This AQA Anthology poem has been extensively analysed on Tusitala here. But looking at it a few days ago again I was struck by its subtle recognition of the way we all displace our feelings elsewhere, particularly when we feel vulnerable or anxious about how to behave. ‘Things’ can embody other ‘things’ simply because such displacement keeps us safe . Yet safety is also a strait jacket for intimacy and communication as this poem shows.
Indirection may save us from direct admission and awkwardness, yet (ironically) it undermines our growth through emotional change and in this poem, authenticity through vulnerability.
So in this poem Armitage privileges the Farrand Chapelette as a means of exploring the unspoken affections between father and son, so that the attempt to rescue the Harmonium is a displacement of the poet’s desire to preserve his father’s life. And so we all attempt to rescue that which may be falling away from us, and this poem’s innate poignancy captures this desire to rescue, to be heroic, very quietly, yet very convincingly.
The Farrand Chapelette was gathering dust
in the shadowy porch of Marsden Church.
And was due to be bundled off to the skip.
Or was mine, for a song, if I wanted it.Sunlight, through stained glass, which day to day
could beatify saints and raise the dead,
had aged the harmonium’s softwood case
and yellowed the fingernails of its keys.
And one of its notes had lost its tongue,
and holes were worn in both the treadles
where the organist’s feet, in grey, woollen socks
and leather-soled shoes, had pedalled and pedalled.But its hummed harmonics still struck a chord:
for a hundred years that organ had stood
by the choristers’ stalls, where father and son,
each in their time, had opened their throats
and gilded finches – like high notes – had streamed out.Through his own blue cloud of tobacco smog,
with smoker’s fingers and dottled thumbs,
he comes to help me cart it away.
And we carry it flat, laid on its back.
And he, being him, can’t help but say
that the next box I’ll shoulder through this nave
will bear the freight of his own dead weight.
And I, being me, then mouth in reply
some shallow or sorry phrase or word
too starved of breath to make itself heard.