's weighing and measuring and his "morbid verse/of facts" will never entirely accommodate nor account for the truths of the human condition, the poet's image, embodied in the context of his poem, approaches the ancient, mythic function of poetry by making intelligible mysterious, hidden realities we can neither measure nor observe. The presence of the motionless, vagrant figure in "Bedtime story" is felt strongly in Abse's two...