I was recently asked by a literary magazine to write a poem on terror. Even though the idea was obviously a response to the Mumbai attacks, the editors emphasised that terror can be taken to include the “somewhat ‘personal’ terror of a teacher/father/boss/local goonda/institutions”. They also insisted that the focus should be on the experience and not the discourse around terror. Nevertheless, I am struggling and not because I believe poets can choose to remain immune to terrorist attacks. I am struggling because all the effective poems I know about terrible human things manage to be both direct and oblique. In a literal-minded age when impersonal slogans win over nuanced experience, how does one achieve this combination?

And even if it were written, how would a poem satisfy our problem-solving attitude to terror? It would not. As WH Auden famously said in his tribute to WB Yeats, ‘...poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/ In the valley of its saying...’ Yeats, though, used to worry that his writing had made something (and something downright tragic) happen: ‘I lie awake night after night/ And never get the answers right./ Did that play of mine send out/ Certain men the English shot?’ Which to some ears — like Paul Muldoon’s — sounds like vanity on poetry’s behalf. In a poem called ‘9 Middagh Street’, Muldoon brings down the older poet beautifully. His answer to Yeats’ question is: ‘...Certainly not./ If Yeats had saved his pencil lead./ Would certain men have stayed in bed?’

Poetry is never utilitarian, even if it can, and does, lead to changes of heart. The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova tells us in the preface to her long poem ‘Requiem’ how, when she spent 17 months in the prison queues in Leningrad waiting to see her son, someone once identified her as the poet Akhmatova. A woman behind her in the queue, who had not heard of Akhmatova before, asked her, referring to the horror of their situation — Can you describe this? And the poet replied — Yes I can. At which something resembling a smile flitted over the woman’s broken face.

Every situation is in some

way redeemable if it can be described. To describe is a moral act yet one which does not force a conclusion on the reader. Archibald Macleish said this more elegantly: ‘A poem should not mean but be’ and William Carlos Williams seems to have had this very principle in mind when he wrote: ‘So much depends/ upon/ a red wheel/ barrow/ glazed with rain/ water/ beside the white/ chickens’. I both love and am always exasperated by ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ (yes, that’s the poem in its entirety). You can mine the world for beauty inch by inch. That’s where the poetry is — in the very existence of things and in their marvellous and arbitrary juxtapositions — the red wheelbarrow ‘beside’ the white chickens.

But as soon as you feel your heart leap up at this truth, comes the other side of the equation between beauty and the human perception of it. Rainer Maria Rilke expresses it best — ‘Yes — the springtimes needed you. Often a star/ was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you/ out of the distant past, or as you walked/ under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission./ But could you accomplish it?’’ Rilke’s ‘Duino Elegies’ make ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ seem banal. For with Rilke we are in a territory which is not just way beyond the utilitarian but also much deeper than mere aesthetic satisfaction in the natural and ‘interpreted’ world. So little depends on the red wheelbarrow, Rilke seems to be saying, and so much depends on the deeper longings it evokes in us. But do we know what to do with these longings? Can we even experience them fully — we who are always ‘distracted by expectation’, we who “when moved by deep feeling evaporate?”
Seen against Rilke’s awareness of the tawdriness of experience and the essential emptiness of the human soul, ‘terror’ can only mean one thing — the one thing it has always meant. The first of that incredible suite of poems — the Duino Elegies — reminds us that: ‘...beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.’ It gives me hope to think that in Rilke land — where to die young is the only pure experience and where “the living are wrong to believe in the too-sharp distinctions which they themselves have created” — a poem about a terrorist attack would only be a very temporary measure.