From the personal to the global, there is an uneasy abundance of things to be scared of at the moment. Dare you face up to some in verse?
Fear is all around us at the moment. Every time you read or listen to the news it’s another story of terror, one way or another. And it’s not limited to the bigger stories of bombing, shooting or Donald Trump; we are learning to fear the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe. Golfers fear Zika in Rio, so decline invitations to play at the Olympics – then, the virus turns up closer to home. Black Americans fear those whose job it is supposed to be to protect them, while the police fear toys and telephones.
It can feel at times like we’re living through the hopeless hell of James Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night, where fear permeates everything, even its half-hearted denial in the line “No hope could have no fear”, a kind of desperate whistling in the dark. Thomson’s poem is a foreshadowing of The Waste Land’s ominous swarms of London pedestrians and Eliot’s offer to show the reader “fear in a handful of dust”.
Continue reading...
